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Sociology, like most disciplines/institutions in racialized (and other oppressive) social systems, are steeped with policies and practices that are designed to maintain the status quo. Thus, they are partly responsible for the gatekeeping, careerism, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination that plague our scholarly communities. In this piece, an extension of my 2018 Presidential Address to the Association for Humanist Sociology, I challenge academics to push back and find better ways, through critical humanist sociology, to serve the public good.

In this Editorial Feature Review, we reached out to senior race/racism and ethnicity scholars who have theoretically, epistemologically, and empirically contributed in major ways to what we now call the sociology of race and ethnicity. We wanted to pay our respects to these mothers and fathers of the discipline and the gifts that they have given our discipline over their careers. Our review was guided by a set of six key questions that cover their views of the field in the early parts of their careers, their experiences along the way, their views of what is going on now in the discipline, and their advice and suggestions to those currently practicing sociologies of race and ethnicity. We highlight eight major lessons from central scholars who have inspired generations of academics and whose leadership, mentorship, and scholarship, will never be forgotten.

The graduate student experience, for many, can be a time of great stress, insecurity, and uncertainty. Overwhelmingly, studies verify that good mentoring is one of the best indicators of graduate student success. In this literature review, we outline in detail previous research that attest to these experiences, and pay specific attention to the experiences of students of color. In general, our read of the literature suggests that academia, in general, and sociology, in particular, does not do a good job of mentoring graduate students of color. We begin our essay with an overview of graduate student experiences. Next, we discuss the mentoring side of the equation, addressing reasons that might explain variations in how students are mentored in higher education. Finally, we end with some thoughts on what faculty and departments can do to address the inadequate mentoring of graduate students of color.

Today, race and ethnicity scholars generate a wealth of important research that documents the parameters of racial and/or ethnic inequality, how such inequality persists, and how it relates to, or intersects with, other dimensions of social life. Here we argue that these scholars should devote their abundant intellectual energies not only to illuminating the parameters and causes of racial injustice but also to producing work that might shift popular understandings and stimulate change. We ask, how can we collectively be more deliberate and strategic in grappling with how to do research that matters in the world? This is not a new question but places us within a long tradition of race scholars who were, and are, deeply invested in producing knowledge in service of societal transformation. In what follows we take up the question of how to do work that is intellectually rigorous and deeply engaged. Specifically, we offer a close examination of the intersection of racial and/or ethnic research and public policy. We begin by arguing for a much broader definition of public policy than typically gets deployed within academic institutions. We then turn to outlining some of the opportunities and challenges of trying to do this work. Finally we provide a number of concrete examples of how scholars of race/ethnicity can and do deploy their research in the world.

Historian Carter G. Woodson was also a founding framer of Black Studies who created the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History in 1915 to promote the study of Black life and history in order to "bring about harmony between the "races" by interpreting one to the other." Black studies or Africana Studies emerged from the larger social and political movement of global Black liberation in the late 1960s as a nascent academic field. Their protest led to the creation of the first Black Studies department in the United States. [Extracted from the article]

Although the survey community almost unanimously agrees that Blacks and Whites have vastly different views on central matters, few qualitative studies have validated this claim. Thus, in this study we examine Blacks' views with interview data from the . Specifically, we assess whether Blacks use the frames of color blind racism--the dominant ideology of the post-civil rights era--to articulate their positions on racial issues. The data suggests that although few Blacks are directly affected by the frames of color blindness, these frames have shaped the argumentative terrain in which they battle, blurred their views on many issues, and blunted the oppositional character of their counter views.