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Our goal with this special issue is to expand currently untapped ideas about racial microaggressions from a sociological point of view. As noted, research on this issue comes largely out of psychiatry, psychology, and education-disciplines that tend to place less emphasis on structural and institutional causes of racism. There is a need for more sociologically guided research to examine how subtle, covert, and non-apparent forms of racism affect minorities physiologically, psychologically, and emotionally-and how these micronooses can best be understood in a larger context of structural racism. Examination of racial microaggressions from a sociological point of view promises additional insight to help understand the complexities of contemporary race and racism in America and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diversity has become a common term in the business world. But, what exactly does it mean to be diverse? In this article, I examine the notion of diversity in the business world and explore how, in the wane of progressive programs such as affirmative action and organizational multiculturalism policies diversity has become the post-civil rights mantra of equality in America. Using interview data from upper-level managers in Fortune 1000 companies I argue that diversity ideology has enabled many organizations to curtail deeper investigations into the gender and racial inequalities that continue to persist in the workplace. I find that managers tend to exclude race and gender in their definitions of diversity. Further, I find that most managers, even while claiming that their companies were interested in promoting diversity, could not effectively elaborate on their company’s diversity policies or practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss the dominant racial stories that accompany color-blind racism, the dominant post-civil rights racial ideology, and asses their ideological role. Using interview data from the 1997 Survey of College Students Social Attitudes and the 1998 Detroit Area Study, we document the prevalence of four story lines and two types of testimonies among whites. We also provide data on ideological dissidence among some whites (we label them racial progressives) and blacks. We show that although these stories, and the racial ideology they reinforce, have become dominant, neither goes uncontested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-civil rights America, most whites believe the nation is "beyond race." If confronted with the reality of racial inequality, they proclaim they have nothing to do with it. Their goals in this paper are twofold. First, they suggest whites' new common sense reflects a new, more subtle racial ideology, the ideology of color blind racism. They use data from the 1997 Survey of Social Attitudes of College Students and the 1998 Detroit Area Study to document the central frames of this ideology and examine how most whites use them to explain a variety of racial matters. Second, they argue that racial stratification in the United States is becoming Latin America-like. Another example of this mainstream viewpoint is expressed in interviews where whites often go so far as to deny minority claims of discrimination suggesting that such attitude are helpful, un-American, or American racist. Specifically, they contend racial stratification is becoming tri-racial with a pigmentocratic component to it and that the ideology of color blind racism will bolster this trend. They use a variety of data to test on a preliminary basis our thesis. They conclude examining the implications of this new ideology and racial stratification system for the future of race relations in this country.