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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]

This essay serves as a response to Hirschfield's (2015) article, 'Lethal Policing: Making Sense of American Exceptionalism,' published in the December 2015 issue of this journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a day when many are fatigued with discourse on racism, discrimination, and inequality but others face a socially and politically trenchant White backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement, race scholars are faced with the complex scenario in which they must simultaneously articulate (1) what, when, and where racism operates to exercise both deleterious and advantageous effects on differently racialized actors and (2) exactly why and how racism (especially its “color-blind” variant) functions toward the reproduction of the racialized social system. While scholarship on the former is well rehearsed, we see this special issue as a clarion call for new scholarship to interrogate the precise mechanisms by which color-blind racism and the racialized social system operate. New work on mechanisms gestures (at the least) toward the three directions laid out in this issue: the axiological (the study of values), ontological (the study of being), and epistemological (the study of knowledge) dimensions of social life. Race scholars would be well served to illumine how color-blind racism and the racialized social system hold specific properties and processes by which values, being, and knowledge function intimately and integrally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (NACCD) to examine the 1967 race riots that were taking place in Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, and Detroit that erupted in the mid-1960s. That report, officially labeled the Kerner Report, outlined structural inequalities in America that privileged whites over other racial and ethnic groups; the report concluded that the United States was headed toward two separate and unequal societies: black and white. Forty-seven years after the Kerner Report where do we stand? In this article, I revisit recent events on police violence toward minorities and give consideration to some thoughts moving forward. [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.