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We raise concerns about Quadlin and Montgomery's Social Psychology Quarterly article, "When a Name Gives You Pause," a study of whether racialized names affect the time to dog adoption in a county shelter. Our comment is guided by the recent insistence of American Sociological Association leadership for greater critical introspection in sociological research. First, the study is ahistorical by overlooking histories of human-animal relations and naming in the construction of anti-Blackness. Second, the study is acontextual by contorting labor market research and color-blind perspectives in a manner that directs undue attention to the treatment of dogs without specifying the concrete disadvantages for Black people. The study's narrow focus on adopters misrepresents organizational factors within animal shelters. These various oversights invest Quadlin and Montgomery's article in a whiteness-centered sociological tradition. We urge divesting from this tradition and conclude with a call for sociology to be more educative and reflexive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1899, diphtheria claimed the life of W. E. B. Du Bois's son, Burghardt. How can Burghardt's death help us to understand the racialized consequences of the present coronavirus pandemic? This article considers what Du Bois described as the "phantasmagoria" that ensnares racial structures. I examine COVID as the latest iteration of a distinctly racialized American trauma narrated in the grammar of Du Bois's reflections on disease, extrajudicial killings, and kinship. This fever dream of conflagration and asphyxiation has haunted Black lives since slavery. Du Bois gave meaning to this racial spectre in religious terms as a story of perpetual death but eventual emancipation. By situating Du Bois in relation to the work of Christina Sharpe (2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press), this essay ruminates on the orthography of slavery's inheritances with regard to disease and its symbiotic relationship with lynching. I conclude by considering Du Bois's invocation to darkwater as a demand for Black healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]