How does skin color shape the social networks and integration pathways of phenotypically diverse immigrant groups? Focusing on Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, groups with considerable diversity across the Black-White color line, we explore whether migrants to the United States have greater color homophily in their primary social networks than non-migrants in the sending societies. We analyze egocentric network data, including unique skin color measures for both 114 respondents and 1,702 alters. We test hypotheses derived from ethnic unifier theory and color line racialization theory. The data show evidence of color homophily among Dominicans, but suggest that these patterns may be imported from the sending society rather than fostered by the U.S. context. Further, we find that migrants' skin color is associated with having ties to White or Black Americans, but with different patterns for each ethnic group. We discuss the implications of these findings for economic mobility and U.S. racial hierarchies.

During the past several years a growing body of literature has encouraged sociologists to examine the intersection of race and Islam as a distinct form of racialization. What is further needed is an understanding of the experiences of racialization of Muslims through the prism of intersectionality. Applying and expanding Selod’s (2018a, 2018b) conceptualization of “gendered racialization” we argue American and international Muslim college women in the United States experience racialization at the intersection of nationality-culture; how their corporeal bodies are gendered and racially signified; religious-political expression; and legal-political policies and practices. Using data from 34 Muslim women college students we argue, first, that they are being racialized in similar practices and feel un-American and that they do not belong but how they mitigate racialization differs based on their intersecting identities. Specifically, the intersecting forces of nationality, gender and racial body signification, and religious-political expression are pertinent. Second, Muslim women college students negotiate their racialization with different coping strategies informed by their intersecting identities, notably their nationality and how they are bodily signified. These findings expose how whiteness is a malleable process for Muslim college women and choosing how to navigate racialization is determined by competing identities.

Using 11 high-grossing post-9/11 Hollywood films on terrorism and the Middle East, the author analyzes how films racialize Muslim identities in service to Islamophobia. This research brings together racialization theory with analysis of political ideologies that illustrate visualized racialized meanings on Muslim identities. The racialized portrayals of Muslim bodies inscribed in the political rhetoric of the War on Terror follow a systemic process of ethnoracial cultural othering that objectifies, vilifies, and dehumanizes Muslim identities. The author demonstrates how films engage in the political processes of racial construction of Muslim identities by criminalizing their gendered identity, dehumanizing their body, and devaluing their territorial and physical space in the context of the War on Terror.

Negative stereotypes about racial minorities, particularly African Americans, persist in the United States. Given the imperviousness of racial stereotypes about minorities, can individuals who date interracially also be stereotyped? The author investigates this by conducting the first systematic study of men’s attitudes toward white and black women who date outside their race. First, the author inductively uncovers these stereotypes through focus groups. Second, to assess these stereotypes’ nationwide prevalence and to minimize social desirability bias, the author applies a survey experiment, in which interracial dating is subtly primed via photographs of couples, to a national sample of men. The findings are mixed. In the experiment, crossing the white-black racial boundary does activate negative stereotypes for women, which may have reputational costs, but mostly among older white male respondents. These costs include changes in men’s perceptions of their class status, cultural values, and even sexual practices. In conclusion, interracial dating is a key social site where gender-based moral norms are policed, class divisions are constructed, and racial boundaries are maintained.

Through a case study of an ongoing diversity initiative at Diversity University (DU), a public, flagship university in the U.S. South, the author’s research advances understanding of the discursive relationship between neoliberalism and contemporary racial ideology. As part of a larger ethnographic project, the author draws on more than ten years worth of diversity discourse at DU to illuminate diversity’s economization: the process whereby specific formations of economic values, practices, and metrics are extended toward diversity as justification for DU’s efforts. The analysis responds to three questions: (1) How is diversity economized by the organization? (2) How is this economization articulated through organizational discourse on diversity? and (3) How does the economization of diversity potentially reconfigure race and racial subjectivities? The findings reveal three interrelated processes that facilitate diversity’s economization: diversity as investment, diversity metrics, and diversity as affective labor. Together these processes congeal and convert multicultural principles and practices into economic ones. Consequently, diversity’s economization recasts nonwhite racial subjectivity as human capital for DU and its white publics, minimizing and entrenching existing racial inequality in the process.