This article examines how the concentration of low-income African American students in urban elementary schools is deeply coupled with a leveling of teachers' expectations of students and a reduction in their sense of responsibility for student learning. We argue that this process is rooted in school-based organizational habitus through which expectations of students become embedded in schools. We show that this process can be mediated if school leaders engage in practices designed to increase teachers' sense of responsibility for student learning. [organizational habitus, race, class, teacher expectations] Understanding how race and social class stratification is perpetuated from one generation to the next is an enduring problem in educational research. Prior work has examined how structural forces, school-level institutional practices, and students' responses to these structures and practices contribute to social reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron

This article uses the School Crime Supplement of the National Crime Victimization Survey to investigate the factors related to White and African American students' perceived levels of fear of harm, while at school and while commuting to and from school. Of particular interest were the effects of school security measures, including metal detectors, security guards, locked doors, and surveillance cameras. After controlling for the effects of previous victimizations, security measures, and other contextual and demographic variables, there were no differences in levels of fear across gender and race groups. However, certain predictors of fear differentially affected White and African American students. Previous victimization experiences, including bullying, and the presence of metal detectors increased levels of fear for

Much work in the sociology of race and ethnicity centers on an underlying narrative of racial progress. Progress narratives are typically conceptualized as a linear process of slow, yet inevitable, improvement. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and Afro-Pessimism, theoretical perspectives that emerged outside of the discipline of sociology, this paper urges a rethinking of linear progress narratives. First we elucidate the central tenets of these theoretical paradigms. We then apply them to diversity and labor market research, providing suggestions for how sociology can incorporate these perspectives.

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This article analyzes how four Black musical artists make “quiet,” or the inner life of African Americans, legible. Specifically, we consider ways that the quiet found within the lyrics of recent acclaimed albums from two hip-hop artists and two neo-soul artists—Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN (2017) and Rapsody’s Laila’s Wisdom (2017), Solange’s A Seat at the Table (2016) and Maxwell’s blackSUMMERS’night (2016), respectively—offer subtle, quotidian challenges to oppression, dehumanization, and objectification. We find that quiet occurs as artists describe the use of metaphysical space, or how place is used to make and take space for the self and to find peace, the protection of the interior self, and the gifts of quiet to the struggle for resistance. These lyrics speak to the interior safe space that Blacks seek as refuge from oppression by the dominant culture and demands from within their community. We contend that Blacks exercise power through their dominion over their interior selves, which in turn expresses their humanity. It is their control of the content of inner life, whatever those contents may be, that is an expression of sovereignty.