Du Bois Review

08/11/2026

New from DBR -
School District Financial Debt Through the Lens of Critical School Finance: Analyzing Dispossession, Extraction, and Racial Capitalism

- Carlas McCauley

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X26100186

This article applies Critical School Finance theory to analyze the $543.9 billion in U.S. school district debt as a mechanism of racialized wealth extraction. Using the framework’s five core concepts—dispossession, kleptocracy, extraction/super-expropriation, racial capitalism, and inequality—we examine how debt systematically transfers educational resources from predominantly Black, Latino, and low-income students to financial institutions and bondholders.

Case studies of Chicago, IL and Philadelphia, PA reveal how districts serving students of color carry disproportionate debt burdens, divert billions from instruction to debt service, and experience compounding educational disadvantages. We argue that school debt is not neutral fiscal management but represents organized theft that reproduces racial inequality across generations, demanding transformative rather than incremental reform.

Photo element by Antonio Perez.

08/11/2026

This article is now

New from DBR -
Policing Black Youth: The Origins of School Policing in the United States
- Kaneesha Johnson and Tyler Whittenberg

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X26100174

Policing has become a popular topic of inquiry in social science literature, but much of this attention has been confined to traditional forms of policing, focusing on state and municipal police departments or, in the case of schools, have focused on disciplinary policies.

In seeking to expand the contours of what the scholarly community defines as police, we focus our attention on the origins of K-12 school policing. Specifically, using a multi-modal historical approach, we provide a history of when and why police were stationed in schools in cities throughout the United States. Focusing on the sequencing of events, we show that when the dominant White status quo is challenged by the movement of Black people into formerly White dominated areas and demands are made for education equity from those groups, the state responds by bolstering fears of violence from Black youth and implementing punitive state structures in the form of placing police officers in schools.

📷: Santa Monica Police - School Resource Officer. Photo by Tomás Del Coro. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

07/13/2026

Read our Summer 2026 issue!
Volume 23 - Issue 1

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/du-bois-review-social-science-research-on-race/latest-issue

New research suggests that in Latin America, skin tone may be a more powerful driver of inequality than self-identified racial categories — and that wealth-based stratification is far more common than occupational stratification across the region. In the Spring 2026 issue (23.1), Ryan A. Smith and Rubia R. Valente analyze data from sixteen Latin American countries to assess the prevalence of "colortocracies" and the relative weight of skin tone versus ethnoracial identity in producing socioeconomic inequality.

Also in the issue, Erin Gaede and Pamela Oliver compare Black newspaper and New York Times coverage of anti-police-violence protests in 1990s New York; Tunde Alabi draws on Du Bois's concept of double consciousness to examine how Nigerian migrants navigate self-identification and immigrant integration; and Fithawee Tzeggai recovers a suppressed grassroots critique of urban school segregation from 1960s Chicago to challenge prevailing liberal framings of educational inequality.

Other themes include Black Boston's long history of resistance to police civil rights violations; racial whitening as a global political strategy in the First Brazilian Republic; race and caste in the American Bahá'í magazine World Order (1935–1949); comparative readings of Reconstruction in the thought of Du Bois, Harry Haywood, and James S. Allen; and the ethics of elite educational advantage conferral for Black families.

06/27/2026

New from DBR -
Policing Black Youth: The Origins of School Policing in the United States
- Kaneesha Johnson and Tyler Whittenberg

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X26100174

Policing has become a popular topic of inquiry in social science literature, but much of this attention has been confined to traditional forms of policing, focusing on state and municipal police departments or, in the case of schools, have focused on disciplinary policies.

In seeking to expand the contours of what the scholarly community defines as police, we focus our attention on the origins of K-12 school policing. Specifically, using a multi-modal historical approach, we provide a history of when and why police were stationed in schools in cities throughout the United States. Focusing on the sequencing of events, we show that when the dominant White status quo is challenged by the movement of Black people into formerly White dominated areas and demands are made for education equity from those groups, the state responds by bolstering fears of violence from Black youth and implementing punitive state structures in the form of placing police officers in schools.

📷: Santa Monica Police - School Resource Officer. Photo by Tomás Del Coro. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

06/19/2026

New from Du Bois Review:
National Identity in the Era: A Du Boisian Examination of Identity Prominence and Change
- Temi Alao

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X26100162

W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that the way Black Americans understand the racial world and their place within it shapes their connections to national identity differently from those of White Americans. This article juxtaposes Du Bois’s theory of racialized subjectivity with Identity Theory’s constructs of prominence and change to examine differences in attachment to American nationhood during a turbulent period of American politics: the Trumpism era.

Using data from three waves of the American National Election Studies (2012, 2016, 2020), this study examines the extent to which White and Black Americans viewed their national identities as important before, during, and after Trump’s first presidential administration. I employ “racial identity prominence” as a nuanced measure of race to illustrate a phenomenological element of American national identity that differentially shapes attachment. The findings reveal that the Trumpism period catalyzed significant identity change between 2012 and 2020.

Moreover, the degree to which White and Black Americans connected to their national identity across the three election years largely depended on the subjective importance they assigned to their racial identity—that is, their racial identity prominence. The White American archetype was reinforced, as Whites with strong attachment to their racial identity also expressed strong national identity.

Interestingly, Black Americans also expressed strong ties to their national identity during this period, particularly those with a strong racial identity. Still, the question of how White and Black Americans envision the country and their place in it remains complex.

📷: Children wearing "Make America Great Again" hats at the 2017 inauguration. Source: Wikipedia - "Trumpism". National Park Service, public domain.

06/05/2026

Full guidelines can be found on our Cambridge University Press webpage under "Preparing Your Materials":
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/du-bois-review-social-science-research-on-race/information/author-instructions/preparing-your-materials

06/02/2026

New from Du Bois Review:
A Chicago Casino for Racial Equity?: Strategic Racialization and Community Resistance Across Contexts
-Andrew Frangos and William Sites

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X26100150

Recent scholarship has directed attention to how racial discourse, and colorblind racism in particular, influences urban redevelopment in U.S. cities. This study employs a theory of strategic racialization to better understand how developers use race-related discourse to seek public support for their projects and how community members respond. Focusing on a series of public meetings regarding three competing proposals to build a casino in the city of Chicago, we find that racial meanings and categories played a central role in efforts by developers and community members to characterize, support, and challenge the casino project.

Comparing public interactions across three different communities, we argue that developers deployed a shifting array of discursive strategies—territorial ascription, multiculturalism, colorblind racialization, and a more novel variety of racial equity claims—to mobilize the unique geographic and organizational characteristics of their proposed projects as assurances of racial equity. We identify three distinct discourses that organized the racial equity claims of developers and community members: Black-led capitalism, racially representative capitalism, and spatially connective capitalism. We conclude that while community members actively contested developers’ claims and called for greater specificity concerning beneficiaries, they did not challenge the capitalist logic that merely redistributing the benefits of development among owners and workers—however racialized—could bring about racial equity.

06/02/2026

New from DBR:
Generational Status and Political Participation Among Asian Americans: Social Integration as a Mechanism of Political Incorporation
- Chigon Kim

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X26100149

One way to understand the trajectories and outcomes of immigrant political incorporation is to examine changes in political participation across immigrant generations. Yet, patterns of political participation other than voting among Asian Americans across immigrant generations, particularly beyond the second generation, remain understudied.

In addition, little empirical research has examined the mechanisms that generate the differences in the extent of political participation across immigrant generations. This study investigates whether, and to what extent, observed patterns of political participation across length of residence among first-generation immigrants and across successive immigrant generations can be accounted for by indicators of social integration, particularly engagement in political discussion with family and friends and involvement in civic organizations in the community, net of marriage patterns and other sociodemographic characteristics.

Using data from the 2008 National Asian American Survey, the analysis focuses on the six largest Asian American groups: Chinese, Asian Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese. An overall political participation index is constructed by counting five dichotomous indicators of nonvoting political activity—campaigning, making political donations, contacting government officials, working with others to solve a community problem, and protesting—in the last twelve months. Descriptive results show that political participation increases with length of residence among first-generation immigrants and across immigrant generations, but tapers off in the third generation. Multivariate analyses indicate that these generational differences in the number of political activities are largely explained by variation in social integration, with the exception of recent immigrants with fewer than ten years of residence. Overall, the findings highlight social integration as a key mechanism of political incorporation among Asian immigrants and their descendants.

📷: Edmond Dantès on Pexels

05/01/2026

Find the full Call for Papers on our website: hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/dubois-review

04/27/2026

New from DBR:
How Prevalent are Colortocracies in Latin America?
An Examination of Cross-National Heterogeneity in the Effects of Skin Tone and Self-Identified Race on Occupational Status and Material Wealth

- Ryan A. Smith and Rubia R. Valente

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X26100137

Recent scholarship has significantly advanced social scientific understanding of the socioeconomic consequences of skin tone and ethnoracial identity in several Latin American countries. We update and extend this literature by conceptualizing colortocracies as countries that exhibit a preference for Whiteness as evidenced by lighter-skinned individuals enjoying higher levels of socioeconomic status than their darker-skinned counterparts. Specifically, we test the preference for Whiteness hypothesis using data from the 2018 Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP)—a nationally representative dataset covering approximately 90% of the Latin American population (about 578 million people) across sixteen countries. We find strong evidence that wealth-based colortocracies are three times as prevalent throughout Latin America as occupational-based colortocracies. Interviewer-rated skin tone is a stronger predictor of inequality than self-designated racial categories, but the magnitude of its strength is far greater when predicting wealth than occupational status. We conclude that the extent to which colortocracies (e.g., preference for Whiteness) exist in Latin America simultaneously depends on the outcome measure and the country under consideration. We document this cross-national variation and discuss the implications of our findings for future research.

📷: Figure 2 in the article. Relative odds of being in a higher occupational status category by skin tone.