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In 1987, the City of Los Angeles instituted the first gang injunction in the country. Gang injunctions are pursued through the civil courts to seriously restrict the activities and movement of suspected gang members and affiliates. People who have been served with a gang injunction are often prohibited from everyday activities, such as wearing sports jerseys, talking to other gang members, and being out in public past curfew, regardless of age. Though often justified by law enforcement as a necessary tool to fight gang violence, we argue that gang injunctions are similar to Slave Codes, Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws, which established a separate system of justice based on race. As such, gang injunctions serve as an extension of an apartheid-like system of justice that seriously limits the life opportunities of people of color within gang injunction territories.

This chapter draws upon the oral histories of people targeted by gang injunction laws within California, paying particular attention to how gang-identified individuals are surveiled, controlled, and confined.

Gang injunctions operate on an apartheid-like justice system that punishes perceived gang members harsher than non-gang members. These laws affirm the legal tactics that maintain racial boundaries and promote a system of justice that mirrors the Black Codes following the end of slavery. The evidence suggests that gang injunctions solely target low-income youth of color, who have been identified as gang members and served with injunctions.

Despite the ubiquity of gang injunctions within California, there is little research on gang injunctions, and even less literature on how these injunctions shape the life course of suspected gang members. We attempt to address this gap in the literature by showing how gang injunctions are not simply about fighting crime, but rather they are a tool used to control and corral communities of color.

Organizational approaches to racial inequality have provided contextual insight into a host of traditional stratification outcomes (e.g., hiring, earnings, authority). This chapter extends the organizational approach by drawing on the health-stress framework to explore how organizational context affects experiential and health-related outcomes – discrimination, social support, and psychological distress. Drawing on a sample of Black workers in the United States, we examine the relationship between workplace racial composition and psychological distress, as well as two potential mediators – racial discrimination and workplace social support. Our findings reveal that psychological distress is similar for Black workers in token (<25% Black coworkers), tilted other race (25–49.99% Black coworkers), and tilted same race (50–74.99% Black coworkers) job contexts. Workers in Black-dominated jobs (>75% Black coworkers), however, experience significantly less psychological distress than other compositional thresholds, net of individual, job, and workplace characteristics. This relationship is not explained by either racial discrimination experiences or supervisor and coworker social support. This finding suggests that researchers need to theorize and examine other protective factors stemming from coworker racial similarity.

There are racial differences in policing and treatment when people are stopped for the same crimes, and scholars have long documented and expressed concern regarding the police’s reactions to Black men. In this paper, we argue that racism is the root cause of police-involved killings of unarmed Black men. Utilizing several contemporary examples, we articulate the ways racism operates through cultural forces and institutional mechanisms to illustrate how this phenomenon lies at the intersection of public safety and public health. Thus, we begin by defining racism and describing how it is gendered to move the notion that the victims of police involved shootings overwhelmingly tend to be Black men from the margins of the explanation of the patterns to the center. Next, we discuss how the police have been used to promote public safety and public health throughout US history. We conclude by describing common explanations for contemporary police-involved shootings of unarmed Black males and why those arguments are flawed. Reframing the phenomena as gendered racism is critical for identifying points of intervention. Because neither intent nor purpose is a prerequisite of the ways that racism affects public safety and public health, the differential impact of policies and programs along racial lines is sufficient for racism to be a useful way to frame this pattern of outcomes. Incorporating gender into this framing of racism introduces that ways that Black men have been viewed, stereotyped, and treated implicitly in institutional practices and explicitly in institutional policies.

Black slavery and white racism in the South and the nation, de jure and de facto Jim Crow, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed separate schools, “massive resistance” to it (Klarman, 1994, p. 82), plus racial disparities in educational achievement since 1954, all frame this narrative of black males' quest for higher education. Bondmen were denied literacy and black freemen rarely attended school, much less pursue advanced study, during the antebellum period. Union victory in the Civil War, abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), and Reconstruction marked the rise of not only Negro schools and colleges but also southern share cropping, called “the new slavery” (Du Bois, 1935, p. 715), and epidemic violence against blacks that imposed their disfranchisement and segregation, by laws and customs, until the 1960s. Thus African American males sought collegiate and professional training in a national milieu of white supremacy, which postulated black men's mental and moral inferiority but ignored their widespread poverty, separation, and unequal opportunities. Confined in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), they breached the color-line little by little at white institutions, thereby paving the way for Brown, the civil rights movement, and desegregation. In the second half of the 20th century, HBCUs and the majority-white institutions trained increasing numbers of black male graduates and professionals. By 1980 though, only some 11 percent of young black men had received 4 years of college compared to 25.5 percent of young white men (Jaynes & Williams, 1989). An “achievement gap” was evident and it persists today (Lee, 2002, p. 3), revealing the deep roots of race and class inequality in America. White racism, its legal and extralegal forms, and black aspirations and efforts underlay and continue to fuel black men's drive for higher learning. Over time black men, and certainly women as well, faced racist structures, ideologies, and attitudes born of slavery; sub-citizenship, stereotypes, and terror, among other barriers, through a century of Jim Crow; and after Brown, ongoing discrimination, socioeconomic disadvantages, and ambiguous “affirmative action” policies (Jaynes & Williams, 1989, p. 376).

In this article Professor Perry argues that Plessy v. Ferguson and the de jure segregation it heralded has overdetermined the discourse on Jim Crow. She demonstrates through a historical analysis of activist movements, popular literature, and case law that private law, specifically property and contract, were significant aspects of Jim Crow law and culture. The failure to understand the significance of private law has limited the breadth of juridical analyses of how to respond to racial divisions and injustices. Perry therefore contends that a paradigmatic shift is necessary in scholarly analyses of the Jim Crow era, to include private law, and moreover that this shift will enrich our understandings of both historic and current inequalities.

After war, societies can undergo change that extends justice to formerly excluded groups. Using theories of moral exclusion and moral inclusion as a lens, this chapter examines societal change in two consecutive periods after the American Civil War (1861–1865): Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Focusing on the well being of black Americans in the American South, this chapter examines Reconstruction's inclusionary gains and setbacks. It then describes challenges faced by black Americans during Jim Crow, a period of white supremacy and violence, and factors associated with Jim Crow's decline. Applying social psychological theory to these historical periods offers insight into the dynamics of inclusionary and exclusionary change.

Purpose – The chapter examines the relationship between Black elected officials (as candidates and in office) and the media that covers them by examining how media use race when discussing these officials.Design/methodology/approach – The chapter uses a content analysis design. The basic strategy is to examine eight years’ worth of discussion in newspapers, both in Ohio and nationwide, concerning Mark Mallory as he runs for mayor of Cincinnati and then acts as mayor from 2005 to mid-2012.Findings – The chapter provides information on how the media (mainstream media and Black media) includes racial mentions when discussing Mark Mallory. The findings support my two main hypotheses: that Mark Mallory is more heavily racialized as a mayoral candidate in mainstream newspapers than he is as a sitting mayor, and that for Black newspapers, he is more heavily racialized at either stage (candidate or sitting mayor) than he is with mainstream newspapers.Research limitations/implications – Because the research only looks at one individual, the findings lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers should expand the focus to examine more Black elected officials and/or Black candidates for office.Practical and social implications – The chapter shows how discussions of race around a Black elected official may be beyond that official’s control.Originality/value – This chapter is original in showing how race can be made a part of the public media discussions of minority elected officials. The research design gives us a template for future study of the influence of race in media representations in minority politics.