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Responding to findings of psychological discomfort impeding interracial/interethnic attitude and skill development, the purpose of this paper is to investigate group-level factors as possible antecedents to individuals’ comfort in interracial/interethnic interactions. Among individuals experiencing diversity during a key developmental stage in life, college students, the study inquires whether group practices that foster a sense of belonging and inclusion among all members differentiate comfortable from uncomfortable interracial/interethnic interactions. As part of the analysis, the construct interracial/interethnic comfort is developed and tested as a measure of interactions that are experienced with ease and confidence.

Scale development methods and structural equation modeling were used to analyze survey data from 360 members of a voluntary service organization at 50 US colleges.

The structural equation analyses indicate that the group practices – shared superordinate purpose, a welcoming climate for diverse members, and practices for structuring interactions among all group members – have significant and important effects on interracial/interethnic comfort, which was found to be a reliable construct. The relationship between each of the group practices and individuals’ interracial/interethnic comfort was either totally or partially mediated by the individuals’ sense of belonging, a strong form of inclusion.

The results indicate group practices that possess the capacity to contribute to students’ interracial/interethnic attitude and skill development by creating solidarity and comfort in their interactions with diverse others. Institutions can make efforts to further individuals’ cultural development by stimulating the use of these practices in campus groups.

This study identifies concepts for understanding and addressing the known, problematic phenomenon of psychological discomfort in settings of diversity. These constructs offer new directions for research on diversity climate by focussing on relational practices at the group level that can move diversity beyond numerical representation to strong inclusion and close relationships.

The purpose if this study is to examine differences in conflict management strategies, relational satisfaction and social support of individuals in same-race and interracial relationships. Additionally, the authors examined associations between self-reported and observed measures of conflict management strategies.

The current study used Bronfenbrenner’s (2005) bioecological theory as an organizing framework. Twenty individuals in interracial and same-race relationships were recruited from a large Northeastern US university. Self-report and observational measures of conflict management strategies were obtained as were individuals’ self-reported levels of relational satisfaction and social support.

Results indicated a few differences in conflict management strategies between individuals in same-race and interracial dyads and no differences in social support or satisfaction. Observational measures of conflict management were largely uncorrelated with their corresponding self-report measures.

The current sample was small and consisted of students from a predominately White region of the country; thus generalizability and statistical power are limited. However, the results suggest ways interracial and same-race dyads might manage conflict differently as well as how self-reported and observational methods might differ in terms of the results obtained.

Interracial couple relationship processes are largely unexplored, but are important to study. The current findings further suggest that self-report and observational methods should be combined to more fully portray the conflict management strategies of individuals in interracial and same-race relationships.

Charter schools are an increasingly popular form of publicly funded school choice. Racially framed as a policy to narrow academic achievement and opportunity gaps, charter schools disproportionately serve Black and Latinx students. In 2016, “lifting the cap” on the number of charter schools allowed in Massachusetts became an intensely fought ballot referendum. Drawing on racial formation and resource mobilization theories, I argue that resources developed and mobilized in political campaigns or social movements have analytically relevant racial dimensions. They are “racial resources” or value-producing entities that are imbued with meaning about race categories, racial systems, and/or racial ideologies. The anti-expansion’s interracial coalition was a decisive factor in the campaign, because the coalition implemented a shared decision-making structure to develop a more robust and ideologically consistent strategy for mobilizing their racial resources. These resources include a local base of racially diverse spokespeople who brought key cultural resources – legitimacy, authenticity, and trust – to the campaign, as well as race-conscious and race-neutral message framing.

In this narrative I capture part of my first year experience in the doctoral sociology program at the University of Chicago. I analyze entries from my U of C journal, recorded during the 1992–93 academic year, paying special attention to discussions regarding race and interracial interactions. I focus on “The Sid Cartwright Incident”—a negative encounter with a white professor —to elucidate ways in which race penetrated my everyday existence and pressed me to define sometimes ambiguous interracial interactions as unpleasant racial encounters. I reveal the complex and contradictory ways that my past experiences with racism and discrimination may have distorted my thinking about interracial encounters and at the same time invigorated my determination to move beyond those encounters. I conclude with a discussion of the cumulative impact of negative interracial encounters on African Americans.

The aim of this paper is to examine the strategic approach of culturally responsive and communicative teaching (CRCT) through a critical assessment of interracial teachers in their daily school interactions.

The empirical data were obtained through interviews among ten interracial teachers. The analysis was made through a thematic approach to obtain substantial data from interviews.

The findings reveal that attempts to gain sufficient comprehension of CRCT are actualized through routine interaction in the multicultural school environment hence resulting in embedding self-awareness of cultural competence in a multicultural classroom, constructing emotional and social development on cultural awareness and internalizing responsive awareness on social engagement in global learning.

The contribution of this research provides an insightful value on expanding key consideration to support the multicultural classroom environment with an active engagement and enhancement of CRCT as fundamental basis of the multicultural classroom.

This chapter explores how power obtained from societal hierarchies of gender, race, and economic status is covertly used by individuals within relationships, further maintaining systems of stratification. The case of marriage is used to examine how social stratification translates into and is reinforced within even the most intimate relationships in terms of control over decision making. Analysis of in-depth interviews with black and white wives in same-race and interracial marriages illustrates how economic inequality affects who makes what decisions within marriage and how race affects what decisions are made. In the midst of income and racial inequality, socialized gender roles dictate which spouse controls certain arenas versus others. Gender norms operate covertly to affect decision making dynamics through mechanisms of availability, areas of knowledge, and preference.

This chapter examines the processes by which a group's racial composition affects its performance and the social-cognitive tendencies of its individual members. Drawing on published and unpublished experiments regarding group composition and interracial interaction, this review demonstrates that the information exchange perspective on diversity – in which demographic heterogeneity is expected to translate into informational heterogeneity – is more complicated than some have suggested, and is not wholly responsible for the positive performance effects of racial diversity. Indeed, many of the benefits of diversity can be attributed to the impact of heterogeneous settings on White individuals, as well as to motivational and other non-informational processes.

Through an analysis of the leaders of the 1960s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) this paper highlights the importance of individual identity work, and argues for an expanded theoretical treatment of social movement identity processes that takes account of partial identity correspondence (a partial alignment between an individual identity and the movement identity) to include degrees of identity congruence. Actors can embrace a movement, but remain in a state of conflict regarding some dimensions of its identity. Extending James Jasper's ((1997). The art of moral protest: Culture, biography, and creativity in social movements. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) identity classifications, the data suggest that participants engage in identity justification work when incongruence among personal identity (biographical), collective identity (ascribed, i.e. race, gender), and movement identities exist. This work may not reflect the organization's efforts to frame or reframe the movement identity. This study finds that individuals manage incongruence with organizational and tactical movement identities by employing three identity justification mechanisms: (1) personal identity modification of the movement's identity; (2) individual amplification of the common cause dimension of collective identity; and (3) individual amplification of the activist identity through pragmatic politics. Rather than dismantling the past, as Snow and McAdam ((2000). In: S. Stryker, T. J. Owens, & R. W. White (Eds), Self, identity, and social movements (pp. 41–67). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) propose, actors incorporate their biographies as a mechanism to achieve feelings of community and belonging. It is not so much an alignment with the organization's proffered movement identity as it is a reordering of the saliency hierarchy of their identities. Unlike Snow and McAdam's conceptualization of identity amplification, the reordering of an identity hierarchy and the amplification of certain identities is precipitated by the actor's, not the organization's, efforts to align her/his personal identity, collective identity, and movement identities.