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The educational attainment of rural people differs considerably based upon peoples' races and ethnicities. For example, in 2015 twice as many White rural adults had a bachelor's degree or higher compared to Black, American Indian and Alaska Native, and Hispanic or Latino rural adults. Within higher education contexts if one is to understand college students and their experiences, a recognition of students' identities is necessary. For African American college students from rural areas, I argue a starting point for understanding these students and their experiences in college environments is an exploration of the intersection of their place-based and race/ethnicity-based identities. This chapter, therefore, provides statistics about the educational attainment of rural people, reviews rural place–based identity literature, and then integrates perceptions of place with perceptions of race and ethnicity. Based on this discussion, recommendations for future pedagogies, practices, and research are suggested for faculty, staff, and scholars.

The current study examines developing racial attitudes among a group of African American adolescents. Data for this study include 28 open-ended, qualitative interviews with African American adolescents (64% girls, 36% boys) in Detroit, Michigan, and were drawn from a larger study in which these adolescents and their mothers were interviewed about racial socialization. Data analysis shows adolescents' racial attitudes to be ambivalent and influenced by the dissonance between “color-blind” rhetoric – the idea that “race doesn't matter” – and their everyday experiences, in which race does matter in important ways. Adolescents' reports of racial attitudes and experiences with racism frequently include travel anecdotes, which reveal how place, travel, and negotiating the color line influence their developing ideas about race. The findings suggest that sources beyond parental socialization strongly affect adolescents' developing racial attitudes and identities and that young people's voices should be further utilized in studies examining these issues.

Various philosophers and thinkers have discussed the importance of thinking and philosophising about the concept of ‘place’. A necessary structure of human experience, place is vital to the very foundation of human experience. More than the geography or arrangement of places, place is a concept that moulds human experience and contributes to understanding oneself and the world. Place has also been used to explain political motivations and issues such as citizenship, diaspora and migration. Despite its importance, place has not been problematised enough and has been neglected in studies of intersectionality. For instance, the role and influence of place in a person's diversity wheel and the interlocking web of oppressive structures have been reduced to either racial, class or gender categories. As a result, current critical theories fall short in drawing up the effects of place on intersectionality. This chapter, therefore, proposes the need to develop a critical place theory. It highlights the role that place-aspects play in the oppression and marginalisation of individuals. Moreover, it also examines the relatively new concept of placism as an analytical framework that can be used to explain varying oppressive placial structures.

The practice of transracial adoption often triggers strong emotions, effecting views on its ethical validity, both from individuals who are pro transracial adoption and those who strongly resist transracial adoption. This chapter will consider transracial adoption of children of African-Caribbean origin and its psychological impact along a continuum of psychological wellbeing, psychological adjustment and aspects of mental health. The chapter will draw on literature from the USA and, where available, from the UK.

One of the earliest publications on transracial adoption by Grow and Shapiro (1974) explored the psychological adjustment of African-American children placed within white American families. This study along with later studies (Silverman & Feigelman, 1981) concluded that the children were adjusting well in placement. Further early research appeared to suggest that transracial placements have little negative impact on issues of self-esteem, racial or self-identity or intellectual development (Curtis, 1996; Hayes, 1993; Hollingsworth, 1997, 1998; McRoy, 1994; Simon, Altstein & Melli, 1994; Vrogeh, 1997).

The undermining impact on mental health for transracial adoptees appears to be an argument related to the disconnect between the child’s developing racial identity and lack of preparation for racism and the cultural and ethnic group social devaluation likely to be experienced in a white racist society. The impact of loss of ethnic identity is said to be a key issue in the research on transracial adoption. Ethnic identity is the connection or recognition that one is a member of a specific ethnic or racial group and coming to adopt those associated characteristics into the group associated cultural and historical connections into oneself identity (Rotheram & Phinney, 1987). The establishment of a secure and accurate racial identity is said to be a protective factor in psychological adjustment. This chapter will explore issues and narratives related to this argument.

This chapter analyzes the semiotic construction of US claims to sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Building on semiotic theories in sociology and theories within critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies, it presents an interpretive analysis of state, military, and academic discursive strategies. The US empire-state attempts to construct colonial narratives of race and sovereignty that rehistoricize the history of Hawaiians and other Indigenous peoples. In order to make claims to sovereignty, settler-colonists construct narratives that build upon false claims to superiority, advancement, and discovery. Colonial resignification is a process by which signs and symbols of Indigenous communities are conscripted into the myths of empire that maintain such sovereign claims. Yet, for this reason, colonial resignification can be undone through reclaiming such signs and symbols from their use within colonial metanarratives. In this case, efforts toward decolonial resignification enacted alternative metanarratives of peoples' relationships to place. This “flip side” of the synecdoche is a process that unravels the ties that bind layered myths by providing new answers to questions that underpin settler colonial sovereignty.

As a team of eight scholars at the University of Texas, we collaborate to research issues that directly focus on the development, training, and experiences of anti-racist and social justice leaders in urban secondary schools. Each of us considered a personal event, or series of events, that significantly influenced our thinking about social justice. We share experiences of personal and institutional racism, and reflect on how these experiences continue to shape our awareness of race. Our perspectives capture how issues of race and racial discrimination persist in a status quo educational system and how past experiences directly influence our work.

This paper explores how racial neoliberalism is the latest evolution of race and global capitalism and is analyzed in the example of global tourism in Costa Rica. Racial neoliberalism represents two important features: colorblind ideology and new racial practices.

Two beach tourism localities in Costa Rica are investigated to identify the racial neoliberal practices that racialize tourism spaces and bodies and the ideological discourses deployed to justify racial hierarchical placement that perpetuates new forms of global and national inequality.

Three neoliberal racial practices in tourism globalization were found. First, “neoliberal networks” supported white transnational actors’ linkage to national and global tourism providers. Second, “neoliberal conservation” in beach land protection policies secured private tourism business development and impacted current and future racial community displacement. Third, “neoliberal activism” exposed how community fights to change local tourism development was demarcated along racial lines.

An inquiry into the mechanisms and logics of how racism contemporarily operates in the global economy exposes the importance of acknowledging that race has an impact on different actor’s global economic participation by organizing the distribution of material economic rewards unevenly.

As scholarship exposes how gender, ethnicity, and class are constituted through global economic arrangements it is imperative that research uncovers how race is a salient category also shaping current global inequality but experienced differently in diverse geographies and histories.

Black women have traditionally occupied a unique position in the American economic structure – at the very bottom. The year 1920 is a unique historical moment to examine how this came to be. Economic prosperity immediately following World War I, the first wave of Black migration, and accelerating industrialization created occupational opportunities that could have enabled Black women to escape working poverty, as the majority of Black men did, but they were actively constrained. Historical narratives have extensively described Black women’s occupational restriction across regions to dirty work, such as domestic service, but not often in conjunction with a comparison to the expanding opportunities of Black men and White women. While intersectionality studies have honed in on the unique place of Black women, little attention has been devoted to this from a historical vantage point. This chapter examines the role that race, gender, and place played in shaping the experience of working poverty and integrates a consideration of queuing theory and Black population size to examine how variations might shape racial outcomes in the labor market in 1920.

This chapter sets out to examine the topic of a spatial analysis of urban crime through an analysis of David Simon’s seminal television series The Wire. By developing an analysis of the issues that are presented in the series, issues such as race, ethnicity and representation will be addressed in order to add to the understanding of these topics in relation to race and media representations. Each section will address a set of themes which are evident in The Wire. The chapter highlights the idea of race in the series and how characters are presented on screen. The research is also concerned with economic issues depicted in the series and the effect of the economy on the characters in Baltimore, the U.S. city in which The Wire was set.

The conclusion of the chapter addresses poverty class and inequality as topics and sets out to document these themes in relation to race. The third chapter also discusses the racism and discrimination that is apparent in The Wire. By contextualising the series, the book is attempting to theorise relevant issues surrounding race, gender and power through an examination of relevant literature and the development of a theoretical framework from which key issues will be addressed.