Group boundaries and movement across them.
9 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders · 1968
Concludes that the 1967 urban riots grew out of entrenched racial discrimination in housing, employment and policing, and warns that the United…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois · 1903
Introduces double consciousness — seeing yourself through the eyes of a society that despises you — and founds American sociology of race.
+1 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Racial Formation in the United States
Michael Omi & Howard Winant · 1986
Argues that race is neither a fixed biological fact nor pure illusion but an ongoing social and political process, continually reshaped by struggles…
+5 more at this level
9 works
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
Concludes that the 1967 urban riots grew out of entrenched racial discrimination in housing, employment and policing, and warns that the United States was moving toward two societies, separate and unequal.
link checked 17 Sept 2026W. E. B. Du Bois
Introduces double consciousness — seeing yourself through the eyes of a society that despises you — and founds American sociology of race.
about 4.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Hannah Arendt
Argues from her own experience of statelessness that the refugee, stripped of legal protection by any state, reveals a gap at the heart of a rights framework built on national citizenship.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Michael Omi & Howard Winant
Argues that race is neither a fixed biological fact nor pure illusion but an ongoing social and political process, continually reshaped by struggles over how racial categories are defined and used.
William Safran
Sets out criteria for what makes a dispersed population a diaspora, a myth of return, a homeland orientation, a boundary-maintaining identity, that became the reference definition later diaspora scholarship argued against.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles Taylor
Argues that withholding recognition of a group's distinct identity can inflict real harm, so a liberal state has reason to accommodate cultural difference rather than apply the same rules to everyone regardless of identity.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alejandro Portes & Min Zhou
Argues that the children of immigrants do not assimilate along one path into a shared mainstream, but sort into divergent outcomes depending on family resources and the community they join.
Rogers Brubaker
Argues that treating ethnic groups as real, bounded actors mistakes a category people use for a thing that exists, and that ethnicity is better studied as a way of perceiving experience than as a fixed group membership.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Josephine Hoegaerts, Tuire Liimatainen, Laura Hekanaho & Elizabeth Peterson (eds.)
Argues that Finland's self-image as untouched by colonialism obscures how Finnish identity was built through the same racial hierarchies as other European nations, with lasting effects on who counts as fully Finnish today.
link checked 17 Sept 2026