Racial capitalism is a fundamental cause of the racial and socioeconomic inequities within the novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) in the United States. The overrepresentation of Black death reported in Detroit, Michigan is a case study for this argument. Racism and capitalism mutually construct harmful social conditions that fundamentally shape COVID-19 disease inequities because they (a) shape multiple diseases that interact with COVID-19 to influence poor health outcomes; (b) affect disease outcomes through increasing multiple risk factors for poor, people of color, including racial residential segregation, homelessness, and medical bias; (c) shape access to flexible resources, such as medical knowledge and freedom, which can be used to minimize both risks and the consequences of disease; and (d) replicate historical patterns of inequities within pandemics, despite newer intervening mechanisms thought to ameliorate health consequences. Interventions should address social inequality to achieve health equity across pandemics.

Despite a general acceptance of "race" as a social, rather than biological construct in the social sciences, racial health disparities research has given less consideration to the dimensions of race that may be most important for shaping persistent disparities in adult physical health status. In this study, we incorporate the social constructionist view that race is multidimensional to evaluate the health significance of two measures of race, racial self-identification and the socially perceived skin tone of black Americans, in a sample of black and white adults in the Nashville Stress and Health Study (N=1186). First, we use the approach most common in disparities research-comparing group differences in an outcome-to consider self-identified racial differences in allostatic load (AL), a cumulative biological indicator of physical dysregulation. Second, we examine intragroup variations in AL among blacks by skin tone (i.e. light, brown, or dark skin). Third, we assess whether the magnitude of black-white disparities are equal across black skin tone subgroups. Consistent with prior research, we find significantly higher rates of dysregulation among blacks. However, our results also show that racial differences in AL vary by blacks' skin tone; AL disparities are largest between whites and dark-skinned blacks and smallest between whites and light-skinned blacks. This study highlights the importance of blacks' skin tone as a marker of socially-assigned race for shaping intragroup and intergroup variations in adult physiological dysregulation. These results demonstrate the importance of assessing multiple dimensions of race in disparities research, as this approach may better capture the various mechanisms by which "race" continues to shape health.

Amidst institutional reckonings with anti-blackness, minority-serving institutions (MSIs) are thought to be an intervention. But, how do Black students perceive being served at Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs)? Analyzing focus groups (n= 33), we find Black students perceived anti-blackness at an HSI from: overrepresentation of white personnel in power; lack of culturally attuned and financial support; racially hostile climate; and little solidarity from non-Black Latinx and other peers. We show that HSIs contend with anti-Black institutional embeddedness, too, and argue that the goals of HSIs to serve racially minoritized students will not be achieved unless they address institutional, organizational, and interpersonal anti-Blackness.

White supremacy shaped both the formation of the South African racial state and the formation of racial groups, including the creation of the Coloured category as mixed and liminal between White and Black. There are, however, debates about the continuing legacy of white supremacy in post-apartheid, contemporary South Africa. This paper joins others in the important task of delineating racial hierarchies within contemporary South African society to help reveal the form of oppression, and the accompanying underlying assumptions and ideologies, such as white supremacy, that allows racial difference and deprivation to remain. In this paper, I analyze semi-structured interview data from 50 “Coloured” adults in order to explore their understanding of white supremacy, the racial hierarchy, and contemporary racism. I find that white supremacy negatively impacts Coloureds’ lived experiences through shaping their experiences of structural and interpersonal discrimination from White South Africans. In addition, Coloured South Africans understand the legacy of white supremacy in shaping contemporary racial hierarchies such that White South Africans “still come out on top.” However, I argue that, at the same time, white supremacy also “colours” or hinders some Coloured respondents’ perceptions of their remaining relative privilege in post-apartheid South Africa. This project contributes by revealing a more complete story about the pervasiveness of contemporary hegemonic, global white supremacy that impacts all aspects of the racial hierarchy, including those mixed or in the middle.