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This chapter examines the discursive strategies utilized by both the media and popular culture in their commentaries on the Obama moment. These strategies—referred to as “racial grammar”—serve as a formidable political tool for the maintenance of racial order. Through an exploration of housing policies, the chapter demonstrates the subtle institutionalized impact of colorblind policies and “post-racial nonsense.” A close examination of research in the areas of housing, education, and everyday social interaction reveals little progress since the 1960s as Blacks are still more segregated than any other racial or ethnic group in America. The actual difference between the de jure racism of the Jim Crow era and the smiling face of segregation today is simply in how it is accomplished. The colorblind racism that emerged in post-racial America is therefore contradictory. Despite its genteel character, colorblind racism somehow safeguards white supremacy.

This introductory chapter presents the organization of the book as it examines the dynamics of movements situated at the intersections of marginalized axes of race, gender, and class. By definition, these movements are confronted with cross-cutting issues and images that “disproportionately and directly affect only certain segments of a marginal group.” First, it examines whether the historical development of discourse by the women's movement about women and work, in terms of race, gender, and class intersectionality, shaped the way contemporary welfare rights activists respond to the cross-cutting issues embodied in welfare politics. Second, it explores how contemporary realities of colorblind racism and intersectionality influence activists' willingness to engage with issues of race and class embedded at the core of welfare politics.

This chapter studies the “race and class consciousness” frames that challenge the dominant racial ideology of colorblindness. Colorblindness frames articulate different forms of marginalization in a hierarchical manner rather than as mutually constitutive processes. Race and class consciousness frames, on the other hand, take experiential and political intersectionality seriously. They reflect a consciousness about the multiplicative nature of identity and, by extension, the multiplicative and interlocking qualities of these systems. These frames also transform intersectionality from a theoretical approach to a practical organizing and political strategy. Race and class consciousness frames are used most often by women of color activists. They are the foundation of a challenge to colorblind racism.

In this chapter we focus more directly on individualized and felt treatment of low-income Black students in a context in which difference manifests itself in the school's environment in particular kinds of ways. To be clear, we address felt peer racism but we do not have evidence from White and/or privileged students of color, or participant observation data, that validate such treatment directed towards this group. Significantly, however, the topic surfaced strongly among low-income Black students, making such felt treatment as linked to the nature of their “outsider within” status, important to unpack. As part of this discussion, we additionally take up the position of privileged multi-generational Black students and the privileged children of “flexible immigrants” of color in elite private schools. We then examine the college destination patterns of all students included in this book. We intentionally break from strong ethnographic form to probe, at a more deeply analytical and theoretical level, the meaning behind data reported here and in earlier chapters. At times, then, we go well beyond the actions and words of the participants themselves in order to theorize, in new ways, class and race productions.

This chapter focuses on the influence that the Black Power movement and rise of employment discrimination litigation had on the Vulcan Society and Black firefighters across the country. The dialectical relationships between the civil rights and Black Power movements and the Vulcan Society’s old and new guard eventually transformed the organization and its objectives and helped facilitate the IABPFF, a national Black caucus group formed to combat discrimination and increase Black representation in — and community control of — urban fire departments. Both the IABPFF and the Vulcan Society embraced “separatism without separation,” and used their “outsider status within a white-dominated institution,” as well as shifts in employment discrimination case law, to “reveal the inner workings of institutional racism” within the FDNY and urban fire departments more generally. This shift was instrumental in the fight to establish legal remedies to address institutionalized racism and its impact on the racial composition of urban fire departments and became the primary method used by the Vulcan Society and the IABPFF and its local affiliates to make fire departments more representative of and responsive to the people and communities they served