William Sites

Critical race theories of ideology, surprisingly, replicate key tensions in early Marxist thought. Following a selective review of several Marxist theorists, this article examines critical race conceptions of racial ideology within the influential work of Charles W. Mills and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, probing three related problem areas: an “expressive” theory of society, the correspondence of ideologies to racial groups, and an overreliance on standpoint implications. In response, the author develops a heterodox, nonreductive Marxist theory in which racial ideologies, although historically durable, are seen as contingent, relatively autonomous constructs that take shape unevenly within capitalist societies, do not correspond to fixed social groups, and may or may not facilitate the reproduction of capitalism. Developing a less deterministic theory of the relation between social structure, group identity, and racist belief opens up more generative approaches to the problem of racial ideology.

Although immigrant hometown associations (HTAs) are most often recognized as important for sustaining transnational ties to sending societies, Chicago HTAs took a leadership role in the 2006 marches for US immigrant rights. Employing a binational historical framework focused on the influence of political opportunities and threats on social movement activism, we argue that the involvement of Chicago HTAs in US-oriented mobilization resulted from an evolving series of organizational responses to state actors in both Mexico and the USA. We find that these interactions conferred growing levels of organizational capacity and political legitimacy upon CONFEMEX, the Chicago-based HTA confederation, and played a key role in its embrace of US-centred strategies of popular mobilization in 2006. These findings suggest the utility of a long-term, binational focus on multiple state actors in order to understand the complex political evolution of HTAs and the emergence of the US immigrant rights movement.

Recent geographical studies of music (e.g., Anderson, 2002; Wood et al., 2007) suggest their potential to contribute to critical utopian thinking. This study offers a preliminary examination of musical utopianism, focusing in particular on its contribution to several questions provoked by the emerging dialogue between urban spatial theory and artistic cultural practice (Pinder, 2008). Drawing insights from philosophy, musicology, sociology, geography, and urban studies, this theoretical investigation centers on how music creates imagined spaces and whether these spaces might be considered utopian. Following a discussion of black music's distinctive engagement with utopia and the city, the Chicago-based work of the composer and bandleader Sun Ra is examined as a complex, experimental exploration of musical utopia in a post-utopian age.

Post–World War II urban history, by prioritizing either political economy or cultural consumption, has tended to produce narratives of African American experience that emphasize marginalization or incorporation. This article examines a group of Chicago activists and musicians surrounding the jazz experimentalist Sun Ra and his business partner Alton Abraham to explore the contribution of radical political currents and heterodox cultural practices to black urban culture of the early postwar period. Sun Ra and his colleagues engaged in various modes of vernacular dissemination—public preaching, political broadsheets, and, especially, musical performances for community associations and local commercial audiences—to challenge what they saw as the catastrophic degradation of black Americans in the postwar city and to present utopian alternatives. In the process, Ra, Abraham, and their associates developed a distinctive form of cultural production, one that departed from the market-liberal, race-relations orthodoxies of metropolitan elites, black or white, and that anticipated the more visible black cultural radicalism of the 1960s.

This paper examines the anti-Wal-Mart and immigrant rights movements in Chicago in order to understand how local political institutions influence dynamics of exclusion and incorporation. Tracing the post-1970s reconfiguration of the city's machine politics, I argue that a mayor-centered neoclientelism has enabled the local state to flexibly manage the political challenges posed by movements. This analysis seeks to contribute to broader conceptions of contemporary urban governance, suggesting how a ‘deviant’ set of local institutions may facilitate the sort of hybridized formations upon which a neoliberal politics relies.

Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, black—white disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolution of racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives about black economic fortunes that emphasize changing skill demands related to the rise and fall of the industrial economy. Reviewing a large body of work by economic historians and other researchers, this article contends that the historical evidence is not consistent with manufacturing- and skills-centered explanations of changes in relative black earnings and employment. Instead, data from the 1940s onward suggest that racial earnings inequalities have been significantly influenced by political and institutional factors—social movements, government policies, unionization efforts, and public-employment patterns—and that racial employment disparities have increased over the course of the postwar and post-1970s periods for reasons that are not reducible to skills. Taking a broader historical view suggests that black economic fortunes have long been powerfully shaped by nonmarket factors and recenters research on racial discrimination as well as the political and institutional forces that influence labor markets.