Secret and private organizations, in the form of Greek-letter organizations, mutual aid societies, and civic orders, together possess a storied and often-romanticized place in popular culture. While much has been made of these groups’ glamorous origins and influence—such as the Freemasons’ genesis in King Solomon’s temple or the belief in the Illuminati’s control of modern geo-politics—few have explicitly examined the role of race and ethnicity in organizing and perpetuating these cloistered orders. This volume directly addresses the inattention paid to the salience of race in secret societies. Through an examination of the Historically Black and White Fraternities and Sororities, the Ku Klux Klan in the US, the Ekpe and Abakuj secret societies of Africa and the West Indies, Gypsies in the United Kingdom, Black and White Temperance Lodges, and African American Order of the Elks, this book traces the use of racial and ethnic identity in these organizations. This important contribution examines how such orders are both cause and consequence of colonization, segregation, and subjugation, as well as their varied roles as both catalysts and impediments to developing personal excellence, creating fictive kinship ties, and fostering racial uplift, nationalism, and cohesion. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This volume brings together a variety of studies on the question of cities, ethnicity and diversity. Contributions cover various facets of life in contemporary cities, ranging from the role which street markets play in diverse neighbourhoods, to everyday multiculture in a specific street, the role of community and hometown associations among migrant communities, expressions of ethnicity in urban neighbourhoods, and the changing dynamics of integration and community cohesion. This book will be of interest to those who are concerned with developing a better understanding of how urban communities are being transformed by the development of new patterns of migration and ethnic mobilisation. With contributions from a wide range of scholarly and national backgrounds, each chapter helps to provide an overview both of current trends and of historical patterns and processes. Collectively they provide important insights into the shifting patterns of community and identity in increasingly diverse communities and neighbourhoods. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Multiculturalism, Social Cohesion and Immigration brings together original research that addresses key facets of the changing dynamics of race, multiculturalism and immigration in contemporary British society. The various chapters in this volume tackle important social and political issues such as ethnic diversity and segregation, post-race politics, contact and threat hypotheses, national identity, anti-racist mobilisation and whiteness. It provides an important insight into the dynamics of contemporary British society. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

The world of elite campuses is one of rarified social circles, as well as prestigious educational opportunities. W. Carson Byrd studied twenty-eight of the most selective colleges and universities in the United States to see whether elite students’ social interactions with each other might influence their racial beliefs in a positive way, since many of these graduates will eventually hold leadership positions in society. He found that students at these universities believed in the success of the ‘best and the brightest,’ leading them to situate differences in race and status around issues of merit and individual effort. Poison in the Ivy challenges popular beliefs about the importance of cross-racial interactions as an antidote to racism in the increasingly diverse United States. He shows that it is the context and framing of such interactions on college campuses that plays an important role in shaping students’ beliefs about race and inequality in everyday life for the future political and professional leaders of the nation. Poison in the Ivy is an eye-opening look at race on elite college campuses, and offers lessons for anyone involved in modern American higher education.

The chapters in this collection cover diverse aspects of the changing meanings and boundaries of race, migration and identity in the contemporary United States. The situation in the USA has been the subject of intense policy and political debate over the past decades and the papers in this volume provide an important insight from a wide range of analytical perspectives. They provide an insight into the changing dynamics of race and migration in the contemporary environment, combining conceptual analysis with original empirical research. The concerns of this volume address global questions of relevance as well as those specific to the USA. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

The concept of ‘super-diversity’ has received considerable attention since it was introduced in Ethnic and Racial Studies in 2007, reflecting a broadening interest in finding new ways to talk about contemporary social complexity. This book brings together a collection of essays which empirically and theoretically examine super-diversity and the multi-dimensional shifts in migration patterns to which the notion refers. These shifts entail a worldwide diversification of migration channels, differentiations of legal statuses, diverging patterns of gender and age, and variance in migrants’ human capital. Across the contributions, super-diversity is subject to two modes of comparison: (a) side-by-side studies contrasting different places and emergent conditions of super-diversity; and (b) juxtaposed arguments that have differentially found use in utilizing or criticizing ‘super-diversity’ descriptively, methodologically or with reference to policy and public practice. The contributions discuss super-diversity and its implications in nine cities located in eight countries and four continents. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

The chapters in this volume examine the racial and ethnic landscape of Britain in a contemporary era of neoliberalism and financial crisis. A key aspect of neoliberal thought is the belief that we live in a ‘post-racial’ in which the problems of racism and xenophobia have been overcome. However, cultural retrenchment and coded xenophobia have been sweeping the political terrain, accompanied by ‘new racisms’ and ‘new racial subjects’ that only close contextual analysis can unpick. The scholarship contained in this collection challenges those who suggest that we live in a post-racial time. By focusing on particular locations in Britain at a particular moment, the volume explores local stories of ‘race’ and racism across changing sociopolitical ground. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of race, racism, diaspora, multiculturalism, post-colonialism, transnationalism and post-race. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This study reviews developments in the ethnic and national identity of the descendants of migrants, taking ethnic Chinese as a case study. Our core question is why, in spite of debates worldwide about identity, exclusion and rights, do minority communities continue to suffer discrimination and attacks? This question is asked in view of the growing incidence in recent years of ‘racial’ conflicts between majority and minority communities and among minorities, in both developed and developing countries. The study examines national identity from the perspective of migrants’ descendants, whose national identity may be more rooted than is often thought. Concepts such as ‘new ethnicities’, ‘cultural fluidity’, and ‘new’ and ‘multiple’ identities feature in this examination. These concepts highlight identity changes across generations and the need to challenge and reinterpret the meaning of ‘nation’ and to review problems with policy initiatives designed to promote nation-building in multi-ethnic societies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Karim Murji is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Open University, UK. He writes on cultural and policy studies of ethnicity and racism, and criminology. With John Solomos, he is the editor of Racialization: Studies in theory and practice (2005) and Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations. He is an Editor of the journal Sociology. Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, UK. She has written on issues of racism and sexuality, global cultures of racism and the war on terror. Her recent work includes Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on Terror (2008) and the edited collection Ethnicities and Values in a Changing World (2009).

Do second-generation ethnic minorities, those born and brought up in Britain, increasingly adopt British attitudes, values and ways or life, or do they, as some commentators have claimed, remain isolated from the mainstream? This study maps the extent of generational change among Britain’s ethnic minority population and explores the underlying processes involved. It asks whether generational change has been in the direction of greater integration, or whether some minorities been slower to integrate, perhaps as a result of the prejudice and discrimination from the white British that they have encountered or because of desires to maintain ethnic values and resist Western practices. The study draws on the most recent and most authoritative British data to answer these questions. Chapter authors include leading authorities both from Britain and America, including Mary Waters (Harvard), Lucinda Platt (LSE) and Anthony Heath, CBE (Oxford and Manchester) as well as a new generation of young scholars. It will be essential reading both for students and scholars working on ethnic relations and for policy-makers and the wider public interested in questions of social cohesion, multiculturalism and integration. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.