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Books by R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy

Papers by R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

The aim of this visualization is to highlight sociodemographic variation among Black suburbs and ... more The aim of this visualization is to highlight sociodemographic variation among Black suburbs and spur further research on them. The authors provide a sociodemographic portrait of Black suburbs, defined as those that are more than 50 percent Black, to highlight their prevalence and variety. The 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas in 2018 contained 413 Black suburbs, representing 5 percent of all suburbs. The authors examine distributions of Black suburbs on two characteristics, median household income and housing age, to make two points. First, Black suburbs feature substantial sociodemographic variation in terms of both income and housing age. Second, this variation is not primarily a function of suburbs’ Black population share. Contrary to common assumptions, Black suburbs are not all older suburbs populated by the socioeconomically disadvantaged but include newer, middle-class, and affluent places as well.

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231211065521 for Visualizing Variation in Major... more Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231211065521 for Visualizing Variation in Majority-Black Suburbs in the United States by Kiara Wyndham Douds, R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy and Kimberley Johnson in Socius

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2018

Urban Education, 2017

This article explores the range of experiences and meanings of Black life in suburban space. Draw... more This article explores the range of experiences and meanings of Black life in suburban space. Drawing from educational, historical, and sociological literatures, I argue that an underconsideration of suburban space has left many portraits of educational inequality incomplete. The article outlines the emergence of American suburbs and the formation of the city suburb divide which governs much framing of educational inequality and why this frame has limited thinking about what suburbs are and who lies within them. I follow with a discussion of the contemporary state of the suburbs which are now often more racially, ethnically, and economically diverse than their proximal central cities. There are a variety of suburb types, and this article explores three: majority–minority suburbs, exclusive enclaves, and gateway communities. Each suburb type leads to unique challenges such as demographic mismatch between leadership and school population to considering how ethnicity and race interact w...

Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, 2010

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to gain greater understanding of the ways that youth “do r... more Purpose – The purpose of this study is to gain greater understanding of the ways that youth “do race” in the post-Civil Rights United States. Scholars have studied racial discourse and meaning among adults but have not rigorously investigated the patterns of discourse among youth. Methodology – I analyze in-depth interviews and in and out-of-school observations drawn from three racially mixed fourth-grade classrooms in a city that I call Rolling Acres. Among the 31 families, 21 of the children identified as White and 10 identified as Black. Rolling Acres is a midsized city of over 100,000 residents where 75 percent of its residents identify as White and 9 percent identify as Black. Findings – Youth maintain complex understandings of the importance of race, but mediate the expression of these sentiments based on their social identities and public scripts. Both Black and White children first suggest race does not matter when asked, but then describe that race is important to others in their school. White youth suggest Black youth are the perpetuators of racial antagonisms and perpetuate racial significance through their actions. Black youth suggest White youth do not typically antagonize over race, but when they do the perpetrators are acting out of individual beliefs and thus are limited in impact. Originality – Through an exclusive concentration on the voices of the young, new patterns of understanding and discourse are uncovered, which may relate to later divergences in racial meaning in adulthood between Blacks and Whites.

Peabody Journal of Education, 2016

Sociology

Recent years have seen a rapid growth in interest in the addition of a spatial perspective, espec... more Recent years have seen a rapid growth in interest in the addition of a spatial perspective, especially in the social and health sciences, and in part this growth has been driven by the ready availability of georeferenced or geospatial data, and the tools to analyze them: geographic information science (GIS), spatial analysis, and spatial statistics. Indeed, research on race/ethnic segregation and other forms of social stratification as well as research on human health and behavior problems, such as obesity, mental health, risk-taking behaviors, and crime, depend on the collection and analysis of individual- and contextual-level (geographic area) data across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Given all of these considerations, researchers are continuously developing new ways to harness and analyze geo-referenced data. Indeed, a prerequisite for spatial analysis is the availability of information on locations (i.e., places) and the attributes of those locations (e.g., povert...

African American Studies, Feb 21, 2023

Humanity & Society, 2012

The Internet is a space where technological limits have been broken, yet race continues to shape ... more The Internet is a space where technological limits have been broken, yet race continues to shape the places and ways that people interact. Since 2008, TheRoot. com (hereby referred to as The Root) has occupied a unique and meaningful place within cyberspace by providing a venue for discourse on black communities. On The Root, black scholars, writers, and artisans engage larger black audiences in dialogue on matters facing the African diaspora, in many ways expanding the potential for a vibrant black public sphere. As a project founded by African American Studies professor Henry Louis-Gates, The Root has created a space for fast paced exchange between academics and the black public sphere. The role of the public sphere was first written about by Jurgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and later critiqued by a range of scholars (Fraser 1990; HarrisLacewell 2004, Black Public Sphere Collective 1995). I draw from Catherine Squires’ (2002) working definition of black public sphere/spheres as an, ‘‘ . . . emergent collective composed of people who (a) engage in common discourses and negotiations of what it means to be Black, and (b) pursue particularly defined Black interests’’ (p. 454). I review The Root with an eye toward its potential to fulfill the continued pursuit of a thriving black public sphere. There has been considerable debate about the relevance or presence of viable black public sphere but these discussions have underconsidered sites like The Root as a new channel to establishing and expanding the black public sphere. The Root did not emerge out of thin air. In 2000, Henry Louis Gates founded the website www.africana.com which featured the tagline ‘‘Gateway to the Black World.’’ Africana.com was a unique online companion to the Africana (2005) that Gates coedited with Kwame Anthony Appiah. The emergence of Africana.com

Proceedings of the 2021 AERA Annual Meeting

American Journal of Sociology, 2015

An entry from the Wiley Blackwell Sociology Encyclopedia 2017

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

The aim of this visualization is to highlight sociodemographic variation among Black suburbs and ... more The aim of this visualization is to highlight sociodemographic variation among Black suburbs and spur further research on them. The authors provide a sociodemographic portrait of Black suburbs, defined as those that are more than 50 percent Black, to highlight their prevalence and variety. The 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas in 2018 contained 413 Black suburbs, representing 5 percent of all suburbs. The authors examine distributions of Black suburbs on two characteristics, median household income and housing age, to make two points. First, Black suburbs feature substantial sociodemographic variation in terms of both income and housing age. Second, this variation is not primarily a function of suburbs’ Black population share. Contrary to common assumptions, Black suburbs are not all older suburbs populated by the socioeconomically disadvantaged but include newer, middle-class, and affluent places as well.

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231211065521 for Visualizing Variation in Major... more Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231211065521 for Visualizing Variation in Majority-Black Suburbs in the United States by Kiara Wyndham Douds, R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy and Kimberley Johnson in Socius

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2018

Urban Education, 2017

This article explores the range of experiences and meanings of Black life in suburban space. Draw... more This article explores the range of experiences and meanings of Black life in suburban space. Drawing from educational, historical, and sociological literatures, I argue that an underconsideration of suburban space has left many portraits of educational inequality incomplete. The article outlines the emergence of American suburbs and the formation of the city suburb divide which governs much framing of educational inequality and why this frame has limited thinking about what suburbs are and who lies within them. I follow with a discussion of the contemporary state of the suburbs which are now often more racially, ethnically, and economically diverse than their proximal central cities. There are a variety of suburb types, and this article explores three: majority–minority suburbs, exclusive enclaves, and gateway communities. Each suburb type leads to unique challenges such as demographic mismatch between leadership and school population to considering how ethnicity and race interact w...

Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, 2010

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to gain greater understanding of the ways that youth “do r... more Purpose – The purpose of this study is to gain greater understanding of the ways that youth “do race” in the post-Civil Rights United States. Scholars have studied racial discourse and meaning among adults but have not rigorously investigated the patterns of discourse among youth. Methodology – I analyze in-depth interviews and in and out-of-school observations drawn from three racially mixed fourth-grade classrooms in a city that I call Rolling Acres. Among the 31 families, 21 of the children identified as White and 10 identified as Black. Rolling Acres is a midsized city of over 100,000 residents where 75 percent of its residents identify as White and 9 percent identify as Black. Findings – Youth maintain complex understandings of the importance of race, but mediate the expression of these sentiments based on their social identities and public scripts. Both Black and White children first suggest race does not matter when asked, but then describe that race is important to others in their school. White youth suggest Black youth are the perpetuators of racial antagonisms and perpetuate racial significance through their actions. Black youth suggest White youth do not typically antagonize over race, but when they do the perpetrators are acting out of individual beliefs and thus are limited in impact. Originality – Through an exclusive concentration on the voices of the young, new patterns of understanding and discourse are uncovered, which may relate to later divergences in racial meaning in adulthood between Blacks and Whites.

Peabody Journal of Education, 2016

Sociology

Recent years have seen a rapid growth in interest in the addition of a spatial perspective, espec... more Recent years have seen a rapid growth in interest in the addition of a spatial perspective, especially in the social and health sciences, and in part this growth has been driven by the ready availability of georeferenced or geospatial data, and the tools to analyze them: geographic information science (GIS), spatial analysis, and spatial statistics. Indeed, research on race/ethnic segregation and other forms of social stratification as well as research on human health and behavior problems, such as obesity, mental health, risk-taking behaviors, and crime, depend on the collection and analysis of individual- and contextual-level (geographic area) data across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Given all of these considerations, researchers are continuously developing new ways to harness and analyze geo-referenced data. Indeed, a prerequisite for spatial analysis is the availability of information on locations (i.e., places) and the attributes of those locations (e.g., povert...

African American Studies, Feb 21, 2023

Humanity & Society, 2012

The Internet is a space where technological limits have been broken, yet race continues to shape ... more The Internet is a space where technological limits have been broken, yet race continues to shape the places and ways that people interact. Since 2008, TheRoot. com (hereby referred to as The Root) has occupied a unique and meaningful place within cyberspace by providing a venue for discourse on black communities. On The Root, black scholars, writers, and artisans engage larger black audiences in dialogue on matters facing the African diaspora, in many ways expanding the potential for a vibrant black public sphere. As a project founded by African American Studies professor Henry Louis-Gates, The Root has created a space for fast paced exchange between academics and the black public sphere. The role of the public sphere was first written about by Jurgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and later critiqued by a range of scholars (Fraser 1990; HarrisLacewell 2004, Black Public Sphere Collective 1995). I draw from Catherine Squires’ (2002) working definition of black public sphere/spheres as an, ‘‘ . . . emergent collective composed of people who (a) engage in common discourses and negotiations of what it means to be Black, and (b) pursue particularly defined Black interests’’ (p. 454). I review The Root with an eye toward its potential to fulfill the continued pursuit of a thriving black public sphere. There has been considerable debate about the relevance or presence of viable black public sphere but these discussions have underconsidered sites like The Root as a new channel to establishing and expanding the black public sphere. The Root did not emerge out of thin air. In 2000, Henry Louis Gates founded the website www.africana.com which featured the tagline ‘‘Gateway to the Black World.’’ Africana.com was a unique online companion to the Africana (2005) that Gates coedited with Kwame Anthony Appiah. The emergence of Africana.com

Proceedings of the 2021 AERA Annual Meeting

American Journal of Sociology, 2015

An entry from the Wiley Blackwell Sociology Encyclopedia 2017

This article explores the range of experiences and meanings of Black life in suburban space. Draw... more This article explores the range of experiences and meanings of Black life in suburban space. Drawing from educational, historical, and sociological literatures, I argue that an underconsideration of suburban space has left many portraits of educational inequality incomplete. The article outlines the emergence of American suburbs and the formation of the city suburb divide which governs much framing of educational inequality and why this frame has limited thinking about what suburbs are and who lies within them. I follow with a discussion of the contemporary state of the suburbs which are now often more racially, ethnically, and economically diverse than their proximal central cities. There are a variety of suburb types, and this article explores three: majority–minority suburbs, exclusive enclaves, and gateway communities. Each suburb type leads to unique challenges such as demographic mismatch between leadership and school population to considering how ethnicity and race interact with Afro-Latino communities. A discussion of how racialized poverty in suburbia shapes the school and social experiences of Black youth is offered. The article closes with the consideration of the directions researchers should consider and areas of policy that are ripe for reengagement given the diversity of Black experiences in suburban schools.