The Sociology of Urban Black America Marcus Anthony Hunter 1 and Zandria F. Robinson 2 1 Department of Sociology and African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095; email: hunter@soc.ucla.edu 2 Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee 38112; email: robinsonz@rhodes.edu Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2016. 42:385–405 The Annual Review of Sociology is online at soc.annualreviews.org This article’s doi: 10.1146/annurev-soc-081715-074356 Copyright c  2016 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved Keywords inequality, place, race, sociology, urban Black America, urbanization Abstract Beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro and Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors, this review revisits and examines sociological research on urban Black Americans from the late nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on the approaches, frameworks, and sociological insights that emerged over this period, we examine this scholarship within two broad frames: the deficit frame and the asset frame. The deficit frame includes scholarship emphasizing both the structures that negatively affect Black ur- ban life (e.g., disappearance of work, residential segregation, poor education, urban poverty) and the cultural “deficits” that either are adaptations to those structural realities or (as some deficit scholars argue) are the cause of urban Black hardships. The asset frame includes scholarship focusing on the agency and cultural contributions of urban Black Americans. Detailing the histori- cal origins and contemporary use of these frames, we demonstrate how the sociology of urban Black America remains a reflection of the possibilities and problems of the broader discipline. The review concludes by outlining new conceptual opportunities offered by what we refer to as chocolate city sociology. 385 Click here to view this article's online features: • Download figures as PPT slides • Navigate linked references • Download citations • Explore related articles • Search keywords ANNUAL REVIEWS Further Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2016.42:385-405. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by University of California - Los Angeles UCLA on 12/13/16. For personal use only.