The racial architecture of belonging: Du Bois and the boundaries of the nation

This essay reviews Jessica Vasquez-Tokos's Burdens of Belonging: Race in an Unequal Nation. Building on Du Bois's insight that racial hierarchy structures national belonging, Vasquez-Tokos demonstrates that belonging in the United States is a historically produced and racially stratified social position. Burdens of Belonging shows how institutions, social interactions, and national narratives construct people of color as social “problems” while positioning Whiteness as the benchmark of Americanness. The book traces how these dynamics are reproduced through institutional settings like schools, where racial messaging cultivates “anticipatory racial stress”, shaping individuals' sense of safety, aspirations, and everyday navigation of the nation. Concurrently, respondents generate counter narratives and collective claims to land, labor, and belonging. By synthesizing Du Boisian theory, racial formation theory, and settler colonial analysis, Burdens of Belonging reconceptualizes belonging as a stratifed outcome of historical power relations and highlights the continuing implications of racialized legitimacy for the future of American democracy.