politics

While considerable media attention has been paid to the student debt crisis in the United States, few stories have detailed how this burden falls disproportionately on Black borrowers. Recently, CNBC interviewed Jason Houle about how student loans contribute to the racial wealth gap.

In their research, Houle and his co-author found that Black Americans accumulate nearly twice as much debt as their white counterparts by graduation. This disparity grows through adulthood as Black borrowers pay their loans at a slower rate than whites (4% per year vs. 10% per year). Fifteen years after college, Black borrowers hold 185% more student debt than whites. Houle contends that “the racial wealth gap is both the biggest and has grown the fastest among those with a college education,” and that student loans are a primary reason for this trend. In fact, student loans explain roughly 25% of the total racial wealth gap by age 30.

Houle offers several explanations for this gap. Black students on average have less financial capacity to pay for college than whites, causing them to pursue more loans. Additionally, Black students are more likely to attend expensive for-profit colleges and use private loans, both of which offer fewer protections to consumers. Houle uses the phrase “predatory inclusion” to describe this phenomenon, remarking that expanded access to higher education for Black Americans has also expanded opportunities for financial institutions to exploit them. These findings have made Houle rethink the metaphor of higher education as an engine of upward mobility: 

“In a world where we have rising college costs and rising student debt, it raises questions about whether or not that engine may be sputtering out.”

Gentrification is rapidly transforming once-industrial cities into trendy urban neighborhoods.  However, the dangers that lie below the surface – “hundreds of millions of pounds” of hazardous wastes released by small and large businesses each year – fail to be addressed at the same rate. In a recent interview in The Guardian, sociologists Scott Frickel and James R. Elliot discuss findings from their book about the limitations of current data on environmental hazards and how gentrification has diversified the types of people at risk of exposure to toxic waste.

Frickel and Elliot explain that government databases on hazardous sites only appeared in mid 1980s, and databases often exclude manufacturers that have few employees or release under a specified threshold of pollutants. Reporting is also completely voluntary, meaning the databases only contain the information facilities choose to report. In their research, Frickel and Elliot use old manufacturing directories to address these limitations by creating their own database. They found manufacturing to be heavily concentrated in certain “legacy sites,” or areas where you would expect to find heavy industry with large concentrations of factories or other facilities. However, these site boundaries also spread out slowly over time, and so too did the hazardous wastes. While disadvantaged social groups are more typically exposed to these pollutants, gentrification has disrupted this to some extent.  Elliot explains,

“We do also find things that we’ve come to unfortunately expect from the vast research on environmental injustices… These larger facilities are opening up and disproportionately concentrating in areas of ethnic minority and low-income settlement. But when we begin to consider the spread and the accumulation across cities as land uses change, that picture also changes. We begin to see, as one of our colleagues put it, that we’re all in this together. Many different types of neighborhoods are exposed.”

To remedy this exposure to hazardous materials, Frickel suggests that urban planners seriously consider the history of pollutants that exist below our cities when addressing sustainability. It remains to be seen how gentrification will impact citizens’ ability to hold businesses and government officials accountable for these environmental hazards, but recent events such as the water crisis in Flint should serve as a key example of how far we have left to go to address toxic hazards. 

The contemporary Afro hairstyle has a particular history in the United States that signifies political, cultural, and social resistance. For one, it is a symbol of resistance against white cultural notions of what types of hairstyles and clothing are “aesthetically pleasing.” It also represents a global movement. However, the Afro’s use in popular culture and the media sometimes contradicts the goals of social resistance. A recent article in The Atlantic by Saida Grundy documents how modern uses of the hairstyle can both further ideas of resistance and reduce the Afro to merely a media commodity.

Grundy argues the use of the Afro by Colin Kaepernick in a recent Nike ad campaign has turned a symbol of resistance — made famous during the Black Power movement by people like Angela Davis and other revolutionaries — into a retail commodity. Davis also faced this issue. She was troubled by the way her activism and scholarly work was reduced to an iconic image sold on various merchandise. In a similar way, the branding of Kaepernick’s racial politics risks undermining his intention of highlighting egregious racial disparities in the United States. According to Grundy, Kaepernick has no control of how his message will be received by Nike consumers. Instead,

“He is a proxy—a window-dressing model for the larger project of packaging Black Power images, which is jarringly similar to the cultural reimagining that deemed Davis’s style and the black leather jackets and berets of her contemporaries irresistibly and undeniably cool.”

In short, using symbols of Black resistance in consumer culture can be a double-edged sword. While the use of these symbols can further the movement’s publicity and longevity (as represented by the longtime symbolism of the Afro), it also runs the risk of reducing its message to something that can be easily bought or sold.

Vox writer Zack Beauchamp, among many other cultural critics and journalists, became “obsessed” with the question of why Kavanaugh supporters appear unfazed by potentially false claims during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Beauchamp’s article on the subject relied extensively upon an American Sociological Review article (and an extensive tweet thread from one of the authors) to explain why this might be the case.

According to research from Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim, and Ezra Zuckerman-Sivan, voters can recognize that a politician is lying but still consider them authentic. Their study includes analysis of President Trump’s claim during the 2016 campaign that global warming is a hoax developed by China, which most of the participants labeled as “highly false.” The authors found that,

“Trump voters were significantly more likely to justify the lie as a form of symbolic protest…[and they were] much more likely to think the statement ‘was his way of challenging the elite establishment’ than to see the statement as true.”

To test these findings further, Hahl and colleagues conducted an experiment that involved a simulated college election where the main issue was the imposition of a campus alcohol ban (which would threaten campus traditions). Participants who were assigned the traditionalist group and led to believe that the establishment was treating them unfairly supported a candidate who used clearly false data because they viewed the candidate as speaking toward a deeper truth. As demonstrated by the research, the election, and Kavanaugh’s hearings, there must be some sort of legitimacy crisis — either a corrupt establishment or unfair favoring of an upstart group — in order to set up an environment where lies resonate with a sense of truth for an aggrieved group. Beauchamp expands further,

“As with Trump, the deeper truth is that a particular group is treated unfairly by the establishment (recall Kavanaugh’s opening),” Zuckerman-Sivan wrote in a Twitter thread. “So long as the obvious lies can be framed as serving that larger truth, the liar can present himself as the group’s ‘authentic champion.’”

Importantly, Hahl and colleagues find that individuals from all across the political spectrum were susceptible to “the appeal of the lying demagogue” — making lies in search of a larger truth a more common occurrence than just in the last election.

While political unrest in the United States and in the Middle East may look very different on the surface, social media plays a key role in both contexts. In an article published by MIT Technology Review, Zeynep Tufekci uses her research on political upheaval and social media to show how digital connectivity can enable large-scale movements — like the one in Egypt that ousted an autocratic leader during the Arab Spring — but also has a “dark side” that includes things like online infighting among activists. 

Tufekci’s research further illustrates how traditional gatekeepers including mainstream media and NGOs have been removed from their positions of power by the swift rise of new, digital gatekeepers like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Politicians including Barack Obama and Donald Trump have used digital connectivity to bypass mainstream media and reach the public directly. While digital connectivity is useful to coordinate protests and create social communities, it can also polarize opinions — as was the case with Russian operatives who created fake local media brands and published polarizing content on social media during the 2016 presidential campaigns in the United States. Tufecki argues that social media is a double-edged sword: Both an instrument for spreading democracy and as a weapon that attacks it. Tufekci’s forward-looking proposition in the face of this reality is:

The way forward is not to cultivate nostalgia for the old-world information gatekeepers or for the idealism of the Arab Spring. It’s to figure out how our institutions, our checks and balances, and our societal safeguards should function in the 21st century — not just for digital technologies but for politics and the economy in general. This responsibility isn’t on Russia, or solely on Facebook or Google or Twitter. It’s on us.

More than 20 million people tuned in to the Ford-Kavanaugh hearing on Thursday. Many sociologists provided perspectives on the hearing, outlining everything from the myths about rape to the connections (and differences) with the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas case. In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Shamus Khan provides his take on how class privilege shaped many of Brett Kavanaugh’s actions.

In his book Privilege, Khan followed students at St. Paul’s, an elite private school in New Hampshire. He describes how elite institutions, including the ones Kavanaugh attended, like Yale, foster privilege among their predominantly upper-class student bodies. This privilege includes ideas that students are “exceptional” and that the “rules don’t really apply to them.” As Khan explains in the article,

“What makes these schools elite is that so few can attend. In the mythologies they construct, only those who are truly exceptional are admitted — precisely because they are not like everyone else…Schools often quite openly affirm the idea that, because you are better, you are not governed by the same dynamics as everyone else. They celebrate their astonishingly low acceptance rates and broadcast lists of notable alumni who have earned their places within the nation’s highest institutions, such as the Supreme Court.”

These narratives of privilege among the elite can have some pretty nasty implications. Khan cites research by economist Raj Chetty demonstrating that admission to an Ivy League school is rarely the result of educational aptitude, but rather extreme family wealth. He asserts that this class privilege, masked by notions of “exceptional qualities,” is tied to beliefs about special treatment among the elite. For example, Kavanaugh’s supporters argue that he deserves the Supreme Court nomination and accountability for actions he committed years ago doesn’t really apply to him. Khan illustrates further how this privilege also shaped Kavanaugh’s actions on Thursday:

“This collective agreement that accountability doesn’t apply to Kavanaugh (and, by extension, anybody in a similar position who was a youthful delinquent) may help explain why he seems to believe he can lie with impunity — a trend he continued Thursday, when he informed senators that he hadn’t seen the testimony of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, even though a committee aide told the Wall Street Journal he’d been watching.”

In short, Khan’s research demonstrates how class privilege has shaped Kavanaugh’s actions from the outset, and how this privilege is cemented by the institutions and social circles around him.

The National Weather Service estimates that Hurricane Florence dropped over 8 trillion gallons of rain across North Carolina, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has just started evaluating how much damage was done. While Hurricane Florence and other natural disasters impact thousands of lives every year, not all groups recover equally. Recent research reported by Mic reveals that non-white households tend to lose wealth after a natural disaster, while white households often profit.

Tracking families from 1999 to 2013, sociologists Junia Howell and Jim Elliot found that white families in the most disaster-hit counties gained $126,000 in wealth on average over the 14 years of the study. By contrast, Back, Latinx, and Asian families in the same counties lost $27,000, $29,000 and $10,000 respectively. “Put another way, whites accumulate more wealth after natural disasters while residents of color accumulate less,” Elliot explained.

After a natural disaster, FEMA provides grants and low-interest loans to offset the cost of property damage. While it would make sense that federal disaster relief would mitigate racial disparity, Howell and Elliot’s research shows that it actually makes it worse. Counties receiving the most FEMA aid experienced the starkest widening of the racial wealth gap. Black families in counties that received the least FEMA aid accumulated $82,000 more wealth on average than Black families in counties that received the most aid. The researchers tried to explain this puzzling finding:

“Based on previous work on disasters such as hurricanes Katrina and Harvey, we know FEMA aid is not equitably distributed across communities … When certain areas receive more redevelopment aid and those neighborhoods also are primarily white, racial inequality is going to be amplified.”

In other words, one potential explanation for this trend is that white communities within counties receiving federal aid tend to receive more investment for rebuilding after a disaster than non-white communities in the same county. And with climate change increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, this discovery implies worsening racial wealth gaps in the future. However, Howell and Elliot see reason to be hopeful,

“The good news is that if we develop more equitable approaches to disaster recover, we can not only better tackle that problem but also help build a more just and resilient society.”

The devastation of Hurricane Florence is not limited to the loss of human lives. It is estimated that millions of chickens and thousands of pigs died in North Carolina from the flooding. Vegan social movements have pointed to this major loss of animal life as one of the many reasons to reduce our reliance on meat and the consumption of other animal products. However, these groups face a difficult path ahead as factory farming is a massive U.S. industry. A recent article in The Atlantic highlights research by sociologists Corey Wrenn, Nina Gheihman, and Elizabeth Cherry on the many obstacles that can thwart veganism from blossoming into a large-scale social movement.

According to Wrenn, one of the main barriers to mobilization of any social movement is that they allow “free-riders”, or individuals who may identify with the movement but do not change their behavior. In the case of veganism, including “flexitarians” — people who are interested in vegetarianism or veganism but still eat meat and other animal products — waters down the cause’s overall message. Wrenn argues that including flexitarians “maintain[s] the illusion of mass support, [while] real power is reserved for core members.” Wrenn suggests that smoking cessation campaigns provide a key example of how an “all or nothing” approach can bring about meaningful change in consumption behaviors.

In the same article, Elizabeth Cherry and Nina Gheihman push back against Wrenn’s claims, advocating that incrementalism and inclusion of those who aren’t strictly vegan may lead to more success for vegan social movements. Cherry, who has a book comparing animal rights activism in France and the United States, argues that vegan social movements promoting meat reduction rather than complete elimination parallels the often incremental shift by many vegans into a plant-based diet. Gheihman agrees with Wrenn that flexitarianism may damage vegan social movements in the long-term, but also believes that including those at the margins of the movement accounts for the multiple motivations people may have for going vegan. Gheihman expands further,

“I do believe that flexitarianism as an initial approach is worthwhile, as there are many people who are not willing to adopt the ideological stance of the animal-rights movement within a society that does not yet embrace it. As well, they may have alternate motivations for following a plant-based diet, including health and environmentalism, and I believe these motivations are as valid as that of animal rights.”

The current immigration policies and practices of the Trump administration have received significant scrutiny. Many detainees are subjected to inhumane treatment in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities around the nation, demonstrated in recent reports of  sexual assault and the potential death of a migrant child upon release from detention. In a recent article in The Conversation, sociologist Tanya Golash-Boza argues that the criminalization and deportation of immigrants is nothing new, but rather that the Trump administration’s actions are part of a broader pattern of mass deportation.

In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security was created, and upon its inception housed both ICE (which was also formed in 2003) and Customs and Border Protection to enforce immigration laws. According to Golash-Boza, the transferral of immigration law enforcement from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security served two purposes: changing the tone of immigration enforcement as an issue of national security and a massive cash flow to immigration law enforcement agencies.

Even though immigration is central to Trump’s image and platform, deportations were actually highest under President Obama, with three million people deported during his tenure. Tough immigration enforcement has occurred across party lines and is about more than just ICE. Golash-Boza expands,

“For the past 20 years, aggressive immigration law enforcement has been a constant across Democrat and Republican administrations. Democratic President Bill Clinton signed laws in 1996 that greatly expanded deportations. Republican George Bush created the Department of Homeland Security and, in effect, ICE. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security led to a spike in the number of people deported from the U.S.”

Golash-Boza’s research demonstrates that ending mass deportation in the United States will require more than just standing up to Trump and ICE, but addressing our history of aggressive immigration policies and its connections to the “war on terror.”

As debates about gun control continue amid mass shootings, compromise continues to be elusive. One step toward compromise is understanding what drives attitudes about gun control. Conventional wisdom suggests attitudes about gun control are closely tied to other political views, party affiliation, or past experiences with using firearms for hunting or personal protection. Sociologists have shown that attitudes about guns are also cultural, tapping into deep assumptions about what it means to protect and provide for loved ones. Now, a new study finds an even more surprising link: attitudes about guns are closely associated with core assumptions about religion in society.

In a recent article for the Washington Post, Andrew Whitehead, Landon Schnabel, and Samuel Perry summarize the findings from their study:

“Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalism believe that America has always been ― and should always be ― distinctively Christian in its national identity, sacred symbols and public policies…the connection between Christian nationalism and gun control attitudes proves stronger than we expected. It turns out that how intensely someone adheres to Christian nationalism is one of the strongest predictors of whether someone supports gun control. One’s political party, religiosity, gender, education or age doesn’t matter.”

These findings highlight how attitudes about guns are connected to some Americans’ core sense of social identity. This makes the policy debate a proxy for arguing about who we are as a country, and such a high stakes argument invites deeply entrenched positions.