ethnicity

The Sacramento Bee recently reported on a political battle unfolding over the 2010 Census that brings sociologists and demographers center stage.   The fight has begun over whether and how to count legal and illegal immigrants in the Census.

The context:  Senator David Vitter of Louisiana wants only legal citizens to be counted in the Census.  Steve Gándola, president and chief executive officer of the Sacramento Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, wants to count all Latinos in the 2010 census, including millions of noncitizens.  Meanwhile, Rev. Miguel Rivera, who heads the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, wants illegal Latino immigrants to boycott the Census as a way to show their displeasure with Congress’ refusal to overhaul national immigration laws.  His motto: “No legalization, no enumeration.”

A sociologist weighs in on the stakes at hand:

With the largest Latino population in the nation, California has a big stake in the debate.  The Golden State would lose five of its 53 House seats if noncitizens were not counted, according to a study by Andrew Beveridge, a professor of sociology at Queens College in New York.

Some historical context on the issue:

Citizenship has never been a requirement, dating back to the first census in 1790, when each slave was counted as three-fifths of a person, said Clara Rodriguez, a sociology professor and census expert at Fordham University in New York.  “Slaves were not citizens,” she said. “They did not become citizens until after the Civil War.”

Rodriguez sympatheizes with Rev. Rivera’s goals but thinks the effort is misguided: 

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Rodriguez said. “I think that they’re shooting themselves in the foot. I think if people are here, they should be counted. Whether they’re here in an undocumented fashion or not, you’re here. And most of these people have to work and pay taxes.”

Rodriguez said an organized boycott would just complicate the work of the federal officials who fret about undercounts every 10 years, when the census is conducted. In the past, she said, individuals have decided on their own whether or not to participate.

“The census has had a very hard time in the past getting people to cooperate, for a variety of reasons,” Rodriguez said.

“Some people don’t want to be bothered. Some people don’t want government interference. Some people don’t want to fill out all those forms. They don’t think the government should know all that. And some people don’t want the government to know that they’re here.”

The Los Angeles Times ran a story this week about a new study that details the persistence of negative racial stereotypes, reporting that “Changes in social standing such as falling below the poverty line or going to jail made people more likely to be perceived as black and less likely to be seen as white,” according to the researchers.

The Los Angeles Times reported this weekend on how some multiracial families see Barack Obama as ‘Other’ like them — meaning that Obama’s multiracial identity, not fitting into a single “racial category,” is sometimes best described by the term ‘Other.’ The article tells the stories of several multiracial families who provide commentary on the difficulty of assigning themselves to a single racial category on forms like college applications. The LA Times reports:

Race, however, continues to be a stubborn puzzle. It wasn’t until 2000 that Americans were allowed to check more than one box for race on U.S. census forms. At that time, about 6.83 million people, or 2.4%, checked two or more races on census forms out of a population of about 281 million.

Additional commentary from a sociologist and a demographer helps to clarify this new trend…

Carolyn Liebler, a sociology professor specializing in family, race and ethnicity at the University of Minnesota, said she expected that the numbers of people identifying as multiracial would be higher in 2010 than they were in 2000 “because the number of mixed-raced marriages are going up” and because of Obama.

Tom W. Smith, an expert on race and demographics at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, calls it the “Obama effect.” “He’s made being multiracial salient,” Smith said.

Read more.

Science Daily reports on a new study from sociologist Rob Ford about the decline in racial prejudice in Britain since the 1980s, which the research suggests is attributable to the tolerance of younger generations.

Dr. Rob Ford from The University of Manchester says that social contact with black or Asian Britons is becoming increasingly unremarkable to white people in their 20s and 30s.

The study published in next month’s British Journal of Sociology found that while 60% of people born in the 1910s opposed marriage between white relatives and ethnic minorities, this figure falls to 25% for people born in the 1970s.

The study draws upon data from the British Social Attitudes Survey conducted in the 1980s and 90s.

“The marked decline in racial prejudice is backed by further data points in 2006, 2004 and 2003 so the results here are pretty emphatic: we are becoming a more tolerant society. The attitudes of older cohorts reflect the fact that their perceptions were shaped by growing up in an ethnically homogeneous Britain before mass immigration began,” he said. “Those cohorts express much more hostility about social contact with minority groups than their children and grandchildren.”

Ford cautions against the assumption that racial prejudice will disappear in the immediate future. He notes, “…while prejudice is therefore likely to be less of a problem in the future, it is unlikely to disappear overnight. Cohort replacement is a slow process and significant levels of hostility to ethnic minorities remain even in the youngest cohorts surveyed here.”

Read more.

The American is now running a story titled, “The Long March of Racial Progress,” a piece that examines the story of race relations in America and the extraordinary changes that have come about. Sociological commentary is featured prominently in this story, specifically the work of sociologist Reynolds Farley.

The American reports: 

As University of Michigan sociologist Reynolds Farley points out in a new paper, there are now 41 African Americans serving in the House of Representatives, compared to only six when the Kerner Commission issued its famous report on race and poverty in 1968. During the years following the Kerner Report, “The slowly rising incomes of black men and the more rapidly rising incomes of black women produced an important economic change for African Americans,” Farley writes. “In 1996, for the first time, the majority of blacks were in the economic middle class or above, if that means living in a household with an income at least twice the poverty line.”

According to Farley, “Only three percent of African Americans could be described as economically comfortable in 1968. That has increased to 17 percent at present. This is an unambiguous sign of racial progress: one black household in six could be labeled financially comfortable.” He notes that the black-white poverty gap “is much smaller now” than it was in the late 1960s.

The story continues, as Reynolds notes, with a point of caution:

Of course, we should not be overly sanguine about black progress, which has been hindered in recent decades by social pathologies and family disintegration. Since the 1968 Kerner Report, “adult black men have fallen further and further behind similar white men in terms of being employed,” says Farley, emphasizing that “the white-black gap in personal income is not closing, nor is the white-black gap in household income getting any smaller.” Indeed, both the white-black income gap and the white-black gap in educational attainment remain “persistent and substantial.”

Read the full story.

The Washington Post reports this morning on findings from sociologist Emilio J. Castilla, of MIT. Castilla’s study, published in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Sociology, examines merit-based pay plans that aim to distribute rewards without racial or gender bias. He concludes that they still favor white men.

The Post reports:

The biases [in pay] were introduced when a supervisor recommended raises or when the human resources department approved them, [Castilla] said. His research, published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Sociology, found that minorities and women had starting salaries similar to those of white men. Biases crept in over time, creating a pay gap. Even though merit-based systems create the appearance of meritocracy, he said, they need more transparency and accountability to live up to it.

Read more.

NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday featured a report on the results of a new collaborative study from some of our country’s premier immigration scholars — John Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters, and Philip Kasinitz.

Margot Adler of NPR reports:

In much of the debate over immigration, there is an underlying question: Are today’s immigrants assimilating into the mainstream as easily as past generations? The answer, at least in New York City, is an unqualified “yes,” according to the results of a 10-year study involving more than 3,000 young men and women, most of them in their 20s.

John Mollenkopf, a professor at City University of New York and an author of the study, says that if you look at the children of immigrants, “the kids are doing well compared to their parents and also doing well compared to the native-born comparison groups.”

Link to the story.

The latest issue of Newsweek featured an article entitled, ‘The Future of Freedom: The Fate Of Liberty In The Next Century Is Fragile, In Part, Because The Very Notion Is Now So Ill-Defined.’

Newsweek reporter Robert J. Samuelson writes,

In a century scarred by the gulags, concentration camps and secret-police terror, freedom is now spreading to an expanding swath of humanity. It is not only growing but also changing–becoming more ambitious and ambiguous–in ways that might, perversely, spawn disappointment and disorder in the new century.

Undoubtedly, it was time for some sociologists to weigh in…

In 1900, this was unimaginable. “Freedom in the modern sense [then] existed only for the upper crust,” says political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset of George Mason University. There were exceptions–America certainly, but even its freedom was conspicuously curtailed, particularly for women and blacks.

…

Traditional freedom historically meant liberation from oppression. But now freedom increasingly involves “self-realization.” People need, it’s argued, to be freed from whatever prevents them becoming whoever they want to be. There’s a drift toward “positive liberty” that emphasizes “the things that government ought to do for us,” says sociologist Alan Wolfe of Boston College. This newer freedom blends into individual “rights” (for women, minorities, the disabled) and “entitlements” (for health care, education and income support) deemed essential for self-realization.

Read more.

The New York Times reports on a new collaborative study by sociologist Philip Kasinitz of CUNY, political scientist John H. Mollenkopf, and Harvard sociologist Mary C. Waters. The findings from this $2 million 10-year project will soon be published in a book titled “Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age” from Harvard University Press.

The study focused on a number of different groups to examine the experiences of adult children of immigrants in the New York region including: Dominicans, Chinese, Russian Jews, South Americans (encompassing Colombians, Ecuadoreans and Peruvians) and West Indians. For the purposes of comparison, the investigators also studied U.S.-born whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans born on the mainland who live in the New York area.

The study pointed to signs of positive progress as many of these adult children achieve more than their parents in education as well as earnings, in some cases surpassing native-born Americans. But on a more cautionary note, the study highlighted how persistent poverty and low academic achievement among Dominicans and the prevalence of racial discrimination again Caribbean immigrants impede universal progress for all groups.

How did they do it?

“The study was based on 3,415 telephone interviews conducted between 1998 and 2000; 333 face-to-face follow-up interviews in 2000 and 2001; and a final round of 172 follow-up interviews in 2002 and 2003. The subjects of the study were 18 to 32 at the time of the initial interviews and were either born in the United States to at least one immigrant parent, or arrived in the United States by age 12. The study covered 10 counties: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Westchester and Nassau in New York and Essex, Hudson, Passaic and Union in New Jersey.”

There’s an interesting discussion going on at scatterplot about racial & ethnic names: first a post about “black” vs. “African American,” and then another post about “caucasian” and “European American.” In the comments on the first post, a reader pointed out an article from Public Opinion Quarterly reporting survey results on the preference of “black” vs. “African Americans” for, well, blacks/African Americans. The article summary:

Our respondents are nearly equally divided in their preference for the label “black” versus “African-American.” Significant correlates or predictors of terminological preference include the racial composition of the grammar school that respondents attended, respondents’ degree of racial group consciousness, and age, region, and size of city of residence.