inequality

With the current presidential administration’s promises to build border walls and increase deportations, it may be surprising that Latinx immigrants report experiencing less discrimination than those born in the United States. According to a recent survey featured in NPR’s Code Switch, only 23% of Latinx immigrants report experiencing discrimination, while 44% of Latinx born in the United States report discrimination. 

Sociologist Emilio Parrado told NPR that perceptions and experiences of discrimination are related to an individual’s level of participation in and adaption into United States culture. Research suggests that Latinx born in the United States may face more direct discrimination than immigrants, because they are more likely to engage in competitive workforce and social settings. 

“Discrimination is a strategy of the dominant group to protect itself, to protect the benefits that they have, so discrimination is something that emerges not when people are culturally different, but that emerges when people compete.”

Parrado also argues that many immigrants come to the United States without knowing the contextual “rules” of interactions with others, which makes it harder to  immediately identify instances of discrimination or racism.

“For immigrants, there is a process of learning that you are being discriminated against…Immigrants tend to think that it’s their own fault, that it’s because they don’t know the rules, or they don’t know English.”

Thus, past research may not fully capture how much discrimination is occurring simply because people may not recognize it as such. In response, some children of Latinx immigrants who were born in the United States are trying to educate their families on what discrimination looks like.

Recent social movements in the United States, like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, have sought to challenge the status quo. While such movements often make the news, less attention is paid to how they achieve success. A recent article in the New York Times by sociologist Kenneth T. Andrews argues that social movements bring about change through exercising different types of power — cultural, disruptive, or organizational.

We are used to seeing cultural or disruptive power from movements in the media, but organizational power is also important. Organizational power is reflected in a movement’s ability to sustain its agenda through ties to other groups. Recent research suggests that after the Tea Party built upon disruptive power gained from initial protests, it established local organizations and supported political candidates that shared its ideas, ultimately transforming the Republican Party. However, as with each mechanism of power, organizational power also has constraints. Andrews explains,

“Staging the occasional protest and raising money are one thing; developing leaders and building constituencies are another. Despite substantial resources and hundreds of organizations, the environmental movement, for example, has not generated the sort of participation sufficient to meet the environmental challenges we face.”

In short, the pathways to power that different social movements utilize are very important to the movement’s success in encouraging change. A movement may have the most success when it combines all three types of power, which helped movements like the Civil Rights Movement. And even if a movement itself is short-lived, the cultural effects may remain long after a movement has fizzled out, and even small-scale changes can still have the cultural power to affect the status quo well into the future.

Over the past few years, Hollywood has come under fire for its continued exclusion of women and racial minorities, both in front of and behind the camera. With controversies surrounding the perpetual whiteness of Oscars nominees to disappointing statistics coming out of the annual Hollywood Diversity Report, there is a renewed conversation about the lack of diversity in the media we consume. However, a new report finds that television showrunners and writers are still mostly white, which has important consequences for the ways people of color are represented in the shows we watch.

The report finds that less than 10% of the 234 major series studied were led by minority showrunners, and only 14% of writers for these shows were members of a minority group. The Washington Post talked to Darnell Hunt, author of the report and co-author of the annual Hollywood Diversity Report, who explained that this lack of diversity in the writers’ room leads to unequal and inaccurate representations of racial minorities on the screen. Hunt said,

“White men dominate the major positions, and people of color and women have a long way to go to attain any type of equity … We need to change that because television is not just entertainment. Media images do matter, particularly for people who don’t have a lot of face-to-face encounters with people who are not like them. A lot of what they learn about people is what they see in these images.”

Hunt explains that shows led by black showrunners, like FX’s “Atlanta,” and shows with a diverse writing room are more likely to acknowledge racial inequality, whereas predominantly white writers’ rooms more often portray minority characters as one-dimensional “sidekicks.” An especially troubling example from the report concerns depictions of the criminal justice system. The article explains,

“None of the [crime-drama] episodes acknowledged the systemic racial profiling of black Americans, that black people are more likely to be pressured into plea bargaining for crimes they did not commit, or that they routinely face harsher penalties than whites for committing the same crimes … [These] depictions of policing and the court and prison systems, combined with viewers’ existing biases, undermine public support for policies that could help advance racial equity in American society.”

In short, when people of color are left out of the writers room, their stories are left out too.

College education is a core part of social mobility in the United States, but it is also increasingly controversial. Amid polarizing views on trust in colleges and universities and a proposed plan to tax graduate students’ tuition waivers, Americans are facing big questions about the role of higher education in our society.

Now, there’s a new twist. In an op-ed column for The New York Times, UC Merced sociologist Charlie Eaton looks at how some private schools are tied up in the Paradise Papers exposé. Eaton writes,

“It’s an increasingly bipartisan view that elite private colleges are islands of wealth. And there’s good reason for that: It’s true … the Paradise Papers revealed that dozens of wealthy college endowments use Caribbean islands as offshore tax havens for their investments.”

Eaton argues that this revelation is in line with a long term trend toward inequality in higher education, where some schools show a broad commitment to educating a wide range of people, while others stockpile their resources to serve a small student body. Elite private schools often enroll a limited number of students, drawing a large proportion from “the 1 percent.”

“The problem with enormous endowment growth is that private institutions have not used the resource boom to provide greater benefits to the public … America’s top public universities, on the other hand, have substantially increased their enrollments since the 1970s despite shrinking state funding. They also tend to enroll low-income students at much higher rates.”

In a time where more people are skeptical of colleges and universities, scandals like this pose a central question for the future of higher education: can private schools provide a leg up, or will they have to find another way to pay out?

In our current political climate, freedom of speech is a major concern on college campuses and beyond. Controversial campus speakers such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer have caused event cancellations and sparked protest. Harsh criticism has come from those on the right, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions who recently stated that “the American university was once the center of academic freedom — a place of robust debate, a forum for the competition of ideas … is transforming into an echo chamber of political correctness and homogenous thought, a shelter for fragile egos.”

In a Monkey Cage analysis for The Washington Post, sociologist Jeffrey Kidder discusses conservative criticisms of liberal “safe spaces” and what these critiques illustrate about conservative identity. In some instances, provocation of liberals and progressives serves to simply embolden conservative identity, as they are able to claim a victory in successfully inciting liberal outrage. Kidder notes,

“Instead of focusing on policy debates or electoral outcomes, right-leaning students can find a sense of purpose in offending (or outright attacking) those they come to see as the opposition…Thinking sociologically — and not just politically or ideologically — about such controversies will help clarify what is at stake for the individuals and organizations involved. We must not lose sight of the narratives supporting social identities. Despite claims to the contrary, conservative groups are equally working to maintain their own safe spaces. These are largely battles over which identities get to be privileged in the public sphere, in which actors on both the left and right interpret history so as to cast their actions and causes in the most favorable possible light.”

Kidder argues that behind their critiques of liberal safe spaces, conservatives are in fact asking for their own safe spaces on campus too. In his ethnography of college Republicans, he finds that while Republicans may have national government control, many feel they are the vocal minority in campus settings. 

Recent celebrations of National Hispanic Heritage Month call our attention to the growing importance of Hispanic culture, histories, and contributions in the United States. As the Hispanic population has grown, so too has the interest in defining what exactly it means to be “Hispanic.”  Research suggests that administrative agencies, particularly the U.S. Census Bureau, played a significant role in unifying different identities under this single pan-ethnic umbrella category. In a conversation with sociologist Cristina Mora, NPR’s Code Switch uncovers the complicated history behind the term “Hispanics.”

Prior to the 1960 census, Latin communities did not have an identifiable option or category matching their ethnic identity. Initial attempts in the 1960 and 1970 census resulted in a massive undercount. Following these largely unsuccessful efforts, Mexican and Puerto Rican communities mobilized to come up with a sufficient term for the 1980 census. Terms were heavily contested, agencies and experts debated various phrasings, and, with reservations, they eventually decided on Hispanic. And the importance of finding a proper category cannot be underestimated — having “Hispanics” as a category in the census enabled communities to address pressing political issues. Mora told NPR,

“Once the category was made, everything from political groups to civic organizations to every other media group that would emerge, would draw on census data. As soon as the census numbers came out, Latino lobby groups could then run the numbers and say, ‘Look, this is what Latino poverty looks like; this is what Latino educational attainment looks like.’ They could go up to the Department of Education, for example, and say, ‘Latinos are the second-largest minority group. And yet, our educational attainment pales to that of whites. Send money to our schools.’”

Despite its contested nature, the use of the ethnic category of Hispanic and its incorporation into administrative counts has proven to be an effective tool for mobilization of Latinx populations. Mora’s research indicates that defining ethnic categories in this way may create opportunities to increase political representation and power among minorities in the U.S.

The goal of increasing “diversity” has become a common focus in university admissions, meaning strengthening the presence of underrepresented minorities within the student body. This kind of rationale also appears in businesses and government, with rhetoric that emphasizes how diverse groups can be more productive and innovative. In essence, most see pursuing diversity as a good thing because of the benefits of diversity.

That said, researchers question whether “diversity” policies and programs really overcome existing racial inequalities, and some argue that organizations are more interested in boasting about their diversity than they are in actually increasing minority representation. Ellen Berrey has researched the meaning and use of the word “diversity” in a variety of sites. Her research, as described in The New Yorker, suggests that touting the benefits of diversity can have an unintended consequence: glossing over issues of inequality, exclusion, and discrimination. As an example, Berrey describes an investigation of diversity in a Fortune 500 company,

“The diversity-management program functioned mainly as a surreal exercise in internal branding, entirely separate from the legal department (which handled claims of discrimination). So-called diversity managers worked to foster an “inclusive” environment, but they seemed to spend much of their time “reiterating the good that would come from diversity,” as a way of justifying their own positions.”

The New Yorker article also discusses research by Natasha Warikoo, who examines the ways that white students at Ivy League colleges describe diversity on campus. Their accounts point to what Warikoo calls “the diversity bargain” — white students accept the existence of racialized admissions programs with the expectation that students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds will expose them to new ideas, cultures, and experiences. In general, these researchers find that “diversity” rhetoric often misses the bigger picture of continued racial inequality in the United States.

For the past twenty-five years, Oklahoma has seen some of the highest levels of female incarceration in the United States. In a recent article from Reveal, research by sociologist Susan Sharp demonstrates that incarceration rates and sentence severity varies between different counties within the state, where courtroom cultures and access to legal resources vary.   

Across the state, harsh drug sentencing leading to lengthy prison sentences for women is the norm, and Sharp argues that women in Oklahoma have become “collateral damage” in the War on Drugs. This is in large part due to the cultural norms surrounding women’s roles as mothers. Sharp explains,

“I think the general population of the state feels that a woman – particularly a woman who has children who uses drugs – violates all the norms in a way that they find unacceptable . . . and they would rather see those children grow up in foster care than to be with a mother who had a drug problem.”

However, Sharp has found that rural counties with more “get tough on crime” district attorneys and judges will typically send more people to prison, and poor women in these areas often experience the “wrath of judges and prosecutors.” In urban areas, women have access to more resources — money for private attorneys and specialty courts for drug addiction and mental health issues — which often keeps them from serving a sentence or helps reduce their time served.  The case of Oklahoma demonstrates how local differences influence punishment, as external and situational factors play a central role in shaping personal experiences with the criminal justice system.

In the past 50 years, marriage rates among U.S. adults have declined significantly. Social science suggests that financial success may play an central role in this trend. For example, in 2015 65% of adults 25 and older with a four year degree were married, while only 50% of those with a high school education were married. In a recent article in The New York Times, sociologists Sharon Sassler and Andrew Cherlin weigh in on this divergence in marriage rates.  

According to social scientists, some of the change has to do with economic trends. The decline in manufacturing jobs in the United States has made men without college educations less “marriageable.” According to Sassler, “women don’t want to take a risk on somebody who’s not going to be able to provide anything.” This decline has not, however, corresponded to a decline in births — births are just happening outside of marriage more often now. The article explains, 

“In reality, economics and culture both play a role, and influence each other, social scientists say. When well-paying jobs became scarce for less educated men, they became less likely to marry. As a result, the culture changed: Marriage was no longer the norm, and out-of-wedlock childbirth was accepted. Even if jobs returned, an increase in marriage wouldn’t necessarily immediately follow.”

On the other hand, those with college degrees are more likely to postpone marriage and children until after they feel financially stable, but then they do get married. They also may benefit from their own parents’ help in paying for education, birth control, and rent, allowing them the advantages of achieving stability not often available to lower and working class adults. Privilege, therefore, can play a key role in the decision to get married.

Does talking about economic inequality really matter when it comes to influencing voters? A recent article in The Washington Post discusses research on whether income inequality impacts Americans’ support for certain economic policies. A report from Leslie McCall and Jennifer A. Richeson suggests that when presented with data on economic inequality, Americans develop skepticism about the existence of actual economic opportunity, and will tend to favor policies that promote equality. Using experimental data, the researchers found that when presented with information on income inequality, 58% of Americans surveyed responded more favorably toward policies proposing decreasing the pay gap (in contrast to 51% for those who did not receive information). The authors write,

“Americans tend to support greater spending on education when their opposition to inequality rises or inequality itself rises, consistent with a link between concerns about inequality and opportunity. But this pattern may be limited to particular time periods and does not extend to support for other kinds of spending or government redistribution generally.”

The research suggests that Americans are fully capable of linking income inequality with economic opportunity and that efforts should not be made to avoid discussing one or the other. The authors conclude,

“For this reason, the instinct to focus on economic opportunity instead of inequality seems misplaced. In the minds of Americans, the two can be linked quite readily.”