inequality

ScienceBlog recently reported on a new study that finds that darker-skin Latinos earn less money on average than light-skin Latinos.  While some wish to be accepted as “white,” many experience  discrimination based on skin color:

The results suggest that the rapid influx of Latino immigrants will shift the boundaries of race in the United States, but will not end skin-color-based discrimination.

“It is likely we will see change in our racial categories, but there will not be one uniform racial boundary around all Latinos,” said Reanne Frank, co-author of the study and assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University.

“Some Latinos will be successful in the bid to be accepted as ‘white’ — usually those with lighter skin. But for those with darker skin and those who are more integrated into U.S. society, we believe there will be a new Latino racial boundary forming around them.”

In filling out surveys, separate questions about race and ethnicity have become increasingly challenging for Latinos to answer:

Under the current census form, Hispanics and Latinos have been set apart as an ethnic group and are instructed to choose the race that best fits them. The 2000 Census had six categories, and the 2010 Census has 15 categories, but “Latino or Hispanic” is not one of the options.

“We are hearing stories from Census takers that many Latinos say the race question does not fit them. They are confused by why they can’t label their race as ‘Hispanic or Latino,’” Frank said.

In the 2000 Census, about 50 percent of those who marked “Hispanic or Latino” as their ethnicity chose “some other race” as their racial category. That has been interpreted by many researchers as them attempting to assert an alternative Latino racial identity, she said.

Thus, Frank suggests the emergence of Latino as a new racial classification in the U.S. as opposed to an ethnic identity:

“We believe the more-integrated immigrants have faced discrimination in the country, and realize that ‘white’ is not an identity that is open to them. They may be trying to develop a new alternative Latino racial category,” Frank said.

“It appears that some with lighter skin will be able to pass as white, but others with darker skin will not and will continue to face discrimination.”

Frank said it is not possible at this time to tell what proportion of Latino immigrants will be accepted as white, and how many will be forced into a new racial category.

A new study finds that it now costs approximately $60,000 a year for a family of four to survive in Philadelphia without government assistance, reports The Philadelphia Inquirer.  This actual cost of living is almost three times as much as the federal poverty level:

The San Bernadino Sun recently reported on Louisiana State University sociologist Edward Shihadeh’s recently published research on the effect of Latino immigration on black labor market participation:

The Globe and Mail has published an interview with two University of Toronto sociologists who have written a new book on “foodies.” According to the article:

As the authors explain in their new book Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape, for which they interviewed 30 people and analyzed hundreds of articles, today’s foodies might find classic French haute cuisine stuffy. They may be willing to try goat testicles and sheep brains. And they’ll happily visit the city’s best hole-in-the-wall eateries, no matter how dumpy the decor. But one thing foodies flat-out refuse to eat is dinner at a mundane, generic chain restaurant.

Sociologists Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann argue that being a foodie isn’t just about consuming good food, it’s also about garnering cultural capital. Says Johnston:

A lot of elements of foodie culture are still relatively exclusive, and part of what foodie culture is about is dabbling in all sorts of different ethnic cuisines and food traditions. What makes that a kind of privilege is to have the kind of knowledge to go to all of these kinds of places [whether it’s a fancy restaurant or hole-in-the-wall eatery], so you’re not just familiar with one type of ethnic cuisine, you’re familiar with the whole range of them. And that can end up constituting a kind of cultural capital people use to display their sophistication.

However, this may entail ignoring inequalities. Says Baumann:

…if you’re going to be a foodie and value authentic and exotic cuisine, it’s going to lead you to places of poverty, to contexts of impoverished food production and consumption. Through romanticizing those conditions of poverty, you can get the good food without having to dwell on the uncomfortable fact of poverty.

The authors also noticed gender differences among foodies:

Johnston: One thing that was surprising to me was the different ways that men and women embody their foodie culture. Men often emphasize their expertise more, and they’re often much more interested in the exoticism, especially eating things that are wildly unconventional, like goat testicles. And women didn’t do that as much. They talked more about how their interest in food was also about protecting the health of their family.

USA Today reports on a new study examining whether people who are overweight receive less care from their doctors.

Previous research has shown that some physicians find it awkward to work with obese patients and have low expectations for success. And heavy patients have reported feeling that doctors are biased and disrespectful because of their extra weight. To examine whether such attitudes translate into differences in actual practice, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center evaluated the medical care of nearly 70,000 patients. They were Medicare beneficiaries or received care from Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals.

The scientists compared how likely heavy and normal-weight people were to meet standard guidelines for preventive care, including diabetes care (eye exams, sugar and cholesterol testing), flu vaccines, pneumonia vaccines and screenings for breast, colorectal and cervical cancers.

Results showed that people in the study who were overweight or obese were just as, if not more, likely to receive preventative care from their doctors as people of normal weight.

The study’s lead investigator, who holds an MD and a PhD in sociology, comments:

“Physicians appear to be doing a good job at preventive care, despite surveys suggesting that physicians have negative attitudes toward obesity and patients’ perceptions that their doctors are biased,” says lead author Virginia Chang, an assistant professor of medicine and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania…

“It’s important to ensure that obese patients are getting equitable preventive care, as these services can save lives and reduce costs down the road,” Chang says.

Still, questions remain. “Our findings do not address patients’ satisfaction with their care,” she says. “And these findings may not be true of younger populations where the stigma of obesity may be greater.”

Also, yesterday the Chicago Tribune discussed whether disasters cause people to behave selfishly or altruistically.

When the ship is sinking is it really women and children first, or every man for himself? The answer, it seems, may depend on how fast it’s going down.

Comparing who survived two of history’s most famous sinkings — the Titanic and the Lusitania — indicates sharply different behavior on the two doomed vessels, neither of which had enough available lifeboats for all passengers.

When a torpedo sent the Lusitania to the bottom in just 18 minutes, claiming 1,198 lives, most survivors were young, fit people age 16 to 35 who could rush to a spot in the lifeboats and hang on to it.

By contrast, it took 2 hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to slip beneath the waves, time for people to consider what to do rather than just react. While 1,517 people perished, the survivors tended to be women, children and those accompanying a child.

Economist Benno Torgler led a study about how people act in extreme situations. He comments:

“In the environment of the Titanic, social norms were enforced more often, and there was also a higher willingness among males to surrender a seat on a lifeboat,” researcher Benno Torgler of Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia said of the findings.

Why might this be?

Torgler points to the “procreation instinct,” which holds that because the survival of a species depends on its offspring, a high value must be placed upon females of reproductive age as a valuable resource.

Aboard the Titanic, where social norms had time to come into play, women had a 53 percent higher probability of surviving than males, Torgler said. “But no (such) effect was observable in the Lusitania.”

The Titanic went down after colliding with an iceberg on the night of April 12, 1912. It was three years later, May 7, 1915, that a torpedo sank the Lusitania.

The researchers note that it is likely that those aboard the Lusitania were familiar with the Titanic disaster and that also might have affected their thinking more toward self-preservation.

A social psychologist weighs in:

Col. Thomas Kolditz, head of the department of behavioral sciences at the U.S. Military Academy, said the researchers’ explanation for this behavior difference is plausible, “but they underestimate the role of leadership.” Competent leaders in dangerous situations influence people, but this takes time, said Kolditz, who was not part of the research team.

“It is unlikely that the mere passage of time led to the emergence of pro-social and selfless behaviors. It is much more likely that, in the case of the Titanic, leaders were able to impact the process of abandoning ship in a more direct way, whereas the effect of leadership was minimized in the fast-breaking circumstances on the Lusitania,” Kolditz said.

Additionally, social class affected survival chances in these disasters:

The study found a higher survival rate for first-class passengers on the Titanic, but not on the Lusitania, where first-class passengers fared even worse than third-class passengers in the scramble to exit the ship.

In the case of the Titanic, upper class passengers also had more time to assert the privilege to which they were accustomed, calling on the ships officers whom they knew and perhaps even bargaining for seats in the lifeboats.

Read more.

BBC News recently reported on the concept of “parental determinism,” as discussed by Kent University (England) sociology professor Frank Furedi:

There was a pervading prejudice that virtually all of society’s problems were caused by poor parenting.  There was an attempt to “weed out” unfit parents and intervene before they even had children, he said.  In an article for Spiked online, he likened “parental determinism” to Hitler’s eugenics and Stalinism.

He said: “The idea of a one-dimensional causal relationship between parenting and socioeconomic outcomes, dreamt up by the British think-tanks and policy makers, threatens to take public discourse to a new low.

He points to the roots of “parental determinism” in Britain:

The idea of early intervention was conceived by Tony Blair’s regime which “promoted the fantasy that the government could fix society’s problems by getting its hands on the nation’s toddlers before their parents had chance to ruin them”.

“He believed it was possible to spot tomorrow’s ‘problem people’ even before they were born,” he added.  This notion of parental determinism allowed politicians to promote the “most absurd prejudices…Over the weekend, Iain Duncan Smith the former Tory leader, argued that children from broken homes and dysfunctional families have underdeveloped brains and start school with the mental capacity of one-year-olds,” he said.

Furedi argues that “parental determinism” is particularly damaging in the realm of education:

This was because of the way it could erode adult responsibility and authority, he said.  If adults were reluctant or confused about giving guidance to the younger generation, then the challenge facing the teacher in the classroom could be “overwhelming”, he said.  “It is hard to be the last bastion of authority in a society where adult authority seems to be crumbling,” he added.

He called for adult authority to be affirmed both in and out of the classroom and for the relationship between parents and teachers to be re-drawn.  “There is a difference between raising children and educating them, and this distinction must be re-established to allow for a clearer and more constructive relationship between parents and teachers,” he concluded.

Click here to read Furedi’s full article in Spiked.

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently examined Americans’ tendency to turn on the poorest members of their society during hard economic times:

Last month, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer of South Carolina said that when the government helps the poor, it’s like people feeding stray animals that continually “breed.”

And just last week, Colorado state legislator Spencer Swalm said poor people in single-family homes are “dysfunctional.”

Both statements riled some Americans from the Piedmont to the Rockies and underscored a widely held belief: In tough times, people are tough on the poor.

It’s not just politicians playing the blame game, either:

In an April 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center in Washington, 72 percent agreed with the statement that “poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs.” That’s up from 69 percent in 2007.

“The economic downturn has made the middle class less generous toward others,” said Guy Molyneux, a partner at Hart Research Associates, a Washington firm that researches attitudes toward the poor. “People are less supportive of the government helping the poor, because they feel they’re not getting enough help themselves.

The Inquirer also featured sociological commentary on the phenomenon:

Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University, agreed: “Hatred of the poor is fueled by the middle class’s fear of falling during hard times.”

Americans don’t understand how the poor are victimized by a lack of jobs, inefficient schools, and unsafe neighborhoods, experts say.

“People ignore the structural issues – jobs leaving, industry becoming more mechanized,” said Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson, renowned for his study of the Philadelphia poor. “Then they point to the poor and ask, ‘Why aren’t you making it?’

While drawing comparisons between Hurricane Katrina and the recent earthquake in Haiti may be tempting, sociologist Kathleen Tierney tells CNN why doing so is not such a good idea.

Like Katrina, the earthquake has produced effects of catastrophic proportions. Both events rank among the largest catastrophes ever experienced in the Western Hemisphere.

They both have resulted in large loss of life and immense human suffering and make the coordination of emergency resources extremely difficult. Ordinary citizens are left to fend for themselves in the wreckage. And as we saw in Katrina and see now in Haiti, residents of disaster-stricken areas are the true first responders.

The aftermath of such catastrophes brings more prolonged suffering and massive recovery challenges. People pay attention as the media cover them, but they turn their attention elsewhere when the cameras leave, even though many of the real challenges that victims and affected regions face emerge later. Like the Gulf region, Haiti will struggle for years and perhaps decades to rebuild and recover.

But there, the comparisons end.

The contrasts have much to do with the events’ impacts on a national versus regional scale.

Katrina did not flatten our nation’s capital or prevent national leaders from communicating with one another. Impacts were catastrophic in areas where Katrina struck, creating significant logistics problems, but the infrastructure of the rest of the nation was untouched. Also important, it was possible to issue warnings for Katrina, which enabled the vast majority of those who were at risk to evacuate to safety. The victims of the earthquake had no such warning.

In contrast, the earthquake in Haiti destroyed much of its capital, Port-au-Prince, and affected approximately one-third of the population of the entire country. The proportion of the nation’s population that has been killed, injured or left homeless is enormous. The facilities that could have assisted victims, such as hospitals, clinics and the UN headquarters for the nation, were destroyed or are not operational. Aftershocks, which will continue for weeks, months and perhaps even years, will do additional damage and further compound both rescue and relief efforts.

In addition, both disasters affected the poor and vulnerable, but again scale comes into play:

On almost all indicators of well-being — health, education, literacy, income — Haiti ranks very low. The nation has a long history of rule by dictators, political coups and savage violence. The capacity of Haiti’s series of governments to provide services to its people has been abysmal for most of its history.

In many ways, residents of Haiti faced a daily disaster even before the earthquake. These differences matter, and they should be kept in mind by those seeking to see parallels between the two catastrophes.

According to the Seattle Times, evidence gathered by University of Washington sociologists Katherine Beckett and Robert Crutchfield overturned the state of Washington’s law banning incarcerated felons from voting.  The case, Farrakhan v. Gregoire, was decided on January 5, 2010:

The surprising ruling, by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, said the law violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act by disenfranchising minority voters.  The decision is the first in the country’s federal appeals courts to equate a prohibition against voting by incarcerated felons with practices outlawed under the federal Voting Rights Act, such as poll taxes or literacy tests.

The two-judge majority apparently was persuaded by the plaintiffs’ argument that reams of social-science data filed in the case showed minorities in Washington are stopped, arrested and convicted in such disproportionate rates that the ban on voting by incarcerated felons is inherently discriminatory.

The article details the sociological research in question:

[The case] was built on research by University of Washington sociologists who found that blacks are 70 percent more likely — and Latinos and Native Americans 50 percent more likely — than whites to be searched in traffic stops.

The research also showed that blacks are nine times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, despite the fact that the ratio of arrests for violent crime among blacks and whites is less than four-to-one. One result of that: 25 percent of black men in Washington are disenfranchised from voting.

The decision, written by Judge A. Wallace Tashima, said the studies “speak to a durable, sustained indifference in treatment faced by minorities in Washington’s criminal justice system — systemic disparities which cannot be explained by ‘factors independent of race.’ “

The state of Washington is appealing this ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.  To read a somewhat sociological editorial on this decision, you may also want to check out an editorial by Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large.

Voter Disenfranchisement Statistics: