inequality

A recent New York Times article highlighted the phenomenon of African Americans downplaying racial markers in their resumes in order to compete in the job market:

Tahani Tompkins was struggling to get callbacks for job interviews in the Chicago area this year when a friend made a suggestion: Change your name. Instead of Tahani, a distinctively African-American-sounding name, she began going by T. S. Tompkins in applications.

Yvonne Orr, also searching for work in Chicago, removed her bachelor’s degree from Hampton University, a historically black college, leaving just her master’s degree from Spertus Institute, a Jewish school. She also deleted a position she once held at an African-American nonprofit organization and rearranged her references so the first people listed were not black.

Black job seekers said the purpose of hiding racial markers extended beyond simply getting in the door for an interview. It was also part of making sure they appeared palatable to hiring managers once race was seen. Activism in black organizations, even majoring in African-American studies can be signals to employers. Removing such details is all part of what Ms. Orr described as “calming down on the blackness.”

The article provides some sociological data on how African Americans are faring in the labor market:

[The] Popular perception that affirmative action still confers significant advantages to black job candidates…is not borne out in studies. Moreover, statistics show even college-educated blacks suffering disproportionately in this jobless environment compared with whites.

“The average organization either doesn’t have diversity programs, or has the type that is not effective and can even lead to backlash,” said Alexandra Kalev, a University of Arizona sociologist who has studied such efforts. “So in the average organization, being black doesn’t help.”

Playing down one’s black identity may carry a psychic toll for those who do so:

In “Covering: the Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights,” Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at New York University, wrote about this phenomenon not just among blacks but also other minority groups. “My notion of covering is really about the idea that people can have stigmatized identities that either they can’t or won’t hide but nevertheless experience a huge amount of pressure to downplay those identities,” he said. Mr. Yoshino says that progress in hiring has meant that “the line originally was between whites and nonwhites, favoring whites; now it’s whites and nonwhites who are willing to act white.”

John L. Jackson Jr., a professor of anthropology and communications at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Racial Paranoia,” said he wondered about the “existential cost” of this kind of behavior, even if the adjustments were temporary and seem harmless.

“In some ways, they are denying who and what they are,” he said. “They almost have to pretend themselves away.”

Sociologists predict that half of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point in their childhood, according to the
Philadelphia Inquirer.

In a stark and surprising finding, about half the children in the United States will be on food stamps at some point during their childhood, a new study of 29 years of data shows.

One in three white children and 90 percent of all black children – ages 1 through 20 – will use the program, according to the research, published this month in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

“This means Americans’ economic distress is much higher than we had ever realized,” said Thomas A. Hirschl, a sociology professor at Cornell University and a coauthor of the study with Mark R. Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

The survey finds that continued food-stamp usage signifies a kind of poverty that is “a threat to the overall health and well-being of American children, and, as such, represents a significant challenge to pediatricians in their daily practice.”

Although the data used in this study ends in 1997, and thus does not account for the current recession, these findings seem to correspond with a report published Monday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

The persistent poverty described in the survey dovetails with the findings of a U.S. Department of Agriculture study released Monday. It determined that 49 million Americans – 17 million of them children – were unable to consistently get enough food to eat in 2008. Nearly 15 percent of households were having trouble finding food, the highest number recorded since the agency began measuring hunger in 1995.

The study’s authors note that kids are often overlooked in U.S. social programs:

“The number-one poverty program in the United States is Social Security,” Hirschl said. “There is no such system for children.”

But how trustworthy is the prediction that 50% of all U.S. kids will use food stamps at some point in their childhood?

Because there was so much data, the authors were able to use a very long window of observation, which helped them extrapolate into the future about food-stamp usage, said John Iceland, a sociology professor at Pennsylvania State University. Iceland, who is familiar with the methodology used in the Hirschl-Rank paper, described it as “very solid work.”

“It’s like determining the likelihood of developing heart disease from health data,” Rank said.

The Michigan study is well-known and widely used by social scientists, and it has proven to be accurate over the years, Iceland said.

The finding that 50 percent of children will be on food stamps in their lifetime is conservative, Hirschl said.

That’s because only about 60 percent of households eligible for food stamps actually get them, a finding backed up by the newly released Department of Agriculture study. Stigma and ignorance of the program hold people back, he said.

The Boston Globe also picked up on Devah Pager and colleagues’ findings about the persistence of racial discrimination in hiring:

The study was run by sociologists at Princeton who recruited and trained white, black, and Latino “well-spoken, clean-cut young men” to apply for real entry-level jobs throughout New York City with fictitious, but essentially identical, resumes. The results were stark: “Blacks were only half as likely to receive a callback or job offer relative to equally qualified whites; moreover, black and Latino applicants with clean backgrounds fared no better than a white applicant just released from prison.” Even worse, the minority candidates were often channeled to positions inferior to those advertised, while the white candidates were often channeled to superior positions.

Sociologists have found that it’s not just individuals who pay a high price for payday lending practices. Whole neighborhoods pay, too, in more than just monetary ways.

As reported by Reuters:

As Congress debates financial regulatory reform and the Obama Administration advocates for greater consumer financial protection, a new study finds a need for Congressional action on fringe banking practices used heavily by financially vulnerable families. The study released today details the toll on communities with a high concentration of payday lending business and finds a clear association between the presence of payday lenders and neighborhood crime rates. The study recommends that Congress take action to cap payday lender interest rates at 36 percent, enacting for the entire country protections Congress put in place for U.S. military families.  The new study, entitled “Does Fringe Banking ExacerbateNeighborhood Crime Rates? Social Disorganization and the Ecology of PaydayLending,” was conducted by The George Washington University professors Charis E. Kubrin and Gregory D. Squires, along with Dr. Steven M. Graves of California State University, Northridge.

Further…

These broader community costs include higher rates of violent crime.  The study found that the association between payday lending and violent crime remains statistically significant even after a range of factors traditionally associated with crime are controlled for statistically.

The sociological commentary…

“As a criminologist, I can attest to the fact that there is woefully limited research on the impact of the behavior of financial institutions on neighborhood crime.  As our research demonstrates, these connections can no longer be ignored by criminologists and law enforcement officials across the country,” said Charis Kubrin.

Paste Magazine reports that students at Harvard will soon be able to register for a class based on the HBO series, “The Wire”.

The class will be taught by sociology professor William J. Wilson, an outspoken, long-time fan of the show. “It has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality, more than any other media event or scholarly publication,” Wilson told the audience at a panel discussion on campus.

That’s high praise from a renowned sociologist, who is not alone in his enthusiasm for the show as a vehicle for teaching.

Harvard is not the only university to offer a course about The Wire. UC-Berkeley teaches a film studies course about it, and so does Middlebury College. Duke offers a literature course that uses it to examine phenomenology and 21st century visual media.

In 2007, Paris initiated a bike-sharing program to  provide “an inexpensive, healthy and low-carbon alternative to hopping in a car or bus”. The program purchased 20,600 specially-made bicycles, 80 percent of which have now been vandalized or stolen. The New York Times reports:

“The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” Le Monde mourned in an editorial over the summer. “The Vélib’ was aimed at civilizing city travel. It has increased incivilities.”

The heavy, sandy-bronze Vélib’ bicycles are seen as an accoutrement of the “bobos,” or “bourgeois-bohèmes,” the trendy urban middle class, and they stir resentment and covetousness. They are often being vandalized in a socially divided Paris by resentful, angry or anarchic youth, the police and sociologists say.

A sociologist comments:

Bruno Marzloff, a sociologist who specializes in transportation, said, “One must relate this to other incivilities, and especially the burning of cars,” referring to gangs of immigrant youths burning cars during riots in the suburbs in 2005.

He said he believed there was social revolt behind Vélib’ vandalism, especially for suburban residents, many of them poor immigrants who feel excluded from the glamorous side of Paris.

“It is an outcry, a form of rebellion; this violence is not gratuitous,” Mr. Marzloff said. “There is an element of negligence that means, ‘We don’t have the right to mobility like other people, to get to Paris it’s a huge pain, we don’t have cars, and when we do, it’s too expensive and too far.’ ”

Despite these setbacks, the bike-sharing will continue:

Still, with more than 63 million rentals since the program was begun in mid-2007, the Vélib’ is an established part of Parisian life, and the program has been extended to provide 4,000 Vélib’s in 29 towns on the city’s edges.

This week the press release services are aflutter with stories about parenting, with father’s day just a few days away, but one particular story caught my eye about ‘non-traditional fathers’ authored by a sociologist who interviewed low-income fathers about the meaning of fatherhood – specifically in light of the difficulties faced by these fathers parenting in the absence of a spouse or a father-figure role model in their own lives.

Newswise reports:

This Father’s Day, a Brigham Young University sociologist is focusing on dads that don’t fit the traditional script – dads in the mold of the character played by Will Smith in the film The Pursuit of Happyness (before he earned millions as a stockbroker).

These dads are poor. They’re unmarried. Their own fathers commonly were a lesson in what not to do. Defining fatherhood as they go, these dads shared the meaning they find as self-taught fathers in a study Professor Renata Forste published in a recent issue of the journal Fathering.

“Those who didn’t have a role-model type father, they know what they don’t want to do, but they don’t know what to replace it with,” Forste said.

A clear theme emerged from in-depth interviews with 36 such single dads: Their relationship with their own father determined whether they aimed to succeed, or aimed not to fail. The men who felt close to their fathers tried to “pass the baton” and be a nurturing parent that balances work and family time. One 23-year-old dad in this group had this succinct answer: To make as much money as you can while spending the most time with your kids.

The impact of the absence of positive role models was also noted in the study…

“A lot of them talked about coaches, Scout leaders, and fathers of friends,” Forste said. “They desperately need positive role models and men in their lives. Anybody who works with youth has an opportunity to make a difference.”
Forste also notes the work of Princeton sociologist Sarah McLanahan with a project called Fragile Families. McLanahan’s research finds that attending the birth of their child can be a life-changing moment for young men that may not otherwise embrace fatherhood.

The dads interviewed in the BYU study – selected because they are involved parents – also cast the birth of their children in life-altering terms:

Right away I knew I had a responsibility and it was mine so I wasn’t going to deny it or try to forget about it or anything.

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.

Salon Magazine interviewed Georgetown University sociologist Michael Eric Dyson about Barack Obama and race in America. Salon writes, “According to sociologist and Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, Barack Obama has already won the election. But if he were white, ‘he’d be up by 15 to 20 points in the polls.'”

An excerpt from the interview: 

Does it not surprise you that two-thirds of black Americans say race relations are poor?

Not at all. Regardless of whether or not they make $100,000, they still see barriers imposed that white brothers and sisters don’t see. If you were stopped by a policeman, as a black person you think: Will they make up some story that I tried to run and shoot me in the back? I use that example because I have been pulled over by the police several times despite the fact that I have a Ph.D. from Princeton and some notoriety. It makes no difference. You are still afraid. That is the great equalizer among black people, regardless of how rich or well-known they are.

It would obviously be an enormous achievement if Barack Obama were to be elected president. What would he be able to change for black Americans?

Well, let’s start with what he can’t change. Given the investment of black people in Mr. Obama’s success, you would think that he was a kind of political Santa Claus, that the day after he was elected, black people wouldn’t have to pay taxes or would get a get-out-of-jail-free card. But social inequalities will still be real. Ironically enough, he has imposed upon himself certain restrictions when it comes to showing a willingness to be susceptible to the demands of black people.

Read Cordula Meyer’s interview with Dyson here.

This morning USA Today covered a new study by the Pew Research Center that surveyed 1,260 individuals about decision-making in the ‘typical American home.’ The study found that women had the final say in decisions at home in 43% of the couples.

USA Today called in a sociologist…

Sociologist and gender studies expert Michael Kimmel of Stony Brook University-New York says the responses suggest the path for couples is “far grayer” these days as couples weave in more equality.

“There’s far more fluidity in family decision-making around these topics than ever before, and that’s the real news,” he says. “Sometimes she makes the plans, sometimes he does. It’s who has the spare time.”

Kimmel offers three ways to interpret the findings: “One is ‘Only 43% of women make most of the decisions.’ Another way is ‘Couples are in their homes navigating and negotiating equality far more than ever before.’ A third way to read it is ‘In both very traditional couples and in very egalitarian couples, women’s sphere of influence has always been the family purse. She pays the bills, decides which dinner parties they go to. He goes along with family projects.’ “

Read the full story.