race

Graphic Sociology’s Laura Norén recently posted an illustration of who is earning degrees in the U.S., highlighting the growing percentage of women earning bachelor’s, master’s, and professional/doctoral degrees since the 1970s. Her engaging graphic also pointed out the percentage of degree earners by race, relative to the proportion of each group in the overall population.

TSP was pleased to see that the graphic and Norén’s analysis, which drew on data from the Department of Education and the Census Bureau, caught the eye of Andrew Sullivan over at The Daily Beast, bringing a sociologist’s take on the collegiate gender gap to an enormous public audience. Click through to see Sullivan’s post.

The United States has a greater share of its population behind bars than any other nation. Yet this captive audience is almost never captured by large national surveys used to study the U.S. population. This might distort what we think we know about black progress in recent decades, the Wall Street Journal reports, because a large enough swath of the young African American male population is incarcerated and unaccounted for by these surveys.

Among the generally accepted ideas about African-American young-male progress over the last three decades that Becky Pettit, a University of Washington sociologist, questions in her book “Invisible Men“: that the high-school dropout rate has dropped precipitously; that employment rates for young high-school dropouts have stopped falling; and that the voter-turnout rate has gone up.

For example, without adjusting for prisoners, the high-school completion gap between white and black men has fallen by more than 50% since 1980, says Prof. Pettit. After adjusting, she says, the gap has barely closed and has been constant since the late 1980s. “Given the data available, I’m very confident that if we include inmates” in more surveys, “the trends are quite different than we would otherwise have known,” she says.

Voter turnout is another example, especially in light of this year’s presidential election.

…commonly accepted numbers show that the turnout rate among black male high-school dropouts age 20 to 34 surged between 1980 and 2008, to the point where about one in three were voting in presidential races. Prof. Pettit says her research indicates that instead the rate was flat, at around one in five, even after the surge in interest in voting among many young black Americans with Barack Obama in the 2008 race.

“I think that’s kind of stunning,” Prof. Pettit said.

Experts debate the feasibility of including prisoners in such surveys, as well as how to make the best use of available data. Even Pettit admits, “These are really, really tricky things.”

The doodle on the Google home page today may have raised a few eyebrows. Featuring a dark-skinned man running over a course of hurdles on a pink track lined with green grass, for some, it conjures up the historically problematic association of African Americans with watermelons. An op-ed in Five Towns Jewish Times contemplates whether the doodle is racist, or if it should be dismissed as an unfortunate coincidence. The piece cites a post by Lisa Wade, sociologist and TSP blogger, to unpack why such images are offensive when placed in historical context:

“African Americans,”  the argument went, “were happy as slaves.  They didn’t need the complicated responsibilities of freedom, they just needed some shade and a cool, delicious treat.”

The pervasive association with watermelons has reinforced the stereotype of African Americans as simple-minded and inferior, thus justifying systems of oppression and inequality. With this problematic history, perhaps Google would do well to reconsider this doodle.

In 1986, only 1/3 of Americans viewed interracial marriage as acceptable.  However, a report by the Pew Research Center found that today’s public is more accepting of the rise of interracial marriage. The New York Times reported:

The more positive attitude toward intermarriage represents a sharp break from the recent past and parallels behavioral change: about 15 percent of new marriages across the country in 2010 were between spouses of different races or ethnicities, more than double the share in 1980.

As the Executive Vice President of the Pew Research Center noted, interracial marriage has gone from being illegal, to being a taboo, to being unusual to, now, being less unusual.  The article also hints at some other interesting facts found by the study.  For example, intermarried couples are more likely to live in the West (largely due to the  concentration of immigrant minority groups there).

If you’re familiar with his previous books, Losing Ground and The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, you won’t be surprised to learn that Charles Murray’s new book is ruffling more than a few scholarly feathers. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week outlines the ruckus and a few sociologists weigh in.

The Chronicle summarizes the book:

Mr. Murray’s newest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (Crown Forum), makes a pretense of making nice. It bills itself as an attempt to alleviate divisiveness in American society by calling attention to a growing cultural gap between the wealthy and the working class.

Focused on white people in order to set aside considerations of race and ethnicity, it discusses trends, like the growing geographic concentration of the rich and steadily declining churchgoing rates among the poor, that social scientists of all ideological leanings have documented for decades. It espouses the virtues of apple-pie values like commitment to work and family.

But Mr. Murray, a Harvard and MIT-educated political scientist, seems wired like a South Boston bar brawler in his inability to resist the urge to provoke. In the midst of all of his talk about togetherness, he puts out there his belief that the economic problems of America’s working class are largely its own fault, stemming from factors like the presence of a lot of lazy men and morally loose women who have kids out of wedlock. Moreover, he argues, because of Americans’ growing tendency to pair up with the similarly educated, working-class children are increasingly genetically predisposed to be on the dim side.

(This is the point where heads turn, fists clench, and a hush is broken by the sound of liberal commenters muttering, “Oh no he didn’t.”)

Even Murray seems to know that his conclusions and brand of social scientific analysis and commentary may not sit well in academic circles:

“I am sure there are still sociology departments where people would cross themselves if I came into the room,” he said in an interview last week.

While some sociologists, such as Claude S. Fischer, think that Murray’s book will likely not get much play in scholarly circles, Dalton Conley notes that Murray is:

“probably the most influential social-policy thinker in America” thanks to his engaging writing style and his ability to make complex ideas accessible to wide audiences. “He is like the Carl Sagan of social policy,” Mr. Conley said, “but with an ideological slant.”

A flashpoint for many social scientists has long been Murray’s use of social scientific research, methods, and rhetoric. Conley explains how Murray’s use of social science may mislead readers on both theoretical and methodological grounds:

Although his descriptions of societal problems echo a lot of research performed by other scholars, he takes leaps in naming the causes or proposing solutions. Mr. Conley …said the idea that certain values, such as religiosity, lead to financial success “is a big, big assumption that outpaces the evidence,” because social scientists cannot conclusively prove such causal relationships without conducting randomized experiments on humans.

It is entirely possible, he said, that religiosity and financial success go hand in hand not because the former causes the latter, but because the latter causes the former, or both are the product of some other force not being considered.

Katherine Newman also adds:

Most social scientists continue to argue that it is economic hardship that leads to deterioration of working-class social conditions, not the other way around. “I don’t think there is any question that Americans in the working class, and those below the poverty line, have been hammered by the economic transformations that have robbed them of stable employment, and privileged those who are really well educated, giving them access to the only good jobs we have…”

In light of this disconnect, The Chronicle argues:

At the end of the day, the cultural and economic divide most illuminated by Coming Apart might be one found in scholarly publishing. On one side are authors and publishers who produce nuanced books that offer only conclusions stemming from research, and tend to be too esoteric for wide readership. On the other side are authors and publishers who cash in by producing best-selling polemics, in which research is used to buttress foregone conclusions.

Here at TSP, we’re trying to do something to bridge this very divide!

An Associated Press exclusive, published by Fox News, explained that 1 in 14 people went beyond the standard race labels in the 2010 Census.

The figures show most of the write-in respondents are multiracial Americans or Hispanics, many of whom don’t believe they fit within the four government-defined categories of race: white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander or American Indian/Alaska Native. Because Hispanic is defined as an ethnicity and not a race, some 18 million Latinos used the “some other race” category to establish a Hispanic racial identity.

Three million other write-ins came from Arabs, Middle Easterns, or others and who don’t fully view themselves as “white.”  To better understand this, the Associated Press turned to a sociologist.

“It’s a continual problem to measure such a personal concept using a check box,” said Carolyn Liebler, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in demography, identity and race. “The world is changing, and more people today feel free to identify themselves however they want — whether it’s black-white, biracial, Scottish-Nigerian or American. It can create challenges whenever a set of people feel the boxes don’t fit them.”

Though it’s personal, racial identity is also a highly political issue.  Census data are used to distribute federal aid, draw political districts, and enforce anti-discrimination laws.  As the number of people identifying as “some other race” has jumped 3.7 million in the last decade, it’s clear this personal and political issue will be something Americans continue to wrestle with.

In explaining the purpose of a “whiteness studies” course—the kind offered at dozens of colleges and universities in the United States—Alex P. Kellogg of CNN.com writes:

The field argues that white privilege still exists, thanks largely to structural and institutional racism, and that the playing field isn’t level… educators teach how people of different races and ethnicities often live very different lives… The field has its roots in the writing of black intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois and author James Baldwin.

Still, “In the past, detractors have said the field itself demonizes people who identify as white.” So, then, how did the courses manage to continue, and why are they seemingly on the way out now?

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociologist at Duke and the University of Pennsylvania, tells the reporter:

Having Obama is, in a curious way, putting us behind… You have a growing racial apathy. People are telling you, I don’t want to hear about race, because we’re beyond that… But we still have a white America and a Black America.

Another sociologist, Charles Gallagher of Philadelphia’s La Salle University, said that he still has to convince his students that inequality exists. “Gallagher, whose latest book Retheorizing Race and Whiteness in the 21st Century was published last year,” writes Kellogg, ” is teaching intro to sociology and urban sociology classes this semester, and while neither is strictly about race, he says he will make a point to talk about modern day racism and white privilege.” Still, “he expects his students—and increasingly, some who are black—will be there ready to push back, particularly on the notion that race still determines your lot in life.” Gallagher asks:

How do we talk about race or racism in the United States if people think racism is gone?

The article moves on to discussing whether, rather than being privileged, whites, as some suggest, are actually racially oppressed. Charles Mills, a philosopher at Northwestern, argues, Kellogg says, “that whites in particular have a self-interest in seeing the world as post-racial. In that world, everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed… your success in life [is] not determined by race, but by how hard you work.”

Even as classes on whiteness studies instead seem to be dissolving into interdisciplinary race courses which take the time out to discuss persistent white privilege, academics tell CNN.com that “in the past, conservatives derided whiteness studies as anti-white, but the sharp vitriol against the discipline has largely subsided,” and the field “continues to evolve.” As Kellogg concludes, “While the filed is still little known in some corners, and criticized as being obsolete in others, proponents of… whiteness studies say that’s all part of progress.”

Not only are we excited to spot Reynolds Farley’s Contexts article “The Waning of American Apartheid?” (Summer 2011) written up in the Emerging Ideas section of the Jan.-Feb. 2012 issue of the Utne Reader, we’re gratified to see the elegant treatment it’s received in this “Citings & Sightings” style piece. Further, the illustration (at left, by Peter Thomas Ryan, peterthomasryan.com) wittily gets at the heart of the matter. What more could an editorial team want?

In the piece, the author writes of Farley and his fellow researchers’ extensive longitudinal work:

The stats aren’t evidence of a racial utopia (50 percent of thse respondents hit the edge of their [neighborhood] comfort zone at a 50-50 split in racial composition), but from block to block, there does seem to be slow and steady progress toward a more racially integrated America.

To check out the original article, please visit contexts.org.

As part of its programming surrounding our national day of remembrance in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., NPR’s Fresh Air brought scholar Michelle Alexander to the airwaves last night for a lengthy, fascinating interview. Alexander is the author of the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (out now in paperback with an introduction by Cornel West), and she argues persuasively that, as NPR puts it, “Jim Crow laws are now off the books [but] millions of blacks… remain marginalized and disenfranchised… denied [the] basic rights and opportunities that would allow them to become productive, law-abiding citizens.”

President Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” was declared, Alexander said, “primarily for reasons of politics—racial politics. … [these] racially coded ‘get-tough’ appeals on issues of crime and welfare appeal to poor and working-class whites, particularly in the South, who were resentful of, anxious about, and threatened by many of the gains of African Americans in the civil rights movement.” And so, the war on drugs keeps Jim Crow going:

Today there are more African Americans under correctional control—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. …In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African American men are either under correctional control or branded felons and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives

In her conversation with Dave Davies, Alexander went on to explain that, while some, like criminologist David Kennedy, believe  anyone who’s spent time with those fighting the “War on Drugs” on the streets (that is, who’ve embedded themselves with beat cops and DEA agents) knows there’s absolutely no racial or class bias in who gets arrested for what, she’s found in her research that, for white, middle and upper-class kids, some crimes are considered rites of passage deserving only a slap on the wrist. Just a few miles away, though, in poorer communities of color, those same crimes (particularly the sale and use of recreational drugs, which Alexander says research has found are no more likely among black adolescents than white nor among poor vs. white kids) relegate young people to a life haunted by the legal system.

This, Alexander goes on, is especially problematic in one under-examined way: the disenfranchisement of convicted felons means that these communities, which are already low in political capital (that is, real political power), don’t even have the ability to go and vote for the politicians (and policies) that might improve their lives. “My experience and research has led me to the regrettable conclusion that our system of mass incarceration functions more like a caste system than a system of crime prevention or control,” concludes Alexander.

Each year, millions of people don their running kicks and spandex and tackle 5ks, marathons, or the occasional holiday-themed trot.  But if you’ve ever been a spectator at one of these events, you’ve perhaps wondered what Runner’s World’s Jay Jennings found himself asking: Why is running so white?

That perception has become a truism, and the truism has become a joke. The popular satirical blog “Stuff White People Like,” which spawned a best-selling book, ranked marathons 27th on the original list, just behind farmer’s markets and Wes Anderson movies. More scathing was comedian Daniel Tosh, in a segment on his show, Tosh.0: “The only reason marathons are still around is so 20,000 white people can chase three black guys through the streets of Boston like the good old days.”

But how valid is the idea that running is indeed a predominantly white sport?

Well, pretty darn valid, according to Running USA’s recently released biannual National Runner Survey. Media spokesperson Ryan Lamppa stresses that its methodology is “opt-in” from 60 running organizations and clubs nationwide and “may not be a representative sample” of the actual running population. Still, the numbers, compiled between January and May 2011 from nearly 12,000 respondents, are eye-opening: “Core runners” (who tend to enter running events and train year-round) are 90 percent Caucasian, 5.1 percent Hispanic, 3.9 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, and, in perhaps the most startling figure, only 1.6 percent African-American. (The sample adds up to more than 100 percent because respondents could mark more than one choice.) Those numbers are consistent with ones from other surveys, such as Runner’s World’s, and have remained low even as the number of runners has grown by 56 percent in the past decade, according to the National Sporting Goods Association. (The overall population, from the 2010 U.S. census, is 72 percent white, 16 percent Hispanic or Latino, 13 percent black or African-American, 5 percent Asian, and 1 percent American Indian or Alaska native.)

The next question is, of course, why?  In search of an answer, Jennings spoke with new and well-trod runners, heads of national organizations, race directors, coaches, and academics. Through these conversations, he learned that there are economic and cultural roadblocks for minority runners.

Arguably, a potential runner needs only a pair of shoes (barefoot enthusiasts will say not even that!) and a stretch of pavement, but in reality, dedicated running shoes (which RunnersWorld will tell you elsewhere are critical for injury prevention) and race entrance fees can be expensive, especially over time.  Moreover, poor neighborhoods may lack safe avenues for running.

In fact, ‘Lacking a safe place to exercise’ was the top barrier to physical activity for African-American women age 40 and older in a 2000 study published in the journal Health Psychology. In another study for the American College of Sports Medicine in 2007, Simon J. Marshall, Ph.D., the lead researcher, commented,

“People in poverty are more likely to live in neighborhoods where public recreation is unavailable or dangerous,” but he added, this does not mean that culture does not play a role.

Martin Beatty, an African-American head track and field coach at Middlebury College in Vermon, cites social pressure to participate in football and basketball as a factor resulting in low participation in cross-country.  Another interviewee told Jennings,  “Within African-American culture, if your kids don’t play football and basketball, in a lot of communities, it’s not respected.”  Low minority participation in the sport means that there are few role models, on the street or in ad-campaigns, to inspire non-white runners. And when African-Americans do participate in running, stereotypes tend to funnel them toward short-distance events.

Why does all of this matter?  Health disparities, for one, says Harvard University sociologist, David R. Williams.

[The] professor (and two-time Detroit Marathon finisher) who studies racial differences in health, told Steve Barnes on an Arkansas public-affairs television broadcast, “You cannot take individuals who have been shackled by chains and put them at the start of a line to run a marathon…and expect them, if they haven’t had any training or preparation, to be successful.” He was speaking metaphorically, but a very real fact he cited is that “96,000 African-Americans die every year prematurely from racial disparities in health.”…”All of our institutions,” he said, citing schools, churches, and others, “Need to be encouraging healthy choices.”