race

Today United Press International is running a story on new research – presented at this weekend’s American Sociological Association annual meeting -from sociologist Hannah Brueckner of Yale University, which suggests that fewer highly educated black women in the U.S. are marrying and starting families.

UPI reports, with the author’s commentary:

“In the past nearly four decades, black women have made great gains in higher education rates, yet these gains appear to have come increasingly at the cost of marriage and family,” Brueckner said.

The study on family formation and marriage longitudinal trends in the specified demographic found the marriage gap between highly educated black and white women increased dramatically between the 1970s and recent years.

In the 1970s the gap was 9 percent, while that gap rose to 21 percent in 2000-2007. Brueckner said the growing divide may be due to a lack of acceptable partners for highly educated black women.

“They are less likely than black men to marry outside their race, and, compared to whites and black men, they are least likely to marry a college-educated spouse,” she suggested.

Read more.

This morning the Washington Post is running a story about a new study out of the Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Mobility Project, offering a more nuanced understanding of the forces affecting the income outcomes they documented in a project completed several years ago — “that nearly half of African American children born to middle-class parents in the 1950s and ’60s had fallen to a lower economic status as adults, a rate of downward mobility far higher than that for whites.”

But why? The answer is at least in part due to geographic location. The Pew Center’s new research suggests that “being raised in poor neighborhoods plays a major role in explaining why African American children from middle-income families are far more likely than white children to slip down the income ladder as adults.”

The new study:

This week, Pew will release findings of a study that helps explain that economic fragility, pointing to the fact that middle-class blacks are far more likely than whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods, which has a negative effect on even the better-off children raised there. The impact of neighborhoods is greater than other factors in children’s backgrounds, Pew concludes.

Even as African Americans have made gains in wealth and income, the report found, black children and white children are often raised in starkly different environments. Two out of three black children born from 1985 through 2000 were raised in neighborhoods with at least a 20 percent poverty rate, compared with just 6 percent of white children, a disparity virtually unchanged from three decades prior.

Even middle-class black children have been more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods: Half of black children born between 1955 and 1970 in families with incomes of $62,000 or higher in today’s dollars grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods. But virtually no white middle-income children grew up in poor areas.

Using a study that has tracked more than 5,000 families since 1968, the Pew research found that no other factor, including parents’ education, employment or marital status, was as important as neighborhood poverty in explaining why black children were so much more likely than whites to lose income as adults.

A sociologist authored this new report…

Patrick Sharkey, the New York University sociologist who wrote the report, said researchers still need to pinpoint which factors in neighborhoods matter most, such as schools, crime or peer groups. But overall, he said, the impact of the contrasting surroundings for black and white children was indisputable.

“What surprises me is how dramatic the racial differences are in terms of the environments in which children are raised,” he said. “There’s this perception that after the civil rights period, families have been more able to seek out any neighborhood they choose, and that . . . the racial gap in neighborhoods would whittle away over time, and that hasn’t happened.”

And other scholars offered feedback…

Ideally, said several scholars who read the report, investments in struggling neighborhoods would improve them to the extent that the middle-income families would not feel the need to leave.

“These findings do suggest that those with the means or resources should try to escape these neighborhoods,” said Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson. “But . . . the exodus of middle-class families from poor black neighborhoods increases the adverse effects of concentrated poverty.”

Read more.

As many of you have probably read in the newspapers this week, the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s mistaken arrest has stirred debates about racial profiling in numerous media outlets as well as among academics. The New York Times summarizes: “Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard scholar of African-American history, was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Mass., last week by an officer investigating a report of a burglary in progress. Although charges for disorderly conduct were dropped, the incident has caused a stir over the issue of racial profiling.” (See the full story here.)

Although the some of the details of the case are still contested by the Cambridge police and Professor Gates, the events have generated some thoughtful sociological commentary on the course of events.

NYTimes blog ‘Room for Debate‘ hosted a discussion that featured commentary from scholars of law, psychology, criminology, criminal justice, and sociologist Peter Moskos, who noted:

As long as race matters in America, racial profiling will exist. But counter intuitively, police need to have more discretion, not less, to lessen profiling.

Police, at least in theory, are trained to avoid profiling. The same can’t be said for the public. If a citizen calls to report a suspicious person, police are suddenly forced into a situation that could very well stem from the ignorance or racism of some anonymous caller. And ignorance, which comes from all races, does not lend itself to effective community policing. Unfortunately, the age of the knowledgeable local foot officer is over.

There is a small segment of the population — street-corner young male high-school drop-out drug dealers come to mind — that should be profiled. Police attention will and should focus on high-crime corners. If these corners are black, well, reality often isn’t politically correct. In New York City, there are about 40 white and 330 black homicide victims per year.

Read more.

Earlier this week, a Crawler reader pointed me to a fantastic video interview with well-known sociologist Mary Pattillo as part of the Conversations from Penn State series from Penn State Public Broadcasting. The interview covers Pattillo’s path through academia, her two books on the black middle class, as well as what the Obama family means for the study of race and family.
See the video below, or link to the site here.

National Public Radio (NPR) ran an interesting story yesterday about the effects of the recession on young, low income families, drawing up the expertise of well-known sociologist Maria Kefalas.

The NPR blurb:

Financial and emotional stability can be an elusive fantasy for young, low-income families. Writer Laura Sessions Stepp, who wrote about “fragile families” in this week’s Washington Post Magazine , discusses how unemployment and financial troubles can shatter even the most loving young families. And sociology professor Maria Kefalas explains how family stability has become a class privilege in America.

Listen to the broadcast, here.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story about the recently-released paperback edition of a volume edited by Elijah Anderson entitled, Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black and Male. The collection of sixteen essays, includes work by William Julius Wilson, Gerald D. Jaynes, and David Kairys, with a foreword by Cornel West.

The Inquirer reports:

They are overrepresented in the ranks of the unemployed and the incarcerated, and underrepresented as college students, as live-in husbands, and as fathers raising children. They are more likely than most to die early and violently. Perhaps most important, young black men are among the most misunderstood people in America.

To bring awareness and understanding to their plight and to offer solutions, sociologist Elijah Anderson has brought together a roster of eminent and emerging social scientists and activists in his latest work, Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male.

The review goes on to say…

Anderson has made certain to include the perspectives of emerging young thinkers as well, including his son Luke, a community organizer in Chicago; Waverly Duck, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at Yale; and Imani Perry, a professor of law at Rutgers-Camden who is joining the faculty at Princeton University.

Anderson has long contended that in impoverished black communities, income is derived from three main sources: low-paying jobs, welfare, and an irregular, underground economy based on bartering, borrowing, hustling and street crime.

The failure of any one of those sources, he asserts, pushes individuals to one of the two others, and the disappearance of low-paying jobs and welfare drives people to the underground economy, which is governed by violence. This assertion is the premise of Anderson’s seminal books Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999) and A Place on the Corner (1978).

In his own essay, Anderson writes that inferior schooling, employment discrimination, and stereotypes have taken a heavy toll on the social capital of young black men.

“All this set the stage for the situation we face today. The social costs of impoverishment fell particularly hard on the heads of young black men who are feared by the rest of society and left to fend for themselves by white authorities,” Anderson writes. “In his alienation and use of violence, the contemporary poor young black male is a new social type peculiar to postindustrial America. This young man is in profound crisis. His social trajectory leads from the community to prison or cemetery, or at least to a life of trouble characterized by unemployment, discrimination and participation in an oppositional culture – which is how he goes about dealing with the alienation from society.”

The overwhelmingly positive review encourages interested readers to seek out this book to better understand an array of social problems, but reviewer Vernon Clark notes that “a weakness of the book is that the prescribed solutions are not nearly as concrete or commensurate in number as the relentless documentation of the problems and the long list of them.”

Read more.

Well-known Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson has come out with a new book entitled, “More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City,” which recently caught the attention of Minnesota Public Radio. MPR featured the author, in an exchange with Michael Fauntroy, an assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University, about the book and a broader discussion about whether or not poverty among African-Americans in the United States is the result of racism or other external forces…

Listen to the feature.

Fox News reports, “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez wasn’t the first to discover the book he gave to President Obama last week in an attempt to ease diplomatic tensions — college students in the U.S. have been turning its pages for years.” The book the story refers to is the 317-page Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano.

In the article, academics were called upon to explain the fervor surrounding the book, and how its use among college professors in numerous undergraduate courses highlights its importance. Including historian Paul Ortiz…

Associate Professor Paul Ortiz at the University of Florida said he most recently used Galeano’s book while teaching a class on African and Latin American history last fall.

“The way I present him is that he himself was an oppositional scholar,” Ortiz said. “He was writing against the mainstream economic viewpoint of the development of the Americas.”

University of Minnesota sociology graduate student Ryan Alaniz was also asked to comment on the book…

Ryan Alaniz, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, said he requires students to read portions of the book’s introduction for a sociology class he teaches called “Sociological Perspectives of Race, Class, and Gender.”

“The story of global capitalism is often told from a U.S. viewpoint often without the recognition that people in other parts of the world may have a very different explanation,” Alaniz wrote in an e-mail. “To gain a more holistic understanding of the consequences of capitalism, a critical student must be exposed to different interpretations of those consequences. Galeano’s book offers a critical Latin American perspective.”

Read more.

This past weekend, the New York Times Book Review highlighted a compelling new book from sociologist William Julius Wilson entitled, ‘More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City.’ 

The Times writes:

In “More Than Just Race,” the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson recaps his own important research over the past 20 years as well as some of the best urban sociology of his peers to make a convincing case that both institutional and systemic impediments and cultural deficiencies keep poor blacks from escaping poverty and the ghetto.

The systemic impediments include both the legacy of racism and dramatic economic changes that have fallen with disproportionate severity on poor blacks. State-enforced racial discrimination created the ghetto: in the early 20th century local governments separated the races into segregated neighborhoods by force of law, and later, whites used private agreements and violent intimidation to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. Worst, and most surprising of all, the federal government played a major role in encouraging the racism of private actors and state governments. Until the 1960s, federal housing agencies engaged in racial red lining, refusing to guarantee mortgages in inner-city neighborhoods; private lenders quickly followed suit.

Meanwhile, economic and demographic changes that had nothing to do with race aggravated the problems of the ghetto. Encouraged by recently built highways and inexpensive real estate, middle-class residents and industry left the inner city to relocate to roomier and less costly digs in the suburbs during the ’60s and ’70s. Those jobs that remained available to urban blacks further dwindled as companies replaced well-paid and unionized American workers with automation and cheaper overseas labor. The new economy produced most of its jobs at the two poles of the wage scale: high-paying jobs for the well educated and acculturated (lawyers, bankers, management consultants) and low-paying jobs for those with little education or skills (fast food, telemarketing, janitorial services).

And today…

Today many ghetto residents have almost no contact with mainstream American society or the normal job market. As a result, they have developed distinctive and often dysfunctional social norms. The work ethic, investment in the future and deferred gratification make no sense in an environment in which legitimate employment at a living wage is impossible to find and crime is an everyday hazard (and temptation). Men, unable to support their families, abandon them; women become resigned to single motherhood; children suffer from broken homes and from the bad examples set by both peers and adults. And this dysfunctional behavior reinforces negative racial stereotypes, making it all the harder for poor blacks to find decent jobs.

Read more.

US News & World Report presents the findings from a new study suggesting that when the economy is in a significant downturn, members of minority groups are more likely to be the victims of crime than others. The study, from sociologist Karen Heimer and criminologist Janet Lauritsen makes use of longitudinal data to establish the trend beyond our current recession…

National crime statistics from 1973 to 2005 show an increase in violent, non-lethal crime against blacks and Latinos during and after periods of recession, according to research that was scheduled for presentation Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Chicago.

“Minorities experience substantially higher rates of violent victimization than non-Latino whites in the United States,” researcher Karen Heimer, a University of Iowa sociology professor, said in a news release issued by her school. “Our study shows that the higher rates of poverty, urban residence and differential age distributions of non-Latino blacks and Latinos help to explain these groups’ higher victimization rates.”

By knowing this trend, law enforcement officials, criminal justice policy-makers and those who offer help and services to victims can better prepare against fluctuations in crime during the current recession, said Heimer, who worked on the study with Janet Lauritsen, a professor in the criminology and criminal justice department of the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Read more.