race

The New York Times Sunday Book Review ran an insightful essay by sociologist Orlando Patterson of Harvard University entitled ‘Race and Diversity in the Age of Obama,’ yesterday morning.

Patterson begins:

Barack Obama’s historic victory was made possible by two great converging forces that began near the middle of the last century: the civil rights revolution and the changes engendered by the Immigration Act of 1965. The civil rights movement led to the rapid dismantling of Jim Crow and the inclusion of black Americans in politics, the military, the middle class and popular culture. The 1965 immigration act set in motion vast demographic and social changes that have altered the nation’s ethno-racial landscape.

At present, the foreign-born represent 12.6 percent of the total American population (this is still less than the 14.7 percent reached in 1910, during the earlier great wave of migration). A little over half of these immigrants are from Latin America and a quarter are from Asia. Over all, minorities now constitute slightly over a third of the population; in four states, minorities are the majority: Hawaii (75 percent), New Mexico (58 percent), California (57 percent) and Texas (52 percent), as they are in the District of Columbia (68 percent). It has been all too easy to misinterpret and sensationalize these demographic changes.

Patterson notes:

Until recently, the conventional wisdom among social scientists was that the adjustment of recent immigrants to America would be fundamentally different from that of the European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has been claimed that they are from different “races” and are entering a harsher postindustrial America with fewer opportunities for mobility, and also that the ease of communication and travel to their homelands discourages assimilation.

However, these arguments miss the real sociological drama that is now unfolding: the present wave of immigrants and their children are rapidly assimilating into an ever-vibrant American mainstream culture, and at a pace greater than the Europeans who came during the previous large wave. The assumption that the current wave should find adjustment harder because they come from different “races” rests on a hopeless misconception. At the time of their arrival, Jews, Italians and other Eastern and Southern Europeans — and even the Catholic Irish — were viewed by native whites as belonging to very different (and inferior) races. In fact, they did not assimilate because they were white; they became “white” because they assimilated.

Throughout the essay, Patterson draws upon previous research by numerous sociologists including Douglas Massey and William Julius Wilson, among others.

Read the full essay.

Earlier this week Inside Higher Education ran a fascinating story on the impact of parents on low-income high school students’ chances of enrolling in college.

The story begins…

Many studies have found that low-income high school students and those whose parents are not well educated are less likely to enroll in college. And disproportionate numbers of black and Latino youth fall into this group.

One solution to this problem is to increase the availability of aid — as the Obama administration and Congress appear to agree with their plans to increase the maximum Pell Grant significantly. But research presented [in San Francisco] Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association suggested that without shifting the attitudes of parents of low-income students — well before it’s time to enroll for college — any increases may not have the full impact desired.

New work presented by University of Washington sociologist Deborah M. Warnock, entitled  “Inequalities at the Outset,” uses ” a combination of federal and state databases in which parents are interviewed about college for their eighth graders.” According to Inside Higher Ed, Warnock “finds negative attitudes that not only are likely to discourage these youth from enrolling, but that suggest widespread ignorance of the present availability of aid — even before any Pell Grant growth — for those below the poverty line. And she found that low-income white parents may be particularly unaware of aid.”

Additional findings:

• Hispanic and Asian parents of eighth graders are less likely than white parents to think about how to finance a higher education, and black parents are more likely than white parents to think about paying for college.
• Parents with low incomes and less education are less likely than others to have thought about how to pay for college.
• While a majority of parents of all demographic groups who are below poverty level report that they believe they have “no way” of getting funds for college for their children, white parents in poverty are more likely to have this feeling than are minority parents.
• Among middle and upper income families, across the board, only a minority feel there is “no way” to pay for colleges. In this economic group, whites are less likely than minority parents to feel that way.

Read more.

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.