race

In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Everything depends on upbringing.” Parents who agree have devised limitless strategies for optimal child-rearing. To test one strategy, sociologists Susan Dumais, Richard Kessinger, and and Bonny Ghosh investigated whether parents’ involvement at school could provide an advantage on children’s teacher evaluations. They found that it did improve the kids’ scores for language and literacy, approach to learning, and interpersonal skills—but only in all three categories if children also came from white, college-educated families.

This research builds on Annette Lareau’s finding that families’ approaches to parenting differ depending on their economic and educational resources. In contrast to working-class parents, both black and white middle-class parents, she found, tend to parent with “concerted cultivation.” These parents create a highly organized schedule of structured activities for their children, are active in their schools, and train them to interact confidently with adults. Lareau suggests that middle-class children might be able to obtain a more customized education and be viewed as more socially competent by their teachers because of the resulting ability to negotiate.

While exploring how this advantage might work, Dumais, Kessinger, and Ghosh determine that certain parenting practices are more beneficial for children in particular racial or socioeconomic groups. For instance, parental volunteering only benefits all three of the teacher evaluations for white children from college-educated families. On the flip side, white children of high-school educated families receive poorer evaluations if their parents attend conferences, as do African American children of college-educated families when their parents request a specific teacher. The authors interpret these findings as sound rationale for Tolstoy’s lament: “I often think how unfairly life’s good fortune is sometimes distributed. ” Undeniably, each family’s unique racial and educational background still triggers barriers in the educational system.

Twenty years ago, Christine Williams wrote “The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the ‘Female’ Professions,” examining how gender inequality operates in traditionally sex segregated, predominantly female occupations such as nursing, teaching, librarianship, and social work. She found that men in these occupations were often “fast-tracked” to higher administrative and management positions, and she called this process the “glass escalator.” Williams’s study provided an important complement to analyses of the “glass ceiling”—the invisible threshold in the organizational hierarchy above which women would rarely be promoted.

In the most recent issue of Gender & Society, Williams returns to her earlier work to see what’s changed. She finds that the glass escalator remains for men in female-dominated professions, although it operates differently based on identity and on the current economic climate.

Williams concedes that the glass escalator operates most clearly in relation to white men in stable middle-class jobs. Further, the glass escalator only operates in organizations with stable employment, job hierarchies, and career ladders—all aspects of work that have changed drastically over the past decade. She argues, “We need new metaphors to understand the persistence of male privilege in the flexible, project-based, and flatter neoliberal organization.”

The ability to create your own avatar in video and online games has become increasingly popular, particularly with the increase in online MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games). With the advent of avatars, players are able to pick and choose how they want their gaming character to look, act, and even feel. As expected, players often attempt to replicate themselves in their avatar. But what happens when your characteristics are not available?

Setting out to determine how race is represented in video game characters, David Dietrich found that only 10 of the 65 games he analyzed allowed for a non-white avatar. Dietrich looked at non-white skin color, hair style/color, and facial features, finding that a majority of these games—including World of Warcraft, which boasts over 10 million players as of 2012 and dominates the online gaming world—to be reinforcing “normative whiteness” by assuming that the default color of their players is white.

The consequence, Dietrich argues, is that these all-white worlds force non-white players to “become white” in order to play while implicitly signaling to the non-white player that they do not belong. While the exclusion of non-white avatar options is likely unintentional on the part of the game’s creator, the simple fact that this was overlooked is evidence enough of the “unquestioned standards of whiteness” in American society. What these games are telling us is that you can be a fairy, a dwarf, or the Primordial Thunder King, but you can only be white.

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Considered undesirable by many Americans, “brown collar” jobs are those occupations with an overrepresentation of newly arrived Latino immigrants. With low pay and low status, employment in areas such as construction, hospitality, and textile production has been thought to offer few opportunities to earn better wages and learn English (which can, in turn, lead to higher wages).

Describing these workplaces as “linguistic niches” due to the prevalence of Spanish-speakers, Ted Mouw and Sergio Chavez’s complex and novel data analysis showed that brown collar occupations are not necessarily dead end jobs. Analyzing survey and government data—even bringing in a longitudinal element that’s been missing in other research—the authors found that the niches actually enabled some newly arrived immigrants to learn English while getting a foothold in the U.S. labor market.

Mouw and Chavez found that, although immigrant workers initially “sort” into brown collar jobs upon arrival to the U.S., these jobs are not detrimental to wage growth if they are used as a transition to the mainstream labor market—a feat 20% of workers are able to achieve. It’ll be interesting to find out the secret to their success.

A lot of 2008 election analysis focused on prejudice and race—would white Americans vote for a black president? In his recent Public Opinion Quarterly piece, Seth Goldman turns this question around to ask how the massive reach of the Obama campaign affected racial prejudice. He shows that, in just six months, the “Obama Effect” reduced racial prejudice at a rate five times faster than the average drop in racism over the entire previous twenty years. Because the same people were polled at various times during the Obama campaign, Goldman was able to measure individual- rather than group-level changes.

Unexpectedly, this effect was strongest among McCain supporters, especially those who watched political television shows. The effect was even stronger in states where the Obama campaign aired an influx of television advertisements. Watching TV didn’t change Republicans’ political views or swing their vote. Instead, seeing Obama challenged their expectations of black Americans by offering a positive image and countering stereotypes. Television is where media acts as a point of “virtual” contact between racial groups—and as Goldman argues, it can reduce prejudice as effectively as a face-to-face encounter.

On July 7, 2005, four British Muslim young men from the Leeds area detonated bombs on the London transportation system killing over fifty people. In the wake of these 7/7 bombings, politicians and academics worried that incidents of racism and Islamophobia against British South Asians perceived as Muslim would dramatically increase. Demonstrating a commonsense yet novel methodology, Yasmin Hussain and Paul Bagguley (Racial and Ethnic Studies, January 2013) interviewed forty British Pakistani Muslims to gauge post-7/7 racist or Islamophobic incidents, rather than replicate social science research that measures white, non-Muslim respondents’ changes in attitudes toward Muslims.

Among the findings, Hussain and Bagguley report that instead of outright violent incidents, most manifestations of racism and Islamophobia were much more subtle and patterned, experienced as “funny looks” from (mainly white) non-Muslim strangers. Drawing from the slang British connotation of “funny” as peculiar or slightly hostile, these looks were aimed particularly at young South Asians who were recognizably Muslim, wearing more traditional forms of dress. Women with headscarves disproportionately experienced funny looks, although respondents of all genders drew these looks if they were carrying a bag or backpack in public.

Responding with increased self-policing, many young Muslims said they’d become more intentional about when and where they travelled in order to insulate themselves from hostility and potential violence. Some even stopped wearing traditional dress. Other respondents disregarded these issues as an act of resistance and assertion of their identity as British Muslims. Hussain and Bagguley’s study reminds us that racism and prejudice is often not experienced directly through verbal or physical attacks but rather manifested in racial micro-aggressions that are difficult to quantify.

Even alternative media reporting on the housing crisis are using mainstream ways of talking about the problem. While you’d expect publications like BE, The Root, and Colorlines to be more radical (alternatives to, say, Forbes), instead they stick with “neoliberal” and “postracial” themes. That is, these publications believe housing problems are individual problems and have little to do with race, even when banks have admitted in court that race was part of their mortgage decision process. In Catherine Squires’ new study on the disproportionate impact of the subprime mortgage crisis on African Americans, she shows how mainstream rhetoric is rearticulated by even alternative media.

In her content analysis, Squires reveals that both BE and The Root presented stories in which responsibility for the mortgage crisis was shifted from the banks and lenders to the individual borrower. Colorlines was the only publication to address the unequal access of whites and people of color to the American Dream and home ownership, demonstrating greater resistance to the specious appeal of neoliberal rhetoric by placing greater onus on the government and the beneficiaries of its bailout (that is, the banks).

The expectation instilled in alternative media to present a different perspective endures. However, when even the stories they publish look like recycled versions of the mainstream, readers’ trust is sure to wane.

Some call it “tough love,” others claim they’re just “keepin’ it real.” Either way, by preparing their children to face racism, parents hope their kids will be able to handle such realities in non-violent ways.

In their attempt to understand the impact of interpersonal racial discrimination on criminal offending, Callie Burt, Ronald Simmons, and Frederick Gibbons offer new insights into how African American parents prepare their children for experiences with racial bias in order to foster a sense of resilience.  Based on panel data from several hundred male African American youth from the Family and Community Health Study, their findings show that higher instances of racial discrimination increase the likelihood of crime. But they also find that families use what they call “ethnic-racial socialization” (ERS) as a means of reducing this effect. According to the authors, ERS is “a class of adaptive and protective practices utilized by racial/ethnic minority families to promote functioning in a society stratified by race and ethnicity.” ERS is not necessarily a strategic effort, but an adaptive means of coping with racial inequality. In addition to reducing the impact of racial discrimination among the sample of black youth, ERS also weakened the effects of emotional distress, hostile views, and disengagement from norms on increased offending. Further, teaching kids about racism may prevent them from getting tangled up in criminal responses, but it’s also clear evidence that our society hasn’t transcended race or racism.

In an era of concerted cultivation and enlightened parenting, the need to steer children away from crime by revealing harsh inequalities at a young age seems futile. Ethnic-racial socialization strategies are not compatible with most middle-class cultural scripts. However, the irony in all of this is that most privileged parents are keeping it just as “real” as low-income parents of color. It is the stark contrast in how these parents practice concerted cultivation—whether in teaching piano scales or teaching kids to expect a racist world—that catches our attention.

While the pains of eviction have been felt broadly across the U.S. in recent years, Matthew Desmond (American Journal of of Sociology, August 2012) shows that women in poor, predominantly African American neighborhoods have taken the hardest hit.

Analyzing Milwaukee County records from 2003 to 2007, Desmond found that, even before the recession, half of all evictions occurred in predominantly black, impoverished, inner-city neighborhoods. Women in these neighborhoods were disproportionately affected: they accounted for just 9.6% of Milwaukee’s total population, but 30% of all evictions.

Based on surveys and ethnographic research, Desmond argues that both structural factors (falling incomes relative to rising housing costs) and gendered responses in the face of impending eviction (for example, women may try to reach out to personal networks for help, but these personal networks may offer fewer resources) contribute to black women’s disproportionate eviction rates.

Even so, from the start, women in these neighborhoods face an unequal risk for eviction simply because they are more likely to sign rental agreements: criminal convictions increasingly bar African American men from the rental process. Eviction and conviction are, thus, intertwined forces that restrict housing options for African Americans.

The basketball court, like other sporting venues, is supposed to be a place for meritocratic values: success is determined not by skin, but by skill. In a recent journal article (Ethnic & Racial Studies, June 2012), however, Kathleen S. Yep contends that race continues to matter in elite-level sports, even if prevailing beliefs suggest otherwise.

Implementing historical data analysis and in-depth qualitative interviews with former non-white “barnstorming circuit” basketball players, Yep argues that media portrayals of today’s non-white NBA players largely echo those from the 1930s. One possible example is the trifecta of Demarcus Cousins (portrayed as the hotheaded and volatile black threat), John Wall (the skilled and coachable black hero), and Jeremy Lin (the hard-working Asian American novelty act). While all joined the NBA in 2010, the words used to describe them are remarkably similar to those used 70+ years ago for teams such as the Harlem Globetrotters (the black threat), the Bearded Aces (the white hero), and the Hong Wah Kues (Asian American novelty act). Though some black players, like Wall, are now elevated to hero status because of their superb skill and work ethic, not all non-white players are viewed as quite as deserving. Such disparities, Yep insists, are a sign of the contradictions inherent in a sporting world that pushes the rhetoric of liberal multiculturalism while still relying on discourses of white supremacy.