race

Hanukkah starts tonight! Last month the first comprehensive study of American Jews in over ten years found a drastic decrease in Jews who identify with Judaism for religious reasons and an increase in those who identify with Judaism for ethnic or cultural reasons. While this can in some ways be explained by the overall decrease in religiosity among younger Americans, a sociological understanding of these findings would also look to the interaction between ethnicity and religion.

Ethnic identities are constructed by ethnic groups, but also by external forces such as the economic and political climate the ethnic group inhabits.

• Joane Nagel. 1994. “Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture.” Social Problems 41(1).

The lines between ethnicity and religion are often blurry and the phenomenon of identifying with a religious or ethnic group for purely symbolic reasons is not new.

• Herbert Gans. 1994. “Symbolic Ethnicity and Symbolic Religiosity: Towards a Comparison of Ethnic and Religious Acculturation.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17(4).

The opposite is also true – holding beliefs without being a member of any particular church or religious group is on the rise.

• Davie, Grace. 1990. “Believing Without Belonging: Is This the Future of Religion in Britain?” Social Compass 37(4).

Shopping while black is not a crime, but what happens when a store assumes the customer is always white?

ColorofChange.org has created a petition urging the NYPD to conduct a full investigation into over 50 arrests of young people, predominantly of color, outside of major department stores like Barney’s and Macy’s. Why hasn’t the “shop and frisk” trend gone out of style?  Theories on race and racism, as well as the application of such ideas through social experiments, may offer some useful insights.

To study the gap between actions and rhetoric, audit studies reveal patterns of discrimination in the working world which shape employment opportunities for many low-wage workers of color.

• Pager, Devah and Lincoln Quillian. 2005.  “Walking the Talk? What Employers Say Versus What They Do.” American Sociological Review. 70: 355-80.

• Pager, Devah, Bruce Western, Bart Bonikowski.  2009.  “Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment.”  American Sociological Review.  79: 777-99.

Some theorists view racial attitudes through a conflict perspective that suggests racism and prejudice is rooted in different social positions between groups.

• Bobo, Lawrence. 1999.  “Prejudice as Group Position: Microfoundations of a Sociological Approach to Racism and Race Relations.”  Journal of Social Issues.  55(3): 445-72.

It’s Columbus Day! In 1492 he sailed the ocean blue and—well—historians, sociologists, and even web comic artists have been reminding us for a while now that he didn’t really “discover” America, so much as find the native peoples who were already living there. So, how does the narrative of Columbus day (or any other story in our history textbooks) keep coming up the same way year after year?

Columbus’ voyage isn’t the only historical story we tend to get wrong in the classroom.

A recent report from the New York Times tells us that Washington may be loosening the leash on mortgage lenders, but a range of research from sociologists over the last five years suggests that there were actually multiple problems that led to the 2008 housing crash, and they weren’t all about financial regulation alone.

Modern mortgages arose when homeownership was politically popular.

• Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam’s A Theory of Fields

Politicians often used economic policy to “punt” unpopular political conflict.

• Greta Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, 2011.
• Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson, Too Big to Bail: The “Paulson Put,” Presidential Politics, and the Global Financial Meltdown (Part 1 and Part 2) 2009.

Subprime lending didn’t just take advantage of the poor—it was also a racial problem.

• Jacob Faber, Racial Dynamics of Subprime Mortgage Lending at the Peak, 2013.