race

With the appointment of a new Supreme Court Justice looming, Roe v. Wade — the landmark legislation that legalized abortion across the United States — faces an increasing threat of being overturned. While we often talk about the women who have or seek abortions, we tend to forget about the providers who perform them. Abortion providers today certainly face many challenges to performing this service, but before Roe v. Wade, choosing to perform abortions was usually illegal and dangerous. Despite this precarity, many providers risked their lives to ensure women had access to abortions.

Abortion didn’t always receive public concern. In fact, prior to the mid 1900s, abortion was considered a strictly medical matter. In the late 1800s, medical professionals began advocating for the criminalization of abortion, arguing that women who sought them were medically ignorant about pregnancy. And, at a time when a growing number of immigrant groups seemed to threaten the dominance of White, Anglo-Saxons, doctors vehemently opposed abortions for White, Anglo-Saxon women who defied their “natural” purpose — to reproduce. Many doctors remained opposed to abortion into the mid to late 1900s, but not all. These others doctors — known as “doctors of conscience” — performed illegal abortions, often requiring the women they served to wear blindfolds so they could not identify the doctors if they were later arrested.

• Kristin Luker. 1984. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. University of California Press.  
• Nicola Beisel and Tamara Kay. 2004. “Abortion, Race, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century America.” American Sociological Review 69: 498-518.
• Carole Joffe. 1995. Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortions. Beacon Press.

It was not only trained medical professionals who performed illegal abortions. Some providers had little to no legitimate medical training. For example, members of the underground abortion service in Chicago — known as “Jane” — sought training so they would not need to rely on outsiders to perform services. Surprisingly perhaps, many clergy used their status and privilege of confidentiality with clients to provide referrals and assistance to women seeking abortions through an organization known as the Clergy Consultation Service (CCS).

• Laura Kaplan. 1995. The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service. University of Chicago Press.
• Kelly Suzanne O’Donnell. 2017. “Reproducing Jane: Abortion Stories and Women’s Political Histories.” Signs 43(1): 77-96.

The CCS alone estimates that the abortion providers they worked with were able to supply hundreds of thousands of women with abortion services before Roe v. Wade. And this was only possibly through the collaborative efforts of individuals who formed organizations and networks, and used their privileges and resources to help women who sought their assistance. Today women continue to fight for reproductive rights, and with the possibility of Roe v. Wade‘s overturning, many worry that women will once again need to rely on providers like doctors of conscience to meet their reproductive needs. 

This episode of the podcast, Criminal has more about the Clergy Consultation Service.

Brett Kavanaugh’s recent nomination for Supreme Court Justice faces much opposition from Congressional Democrats and other progressive political groups. These groups express concerns over a possible overturning of Roe v. Wade, redaction of climate change policies, and implementation of more punitive criminal justice policies. This political contention is crucial, as Supreme Court justices and their rulings can have far-reaching impacts. One area where the Court has been highly influential is shaping how colleges and universities consider applicants’ racial identity during their admissions decisions.

In the 1960s and 1970s, several colleges voluntarily implemented admissions programs designed to boost the presence of underrepresented racial minorities and women within their student bodies. These policies became known as “affirmative action,” a highly politicized issue since its inception. During the 1978 case, Regents of the University California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court ruled against the use of racial quotas and thresholds, but Justice Lewis F. Powell stated that pursuing “diversity” is a constitutional goal. His written opinion affirmed colleges’ right to pursue a diverse student body and therefore consider applicants’ race in admissions, albeit with several considerations and under a standard of “strict scrutiny.”

• Ellen C. Berrey. 2011. “Why Diversity Became Orthodox in Higher Education, and How it Changed the Meaning of Race on Campus.” Critical Sociology 37(5): 573-596.
• Lisa M. Stulberg and Anthony S. Chen. 2014. “The Origins of Race-Conscious Affirmative Action in Undergraduate Admissions: A Comparative Analysis of Institutional Change in Higher Education.” Sociology of Education 87(1): 36-52.
• Kelly Carr. 2018. The Rhetorical Invention of Diversity: Supreme Court Opinions, Public Arguments, and Affirmative Action. Michigan State University Press.

Since Bakke, The Supreme Court has ruled on affirmative action in cases such as Gratz v. Bollinger in 2003, Grutter v. Bollinger in 2004, and Fisher v. University of Texas, which appeared before the Court in both 2013 and 2016. In each instance, the “diversity” rationale in the Bakke ruling was upheld; colleges have been allowed to consider race in admissions under certain conditions. Yet, several scholars note that prioritizing “diversity” often ignores issues regarding privilege, access, and racial inequities in America. The Supreme Court inspired a defense of race-based policies in admissions for the sake of promoting a cosmopolitan, worldly, “diverse” college experience. By contrast, the original proponents of affirmative action highlighted the need to address pervasive racial inequalities in America, inequalities that persist today.

• Wendy Moore and Joyce Bell. 2011. “Maneuvers of Whiteness: ‘Diversity’ as a Mechanism of Retrenchment in the Affirmative Action Discourse.” Critical Sociology 37(5): 597-613
• Mario L. Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig. 2015. “Judging Opportunity Lost: Assessing the Viability of Race-Based Affirmative Action after Fisher v. University of Texas.” UCLA Law Review 62: 271-305.
• Ellen Berrey. 2015. The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice. University of Chicago Press.
• Candis W. Smith and Sarah Mayorga-Gallo. 2017. “The New Principle-Policy Gap: How Diversity Ideology Subverts Diversity Initiatives.” Sociological Perspectives 60(5): 889-911.

The history of race-based policy and the Supreme Court illustrates how the Supreme Court justices can shape public policies and social problems. It is likely that anti-affirmative action lawsuits will appear before the Supreme Court again (see Margaret M. Chin and Syed Ali’s recent TSP feature on race, merit, litigation, and school admissions procedures). For now, it is unclear whether the Supreme Court will continue to rely on Bakke or turn to a different rationale in the future. Thus, as the nomination and confirmation process for the next Supreme Court justice plays out, we can be sure that many people will be keeping a close eye on proceedings.

The FIFA World Cup is in full swing in Russia, and fans from all over the world have been traveling or tuning in to catch their favorite teams and players. The World Cup may seem like fun and games, but for social scientists all over the world, soccer — or “football,” as most of the world calls it — is Exhibit A in the argument that sport and its mega-events are a powerful social force on the world stage.

• Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson. 2009. Globalization and Football. Sage.
• Eric Dunning. 1999. Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilisation. Routledge.
• John Horne and Wolfram Manzenreiter. 2006. “An Introduction to the Sociology of Sports Mega-Events.” The Sociological Review 54(2): 1-24.

Sport elites and enthusiasts often celebrate the positive, community-building dimensions of soccer’s social power, highlighting soccer’s role in building national unity and fostering international cooperation. Across various geographic boundaries and historical periods, soccer can and often does bring people together through shared traditions, social networks, and goals. International sports can even shape international politics and diplomacy.

• Alan Tomlison and Christopher Young. 2006. National Identity and Global Sports: Events Culture, Politics, and Spectacle in the Olympics and the Football World Cup. State of New York University Press.
• Lincoln Allison. 2004. The Global Politics of Sport: The Role of Global Institutions in Sport. Routledge.

As TSP co-Publisher Doug Hartmann has insisted for years however, even as sport builds community and social connections, it simultaneously crates differences and distinctions, some of which can lead to conflict or inequality. Global soccer exhibits these social dynamics as well. For example, the popularity of sports and competition in many parts of the world can be connected to historical processes of colonialism and imperialism. Another common theme in the social scientist’s playbook is the racism and violence that so often accompanies soccer in both national and international settings.

• Ben Carrington. 1998. “‘Football’s Coming Home,’ But Whose Home? And Do We Want It?: Nation, Football and the Politics of Exclusion.” Pp. 121-143 in Fanatics: Power, Identity, and Fandom in Football. Routledge.
• Richard Guilianotti (ed). 2013. Football, Violence and Social Identity. Routledge.

All this might help explain why some scholars have been cautious and critical of the Russian World Cup, such as Jules Boykoff, who warns against the presence of bigotry and ultranationalism in an op-ed with the LA Times. The complicated intersections of sport, power, and race means that there are times when it’s not all fun and games.

For more, check out this NBC Think article on “sportwashing”– using mega-sports events to elevate a country or politician’s reputation and distract from their negative human-rights records.

During PRIDE month Americans celebrate gender and sexuality spectrums, but many social arenas still rely on a rigid binary. Athletics is one of the spaces where gender segregation still dominates. In fact, its strict separation of sports into male and female competitions actually requires sport administrators to set and police the boundaries between the sexes and has created many controversies and conundrums in recent years. Sociological research illustrates how actors use gender verification, or sex testing, in athletics as a weapon of nationalism, sexism, and racism, thus reinforcing a medical view of the gender binary in an attempt to ensure “fair play.”

Gender verification in international athletics was part of the battlefield of the Cold War. Systematic sex testing in the Olympic Games began in 1968, largely in response to concerns about the dominant performances of the East German women and fears or rumors of men posing as women. In addition to being used as a weapon of nationalism, gender verification testing targeted athletes who did not conform to white, Western norms of femininity. Even after systematic sex testing was (briefly) eliminated by the International Olympic Committee in 2000, “suspicious” athletes such as the middle-distance runners Santhi Soundarajan and Caster Semenya were forced to undergo gender verification in 2006 and 2009.

• Stefan Wiederkehr. 2009. “‘We Shall Never Know the Exact Number of Men Who Have Competed in the Olympics Posing as Women’: Sport, Gender Verification and the Cold War.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 26(4): 556–72.
• Lindsay Parks Pieper. 2014. “Sex Testing and the Maintenance of Western Femininity in International Sport.” International Journal of the History of Sport 31(13): 1557–76.

Sport federations continue to defend gender verification of women — but not men — on the basis of “fair play,” or the idea that women competing against men face an unfair athletic disadvantage. Feminist scholars have critiqued the fair play reasoning as a smokescreen for the policing of women, especially as sex segregation and drug testing are two of the only ways that sport federations attempt to enforce a level playing field. Additionally, sex testing forces a medical definition of sex and draws sharp lines that punish individuals who are intersex, have chromosomal abnormalities, or have higher than average levels of androgens.

• Cheryl Cooky and Shari L. Dworkin. 2013. “Policing the Boundaries of Sex: A Critical Examination of Gender Verification and the Caster Semenya Controversy.” Journal of Sex Research 50(2): 103–11.
• Claire F. Sullivan. 2011. “Gender Verification and Gender Policies in Elite Sport: Eligibility and ‘Fair Play.’” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 35(4): 400-419.

How sex has been defined and verified has shifted as the medical understanding and technology available has advanced, but all gender verification methods will continue to struggle with how to fit the wide spectrum of gendered individuals into only two boxes.

Teaching about race and racism in school systems and classrooms is a complex task, and crafting curricula and policies in these areas are even more so. As recent debates over history textbooks and lesson plans about slavery illustrate, race and racism are often emotional and controversial, and vary from community to community, state to state, or nation to nation. The notion of “antiracism” has been another recent touchstone — and research on the topic may lead to more informed policies and decisions on how to address racism in educational contexts.

In its definition, antiracism confronts racism and challenges White gains from the exclusion and oppression of people of color, even if those gains are unintentional. Antiracism in education follows these tenets, by focusing on racial inclusiveness and questioning how conceptions of race and racism have shaped what counts as knowledge.

David Gillborn. 2008. “Developing Antiracist School Policy.” Pp. 246-251 in Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School. New York: The New York Press.

Audrey Thompson. 1997. “For: Anti-racist Education.” Curriculum Inquiry 27(1): 7-44.

Many antiracist education programs focus on White individuals, assuming that Whites are the main actors that can produce change, but also major obstacles to progress. But research suggests that students of color are also an important part of the teaching and learning process. These students can bring their own personal experiences — which can’t be learned from books — into the classroom and thus, these students can be instrumental in promoting antiracist change. Involving communities of color in educational processes, by informing students on African languages, cultures, and heritage, for example, can promote collective learning and knowledge production to benefit both students of color and White students.

David Gillborn. 1996. “Student Roles and Perspectives in Antiracist Education: A Crisis of White Ethnicity?” British Educational Research Journal 22(2): 165-179.

George J. Sefa Dei. 2008. “Schooling as Community: Race, Schooling, and the Education of African Youth.” Journal of Black Studies 38(3): 346-366.

For most of us, our only way to know what life in prison is like is through occasional movies and TV shows. But for inmates, the prison impacts all aspects of their lives. Recent stories have filled newsfeeds about a food protest in a Washington state facility, religious discrimination in Michigan, and a massive fire in a Venezuelan jail that claimed 68 lives. These events put the often-dismal conditions, lack of programs, and corruption in carceral spaces on full display. Social science research on prisons can help us understand the conditions of prison life and how broader social context shapes prison structures.

Classical sociological perspectives view prisons as totalizing institutions that define both the day-to-day routines and the personal identities of those incarcerated. This leads to “pains of imprisonment” beyond loss of freedom. More recent scholarship demonstrates how structural inequality, and especially racial inequality in the United States, shaped the development of prisons. Racialization and racial segregation still shape practices within prisons today.

• Rose M. Brewer and Nancy A. Heitzeg. 2008.  “The Racialization of Crime and Punishment: Criminal Justice, Color-Blind Racism, and the Political Economy of the Prison Industrial Complex.” American Behavioral Scientist 51(5): 625-644.
• Erving Goffman. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Penguin Random House.
• Gresham M. Sykes. 2007. The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison. Princeton University Press.

Prison overcrowding has been a major concern in the United States since the beginning of the prison boom in the 1970s. Research clearly shows that overcrowding has serious physical and mental health effects for the incarcerated, and deleterious impacts for safety in prisons. In Latin America, prisons are also overcrowded, and often include a disproportionately high number of prisoners who are awaiting trial, but have not been convicted. Since these prisons lack government oversight and often have insufficient financial resources, many prisons suffer from corruption, persistent abuse by prison officers, and a crumbling physical infrastructure. Religious entities, and sometimes even prisoners themselves, play crucial role in administering and organizing prisons, as well as providing resources and rehabilitation opportunities.

• Michael Massoglia. 2008.  “Incarceration as Exposure: the Prison, Infectious Disease, and Other Stress-Related Illnesses.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 49(1): 56-71.
• Craig Haney. 2006. “The Wages of Prison Overcrowding: Harmful Psychological Consequences and Dysfunctional Correctional Reactions.” Washington University Journal of Law & Policy 22: 265-293.
• Andrew Johnson. 2017. If I Give My Soul: Faith Behind Bars in Rio de Janeiro. Oxford University Press.
• Markus-Michael Müller. 2012. “The Rise of the Penal State in Latin America.” Contemporary Justice Review 15(1): 57-76.

Recent events and protests shine a light on the importance of continued research on prison conditions across the globe. These studies both help us to understand how social contexts “on the inside” and outside of prisons shape the lives of the incarcerated, and bring awareness to an issue that is often obfuscated from public life.

The effects of violent conflict are difficult to measure, from refugee displacement to PTSD or other mental health concerns. Humanitarian advocates may look at refugee displacement while psychologists examine PTSD or other mental health concerns. Though sociological insights often remain overlooked, a number of scholars have made essential contributions in understanding the long-term effects of violent conflict. Their work illustrates how conflict can have social and relational effects, and their findings may help to prevent future violence or perpetuate tension for generations to come.

In the context of conflict, the word “trauma” often refers to psychological effects for an individual who has experienced violence. However, sociology allows for a look into the social consequences of violence. Coined by Jeffrey Alexander, “cultural trauma” describes the irrevocable impact of violence upon a group which was subjected to atrocities, influencing understandings of identity far past the conflict itself. The violence experienced by subjugated groups like African Americans and Jews, for example, becomes a key part of how members of these groups understand their identity in the present.

• Jeffrey C. Alexander. 2012. Trauma: A Social Theory. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.

Cultural trauma does not always occur following a violent event. An event must first become widely understood and accepted as a violation, and this generally occurs with the help of institutions, like the law, education, or the media. Some injustices, like violence against native populations in the Americas, are still not fully accepted as persecution. Powerful institutions may seek to limit a group’s capacity to identify as victims, like educational structures that don’t teach the persecution of Native Americans to students. Conversely, those who experienced the violence (or their ancestors) can use institutions to try and reframe this narrative.

• Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Hannah Arendt. 2005. Responsibility and Judgement, New York City, NY: Schocken.

Over time, understandings of past violence can change. Commemorative events can pass on memories from atrocities, but often shift in content over time as new individuals take over elements of the commemorative process. Narratives may also shift to reflect contemporary understandings of violence or identity. For example, recognition of Native American genocide — and subsequent declarations of Indigenous People’s Day on Columbus Day — captures a shift in attitudes about past violence.

• Jeffrey Olick. 1999. “Genre Memories and Memory Genres: A Dialogical Analysis of May 8, 1945 Commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany.” American Sociological Review 64: 381-402.
• Alejandro Baer. 2011. “The Voids of Sepharad: The Memory of the Holocaust in Spain.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12(1): 95–120.

This month many celebrated Easter Sunday, symbolizing the resurrection of Christianity’s most prominent figure, Jesus. In this context, we find ourselves reflecting on the rise of the U.S. evangelical movement and the individuals who constitute its membership. Most recently progressives criticized evangelicals for their support of Donald Trump, who received over 80 percent of the evangelical vote despite his lack of religious practice, and his purported incidents of sexual misconduct. Sociological research provides a complicated picture of evangelicals in the United States and their beliefs.

The evangelical movement emerged during the mid-twentieth century and quickly gained popularity among conservative Whites in the 1990s. The core belief of evangelicalism, which has its roots in fundamentalism, lies in its assertion of the Protestant Bible as God’s actual word. Evangelicals see the Bible as the ultimate authority over moral matters and believe it cannot be contested. Their mission seeks to convert non-believers to Christianity so they may see Jesus as their savior and save their souls from eternal damnation.

• Christian Smith. 1998. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Andrew M. Greeley and Michael Hout. 2006. The Truth about Conservative Christians: What They Think and What They Believe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Evangelicals also make up an essential part of the Republican Party. Several explanations exist for the strong link between evangelicalism and right-wing politics, including religiosity, gender and family ideologies, and moral standards. For example, evangelicals support political causes that reaffirm Biblical beliefs and support ideologies that center patriarchal models of family. Further, moral traditionalists hold universal ideas about what is right and wrong and support political causes and figures that uphold moral principles they perceive to be under threat.

• Steven Brint and Seth Abrutyn. 2010. “Who’s Right About the Right? Comparing Competing Explanations of the Link Between White Evangelicals and Conservative Politics in the United States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49(2): 328-350.
• Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks. 1997. “The Religious Factor in US Presidential Elections, 1960-1992.” American Journal of Sociology 103(1): 38–81.

Yet, several scholars warn against overgeneralizing about evangelicals. For example, Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout point out that while a significant amount of African American Christians share some of these evangelical beliefs, they overwhelmingly support democratic policies. Furthermore, outside of the U.S. context, many conservative White Christians reject right-wing social politics.

• Lydia Bean. 2014. The Politics of Evangelical Identity: Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canada. Princeton University Press.

Following the arrest of two Black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks, public attention has increasingly focused on how race impacts whose presence in certain areas is questioned or not. The incident at Starbucks is part of a broader phenomenon about who we see as belonging or not-belonging in social settings and different spaces. Often, these perceptions — about who should and shouldn’t be at particular places — are rooted in race and racial difference.

Research shows that beliefs about belonging particularly affect how Black people are treated in America. Sociologist Elijah Anderson has written extensively about how certain social settings are cast as a “white space” or a “black space.” Often, these labels extend to public settings, including businesses, shopping malls, and parks. Labels like these are important because they can lead to differences in how some people are treated, like the exclusion of the two Black men from Starbucks.

• Anderson, Elijah. 2011.  The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life. W.W. Norton & Company.
• Elijah Anderson. 2015. “The White Space.” Sociology of Race & Ethnicity 1(1): 10-21.

When addressing the intersections between race and social space, social scientists often focus on residential segregation, where certain neighborhoods are predominantly comprised of members of one racial group. While these dynamics have been studied since the mid 20th century, research shows that race is still an important factor in determining where people live and who their neighbors are — an effect compounded by the 2008 financial crisis and its impacts on housing.

• Jacob S Rugh, Len Albright, and Douglas S. Massey. 2015. “Race, Space, and Cumulative Disadvantage: A Case Study of the Subprime Lending Collapse.” Social Problems 62(2): 186-208.
• Matthew Hall,  Kyle Crowder, and Amy Spring. 2015. “Neighborhood Foreclosures, Racial/Ethnic Transitions, and Residential Segregation.” American Sociological Review 80(3): 526-529.
• Ray Sin and Maria Krysan. 2015. “What Is Racial Residential Integration? A Research Synthesis, 1950–2013.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity  (1)4: 467-474.

On Earth Day, we think about the environment and how we can protect it. While we tend to think of “going green” as something that began in the 1970s, the history of U.S. environmental movements stretches much further into the past. Over the course three specific historical periods — Conservationist/Preservations, Ecocentrist, and Political/Deep Ecology — environmental activism has shifted in its issues, from parks to pollution and clean water to climate change.  

The early Conservationism and Preservation movements emerged in the 1860s as reactions to the Industrial Revolution and explosion of cites. The mostly White, male elites argued that nature has a functional value in maintaining human societies. These activists were largely unconcerned with the rights and livelihoods of rural residents and native peoples, and were more focused on their own need for distinction, space, and recreational opportunities. We can thank these early movements for the National Arbor Day Foundation, The Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Organization, and the creation of National Parks.

• Dorceta E. Taylor. 2016. The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

The Ecocentrist movement began its development at the turn of the 20th century, but remained dormant until Rachel Carson’s publication of Silent Spring in 1962 connected the maintenance of clean, pollution-free ecosystems to public health and human survival. This period’s series of landmark successes includes the establishment of the Environmental Defense Fund in 1967, Earth Day in 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

• Robert J. Brulle. 1996. “Environmental Discourse and Social Movement Organizations: A Historical and Rhetorical Perspective on the Development of US Environmental Organizations.”
  Sociological Inquiry 66: 58-83.

The later historical period and the Political and Deep Ecology period linked social inequalities and consumerism to environmental degradation. Environmental issues like toxic waste, for example, primarily affect poor and working-class citizens. In contrast to earlier periods of elite-driven environmental activism, the toxic waste movement has been made up of people who experience environmental hazards first-hand.

• Phil Brown and Susan Masterson-Allen. 1994. “The Toxic Waste Movement: A New Type of
  Activism.” Society and Natural Resources 7: 269-287.

The most recent period of the U.S. environmental movements has seen less success than previous eras. By the 1980s, environmental issues became more complicated and abstract. Ozone depletion, acid rain, and global warming fell outside the jurisdiction of existing regulatory agencies and were more difficult to see than something like chemicals and garbage in rivers, lakes, and streams. Although many citizens generally support environmental protection, fewer people support government spending on environmental issues, especially since these issues are often invisible. Furthermore, contemporary concerns like climate change require international cooperation because they span geographic boundaries.

• Robert J. Brulle and J. Craig Jenkins. 2008. “Fixing the Bungled U.S. Environmental Movement.” Contexts 7(2): 14-19.