Author Archives: legallysociable

Sociologist reflects on his research about the LA Riots

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Sociologist Darnell Hunt studied how perceptions of media coverage of the 1992 LA Riots differed by race in Screening the Los Angeles ‘Riots’: Race, Seeing, and Resistance. Hunt recently reflected on his research:

Darnell Hunt was a graduate student at the time of the riots, studying race and media.

“I was looking for a case study,” he said. “And then the riots happened.”

He immediately focused on the reaction to the news coverage of the riots, which would later form the basis for his dissertation. Hunt took his camcorder down to the center of the protests and left the VCR running, he said, so he could compare the media’s take on the events that day compared to the reality just outside as part of his research.

Hunt is now a sociology professor at UCLA, and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. While he witnessed firsthand much of the upheaval across the city while conducting his research, he said he found optimism in the clean-up period following the six days that the riots took place.

“People saw (the aftermath) as this moment when people came together around a common cause, across racial lines, and talked about the possibility of coalitions and achieving some type of progress,” he said.

Hunt’s research from 20 years ago, which he continues to observe and build upon, showed that people of different ethnicities perceived media depictions differently.

Thursday, he spoke at a UCLA event that explored the role played by the media during the L.A. riots.

Hunt recalled the riots still being fresh in the minds of many when he started out as a professor, but now only a couple of hands go up when he asks who remembers them in his lectures, he said.

But the issues that contributed to the riots are still relevant, he said. Unemployment and economic disparity have not necessarily improved in the city, he said.

“It’s been a couple steps forward, a couple steps back,” Hunt said. “One positive development is that we do have more communication across racial and ethnic lines.”

Several quick thoughts:

1. This seems to be a good example of taking advantage of a research opportunity. Does this illustrate the advantages of being at a school in a big urban center where a lot of things are going on?

2. Though the remarks above are brief, it sounds like Hunt is suggesting that not much has changed in regards to race in Los Angeles?

3. I’m amused that Hunt says that students don’t remember these events. Of course, traditional students in college today would have been born between 1990 and 1995 so it would be difficult to remember events from 1992. At the same time, this illustrates the need for faculty to keep up with research: if the careers of faculty are mainly based on their dissertation, this could become outdated or uninteresting to new generations rather quickly. That doesn’t mean students shouldn’t know about what a professor researched but the passage of time can make it harder to make a case for its relevance.

Worried about NATO protests in the Chicago suburbs? Look for graffiti, flyers

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I know there is a lot of preparation going on for the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago but should this really include warning people in the suburbs? Here is what was printed in the May 2012 edition of our community’s newsletter:

While the G8 Summit has been moved to Camp David, the NATO Summit is still planned for the City of Chicago from May 19 through May 21, 2012. At this time, it is unknown what impact that Summit will have on the City. [Our] Police and Fire Departments are well aware of the upcoming event, and have been involved in pre-event strategy meetings and preparations. Please be assured that there is no anticipation, or information at this point, that any significant incident(s) will occur within the City, and [our] residents may expect the same level of security they have come to know and trust.

Being part of the community, residents and business owners have the unique opportunity to be observant and are encouraged to report suspicious activity, especially graffiti. It is one of the most basic indicators that certain extremist groups are making an appearance. Flyers advocating direct actions against government, businesses, or other institutions are another indicator of suspicious activity. For more information…

One could argue that there is already graffiti in the suburbs; was this done by extremist groups? And flyers about direct action – are we expecting anarchists or violent groups at the local strip mall or subdivision? Additionally, these sound like gross generalizations.

On one hand, perhaps it is good that our local government is trying reassure people about the protests that will get a lot of attention in the media. See all the coverage yesterday about the small May Day protests in Chicago. Even if much doesn’t happen during the NATO Summit, residents of Chicagoland will certainly be aware of the possibilities.  On the other hand, I’m disturbed that suburbanites may think that these protests will affect their suburban paradises more than 15 miles from the Loop…

Argument: we need to question today’s economic equations that are based on the suburban experiment

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Here is an interesting argument regarding the American suburbs: Charles Marohn suggests the economic equations behind suburban development need to be questioned.

I’m struck by how strongly our culture associates growth and prosperity with highway construction and expansion. Tom Friedman, a respected left-of-center columnist with the New York Times, had an entire chapter in his most recent book, That Used to Be Us: How America fell behind in the world it invented and how we can come back, devoted to the concept that “our winning equation” is, in part, to invest in infrastructure and then watch prosperity flourish, just like it did in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Of course, this ignores that fact that our investments during the first generation of America’s Suburban Experiment (1950-1975) were higher return investments that generated a lot of positive cash flow. I like to point out that, when we built the 35W bridge here in Minnesota for the first time, it connected far flung areas of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan region in a way that had not been done before. Following that investment, new commercial real estate was developed, new residential housing went in and the resulting influx of tax receipts made us feel wealthy. When the bridge fell down and had to be rebuilt, we didn’t experience all that new growth, just the costs of construction and delay. Maintenance has an entirely different set of financial metrics than new construction…

Unfortunately, we base this belief on the illusion of wealth that was created in the early years of the Suburban Experiment, where the first life cycle of horizontal expansion had produced growth for our economy and that pesky overhang of maintenance was still a decade or more away. We should know better by now, but there are few in a position to change the system that don’t benefit, at least in the short term, from it being perpetuated…

Now let me drop the bomb I’ve been alluding too: Those “benefits” that we kind of think of as prosperity, wealth or GDP; they really aren’t. There are derived from a set of narrow correlations between time saved and prosperity that we witnessed in the early 1950’s when we built those initial highways. We connected these far flung places — places only served by railroads or poorly constructed roadways prior — and we saw all kinds of economic gains. We then used that knowledge to build equations to justify expansion of the system. Nobody ever questions those equations today (why would they) and nobody stops to consider the diminishing returns of the system.

So there is not actually any money here, just a few seconds of saved time here and there that economists and engineers equate with money when they are trying to justify a project. Do you take home more money, generate more wealth for the economy or spend more of your income when you can arrive at work 45 seconds more quickly? Not me either. These equations are a joke. (If you want to learn more, read our 2010 series on Costs and Benefits.)

An interesting update to an old argument: the suburbs are unsustainable in the long run because they are based on new growth and continuous reinvestment. In the end, there won’t be enough money left to sustain it all, even if we could keep the infrastructure up to date.

Is Marohn really saying that the economic growth of the United States since the 1950s is largely an illusion? I’d like to hear about more of this aspect of the argument…

This reminds me of some of my research on suburban communities that are approaching build-out. In their earlier growth phases, these communities could expect a certain amount of money to flow in from new development and fees. However, once this stopped (and combined with the recent economic crisis), these towns are left scrambling for money. Without a good amount of new development, the budgets aren’t increasing much even as residents continue to push for equal or increased levels of service plus everything is aging (infrastructure, housing stock which makes it less attractive, municipal buildings, etc.). Is this an analogous situation?

Bonus: you even get a financial analysis of a diverging diamond interchange!

Chicago’s Lathrop Homes added to the National Register of Historic Places

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I’ve discussed before the implications of public housing projects like Cabrini-Green disappearing. Essentially, the disappearance of these buildings means that some of our collective memory regarding public housing simply fades away. Therefore, I was interested to see that one of the earliest public housing projects in Chicago, Lathrop Homes, was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places:

For more than six years, residents, preservationists and community advocates have been pushing to save the Lathrop Homes from demolition and to rehabilitate the public housing complex.

Their efforts got a boost Monday when state officials announced that the site has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places…

The listing does not automatically preserve Lathrop’s collection of low-rise brick buildings and ample green space, officials said. But it makes the site eligible for federal tax credits and financial incentives. The designation also triggers a review by state historic preservation officials if federal or state funds are used to demolish the site…

Built in the 1930s, Lathrop Homes were once celebrated because of their vibrant mix of residents, rich history and ornamental touches rarely found in public housing. Lathrop Homes were designed by architects like Robert S. DeGolyer and Hugh M.G. Garden, who were out of work because of the Great Depression.

In recent years, the 925-unit complex has become a battleground over the CHA’s plan to transform the homes into a mixed-income development. As of January, 170 units in the complex were occupied.

We’ll have to wait and see how much preservation takes place in the years to come. I wouldn’t be surprised if the CHA drags its feet…such things have happened before.

It is interesting to note that the Lathrop Homes are on the north side of Chicago as was Cabrini-Green. I wonder how much this geography affected the ability and interest of residents in fighting to save the buildings.

If these buildings were preserved, how many people would be interested in visiting? In a related matter, does the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago generate much interest the buildings and people who lived in them? Here is how the museum describes its purpose:

The National Public Housing Museum is the first cultural institution in the United States dedicated to interpreting the American experience in public housing. The Museum draws on the power of place and memory to illuminate the resilience of poor and working class families of every race and ethnicity to realize the promise of America.

It sounds like there is potential here…although I don’t know how popular this might ever be, it doesn’t mean it isn’t worth pursuing.

Route sociology majors can go: data analyst

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I try to remind my students in Statistics and Social Research that there is a need in a lot of industries for people who can collect and analyze data. I was reminded of this when I saw an obituary about a sociologist who had gone on to become a well-known medical data analyst:

A professor in the Department of Health Services at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, [E. Richard] Brown founded the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research in 1994.

One of the center’s major activities has been the development of the California Health Interview Survey, the premier source of information about individual and household health status in California. It has served as a model for health surveys for other states.

Brown was the founder and principal investigator for the survey, which produced its first data from interviews with more than 55,000 California households in 2001. Information from the survey, which has been conducted every two years, has been used by policymakers, community advocates, researchers and others.

And working with important data can then lead to public policy options:

“The single thing that makes Rick stand out in this field is that he had an extraordinary capacity to use evidence about the public’s health and strategize and advocate to turn that evidence into the best policy and action,” said Dr. Linda Rosenstock, dean of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

In 1990, Brown was co-author of California’s first single-payer healthcare legislation. He also co-wrote several other healthcare reform bills over the last two decades…

He also was a full-time senior consultant to President Clinton’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform and served as a senior health policy advisor for the Barack Obama for President Campaign — as well as serving as an advisor to U.S. Sens. Bob Kerrey, Paul Wellstone and Al Franken.

We need more people to collect useful data and then interpret what they mean. These days, the problem often is not a lack of information; rather, we need to know how to separate the good data from the bad and then be able to provide a useful interpretation. While some students may prefer to skip over the methodological sections of articles or books, understanding how to collect and analyze data can go a long way. Additionally, learning about these methods and data analysis can help one move toward a sociological view of the social world where personal anecdotes don’t matter as much as broad trends and looking at how social factors (variables) are related to each other.

Shiller makes more dire prediction: “we might not see a really major [housing] turnaround in our lifetimes”

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I highlighted about a month ago a prediction from economist Robert Shiller that suburban housing values may not recover anytime soon. Shiller made another prediction this past week that is even more dire:

The housing market is likely to remain weak and may take a generation or more to rebound, Yale economics professor Robert Shiller told Reuters Insider on Tuesday.

Shiller, the co-creator of the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index, said a weak labor market, high gas prices and a general sense of unease among consumers was outweighing low mortgage rates and would likely keep a lid on prices for the foreseeable future.

“I worry that we might not see a really major turnaround in our lifetimes,” Shiller said.

Shiller is the most pessimistic prognosticator about the housing market I’ve seen. Is this earning him credibility or scorn?

By the way, is there any academic or impartial observer who keeps track of such predictions? I thought about this during the NFL draft: think how many hours and days were wasted coming up with mock drafts that are based on one-seventh of the draft and often have mistakes. What is the same number of hours and days was devoted to trying to predict the outcome of the US housing market in the coming months and years – would the predictions get any better?

What a sociology class can do: help develop a minimum wage initiative for San Jose

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I’m always intrigued by sociology class projects that go beyond the classroom. Here is an example from San Jose of a class project that will be on the ballot this November:

The proposed San Jose measure would raise the hourly minimum wage in the city from the current $8 state requirement to $10 with yearly inflation adjustments. It is modeled on San Francisco’s 2003 minimum wage law, which includes annual inflation adjustments that raised the floor this year on that city’s pay rate 32 cents to $10.24 an hour.

The idea behind the San Jose ballot measure originated among students in a San Jose State sociology class taught by professor Scott Myers-Lipton.

In late March, the students, together with labor leaders and community organizers, submitted 36,225 signatures to the registrar’s office. Proponents needed at least 19,161 valid signatures of registered city voters to qualify for the November ballot, and at least 19,518 were found to be sufficient.

“The students and I are thrilled that it qualified and that we received the support of the community at large, from labor, faith and community based organizations in this effort,” Myers-Lipton said Tuesday.

I can imagine some of the public conversation about this: college students in a sociology class (already considered a liberal discipline) team up with local activists to introduce this bill? At the same time, might this be considered good experiential learning as students are learning about local politics and how they can get involved?

Here is some more information on how the class got involved:

As part of Myers-Lipton’s Sociology 164 course on Social Action, students studied President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s proposal for an Economic Bill of Rights. As student activist Elisha St. Laurent explains, “The economic bill of rights guarantees everyone a job, a living wage, a decent home, medical care, economic protection during sicknesses or old age or unemployment.” The minimum wage campaign is a practical way of making some of these guarantees more attainable for San Jose residents. “We’re trying to link the economic bill of rights to inequality in the San Jose area,” she says.

As the mother of a five-year-old boy and someone who is working to pay for college, St. Laurent has experienced the realities of the low-wage economy directly. “Especially as a single mother,” she says, “you know I’m continually struggling. I’m always working minimum wage. Right now I make $9.25, so it would be a 75-cent increase for me. But an extra $100 or $200 in my check would make a difference. It’s making sure that I have gas in my car so that I can take my son to school, and then still being able to pay my bills.”…

As the students moved forward with the idea, they found significant partners such as Working Partnerships USA, a think tank for public policy that affects working class families, the NAACP and the local faith-based group Sacred Heart Community Service.

Myers-Lipton explains, “Early on, there was a discussion that occurs in any campaign asking, ‘Is this winnable? Is it worth putting in all the effort.’ At that point [Sacred Heart Executive Director] Poncho [Guevara] said, ‘You know, win or lose, we need to put forward a vision of what we stand for. We need to be putting our vision forward rather than  always being on the defensive. So even if we lose, we’re going to win in the long run.'”

It sounds like these students are taking their readings and trying to put some of the ideas into practice. It would be interesting to hear how much they have learned about sociology or a sociological perspective throughout this process.

Collective effervesence: from Man U. vs. Man City to voting

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An editorial in The Guardian suggests we seek out more moments of collective effervescence:

As every Mancunian football fan will tell you, tomorrow evening sees the most hotly awaited derby in Premier League history when Manchester City and Manchester United square up for the last time this season. Whatever the outcome, what we will witness in abundance – at least while the ball is in play – is what the father of sociology, Emile Durkheim, called “collective effervescence”, a ritually induced passion or ecstasy that cements social bonds.

Given the current Europe-wide epidemic of melancholia induced by various crises, financial and political, and not helped in the UK by an April deluge, predicted to last through May, the good news is that we are all about to experience opportunities for a veritable season of effervescence. We report on these pages how three giant puppets walking the streets of Liverpool as part of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic have attracted 250,000 people on to the streets and raised the spirits of the city hugely. Over coming months, even arch cynics – those allergic to red, white and blue, republicans and lifelong couch potatoes – may find themselves succumbing, just a little, to communal and classless pleasures as, for instance, the celebrations connected to the Queen’s diamond jubilee gather traction. The Olympics become ever more imminent and the prospect of a gold medal or two potentially binds stranger to stranger regardless of income, ethnicity and background, in the alchemic way that victory in sport can…

Any festivity, inevitably in this day and age, comes saturated in commercialism. It will be difficult over the next several months to find a china cup and tea towel that isn’t festooned with crowns, coronets or concentric rings. Nevertheless, there will be events and occasions – many of them free –which will proof themselves again commodification and remain beyond the reach of the marketplace simply because they require only our time and interest….

This week sees London mayoral and local elections in addition to a referendum on elected mayors in 10 English cities. Inertia, rather than effervescence, is likely to mark the experience. But while dancing in the streets strengthens our collective sense of solidarity, we improve its health still further by exercising our hard-won right to vote. As Professor Michael Sandel pointed out in his Reith lectures on BBC’s Radio 4 in 2009: “The virtues in democratic life – community, solidarity, trust, civic friendship – these virtues are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are, rather, like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise.”

Translation: while the world may look like it is in bad shape, there are still moments in which we can come together, advance the common good, strengthen relationships, and be part of something bigger than ourselves. It is interesting, however, to note that some of these examples require choosing one side or another. For example, will fans of Manchester United or Manchester City be celebrating the game of football together or hoping the other side loses disastrously? In voting, is everyone pursuing the common good or hoping their side gets enough political power to force the other side to kowtow to its interests? Perhaps there are still moments where people can come together in larger settings, such as at the Olympics (national pride? celebrating humanity?) or at large rock concerts or a few other places.

Also, I’m having a hard time imagining an American newspaper editorial invoking Emile Durkheim. Would many newspaper editors in the United States know who this is?

How important are long-time residents to a neighborhood or a community?

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A profile of a New York City woman who has lived 100 years in the same neighborhood (along a 1,200 foot stretch) raises an interesting question: how much do long-time residents contribute to a community?

Ms. Jacobs is already a demographic rarity: she was one of 2,126 city residents 100 and over recorded in the 2010 census. But even though very few New Yorkers can claim a century spent in essentially one place, the notion of maintaining roots on a street is not entirely uncommon, said Andrew A. Beveridge, a Queens College sociologist.

A decade ago, Professor Beveridge recalled, one of his students interviewed a man of about 100 who had lived his entire life in the same house in Richmond Hill, Queens.

Bruce D. Haynes, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, who grew up in Harlem, said that his own father spent the better part of 65 years in a house on Convent Avenue in its Sugar Hill section, until his death in 1995.

“I’d argue that these are the people who make the city what it is,” said Professor Haynes, whose grandfather, George Edmund Haynes, was a co-founder of the National Urban League. “They are the character of the city.”

At first glance, it seems hard to argue with this: people who live in a community for decades are anchors and connect newer generations to what has happened in the past. However, doesn’t this presuppose that these long-term residents are active in their community, meaning that other people know who they are? Just because one lives long in a community does not necessarily mean one is active in it. Additionally, don’t the younger people have to want this connection? Bruce Haynes comments are a great example: his grandfather was involved in an important civic group. Particularly in their older years, might not some long-time residents end up isolated (an issue sociologist Eric Klinenberg discusses in Heat Wave)? Are there studies that have actually measured what the positive effects of having long-time residents in the community?

More broadly, this article celebrates Ms. Jacob’s rootedness. This is a common tension in American life: should people be rooted in their communities or should they be mobile, responding to changing circumstances? On the whole, we tend to be a mobile nation where on average people move at least once every ten years. Yet, we also like the idea that some people care about their community so much (or can’t afford to move?) that they stay put in one place.

 

The exterior vs. the interior of the Brady Bunch house and architecture in TV and movies

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The managing editor of Entertainment Weekly makes an interesting point regarding a famous house in American television: the exterior shots of the Brady Bunch house don’t match the interior shots.

And I grew up obsessing over a particularly brazen TV blunder: The exterior and interior of the Brady Bunch house do not match. At all. Not one bit. In case you never noticed: The interior set depicts a soaring two-story home with the second story over the structure’s right side; the outside is a low-slung split-level with a second story over the left side. (In fact, the second-floor window was fake.) How could they let this happen? Sherwood Schwartz once explained to the Los Angeles Times that the San Fernando Valley house used for the exterior shots was chosen because “we didn’t want it to be too affluent, we didn’t want it to be too blue-collar. We wanted it to look like it would fit a place an architect would live.” In other words, the exterior struck the right emotional note for audiences, and logic be damned. I can live with that. In fact, audiences will forgive almost any lapse in logic if the story does its primary job well – and that is to move us, scare us, tickle us, and give us characters worth knowing. The Brady house made no sense, but I still wanted to live there. And while it may not be necessary to cross the Golden Gate Bridge to get to the San Francisco Airport (unless you’re coming from Sausalito), it makes for a nice aerial shot loaded with symbolism. The best purveyors of pop culture know that poetic truth trumps literal truth every time.

Six thoughts about this:

1. I’m not someone who looks for or particularly cares about inconsistencies in movies and television shows. And yet, this still seems pretty egregious: the sides of the house don’t even line up?

2. Is this house really befitting of an architect? Would any architect worth his salt really want to admit that he lived in a stereotypical split-level? While some might defend the ranch as an exemplar of post-World War II American life, are there people who defend the split-level?

3. The explanation from Sherwood Schwartz is very interesting: the home is supposed to invoke a certain American middle-classness. Another way to think about it is the home is supposed to invoke a particular emotion and then fade into the background.

4. I bet there would be a fascinating study in looking at TV and movie depictions of American homes. As Juliet Schor suggested in The Overspent American, the “middle-class house” on TV has really gotten big and more luxurious over the years.

5. The exterior of the house is interesting but what about the astro-turf lawn?

6. It can be a little bit strange to visit these television homes on the set. Two years ago, we toured the Warner Brothers studio and saw a number of sets. Here are three shots: the emergency room exterior for ER, Lorelai Gilmore’s house on Gilmore Girls, and their oft-used street scene.

After seeing these in person, I imagine there is some room for commentary about the reproducibility of more modern architecture, the impermanence of place, and how it can easily transition from one film to another TV show to a miniseries and so on…