Tag Archives: diversity

Evangelicals and when the “postmodern” and “urban” came to the American suburbs

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A reflection on pastor and author Tim Keller’s life includes this line involving distinctions between American places:

Photo by Zekai Zhu on Pexels.com

His insights hit a nerve at a time when evangelicals were realizing that “postmodern” and “urban” challenges—religious diversity, isolation, transience—were becoming common in rural and suburban contexts as well.

In the American context, suburbs often served as a refuge from perceived problems of the city. Religious diversity in cities involved all sorts of religious traditions as people flocked to cities in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Even with the number of people in cities, Americans often celebrated an ideal of families living in suburban single-family homes rather than feeling atomized in large cities. Whereas people moved in and out of cities and urban neighborhoods, Americans often perceived suburbs as built around family and children, neighbors, and community groups.

How might we evaluate these features separating places? It is hard to discuss religious diversity without addressing race and ethnicity. As suburbs often excluded people who were not white, religious diversity was limited. Suburbs are increasingly diverse in terms of race and ethnicity and social class. Regarding isolation, plenty of narratives have been shared and told where individuals found the suburbs to be isolating. Compared to suburbs, cities offer opportunities for exploration and finding a place among other similar people. The suburbs may have celebrated certain social relationships but they were also quite transient for decades in the postwar era as people took advantage of opportunities.

If the lines between cities, suburbs, and rural areas are now more blurred, are evangelicals better equipped to address a changing world? How might they address complex suburbia?

Using public art to promote diversity in Naperville

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Naperville is more diverse today than in past decades, it has a history of promoting public art in its downtown and along the Riverwalk, and it was home in recent years to multiple incidents of racism. Put this all together and a recently formed group just completed a new art installation:

https://www.napervilleart.org/

In part, this is a response to a downtown mural commissioned in 2014 that featured little diversity.

Three thoughts:

  1. Using public art, an already accepted medium in downtown Naperville, to make a new statement seems like it could be effective. At the same time, having more art that promotes diversity in the community in more prominent locations also matters.
  2. How much room is there in downtown Naperville to do different kinds of art? At this point, there are a number of murals, statues, and sculptures. How varied could future works in these formats be and what new formats might be included? More artistic freedom and new aesthetics – downtown Naperville generally has a red brick, several story building look – could also contribute to a sense of diversity.
  3. The conversation about art gets at larger questions about race and ethnicity in Naperville. Although it is more diverse than in the past, is it welcoming to all people? Do all residents feel comfortable in the downtown and in other local institutions? How does the community tell its own history? What is the vision for the future?

“One Naperville” sticker, more diverse suburb

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While recently at a rest stop in Indiana, I saw a minivan with an Illinois license plate and this sticker on the back:

No automatic alt text available.

Given the uniqueness of the sticker and my scholarly interest in Naperville, I almost snapped a picture of the vehicle but did not feel so inclined with its passengers standing not too far away. Instead, I found the image on the Internet. I do not know if there are ongoing “One Naperville” efforts but I found an event from September 11, 2016 commemorating 9/11 put on by the Naperville Interfaith Leadership Alliance. The similarities in style to the “Coexist” bumper stickers are due to the makers of this sticker (see bottom right). The peacemonger.org people are the same ones behind the original “Coexist” design.

Naperville is known for a number of features including its wealth, its high ranking in a number of listings of quality places (examples here, here, and here), its fast-growing population at the end of the twentieth century, its vibrant downtown, its office space along I-88, and, more recently, its diversity. According to QuickFacts from the U.S. Census Bureau:

NapervilleQuickFacts

That this large and wealthy suburb is only 68.1% white alone is notable. The diversity is noticeable in different retail establishments, those using the city’s Riverwalk, the local government naming liaisons to minority groups, and the presence of different religious groups (including mosques).

However, Naperville was not always this way.

A push for Naperville to declare itself a “welcoming city”

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The Naperville City Council has recently discussed declaring the suburb a “welcoming city”:

Some Naperville residents and city council members want the city to adopt a resolution that would declare Naperville a welcoming city to people of all backgrounds. The push comes amid an election that includes the first openly gay candidate for Naperville City council…

O’Meara is part of a couple women’s groups that are asking the city not to become a sanctuary city, but to name itself a welcoming city, she said. “We believe that becoming a welcoming city is something that you’ve already done over the years that people have been coming here,” O’Meara said. “It’s important that people moving into this town know that this town is going to support them in what they have to do going forward.”

Councilwoman Becky Anderson floated the idea of adopting such a resolution at an earlier City Council meeting after Naperville resident Anthony Castagnoli spoke during public comment period, asking the City to act in resistance to President Donald Trump’s actions…

“One of the things I would task us to think about as council members as we approach our next social service grant cycle is what could we be doing with the social service grant to make people feel more comfortable, or to aid those who are struggling in our community because of discrimination whether it’s through immigration or otherwise,” Boyd-Obarski said. “As we confront the country around us, if we really want to be welcoming, let’s think about ways that we can do that with our dollars as well as our voices.”

This could be viewed as interesting as a community that traditionally has been fairly conservative. As noted here, perhaps that is why being a sanctuary city is not on the table. At the same time, Naperville is home to a number of wealthier, well-educated residents and wants to continue to attract both high-end businesses and residents. One thing Naperville has done well over the last six decades as it has expanded from a small town to a giant suburb is created a high-quality of life, which today likely includes the values of tolerance and diversity (see Richard Florida’s work for an argument on why this is so important for today’s cities).

The people quoted from this article primarily cite Naperville’s welcoming attitude to gay residents. Have all minority residents had similar positive experiences? It wasn’t that long ago that Naperville was a sundown town or a place where black residents could not be shown housing. Or, in the last twenty years or so, the Islamic Center of Naperville has faced opposition over their locations.

The most diverse Census tract in America is in…Anchorage?

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This information from a 2015 story is still surprising: several Anchorage census tracts are the most diverse in the United States.

Mountain View, a northeast Anchorage neighborhood, boasts the most diverse census tract in all of America. That’s according to University of Alaska sociology professor Chad Farrell, who analyzed the census data.
In fact, Farrell says the country’s three most diverse census tracts are all in Anchorage, followed by a handful in Queens, as in New York, which usually tops everyone’s diversity guess list…
Farrell found that two things boosted Mountain View to the top. First, there is a sizable white population left. In many other places, neighborhoods that have increased in diversity have also seen white flight. Not so in Mountain View.
Mountain View also has a significant Alaska Native population, which other cities in America lack.
Alaska’s diversity has spiked in recent years for a host of reasons. Among them are its economy, which prospered when other states were reeling from recession, because it is driven by fishing and oil.
The state is also home to nine military bases, and Mountain View butts up to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. Hawaiian businessman William Hoopai recently opened a new restaurant on the main drag called West Berlin.
Not exactly where many would expect to find such diversity.

New data on (a lack of) diversity in Hollywood and on TV

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A new report on diversity in Hollywood and television was released yesterday:

The study, titled the Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity, examined the 109 films released by major studios (including art-house divisions) in 2014 and 305 scripted, first-run TV and digital series across 31 networks and streaming services that aired from September 2014 to August 2015. More than 11,000 speaking characters were analyzed for gender, racial and ethnic representation and LGBT status. Some 10,000 directors, writers and show creators were examined, as was the gender of more than 1,500 executives.

The portrait is one of pervasive underrepresentation, no matter the media platform, from CEOs to minor characters. “Overall, the landscape of media content is still largely whitewashed,” the study concludes.

In the 414 studied films and series, only a third of speaking characters were female, and only 28.3 percent were from minority groups — about 10 percent less than the makeup of the U.S. population. Characters 40 years or older skew heavily male across film and TV: 74.3 percent male to 25.7 percent female.

Just 2 percent of speaking characters were LGBT-identified. Among the 11,306 speaking characters studied, only seven were transgendered (and four were from the same series).

These appear to be pretty consistent patterns. Given the racialized and gendered history of the United States, is it more surprising that white men still dominate in certain categories or that little has changed even with the discussions of recent decades?

One other thought: in No Logo, activist Naomi Klein recounts her own efforts to push for more diversity in advertisements. In a chapter titled “Patriarchy Gets Funky,” Klein says:

We thought we would find salvation in the reformation of MTV, CNN, and Calvin Klein. And why not? Since media seemed to be the source of so many of our problems, surely if we could only “subvert” them to better represent us, they could save us instead. With better collective mirrors, self-esteem would rise and prejudices would magically fall away, as society became suddenly inspired to live up to the beautiful and worthy reflection we had retouched in its image. (p.108-109)

And corporations bought into it:

That’s when we found out that our sworn enemies in the “mainstream” – to us a giant monolithic blob outside of our known university-affiliated enclaves – didn’t fear and loathe us but actually thought we were sort of interesting. Once we’d embarked on a search for new wells of cutting-edge imagery, our insistence on extreme sexual and racial identities made for great brand-content and niche-marketing strategies. If diversity is what we wanted, the brands seemed to be saying, then diversity was exactly what we would get. And with that, the marketers and media makers swooped down, airbrushes in hand, to touch up the colors and images in our culture. (p.111)

The real issue lay elsewhere:

But our criticism was focused on the representation of women and minorities within the structures of power, not on the economics behind those power structures…

The prospect of having to change a few pronouns and getting a handful of women and minorities on the board and on television posed no real threat to the guiding profit-making principles of Wall Street.

Maybe the issue is less one of representation on the screen and more about who controls the industry and resources.

Haidt argues Anthro and Soc are the worst academic monocultures

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Jonathan Haidt discusses the monoculture of academia and names two disciplines that may be the worst:

JOHN LEO: To many of us, it looks like a monoculture.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. It is certainly a monoculture. The academic world in the humanities is a monoculture. The academic world in the social sciences is a monoculture – except in economics, which is the only social science that has some real diversity. Anthropology and sociology are the worst — those fields seem to be really hostile and rejecting toward people who aren’t devoted to social justice.

JOHN LEO: And why would they be hostile?

JONATHAN HAIDT: You have to look at the degree to which a field has a culture of activism.  Anthropology is a very activist field. They fight for the rights of oppressed people, as they see it. My field, social psychology, has some activism in it, but it’s not the dominant strain. Most of us, we really are thinking all day long about what control condition wasn’t run. My field really is oriented towards research. Now a lot of us are doing research on racism and prejudice. It’s the biggest single area of the field. But I’ve never felt that social psychology is first and foremost about changing the world, rather than understanding it. So my field is certainly still fixable. I think that if we can just get some more viewpoint diversity in it, it will solve the bias problem.

Interesting view from the outside as Haidt says later in the interview, “Anthro is completely lost. I mean, it’s really militant activists.” From the inside, a lot of sociology faculty and students seem to be at least partly motivated by wanting to address particular social issues or problems. Whether that clouds their research judgment more than social psychologists – who just want to understand the world, as any scientist would claim – would be interesting to explore.

If you haven’t read it, Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind is fascinating. He argues that opposing sides – say in politics or academic disciplines – have different narratives about how the world works and this causes them to simply talk past each other. In a 2012 piece, Haidt describes the moral narratives of the American political left and right:

A good way to follow the sacredness is to listen to the stories that each tribe tells about itself and the larger nation. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith once summarized the moral narrative told by the American left like this: “Once upon a time, the vast majority” of people suffered in societies that were “unjust, unhealthy, repressive and oppressive.” These societies were “reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation and irrational traditionalism — all of which made life very unfair, unpleasant and short. But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies.” Despite our progress, “there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation and repression.” This struggle, as Smith put it, “is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.”

This is a heroic liberation narrative. For the American left, African-Americans, women and other victimized groups are the sacred objects at the center of the story. As liberals circle around these groups, they bond together and gain a sense of righteous common purpose.

Contrast that narrative with one that Ronald Reagan developed in the 1970s and ’80s for conservatism. The clinical psychologist Drew Westen summarized the Reagan narrative like this: “Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.” For example, “instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hard-working Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens.” Instead of the “traditional American values of family, fidelity and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex and the gay lifestyle” and instead of “projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform and burned our flag.” In response, “Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.”

This, too, is a heroic narrative, but it’s a heroism of defense. In this narrative it’s God and country that are sacred — hence the importance in conservative iconography of the Bible, the flag, the military and the founding fathers. But the subtext in this narrative is about moral order. For social conservatives, religion and the traditional family are so important in part because they foster self-control, create moral order and fend off chaos. (Think of Rick Santorum’s comment that birth control is bad because it’s “a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”) Liberals are the devil in this narrative because they want to destroy or subvert all sources of moral order.

Holding so tightly to different understandings of the world means that compromising is very difficult.

Naperville ranked as the 186th most diverse city out of 230 biggest cities

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Naperville may be the safest big city but it doesn’t have much diversity according to new rankings from WalletHub:

As the culmination to our series on diversity studies, this final installment combines our previous reports on economic class diversity, ethno-racial and linguistic diversity, and diversified economies with household diversity to paint the clearest image of America’s cities today. Recognizing that economic opportunity follows diversity, where in the U.S. would you rather live? Better yet, where would your unique background be most valuable to society?

To help you answer those questions, WalletHub once again examined the demographic profiles of the 230 most populated U.S. cities. In order to construct our final rankings, we tallied each city’s scores in the four major diversity categories we analyzed in this series.

Los Angeles leads the way at #1 and Chicago is at #32 overall. For the record, Naperville ranks 125 in income diversity, 336 in educational diversity, 265 in racial & ethnic diversity, 170 in language diversity, 149 in region of birth, and 183 in industry diversity. Naperville is also listed as one of the five lowest in marital status diversity as well as in household type diversity.

The commentary on the rankings suggests that economic opportunity is linked to higher levels of diversity. This may be the case but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the economic opportunities are equitably spread across cities. Perhaps having opportunities nearby is better than no opportunities at all – though I’m reminded of some of the earliest American sociological neighborhood studies like The Gold Coast and the Slum that noted how closely the rich and poor could live near each other with no interaction. Even if Naperville is not diverse in many of these areas, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be wealthier or that it won’t be viewed as a desirable place to live (ask Money or other magazines). Indeed, some might see the lack of diversity as highly desirable for both defensible (wanting a higher quality of life – isn’t that what the suburbs are supposed to be about?) and indefensible (trying to avoid members of a different racial/ethnic groups or certain social classes).

Comparing the overall diversity of cities versus neighborhood diversity within cities

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Nate Silver looks at how large cities can be diverse overall but still have high levels of residential segregation:

This is what the final metric, the integration-segregation index, gets at. It’s defined by the relationship between citywide and neighborhood diversity scores. If we graph the 100 most populous cities on a scatterplot, they look like this:

silver-segregation-scatter

The integration-segregation index is determined by how far above or below a city is from the regression line. Cities below the line are especially segregated. Chicago, which has a -19 score, is the most segregated city in the country. It’s followed by Atlanta, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Washington and Baltimore.

Cities above the red line have positive scores, which mean they’re comparatively well-integrated. Sacramento’s score is a +10, for instance.

But here’s the awful thing about that red line. It grades cities on a curve. It does so because there aren’t a lot of American cities that meet the ideal of being both diverse and integrated. There are more Baltimores than Sacramentos.

Furthermore, most of the exceptions are cities like Sacramento that have large Hispanic or Asian populations. Cities with substantial black populations tend to be highly segregated. Of the top 100 U.S. cities by population, 35 are at least one-quarter black, and only 6 of those cities have positive integration scores.

So perhaps the Chicago School was correct: it is really neighborhoods that matter, even within cities with millions of people. This is what an interesting recent map of Detroit showed where there are clearly clusters of the city that have traditional neighborhoods while other parts are more vacant urban prairies. The sociological literature on poor neighborhoods that emerged starting in the 1970s gets at a similar concept: there are unique conditions and processes at work in such neighborhoods. And, Silver’s analysis confirms sociological research on residential segregation that for decades (perhaps highlights most memorably in American Apartheid) has argued that black-white residential segregation is in a league of its own.

Based on this kind of analysis, should sociologists only use city-wide or region-wide measures of segregation in conjunction with measures or methods that account for neighborhoods?

Diversity boom coming to America

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The baby boom after World War II affected American social life and several experts discuss the impact of the coming “diversity boom”:

“This new diversity boom that we’re seeing right now will be every bit as important for our country in the decades ahead as the baby boom [people born between 1946 and 1964] was in the last half of the 20th century,” said demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution.

“We know that the baby boom has changed the country in lots of ways – popular culture, changing values about all kinds of social issues, families, women’s roles and politics.  And I think this diversity boom is going to have just as big of an impact.  We’ll be a very different country and we’re only just beginning to see the start of it,” said Frey…

“The degree of cultural diversity that this introduces to this country is rather like the cultural diversity we had in the 19th century, and for that matter in the 18th century at the time of founding,” observed American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray.  In many ways, according to Murray, diversity has been a positive force throughout America history…

A few decades ago, many analysts warned that these demographic trends would lead to a balkanization of America.  However, most experts now agree that U.S. culture and assimilation will reinforce America’s national character, particularly as the rate of interracial marriage grows.

Demographics or geographic mobility may seem fairly dull but sizable changes – here, an increase in immigration and the foreign-born population or a significant increase in birth rates in the postwar era – are influential. It is interesting to see the positive responses from the experts cited here as I’m less confident that such optimism would be shared by a big majority of Americans. Additionally, such booms don’t last forever (or statistically they may just cease to be booms) though it would be hard to predict when this current boom would slow.