Tag Archives: minorities

Nearly half of American whites feel that discrimination against whites is similar to discrimination against minorities

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Survey data from last year suggest that nearly 50% of whites feel that whites are discriminated against at similar rates to minorities:

Nearly half (46 percent) of Americans agree that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. A slim majority (51 percent) disagree.

  • A slim majority of whites agree that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups, compared to only about 3-in-10 blacks and Hispanics who agree.
  • Approximately 6-in-10 Republicans and those identifying with the Tea Party agree that discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups.
  • Nearly 7-in-10 Americans who say they most trust Fox News say that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. In stark contrast, less than 1-in-4 Americans who most trust public television for their news agree.

So what media you watch the most or political groups you identify with colors your perceptions of what racial groups suffer discrimination? Considering this, I wonder if most American whites could describe a situation where they have personally suffered racial discrimination or whether these data reflect larger perceptions about American society (“people out there are against us/taking our jobs/working the system”). I wish there were some follow-up questions here…

There is also some interesting data here on opinions of Muslims: Americans generally support religious freedom but aren’t as willing to extend this to Muslims.

 

Demographic change: more minority birth than whites

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A number of news outlets reported last week on another marker of demographic change in America: there are now more minority babies born than white babies.

“This is an important landmark,” said Roderick Harrison, a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau who is now a sociologist at Howard University. “This generation is growing up much more accustomed to diversity than its elders.”…

As a whole, the nation’s minority population continues to rise, following a higher-than-expected Hispanic count in the 2010 census. Minorities increased 1.9 percent to 114.1 million, or 36.6 percent of the total U.S. population, lifted by prior waves of immigration that brought in young families and boosted the number of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years…

Minorities made up roughly 2.02 million, or 50.4 percent of U.S. births in the 12-month period ending July 2011. That compares with 37 percent in 1990…

Births actually have been declining for both whites and minorities as many women postponed having children during the economic slump. But the drop since 2008 has been larger for whites, who have a median age of 42. The number of white births fell by 11.4 percent, compared with 3.2 percent for minorities, according to Kenneth Johnson, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire.

I think the last paragraph above is particularly interesting. The story isn’t just that there is a large minority and immigrant population that is having lots of children. Rather, whites and minorities are having fewer children but whites particularly have chosen to have fewer children. How much is this tied to more American living alone?

Of course, it will take some time for all of this to move through the generations. For example, it will be roughly two decades before you have more minorities than whites turning 18 and exercising this at the polls.

Differences in who blogs by race and education

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A new sociological study shows that who blogs is affected by both race and education:

While African Americans as a whole are less likely to afford laptops and personal computers, Internet-savvy blacks, on average, blog one and a half times to nearly twice as much as whites, while Hispanics blog at the same rate as whites, according to a study published in the March online issue of the journal, Information, Communication & Society.

“Blacks consume less online content, but once online, are more likely to produce it,” said the study’s author, Jen Schradie, a doctoral candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley and a researcher at the campus’s Berkeley Center for New Media.

Schradie analyzed data from more than 40,000 Americans surveyed between 2002 and 2008 for the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which tracks Internet use and social media trends. Her latest findings follow up on a 2011 study in which Schradie found a “digital divide” among online content producers based on education and socio-economic status…

But, she said, “While blacks are more likely to blog than whites, it doesn’t mean the digital divide is over. People with more income and education are still more likely to blog than those with just a high school education and Internet access.”

There is not a whole lot of public discussion about this “digital divide” but it is interesting to see how this plays out with blogs. Of course, blogs are just one part of the content of the Internet and are a form that generally lends itself to longer pieces of writing (say compared to Twitter, Facebook, comment sections, discussion boards). In general, how involved are minorities in other forms of web content?

I wonder if the link between blogging and education is tied to the idea that more educated Internet users feel like they have something to say and contribute. Or perhaps education leads people to think that they should have a voice. For example, if you think about Annette Lareau’s theories about two types of parenting, “concerted cultivation” leads to adults who are assertive and comfortable in conversing with others.

“Black flight” to Charles County, Maryland?

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Charles County, a suburban county south of Washington D.C. has experienced population growth in recent years, possibly as the result of “black flight”:

From 2000 to 2010, Charles County’s population rose by 21.6 percent, going from 120,546 to 146,551, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. At the same time, non-Hispanic whites dropped as a proportion of the county’s total population from 67.3 percent to 48.4 percent.

In a decade, the county went from being whiter than the state of Maryland to being a minority-majority jurisdiction.

“You think about the notion of white flight, there’s also the notion of black flight, or Latino flight,” said Kris Marsh, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland who specializes in the study of the black middle class.

“As Prince George’s County moves from a white-dominated county to a black-dominated county, there could be some black households that decide that they don’t want to live in a black-dominated community, so they move out to Howard County … or out to Charles County,” Marsh explained.

“White flight” is a well-known phenomenon that covers the movement of whites away from growing minority populations, particularly in large cities or denser suburbs. I’ve never heard the term “black flight” before though conversation about the movement of the black middle class has generated academic discussion for several decades now. It would be interesting to know how the communities in Charles County, and in some of the other nearby counties which are also mentioned in this story, are adjusting to new populations in areas that still have relatively few people.

Overall, this is a reminder that minority and immigrant populations are growing in suburban areas even though many still think of the suburbs as homogenous white, middle- to upper-class areas.

“Satellite Chinatowns” in the American suburbs

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Here is an overview of how the Chinese population in America has moved from urban Chinatowns to “satellite Chinatowns” in the suburbs:

As the Lunar New Year begins Monday, annual festivities in Washington’s shriveled Chinatown are, for the first time, being promoted by a large marketing firm. New York’s Chinatown, one of the nation’s oldest, has lost its status as home to the city’s largest Chinese population, based on the 2010 census.

Shifts also are under way in Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, San Francisco and Seattle, where shiny new “satellite Chinatowns” in the suburbs and outer city limits rival if not overshadow the originals…

She explained that urban Chinatowns continue to serve a role for newly arrived immigrants with less education or lower skills who seek entry-level work, as well as for elderly residents with poor English skills who cannot drive. But middle-class families are almost nowhere to be found, and in many cities, rising downtown property costs and urban gentrification threaten their traditional existence…

“The movement from big-city ethnic enclaves suggests that discrimination and other barriers to upward mobility have declined,” said Daniel Lichter, a Cornell University sociology professor who is president of the nonprofit Population Association of America. Still, traditional Chinatowns aren’t necessarily going away, he says, comparing them to pockets of “Little Italy” where Americans of all backgrounds now shop and eat.

While this article highlights the move of Chinese residents to the suburbs, this is a trend across numerous minority groups. Suburbs used to be formally and informally closed to minorities and yet in recent decades have seen growing minority populations. At the same time, I would still guess that these population shifts in the suburbs are not randomly distributed.

The article hints at the research on “ethnoburbs” but there is a lot more that could be said about this suburban shift. How do these “satellite Chinatowns” differ from urban enclaves and fit in with surrounding urban areas? How many people of other ethnic groups go to these suburban Chinatowns? How do suburbs adapt to the changing demographics?

There is a lot to be explored here in ethnoburbs and other suburbs with significant and/or growing minority populations.

Two different methodologies to measure the US Jewish population

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Measuring small populations within the United States can be difficult. Here is an example: even though two separate studies agree the US Jewish population is roughly 6.5 million, they used different methodologies to arrive at this number:

Many federations around the country commission scientific studies to better understand their local Jewish populations. These reports typically rely on random digit dialing, in which researchers come up with a percentage of Jews in the community based on the results of telephone surveys. In other instances, researchers will estimate the number of Jews based on the number of people with Jewish last names.

These reports provided the backbone for Sheskin and Dashefsky’s own annual estimate. But since not every federation studies its own population, the two conducted original research in some localities. In this, they were often aided by knowledgeable community members or by local estimates they found online. Lastly, they used data collected by the U.S. Census of three solidly Hasidic Jewish towns in New York state: Kiryas Joel, Kaser Village and New Square. (Aside from these exceptions, the U.S. Census does not count Jews.)

Adding these figures together, Sheskin and Dashefsky came up with a national estimate — albeit a patchwork one — that far exceeded previous figures. And in some ways exceeded their own expectations. Their national total of 6,588,000 is an overestimate, they contend, because some Jews — such as college students who live in one place and go to school elsewhere, or retirees who live part-time in one city and part-time in another — were likely counted twice…

Saxe came to his national estimate of 6.4 million through very different means.

Daunted by the steep expense and lengthy time required by random digit dialing, Saxe and his team ferreted out data that already existed to reach his conclusion. This included information from more than 150 government surveys on topics completely unrelated to Judaism, such as health care or education. Each study had a sample size of at least 1,000 people, and each study asked the question: What is your religion?

“From this, we are now absolutely confident — and it has been vetted by all sorts of groups and people — that about 1.8% of the adult American population says that their religion is Judaism,” he said.

Saxe adjusted his sample to account for children and came to a total of 6.4 million Jews in America.

In order to count and know more about relatively smaller populations in the United States, say Muslims in the United States when asking questions about religion, survey researchers often try to oversample these groups so that they can draw conclusions from a larger N. But as this article notes, finding people of smaller groups through random-digit dialing can take a long time.

Both of these researchers worked with existing data in order make generalizations: one worked with local figures and the other used a sample of large-scale surveys. In both cases, this is a clever use of existing data because doing a large-scale survey would have likely been a lot more costly in terms of time and money.

I would guess both sets of researchers are happy that their figures are close to those of the other study as this enhances the validity of their numbers.

The effect of race in presidential pardons

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An analysis from ProPublica shows that whites benefit more from presidential pardons:

In an in-depth investigation of the presidential pardons process, published this week, ProPublica found that white applicants were nearly four times as likely to succeed as minorities, even when factors such as the type of crime and sentence were considered.

The president ultimately decides who gets a pardon, but Presidents George W. Bush and Obama have relied heavily on recommendations from the Office of the Pardon Attorney inside the Justice Department.

The experts ProPublica talked to don’t all agree on exactly what should be done. Sociologist Frank Dobbin has this suggestion:

“If the goal you want is equivalence for black and whites, the solution should not be to put in more bureaucracy to limit decision-makers’ authority,” Dobbin said. “The solution should probably be some oversight system where the numbers are looked at regularly, and then decisions should be revisited when it looks like there’s some disparity.”

Studies show that more minorities get jobs when companies track race and appoint an individual or board to independently review hiring decisions, Dobbin said.

A number of other experts seem to agree: having an independent board review the decisions would help keep the issue of race at the forefront and help avoid implicit biases.

My first thought when reading this is that why should we expect this to be any different knowing that the criminal justice system is tilted statistically against non-whites and away from white-collar crimes. If traffic stops, convictions, jail time, and death-row decisions are influenced by race, why wouldn’t pardons?

My second thought: are presidential pardons archaic? Do they really benefit society or are they about tradition or political favors (see the recently-revealed disagreement between George W. Bush and Dick Cheney over pardoning Scooter Libby)?

According to the analysis, some other factors that help people get pardons include having “letters of congressional support” and being married.

More blacks moving to the suburbs of Kansas City

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I’ve noted this before but here is another story about the increasing movement of blacks to the suburbs:

The emptying out of African-American neighborhoods in the heart of this city is bemoaned by many who are battling the decline. But in an unexpected twist, the flight of blacks to other city neighborhoods and nearby suburbs in Missouri and Kansas has created an unforeseen result that is generally greeted with optimism: desegregation.

Blacks’ move to suburbia has accelerated in the past decade, shifting the racial make-up of urban and suburban neighborhoods across the nation. The change is particularly striking here because of the area’s long history of racial segregation…

“It’s as much the fact that city ghettos are being broken up as the fact that suburbs are beginning to integrate,” says Kansas City native John Logan, a Brown University sociologist who did the analysis. “It’s one of the places that I would describe as a success in the making, after a long history of intense segregation.”

The decline in segregation here is even more striking than drops in Detroit and New Orleans, areas with similar racially charged histories that are losing black populations. Detroit may be less segregated because blacks have left the area in search of jobs in the Sun Belt. Segregation has declined in New Orleans partly because many blacks were displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Does this mean that more blacks have joined the middle class and then are moving to the suburbs or is the move to the suburbs motivated by a search for jobs and opportunities in order to join the middle class? And what are the consequences of this for cities?

This is one of the most important trends in suburbs today: more minorities and immigrants moving to the suburbs. How this changes the face of suburbia in the next few decades will be fascinating to watch.

(More evidence of this trend here.)

A consequence of white flight: costs for aging infrastructure born more by minorities

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The phenomenon of white flight in the United States refers to whites leaving urban neighborhoods in the decades after World War II and going to the suburbs to avoid growing minority populations. Several researchers recently uncovered a latent consequence of white flight:

Racial minorities pay systemically more for basic water and sewer services than white people, according to a study by Michigan State University researchers.

This “structural inequality” is not necessarily a product of racism, argues sociologist Stephen Gasteyer, but rather the result of whites fleeing urban areas and leaving minority residents to bear the costs of maintaining aging water and sewer infrastructure…

The researchers analyzed Census data on self-reported water and sewer costs in Michigan. The study found that urban residents actually pay more than rural residents, which refutes conventional wisdom, Gasteyer said…

Detroit is the “poster child” for this problem, Gasteyer said. The city has lost more than 60 percent of its population since 1950, and the water and sewer infrastructure is as much as a century old in some areas. Billions of gallons of water are lost through leaks in the aging lines every year, and the entire system has been under federal oversight since 1977 for wastewater violations.

Very interesting: another infrastructure problem to be solved and it happens to fall disproportionally on minority populations. It would be interesting to see this analysis extended beyond Michigan – is this primarily a Rust Belt phenomenon where the big cities have some infrastructure that dates to around 1900 or does this also apply to newer Sunbelt cities?

Overall, it might be helpful for those who argue the United States needs to seriously put a lot money into infrastructure to demonstrate how much this matters to everyone and how much the aging (leaks, potholes, etc.) costs everyone each year. It is pretty hard to live without water and sewers but it wasn’t too long ago that these were not regular amenities. Indeed, 1890 was roughly a turning point when both big cities and smaller suburbs could put together their own infrastructure systems to serve residents. (This also lines up with the period when suburbs started resisting annexation to big cities as they could handle these amenities themselves.) Add roads, electricity, and natural gas to this and you have a system that is vital to modern life but is relatively behind the scenes. If you could add a fairness/social justice dimension to it (the most aging infrastructure is in places that can least afford it), this could be a very public issue.

US “White alone” population grows as more Hispanics label themselves as white

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The Census Bureau has changed their racial categories over the years. The change made in the 2000 Census regarding Hispanics now leads to an interesting finding: more Hispanics are labeling themselves “white alone.”

The shift is due to recent census changes that emphasize “Hispanic” as an ethnicity, not a race. While the U.S. government first made this distinction in 1980, many Latinos continued to use the “some other race” box to establish a Hispanic identity. In a switch, the 2010 census forms specifically instructed Latinos that Hispanic origins are not races and to select a recognized category such as white or black.

The result: a 6 percent increase in white Americans as tallied by the census, even though there was little change among non-Hispanic whites. In all, the number of people in the “white alone” category jumped by 12.1 million over the last decade to 223.6 million. Based on that definition, whites now represent 72 percent of the U.S. population and account for nearly half of the total population increase since 2000…

Some demographers say the broadened white category in 2010 could lead to a notable semantic if not cultural shift in defining race and ethnicity. Due to the impact of Hispanics, the nation’s fastest-growing group, the Census Bureau has previously estimated that whites will become the minority in the U.S. by midcentury. That is based on a definition of whites as non-Hispanic, who are now at 196.8 million…

“What’s white in America in 1910, 2010 or even 2011 simply isn’t the same,” said Robert Lang, sociology professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, citing the many different groups of European immigrants in the early 20th century who later became known collectively as white. He notes today that could mean a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in upstate New York or Jews and Italians in the lowest East side of Manhattan.

Fascinating – we have heard for some time now that within four or so decades, the percentage of whites within the United States would drop under 50%. But if more people see themselves as white, then it might be some time before this comes to pass.

I would be very interested to see who exactly has changed their self-identification from Hispanic to white. (We could also raise the question of whether those who categorize themselves as white are treated as white by others.) The article suggests it is second or third generation Hispanics and this would fit common sociological models: it is about at that point when immigrants assimilate more with the dominant group. If this is the case, does this suggest some widening gaps between Hispanics who have been in the United States longer versus those who are more recent immigrants?

What does this mean for debates about immigration? Implicit in some of these debates is the idea that Hispanic immigrants are not assimilating enough, hence a call for “English first” and limiting immigration. But if Hispanics are following a fairly typical American model where it takes a bit of time for new immigrants to become accepted as and/or see themselves as white, then more people can rest assured.