Tag Archives: race

Narratives of racial segregation in private and public schools in the South

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A larger story about segregated schools in the South contains this bit about the competing narratives behind the more white private schools and the more non-white public schools:

According to one narrative, white leaders and residents starved the public schools of necessary resources after decamping for the academy, an institution perpetuated by racism. According to the opposing narrative, malfeasance and inept leadership contributed to the downfall of the public schools, whose continued failings keep the academy system alive.Hury Minniefield is a purveyor of the former narrative. He was one of the first black students to integrate the town’s public schools in 1967 through a voluntary — and extremely limited — desegregation program. He and his two younger brothers spent a single academic year at one of the town’s white schools. “Because the blacks were so few in number, we didn’t interfere with the white students too much and never did hear the ‘n word’ too much,” he said.

Despite his unique personal history, Minniefield does not believe the schools in Indianola will ever truly integrate. “It has not been achieved and it will likely never be achieved,” he said. “It’s because of the mental resistance of Caucasians against integrating with blacks. … Until the white race can see their former slaves as equals, it will not happen.”

Steve Rosenthal, the mayor, takes a different view. He argues that many white families have no problem sending their children to school with black students, but choose Indianola Academy because the public schools are inferior. His two children, both in their 20s, graduated from the academy, where he believes they received a strong education. “I would not have had a problem sending them to public schools had the quality been what I wanted,” he said, adding a few minutes later, “If there’s mistrust, it’s the black community toward the whites.”…

Students tend to offer the most nuanced perspective on why wholesale segregation endures. “It’s because of both races,” said Brown. “No one wants to break that boundary or cross that line. Both sides are afraid.”

And this is tied to larger concerns about segregation in schools throughout the country:

As the Atlantic reported last week, throughout the country, public schools are nearly as segregated as they were in the late 1960s when Indianola Academy opened. In many areas, they are rapidly resegregating as federal desegregation orders end. White families continue to flee schools following large influxes of poor or minority students. And in Indianola, as in the rest of the country, there’s stark disagreement as to why: Whites often cite concerns over school quality, while blacks are more likely to cite the persistence of racism.

As an urban sociologist, I can’t help but think that residential segregation plays into these issues across the country. Schools tend to draw kids from particular geographic areas and people are pushed into and also choose to live in particular places. Whites tend to want to live with other whites while other racial and ethnic groups have higher tolerances for mixed-race neighborhoods. One attempt to rectify this decades ago was busing students to different schools, something my current students tend to recognize best only when I mention the movie Remember the Titans.

But this may not explain all of the story. One way to segregated public schools is to have segregated neighborhoods. Another way is to simply opt out of the public school system. While the narrative about this decision involves a better educational opportunity or having children in a school with particular values, it is still tied to issues of race and social class.

Increasing racial segregation in the American workplace

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Two sociologists argue there is evidence that some American workplaces have become more racially segregated in recent decades:

The results of our research found in part that there has been a trend toward racial re-segregation among white men and black men since 2000 and increased segregation since 1970 between black women and white women in American workplaces — so much so that it has eliminated progress made in the late 1960s. This is not simply an academic question, but a fundamental problem with American society. While most of us morally embrace equal opportunity and race and gender equality, we find that America is still a long way from those commitments. Only by confronting our shortcomings as a society can we address them…Distressingly, 19 of the 58 industries we surveyed — nearly one-third of all industries — showed a trend toward racial re-segregation between white men and black men over the last dozen years. Transportation services, motion pictures, construction, securities and commodities brokerages are some of the sectors that reflect this trend. In addition, re-segregation since 1970 between black and white women in workplaces has eliminated progress made in the late 1960s.

Transportation services, railroads, publishing and many low-wage manufacturing industries show increased segregation between black and white women. Unfortunately, increased access to private sector managerial jobs for black men and black women came to a grinding halt more than 30 years ago as well. Meanwhile, black women’s employment segregation from white women has actually grown somewhat, as white women made continued gains into traditionally white male jobs…

Where has there been progress? In general, African Americans tend to do better in workplaces that use formal credentials to make hiring decisions. Minorities and white women have made the most progress in professional jobs. These occupations require specific educational credentials to be considered for employment. African Americans also progress in those relatively rare large, private-sector firms that monitor their managers diversity track record.

It sounds like jobs based on social networks tend to be more segregated while jobs based on credentials allow more opportunities for non-whites. This reminds me of the sociological study Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men From Blue-Collar Jobs. Royster found in studying vocational schools that although black and white students were getting similar educations, the instructors and school gave white students more access to the primarily white social networks in the vocational trades while black students were left more to fend for themselves.

 

I would be curious to know how job segregation lines up with residential segregation, one of the more persistent features of American life in the last century. In other words, are workplaces in more diverse areas less segregated?

Since having a good job is tied to income, building wealth, accessing social networks and social capital, and new opportunities, this is important information. Also, this is a reminder fighting segregation is not a linear process.

 

Lack of WASP candidate for election due to the Internet?

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Several commentators have picked up on this feature of the 2012 presidential election: neither candidate is a WASP.

Right now, we’re looking at an absence that would have been a startling presence 50 years ago. With all the focus on economic issues in the U.S. presidential race, there’s hardly any talk about the fact that, for the first time, none of the leading presidential and vice-presidential candidates is a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court has no WASPs. These are new phenomena in the United States.

The totally non-WASP tickets signify major political and social shifts in the networked age. As Robert Putnam showed a decade ago in Bowling Alone, organized groups such as churches, political clubs, fraternal clubs and Scouts have declined in importance. People have moved sharply away from traditional, tightly knit groups into more loosely knit networks that have fewer clan boundaries and more tolerance. The rise of the Internet and mobile connectivity has pushed the trend along by allowing people to expand the number and variety of their social ties…

In 1955, sociologist Will Herberg showed how white America was rigidly divided in Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Indeed, one of the authors of this article was barred from college fraternities because he was Jewish.

Now, when Chelsea Clinton marries, no one remarks on the kippa on her husband’s head. This year, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that 81 per cent of those who know Republican Mitt Romney is a Mormon are either comfortable with his affiliation or say it doesn’t matter to them.

I’m not sure I buy the Internet argument; WASPs lost their elite control because of the Internet? I think the process had started way before this. I wonder if the most basic explanation is that there are simply less WASPs overall in the population. Since the 1950s, there has been a sharp uptick in immigration and more people have had access to education and college and graduate degrees.

Why Asian immigrants moved to the American suburbs

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There has been a flurry of research in the last few decades on the movement of Asian immigrants to the American suburbs, notably looking at the suburbs of Los Angeles and working with the concepts of “ethnoburbs.” Here is a fresh take on the topic from a researcher looking at what has happened in some of these Los Angeles suburbs:

The homeowners I spoke to who settled in the now-Asian ethnoburbs of Diamond Bar, Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, or Walnut, said that they were drawn to the country lifestyle. As one white interviewee says, “our house was backed into the wilderness… Diamond Bar looked like a ranch… a nice place to live, to raise children, (and) a clean healthy environment.” Asian American interviewees – many of whom originate from dense metropolitan areas in East and Southeast Asia, and settled in the east Valley in the mid-1980s and beyond – also sought the east Valley’s country lifestyle since the term implied wholesomeness, the setting suggested order and harmony, and the image accompanied with a single-family home connoted the actualization of the American Dream.

While scholars and researchers rightfully problematize political economies, migration patterns, and social dynamics between different racial and class groups in the contemporary ethnoburb, oftentimes post-1965 Asian immigrants moved to these neighborhoods for tangible and banal reasons. Interviewees provided various mundane and frank motives as to why the east Valley sold them twenty or thirty years ago: inexpensive new housing, reputable school districts, easy access to work, distance from urban crime and racial “others,” and by the late 1980s and 1990s, conveniences to ethnic commodities. Though classism, neatly planned neighborhoods, and country living were pivotal aspects in residents’ decisions to settle, “everyday” matters and concerns also informed how a community grew, struggled, and changed. The Asianization of the greater San Gabriel Valley is not slowing down anytime soon as Merlin Chowkwanyun and Jordan Segall demonstrate.

The contemporary emergence of California’s majority-Asian suburb, then, is not solely about Pacific Rim capital, immigrant family reunification, or Asian Americans’ “Model Minority” status allowing them to enter these formerly elite white neighborhoods. It is deeply linked to how immigrants and non-immigrants imagine, absorb, construct, and reinforce popular discourse and imagery of the American Dream, rosy suburbia, and the U.S. West. The salience of these themes influences how individuals or groups envision and build community throughout the U.S. and across generations.

It sounds like the argument here is about adding the lure of suburban culture to the structural arguments. Like others who moved to the suburbs, the cultural values and ideals attached to the American suburbs proved attractive to Asian immigrants even as some of the larger structural forces, like class, made it more possible.

A comparative element might be helpful here: were Asian immigrants more drawn to the American suburbs than immigrants from other places? If so, why?

Lorton, Virginia illustrates the growing diversity across the US

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The Washington Post takes a closer look at Lorton, Virginia, recently named as one of the most diverse communities in the United States, and discusses how Lorton illustrates broader trends:

Non-whites no longer stick out in a crowd. Lorton is one of the most diverse places in the entire country, according to a new study of census data by two sociologists from Pennsylvania State University. The 19,000 residents are roughly a third white and a third black, and there are significant numbers of Asians, Hispanics and multiracial residents…

What’s happened in Lorton is typical of a demographic sea change that is transforming the Washington area and much of the country. Non-Hispanic whites are a minority in a growing number of metropolitan areas, including Washington. Predominantly white neighborhoods are a relic of the past. New developments that appeal to young families are among the most diverse, drawing Hispanics and Asians who, on average, are much younger than the whites.

Although metropolitan areas are the most diverse, small towns and the countryside are also attracting more minorities. The Penn State researchers found that whites are the predominant group in barely one-third of all places of 1,000 residents or more, compared with two-thirds in 1980.

“Racial and ethnic diversity is no longer a vicarious experience for Americans,” said Barrett A. Lee, one of the study’s authors. “It used to be something that was recognized and debated at the national level. But now even residents of small towns and rural areas are coming face to face with people of different races or ethnicity in their daily lives, not just on the evening news.”

This is part of everyday life in many communities across the United States.

Google Fiber and the racial divide in Kansas City

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As Google Fiber rolls out in Kansas City, they are running into an issue: the existing racial divides in the city.

With Google’s promise last year to wire homes, schools, libraries and other public institutions in this city with the nation’s fastest Internet connection, community leaders on the long forlorn, predominantly black east side were excited, seeing a potentially uplifting force. They anticipated new educational opportunities for their children and an incentive for developers to build in their communities.

But in July, Google announced a process in which only those areas where enough residents preregistered and paid a $10 deposit would get the service, Google Fiber. While nearly all of the affluent, mostly white neighborhoods here quickly got enough registrants, a broad swath of black communities lagged. The deadline to sign up was midnight Sunday…

For generations, Kansas City has been riven by racial segregation that can still be seen, with a majority of blacks in the urban core confined to neighborhoods in the east. Troost Avenue has long been considered the dividing line, the result of both overt and secretive efforts to keep blacks out of white schools and housing areas and of historical patterns of population growth and settlement, said Micah Kubic, with the nonprofit Greater Kansas City Local Initiatives Support Corporation…

During the sign-up, Google faced other practical problems. Many people did not have credit or debit cards, which were required to register, or e-mail addresses. And it failed to account for numerous vacant homes in some communities, so it lowered the number of registrants needed to qualify in those areas.

Many people in black neighborhoods had not heard about Google Fiber, and many who knew only had a vague understanding of it.

This is a reminder there is a “digital divide” between those who have Internet access as well as have knowledge about it and how to use it versus those who do not. As Google has found out, this project also involves public education about the value of having the Internet. It does read as though the company is making a strong effort to inform people about Google Fiber but it may take some time to get the information out.

Portland so progressive that it ignores issues of race?

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A sociologist who teaches about race at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon suggests the city is comfortable discussing and dealing with a lot of issues but not so much when it comes to race:

Miller, who is writing a book tentatively titled “Blacklandia” about the racial awkwardness she’s observed in Portland, says the small black population in Multnomah County (5.7 percent) has made it too easy for white people to avoid ever having to mix with blacks, much less become comfortable with them…

Miller’s point isn’t that Portland is a particularly racist city. In fact, she doesn’t think that at all. But people here are so satisfied with their progressive self-images, she says, that they are neglecting issues that affect the black community. As a result, she says, Portland becomes a less livable city for everybody.

Miller says she’s constantly being reminded that whites here have a lot of bottled up feelings about race they’d like to get out of their system. But they don’t know how.

She spends a lot of time alone at local bars. Miller says they are great places to do sociological research. Often, white people in Portland who start chatting with her in bars learn she has a Ph.D. Invariably after that, Miller says, all they want to talk about is race, as if after a lifetime of searching they’ve finally found an educated black person to whom they can talk.

“I feel like Oprah,” Miller says. “I can’t even sit there and have a cocktail.”

I don’t think Portland, Oregon is the only place where it is difficult to have conversations about race. This is an American issue not just limited to places with relatively lower percentages of minorities.

Argument: Census Bureau could better count Hispanics by focusing on origins

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As I wrote about a month ago, the Census Bureau is looking into ways to better count Hispanics in the 2020 Census. Here are a few more details:

“Many Hispanics, especially those who are immigrants, are unsure about how to respond to census questions about race because the concept of race that we use in the U.S. is not so firmly entrenched in Latin American cultures,” said Shannon Monnat, a UNLV assistant professor of sociology who studies demography…

In April the Pew Research Center published a report from a survey that verified cramming everyone together into one category was problematic.

More than half of the Pew survey respondents said they preferred to use their country of origin as an identifier, 24 percent said they would use “Hispanic” most often and 21 percent labeled themselves “American.”…

“Historically, the standard sociological practice has been to apply ‘race’ to distinctions based on physical appearance and apply ‘ethnicity’ to distinctions based on culture and language, but ethnicity now is used increasingly as an inclusive term to categorize all groups considered to share a common descent,” Monnat said. “Demographers have been predicting a much wider range of responses on census forms and increased blurring of racial categories as minority populations continue to grow and interracial marriage increases over the next several decades. The children produced from these unions will not fit neatly into any of the standard census categories.

“A more realistic approach may be to use the concept of ‘origins’ rather than the traditional concepts of race and ethnicity,” she said.

Keeping up with changing definitions is a difficult task for sociologists and demographers. And this seems like a two-step process: first, we need to know how people understand or identify themselves and then we need to get the survey questions right.

Moving toward “origins” data would be interesting. The Census has some data on this – I think this is from questions about ancestry on the long form. Here is a two paragraph description of how this was done in 2000:

Ancestry refers to a person’s ethnic origin or descent, “roots,” or heritage, or the place of birth of the person or the person’s parents or ancestors before their arrival in the United States. Some ethnic identities, such as “German” or “Jamaican,” can be traced to geographic areas outside the United States, while other ethnicities such as “Pennsylvania Dutch” or “Cajun” evolved in the United States.

The intent of the ancestry question is not to measure the degree of attachment the respondent had to a particular ethnicity. For example, a response of “Irish” might reflect total involvement in an “Irish” community or only a memory of ancestors several generations removed from the individual. A person’s ancestry is not necessarily the same as his or her place of birth; i.e., not all people of German ancestry were born in Germany (in fact, most were not).

Ancestry has its own issues.

Analyst looks at “racial breakdown of [presidential election] polls”

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An analyst for RealClearPolitics takes a look at possible issues with the racial breakdown in the samples of  presidential election polls. A few of the issues:

First, as Chait repeatedly concedes, we don’t know what the ultimate electorate will look like this November. That really should be the end of the argument — if we don’t know what the racial breakdown is going to be, it’s hard to criticize the pollsters for under-sampling minorities. After all, almost all pollsters weight their base sample of adults to CPS (current population survey) estimates to ensure the base sample reflects the actual population; after that, the data simply are what they are.

It’s true that the minority share of the electorate increased every year from 1996 through 2008. But there’s a reason that 1996 is always used as a start date: After declining every election from 1980 through 1988, the white share of the vote suddenly ticked up two points in 1992. In other words, these things aren’t one-way ratchets (and while there is no H. Ross Perot this year, the underlying white working-class angst that propelled his candidacy is very much present, as writers on the left repeatedly have observed)…

“The U.S. Census Bureau allows for multiple responses when it asks respondents what race they are, and Gallup attempts to replicate the Census in that respect. While most pollsters ask two separate questions about race and Hispanic ancestry, Gallup goes a step further, asking five separate questions about race. They ask respondents to answer whether or not they consider themselves White; Black or African American; Asian; Native American or Alaska Native; and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.”

In other words, how you ask the question could impact how people self-identify with regard to race and ethnicity, which could in turn affect how your weighted data look. This is a polling issue that will likely become more significant as the nation grows more diverse, and more multi-racial.

Trying to figure out who exactly is going to vote is a tricky proposition and it is little surprise that different polling organizations have slightly different figures.

I hope people don’t see stories like this and conclude that polls can’t be trusted after all. Polling is not an exact science; all polls contain small margins of error. However, polling is so widely used because it is incredibly difficult to capture information about whole populations. Even one of the most comprehensive surveys we have, the US Census, was only able to get about 70-75% cooperation and that was with a large amount of money and workers. Websites like RealClearPolitics are helpful here because you can see averages of the major polls which can help smooth out some of their differences.

A final note: this is another reminder that measuring race and ethnicity is difficult. As noted above, the Census Bureau and some of these polling organizations use different measures and therefore get different results. Of course, because race and ethnicity are fluid, the measures have to change over time.

The 2020 Census to have different questions about race?

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The Los Angeles Times reports that the US Census Bureau is looking into possibly changing the questions about race and ethnicity in the 2020 Census:

The bureau’s new recommendations were based on research findings of a number of experimental questions given to 500,000 households during the 2010 census. The findings showed that many Americans believe the racial and ethnic categories now used by the census are confusing and don’t always jibe with their own views of their identity.

For example, asked to state their race on the 2010 census, more than 19 million people, including millions of Latinos, chose “some other race,” rather than select from the five categories offered on the census form: white, black, Asian, American Indian/Native Alaskan or Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.

One of the changes proposed now would simply ask respondents to choose their race or origin, allowing them to check a single box next to categories that would include white, black or Hispanic.

Another would add write-in categories to allow those of Middle Eastern or Arab origin to specifically identify themselves, officials said.

A third change would end the practice of offering the controversial term “Negro” as an alternative for African-American or black. Some African-Americans in 2010 criticized the government’s continuing use of the word, saying it was outdated and offensive.

As cultural definitions change, so should the Census in order to better match the lived reality. Of course, this attempt to improve the validity of the results makes it more difficult for researchers and others to match up results from newer Census results, marring the reliability. And as the article notes, this has political implications and this could play into the definitions as well.

It would be interesting to hear more about the experimental results from the 2010 survey as this is a good example of an experiment that doesn’t require a laboratory. What else did people like or not like? I assume the Census Bureau is not going to cave in to those who don’t want to answer a race or ethnicity question at all and/or those who simply answer “American.”