Tag Archives: race

The racial bias in predatory lending

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A new study in the American Sociological Review explores how race impacted predatory lending and the larger U.S. housing crisis:

Poorer minority areas became a focus of these practices in the 1990s with the growth of mortgage-backed securities, which enabled lenders to pool low- and high-risk loans to sell on the secondary market, Professor Douglas Massey of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and PhD candidate Jacob Rugh, said in their study.

The financial institutions likely to be found in minority areas tended to be predatory — pawn shops, payday lenders and check cashing services that “charge high fees and usurious rates of interest,” they said in the study.

“By definition, segregation creates minority dominant neighborhoods, which, given the legacy of redlining and institutional discrimination, continue to be underserved by mainstream financial institutions,” the study says.

The larger tale is that minority neighborhoods still do not have the same access to banks and lending institutions that non-minority neighborhoods enjoy. While the practices are now less covert (no redlining, restrictive deeds and covenants, riots when minorities moved into white neighborhoods), there are still clear race lines in American lending. These lending patterns have a strong impact on where people live, contributing to residential segregation (as seen in these maps).

More discussion about teaching “The Wire” at Harvard

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The class revolving around the television show The Wire in the Harvard Sociology Department continues to draw attention. Here is a quick summary of the some of the public discussion:

In a Boston Globe editorial, Eugene and Jacqueline Rivers, co-founder of the Boston Ten-Point Coalition and Harvard University doctoral student, respectively, wrote in support of the class:

One of the most difficult challenges confronting intellectuals is how to discuss the relationship between race and poverty in Obama’s “post-racial” America…”The Wire” can usefully serve as a non-partisan political resource for engaging the issues of race and poverty.’

The two add that the show is smart and creative, and that it can lead to discussion about programmatic responses to systematic inequality in the inner city.

On the opposite end of the spectrum stands Ishmael Reed, a professor at University of California-Berkeley who also contributed an op-ed on the subject to the Globe.

Reed believes that professors like Wilson are more concerned with using “hot courses built around sensational popular culture like hip-hop and crime shows as a way of filling seats in their classroom,” than with seriously examining race and class relations. Reed contends that the show is riddled with stereotypes, and should not be utilized in a university setting.

I would be curious to hear about the outcomes of the course, both for students and faculty.

What these comments about this particular class are hinting at is that there is disagreement about how to best teach courses about race, poverty, and social class. There are numerous resources professors can draw upon, including a wealth of ethnographic work from the last twenty years.

LeBron James, “the decision,” and race

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Comments made by LeBron James several days ago are drawing attention. James suggested in an interview with CNN that race played a role in people’s reaction to his choice to play with the Miami Heat. A commentator at Salon suggests that James is just stating the obvious:

Now, the Aggrieved White Guy funnels rage to the comment boards, as LeBron is shredded for this latest transgression of truth. While many pundits white and black want to pretend that ego alone stoked this bubbling hate cauldron, Henry Abbott, who presides over ESPN’s network of NBA blogs, noticed a unique phenomenon:

“It is literally the strangest thing I have ever seen NBA fans do. If you look at most NBA stories online, there will be some comments on each that are either racist, coded racism, or in line with racist thinking. On the night of LeBron’s decision, those kinds of hateful comments — whether hateful or not — became the dominant narrative, which blew my mind.”

Fans were uniquely angry at James for showing up a mostly white NBA power structure. His race played a role, how could it not? And if you’re still mad at LeBron, if you’re screaming at him for pointing this out, I don’t think his “ego” is what irks you.

It will be interesting to see how this continues to play out. The Q ratings demonstrated that blacks and whites have different opinions about James.

Several things to note about this argument in Salon: it is partly based on evidence from Internet message boards (where people seem willing to say all sorts of things they wouldn’t say in-person) and it provides a typical defense of “the Aggrieved White Guy” who claims he didn’t bring up race at all. On the whole, such discussions need to acknowledge the larger issue: we live in a racialized society where both overt and covert racism take place and have large social consequences.

Discussing the meaning of racist comments online

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The Washington Post discusses the meaning of racist comments in Internet discussions. One conclusion: if people are still making such comments, there is still a long way to go to reducing racism.

Maps of race in American cities

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The Daily Mail has some maps based on the new 2010 Census data that shows where people of different races live in some of the largest American cities. The article emphasizes the easy-to-see racial divides.

Examining the backlash against LeBron James through the prism of race

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After making “The Decision” to join the Miami Heat, LeBron James has suffered a backlash from many fans and pundits. This backlash has led to a lower “Q score,” a rating that compares the public’s favorable versus unfavorable image of a public figure.

However, how much his Q score dropped is dependent on race: overall, whites were moved more to think negatively about LeBron after what happened this summer. Henry Abbott at Truehoop argues that something deeper, fear, might explain why whites reacted as they did. Also at ESPN, Vincent Thomas argues that James’  relatively unchanged Q scores among blacks is the result of “black protectionism.”

Learning about race from the South

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The Christian Science Monitor has a story about seven lessons that can be learned about race from the South. Here is the list: “recognize how far we’ve come,” “talk about race like a Southerner,” (#3 is not listed in a heading but is something like “see the benefits of frequent interaction between blacks and whites”), “Blacks love Southern opportunity,” “don’t stereotype whites,” “segregation by any other name…,” and “keep moving forward.”

One thing that caught my attention: #6 discusses segregation in the North, a region which supposedly has been more favorable to blacks. Several academics dispute this notion:

“The concept of Southern exceptionalism has obscured a lot of American history and a lot of Southern history, and it’s time to put that to rest and understand how deeply interrelated America and the South is, and how much the two have always resembled each other,” says Larry Griffin, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of “The South as an American Problem.” “For decades and decades, the South’s legacy has been the basic trope that permitted white Americans [to excuse] themselves from all racial guilt and project it to the American South.”

A group of historians – including Mr. Sokol and the University of Michigan’s Matt Lassiter – are revisiting how the North and South diverged after the Civil War. One of Mr. Lassiter’s findings is that Northern segregation happened largely by the same kind of government decrees that enshrined segregation in the South.

“The North has been a freer place, in some ways a better place [for blacks], but on the level of spatial segregation, structural inequalities, and poverty, [the North] is no better than the South and is, in many cases, worse,” says Sokol.

Sociologist James Loewen has also tackled this subject in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Loewen found that in the North between 1890 and 1940, blacks were forced out of many communities, often by informal “sundown laws” that required them to be out of a community by sundown or suffer the consequences.

An interesting article in a country that has difficulty discussing race and dealing with the consequences of a racialized society.

The trolley problem, race, and making decisions

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The trolley problem  is a classic vignette used in research studies and it asks under what conditions is it permissible to sacrifice one life for the lives of others (see an explanation here). Psychologist David Pizarro tweaked the trolley problem to include racial dimensions by using characters named Chip and Tyrone. Pizarro found that people’s opinions about race influenced which character they were more willing to sacrifice:

What did this say about people’s morals? Not that they don’t have any. It suggests that they had more than one set of morals, one more consequentialist than another, and choose to fit the situation…

Or as Pizarro told me on the phone, “The idea is not that people are or are not utilitarian; it’s that they will cite being utilitarian when it behooves them. People are aren’t using these principles and then applying them. They arrive at a judgment and seek a principle.”

So we’ll tell a child on one day, as Pizarro’s parents told him, that ends should never justify means, then explain the next day that while it was horrible to bomb Hiroshima, it was morally acceptable because it shortened the war. We act — and then cite whichever moral system fits best, the relative or the absolute.

Some interesting findings from a different take on a classic research tool. This is always an interesting question to ask regarding many social issues: when does the end justify the means and when does it not?

A sizable but smaller gap in happiness between blacks and whites

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The Freakonomics blog reports on a new study showing that there is a narrowing gap in happiness between black and whites. The reason for this may be the lessening of “day-to-day racism” – but there needs to be more research so that scholars can figure out “How best to get a handle on the evolution of day-to-day racism.”

Islamophobia: a complicated tale

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Time magazine asks a provocative question with its August 30th cover: “Is America Islamophobic?” The story cites a number of statistics, including recent poll figures about whether Americans think President Obama is Muslim, to suggest that Americans have some qualms and/or misperceptions about Islam.

I have little doubt that there is truth in the article – the situation could certainly be improved. However, even with the generally negative tone, the story also  admits the situation is more complicated:

Although the American strain of Islamophobia lacks some of the traditional elements of religious persecution — there’s no sign that violence against Muslims is on the rise, for instance — there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that hate speech against Muslims and Islam is growing both more widespread and more heated. Meanwhile, a new TIME–Abt SRBI poll found that 46% of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence against nonbelievers. Only 37% know a Muslim American. Overall, 61% oppose the Park51 project, while just 26% are in favor of it. Just 23% say it would be a symbol of religious tolerance, while 44% say it would be an insult to those who died on 9/11. 

Islamophobia in the U.S. doesn’t approach levels seen in other countries where Muslims are in a minority. But to be a Muslim in America now is to endure slings and arrows against your faith — not just in the schoolyard and the office but also outside your place of worship and in the public square, where some of the country’s most powerful mainstream religious and political leaders unthinkingly (or worse, deliberately) conflate Islam with terrorism and savagery. In France and Britain, politicians from fringe parties say appalling things about Muslims, but there’s no one in Europe of the stature of a former House Speaker who would, as Newt Gingrich did, equate Islam with Nazism.

A couple things to take out of these two paragraphs:

1. Evidence of increased violence against Muslims is limited or doesn’t exist.

2. There is some anecdotal evidence. This is not necessarily bad evidence but it isn’t systematic or tell us how widespread the issues are.

3. This is not what we might typically consider “religious persecution” – which perhaps suggests how this is defined will change.

4. These issues may be worse in other nations – there is more written about this is in the magazine version as opposed to the abridged version online. Some of the part that is missing between the two paragraphs quoted above:

Polls have shown that most Muslims feel safer and freer in the U.S. than anywhere else in the Western world. Two American Muslims have been elected to Congress, and this year, Rima Fakih became the first Muslim to be named Miss USA. Next month, the country’s first Muslim college will formally open in Berkeley, California…

This suggests that America is one of the better Western nations Muslims can move to. What about America has led to these feelings of safety and freedom among Muslims? We could ask another question: what about America has stopped the response to Islam from being worse, particularly considering the emotions and symbolism of 9/11?

Another quote in the article is intriguing: writer and commentator Arsalan Iftikhar says, “Islamophobia has become the accepted form of racism in America…You can always take a potshot at Muslims or Arabs and get away with it.” The part about the potshots may be true but the first part of this quote ignores a long and complicated racial history in America, particularly antipathy toward African-Americans and other groups. Americans have an infamous legacy of dislike and hatred toward newcomers or “the other” – this is not simply an issue with Muslims.

This is a complicated situation that bears watching.