Tag Archives: race

Shared religious activity enhances marital relationships

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New sociological research suggests that certain kinds of shared religious  practices among married couples leads to better relationships:

[F]or all groups, shared religious activity – attending church together and especially praying together – is linked to higher levels of relationship quality.

The findings were particularly significant for African-American couples (and to a lesser extent, Latinos), according to sociologist and co-author W. Bradford Wilcox:

“Without prayer, black couples would be doing significantly worse than white couples. This study shows that religion narrows the racial divide in relationship quality in America.”

But not all religion is beneficial for marriages:

Couples holding discordant religious beliefs and those with only one partner who attends religious services regularly tend to be less happy in their relationships, the researchers found.

The findings make sense: couples who share a religious perspective and activities benefit while those who don’t share perspectives or activities suffer. The most interesting finding seems to be that about African-American and Latinos benefiting from shared religious activity: the authors suggest such activity helps overcome stress minorities experience.

How race effects chosing a house

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The Houston Chronicle contains an interview with sociologist Michael Emerson about a forthcoming study (to be published in Social Forces) regarding housing choice and race.

First, a bit about the methodology of the study:

Researchers for the Institute for Urban Research at Rice University asked that question to 1,000 whites, 1,000 African-Americans and 1,000 Hispanics in Harris County to determine whether race makes a difference when they select homes and neighborhoods, independent of crime, housing prices and schools…

The housing questions were part of 30-minute interviews conducted for the annual Houston Area Survey. Respondents were asked to imagine they were looking for a house and found one they liked in their price range. They then were presented with computer-generated, random scenarios of school quality, property values, crime rate and racial makeup, and asked the likelihood that they would buy the house.

By using hypothetical situations, researchers were able to isolate the effect of certain factors, such as the racial composition of a neighborhood or the crime rate.

Here is a quick summary of the findings, according to Emerson:

For whites, the percentage of African-American or Hispanic matters significantly. They’re more and more averse to buying a house in a neighborhood as the percentage of African-Americans or Hispanics increases, even when crime is low, property values are increasing, and the local schools are of high quality.

The other result we found was for African-Americans in the Houston area, they’re sensitive to the percent Asian. So as the percent Asian increases, the less likely they are to say they want to buy the house.

And for Hispanics, the racial composition did not impact their preference for buying the home.

One other way to understand how strong the impact is, for whites: The likelihood they wouldn’t want to buy the house when there was racial diversity was equal to the likelihood they wouldn’t want to buy when the crime rate was high.

These findings are similar to those of other studies: Whites prefer not to choose a neighborhood with a certain number of African-Americans and Hispanics, even if the neighborhood has other positive features. The findings about other races are interesting as well – a lot of the housing literature focuses on the preferences of whites which makes sense as they are still the largest group and historically and today tend to have more wealth. But it is important to know the preferences of African-Americans and Hispanics, particularly as the Hispanic population grows.

Interestingly, the racial composition of the neighborhood does not appear to matter to Hispanics. I am curious to see what Emerson and his co-authors suggest is behind this.

Page: Policies based on social class, not just race

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Columnist Clarence Page writes today on comments made last week by Virginia Democratic Senator James Webb. While writing in the Wall Street Journal, Webb “called for an end to government diversity programs.” Page’s conclusion on Webb’s (in Page’s opinion: sometimes muddled) thoughts: “Our colleges and workplaces could benefit from diversity by social and economic class, too, and not just by race.”

This reminds me of William Julius Wilson’s suggestion that Americans don’t like social policies that benefit one group over others. Instead, Wilson suggested we need programs that benefit people from many or all groups in order for such programs to draw widespread support. Webb’s and Page’s suggestions about providing help by social class across races would seem to fit this idea.

Swimming skills and race

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The Chicago Tribune reports on efforts to teach more minority children to swim. The reason is that minority children have fewer swimming abilities (70% of black children and 60% of Hispanic children have limited or no abilities compared to 40% for white children) and the drowning rate for 5 to 14 year olds is three times higher for blacks compared to whites.

Elite college admission practices

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Last year, two Princeton sociologists (T.J. Espenshade and A.W. Radford) published a book titled No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. The book has drawn a number of comments in the blogosphere.

The book was mentioned in the New York Times this past Sunday as Ross Douthat wrote about “the roots of white anxiety.” Douthat summarizes the book’s findings:

Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

According to Douthat, these decisions have consequences: “This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike” and “Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland.”

Granted, this study was restricted to eight elite universities. But many Americans have an image of liberal academia that bears little relation to average lives of shopping at Wal-Mart, living in suburbia, and going to church.

Schooling and race in North Carolina

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Interesting story about schools in North Carolina struggling with this issue: how to create diverse “community schools.” The article details some of the integration efforts and their degrees of success.

A confounding factor: many of the people in the area, nearly 50% in Wake County, were born outside the state and haven’t experienced the long history of integration efforts.

Skin-whitening cream in India

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Yahoo reports on a controversy in India over an ad for Vaseline from Unilever. The campaign was based around having men lighten their Facebook profile pictures.

The ad campaign has drawn attention from around the world as people have both attacked and defended it. The issue is a long-running one in India as it is tied to the caste system and lighter skin people sitting at the top. Skin color has social consequences:

A 2009 poll by an online dating company of 12,000 participants living in Northern India found that they rate skin tone the most important factor in choosing a romantic partner. “Fair skin is generally associated with beauty, greater affluence and increased employability,” writes Riddhi Shah at Salon, who copped to using the creams herself even while criticizing the country’s racist ideas about beauty in her work.

It is interesting that this campaign is targeted toward men as the article suggests this is a recent development in the skin-whitening market in India.

The land of fake businessmen

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Atlantic’s Mitch Moxley reports on a Chinese business practice: hiring fake businessmen to help craft an image. Part of the job:

As we waited for the ceremony to begin, a foreman standing beside me barked at workers still visible on the construction site. They scurried behind the scaffolding.

“Are you the boss?” I asked him.

He looked at me quizzically. “You’re the boss.”

Actually, Ernie was the boss. After a brief introduction, “Director” Ernie delivered his speech before the hundred or so people in attendance. He boasted about the company’s long list of international clients and emphasized how happy we were to be working on such an important project. When the speech was over, confetti blasted over the stage, fireworks popped above the dusty field beside us, and Ernie posed for a photo with the mayor.

If this is common practice, couldn’t some companies lose face (rather than build their image) when others point out or find out that their businessmen are really fakes?

An odd subtext: the requirements for the job included “a fair complexion and a suit.” The fake businessmen are there to indicate that the Chinese company has connections. A “darker complexion and a suit” doesn’t fit the bill for connections? Perhaps a “darker complexion, a suit, and an American accent”?

“The Triumphant Decline of the WASP”

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A NY Times opinion piece from Harvard law professor Noah Feldman makes this argument: “The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.” Feldman explores the changes in the Supreme Court (the appointment of Kagan would make it 6 Catholics, 3 Jews) and Princeton (“As late as 1958, the year of the “dirty bicker” in which Jews were conspicuously excluded from its eating clubs, Princeton could fairly have been seen as a redoubt of all-male Protestant privilege).

So what changed? Feldman provides some reasons: “the anti-aristocratic ideals of the Constitution,” education was an important defining trait for WASPs so opening up universities was a big step, and the American value of fair play. The result:

Together, these social beliefs in equality undercut the impulse toward exclusive privilege that every successful group indulges on occasion. A handful of exceptions for admission to societies, clubs and colleges — trivial in and of themselves — helped break down barriers more broadly. This was not just a case of an elite looking outside itself for rejuvenation: the inclusiveness of the last 50 years has been the product of sincerely held ideals put into action.

These may be accurate reasons. But they seem to ignore the historical context: something happened in the 1960s that changed institutions like Ivy League schools and led to a very different looking Supreme Court. In that decade, the Civil Rights Movement plus an explosion in higher education for the burgeoning US population plus higher rates of immigration from non-European locales plus cultural change (rock ‘n’ roll, television, more open questioning of authority, etc.), changed, or at least began to change, the socioeconomic status of WASPs.

Quick review: The History of White People

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Just finished reading The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter and released in March 2010. Some quick thoughts and pieces I took from the book:

1. The book is an overview of defining “white” from the 1700s to the 1960s in the United States. This requires tracking back to a number of European thinkers. The book provides historical background to “whiteness studies.”

2. There is a long-running link between being “Anglo-Saxon” and “white” in the US. Defining who exactly is Anglo-Saxon has been problematic; groups like the Irish and Scots were originally excluded (1700s-1800s) but came to be a part of the group when America experienced more immigration from Southern Europe/Eastern Europe. The Irish and Italians had to fight for decades to eventually be included in the white group.

3. There were a number of thinkers who tried to classify all humans into a small number of races. The most commonly known categories: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid. But others developed more and different categories. Another common set of categories had “Nordic” people (Germans, others) as superior. These differences between categories, often based on geography but also based on the “scientific” study of head shape, were said to result in hereditary differences in intelligence and temperament, among other traits. Of course, these immutable categories could change based on circumstances. Once World War I started, the “Nordic” category lost much of its standing.

4.  Some “great Americans,” such as Henry David Thoreau and Teddy Roosevelt, were quite steeped in white superiority ideology. Both Thoreau and Roosevelt were quite explicit about this in their writings though this is not widely known today.

5. There is a long history of American residents of the Northeast seeing Southern whites as inferior. In the 1800s, Southern whites and the Irish were seen as sitting at the bottom of the racial heap.

6. Intelligence tests, developed by scholars in the early 1900s, were used to “prove” the superiority or inferiority of certain races.

7. As a general background to the ideology of whiteness, this is a decent book. As for explaining how this ideology, particularly among great thinkers or politicians, translated into public policy and general sentiment among the American population, the book is lacking. What is clear is that defining who was white and establishing whites’ superiority over other races was an important area of thought.