Tag Archives: social class

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.

An argument for Amazon’s one-star reviews reveals the role of cultural critics

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A professional critic praises Amazon’s one-star reviews:

About a year ago, while shopping online for holiday gifts, I became an unabashed connoisseur of the one-star amateur Amazon review. Here I found the barbed, unvarnished, angry and uncomfortably personal hatchet job very much alive. Indeed, I became so enamored of Amazon’s user-generated reviews of books, films and music that my interest expanded to the one-star notices on Goodreads, Yelp and Netflix, where, for instance, a “Moneyball” review notes the movie “did not make you feel warm and fuzzy at the end as a good sports film should.” How true! A rare opinion on a critical darling!…

But there is a visceral thrill to reading amateur reviewers on Amazon who, unlike professional critics, do not claim to be informed or even knowledgeable, who do not consider context or history or ambition, who do not claim any pretense at all. Their reviews, particularly of classics, often read as though these works had dropped out of space into their laps, and they were first to experience it. About “Moby-Dick,” one critic writes: “Essentially, they rip off the plot to ‘Jaws.'” About “Ulysses,” another critic writes: “I honestly cannot figure out the point, other than cleverness for cleverness’ sake.”

Likewise, to seriously dismiss “The Great Gatsby” as “‘Twilight’ without the vampires,” as an Amazon reviewer did, may be glib and reductive, but it’s also brilliantly spot on, the kind of comparison a more mannered critic might not dare. “Whoever made that ‘Twilight’ comparison, whether they know it, is showing their education, that they can connect new media with old works and draw fresh conclusions,” said David Raskin, chair of the art history, theory and criticism department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago…

Speaking of honesty: It should be pointed out here that, in general, online amateur reviews are not mean but usually as forgiving as the professional sort. Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied online reviews — “partly because I was curious if they were real or just someone gaming the system” — told me that 60 percent of Amazon reviews are five-star reviews and another 20 percent are four-star. The information research firm Gartner released a study in September predicting that, within a couple of years, between 10 and 15 percent of online reviews will be paid for by companies — rigged.

It sounds like the argument is this: you can find the average American in the one-star Amazon reviews. Instead of getting the filtered, sophisticated review typically found in media sources, these reviewers give the unvarnished pop culture take. Discussed in this argument is the idea of social class and education. An approved reviewer or critic, the typical gatekeeper, is able to put a work in its context. The educated critic is trying to make the work understandable for others. The educated critic often has experience and education backing their opinions. In contrast, the Internet opens up spaces for individuals to post their own reactions and through aggregation, such as the Amazon five-star review system, have some say about how products and cultural works are perceived.

This new reality doesn’t render cultural gatekeepers completely irrelevant but it does do several things. One, it dilutes their influence or at least makes it possible for more critics to get involved. Second, it also makes more visible the opinions of average citizens. Instead of just theorizing about mass culture or pop culture, we can all see what the masses are thinking at the moment they are thinking it. (Think of the possibilities on Twitter!) Third, it provides space like in this article for reviewers to admit they don’t always want to write erudite pieces but want to have a “normal person reaction.”

Just one problem with this piece: the critic says he doesn’t really read the one-star Amazon reviews for information. Instead, he appreciates the “visceral thrill.” He quotes an academic who says such reviews reveal cultural gaps. Thus, celebrating the one-star reviews may be just another way to assert the traditional reviewer’s cultural capital. Read the one-star reviews for entertainment but continue to go back to the educated reviewer for the context and more valued perspective.

The four cultural camps of American parenting

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A sociologist argues there are four cultural parenting camps in the United States:

The Faithful, who make up 20 percent of American parents and are largely white and middle class, believe strongly that “God’s timeless truths” about sex, marriage, and life remain as true today as they have always been. They seek to defend these truths in the broader culture and, failing that, aim to “buffer themselves from progressive currents enough that their families will remain faithful to their traditions.” Their most important parenting goal is “raising children to reflect God’s will and purpose.”…

The Engaged Progressives, who make up 21 percent of American parents and are whiter, better educated, and more affluent than the population as a whole, march to a very different beat than the Faithful, at least ideologically. They steer clear of organized religion, believe strongly in the virtues of personal freedom, choice, and tolerance, and seek to form their children into independent-minded adults. But these individualistic values are also tempered by a commitment among progressive parents to the “golden rule” and the values that go along with this rule: honesty, openness, empathy, and compassion for the vulnerable. Their cultural commitments point them in a Blue direction (82 percent reported they would not vote for the Republican presidential nominee).

Ironically, whatever their ideological differences with the Faithful, Engaged Progressives live lives that look surprisingly like their ideological opposites. Although they have fewer children (2.46) than the Faithful, they are almost as married (80 percent are married), about as likely to have stay-at-home-mothers when preschool children are in the home as are the Faithful (58 percent compared to 65 percent), and they also highly engaged parents, enjoying—for instance—more meals with their children than the average parent. So, in pursuit of progressive ideals, Engaged Progressives rely on largely neotraditional strategies: namely, marriage and an intensive parenting style.

The same cannot be said about the other two cultural camps of American parents detailed in the report: “the Detached” and “the American Dreamers”, who make up, respectively, 19 and 27 percent of American parents. Although a slight majority of the Detached are married (67 percent), this largely white, largely downscale group of parents feel incapable or unable to exert much of an influence on their children’s lives. They spend comparatively little time interacting with their children, do not eat daily with their parents, are disconnected from the religious and civic fabric of their communities, and instead allow the television and other outside influences to set the cultural agenda for their children. Indeed, Bowman contends that the Detached parents “lack the vision, vitality, certainty, and self-confidence required to embrace any agenda” for their children. Not surprisingly, this camp has little interest in or involvement with politics.

By contrast, the American Dreamers—who are disproportionately working class and minority—have high hopes for their children. Politically, they are divided, with black and Hispanic Dreamers tilting Democratic, and white Dreamers titling Republican. They believe strongly in education, their children are optimistic about their educational prospects, and they want their children to make good on the American Dream. But given that marriage is fragile in this camp (only 64 percent are married), they have less income and education than most parents, and they are more likely to hail from communities with anemic religious and civic institutions, it’s not clear that American Dreamers can make good on the big dreams they have for their children.

A few thoughts about this:

1. Read the PDF report here and see more about the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia here.

2. Sociologist Annette Lareau suggested in Unequal Childhoods that social class led to two parenting styles: concerted cultivation and accomplishment of natural growth. Are Lareau’s two styles spread across these four new categories or was Lareau missing something big?

3. There are some interesting implications here for the culture wars. The suggestion in this article is that both The Faithful and The Engaged Progressives follow similar patterns even if they hold to different ideologies and tend to fight among themselves. Is this because of social class? Education? Race? Current or lingering effects of religion? Living in suburbs and/or wealthier areas?

4. When I see typologies like this, I always wonder about how many categories can and should be created. Is four cultural family types enough or too many? A lower number seems better for having more coherent categories and it is easier to discuss the findings. However, if there are actually smaller clusters of families, then more types may be needed to be more precise and better describe reality.

The intersection of Chinese bridal couples asking for cash, Facebook, and protests

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This could be a poster story for globalization: on Facebook, a Hong Kong bride asked for money from wedding attendees and this has attracted protestors to the wedding.

That’s the prospect facing one Hong Kong couple, who infuriated hundreds after the bride’s Nov. 2 Facebook post went viral.

“I’m not opening a charity….If you really only want to give me a HK$500 [US$65] cash gift, then don’t bother coming to my wedding,” she wrote earlier this month, according to an article Thursday in the Wall Street Journal China.

The bride’s identity and wedding venue were identified by social media users, and a protest was organized via Facebook. Nearly 1,000 have claimed they will attend.

A spokesperson for the hotel where the wedding will be held said they plan on honoring their contract with the couple.

Though giving newlyweds cash is a traditional Chinese custom, sociologist Ting Kwok-fai told The Wall Street Journal that Hong Kong weddings have grown increasingly extravagant in recent years. Engaged couples feel pressured to minimize the cost of the affair, he said, and in this case, the bride may be seeking to recoup some of the costs of the wedding.

Multiple social forces are coming together here in a new kind of way: traditional social norms, new technology and interaction on Facebook, and more public concerns about inequality and conspicuous consumption. This reminds me of the classic 1929 work of the Chicago School of sociology titled The Gold Coast and the Slum. While studying neighborhoods just north of the Loop in Chicago, Zorbaugh discussed the social interaction between some of the wealthiest Chicagoans and some of the poorest Chicagoans. While the two groups certainly knew about each other through walking in or passing through neighborhoods or reading news in the newspaper, there was little direct social interaction. For example, some of the wealthy socialite women tried to start aid groups to help these nearby poor neighborhoods but could not get much participation from the poor neighborhoods.

Today, some of these barriers are reduced because of Facebook and other technology. Again, there is likely not a whole of physical social interaction between those with a lot of money and those without. In Hong Kong, you can walk down Nathan Road in Kowloon and find the some of the world’s most exclusive brands. If you turn off the road several blocks to the west, you are among nondescript apartment complexes with little glitter or glamour. Yet, these new technologies allow for more awareness and more reactions which could then coalesce around social action. The socialite wedding announcement in the prestigious newspaper 50 years ago that would have drawn less attention has now turned into Facebook-announced weddings that can quickly become very public.

Real estate firm survey: younger Americans still want to own a home

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Even though a number of commentators have suggested younger Americans are not as interested in homeownership, a recent survey conducted by “Better Homes & Garden real estate brand” suggests this may not be the case:

Nearly all of them said they were willing to adjust their lifestyles to save for a home. Sixty-two percent said they’d eat out less. Forty percent said they’d work a second job. And 23 percent said they’d move back home with their parents to save money — they’re being strategic about saving money to own a home.

They also said that all of the media coverage of the housing crisis has taught them the importance of doing their research and planning, and they think they’re more knowledgeable about the process than their parents were at their age. But they want to be ready to own — 69 percent said that someone is ready to buy if they can maintain their lifestyle (while owning), and 61 percent agreed that the “readiness indicator” is if they have a secure job.

And even if these younger adults do want to own a home, the real estate industry has to be ready to appeal to this group:

Well, as an industry and certainly as a brand, we’d have to step up our campaign to show young buyers the importance of real estate as a long-term investment and lifestyle.

On a related note, something else also drove us to do this survey: the big disconnect in the average age of a first-time buyer (36), versus the average age of a real estate agent (56). This younger generation of buyers’ habits are different — they’re comfortable using technology, especially mobile devices, to buy and track everything, and agents need to learn this.

Several things are interesting here. First, it appears a good number of younger Americans do want a home but they are also more aware of what it will take to make it happen. If homeownership is such a big investment, younger Americans want to do their homework to know what they are getting into. This could mean that fewer people in this group will buy a home until they find a more “perfect” situation which might decrease the homeownership rate but it could also mean that those who buy a home are more committed.

Second, it is suggested that the real estate industry needs to stay relevant in the era of the Internet. Traditionally, real estate agents are necessary people in the middle who have expertise that the average homeowner would not have. But, potential homebuyers have much more information at their fingertips and if more people are selling their own homes, the real estate industry needs to continually show what extra value it offers. Also, this article hints at the aging of real estate agents: is this a desirable job for young people to pursue? If you look at a table of occupational prestige in the United States, real estate agent is at the bottom.

I wonder if the story for younger Americans and homeownership will be a bifurcated one based on socioeconomic status. Those with higher education and good jobs will continue to buy homes. Those who don’t have college degrees and/or struggle to find a good job may not have the option to do so.

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.

Explaining why New Jersey has the lowest divorce rates in the United States

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The lowest divorce rates in the United States are in New Jersey and here’s why:

According to the 2011 American Community Survey released last month by the Census Bureau, New Jersey ranks last among the states in the percentage of residents 18 and older who are divorced. Just 9 percent of New Jersey adults are divorced, compared with nearly 52 percent of whom are now married.

“The composition of New Jersey married individuals is quite favorable across several indicators, providing some evidence for the low divorce rate,” said Susan L. Brown, a sociology professor and co-director of the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. “These factors include education, race-ethnicity, age, and age at first marriage.”…

“They tend to delay marriage until an age when they’re emotionally and financially ready,” said Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Rutgers. “Higher education and high age at marriage are two of the most important factors that protect against divorce risk. And the current recession not withstanding, New Jersey is among the wealthier states in the nation, and economic stability also contributes to marital stability.”…

“In general, the northeastern states have lower divorce rates because their citizens are more highly educated and marry at older ages than do people in other regions,” said Andrew J. Cherlin, a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins.

In other words, certain social conditions lead to lower rates of divorce in New Jersey and other northeastern states. Having more money, more education, and being older (all related to socioeconomic status?) leads to fewer divorces. These findings could also be related to recent suggestions that those with higher levels of education are more likely to marry (also see here).

Does this mean New Jersey will start promoting itself as a family-friendly state?

Illustrating the tensions of gentrification in Venice, California

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A sociologist has written an analysis of the tensions in gentrification as it has taken place in Venice, California:

Andrew Deener, a University of Connecticut assistant professor who lived in Venice for six years while receiving his Ph.D from UCLA, describes the tension facing Venice – and many American cities – between cultural diversity and urban grime and the recent influx of wealthy residents that have renounced the suburban lifestyle but may still expect many of its benefits – like clean streets, low crime rates and good schools.

In his book “Venice – a Contested Bohemia in Los Angeles,” that was released in July, Deener attempts to relate the new issues facing Venice to explain a cultural phenomenon that is taking part throughout the country – new wealthier residents sometimes clashing with established lower and middle-class residents.

“Urbanites generally give lip service to their search for diversity, but when they see what it means to share spaces – especially with individuals of different socioeconomic backgrounds – they become more cautious and critical,” Deener found.

This sounds like a typical gentrification process. Wealthier or higher-class residents are attracted to Venice because of its lower prices compared to other nearby locations and its gritty nature. However, when these new residents move in, they tend to want amenities more in line with their lifestyles and tastes, which eventually cleans up the grit, and the amenities plus their wealth tends to raise property values, which forces lower-income residents out. It may not be that Venice can retain its gritty character forever; neighborhoods and communities do change over time and local leaders and residents would have to fight hard to keep the community the way it is. At the same time, it is not surprising that existing residents may not greet incoming wealthier residents with open arms as their presence can change the community into something different.

Politicians trying to woo the ambigiously defined middle class

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Amidst an election cycle where all sides want to woo the middle class, several researchers suggest that providing an exact definition of the middle class is difficult:

“You can’t define middle class, but you can ask people, ‘Do you still feel middle class?’ And more and more people don’t,” said Tim Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin…

“The whole attraction of middle class … is it doesn’t mean anything,” said Dennis Gilbert, a sociology professor at Hamilton College who studies class issues. “Middle class means anybody who might vote for you.”…

Still, experts say the term middle class has a cultural connotation that goes beyond the number on your paycheck or tax stub.

Kevin Leicht, director of the Iowa Social Science Research Center at the University of Iowa, said many Americans think of a middle-class life as being one in which you have a stable job, own your own home and occasionally buy something substantial like a new car. You also either went to college or have the aspiration of sending your children to college.

I would disagree with Gilbert and agree with Leicht and Smeeding. When asked, Americans do tend to feel they are middle class, the recent economic crisis notwithstanding. The middle class in America is more of an idea than a clearly-defined category that people move in and out of. Cultural categories can be powerful, perhaps even more so than economic realities.

Recently, the Brookings Institution defined six likely life stages a middle-class person goes through and in 2010, a government task force tied being middle class to six outcomes. It is not impossible to set such criteria for measurement purposes but they do not match up with everyone who would call themselves middle class.

Speaking of politicians looking for middle-class votes, I haven’t seen journalists or scholars discussing how this wooing developed in American political history. How long has this wooing been taking place? Is this primarily a post-World War II phenomenon or does it have a longer history? I wonder if the middle class only matters here because it is in this period of history that politicians think there are a large number of voters to be swayed in this category…

Brookings: who reaches middle-class affected by race, family’s social class, gender

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A new report from the Brookings Institution examines who makes it to the middle class through achieving a number of benchmarks. A summary of the findings:

The study breaks life down into stages (for instance, adolescence) and gives benchmarks for each of those stages (in that case, graduation from high school with a grade-point average above 2.5, no criminal convictions and no involvement in a teenage pregnancy).

They then studied children over time, analyzing whether they met those benchmarks and projecting whether they would make it to the middle class — defined as the top three quintiles of income — by age 40.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that success seems to beget success — meeting each benchmark makes one more likely to meet the next. Moreover, the effect accumulates. A child who meets all the criteria from birth to adulthood has an 81 percent chance of being middle class. A child who meets none has only a 24 percent chance…

Race matters as well. About two in five black adolescents met the benchmark of graduating from high school with a decent grade point average, no children and no criminal record by the age of 19. About two in three white adolescents did.

And from the introduction of the Brookings report:

The reality is that economic success in America is not purely meritocratic. We don’t have as much equality of opportunity as we’d like to believe, and we have less mobility than some other developed countries. Although cross-national comparisons are not always reliable, the available data suggest that the U.S. compares unfavorably to Canada, the Nordic countries, and some other advanced countries. A recent study shows the U.S. ranking 27th out of 31 developed countries in measures of equal opportunity.

People do move up and down the ladder, both over their careers and between generations, but it helps if you have the right parents. Children born into middle-income families have a roughly equal chance of moving up or down once they become adults, but those born into rich or poor families have a high probability of remaining rich or poor as adults. The chance that a child born into a family in the top income quintile will end up in one of the top three quintiles by the time they are in their forties is 82 percent, while the chance for a child born into a family in the bottom quintile is only 30 percent. In short, a rich child in the U.S. is more than twice as likely as a poor child to end up in the middle class or above.

This shouldn’t be too surprising: despite the American cultural emphasis on working hard and getting ahead (a story told by both political parties at their 2012 conventions), certain traits increase the likelihood of achieving a middle-class life. Hard work only goes so far; other social factors such as family background, race, and gender make a difference.

I am intrigued by how the report defines the middle-class life stages as defined by the Social Genome Model (p.3-4 of the report):

1. Family Formation. Born at normal birth weight to a non-poor, married mother with at least a high school diploma.

2. Early childhood. Acceptable pre-reading and math skills AND behavior generally school-appropriate.

3. Middle childhood. Basic reading and math skills AND Social-emotional skills.

4. Adolescence. Graduates from high school w/GPA >= 2.5 AND Has not been convicted of a crime nor become a parent.

5. Transition to adulthood. Lives independently AND Receives a college degree or has a family income >= 250% of the poverty level.

6. Adulthood. Reaches middle class (family income at least 300% of the poverty level).

Why exactly these stages?