Race

Lewis, Amanda E. 2004. "'What Group?' Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era of 'Color Blindness.'" Sociological Theory 22(4): 623-646.

"Sociological research needs to pay more attention to the role of whites as racial actors." Lewis argues that in an era of color-blind racism, we should be careful not to only study the race of whites who claim that identity most loudly and explicitly. Her basic argument is that because we live in a racialized system, everyone "does" race, including whites. However, due to their dominant position in the hierarchy, whites are able to racialize others without developing a strong racial consciousness. Nonetheless, despite this lack of "groupness," whites are an important racial group. For example, in moments such as race riots, neighborhood/school choice, or hiring employees, they often become a more self-conscious group. Lewis argues that in order to effectively study them, we need methodological tools that balance this complexity of loose groupness and high heterogeneity with a strong material position in a racialized hierarchy. DISCRIMINATION

Morning, Ann. 2008. "Ethnic Classification in Global Perspective: A Cross-National Survey of the 2000 Census Round." Population Research and Policy Review 27: 239-272.

Abstract: Academic interest in official systems of racial and ethnic classification has grown in recent years, but most research on such census categories has been limited to small case studies or regional surveys. In contrast, this article analyzes a uniquely global data set compiled by the United Nations Statistical Division to survey the approaches to ethnic enumeration taken in 141 countries. The motives for this analysis combine theoretical, applied, and policy objectives. I find that 63% of the national censuses studied incorporate some form of ethnic enumeration, but their question and answer formats vary along several dimensions that betray diverse conceptualizations of ethnicity (for example, as 'race' or 'nationality'). Moreover, these formats follow notably regional patterns. Nonetheless, the variety of approaches can be grouped into a basic taxonomy of ethnic classification approaches, suggesting greater commonality in worldwide manifestations of the ethnicity concept than some have recognized. Key Takeaways: Along with the points mentioned in the abstract, Morning uses this exercise to identify what is unique about the US Census, potentially identifying solutions to reform it. She says the US is one of few countries to enumerate by race explicitly, although some that use "ethnicity," use racial categories. Second, the US is one of few countries to use both race and ethnicity, and is unique in singling out one ethnic group in particular (Hispanics). COMPARATIVE

Alba, R. and T. Islam. 2009. "The Case of the Disappearing Mexican Americans: An Ethnic-Identity Mystery." Population Research and Policy Review 28(2): 109-121.

Alba and Islam find that there have been significant shifts in the identification of Mexican-Americans in the US Census. These shifts are selective, meaning that comparing outcomes such as segregation across Censuses may yield biased results. However, it is difficult to correct for because there are offsetting exits away from Mexican identity to more mainstream white identities or to pan-ethnic Hispanic/Latino identities. They demonstrate that those with Mexican ancestry identifying as non-Hispanic are higher proportion white, speak only English at higher rates, and have higher educational attainment. This is indicative of a traditional assimilation process. On the other hand, those identifying as "other Hispanic" seem to have lower rates on these measures than those identifying as "Mexican." As a result, they conclude that demographers and sociologists need to be careful treating officially identifying Mexican-Americans as a stable group to be studied over time. ETHNORACIAL IDENTITY

Barth, Fredrik. 1998. "Introduction." Pp. 9-38 in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Origin of Culture Difference. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.

As opposed to the dominant trend in social anthropology in the 1990s studying the culture of particular ethnic groups, Barth argues we should focus on the boundaries between ethnic groups and how they are drawn and defined. He proposes a form of resource competition theory, where the strength and salience of boundaries are determined by the extent of contact and competition between groups. He calls this a "generative viewpoint of analysis," where the very fact of boundary-maintenance is what defines ethnic groups. This is a constructivist idea where groups are defined in relation to one another and shift over time, rather than based on a more positivist cultural definition. THEORY

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1986. "Learning from the Outsider within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought." Social Problems 33(6): s14-s32.

Collins discusses the "outsider within" status of many black women through their access to privileged white spaces, but their simultaneous marginalization. Similarly, she says much black women's research has benefit from being at a unique junction in the gender and racial equality movements. She employs Simmel's notion of the stranger to show how, while this can be difficult, it can also be a benefit. As a result, she encourages sociology to take more seriously black feminist though, as it has a high degree of creativity from its marginal status. 1. key themes in black feminist thought 2. significance of themes for sociological thought, given marginal status 3. implications for considering one's own positionality in research THEORY

Sansone, Livio. 2003. "Negro Parents, Black Children: Racial Classification in a Changing Brazil." Pp. 21-58 in Blackness without Ethnicity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Five racial categories on Brazilian census: branca (white), preta (black), parda (brown/mestizo), amarela (yellow/Asian), indigena. However, people argue that these are highly variable over time and region. Sansone shows that although there are stark disparities across racial groups in Brazil, the same concern for the plight of the black family or lower-class black men has not emerged as in the US. He examines why this is. Sansone argues that there are three versions of race: 1. The official categories, 2. The founding myth of brazil, a mixing of white, black, and indigenous, and 3. The color continuum used in everyday practice. As a result, the terms people use are highly situational and interactive. People use different terms in different places or different contexts. He also notes systematic white preference (mestiçagem); for example, Bahia is classified as a black city and most of his respondents said they lived in a black neighborhood, but only 25% identified as black. Sansone argues that in research on race in Brazil one should take into account the triangular logic used by people there. That is, it is not entirely removed of hierarchy, but also not presented as polar opposites. Finally, Sansone argues that race interacts with education, class, and region in a unique way in Brazil. He rarely saw overtly racial conflict, but notes that self-definition of color describes groups in a specific social position. CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

Glenn, Evelynn N. 2015. "Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of US Race and Gender Formation." Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1(1): 52-72.

Glenn argues for a settler colonial frame in order to historically ground the formation of racial and gender categories for various groups. In particular, she wishes to avoid treating all racisms as the same, but equally not treating them as entirely separate or unrelated. Glenn says that settler colonialism is not a historical event, but rather "an ongoing structure." She describes the unique settler aspect, as opposed to traditional colonialism, in relation to the formation of the category of indigenous people. In general, she emphasizes US settler colonialism as being about acquiring new land to settle. Beyond the obvious implications for Native Americans, she shows how this frame extended to chattel slavery and the treatment of blacks as property and labor. In turn, this expanded towards Mexicans in the form of manifest destiny and finally the view of Asians as perpetual foreigners. For each group she shows how these original historical encounters are solidified into social structure and still exist in modern forms. This is her key point that a settler colonial framework always for a context and group-specific historical approach without neglecting modern day racial structure. THEORY

Wilson, William Julius. 1997. "From Institutional to Jobless Ghettos" [pp. 3-24] and "Ghetto-Related Behavior and the Structure of Opportunity" [pp. 51-87] in When Work Disappears: World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Vintage Press.

In Chapter 1, "From Institutional to Jobless Ghettos," Wilson reflects on Massey and Denton's (1993) argument in American Apartheid, which states that "concentrated poverty is created by a pernicious interaction between a group's overall rate of poverty and its degree of segregation in society." Wilson argues that while historic racial segregation is undoubtedly a root cause of the disproportionate concentration of poverty among blacks, the theory advanced by Massey and Denton does not explain why "the concentration of poverty is certain neighborhoods of this segregated group should increase to nearly three times the group's overall rate of poverty increase" (p. 16). Wilson contends, "to understand new urban poverty one has to account for the ways in which segregation interacts with other [societal changes] to produce escalating rates of joblessness and problems of social organization," which perpetuate the cycle of concentrated poverty in inner-city ghetto neighborhoods (p. 24). Segregation exacerbates employment problems because it leads to weak informal employment referral networks, contributes to social isolation, and reduces opportunities for advancing human and social capital. The new urban poverty thus refers to the transition from "institutional ghettos" to "jobless ghettos" in the 1970s. Institutional ghettos had economic diversity, amenities and institutions, an employed tax base, informal social control, role-models, and civic engagement. The crux of this chapter is the argument that the high concentration of joblessness that characterizes new urban poverty triggers other neighborhood social problems that undermine social organization - ranging from crime, gang violence, and drug trafficking to family breakups and problems in the organization of family life. Social organization refers to "the extent to which the residents of a neighborhood are able to maintain effective control and realize their common goals" (p. 20). There are three dimensions of neighborhood social organization: (1) social networks; (2) extent of collective supervision among neighbors; and (3) resident participation in voluntary and formal institutions. Thus, formal institutions, voluntary associations, and informal networks all reflect social organization. An example of this process: as rates of drug use and firearm possession increase, perceptions of neighborhood safety decrease, which subsequently decreases involvement in voluntary associations and informal social control networks that are essential to maintain the social organization of the neighborhood. In Chapter 3, "Ghetto-Related Behavior and the Structure of Opportunity," Wilson examines the social and cultural effects of living in high-jobless and impoverished neighborhoods. He defines culture as the sharing of modes of behavior and outlooks within a community. His term "ghetto-related behaviors and attitudes" refers to "behaviors and attitudes that are found more frequently in [but are not specific to] ghetto neighborhoods" such as crime or welfare dependence (p. 52). Wilson argues that ghetto-related behaviors and attitudes have become part of neighborhood residents' cultural repertoire, which has evolved over time and represents both perceived and real differences in opportunities. These behaviors and attitudes are both reinforce the economic marginality of the residents in inner-city neighborhoods. However, the decision to act in ghetto-related ways may not reflect internalized values but rather reflect cultural adaptations to constraints and circumstances. These behaviors and attitudes are often met with passive and overt forms of disapproval, but the failure of neighborhood social organization allows these practices to occur much more frequently in ghetto neighborhoods than middle-class neighborhoods where behavioral transmission is facilitated by the presence of role models and effective social control. CLASS/LABOR

Roediger, David R. 1999. "Irish-American Workers and White Racial Formation in the Antebellum United States." Pp. 133-163 in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso.

Irish were accepted as white only when they were embraced by the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church. Whiteness was a unifying component for the Democratic Party to expand their political base by arguing for equal rights for all white men even though the Irish were marginalized by native whites, particularly on moral grounds. Meanwhile, even though the Irish were in greater competition with other whites in the labor market, they organized against blacks, because they were the easier targets. In their strategy to aspire to whiteness, they sought to remove blacks from their workplaces and remove their negative associations with blacks. DISCRIMINATION

Patterson, Orlando. 1975. "Context and Choice in Ethnic Allegiance." Pp. 305-349 in Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, edited by N. Glazer and D.P. Moynihan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Patterson argues that ethnicity is an identity (and form of group allegiance) that is chosen for socioeconomic reasons and that is dependent upon context. Class interests trump (and determine) ethnic allegiances. He argues against a static, unchanging, immutable notion of ethnicity. There is an over-emphasis on the involuntary, immutable aspects of identity (vs. Harold Isaacs), and there should be greater emphasis on ethnicity as a chosen identity. "The fact that ethnicity is chosen cannot be overemphasized." Also, he argues that ethnic group symbols (culture) are arbitrary and, as such, a "theory of ethnic cultural elements and symbols is an absurdity." In order to illustrate this point, he compares the empirical examples of the Chinese in Jamaica vs. the Chinese in Guyana. 1. Chinese in Jamaica: In Jamaica, the Chinese were able to fill a niche/gap and, in doing so, were allowed to consolidate and reinforce their cultural traits in an economic endeavor. The Chinese Jamaicans were able to go the path of segmented creolization. 2. Chinese in Guyana: In Guyana, there was a plurality of niches available and thus no opportunity for true consolidation. The Chinese here went the synthetic creolization route, adopting the dominant culture. ETHNORACIAL IDENTITY

Sampson, Robert J. 2012. "Placed" [pp. 3-30] and "The Twenty-First-Century Gold Coast and Slum" [pp. 414-426] in Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Sampson discusses how the general force of ecological concentration and neighborhood racial stratification, which scholars highlighted seventy years ago, remains pervasive in Chicago today. Building upon the work of Moynihan, the Chicago School and others, Sampson argues that social problems and dislocations have a deep neighborhood structure and relation to concentrated inequality. Not only that, the strength of the interrelatedness of poverty, crime, infant mortality, low birth weight, incarceration, and unemployment is especially stronger in communities of color. Furthermore, neighborhood social disadvantage has durable properties and tends to repeat itself and, because of racial segregation, is most salient in the black community. For these reasons, black children are particularly exposed to the cumulative effects of structural disadvantage, such that the cycle is continually reinforced. Finally, this "poverty trap" cycle can only be broken with structural interventions. What is even more striking, though, is that patterns of racial stratification and concentrated poverty are deeply stable nationwide, as shown in the enduring nature of most neighborhoods' relative economic standing over time, which contests the view that cities like Chicago are unique. These patterns point towards a process of reproduction of inequality that has been taking place for decades across American cities. Sampson goes on to investigate the perceptual and cultural bases of social inequality. His argument is that perceptions of disorder constitute a critical element of social inequality at the neighborhood level and maybe even larger areas. Indeed, the claim that some areas are disreputable and disordered triggers long-term processes that eventually reinforce stigmatized areas and contribute to the durability of concentrated inequality. Though objective visual cues of disorder do not form the causal link to crime as proponents of the broken windows theory often assume, the meanings and contexts of disorder are a central component of neighborhood change. Individual-level social position, observed disorder, racial stigma by place, and implicit bias in interpreting the effect of concentrated minority and foreign-born groups all work together to produce perceptions and feelings of disorder. Furthermore, collective (or intersubjectively shared) perceptions shape a context that constrains individual perceptions and further social outcomes. Sampson provides empirical evidence for this statement by showing that socially perceived disorder is a highly significant predictor of future poverty and outmigration. In short, "shared perceptions of disorder rather than systematically observed disorder appear to be a mechanism of durable inequality. Finally, Sampson dissects the underlying assumptions and validity of experiments that induce subjects to "trade places," such as Moving to Opportunity. In short, these experiments pose individual-level questions while neglecting "the causes or consequences of selection, neighborhood-level interventions, or the study of neighborhood social mechanisms." If we intend to learn about the effects of neighborhood interventions in an experimental design, Sampson argues, the best approach is to randomly assign interventions at the level of neighborhoods or other ecological units instead of that of the individual. NEIGHBORHOODS

Logan, John and Charles Zhang. 2010. "Global Neighborhoods: New Pathways to Diversity and Separation." American Journal of Sociology. 115(4): 1069-1109.

They argue that the theory of "invasion" and "succession," that is as blacks begin to enter white neighborhoods whites move out until they become predominantly black, needs to be rethought in the era of Hispanic and Asian immigration. While in the past stably diverse neighborhoods were exceedingly rare, Logan and Zhang argue that they are much more common now, as long as Hispanic and Asian presence precedes blacks. They argue that there are two processes taking place in "global neighborhoods." In some there still exists white flight where Asians and Hispanics are treated similarly to blacks. However, in others there are mixed areas with all four groups represented. They find some support for the buffering hypothesis, in that Hispanics and Asians can buffer the presence of blacks and lead to more sustainably diverse neighborhoods. However, white flight is still occurring and the presence of all types of minorities increases its likelihood. In some respects, increased heterogeneity has been the result of Asian, black, and Hispanic proximity, but all-white neighborhoods are still common. NEIGHBORHOODS

Pager, Devah, and Hana Shepherd. 2008. "The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets." Annual Review of Sociology 34: 181-209.

This is a straightforward review of the literature on discrimination in employment, housing, credit markets, and consumer interactions. They refer to discrimination as both differential treatment and disparate impact. Differential treatment is when individuals are treated differently by race, while disparate impact is where individuals are treated the same under set criteria, but the criteria are biased. This aspect allows one to consider actions that may not have any explicit racial content, but nonetheless contribute to disadvantage. They also distinguish discrimination from attitudes like prejudice, saying discrimination is explicitly about actions. Employment: Strong evidence of discrimination in hiring process through audit studies. Statistical evidence through fixed effects models also shows negative impact of race on unemployment, net of other characteristics. However, there is less consistent evidence on wage discrimination. Statistical data shows blacks earning less than whites, although some argue this is a result of pre-job traits like cognitive ability, rather than discrimination per se. Housing: Segregation still at similar levels, despite increasing socioeconomic standing of blacks. They argue that most data on housing discrimination uses audit studies. These studies consistently find discrimination in terms of fewer opportunities to view units, less information offered about units, less assistance with financing, and steering into certain neighborhoods. In line with the last finding, housing discrimination tends to vary significantly across neighborhoods within metropolitan areas and is highest in predominantly white areas. Finally, discrimination occurs past the point of sale and minorities are often treated unequally by landlords or neighborhood associations. Credit Markets: The research on credit markets largely focuses on mortgages, given the link between housing discrimination, the racial wealth gap, and credit gap. Blacks and Hispanics get fewer mortgages at the same level of credit as whites. In addition, the mortgages they do get come with higher interest. There is also evidence, although it is more mixed, on modern day red-lining, or a lack of credit available by neighborhood, rather than individual applicant race. Finally, in line with de-regulation and the housing crisis, minorities are more likely to get subprime mortgages. This is called the "dual-mortgage market" where prime lending is overrepresented in white neighborhoods and subprime lending is overrepresented in black neighborhoods. Consumer interactions: This category has the least research. However, there is significant research on car purchases in particular. Evidence finds that blacks pay higher markups and pay more on average for the same cars with the same bargaining strategies in audit studies. Finally, some work shows price markups in minority neighborhoods at fast food restaurants or other large chains. CLASS/LABOR

Wacquant, Loïc. 1997. "For an Analytic of Racial Domination." Political Power and Social Theory (Symposium on "Rethinking Race" with Ann Laura Stoler, Patricia Dominguez, David Roediger, and Uday Singh Mehta). 11: 221-234.

Wacquant describes what he considers 3 main flaws in the approach towards race. First, he believes there's significant conflation between folk and analytical categories. Second, he argues there's an obsession with "origins" that implies culprits and victims, rather than mechanisms. He calls the flawed approach "the logic of the trial" where there is an original sin to be discovered and atoned for, rather than examining current phenomena. Third, he argues we need to go beyond discourse of "racism," and instead talk about racialized practices and institutions that interlock to form racial domination. As a result, he argues for a turn towards new tools to analyze racial subordination, rather than new rhetoric to describe it. THEORY

Weber, Max. 1978. "Ethnic Groups." Pp. 385-398 in Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Weber refers to racial groups as "common inherited and inheritable traits" derived from "common descent." However, he argues that race only creates a group when it is subjectively perceived as a common trait. Often this is through the proximity of a racial "other" causing joint action (i.e. boundary work). In addition, regardless of why groups believed they have a shared ethnic identity, it can have strong consequences for group action. THEORY

Wilson, William Julius. 1987. "Cycles of Deprivation and the Ghetto Underclass Debate" [pp. 3-19] and "Social Change and Social Dislocations in the Inner City" [pp. 20-62] in The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Wilson (1987) aims to refocus the liberal perspective to challenge the dominant conservative views on the urban underclass and provide a more balanced intellectual discussion of why urban social problems increased in the 1970s and continue to persist. The liberal perspective can be summarized by four approaches to the urban underclass: (1) avoid describing any behavior that might be construed as unflattering or stigmatizing to ghetto residents; (2) refuse to use terms such as underclass; (3) emphasize or embrace selective evidence that denies the very existence of an underclass; and (4) emphasize racism as the explanation of urban social problems. Wilson uses the term "underclass" to refer to the heterogeneous grouping individuals and families in the most disadvantaged segments of the black urban community—outside the mainstream American society. This includes individuals experiencing long-term unemployment or joblessness, participating in crime or other 'aberrant forms of behavior,' and experiencing long-term welfare dependency. This term is specifically differentiated from "lower class." In Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson examines why the social problems of urban life in the United States disproportionately affect the urban underclass in the inner cities of contemporary America. The crux of his argument is that neighborhood poverty matters more than individual wealth for a variety of life outcomes due to "concentration effects" present in the ghetto. Wilson echoes his argument from The Declining Significance of Race that historic discrimination plays more of a role than contemporary racism in creating barriers to mobility and socially isolated neighborhoods. Prior to 1960, inner-city community exhibited features of social organization, including a sense of community, positive neighborhood identification, and explicit mechanisms of social control including norms and sanctions. However, subsequent macro-structural forces created a disproportionate concentration of the most disadvantaged segments of the urban black population within inner-city neighborhoods. Within these ecological niches, the structural conditions of poverty and concentrated joblessness due to the relocation of urban jobs created a "distinct social milieu" - patterns of social interactions and behavior. The relocation of manufacturing jobs to the suburbs, the increasing out-migration of middle-class blacks, and the increasing rate of unemployment and joblessness caused these communities to become "socially isolated" from individuals and institutions within the mainstream society (p. 60). Wilson argues that the middle-class creates a "social buffer" from many of the otherwise prolific "social dislocations" associated with the urban underclass by the presence of role models, employment connections, and the positive influences of the middle-class in neighborhood institutions such as schools and churches due to financial involvement and time input. Furthermore, these demographic and economic shifts led to a decrease of the Marriageable Male Index (MMI), which may partially explain the rate of female-headed households and out-of-wedlock births. According to this model, "culture is a response to social structural constraints and opportunities" (p. 61). The central component of Wilson's concentration effects argument is his focus on black male unemployment, which increased steadily until a third of all young black men were unemployed by the mid-1980s. This crisis of joblessness and increasing racial inequality within the labor market has primarily been explained by socio-economic theories, including the spatial and skills mismatch hypotheses. The spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that the relocation of manufacturing jobs from the inner-city to the suburbs severed urban blacks' access to those positions. The skills mismatch hypothesis extrapolates from this theory to argue that spatial mismatch is particularly harmful due to the incongruity between the educational requirements of the service sector jobs that had come to dominate the urban labor market on the one hand and low educational achievement of inner-city black males on the other. The spatial mismatch hypothesis in particular is a central component of Wilson's social isolation theory, which argues that the lack of access to both jobs and job networks within disadvantaged neighborhoods contribute to the persistence of concentrated joblessness and poverty. CLASS/LABOR

Roth, Wendy. 2016. "The Multiple Dimensions of Race" Ethnic and Racial Studies 39(8): 1310-1338.

Abstract: Increasing numbers of people in the United States and beyond experience 'race' not as a single, consistent identity but as a number of conflicting dimensions. This article distinguishes the multiple dimensions of the concept of race, including racial identity, self-classification, observed race, reflected race, phenotype, and racial ancestry. With the word 'race' used as a proxy for each of these dimensions, much of our scholarship and public discourse is actually comparing across several distinct, albeit correlated, variables. Yet which dimension of race is used can significantly influence findings of racial inequality. I synthesize scholarship on the multiple dimensions of race, and situate in this framework distinctive literatures on colourism and genetic ancestry inference. I also map the relationship between the multidimensionality of race and processes of racial fluidity and racial boundary change. Key Takeaways: Roth argues that most scholarship conflates several interrelated but distinct phenomenon under the broad heading of race. She notes that, for example, treating self-identification as a proxy for all axes of race can significantly impact results. She presents a typology that includes racial identity, self-classification, observed race, reflected race, phenotype, and racial ancestry. She then goes on to give examples about when each one is appropriate for research design. For example, using racial identity may be appropriate when studying outcomes that depend on internal self-identification, such as political mobilization or social networks. On the other hand, observed race may be more important when studying how others perceive you, such as in work on discrimination. ETHNORACIAL IDENTITY

Wimmer, Andreas. 2008. "The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries: A Multilevel Process Theory." American Journal of Sociology 113(4): 970-1022.

Abstract: Primordialist and constructivist authors have debated the nature of ethnicity "as such" and therefore failed to explain why its characteristics vary so dramatically across cases, displaying different degrees of social closure, political salience, cultural distinctiveness, and historical stability. The author introduces a multilevel process theory to understand how these characteristics are generated and transformed over time. The theory assumes that ethnic boundaries are the outcome of the classificatory struggles and negotiations between actors situated in a social field. Three characteristics of a field—the institutional order, distribution of power, and political networks— determine which actors will adopt which strategy of ethnic boundary making. The author then discusses the conditions under which these negotiations will lead to a shared understanding of the location and meaning of boundaries. The nature of this consensus explains the particular characteristics of an ethnic boundary. A final section identifies endogenous and exogenous mechanisms of change. Key Takeaways: Ethnic differentiation and boundaries are strategically chosen by actors in order to best support their claims for to prestige, moral worth and political power. Yet, ethnic boundary making is constrained by macrolevel attributes of the social field, such as the political/ institutional order, power hierarchies/ positioning, and network of political alliances. He is less interested in discovering what ethnicity "really is" and more interested in understanding why there are so many variable forms of ethnicity. THEORY

Posel, Deborah. 2001. "Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth Century South Africa." African Studies Review 44(2): 87-113.

Abstract: This paper is an analysis of state practice in respect of racial classification and its epistemological underpinnings in twentieth-century South Africa. It shows how apartheid racial categories—drawing heavily on those enacted by the segregationist state—were wielded as instruments of surveillance and control by a state animated by fantasies of omniscience as much as omnipotence. The architects of apartheid racial classification policies recognized explicitly that racial categories were constructs, rather than descriptions of real essences—a version of the idea of race which enabled the bureaucratization of "common sense" notions of racial difference and which contributed directly to the enormous powers wielded by racial classifiers. If constructs, these categories were powerfully rooted in the materiality of everyday life. The ubiquity of the state's racial designations, and the extent to which they meshed with lived hierarchies of class and status, meant that apartheid's racial grid was strongly imprinted in the subjective experience of race. Key Takeaways: These often ambiguous and imprecise racial categories were solidified through apartheid policy and remain today. Posel ends on a potentially odd "color-blind" conclusion. That is, she argues that current-day policies intended to benefit the victims of apartheid that uses the same classification system inadvertently furthers its lifespan. CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Stephen Raudenbush. 2005. "Social Anatomy of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Violence." American Journal of Public Health 95: 224-232.

Abstract: We analyzed key individual, family, and neighborhood factors to assess competing hypotheses regarding racial/ethnic gaps in perpetrating violence. From 1995 to 2002, we collected 3 waves of data on 2974 participants aged 18 to 25 years living in 180 Chicago neighborhoods, augmented by a separate community survey of 8782 Chicago residents. The odds of perpetrating violence were 85% higher for Blacks compared with Whites, whereas Latino-perpetrated violence was 10% lower. Yet the majority of the Black-White gap (over 60%) and the entire Latino-White gap were explained primarily by the marital status of parents, immigrant generation, and dimensions of neighborhood social context. The results imply that generic interventions to improve neighborhood conditions and support families may reduce racial gaps in violence. Summary: Sampson, Morenoff, and Raudenbush (2005) evaluate competing explanations of variation by race in perpetuation of crime. Two thirds of the black-white and Latino-white disparities in crime rates are explained by parents' marital status, immigrant generation, residential stability, cognitive ability, impulsivity, and - most notably - neighborhood disadvantage. Data from the PHDCN support the thesis that the higher rate of violence among is due to their differential exposure to salient neighborhood conditions, such as the geographic concentration of poverty and reduced informal community controls. Thus, crime is a place-based phenomenon, so generic neighborhood-level interventions may address racial disparities in crime rates. Keywords: racial disparities in criminal behavior; individual-level factors such as parents' marital status, immigrant generation, length of residence, verbal/reading ability, impulsivity; community-level factors such as neighborhood disadvantage Method: multilevel analyses using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) Longitudinal Cohort Study and Community Survey, conducted between 1995 and 2002 Notes: Using data from PHDCN, Sampson, Morenoff, and Raudenbush adjudicate empirically among three major contextual perspectives of racial disparities in criminal offending: (1) the higher rate of violence among blacks is often attributed to a matriarchal pattern of family structure and the prevalence of single-parent, female-headed families; (2) the higher rate of violence among blacks is attributed to racial differences in family socioeconomic context; and (3) the higher rate of violence among is attributed to minority groups' differential exposure to salient neighborhood conditions, such as the geographic concentration of poverty and reduced informal community controls, that cannot be explained by personal or family circumstances. They're analyses confirm and support the third of these perspectives. CRIME

Bleich, Erik. 2011. "Balancing Public Values - The Big Picture" [pp. 3-16] and "Holocaust Denial and Its Extremes" [pp. 44-84] in The Freedom to be Racist? How the United States and Europe Struggle to Preserve Freedom and Combat Racism. Oxford University Press.

All liberal democracies must balance upholding freedom and combating racism. This book takes a unique comparative approach and examines three axes of freedom— speech, association, and opinion-as-motive. In chapter 3, Bleich takes a look at holocaust denial laws, which are often considered the most controversial or extreme restrictions of freedom of expression. In many ways holocaust denial is tricky, because the link to racist action is more indirect than in other examples. Because of this, Bleich argues that it is surprising that holocaust denial laws have moved faster than any other restrictions and have picked up speed since the 1980s. Bleich contrasts this with the USA, which he says has bucked the trend on limiting freedom of expression to be racist. However, he argues that the USA does still have limits COMPARATIVE

Bobo, Lawrence and James Kluegel. 1997. "Laissez Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology." Pp. 15-44 in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s, edited by S. Tuch and J. Martin. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Bobo and Kluegel extend Bobo's 1988 paper and build a theory of Laissez Faire Racism. They are again interested in the paradox of white support for racial equality but lack of support for policy change. They specifically look at the question of whether the racial attitudes of white Americans reflect less racism now than they have in the past and argue that there's been a shift from Jim Crow Racism to Laissez Faire Racism. Laissez Faire Racism is defined as involving "persistent negative stereotyping of African Americans, a tendency to blame blacks themselves for the black-white gap in socioeconomic standing, and resistance to meaningful policy efforts to ameliorate America's racism social condition and institutions." Instead of the state enforced inequality of the Jim Crow era, Laissez Faire Racism relies on the market and informal bias to recreate and sometimes worsen racial inequality. The authors use survey data to support their arguments about racial attitudes, and they use historical analysis of the Civil Rights Movement and of structural changes in the U.S. (e.g. economic shift away from cotton) to examine the factors that led to this shift. Laissez Faire Racism differs from symbolic racism in that it is explicitly based in a historical analysis of the changing economics and politics of race in the U.S. (similar to Omi and Winant's attempt to locate racism in historical context), and it is rooted in Blumer's theory of prejudice as a sense of group position. DISCRIMINATION

Bourdieu, Pierre. [1982] 1990. "The Force of Representation: Notes on the Idea of Region." Pp. 220-228, 286-288 in Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu emphasizes the ways that ethnicity is created in an attempt to seek "objective criteria" of regional or ethnic identity, but in reality is the practice of evaluating mental representations or objectified representations, by which he means symbols. This means debates surrounding ethnicity are largely surrounding the politics of recognizing certain symbols as representations of a group. "Struggles over ethnic or regional identity...are a particular case of the different struggles over classifications, struggles over the monopoly of the power to make people see and believe, to get them to know and recognize, to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social world and, thereby, to make and unmake groups. What is at stake here is the power of imposing a vision of the social world." He calls this a "performative discourse," by which people impose a view of "natural" classification of regions, despite there existing no such thing. Nonetheless, Bourdieu resists dichotomizing the objective and the subjective, saying that the interplay between the two is the nature of the social world. He ends by examining the role of science in this debate, cautioning against its tendency to "demystify" the subjective and propose an objective classification scheme. THEORY

Sampson, Robert J. and Wilson, William J., 1995. "Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality." Pp. 37-56 in Crime and Inequality, edited by J. Hagan and R. Peterson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Broadly speaking, Sampson and Wilson seek to address the link between race and crime. They note that gun violence and homicides have been steadily increasing throughout the '80s for black men, while staying stable for whites. They argue that because people are so hesitant to speak about this link, there has been a lack of research with strong evidence. They seek to remedy this by bridging the structural and cultural perspectives through a focus on neighborhoods and communities. In particular, they point out that blacks and whites reside in drastically different ecological contexts, regardless of individual characteristics. These macro-level patterns of segregation and deprivation lead to the concentration of poverty, which in turn undermines social organization and leads to an increase in crime. They contrast this macro-level approach to the micro-level approach in criminology that seeks to understand which individuals offend and which do not. Instead, they seek to identify cities and neighborhoods that exert macro-level pressure on everyone within them. They use this perspective to promote future research on the areas of ecological concentration of poverty, segregation, residential mobility, family disruption, and social organization. They argue that a focus on this aspects leads to better prevention-oriented policy, rather than after-the-fact solutions that ignore structural context. CRIME

Brubaker, Rogers and Frederick Cooper. 2000. "Beyond Identity." Theory and Society, 29: 1-47.

Brubaker and Cooper (2000) are concerned with the analytical utility of the term and concept of identity. They provide a historical timeline of the use of "identity" in the social sciences. Erik Erikson popularized the term in the 1960s; Allport (1954)'s The Nature of Prejudice linked identity to ethnicity and race; Goffman and symbolic interactionist school; Berger and the constructivist school; 1980s when race, class and gender became the "holy trinity" of literary and cultural studies. Identity is both a "category of practice" (Bourdieu), meaning a meaningful folk category of everyday experience and also a "category of analysis" used by social scientists. B & C suggest that, in terms of analysis, three alternative conceptions might be more useful than the concept "identity." (1) Identification and categorization—this thinks of identity as a process and forces analysts to specify the agents doing the identifying, allowing differentiation between self-identity and identity by others; (2) Self-understanding and social location—this concept should be used to understand an actor's sense of self and her social location and how she is prepared to act on basis of her understandings; (3) Commonality (the sharing of common attributes), connectedness (relational ties), and groupness (the combination of commonality and connectedness and the sense of belonging to a group, like an ethnicity). They argue against the constructivist ("soft") take on identity (wherein "identity" is thought of as fluid, constructed, and multiple), suggesting that it leaves "identity" as a meaningless term. They state: "If identity is everywhere, it is nowhere. If it is fluid, how can we understand the ways in which self-understandings may harden, congeal, and crystallize? If it is constructed, how can we understand the sometimes coercive force of external identifications?" ETHNORACIAL IDENTITY

Brubaker, Rogers. 2009. "Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism." Annual Review of Sociology 35: 21-42.

Brubaker argues that in the past research on ethnicity, race, and nationalism where largely conducted independently, and often within a narrow regional or disciplinary scope. In some respects this remains the case, but he notes the emergence of a global comparative field studying these three concepts as "a single integrated family of forms of cultural understanding, social organization, and political contestation." He emphasizes how modern research is global in the sense that it understands the world as a single integrated space. Even research on a specific region tracks the diffusion of cultural understandings of race and ethnicity, as well as other features of global institutionalism. He also says that some scholars still emphasize the hard differences between race and ethnicity, but increasingly research, even if defining the two differently, emphasizes their overlap and blurry boundary. He argues that key questions in the field, such as criteria of membership, external categorization vs. internal identification, and social closure, do not map neatly onto a clean distinction between race and ethnicity. The second major trend is the effort to go beyond essentialist research that defines groups as fixed and given. He refers to this as "groupism," where groups are treated as internally homogenous and externally bounded unified actors. THEORY

Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wippermann. 2013. Chapters 2-3. Pp. 23-75 in The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Burleigh and Wippermann argue that although Nazi Germany did not invent race or racism, it was the first state whose dogma and practice was racism. In particular, they discuss the ways its ideology was derived from racial-anthropological theories, using "scientific" classification, and from racial anti-Semitic theories defining Jews as the embodiment of modern evils. They then go on to discuss the was racism was implemented as state policy. While many of the laws were created on an ad-hoc basis, they created the legal basis for mass murder. In fact, anti-Semitic legislation was just one component of a broader series of policies targeted towards alien races "less valuable" than the Germanic people. This was done both overtly and covertly. For example, they targeted laws at removing welfare from families with working mothers, which paved the way for medical inspection and racial classification of the population. Child benefits were then further unequally distributed. These types of medical and scientific policy laid the groundwork for the more extreme versions that came later. CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

Quillian, Lincoln. 2012. "Segregation and Poverty Concentration: The Role of Three Segregations." American Sociological Review 77(3): 354-379.

Central to American Apartheid is the idea that there's an interaction between racial segregation and minority poverty rates that combine to intensify concentrated poverty. However, despite the compelling theoretical model and many other valid empirical findings, the evidence is limited. Quillian argues that this is a result of mis specifying segregation as only having two forms: racial segregation and segregation of the poor within race. Instead, he argues that a third form, segregation from non-poor outgroup members, when combined with the original two provides evidence for Massey's original point. In other words, the non-black/Hispanic neighbors of blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately poor, contributing to the concentration of poverty. NEIGHBORHOODS

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1994. "Class" [pp. 53-74] and "Nation" [pp. 75-91] in Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 4: outlines a theory of race and racism. The authors define race as an element of social structure, "a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies." Racial formation is the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created and destroyed. This happens through racial projects, "an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines." This can happen at the macro level (e.g. right- and left-wing politics, state activity) and at the micro level (everyday interaction), and can be applied historically to identify racial formation dynamics in the past. The emergence of a modern conception of race occurred with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas when society was divided into Europeans and "Others," an event that was first justified religiously and then scientifically and still has repercussions today. The authors argue that race is now primarily a political phenomenon. The U.S. began as a racial dictatorship (defining American identity as white) and has undergone a slow transition toward a democracy with racial inequality maintained through hegemony. Racism refers only to those racial projects that create or reproduce structures of domination based on essentialist categories of race. This definition allows for the incorporation of context and focuses on "the 'work' essentialism does for domination." Like Bobo, the authors argue that racism today is more complex than in the past and is a simultaneous interplay between social structure and ideological beliefs. Chapter 5: Change in the racial order happens through an interplay between social movements that come into being as a result of political projects that seek to transform the dominant racial ideology (the positions of both blacks and whites) and policies and programs of the state, which is inherently racial. Its trajectory tends to be a pattern of conflict and accommodation. DISCRIMINATION

Davis, James F. 1991. "The Nation's Rule" [pp. 1-16], "Conflicting Rules" [pp.31-50], and "The Rule Becomes Firm" [pp. 51-80] in Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition. College Station, PA: Penn State University Press.

Davis asks "how does a person get defined as black, both socially and legally, in the United States?" He discusses the one-drop rule as "any person with any known black ancestry" being black. He argues that the one-drop rule is unique to blacks as a group and unique to the US. For example, the concept of passing rests on the one-drop rule. Should someone passing as white just be white? Nonetheless, most Americans are unaware of this uniqueness and this definition is often taken for granted. Davis examines its historical development in order to gain knowledge about race-relations in the US. First, Davis shows that at one point in time there were competing classification systems between the one-drop rule and a rule that defined mulattos as halfway in between whites and blacks. In fact, the one-drop rule did not become widely accepted until the 1920s, but by then there were generations of miscegenation. In the upper south (Virginia) a form of the one drop rule was defined as anyone with a black parent or grandparent from early on. Davis argues that this is because most miscegenation here was between lower-class whites and slaves, therefore the law was ready to see them as low-status. However, in the Carolinas and Louisiana, most white parents were wealthy, and as a result, their mulatto children often became high-status in the free black community. In fact, South Carolina courts legally rejected the one drop rule well into the 1850s. Finally, on black belt plantations in the expanding West, mixed-race children began to develop the distinctions between field and house slaves. This created some internal distinction within the black population but maintained a one-drop approach. Reconstruction and the subsequent rise of the KKK was strongly based around anti-miscegenation and threat from newly freed blacks, helping to grow anti-mulatto sentiment. The rule eventually became hardened during the Jim Crow period. CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

Pattillo, Mary. 2007. "Introduction." Pp. 1-30 in Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City. University of Chicago Press.

Description (UChicago Press): There was a time when North Kenwood-Oakland was plagued by gangs, drugs, violence, and the font of poverty from which they sprang. But in the late 1980s, activists rose up to tackle the social problems that had plagued the area for decades. Black on the Block tells the remarkable story of how these residents laid the groundwork for a revitalized and self-consciously black neighborhood that continues to flourish today. But theirs is not a tale of easy consensus and political unity, and here Pattillo teases out the divergent class interests that have come to define black communities like North Kenwood-Oakland. She explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old-timers as they clash over the social implications of gentrification. Along the way, Pattillo highlights the conflicted but crucial role that middle-class blacks play in transforming such districts as they negotiate between established centers of white economic and political power and the needs of their less fortunate black neighbors. Key Takeaways: Pattillo emphasizes that there is not one unified black political agenda. While at the national level blacks may be relatively united behind the democratic party, the reality of most politics is local. Pattillo argues that on issues of public spaces, jobs, schools, housing, and more blacks are split along the lines of seniority in neighborhood, profession, home ownership, and age. In particular, she argues that class distinctions are highly salient but understudied. In addition, middle-class blacks often act as brokers with whites outside the neighborhood to forge alliances. NEIGHBORHOODS

Browning, Christopher R. and Aubrey L. Jackson. 2013. "The Social Ecology of Public Space: Active Streets and Violent Crime in Urban Neighborhoods." Criminology 51(4): 1009-1043.

Drawing on one element of Jacobs' (1961) discussion of the social control benefits of "eyes on the street," this paper explores the link between the prevalence of active streets and violence in urban neighborhoods. Three distinct data sources from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods are merged to explore the functional form and potential contingency of the active streets-violence relationship: (1) video data capturing the presence of people on neighborhood streets; (2) longitudinal data on adolescents (ages 11 to 16) and their self-reports of witnessing severe violence; and (3) community survey data on neighborhood social organizational characteristics. Results from multilevel models indicate that the proportion of neighborhood streets with adults present exhibits a nonlinear association with exposure to severe violence. At low prevalence, the increasing prevalence of active streets is positively associated with violence exposure. Beyond a threshold, however, increases in the prevalence of active streets serves to reduce the likelihood of violence exposure. The analyses offer no evidence that the curvilinear association between active streets and violence varies by levels of collective efficacy, and only limited evidence that it varies by anonymity. Analyses of data on homicide and violent victimization corroborate these findings. NEIGHBORHOODS

Du Bois, W.E.B. 2004. "Introduction" [pp. 7-19], "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" [pp. 29-33], and "The Concept of Race" [pp. 47-51] in The Social Theory of W.E.B. Du Bois edited by Phil Zuckerman London: Pine Forge Press.

Du Bois begins the first chapter with what he says is the often-unasked question, "how does it feel to be a problem." He goes on to outline his theory of double consciousness, wherein African-Americans are constantly measuring themselves through the criteria of a racist society and attempting to reconcile the "two-ness" of being black and American. He says the history of African-Americans is attempting to attain true self-consciousness. In this sense, they are wishing neither to become more "American" or more "African," but rather understanding it's possible to be both. THEORY

Fernandez, Roberto M. and Isabel Fernandez-Mateo. 2006. "Networks, Race, and Hiring." American Sociological Review 71(1): 42-71.

Fernandez and Fernandez-Mateo argue that the literature on race and social networks in hiring is often contradictory and measures several distinct ways that networks can matter for hiring. For example, more recent research has dismissed the idea that minorities do not have social networks in the job market. Instead, it shows that minorities are often unable to get good jobs from their networks. However, what they call the wrong network problem could be due to a lack of minorities at several points in the hiring process. They're paper seeks to outline this and examine which aspects actually contribute to minority underrepresentation. For example, for a referral process to work in favor of minorities, they must be represented at the job, refer other minorities, and have employers who favor referral applicants. Otherwise, the network will not result in improved job prospects. They find that at the firm they investigate minorities are not underrepresented in positions nor are they less likely to refer. In addition, minorities are also more likely to refer other minorities. Finally, they find little evidence of discrimination in the hiring process, except towards Asian males. They hypothesize that this is because Asians were highly successful in referring, and as a result they were already overrepresented at the firm, so the employer did intend to limit their increase. Nonetheless, they question the wrong network hypothesis and encourage further research to be precise about which stage of the hiring process they believe discrimination occurs at. CLASS/LABOR

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2008. "The Strange Enigma of Race in Contemporary America: [pp. 1-16] and "The Central Frames of Color-Blind Racism" [pp. 53-76] in Racism without Racists. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Few people claim to be racist and most people insist to act in a "color-blind" way. However, race still continues to impact virtually every outcome in the US. Bonilla-Silva seeks to ask how such a high degree of racial inequality is possible in an era when whites insist race is no longer relevant? Secondarily, he seeks to examine how whites explain this contradiction. He argues that this is a result of color-blind racism, the dominant ideology since the end of Jim Crow racism in the 1960s. Instead of attributed blacks' failures to biological and moral inferiority, he says color-blind racism attributes it to market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and cultural limitations. This is the result of a change towards more covert, rather than overt mechanisms of racism. For example, residential segregation is now accomplished without overtly discriminatory policies, but nonetheless remains at similar levels. Bonilla-Silva argues that color-blind racism allows whites to maintain their position in the hierarchy without sounding racist. Bonilla-Silva describes 4 schools explaining the decline in Jim Crow racial attitudes: 1. racial optimists 2. racial pesoptimists 3. symbolic racism 4. laissez-faire racism He says laissez-faire racism is the most compatible with color-blind racism, but he has one theoretical critique. He believes Bobo et al. still view racism as an individual psychological attitude. Instead, Bonilla-Silva argues that people's actions correspond to their position within the larger system, regardless of outward disposition. Bonilla-Silva goes on to describe 4 frames of color-blind racism: abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism. Bonilla-Silva argues that abstract liberalism is the most foundational to color-blind racism, but also the most difficult to understand. He says it involves using the ideas of political liberalism ("equality of opportunity") and economic liberalism to explain racial matters. In this manner you can appear moral, while opposing things like affirmative action because they give "preferential treatment." Naturalization allows people to explain away racism as a natural occurrence, such as people preferring to live with their own. Cultural racism involves making claims about the culture of a group to explain their standing ("they don't value education"). Minimalization involves suggesting discrimination is no longer a central factor ("it's better now than in the past"). DISCRIMINATION

Massey, Douglas and Nancy Denton. 1993. "The Missing Link" [pp. 1-16], "The Construction of the Ghetto" [pp. 17-59], "The Persistence of the Ghetto" [pp. 60-82], and "The Continuing Causes of Segregation" [pp. 83-114] in American Apartheid. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Focus on Chapters 1 and 2 for a general overview. Chapter 3 and 4 are relevant for those of interested in neighborhood studies. Notes: In Chapter 1, "The Missing Link," Massey and Denton (1993) argue that racial segregation is: (1) the missing link in prior attempts to understand the plight of the urban poor; (2) the key structural factor responsible for perpetuating black poverty in the U.S.; and (3) was manufactured through a series of self-conscious actions and purposeful institutional arrangements perpetrated by whites. Wilson (1987) argues in The Truly Disadvantaged that persistent urban poverty stemmed primarily from the structural transformation of the inner-city economy due to a complex interplay of civil rights policy and a historical legacy of discrimination. However, Massey and Denton argue that Wilson's structural argument would not have had the result it did without segregation. Additionally, they emphasize that previous focus on flight of black middle class deflects attention from the real issue - the limitation of black residential options through segregation. Racial segregation - and its characteristic institutional form, the black ghetto - are the key structural factors responsible for the perpetuation of black poverty in the United States. Massey and Denton refer to residential segregation as, "The institutional apparatus that supports other racially discriminatory processes." In Chapter 2, "The Construction of the Ghetto," Massey and Denton trace the historical construction of the black ghetto during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They define a "ghetto" as a set of neighborhoods exclusively inhabited by members of one group, within which virtually all members of that group live. For urban blacks, the ghetto has been the paradigmatic residential configuration for at least eighty years. However, high levels of black-white segregation were not always characteristic of American urban areas. White America, individually and collectively, is responsible for the black ghetto. Thus, the segregated ghetto is the product of institutionalized racism and systematic racial practices such as neighborhood association restrictive covenants, redlining by banks and insurance companies, panic peddling, blockbusting, and steering by real estate agents, and the restriction of public housing projects to low-income areas. Nineteenth century industrialization and the massive migration of blacks from farms to cities spawned the black ghetto then the beginning of twentieth century saw an increasing urban black population confined to a smaller number of neighborhoods, increasing the spatial isolation of blacks. The authors use two segregation indices: the index of dissimilarity and the index of isolation. 1. The standard measure of segregation is the index of dissimilarity, which captures the degree to which blacks and whites are evenly spread among neighborhoods in a city. The index of dissimilarity gives the percentage of blacks who would have to move to achieve an "even" residential pattern, define as one where every neighborhood replicates the racial composition of the city. 2. The isolation index measures the average percentage of blacks in neighborhoods across the city and captures the extent to which blacks live within neighborhoods that are predominantly black. A value of 100% means that all black people live in totally black areas; a value under 50% means that blacks are more likely to have whites than blacks as neighbors. Massey and Denton also note three distinctions between black and immigrant European ghettos: (1) immigrant enclaves are not homogeneous, but contain a wide variety of nationalities; (2) most European ethnics do not live in immigrant ghettos; and (3) ghettos are a permanent feature of black residential life, but are a fleeting, transitory stage in immigrant assimilation. In the post-WWII era, the distinguishing feature of racial segregation was the role of government in maintaining the color line, resting on a foundation of long-standing white racial prejudice including realtor and homeowner interpersonal discrimination and institutionalized racial discrimination within urban housing markets. In Chapter 3, "The Persistence of the Ghetto," Massey and Denton show that high levels of black-white segregation had become universal in American cities by 1970, and despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, this situation had not changed much by 1980. In the 1970s, there was a high degree of physical separation and high degree of spatial isolation among blacks than other racial and ethnic groups. Even under favorable conditions blacks were twice as isolated as Hispanics and Asians and 60% more segregated. Black suburbs replicate the problems of the inner city, black suburbanization often does not eliminate black-white disparities in residential quality nor does it lead to black-white integration. Postwar pattern of ghetto formation involved two actions by whites: discrimination against blacks to keep them from entering all neighborhoods except those near ghetto and avoidance of those neighborhoods threatened with racial turnover. Massey and Denton also emphasize in this chapter that the dissimilarity and isolation indices reveal little about the spatial arrangement of predominantly black community areas, which may be distributed in a variety of ways. Segregation may be conceptualized in terms of five distinct dimensions of geographic variation. A high score on any single dimension removes blacks from full participation in urban society and limits their access to benefits. A subset of U.S. metropolitan statistical areas has a high score on at least four of the five dimensions, which Massey and Denton term "hyper-segregation." 1. Uneveness (i.e., dissimilarity): blacks may be distributed so that they are overrepresented in some areas and underrepresented in others; 2. Isolation: blacks may be distributed so that they rarely share a neighborhood with whites; 3. Clustered: black neighborhoods may be tightly clustered to form one large contiguous enclave or scattered about in checkerboard fashion; 4. Concentrated: black neighborhoods may be concentrated within a very small area or settled sparsely throughout the urban environment; 5. Centralized: black neighborhoods may be spatially centralized around the urban core or spread out along the periphery. In Chapter 4, "The Continuing Causes of Segregation," Massey and Denton examine why black segregation continues to be so extreme. They find that the residential segregation of African Americans cannot be attributed in any meaningful way to the SES disadvantages they experience, however serious. No matter how SES is measured, black segregation remains universally high while that of Hispanics and Asians falls progressively as status rises. Race is what matters. Blacks are not voluntarily segregated, and the black ghetto maintained by real estate agent discrimination and racially biased financial institutions. Strong link between levels of prejudice and discrimination and degree of segregation and spatial isolation that blacks experience. Race the dominant organizing principle in housing and residential patterns. Blacks and whites have a common commitment to, but different definition of segregation; whites prefer smaller percentages of residential mixing. NEIGHBORHOODS

Fox, Cybelle, and Thomas A. Guglielmo. 2012. "Defining America's Racial Boundaries: Blacks, Mexicans, and European Immigrants, 1890-1945." American Journal of Sociology 118(2): 327-379.

Fox and Guglielmo argue that contemporary race/immigration use the historical example of European immigrants to make predictions about the future without fully understanding the debates still surrounding European immigrants. For example, if they were truly considered non-white and then became white has very different implications than if they were considered a sub-category of white and moved more into the mainstream. They also argue that the example of past Mexican migration is overlooked, but both are needlessly muddled. As a result, they hope to systematically remedy these historiographical failures, drawing on the social science literature of boundary processes. In particular, they note the benefits of simultaneously comparing the boundaries of blacks, Mexicans, and European Immigrants, rather than past research which has only compared two groups at once. Their main argument has 3 components: 1. There was a bright boundary between blacks and whites that was widely recognized and institutionalized and monumentally significant for both life chances and social distance. 2. There was no boundary between whites and European immigrants. In institutional settings European immigrants were universally considered white. They argue that there at times was a boundary based on religion, citizenship, etc., but never race. In other words the boundary of whiteness did not blur, but rather the boundary between white groups did, since Southern European immigrants were still always considered white. 3. The white-Mexican boundary was usually recognized and significant for life chances, but inconsistently institutionalized. Which side of the line Mexicans fell on varied by time and place, as well as generation, class, and skin tone. They describe this as a boundary straddling, rather than an intermediate stage on the way to whiteness (Alba). This is because it was not unidirectional, nor did it eventually result in some more stable categorization. ETHNORACIAL IDENTITY

Go, Julian. 2017. "Introduction" [pp. 1-17], "Waves of Postcolonial Thought" [pp. 18-63], and "The Postcolonial Challenge" [pp. 64-102] in Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory. Oxford University Press.

Go introduces social theory and postcolonial thought as being opposed, in that social theory was born out of empire, whereas postcolonial theory was in opposition to empire. As a result, social theory has been institutionalized as sociology, whereas postcolonial theory is the humanities. Thus, the overarching question of the book is "can social theory and postcolonial thought be reconciled?" Go argues that in many ways postcolonial thought is to social theory what anticolonial revolution is to empire. That is, the challenge to social theory might prove "insurrectionary." Go argues that for gender theory gender relations are seen as foundational, for Marxist theory capitalism is seen as foundational, and similarly for postcolonial theory empire is seen as foundational. However, colonialism and empire have not been subject to nearly the same amount of theorizing in sociology. In this sense, sociology has been nearly neglectful in its treatment of postcolonial thought given its key role in modernity, a subject sociology is intimately linked with. Go concludes by arguing that a reconciliation is not impossible. In fact, he says that social theory already has the "scaffolding" of postcolonial thought and that a new third wave of postcolonial thought in the social sciences may be underway. 2 waves: 1st wave: fanon et al. 2nd wave: post-Orientalism. This wave emphasizes how the structures of empire influence how we see and understand the world. This central point of the second wave is what Go believes postcolonial thought can offer. In particular, not only was sociology literally complicit in imperialism, but it currently retains its influence. Orientalism: classical social theory is based heavily in essentialist comparisons with non-Western societies. Go argues that modern theorists like Bourdieu and Giddens maintain this binary West-primitive other view. Hiding empire: Early sociology was inherently about modernity, but somehow colonialism is conspicuously absent. Go argues that one modern version of this is the artificial bifurcation of empires. That is, sociologists view internal countries and their external colonies precisely as divided into these two parts, rather than as one integrative whole. Agency of colonialism: classical and modern sociology actively mask any agency on the part of the subaltern. In particular, he accuses the theory of the diffusion of culture in world-systems theory as being overly linear in its interpretation and ignoring any culture on behalf of the periphery. Metrocentrism: He refers to this as the umbrella term under which Eurocentrism falls. That is, the local is unreflexively deemed to be universal. The categories, concepts, and theories of Europe are transposed onto the rest of the world. THEORY

Lamont, Michèle. 2000. "Euphemized Racism: Moral qua Racial Boundaries" [pp. 55-96] and "Racism Compared" [pp. 169-214] in The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Groups in relatively similar structural positions can draw very different boundaries and senses of morality due to their institutional environments and/or exposure to subcultures with different sets of cultural repertoires. They use these different conceptions of morality to draw symbolic boundaries of moral worth along racial lines that are affected by a sense of threat to group position and fears of being demographically outnumbered and of losing status as Americans. Racism among Americans is legitimized because the moral boundaries employ universal criteria of evaluation. What's the point/contribution? Chapter 2: Moral and racial boundaries are intertwined among American workers and are shaped by the institutions (e.g. churches, political parties, media) and cultural repertoires to which blacks and whites have access. Whites confound poverty, crime, laziness, and lack of family values with blackness, and emphasize the individual and the disciplined self. Blacks think of whites as having a superior attitude and emphasize the collective and the caring self. Chapter 5: Compares French and American racism. French workers resent North African immigrants because of their alleged laziness, parasitism, and perceived cultural incompatibility. Meanwhile, "the lower salience of racism in France [against blacks in general] can be attributed in part to the impact of republicanism," which downplays the salience of skin color [as opposed to French vs. not French] in the French public sphere. What's the theoretical framework? Groups in relatively similar structural positions can draw very different boundaries and senses of morality due to their environments and/or exposure to subcultures with different sets of cultural repertoires. They use these different conceptions of morality to draw symbolic boundaries of moral worth along racial lines that are affected by a sense of threat to group position and fears of being demographically outnumbered and of losing status as Americans. Racism among Americans is legitimized because the moral boundaries employ universal criteria of evaluation. DISCRIMINATION

Hochschild, Jennifer and Brenna Marea Powell. 2008. "Racial Reorganization and the United State Census 1850-1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race." Studies in American Political Development. 22(1): 59-96.

Hochschild and Powell ask two major questions. First, why was the Census Bureau's racial categorization so unstable in this time period? Second, how do censuses relate to the ethnoracial order more generally? For the first question, they argue that census classifications were a result of a combination of "contestation between Congress and the bureaucracy over political control, elected and appointed officials' commitment to scientific integrity, and the pull of ideological beliefs about race on the part of all actors." As a result, they largely maintained white supremacy, but caused great confusion about who whites and nonwhites were. For the second question, they argue that these internal struggles were largely a result of the inability to keep up with massive demographic change in the time period. This finding is reinforced by the reemergence of experimentation in the post-1965 immigration era. Overall, they argue that censuses do not create the racial order by themselves; France doesn't collect racial statistics, but still has a racial order. Nonetheless, censuses help to construct and reconstruct the racial order by providing the language of race, providing the bases of policy, are more. CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

Small, Mario, Robert Manduca and William Johnston. 2018. "Ethnography, Neighborhood Effects, and the Rising Heterogeneity of Poor Neighborhoods across Cities." City and Community, 17(3): 565-589.

In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers came to understand poor urban neighborhoods as blighted, depopulated areas, based on important ethnographic observations in a handful of cities. This image helped inform influential theories of social isolation and de‐institutionalization. However, few scholars have examined whether those observations were representative of poor neighborhoods nationwide—and whether they are representative today. Based on a descriptive analysis of the largest 100 U.S. metropolitan areas using normalized census tract boundaries, we document an important transformation in the conditions of poor neighborhoods. We find that the depopulation in poor neighborhoods often reported in cities such as Chicago and Baltimore was, in fact, typical across cities in 1990. Today, it is not. Moreover, heterogeneity across cities has increased: The experience of neighborhood poverty is likely to depend more today than in 1990 on the city in question. In fact, the most typically studied cities, such as Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee, are increasingly atypical in this respect. Addressing today's core questions about neighborhood effects, how and why they matter, requires paying far greater attention to heterogeneity, conducting more ethnographic observation in ostensibly unconventional cities, and addressing the historically extreme conditions in a newly unique subset of cities. CLASS/LABOR

Lie, John. 2001. "Classify and Signify." Pp. 142-169 in Multi-Ethnic Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

In this chapter, Lie discusses the foundations of the category of "Japaneseness." He says that even though his respondents have very different conceptions of who counts as Japanese and what criteria should be used, no one questions the starting point. He first discusses the conflation of state membership and ethnonational identity. He argues they view Japanese nationality as natural and immutable, whereas citizenship is relatively artificial. However, in ordinary conversation, nationality, ethnicity, and race are one in the same. He argues that the category of jin, or "people," is used to describe all groups, conflating nationalities (the German people) and racial categories (white people). "The category of peoplehood is permanent and homogenous." Lie notes that this conception of Japan transfers itself to Japanese views of other countries; several of his respondents were shocked that not everyone in European countries were white, for example. Lie also talks about the ways foreign orientalist views of Japan are reinforced by the Japanese themselves. For example, there is a fundamental view of Japanese uniqueness and difference emphasized in accounts of the "other." Therefore, Lie also argues that the dominant form of division in Japan therefore is Japanese vs. other. These western accounts are seen as authoritative and maintain some form of Japanese exceptionalism. His discusses this as "typological thinking." Each type is homogenous and essential, therefore any Japanese person expresses the totality of "Japaneseness." He argues this verges on a racist characterization, given internal distinctions of urban vs. rural, political ideology, or class. CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

Anderson, Elijah. 1994. "The Code of the Streets." Atlantic Monthly 273(5): 81-94.

In this ethnography of Philadelphia in the 1990s, Anderson seeks to understand why inner-city blacks, men in particular, are prone to violence. He argues that interpersonal violence and aggression in the inner-city can be understood as an adaptation to circumstances of the ghetto, namely: "the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, the stigma of race, the fallout from rampant drug use and drug trafficking, and the resulting alienation and lack of hope for the future." This violence is part of an oppositional street culture of informal rules, which he terms "the code of the streets." This opposition street culture is part of a dichotomy—street and decent families. Street families maintain oppositional orientations to mainstream culture (lack of respect for others, violence, drugs, beating of children), while decent families adopt mainstream values. He admits that this dichotomy is an ideal type—a decent person can exhibit street orientations, at times, and vice versa. Central to the code is the issue of respect. Because of a lack of police and justice in the inner-city, residents result to violence to defend themselves and also to accrue respect/ status. He mentions presentation of self (Goffman) as important in understanding the "campaign for respect" among residents. NEIGHBORHOODS

Monk, Ellis P. 2015. "The Cost of Color: Skin Color, Discrimination, and Health among African Americans" American Journal of Sociology 121(2): 396-444.

In this study, the author uses a nationally representative survey to examine the relationship(s) between skin tone, discrimination, and health among African-Americans. He finds that skin tone is a significant predictor of multiple forms of perceived discrimination (including perceived skin color discrimination from whites and blacks) and, in turn, these forms of perceived discrimination are significant predictors of key health outcomes, such as depression and self-rated mental and physical health. Intra-racial health differences related to skin tone (and discrimination) often rival or even exceed disparities between blacks and whites as a whole. The author also finds that self-reported skin tone, conceptualized as a form of embodied social status, is a stronger predictor of perceived discrimination than interviewer-rated skin tone. He discusses the implications of these findings for the study of ethnoracial health disparities and highlights the utility of cognitive and multidimensional approaches to ethnoracial and social inequality. COMPARATIVE

Wang, Qi, Nolan Edward Phillips, Mario L. Small, and Robert J. Sampson. 2018. "Urban Mobility and Neighborhood Isolation in America's 50 Largest Cities." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(30): 7735-7740.

Influential research on the negative effects of living in a disadvantaged neighborhood assumes that its residents are socially isolated from nonpoor or "mainstream" neighborhoods, but the extent and nature of such isolation remain in question. We develop a test of neighborhood isolation that improves on static measures derived from commonly used census reports by leveraging fine-grained dynamic data on the everyday movement of residents in America's 50 largest cities. We analyze 650 million geocoded Twitter messages to estimate the home locations and travel patterns of almost 400,000 residents over 18 mo. We find surprisingly high consistency across neighborhoods of different race and income characteristics in the average travel distance (radius) and number of neighborhoods traveled to (spread) in the metropolitan region; however, we uncover notable differences in the composition of the neighborhoods visited. Residents of primarily black and Hispanic neighborhoods—whether poor or not—are far less exposed to either nonpoor or white middle-class neighborhoods than residents of primarily white neighborhoods. These large racial differences are notable given recent declines in segregation and the increasing diversity of American cities. We also find that white poor neighborhoods are substantially isolated from nonpoor white neighborhoods. The results suggest that even though residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods travel far and wide, their relative isolation and segregation persist. NEIGHBORHOODS

Jiménez, Tomás R. and Adam L. Horowitz. 2013. "When White is Just Alright: How Immigrants Redefine Achievement and Reconfigure the Ethnoracial Hierarchy." American Sociological Review 78(5): 849-871.

Jiménez and Horowitz emphasize the importance of analyzing 3rd+ generation Americans, rather than only immigrants, in immigration research. They show how immigration causes shifts in identification and ethnoracial hierarchies for the existing US population, rather than being a one-way process of adaptation for immigrants themselves. In particular, they note that immigration research has been pre-occupied with measuring whether low-SES immigrants compare to higher achieving Americans. This is no longer always the case with the influx of high-skilled immigrants, primarily from South and East Asia. They find that in Cupertino these immigrants define the level of achievement that natives, mostly whites, are measured to. This does not counteract the broad structure of white privilege in the US, but rather shows how ethnoracial categories are geographically and temporally context-specific. Method: 61 interviews with 3rd+ generation Americans in Cupertino, CA, a high-SES area with a majority Asian-identifying population in Silicon Valley. ETHNORACIAL IDENTITY

Jones. Nikki. 2010. "Introduction" [pp. 1-19] and "Conclusion: The Other Side of the Crisis" [pp. 151-162] in Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Jones argues that existing urban ethnography on the code of the street has focused on how it relates to masculinity and largely affects boys. However, girls in these neighborhoods also have their lives dictated by the same code and structural conditions. For example, the girls she talked with also demonstrated an understanding that one needs to demonstrate a willingness to fight in order to pre-emptively defend themselves through the threat of retribution. However, at the same time they struggle to act out the broader gender norms of society. Those who are passive and traditionally feminine are deemed "good" by teachers and counselors, while others are deemed "ghetto." Thus, black female respectability is tied into race, gender, and class politics. As such, they face a unique strain from two competing social pressures. Jones says that the girls she studied attempted to straddle this boundary, judging which role was more appropriate based on the situation, and thus engaging in a form of "code switching." CRIME

Killewald, Alexandra. 2013. "Return to Being Black, Living in the Red: A Race Gap in Wealth that Goes Beyond Social Origins." Demography 50(4): 1177-1195.

Killewald critiques the idea that class explains the racial wealth gap—that is, they the gap is simply because blacks inherit from less wealthy parents. In particular, she notes three failures of BBLR. The sample size is small and selectively omits certain types of households, using a log transformation removes those with negative wealth, and focusing solely on mean differences by race may mask how the racial gap varies across the wealth distribution. She finds that the log transformation has a largely distortionary effect. In fact, she finds in general that for those with net wealth the things that are positively associated with increased wealth, such as education, are not associated with increased wealth for net debtors. She takes this to imply that in many cases net debtors have access to credit that will gain them income in the future. Including these debtors in the BBLR analysis masked the approximately 20% racial wealth gap among those who do have positive wealth. In fact, Killewald finds that among debtors, whites have more debt. This furthers her hypothesis that increased debt may not reflect long-term economic disadvantage. CLASS/LABOR

Lamont, Michèle, and Virág Molnár. 2002. "The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences. Annual Review of Sociology. 28(1): 167-195.

Lamont and Molnar distinguish between symbolic boundaries and social boundaries. Symbolic boundaries are the "conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize," while social boundaries are the "objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources." In this sense, they think of the two as intimately linked but conceptually different. They argue that boundaries provide a frame of studying race/ethnicity that is less static and less biological than cultural theory, citing Barth as an early developer of the concept. In particular, they argue that recent work has emphasized the ways identity construction is through self-definition, symbolic boundaries, and the assignment of collective identities by outsiders. They cite Waters on how West Indian immigrants draw boundaries with African-Americans or Lamont on how black and white working-class men draw moral boundaries. THEORY

Lamont, Michèle, Graziella Moraes Silva, Jessica Welburn, Joshua Guetzkow, Nissim Mizrachi, Hanna Herzog, and Elisa Reis. 2016. "Accounting for Differences" [pp. 19-33] and "The United States" [pp. 34-42] in Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil and Israel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lamont et al. focus on three elements of national context that shape experiences and responses to racism. 1. History, sociodemographic, and institutional context: this factor is the most common among existing scholarship on race in the US. For example, the diversity of the country, the spatial segregation, and its history of racial policy. 2. Strength and mode of "groupness": borrow from Brubaker, "the sense of belonging to a distinctive, bounded, solidarity group." They operationalize this multi-dimensionally, rather than as a continuum from weak to strong. In particular, they note self-identification of interviewees and the strength of group boundaries. Other factors, such as homophily and segregation play a role. 3. Available cultural repertoires: individuals construct narratives from available templates. For example, their countries have different myths about incorporation (American Dream, Zionism, and racial democracy). This multi-faceted paradigm allows them to explain how, for example, African-Americans and Palestinians have similarly high groupness, but respond to exclusion differently. They argue that there is no linear way that these three factors combine to predict frequency of discrimination or responses. Rather, each distinctively structured group responds differently. COMPARATIVE

Lieberson, Stanley. 1961. "A Societal Theory of Race and Ethnic Relations." American Sociological Review 26: 902-910.

Lieberson is responding to prior theories that formulate the stages of race relations that follow contact between two groups as an inevitable "natural history," (e.g. Park), failing to account for the variation in race relations that exists in different places. In contrast, taking situations of contact between an indigenous (a population sufficiently established in an area to possess some institutions and social order) and a migrant group as his starting point, Lieberson proposes that the "cycle of race relations" differs by which group becomes superordinate - which group is able to impose its social order on the other. When the migrant group dominates: conflict at the beginning and the indigenous population suffers numerical decline but doesn't have an alternative location to move to; a 3rd group may be needed to fulfill economic functions until the indigenous group is able to sufficiently participate in the new economy; then as the indigenous group becomes increasingly incorporated within the larger system, the saliency of their subordination increases and conflict may occur. When the indigenous group dominates: less conflict at the beginning, since the migrant group is often better off than in their home country and can return if they wish; the indigenous group controls the influx of other groups so that one doesn't amass too much power by becoming too big; and due to pressure to assimilate, conflict is more limited and sporadic. In general, subordinate migrants appear more assimilated than subordinate indigenous populations. THEORY

Mare, Robert and Christopher Winship. 1991. "Economic and Educational Change and the Decline in Black Marriages," Pp. 175-202 in The Urban Underclass, edited by C. Jencks and P. Peterson. Washington, DC: Brookings.

Mare and Winship show that there has been a substantial decrease in black marriage, even relative to decreases in marriage for all groups. This is negatively associated with economic and educational outcomes. They say that most explanations have hinged upon labor markets. William Julius Wilson argued that the declining economic standing of black men has meant there are fewer marriageable partners for women. Conversely, others have argued that the improved economic standing for black women has meant they rely less upon men for financial stability. Finally, increased educational opportunity for black women may play a role, although it is unclear how, since students have lower rates of marriage, but in the long-term increased education is good for marital prospects. Mare and Winship evaluate these various explanations. They find some support for Wilson's claim, but believe it does not explain more than 20% of the decrease in marriage. They find little support for the second claim, as they believe increased economic standing for black women reduces their reliance on men, but increases their marriageability, offsetting each other. Finally, they find some evidence for the role of education, but it is variable and inconclusive. Therefore, they conclude that a purely socioeconomic explanation does not give the full picture. Instead, they believe there may be shifts in attitudes towards marriage and/or cohabiting. CLASS/LABOR

McCall, Leslie. 2005. "The Complexity of Intersectionality." Signs 30(3): 1771-1800.

McCall argues that although intersectionality has become central in women's studies, there has been little discussion of how to study it. As a result, the kinds of knowledge produced about intersectionality have been limited, since only a limited number of methodologies can be used. McCall goes on to describe the three main methodological approaches to the study of intersectionality: 1. anticategorical complexity: this approach is skeptical of any use of analytic categories, arguing that they inevitably simplify a complex reality. 2. intracategorical complexity: McCall considers this the original and default approach in intersectionality but places it here because it falls in the middle of a continuum. She says these researchers both critique the boundary-defining process itself and recognize the durable nature of many social groups. Instead, they focus on neglected social groups at the intersections of categories, who often cross the boundaries. 3. intercategorical complexity: She believes this is the least recognized type of intersectional work and as such, defining it is her main contribution. She says scholars using this approach "provisionally adopt existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups." That is, while she recognizes that groups are social defined and not static, in order to observe inequality between groups one must still use these groups as "anchor points." THEORY

Muhammad, Khalil G. 2011. "Introduction: The Mismeasure of Crime." Pp. 1-14 in The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Muhammad seeks to understand how the link between blackness and criminality was formed, as well as its impacts on public policy. In particular, he begins with the role of statistics, starting with the 1890 Census, which first released prison data. Muhammad situates this era as one generation after slavery and reflecting a far-reaching anxiety about free blacks, as well as the beginnings of black migration to urban areas. The Census showed that, although blacks comprised 12% of the population, they made up 30% of the prison population. While this was a result of racist laws, policing, and surveillance, the statistics were presented as incontrovertible and color-blind. Muhammad uses this focus to demonstrate the role the North played in the reproduction of racism, disputing the idea that until the end of Jim Crow the South was the sole center of racist discourse. In addition, blackness and crime were permanently linked, while the crime associated with white immigrants in the early 1900s was seen as a passing phenomenon. In particular, demographers grouped whites together, masking high crime rates of poor white immigrants, and playing into an "invasion" narrative from Southern blacks in the Great Migration. In addition, writing such as the Chicago School emphasized the social ecological foundations of white crime, while contrasting it with black crime that was seen as pathological. CRIME

Nagel, Joane. 1995. "Resource Competition Theories of Ethnicity." American Behavioral Scientist, 38: 442-458.

Nagel notes that it is not always clear which divisions between groups will become the basis for ethnic identification and when these divisions will produce major interethnic competition. She uses resource competition theory to examine this question, focusing on two major factors: economic and political competition. It is logical that competition along these lines will cause people to organize in groups, but when do they organize into ethnic groups, as opposed to age, class, gender, etc.? She divides the causes into historical and emergent (i.e. contemporary) causes: Historical: -Ccultural division of labor: she refers to this as "internal colonialism" and shows that when labor is divided on cultural lines it is often by ethnic group. - Split labor market: two groups compete for employment and one is paid a lower wage. This hardens the boundary and increases the likelihood for conflict. Contemporary: - Immigration: Immigrants often settle into ethnic enclaves and fit into the ethnic stratification of host societies. - Politics: access to political office is often in itself the prize in ethnic competition. Ethnicity is often a convenient category for political organizers due to common language, culture, and existing ethnic organizations. Competition can be seen as a driving force underlying patterns of ethnic identification, ethnic group formation, ethnic conflict and antagonism, and ethnic movements. The conditions that generate ethnic, as opposed to some other form of, competition seem to depend on the degree of institutionalization of ethnicity into social, economic, and political life. Once society is organized along ethnic lines, competition similarly tends to be ethnically organized. THEORY

Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 35-76; 172-182.

Patterson is interested in understanding authority within the master-slave relationship. He writes that prior reliance by researchers on Weber's conception of authority (law, charisma, and tradition) is insufficient. Instead, he draws from symbolic anthropology to examine the nature of symbolic control in the master-slave relationship. Slavery is a form of social death - the slave's only social existence is in his relation to his master; he no longer belongs to a community. There are two modes of social death: intrusive, in which outsiders to the slaveholding population are made slaves, and extrusive, in which people from within the slaveholding population who no longer belong (e.g. criminals, the destitute) are made slaves. Despite his social death, the slave was still an element of society (in contrast to the outcasts created by a caste system, who are impure and kept separate), and so occupied a liminal state. The slave's liminality was a source of authority for the master, who was the slave's link to being socially alive. Rituals that accompanied enslavement were used to give expression to the alienation of the slave, and some masters used the language of kinship (e.g. father, daughter) toward establishing authority. Patterson also writes about the parallel roles of Christianity in the American south and in the Roman Empire as a religion that allowed the master and slave to worship the same god without threatening the system but also without denying the oppressed of all dignity. Chapter 7 considers factors intrinsic to the master-slave relationship (private determinants, as opposed to public determinants) that helped determine how the master treated the slave and how the slave responded. These include: what tasks the slave performed, the mode of acquisition of the slave, where the slave lived, personal characteristics of the slave (race, ethnicity, and gender), the slave's skills, and the relative size of the slave population. Relevance to race: When discussing ritual markers of slavery, Patterson writes that skin color differences were actually a poor way of distinguishing slaves in the Americas; variations in hair type was "the real symbolic badge of slavery." In Chapter 7, Patterson writes that ethnic differences between master and slave were more important for determining who become enslaved than race but didn't make a big difference in how slaves were then treated. THEORY

Peterson, Ruth D., and Lauren J. Krivo. 2005. "Macrostructural Analyses of Race, Ethnicity, and Violent Crime: Recent Lessons and New Directions for Research." Annual Review of Sociology 31: 331-356

Peterson and Krivo review the state of the field on race and crime since Sampson and Wilson (1995). They find broad support for their idea that the structural conditions increasing crime and violence are similar for both blacks and whites. This idea of racial invariance is not always supported for every single measure in every place, but by and large holds up. Peterson and Krivo also analyze Sampson and Wilson's focus on the intervening cultural aspects, such as social organization, that occur as a result of structural change. They argue that an outsized portion of research still treats these as causal factors, rather than as mediators. Nonetheless, some work, such as Anderson (1994, 1999), tackles this in the idea of the code of the street. However, the results on this finding are more mixed and it is still unclear when certain aspects of culture mediate neighborhood structure. Finally, Peterson and Krivo review the field as a whole. They find broad support for the idea that structural disadvantage does contribute to crime for all racial groups. However, they feel the field still has not moved far beyond this question. In particular, they seek to understand how race is intertwined with structure. For example, some research on Latino segregated areas shows lower levels of crime than comparable black neighborhoods. They argue that these barrios may be fundamentally different than segregated black neighborhoods due to differential social networks, political structure, or other spatial dynamics, even if they are similar in terms of unemployment, etc. Lastly, they advocate strongly for the use of multi-level modeling in examining any unexplained racial gaps. They find that city-level information can often explain gaps in neighborhoods. For example, city-wide segregation can increase isolation for poor neighborhoods, thus making it especially difficult to combat crime. In addition, there may be spillover effects from adjacent poor neighborhoods. CRIME

Pettit, Becky and Bruce Western. 2004. "Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration." American Sociological Review 69: 151-169.

Pettit and Western (2004) seek to answers two questions: (1) how cumulative risk of incarceration grows as men age and (2) the imprisonment risk at different levels of education. The authors use life table methods - risk of incarceration, risk of death - with multiple decrement methods to examine three hypotheses. ● H1: Race and class disparities in imprisonment increased through the 1980s and 1990s. This hypothesis is rejected by the data - the risk of imprisonment increased for all groups at all ages and racial inequality remained stable but educational inequality increased. However, actual crime rates explain up to 80% of the disparity in black and white imprisonment rates, but the residual is significant: blacks are punished more because of "racial threat" (Sampson and Lauritsen 1997). ● H2: By the 1990s, imprisonment became the modal life event for young black men. This hypothesis is supported by the data. 20% of blacks had been imprisoned by their early thirties, versus 3% of whites. 30% of black men with less than college education had been imprisoned by their early thirties while almost 60% of black male high-school dropouts had been imprisoned by their early thirties. ● H3: By 1990s, the experience of imprisonment among black men is rivaled in frequency of military service and college completion. This hypothesis is supported by the data - the life path of non-college black men through the criminal justice system diverges from the usual trajectory followed by most young American adults. They conclude that incarceration is a new stage in the life course of young low-skill black men. They argue that incarceration should join other major social forces like urban deindustrialization (Wilson 1987), segregation (Massey and Denton 1993), and wealth inequality (Oliver and Shapiro 1995) as an explanation of the persistent disadvantage of low-education U.S. blacks. Imprisonment exacerbates other social inequalities and alters the life course for a whole birth cohort: (1) imprisonment increases unemployment and lowers wages (see Holzer 1994; Pager 2005); (2) imprisonment decreases likelihood of marriage or household formation (see Wilson 1987, 2009); (3) these eroding marriage and employment opportunities creates a feedback mechanism and leads to more crime (Sampson and Laub 1993); and (4) imprisonment extends the "volatility of adolescence" and delays entry into adult roles of worker, spouse, and parent. CRIME

Blumer, Herbert. 1959. "Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position." The Pacific Sociological Review 1: 3-7.

Prior literature has conceived of prejudice as residing within the feelings of individuals, but this is incorrect. Racial prejudice is actually a collective process (not just the sum of individuals). Racial prejudice derives from "a scheme of racial identification" that "involves the formation of an image or a conception of one's own racial group and of another racial group, inevitably in terms of the relationship" between the two. The dominant group is driven by their orientation toward maintaining their group position, a norm that even individuals with feelings of benevolence toward the subordinate group succumb to (or risk the possibility of ostracism). So the source of racial prejudice is a perceived challenge to the dominant group's sense of their position - it is a defensive reaction. The formation of a group's position is historical and set by the conditions of initial contact. The dominant group defines and redefines the subordinate group through communication between members of the dominant group based on an abstract image of the subordinate group - the definitions are forged in the public sphere and come from events that are "seemingly loaded with great collective significance" for the dominant group, not from "the huge bulk of experiences coming from daily contact with individuals of the subordinate group." DISCRIMINATION

Camille, Charles Z. 2001. "Processes of Racial Segregation." Pp. 217-265 in Urban Inequality, edited by A. O'Connor, C. Tilly, and L. Bobo. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Racial residential segregation is the result of complex individual- and institutional-level processes. Traditionally, individual-level research on racial residential segregation has emphasized one or more of the following factors: socioeconomic status; housing-market information and perceptions; neighborhood racial-composition preferences; and racial prejudice and stereotypes. Using data from Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality and U.S. Bureau of the Census File for four cities with varying racial composition, Charles (2001) refutes previous theories on SES and housing market information. They conclude that all groups have comparably accurate information about housing costs and similar perceptions neighborhood desirability. Where differences exist, they are clearly racial. Communities with high minority concentrations are least desirable to whites, even when those communities are affluent. And, minority group members tend to rate as less desirable communities they perceive as hostile. Neighborhood racial-composition reveals a clear and consistent racial rank-ordering of out-groups as potential neighbors. Whites are always the most preferred out-group neighbors but prefer same-race neighborhoods and blacks are the least preferred out-group neighbors but prefer integrated neighborhoods. Group differences in neighborhood racial-composition preferences are examined using the Farley-Schuman show card procedure originally designed for the 1976 Detroit Area Study, which was expanded to include Hispanics and Asians. Respondents were shown a series of cards depicting fifteen houses with varying degrees of integration with blacks, Hispanics, or Asians. The respondent's home is represented by the house in the middle of the card. Respondents are asked if they would feel "very comfortable," "somewhat comfortable," "somewhat uncomfortable," or "very uncomfortable" in each setting. Racial Preference-Indexes (RPI's) were constructed as dependent variables for multivariate analyses, ranging from 0 to 100 for white respondents and 12.5 to 100 for non-white respondents where higher scores indicate greater acceptance of racial residential integration. Charles concludes that these results offer strong evidence of the persistent influence of racial prejudice not as simple out-group but rather as a sense of group position (Blumer 1959; Bobo 1988, 1997, 2006; Lieberson 1980). Whites clearly dominate the economic, political, and prestige hierarchy. NEIGHBORHOODS

Sharkey, Patrick, and Jacob W. Faber. 2014. "Where, When, Why, and for Whom Do Residential Contexts Matter? Moving Away from the Dichotomous Understanding of Neighborhood Effects." Annual Review of Sociology 40: 559-579.

Rather than searching for a dichotomous yes/no answer to whether neighborhoods have effects, Sharkey and Faber summarize research that points at the key mechanisms of how neighborhoods affect individuals. For example, they argue that physical aspects of neighborhood environments are understudied when simply treated a neighborhood as a census tract. Research shows that exposure to air, water, and noise pollution can have negative effects on cognitive development. Similarly, research shows that exposure to violence is significantly more impactful by block group, rather than census tract or broader area. This helps us to explain what it is about violence that matters. Another obvious example is unique boundaries, such as school districts, police precincts, etc. Beyond geographic scale, Sharkey and Faber also argue that temporality should be taken into account more. First of all, length of exposure clearly matters. Second, we might expect that certain impacts, such as school quality, produce differential results by age. NEIGHBORHOODS

Rothstein, Richard. 2017. "If San Francisco, then Everywhere?" [pp. 3-17] and "Considering Fixes" [pp. 195-214] in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: W.W. Norton.

Rothstein documents the de jure segregation that took place in American cities starting in the 1920s, dispelling the idea that modern segregation is a result of de facto segregation and individual prejudice. Using San Francisco, an ostensibly liberal enclave, as an example, he shows how segregation was the result of active policymaking, rather than just the replication of existing inequality. For example, San Francisco had very few black residents before World War II. Nonetheless, when people began to arrive the Federal Housing Authority wholesale blocked loans to build housing for blacks, would not loan to whites living in black areas, but nonetheless supported blockbusting. Altogether, it was impossible to build more housing for blacks with the combination of restrictions. As a result, black areas became overly dense as newcomers to the area had nowhere to live. NEIGHBORHOODS

Sampson, Robert J., William Julius Wilson, and Hanna Katz. 2018. "Reassessing 'Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality': Enduring and New Challenges in 21st Century America." Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 15(1): 13-34.

Sampson, Wilson, and Katz also survey the field of race and crime since their 1995 article. They find broad support for the theory of racial invariance and the role of neighborhood-level structural disadvantage. They clarify racial invariance as having a qualitative, rather than quantitative meaning. That is, they believe the causes of crime to be equivalent across race, rather than the literal magnitudes in quantitative analyses. They believe to insist on finding equivalent coefficients is a misreading of the original article, which only mentions invariance in the context of causes, and is far too highly sensitive to measurement error and random variance. They also take a look at some supra-individual factors, such as increased immigration to the US, and look more closely at the mechanisms that link structural disadvantage and crime. As far as the "Latino paradox," they believe it still mostly supports their theory. That is, structural explanations still mostly predict crime for Latino immigrants. For example, crime rates vary greatly between traditional and new destinations. Similarly, research using HLM has found that increased political support for immigration in a city lower crime in immigrant neighborhoods. Finally, they echo Krivo and Peterson's call for an investigation of mechanisms and outline some existing research. Building off of Anderson, work on legal cynicism, informal organizations, and codes of violence can generally help to explain the persistence of poverty in structurally disadvantaged areas. Work on collective efficacy and social control has had similar results. Finally, they point to work analyzing the broader political economy of cities and effects of public policy. CRIME

Simon, Patrick. 2012. "Collecting Ethnic Statistics in Europe: A Review." Ethnic and Racial Studies 35(8): 1366-1391.

Simon provides a review of various methods of collecting data on ethnicity in Europe. He notes the difficulties in maintaining a constructivist approach or answering complex questions like identity in one survey question. Nonetheless, the choice of different data collection strategies can have strong consequences. For example, he argues that population statistics play a key role in nation-building, and categorizations both reflect and affect the divisions of society. He finds that in Europe nationality is a more widespread concept than ethnicity on statistical forms. However, most European countries have received mass immigration in the past at this point and are often being remade by the second-generation. Parental birthplace can solve this to some degree but may miss discrimination against 3rd+ generation ethnic minorities. As a result, Simon argues that current data collection in Europe does not meet the required standards for effective anti-discriminatory action. CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

Sue, Christina. 2009. "An Assessment of the Latin Americanization Thesis." Ethnic and Racial Studies 32(6): 1058-1070.

Sue argues against Bonilla-Silva's Latin Americanization thesis (LAT) of three categories: whites, honorary whites, and collective black. In particular she takes issue with his desciprtion of the Latin American system. He says it has four features: a tri-racial system with an emphasis on phenotype, strong national identity, a colorblind belief, and the attempt by elites to whiten the country in response to increasing blackness. She agrees with the national identity and color blindness, but takes issue with the first two. First, she argues there is no consensus Latin America is tri-racial. For example, in Brazil there is increasing debate whether to treat it as a color continuum or a more binary system. She argues that what data source one uses largely influences how one cahracteriszes the system. There is no clear ideal type of a tri-racial system and how the boundaries are defined. As far as the whitening premise, Sue has two arguments. First, she says Latin America was always dark, and second that the elites involved in whitening were themselves not white by North American standards. Therefore the idea that they used whitening to maintain their dominance is false. Finally, Sue argues Latin American countries are not homogenous enough to have one theory of race. In the second major section, she takes issue with the operationalization of the LAT. Bonilla-Silva uses a combination of socio-economic measures and subjective identification measures to argue that one can predict how certain groups might develop white-like attitudes. However, when applying this same standard to Latin America, the theory does not hold up. For example, in Latin America those with dark skin are no more likely to perceive discrimination. She takes this to imply that a US-based methodology is being used to test Latin Americanization. Finally, she argues that Latin America is characterized by high horizontal sociability and simultaneous verticle inequality. That is, despite inequality racial groups are less segregated and interact frequently. Despite this, Bonilla-Silva tests whether darks-skinned Latinos are segregated like blacks, etc., implying a very un-Latin American system. COMPARATIVE

Suttles, Gerald. 1968. "Part 1: Territoriality and Ordered Segmentation" [pp. 1-35] and "Practicality and Morality" [pp. 223-234] in Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Suttles (1968) argues that slums have a system of social organization. He argues that slum residents order relations according to local beliefs when those of wider society do not provide adequate guidelines for conduct. That is, slum residents use practical strategies for order. Park (1915) and Suttles both argue that there is a differential moral isolation of certain neighborhoods from wider society resulting from historical process and ecological processes of urban growth that creates moral areas. Suttles argues that residents order relations according to local beliefs when those of wider society do not provide adequate guidelines for conduct. Slums are socially ordered through a moral order and social networks. Communities are a confederation of groups who support public morality but may have local set of standards and practices. He holds that this is a general social process, not just one found in slums; he gives Beverly Hills as an example of a place with a hyper-developed local class system that runs alongside a mainstream taxonomy. In Addams, Suttles finds a practical, rather than an ideal, set of guidelines for conduct. Method: Suttles spent three years in the mid-1960s living on Chicago's Near West Side in a neighborhood he calls Addams, studying the social order of slums. He used participant observation and interviews. NEIGHBORHOODS

Tuan, Mia. 1998. "Racialized Ethnics Compared to White Ethnics: Visiting the Theoretical Debates" [pp. 21-47] and "Conclusion: The Racialized Ethnic Experience" [pp. 152-167] in Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites: The Asian Experience Today. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

The Asian American experience in the United States complicates the straight-line assimilation model because Asian Americans are "racialized ethnics." Two types of perceptions regarding Asian Americans exist, the first confirming straight-line assimilation and the second contradicting it: (1) Honorary Whites (assimilation based upon demographics—intermarriage, socio-economic status, etc.); (2) Forever Foreigners (Asians are discriminated against and seen as outsiders; face discrimination from other minorities because of the "model minority" image). While Tuan acknowledges the differences between race and ethnicity, she also argues that Asian Americans are a case of overlap. Their self-ascription is of ethnicity but ascription/classification by others is of race. This contradicts straight-line assimilation because Asian Americans are racialized, despite acculturation. ETHNORACIAL IDENTITY

Bobo, Lawrence and Mia Tuan. 2006. "Linking Prejudice and Politics" [pp. 23-47], "Disentangling Racialized Politics: Group Position, Injustice, and Symbolic Racism" [pp. 132-173], in Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

The authors are interested in racialized politics: those issues of public debate and controversy in which the rights, statuses, resources, and privileges of groups defined by racial or ethnic criteria are contested. And public opinion can exert both indirect (by determining the general social climate) and direct (by influencing voting decisions) effects on the outcome of racial political struggles. The authors summarize theoretical perspectives on how and why racial prejudice enters into modern politics (self-interest, race-neutral principles and the sense of injustice, and orthodox prejudice) and then develop a group position model based on Blumer that integrates the "valuable contributions of the individual self-interest and orthodox prejudice models with a more sociological concern with the historical development of systems of racial inequality." Their empirical work based on surveys surrounding tribal fishing rights in Wisconsin finds that symbolic racism is most common among those with a traditional outlook, racial prejudice, inaccurate knowledge of the issues, openly biased beliefs, and negative feelings. Their data fits their group position model that combines emotional and unreasoned aspects of intergroup beliefs with instrumental/reasoned aspects of group conflict. They build off of Blumer's group position theory, where the dominant group exhibits 4 features: feelings of superiority, belief that the subordinate group is different and alien, a propriety claim over rights and resources, and perceived threat from the subordinate group. Bobo and Tuan add 3 features to emphasize that "the tenacity of ethno-racial attachments cannot be accounted for in terms of purely rational and material forces:" there is nothing natural or rational about an attachment to a particular set of socially constructed ethno-racial identities, and the sense of group position involves an affective or emotional basis, but there is also a self-interested instrumental character to racial prejudice. DISCRIMINATION

Alba, Richard. 2005. "Bright vs. Blurred Boundaries: Second-Generation Assimilation and Exclusion in France, Germany, and the United States." Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(1): 20-49.

The distinction between bright and blurred boundaries allows for comparative work not dependent on the U.S. context. Boundary construction and dissolution is path dependent, shaped by the history of the immigrant group and its receiving society. Religion (i.e., Islam) in Europe and race in the United States create bright boundaries, but bright boundaries do not eliminate the possibility of assimilation. When bright boundaries exist, assimilation has to happen through individual boundary crossing. Assimilation is easier when the boundary is blurred. This theory can also be applied to citizenship, religion, language, social class. ETHNORACIAL IDENTITY

Monk, Ellis P. 2016. "The Consequences of Race and Color in Brazil." Social Problems 63(3): 413-430.

The vast majority of quantitative research on ethnoracial inequality uses census categories. In this article, however, I question whether census categories (in Brazil) are the most adequate measure for estimating ethnoracial inequality. Using the first nationally representative survey to include interviewer-rated skin color data in Brazil (LAPOP 2010), I examine: (1) the association between skin color and stratification outcomes, (2) how using multiple measures of race may reveal different information about inequality across different outcomes, and (3) whether census race categories and skin color should be considered equivalent or analytically distinct concepts. I find that skin color is a stronger predictor of educational attainment and occupational status among Brazilians than race (operationalized as census race-color categories used in virtually all research on ethnoracial inequality in Brazil). Centrally, this study finds that "race" and "color" are analytically distinct concepts given that they are empirically distinct, even though they are often conflated in everyday life and by social scientists. The implications of these findings for the study of ethnoracial inequality in Brazil and beyond are discussed, with a focus on directions for future research. COMPARATIVE

Pager, Devah and Lincoln Quillian. 2005. "Walking the Talk: What Employers Say Versus What They Do." American Sociological Review 70(3): 355-380.

This article considers the relationship between employers' attitudes toward hiring exoffenders and their actual hiring behavior. Using data from an experimental audit study of entry-level jobs matched with a telephone survey of the same employers, the authors compare employers' willingness to hire black and white ex-offenders, as represented both by their self-reports and by their decisions in actual hiring situations. Employers who indicated a greater likelihood of hiring ex-offenders in the survey were no more likely to hire an ex-offender in practice. Furthermore, although the survey results indicated no difference in the likelihood of hiring black versus white ex-offenders, audit results show large differences by race. These comparisons suggest that employer surveys-even those using an experimental design to control for social desirability bias-may be insufficient for drawing conclusions about the actual level of hiring discrimination against stigmatized groups. CLASS/LABOR

Sharkey, Patrick. 2008. "The Intergenerational Transmission of Context." American Journal of Sociology 113(4): 931-969

This article draws on the extensive literature on economic and social mobility in America to examine intergenerational contextual mobility, defined as the degree to which inequalities in neighborhood environments persist across generations. PSID data are analyzed to reveal remarkable continuity in neighborhood economic status from one generation to the next. The primary consequence of persistent neighborhood stratification is that the racial inequality in America's neighborhoods that existed a generation ago has been transmitted, for the most part unchanged, to the current generation. More than 70% of black children who grow up in the poorest quarter of American neighborhoods remain in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods as adults, compared to 40% of whites. The results suggest that racial inequality in neighborhood economic status is substantially underestimated with short‐term measures of neighborhood income or poverty and, second, that the steps taken to end racial discrimination in the housing and lending markets have not enabled black Americans to advance out of America's poorest neighborhoods. NEIGHBORHOODS

Contreras, Randol. 2011. "Introduction." Pp. 1-33 in The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

This is an ethnography of "stickup kids" in the South Bronx. He argues that as the crack epidemic decreased, criminological research has shown a decrease in crime. However, his group of friends from the South Bronx, who had previously made money on the crack market, now turned to robbing other dealers because it was more lucrative. This crime often went unreported since it took place within an illegal market. However, he noticed the toll the increased violence took on the stickup kids and believes it was far more self-destructive than dealing. As a result, he frames this as similar to research on the decline of the manufacturing sector. While ethnographies have largely focused on the cultural aspects of crime, Contreras argues there has been a failure to understand the structural root causes. In other words, cultural accounts may help to explain an already existing drug market but does little to tell us how it got to be that way. This approach acts as if criminals were always there, but we know that the structure of crime, including who commits what kinds, has changed drastically. For example, Contreras argues that large structural changes like World War II, the New Deal, and the rise of unions helped to explain the decrease of white urban crime in the early 1900s. As a result, he emphasizes Robert Merton's "strain theory." This is essentially a large structural approach that emphasizes how people can feel strain and pressure to break the rules if they don't have access to the approved societal channels. CRIME

Reskin, Barbara. 2012. "The Race Discrimination System." Annual Review of Sociology 38: 17-35.

To understand the persistence of racial disparities across multiple domains (e.g., residential location, schooling, employment, health, housing, credit, and justice) and to develop effective remedies, we must recognize that these domains are reciprocally related and comprise an integrated system. The limited long-run success of government social policies to advance racial justice is due in part to the ad hoc nature of policy responses to various forms of racial discrimination. Drawing on a systems perspective, I show that race discrimination is a system whose emergent properties reinforce the effects of their components. The emergent property of a system of race-linked disparities is über discrimination—a meta-level phenomenon that shapes our culture, cognitions, and institutions, thereby distorting whether and how we perceive and make sense of racial disparities. Viewing within-domain disparities as part of a discrimination system requires better-specified analytic models. While the existence of an emergent system of über discrimination increases the difficulty of eliminating racial disparities, a systems perspective points to strategies to attack that system. These include identifying and intervening at leverage points, implementing interventions to operate simultaneously across subsystems, isolating subsystems from the larger discrimination system, and directly challenging the processes through which emergent discrimination strengthens within-subsystem disparities. CLASS/LABOR

Frank, Reanne, Ilana Redstone Akresh, and Bo Lu. 2010. "Latino Immigrants and the U.S. Racial Order: How and Where Do They Fit In?" American Sociological Review 75(3): 378-401.

Two main questions: 1., how do Latinos see themselves fitting into the US racial order? 2., how are Latino immigrants influenced by racial stratification in the US? Frank, Akresh, and Lu find support for the idea that the racial boundary is shifting to create a new Latino category. However, they argue that lighter skin Latinos will likely be successful in entering the white category. Although all respondents showed an understanding of the benefits of identifying with whiteness, they show that there is still significant skin-color discrimination against darker-skinned Latinos. This reinforces the two-way nature of boundary blurring and shows how some Latinos may not be accepted as white. Finally, they argue that respondents with high length of time in the US, strong English, or other indicators of assimilation were more likely to opt into the "other" category. They claim this shows their desire to engage in boundary change or emphasize a Latino self-classification. ETHNORACIAL IDENTITY

Perlmann, Joel and Mary C. Waters 2007. "Intermarriage and Multiple Identities." Pp. 110-123 in The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965, edited by Waters, M.C. and Ueda, R. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Two points of intermarriage: represents already happened blurring of boundaries and indicates that boundaries will blur further. In addition, mathematically the proportion of marriages that are mixed is always higher than the proportion of individuals who marry out, meaning the next generation inevitably is more mixed. As a result, by the 3rd generation the majority of people also have other ethnic backgrounds. This can be conceptually linked with social mobility, as they often marry into groups that have been in the country longer. They also touch upon notions of projected minority population and how they ignore intermarriage. For example, it is not realistic to assume that all 3rd generation Hispanics will identify similarly strongly as Hispanic. They go on to explain the difficulties in measuring modern intermarriage, including the lack of generational status measured in the census and the increase in cohabitation/decrease in marriage. In addition, while the census now allows you to check more than one race, it is not clear how this is counted and the government generally treats people who mark any non-white category simply as a minority, even if they also check white. ETHNORACIAL IDENTITY

Smith, Sandra. 2010. "Explaining Persistent Black Joblessness" [pp. 1-26] and "Pervasive Distrust and Noncooperation Among the Black Poor" [pp. 27-55] in Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism Among the Black Poor. New York: Russell Sage.

Unemployment among black Americans is twice that of whites. Myriad theories have been put forward to explain the persistent employment gap between blacks and whites in the U.S. Structural theorists point to factors such as employer discrimination and the decline of urban manufacturing. Other researchers argue that African-American residents living in urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty lack social networks that can connect them to employers. Still others believe that African-American culture fosters attitudes of defeatism and resistance to work. In Lone Pursuit, sociologist Sandra Susan Smith cuts through this thicket of competing explanations to examine the actual process of job searching in depth. Lone Pursuit reveals that unemployed African Americans living in the inner city are being let down by jobholding peers and government agencies who could help them find work, but choose not to. Lone Pursuit is a pioneering ethnographic study of the experiences of low-skilled, black urban residents in Michigan as both jobseekers and jobholders. Smith surveyed 105 African-American men and women between the ages of 20 and 40, each of whom had no more than a high school diploma. She finds that mutual distrust thwarts cooperation between jobseekers and jobholders. Jobseekers do not lack social capital per se, but are often unable to make use of the network ties they have. Most jobholders express reluctance about referring their friends and relatives for jobs, fearful of jeopardizing their own reputations with employers. Rather than finding a culture of dependency, Smith discovered that her underprivileged subjects engage in a discourse of individualism. To justify denying assistance to their friends and relatives, jobholders characterize their unemployed peers as lacking in motivation and stress the importance of individual responsibility. As a result, many jobseekers, wary of being demeaned for their needy condition, hesitate to seek referrals from their peers. In a low-skill labor market where employers rely heavily on personal referrals, this go-it-alone approach is profoundly self-defeating. In her observations of a state job center, Smith finds similar distrust and non-cooperation between jobseekers and center staff members, who assume that young black men are unwilling to make an effort to find work. As private contractors hired by the state, the job center also seeks to meet performance quotas by screening out the riskiest prospects—black male and female jobseekers who face the biggest obstacles to employment and thus need the most help. The problem of chronic black joblessness has resisted both the concerted efforts of policymakers and the proliferation of theories offered by researchers. By examining the roots of the African-American unemployment crisis from the vantage point of the everyday job-searching experiences of the urban poor, Lone Pursuit provides a novel answer to this decades-old puzzle. CLASS/LABOR

Vargas, Robert. 2016. "Introduction" [pp. 3-34] and "Conclusion: Toward a Relational Understanding of Urban Violence" [pp. 169-184] in Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio. New York: Oxford University Press.

Vargas states the central research question of the book: why does violence concentrate in particular blocks, rather than others? Although crime has gone down overall in Chicago, it is stubbornly persistent in select concentrated areas. Vargas conceptualizes these blocks as fields that are the site of turf wars between gangs, police, politicians, and nonprofits. He specifically uses blocks, rather than neighborhoods, as he believes crime is highly variable even within neighborhoods. These very small units are often the hot spots of the majority of all crime, and so understanding why they remain that way is central to understanding the persistence of urban violence. He argues that the study of violence must be relational. Rather than just understanding the role of place, we must also understand networks and how relationships among people can trigger or prevent violent crime. Second, he argues for an integration of research on crime with an understanding of political ecology. Vargas shows how political boundaries and debates can have massive impacts on the social context of urban space. CRIME

Waldinger, Roger. 2007. "Did Manufacturing Matter? The Experience of Yesterday's Second Generation: A Reassessment." International Migration Review 41(1): 3-39.

Waldinger (2007) examines the economic differences separating second-generation immigrants from their third-generation-plus counterparts. He argues that neither standard nor segmented assimilation approaches convey an accurate picture of the trajectory or mechanisms by which the last second generation has succeeded. Manufacturing may have mattered, but it was far from all-important. While the second-generation Polish immigrants converged on manufacturing, their more numerous Italian counterparts made a living in other ways, showing no propensity for industrial work. The compressed wage structure in the manufacturing sector - high wages for low skills - meant there was less overall income inequality in the U.S. However, along with the positive features of manufacturing also came its negative aspects, including decreasing the occupational prestige of Polish immigrants, which negatively affected their group position. He argues that job sector and region mattered more for economic mobility. Method: Using data from the 1970 Census of Population, this article shows that manufacturing mattered, but in ways neither expected nor consistent with either of today's prevailing, theoretical approaches. This analysis focuses on descendants of Poland and Italy compared with northern-born African-Americans. CLASS/LABOR