Stratification/INEQUALITY: crime, education, incarceration, income, labor market, policing, poverty, wealth

MacLeod 09

Ain't No Making It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood [Inequality - Education, Empirical - Ethnography]: "The male teenage world of Clarendon Heights is populated by two divergent PEER GROUPS. The first group, dubbed the Hallway Hangers because of the group's propensity for 'hanging' in a particular hallway in the project, consists predominantly of white boys. Their characteristics and attitudes stand in marked contrast to the second group, which is composed almost exclusively of black youths who call themselves the Brothers. Surprisingly, the Brothers speak with relative optimism about their futures, while the Hallway Hangers are despondent about their prospects for social mobility. ... The optimism of the Brothers and the pessimism of the Hallway Hangers stem, at least in part, from their different appraisals of the openness of American society. ... some of the brothers aspire to middle-class occupations partly because they do not see significant societal barriers to upward mobility." 6 "This book's BASIC FINDING—that two substantially different paths are followed within the general framework of social reproduction—is a major challenge to economically determinist theories. Two groups of boys from the same social stratum who live in the same housing project and attend the same school nevertheless experience the process of social reproduction in fundamentally different ways. ... The interface between the cultural and the structural is critical to our understanding of social reproduction. ... Aspirations provide a conceptual link betweeen structure and agency in that they are rooted firmly in individual proclivity (agency) but also are acutely sensitive to perceived societal constraints (structure)." 137 CONCLUSION: "This book shifts the emphasis from individual deficits to structural inequality. Part One discloses that the roots of perceived individual pathology—unruliness in school, alcohol and drug abuse, violence, and crime—actually lie deep within the social structure. The leveled aspirations and behavior of the Hallway Hangers cannot be understoood apart from structural constraints on opportunity that in their cumulative effect are all too forbidding. The Brothers, in contrast, refuse to be cowed by the long odds. Spurred on by the distinctively American language of aspiration that gushes forth from our television shows, oru pop songs, and our advertisements, the Brothers lace up their sneakers and ' just go for it.' But we have seen that schools, even ones as good as Lincoln High, end up reinforcing social inequality while pretending to render it superfluous. The Brothers struggle academically in school and are socialized for positions near the bottom of the class pyramid. Part Two explores how the Hallway Hangers and Brothers fare in the structure of the job market. The results are depressing. The experiences of the Hallway Hangers since 1984 show that opting out of the contest—neither playing the game nor accepting its rules —is not a viable option. Incarceration and other less explicit social penalties are applied by society when the contest is taken on one's own terms. There is no escape: The Hallway Hangers must still generate income, build relationships, and establish households. ... Trapped inside the game, the Hallway Hangers now question their youthful resistance to schooling and social norms. Granted the opportunity to do it over again, the Hallway Hangers say they would have tried harder to succeed. But the Brothers have always tried, which is why their experiences between 1984 and 1991 are as disheartening as the Hallway Hangers'. If the Hangers show that opting out of the contest is not a viable option, the Brothers show that dutifully playing by the rules hardly guarantees successs either. Conservative and liberal commentators alike often contend that if the poor would only apply themselves, behave responsibly, and adopt bourgeois values, then they will propel themselves in to the middle class. The Brothers follow the recipe quite closely but the outcomes are disappointing. They illustrate how rigid and durable the class structure is. Aspiration, application, and intelligence often fail to cut through the firm figurations of structural inequality. Though not impenetrable, structural constraints on opportuntiy, embedded in both schools and job markets, turn out to be much more debilitating than the Brothers anticipated. Their dreams of comfortable suburban bliss currently are dreams deferred and are likely to end up as dreams denied. ... This book shows clearly that POVERTY IS NOT A BLACK ISSUE. ... The underclass has been twisted into a racial rather than a class formation, and poverty has become a black issue. By bringing the white poor into view, our story dissolves the mistaken connection between African Americans and behavior associated with poverty—crime, family disruption, substance abuse, and so on. ... Because criminality is almost completely confined to the Hallway hangers, this study debunks stereotypes about the black poor. ... Poverty is not a moral problem, much less a black moral or cultural problem. ... This book confirms that STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY CAUSES POVERTY. The presumed behavioral definciencies of the lower class are the consequenc rather than the cause of poverty." 242

Oliver & Shapiro 06

Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality [Inequality - Wealth, Empirical - Survey & Interviews]: "The empirical HEART of our analysis resides in an examination of differentials in black and white wealth holdings. This focus paints a vastly different empirical picture of social inequality than commonly emerges from analyses based on traditional inequality indicators. The burden of our claim is to demonstrate not simply the taken-for-granted assumption that wealth reveals 'more' inequality—income multiplied x times is not the correct equation. More importantly we show that wealth uncovers a qualitatively different pattern of inequality on crucial fronts. ... In stating our case, we do not discount the important information that the traditional indicators provide, but we argue that by adding to the latter an analysis of wealth a more thorough, comprehensive, and powerful explanation of social inequality can be elaborated." 3 "We develop THREE CONCEPTS to provide a sociologically grounded approach to understanding racial differentials in wealth accumulation. These concepts highlight the ways in which this opporrtunity structure has disadvantaged blacks and helped contribute to massive wealth inequalities between the races. Our first concept, 'racialization of state policy,' refers to how state policy has impaired the ability of many black Americans to accumulate wealth—and discouraged them from doing so—from the beginning of slavery throughout American history. From the first codified decision to enslave African Americans to the local ordinances that barred blacks from certain occupations to the welfare state policies of today that discourage wealth accumulation, the state has erected major barriers to black economic self-sufficiency. ... Our second focus, on the 'economic detour,' helps us understand the relatively low level of entrepreneurship among and the small scale of the businesses owned by black Americans. While blacks have historically sought out opportunities for self-employment, they have traditionally faced an environment, especially from the postbellum period to the middle of the twentieth century, in which they were restricted by law from participation in business in the open market. ... The third concept we develop is synthetic in nature. The notion embodied in the 'sedimentation of racial inequality' is that in central ways the cumulative effects of the past have seemingly cemented blacks to the bottom of society's economic hierarchy. A history of low wages, poor schooling, and segregation affected not one or two generations of blacks but practically all African Americans well into the middle of the twentieth century." 4 "The CENTRAL QUESTION of this study is, Why do the wealth portfolios of blacks and whites vary so drastically? The answer is not simply that blacks have inferior remunerable human capital endowments—substandard education, jobs, and skills, for example—or do not display the characteristics most associated with higher income and wealth. We are able to demonstrate that even when blacks and whites display similar characteristics—for example, are on a par educationally and occupationally—a potent difference of $43,143 in home equity and financial assets still remains. Likewise, giving the average black household the same attributes as the average white household leaves a $25,794 racial gap in financial assets alone." 8

Carter 05

Keepin' It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White [Inequality - Education, Empirical - Ethnography]: "Keepin' It Real addresses FOUR MAIN ISSUES that deal with how students handle everything from the institutional, the cultural, and the personal, when it comes to their school attachment. [1] First, in our society, not all groups, but rather a privileged few get to define what knowledge is or to define the images of the intelligent student. Students expressed their awareness of these dynamics, wrestling with their perceived unfairness of it all. If a pupil does not conform to these images, no matter how sharp his native ability, then he is marginalized. Students in this study, as the evidence will show, claim that their school attachement and engagement are often affected by how teachers and principals, the school's cultural gatekeepers, parcel out rewards and sanctions according to who abides by dominant cultural rules. They call attention to a hierarchy of cultural meanings in schools and in society that further perpetuates social inequality. [2] Second, I challenge a predominant yet persistant view that a reactive culture among African American and Latino students towards white and middle-class dominance engenders attitudes and values that inhibit their academic achievement. I claim that the ethno-racial cultures serve positive functions, including a sense of belonging, distinction, and support for how to critique and cope with inequality. Their ethno-racial cultures are not mere adaptations and reactions to experiences with closed opportunities. Neither are bad behavior, deviance, and delinquency the principal components of these cultures. Rather, their cultural presentations of self are better understood as practices of distinction based on a critique of an undiscerning mainstream culture in schools rahter than a submission to powerless and oppression. [3] The story of how these youths deploy culture to gain status is complex and varied, however, and their approaches are better understood as a continum rather than a fixed, singular cultural narrative. Some students comply with the dominant or mainstream cultural rules, while others challlenge them and create and maintain their own repertoire of cultural codes and meanings. Thus, the third major argument of Keepin' It Real is that students' differences in attachment and engagement to school are connected to their ideologies about how in-group members should respond to social inequalities and about how in-group members should respect the cultural boundaries that they create between themselves and others. [4] Fourth, the common cultural explanations for Black and Latino student achievement miss another key variation within these groups that comes from the intersections between ethno-specific culture and gender socialization among low-income African American and Latino students. ... there is also an untold gender story in the race, ethnicity, culture, and achievement literature. Research has hinted at the 'feminization' of achievement and schooling in the United States, and within many Black and Latino communities, the ratio between the number of girls and boys completing high school and attending college has doubled." 6 "students in this study fell into THREE GROUPS that characterize how they managed their identities, cultural styles, and educational beliefs. ... Noncompliant believers [believe] that education is the main route to socioeconomic mobility [but] their cultural identities and self-understanding as racial and ethnic beings lead them to challenge the compliance with rules that we use to denote good students. Usually, such students have limited knowledge of dominant culural rules, or they refuse to accept all of the codes and expectations from ... the 'culture of power' because they see value in their own body of cultural know-how, which the school does not necessarily acknowledge. ... cultural mainstreamers embrace the dominant cultural repertoire, or body of cultural know-how, and although they express their own racial or ethnic background as a central part of their identity, they portray most cultural behaviors as racially or ethnically neutral. ... Cultural mainstreamers comply with the mandates of schooling, even if they risk being rejected by their fellow African American and Latino peers for refusing to embrace their own racial and ethnic speech codes and musical, interactional, and social styles. A third group, the cultural straddlers, deftly abides by the schools' cultural rules. ... For example, a cultural straddler is the African American or Latino student who is a member of the school's academic elite, enrolled in the advanced placement and honors classes, who is recognized by his teachers and selected to represent the school and speak at a special event held at the local university that brings together future young leaders, and who is popular among his peers at school and back at the housing project where he lives because he 'keeps it real' by creating rhymes and poetry that resonate with them about the social and economic conditions of their community and society." 12

Jargowsky 15

Architecture of Segregation: Civil Unrest, the Concentration of Poverty, and Public Policy [Inequality - Poverty, Empirical - Survey]: EF: Jargowsky examines recent trends in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, seeking to understand the policies and choices that create concentrated disadvantage as an "architecture of segregation" that ultimately leads to societal problems, such as police violence, crime, and high-poverty ghettos. He argues that the US is seeing a dramatic re-concentration of urban poverty, despite earlier gains, which has resulted in a doubling of the population living in high poverty ghettos and a particularly large impact on poor children. He points to housing policy as a main driver of residential segregation by race and socioeconomic status, arguing that suburbanization has allowed the wealthy to flee city centers and inner-ring suburbs with the political and financial support of the state.

Bertrand & Mullainathan 04

Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination [Inequality - Labor Market, Empirical - Experiment]: "WE STUDY race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perceived race, resumes are randomly assigned African-American- or White-sounding names. White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. Callbacks are also more responsive to resume quality for White names than for African-American ones. The racial gap is uniform across occupation, industry, and employer size. We also find little evidence that employers are inferring social class from the names. Differential treatment by race still appears to still be prominent in the U.S. labor market." 991 "WE FIND large racial differences in callback rates. Applicants with White names need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback whereas applicants with African-American names need to send about 16 resumes. This 50-percent gap in callback is statistically significant. A White name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience on a resume. Since applicants' names are randomly assigned, this gap can only be attributed to the name mainipulation. Race also affects the reward to having a better resume. Whites with higher-quality resumes receive nearly 30-percent more callbacks than Whites with lower-quality resumes. On the other hand, having a higher-quality resume has a smaller effect for African-Americans. In other words, the gap bteween Whites and African-Americans widens with resume quality. While one may have expected improved credentials to alleviate employers' fear that African-American applicants are deficient in some unobservable skills, this is not the case in our data. ... We find that [an applicant's postal address] living in a wealthier (or more educated or Whiter) neighborhood increases callback rates. But, interestingly, African-Americans are not helped more than Whites by living in a 'better neighborhood. ... we find that the racial gaps in callback are statistically indistinguishable across all the occupation and industry categories covered in the experiment." 992

Ainsworth-Darnell & Downey 98

Assessing the Oppositional Culture Explanation for Racial/Ethnic Differences in School Performance [Relations - Education, Empirical - Survey]: ABSTRACT: "The oppositional culture explanation for racial disparities in school performance posits that individuals from historically oppressed groups (involuntary minorities) signify their antagonism toward the dominant group by resisting school goals. In contrast, individuals from the dominant group and groups that migrated freely to the host country (immigrant minorities) maintain optimistic views of their chances for educational and occupational success. Because of its historical and cross-cultural appeal, this explanation has been well-received by academics, although key implications of the theory have not been carefully tested. Proponents have failed to systematically compare perceptions of occupational opportunity and resistance to school across involuntary, dominant, and immigrant groups. Using a large sample of African American, Asian American, and non-Hispanic white high school sophomores from the first follow-up of the National Education Longitudinal Study, we provide the first rigorous test of the oppositional culture explanation. Upon close scrutiny, its key predictions fail." "Using data from a national survey, WE FOUND that the model is inconsistent with the data in several ways. The fundamental flaw of Ogbu's oppositional culture explanation is that African American students do not perceive fewer returns to education and more limited occupational opportunities than do whites. ... On a host of specific questions about their everyday lives in the classroom, African American students report more pro-school attitudes than do white students. And rather than suffering sanctioning from peers, African Americans who are viewed as good students are more likely to be popular than are their white counterparts." 547

Fordham & Ogbu 86

Black Students' School Success: Coping with the "Burden of 'Acting White'" [Relations - Education, Empirical - Ethnography]: "OUR MAIN POINT in this paper is that one major reason black students do poorly in school is that they experience inordinate ambivalence and affective dissonance in regard to academic effort and success. This problem arose partly because white Americans traditionally refused to acknowledge that black Americans are capable of intellectual achievement, and partly because black Americans subsequently began to doubt their own intellectual ability, began to define academic success as white people's prerogative, and began to discourage their peers, perhaps unconsciously, from emulating white people in academic striving, i.e., from 'acting white.' Because of the ambivalence, affective dissonance, and social pressures, many black students who are academically able do not put forth the necessary effort and perseverance in their schoolwork and, consequently, do poorly in school. Even black students who do not fail generally perform well below their potential for the same reasons." 177 "IN THE CASE STUDY of Capital High School in Washington, D.C., WE SHOWED that coping with the burden of acting white affects the academic performance of both underachieving and high-achieving students. Black students who are encapsulated in the fictive kinship system or oppositional process experience greater difficulty in crossing cultural boundaries; i.e., in accepting standard academic attitudes and practices of the school and in investing sufficient time and effort in pursuing their educational goals. Some of the high-achieving students do not identify with the fictive kinship system; others more or less deliberately adopt sex-specific strategies to camouflage their academic pursuits and achievements. The strategies of the academically successful students include engaging in activities which mute perceptions of their being preoccupied with academic excellence leading eventually to individual success outside the group, i.e., eventual upward mobility. Among them are athletic activities (which are regarded as 'black activities') and other 'team' oriented activities, for male students. Other high-achieving students camouflage their academic effort by clowning. Still others do well in school by acquiring the protection of 'bullies' and 'hoodlums' in return for assisting the latter in their schoolwork and homework. In general, academically successful black students at Capital High (and probably elsewhere) are careful not to brag about their achieve- ments or otherwise bring too much attention to themselves. We conclude, however, from this study of high-achieving students at Capital High, that they would do much better if they did not have to divert time and effort into strategies designed to camouflage their academic pursuit." 202

Jack 14

Culture Shock Revisited: The Social and Cultural Contingencies to Class Marginality [Relations - Education, Empirical - Interviews, Survey]: "The degree of cultural and social dissimilarity between one's life before and during college helps explain variation in [social] experiences [for lower-income graduates]. I contrast the experiences of two groups of lower-income, black undergraduates—the Doubly Disadvantaged and Privileged Poor. Although from comparable disadvantaged households and neighborhoods, they travel along divergent paths to college. Unlike the Doubly Disadvantaged, whose precollege experiences are localized, the Privileged Poor cross social boundaries for school. In college, the Doubly Disadvantaged report negative interactions with peers and professors and adopt isolationist strategies, while the Privileged Poor generally report positive interactions and adopt integrationist strategies. ... I show that even for undergraduates from similar class backgrounds, the effects of class marginality, taken as feeling like an outsider because of one's class background, are not uniform. Rather, class marginality has cultural and social contingencies. It is those lower-income undergraduates whose lives before college are culturally and socially dissimilar to their lives in college who experience the effects of class marginality most acutely." 454

Stainback & Tomaskovic-Devey 12

Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private Sector Employment Since the Civil Rights Act [Inequality - Labor Market, Empirical - Historical]: "It is this extension of rights to equal opportunity in employment, freedom from discrimination in employment, and the erosion of race and gender employment segregation as a legitimate and expected practice that is at the HEART OF THIS BOOK. The passage of the Civil Rights Act is without question one of the most monumental achievements in the history of the United States, perhaps even the world. The act made clear for the first time at a national level that the use of racial and gender status distinctions in employment was illegiti- mate and illegal. The passage of a law, however, does not automatically produce societal change. How did employers respond to this legal challenge? How much progress has the United States made as a nation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Which groups benefited, and who lagged behind? These are the questions we grapple with throughout the book." xxi "WHAT WE DISCOVER in this book is that desegregation trajectories away from the near-total white male privilege observed prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act have been responsive primarily to pressures for change from the environment and from internal constituencies. When these pressures are absent, so is progress. We document the important environmental pressures that came from the civil rights movement and federal legislation in the 1960s and from the women's movement, judicial rulings, and fed- eral regulation in the 1980s. After 1980, the pace of change slowed consid- erably as racial employment inequality faded from the political discourse and gender-based politics slowly withered." xxiv

Duncan 68

Inheritance of Poverty or Inheritance of Race [Inequality - Poverty, Empirical - Survey]: "I SHALL ARGUE in particular, that Negroes (that is, disproportionate numbers of them) are poor mainly because they are 'Negroes' and are defined and treated as such by our society and that their poverty stems largely not from the legacy of poverty but from the legacy of race." 87 "The Negro handicap, therefore, as suggested elsewhere, is a DOUBLE HANDICAP: First, the Negro begins the life cycle (typically) with characteristics that would be a disadvantage to anyone, white or Negro—specifically, in the present model, low levels of parental socioeconomic status. Second, achievements at subsequent stages of the life cycle, already lowered by the initial handicap, are further reduced when favorable circumstances (to the extent that they exist) cannot be capitalized on as readily." 96 "WE HAVE SEEN that the effect of family background per se, while substantial, is not large enough to explain the greater part of the Negro-white gap in income, occupational status, or educational attainment." 102

Smith & Moore 00

Intraracial Diversity and Relations among African Americans: Closeness among Black Students at a Predominantly White University [Relations - Education, Empirical - Surveys, Interviews]: "Employing as a case study black college students who attend a predominantly white university, we find that, although black students continue to create their own social groups to combat feelings of isolation and alienation from the larger campus community, there exists considerable variation in the level of closeness they feel toward other black students and the black community on campus. ... These findings suggest that homogeneity in values, attitudes, and experiences among black students should not be assumed. Based on in-depth interviews, our study suggests that what is driving students' feelings of closeness to or distance from other black students is the extent to which they perceive themselves to be different from the majority of other black students on campus. These perceived differences stem from three factors: racial/ethnic identification, SES, and preadult integrative experiences. First, biracial students are significantly less likely to feel close to other black students on campus. ... Second, low SES students are less likely to feel close to black students on campus when compared to high SES students. ... Third, consistent with previous research, we find that preadult interracial contact has a negative effect on closeness to other blacks." 34

Wilson, G 07

Introduction to Race, Ethnicity, and Inequality in the U.S. Labor Market: Critical Issues in the New Millennium [Inequality - Labor Market, Introduction]: "A GENERAL CONCLUSION: race and ethnicity continue to matter as salient factors in the American labor market. Accordingly, findings from this voluminous literature have helped to assess the merits of prominent theoretical perspectives that most directly address the nature and extent of racial/ethnic stratification in the American workplace. Two examples of this will suffice: findings render fundamentally incorrect the predictions from what is now a relatively distant generation of sociologists, who, operating through the lens of a structural functional theory, maintained that the use of ascriptive cri teria such as race and ethnicity were deemed fundamentally incompatible with the logical imperatives dictated by advanced capitalist societies that put a pre mium on meritocratic criteria and principles of efficiency in determining access to socioeconomic rewards in the American labor market. Furthermore, findings from contemporary studies have demonstrated that facile and sweeping conclusions regarding the accuracy of the more recently enunciated thesis about the 'declining significance of race,' at least, as it applies to dynamics within the civil rights era, are unwarranted." 7 "Overall, in contemporary studies, a series of OVERARCHING ANALYTIC APPROACHES that posit how race/ethnicity operate to structure inequality in the American labor market can be identified. Two such prominent approaches are offered as illustrations. The first maintains that race/ethnicity operates under the umbrella of broader causal statements about the distribution of rewards in the labor market. Illustrative of this are attempts to analyze race/ethnicity in the workplace in the context of theories of class conflict as well as within the framework of tools adopted from neo classical economics?such as "monopolistic" practices that have been used to maintain that strategically placed groups that have incentives to maintain racial/ethnic inequality. A second line of research is noteworthy because it assesses the salience of race/ethnicity in the workplace on a basis that is independent of, and not reducible to, other causal, supposedly more funda mental determinants such as class relations and the logic of supply and demand dynamics in the labor market." 8

Hunt & Wilson, G 11

Introduction to Race, Racial Attitudes, and Stratification Beliefs: Evolving Directions for Research and Policy [Inequality - All, Introduction]: "Such work stems from two primary, and sometimes overlapping, scholarly domains: RACIAL ATTITUDES and STRATIFICATION BELIEFS. Racial attitudes research focuses on the antecedents and consequences of beliefs about race, racial prejudice, and racial policy support. Stratification beliefs research focuses on beliefs about the causes of social and economic inequalities (including patterns by race) and the implications of such for relevant public policies. Scholarship in these two areas has incorporated 'race' in two primary ways: as a predictor, focusing on how race/ethnic group membership shapes patterns of adherence to various ideological belies and worldviews; and as part of the content of ideologies, beliefs, and worldviews." 7 OUTLINE: "The first several articles in this volume explore the dynamics of race, inequality, and ideology in relation to specific institutional domains or issues of national concern: crime, religion, work, and immigration/national inclusion. ... The remaining articles in the current volume all deal, in one way or another, with racial policy attitudes or the changing nature of racism in twenty-first-century America. ... Three articles in this volume deal directly with current debates over the nature of modern racial prejudice, focusing on the measurement and the implications of a specific topic in the 'new racism' literature: racial resentment. ... Two additional articles address issues of long-standing concern to scholars interested in the social and psychological bases of whites' policy attitudes: the impact of social context on racial policy outlooks and the role of racial prejudice in shaping support for (ostensibly) nonracial policy matters. ... The two final articles in this volume both deal with issues of racial prejudice or stratification ideology in the context of the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States." 7

Dobbin 09

Inventing Equal Opportunity [Inequality - Labor Market, Empirical - Survey]: "There is a rich trove of books on each of the first three ACTS in the equal opportunity drama: the civil rights movement, passage of equal op- portunity laws, and federal enforcement of those laws. Those books neglect the long fourth act, in which the personnel profession's com- pliance efforts translated the law into practice. ... In the first act of the equal opportunity story, the civil rights movement called for Congress to outlaw discrimination in employment, ed- ucation, housing, and public accommodations, demanding legislation that, with the one hundredth anniversary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 looming, might make good on the promise that all men (and women) are equal in the eyes of the law. ... In the second act, politicians required federal contractors to practice equal opportunity in 1961, required employers to pay men and women the same wages for the same work in 1963, and required all employ- ers to offer equal employment opportunity in 1964. ... In the third act, federal administrators and courts shaped how these vague laws would be enforced. ... This book chronicles the fourth act in the drama, which began soon after John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925 in 1961, requiring firms with federal contracts to take 'affirmative action' to end discrim- ination. Personnel professionals crafted equal opportunity programs with instruments drawn from their professional arsenal, and those pro- grams came to define fair employment and discrimination. It was per- sonnel experts who decreed that managers should advertise jobs and that they should use performance evaluations to judge applicants for promotions." 3 "Personnel experts promoted one ROUND OF COMPLIANCE MEASURES after another. In the 1960s, they wrote nondiscrimination policies based on union non- discrimination rules, and set up recruitment and training programs for women and minorities. In the 1970s, as the profession more than dou- bled in size and as the proportion of women rose from a third to nearly a half, they formalized hiring and promotion with performance evalua- tions, salary classification, and other measures to eliminate managers' opportunities to exercise bias.28 In the Reagan years, when affirmative action was on the ropes, they changed course, arguing that the new hiring and promotion practices helped to rationalize "human resources management" and relabeling "equal opportunity" programs as "di- versity management" programs. Then in the 1990s and 2000s, the in- creasingly feminized human resources profession focused on women's issues, pushing for the expansion of work and family programs and antiharassment programs. In each period the meaning of discrimina- tion changed, and the roles of social movements, organizations, the professions, and the government evolved in ways that challenged the conventional wisdom." 13

Moore 11

Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women [Inequality - Other, Empirical - Interview]: Majority of research on lesbian families focuses on white, middle-class women and is generalized to all families of color. Moore's central argument is that race, as a social structure, and as it intersects with gender, class, and sexuality, shapes the way black women "come into" gay life, formulate their gender presentations, enter into intimate relationships, interact with extended family and community members, maintain respectability, and ultimately make decisions about how to form their families. Moore illustrates the importance of social context in how black women choose both their public and private presentation of self. Based on intersectionality theory, Moore articulates the different race (American born or Caribbean born) and economic contexts that influence how women understand and embrace their sexuality and how they choose to present their gender identity. Finds that respectability is particularly important to middle-class and West Indian and Caribbean women who fear disgracing their families and communities. Moore critiques previous studies for using narrow definitions of "lesbian mother" that exclude from studies lesbians who have become mothers through previous heterosexual relationships and partners who already have children. By using a broader definition, Moore is able to examine how mothers become lesbians and how lesbians become mothers. The theme of maintaining respectability within the Black community while simultaneously expressing sexual freedom and autonomy recurs throughout Invisible Families

Ogbu 90

Minority Education in Comparative Perspective [Inequality - Education, Theory]: "THREE types of COMMUNITY FORCES influence minority children's school adjustment and academic performance: instrumental, symbolic, and relational. Instrumental factors, those that encourage striving for school success among American immigrant minorities, include their positive, dual-status, upward-mobility frame of reference and their folk theories of getting ahead in America. ... Symbolic factors such as the social identity and cultural frame of reference of the immigrants, while different but not necessarily ambivalent or oppositional to the White American cultural frame of reference upon which school values are based, also promote school striving and success among those groups. ... The relational factor that promotes school success among immigrant minorities involves their degree of acquiescence and trust in the schools and school personnel. ... The instrumental factors do not work so favorably for involuntary minorities. To begin with, involuntary minorities possess a negative, dual-status, limited-mobility frame of reference that does not encourage striving for school success. ... Similarly, symbolic factors do not particularly encourage striving for school success among involuntary minorities. ... The relationship between involuntary minorities and the public schools (and, subsequently, those who control the schools) does not help to promote academic success among involuntary minorities." 51 CONCLUSION: "Immigrant minorities and involuntary minorities differ not only in the initial terms of their incorporation into society but also in their choice of reference groups for comparing their present status and future possibilities, their folk theories of getting ahead (especially with regard to education), their collective identities and cultural frames of reference for judging appropriate behavior, their modes of affirming group membership and solidarity, and their degree of trust in the dominant group and its institutions. Immigrant minorities are relatively more successful in school than involuntary minorities because the status of the former as voluntary minorities generates for them certain community features that enhance the attitudes and behaviors conducive to school success. This does not mean that all immigrant minority students succeed in school or that all involuntary minority students fail, nor does it mean that involuntary minority children have no obligation to understand and relate to the culture and language of the schools-education will always be a two-way street. However, there appear to be dominant patterns of academic adaptation among the two types of minorities. Each type of minority has at its disposal several culturally based strategies to enhance their chances of school success, yet they differ in the degree of support, especially peer support, that they provide to individual members of their groups who attempt to utilize those strategies." 54

Rosenfeld & Kleykamp 12

Organized Labor and Racial Wage Inequality in the United States [Inequality - Labor Market & Income, Empirical - Survey]: OUTLINE: "We first investigate unionization in order to test theories of African-Americans' engagement with the labor movement in the United States. Next, we estimate the effects of union membership and of joining a union on wages. Unlike scholarship on the historical relationship between blacks and organized labor, recent research on black-white wage inequality conceptualizes unions as benefiting blacks and whites similarly. This assumption ignores both organized labor's historical role in blocking access to well-paying, stable employment for African-Americans and possible explanations for blacks' overrepresentation in unions in more recent periods. Our analysis tests whether the effect of unionization on wages varies by race. We utilize these race-specific wage premium estimates for our final investigation of the article: an account of what black-white wage inequality in the private sector would look like had 1970s unionization rates—the highest in our series—persisted. This counterfactual provides a picture of how the near disintegration of a core labor market institution affects economic inequality between black and white workers." 1461 "Three main empirical FINDINGS undergird the theoretical contributions of the article. First, we show that African-Americans' disproportionately high rates of organization are not simply reducible to their labor market positions. Instead, our analyses are consistent with a protectionist theory of the labor movement, where out-groups seek unionized employment as a refuge against discriminatory treatment in nonunion sectors. Second, we find little evidence to suggest that unionization actually offers any additional economic protection to blacks compared with whites: both groups benefit similarly from organization. Third, despite the lack of an added economic benefit, private-sector union decline has exacerbated black-white wage inequality, especially among female workers." 1462

Rios 11

Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys [Inequality - Policing, Empirical - Ethnography]: "This is where my RESEARCH QUESTIONS for this project became clear: How do surveillance, punishment, and criminal justice practices affect the lives of marginalized boys? What patterns of punishment do young people such as Slick encounter in their neighborhoods in Oakland? What effects do these patterns of punishment have on the lives of the young men in this study? Specifically, how do punitive encounters with police, probation officers, teachers and administrators, and other authority figures shape the meanings that young people create about themselves and about their obstacles, opportunities, and future aspirations?" 7 "ULTIMATELY I ARGUE that a system of punitive social control held a grip on the minds and trajectories of the boys in this study. What this study demonstrates is that the poor, at least in this community, have not been abandoned by the state. Instead, the state has become deeply embedded in their everyday lives, through the auspices of punitive social control. Fieldwork allowed me to observe firsthand the processes by which the state asserts itself into civil society through various institutions, with the specific intent of regulating deviant behavior and maintaining social order. This punitive social control becomes visible when we examine its consequences. These include oppositional culture, perilous masculinity, and other actions that attempt to compensate for punitive treatment. But not all consequences of punitive social control are detrimental. The mass and ubiquitous criminalization of marginalized young people, what I refer to as hypercriminalization, brings about a paradox. One response to criminalization is resistance. Some of this resistance is self-defeating. However, other components of this resistance have the potential to radically alter the worldviews and trajectories of the very marginalized young people that encounter criminalization." 21

Royster 03

Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar Jobs [Inequality - Labor Market, Empirical - Interviews]: "From an economic point of view, my students' comments demonstrate a great faith in the 'INVISIBLE HAND.' They assume that everyone who seeks work has an equal chance of being considered for jobs and that the best candidate is nearly always chosen irrespective of race or other irrelevant characteristics—except when affirmative action interferes with this self-regulating system. The 'invisible hand' analogy suggests a sorting process that is free of particularistic bias and therefore inherently meritocratic. According to this worldview, anyone who studies and works hard ought to be able to make it in their chosen field. Faith in the 'invisible hand' is associated with an endorsement of Market explanations of social inequality. On the other hand, some of my students seem to endorse an alternative view, namely that many people get their jobs as a result of knowing the right people. Sociologists call this perspective the Embeddedness approach because it suggests that each person is embedded in a network of social relationships that help an individual accomplish a variety of goals, including getting a job. This approach brings to my mind the workings of a 'visible hand' that interferes with the workings of the 'invisible hand' and disrupts meritocratic sorting procedures. Not surprisingly, these two perspectives differ a great deal in how they explain the workings of complex labor markets that include young and minority job seekers, who are the main subject of this book." 6 "studying blacks and whites who attended the same vocational schools and studied many of the same trades. ... I constructed my study to answer a set of basic QUESTIONS: [1] What happens when whites and blacks share a track placement, the same teachers, and the same classrooms? [2] Can desegregated institutions, in this post-civil rights era, provide equal foundations and assistance for blacks and whites? [3] Does the problem of embeddedness—in this case, historically segregated job networks—stifle the emergence of cross-racial linkage mechanisms and networks beyond schools? [4] Or does the post-Civil Rights era provide a new color-blind labor market in which blacks who show signs of work-readiness and achievement succeed on a par with white peers in terms of initial employment outcomes? [5] Finally, are black students, as the racial deficits theory suggests, lacking something that should make them less desirable as workers than their white peers?" 10 FINDINGS: "Although the majority of the whites and blacks performed well and studied the same subjects ... whites experienced far greater success than blacks. Specifically whites held more jobs within their fields, earned higher wages, experienced less unemployment, and had smoother transitions between jobs. They also got more effective assistance from family and friends and from white male teachers. Blacks, by contrast, often relied on poorly situated black family members and friends, and received only verbal encouragement, rather than material assistance, from white male teachers. Despite the advantages whites held over blacks—advantages not linked to educational, motivational, or character differences—many whites were convinced that blacks were unfairly advantaged because of reverse discrimination. This ideology—fostered by whites who lived and socialized within racially segregated networks—served to create disincentives for including blacks and replaced the old black-inferiority rationale for exclusion with a new black-ascendency rationale. According to this view, since the government was helping blacks but not whites, whites must help one another in the marketplace. None of the white males I spoke with had faced direct discrimination in the workplace, but a number held vague suspicions that they had lost out to blacks at some point or another. Only black males were able to provide specific examples of subtle and not-so-subtle forms of racism" 11

Spohn 15

Race, Crime, and Punishment in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries [Inequality - Crime, Review]: ABSTRACT: "Flagrant and widespread racism that characterized the criminal justice system during the early part of the twentieth century has largely been eliminated, but racial disparities persist. Whether because of overt racism, implicit bias, or laws and practices that have racially disparate effects, black (and Hispanic) men and women make up a disproportionate number of people in American prisons and on death row. Researchers have conducted dozens of studies designed to untangle the complex relationships between race and punishment to determine the causes of racial disparities. Findings vary somewhat, but most conclude that the share of racial disproportionality in imprisonment that can be explained by differential involvement in crime has declined over time; attribute the continuing—possibly worsening—disparity to policies pursued during the war on drugs and officials' race-linked stereotypes of culpability, dangerousness, and likelihood of reoffending; and contend that race affects the capital sentencing process. Remedying this will require reducing the size of the prison population, reforming the sentencing process so that many more offenders convicted of nonserious crimes receive alternatives to incarceration, and abolishing or severely restricting use of the death penalty." 49

Mastrofski 11

Race, Policing, and Equity [Inequality - Policing, Introduction]: "The rapidly growing sophistication of evidence on crime and place also is enlarging to add the element of 'justice,' one that too often remains an afterthought in the research literature about crime policy. The findings of this budding literature on the justice of crime control practices suggest that more complex explanations are required regarding race effects. ... Despite the differences of viewpoint found among the researchers and essayists presented in this volume, as a group they conjure what may be a growing uneasiness or ambivalence about the potential for problems in the current 'you call we haul' system of allocating police resources, whether it is considered a sort of inequitable 'collateral damage' of the war on drugs or the deleterious consequences of an 'elegant social machinery.'" 598

Pager & Pedulla 15

Race, Self-Selection, and the Job Search Process [Inequality - Labor Market, Empirical - Survey]: "While existing research has documented persistent barriers facing African-American job seekers, far less research has questioned how job seekers respond to this reality. Do minorities self-select into particular segments of the labor market to avoid discrimination? ... we find little evidence that blacks target or avoid particular job types. Rather, blacks cast a wider net in their search than similarly situated whites, including a greater range of occupational categories and characteristics in their pool of job appli- cations. Additionally, we show that perceptions of discrimination are associated with increased search breadth, suggesting that broad search among African-Americans represents an adaptation to labor market discrimination. Together these findings provide novel evidence on the role of race and self-selection in the job search process" 1005

Kao & Thompson 03

Racial and Ethnic Stratification in Educational Achievement and Attainment [Inequality - Education, Review]: ABSTRACT: "We provide an overview of recent empirical research on racial, ethnic, and immigrant differences in educational achievement and attainment, and we examine some current theories that attempt to explain these differences. We explore group differences in grades, test scores, course taking, and tracking, especially throughout secondary schooling, and then discuss variation in high school completion, transitions to college, and college completion. We also summarize key theoretical explanations used to explain persistent differences net of variation in socioeconomic status, which focus on family and cultural beliefs that stem from minority group and class experiences. Overall, there are many signs of optimism. Racial and ethnic gaps in educational achievement and attainment have narrowed over the past three decades by every measure available to social scientists. Educational aspirations are universally high for all racial and ethnic groups as most adolescents expect to go to college. However, substantial gaps remain, especially between less advantaged groups such as African Americans, I-Jispanics, and Native Americans and more advantaged groups such as whites and Asian Americans. The racial and ethnic hierarchy in educational achievement is apparent across varying measures of the academic experience." 417 "Although the debates are complex, most contemporary THEORIES about why ethnic groups differ in their educational achievement fall into two general categories. The first is about how cultural orientations of certain ethnic groups promote/discourage academic achievement, and the second is about how the structural position of ethnic groups affects the children's (parent, peer, and school) environments." 419 CONCLUSION: "Overall, there are many signs of optimism. Racial and ethnic gaps in educational achievement and attainment have narrowed over the past 3 decades by every measure available to social scientists. Educational aspirations are universally high for all racial andethnic groups as most adolescents expect to go to college. However, substantial gaps remain, especially between less-advantaged groups such as African Americans, EIispanics, and Native Americans and more advantaged groups such as whites and Asian Americans. The racial and ethnic hierarchy in educational achievement is apparent across varying measures of the academic experience." 435

Hamilton 14

Selection, Language Heritage, and the Earnings Trajectories of Black Immigrants in the United States [Inequality - Income, Empirical - Surveys]: EF: Hamilton examines more recent waves of black immigration to evaluate whether black immigrants' earning trajectories surpass those of native born blacks. Building upon past research, he compares black immigrants to native black internal migrants and seeks to understand the importance of native language. He concludes that in 20 years, immigrants from English-speaking countries are likely to surpass earnings of native born blacks in general and movers in particular. He argues that these results demonstrate the importance of selective migration and language heritage as determinants of earnings.

Sampson et al 05

Social Anatomy of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Violence [Inequality - Crime, Empirical - Survey]: "The gap between Whites and Blacks in levels of violence has animated a prolonged and controversial debate in public health and the social sciences. Our study reveals that over 60% of this gap is explained by immigration status, marriage, length of residence, verbal/reading ability, impulsivity, and neighborhood context. If we focus on odds ratios rather than raw coefficients, 70% of the gap is explained. Of all factors, neighborhood context was the most important source of the gap reduction and constitutional differences the least important. ... Whatever the ultimate validity of the constitutional difference argument, the main conclusion is that its efficacy as an explainer of race and violence is weak. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that Blacks are segregated by neighborhood and thus differentially exposed to key risk and protective factors, an essential ingredient to understanding the Black-White disparity in violence. ... Family social conditions matter as well. Our data show that parents being married, but not family configuration per se, is a salient factor predicting both the lower probability of violence and a significant reduction in the Black-White gap in violence. ... We conclude that the large racial/ethnic disparities in violence found in American cities are not immutable. Indeed, they are largely social in nature and therefore amenable to change." 231

Steele & Aronson 98

Stereotype Threat and the Academic Performance of Academically Successful African Americans [Inequality - Education, Empirical - Experiment]: "The existence of a negative stereotype about a group to which one belongs means that in situations where it is potentially applicable, one risks confirming that stereotype, both to oneself and to others. Such situations create what we have called stereotype threat. When the stereotype in question demeans something as important to one as intellectual ability is to good students, it can impair performance. Our experiments show that making African Americans more conscious of negative stereotypes about their intellectual ability as a group can depress their test performance relative to that of whites. Conditions designed to alleviate stereotype threat, in turn, can improve the performance of blacks. These findings come from Studies One and Two, which variously present the test as diagnostic or nondiagnostic of intellectual ability. That is, these studies vary the extent to which the stereotype about blacks' ability seems relevant to the test they are taking. Study Three provides direct evidence that describing a test in a particular way can arouse stereotype threat in black participants. Describing the test as a measure of ability activates the racial stereotype, provokes self-doubt relating to the stereotype, and leads blacks to distance themselves from other stereotypes about African Americans. Study Four shows that merely asking black students to record their race is enough to impair their test performance, even when the test is not described as a measure of ability. This is presumably because race priming makes the stereotype salient in the minds of these participants. Study Five replicates these results. Taken together, the five studies show that stereotype threat can impair the test performance of African Americans even if it is created by queite subtle changes of environment. Eliminating stereotype threat can dramaticallly imporve blacks' performance." 422

McDaniel et al 11

The Black Gender Gap in Educational Attainment: Historical Trends and Racial Comparisons [Relations - Education, Empirical - Surveys]: "Using census data from 1940 to the present, we show that black women have long held an advantage over black men in college completion, which differs sharply from the changing gap in college completion among white men and women. The difference in the black and white gender gap in college completion arguably is due to black men's lack of access to educational resources and high-status occupations and black women's higher incentives for education. Historically, black men had differential access to educational resources, notably the G.I. Bill, and educated black men were largely barred from many of the high-status male- dominated occupations that were available to white men. Black women had greater incentives to work compared with white women, due to lower incomes of black families, high black male unemployment, and the fact that working was more socially acceptable for black women than white women. Although white women's advantage in college completion is a more recent trend, their advantage over white men is growing more rapidly than black women's advantage over black men. Much of men's disadvantage in college completion is located at the transition to postsecondary education, although white males are also disadvantaged in the trend in college completion, given postsecondary enrollment. Finally, it appears that the rising rates of incarceration have contributed only modestly to the gender gap in college completion for blacks. In light of the sharp increase in incarceration rates for black males, it is remarkable that the female favorable gender gap in college completion among blacks has been relatively small in comparison with the tremendous relative gains made by white females. This fact, however, arises mostly from the tremendous educational advance of white women against relatively stagnant gains for white males. Clearly, black males are the most disadvantaged of the four population groups studied here. Despite the converging trends between blacks and whites, black men still lag behind black women more than white men lag behind white women in terms of odds ratios for completing college. Moreover, the overall black-white gap remains very large and shows no signs of closing in the foreseeable future." 909

Quadagno 94

The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty [Inequality - Poverty, Empirical - Historical]: "This book is about how policymakers tried to respond to those demands by reconstructing the racial welfare state of the New Deal. It is also about how these attempts foundered on a deep racial divide. Finally it is about the price the nation still pays for failing to fully incorporate African Americans ihto the national community. That price is a welfare state that lacks the basic protection other industrialized nations take for granted. The argument I develop here differs from other interpretations of the American welfare state. Several leading political theorists contend that the United States has been a welfare state laggard because of a tradition of liberal values, while others focus on the weakness of the working class or the peculiarities of American statemaking. I find all these interpretations partially correct; yet they pay insufficient attention to a key ingredient—race." 4

Feagin 91

The Continuing Significance of Race: Antiblack Discrimination in Public Places [Inequality - Other, Empirical - Interviews]: "Middle-class STRATEGIES for coping with discrimination range from careful assessment to withdrawal, resigned acceptance, verbal confrontation, or physical confrontation. ... Assessing the situation is a first step. ... This careful evalution, based on past experiences (real or vicarious), not only prevents jumping to conclusions, but also reflects the hope that white behavior is not based on race, because an act not based on race is easier to endure. After evaluation one strategy is to leave the site of discrimination rather than to create a disturbance. Another is to ignore the discrimination and continue with the interaction, a 'blocking' strategy ... In many situations resigned acceptance is the only realistic response. More confrontational responses to white actions include verbal reprimands and sarcasm, physical counterattacks, and filing lawsuits. ... In crafting these strategies middle-class blacks, in comparison with less privileged blacks, may draw on middle-class resources to fight discrimination." 103 "I HAVE examined the sites of discrimination, the types of discriminatory acts, and the responses of the victims and have found the color stigma still to be very important in the public lives of affluent black Americans. ... The interviews highlight two significant aspects of the additive discrimination faced by black Americans in public places and elsewhere: (1) the cumulative character of an individual's experiences with discrimination; and (2) the group's accumulated historical experiences as perceived by the individual. ... Anti-black discrimination is a matter of racial-power inequality institutionalized in a variety of economic and social institutions over a long period of time. The microlevel events of public accommodations and public streets are not just rare and isolated encounters by individuals; they are recurring events reflecting an invasion of the microworld by the macroworld of historical racial subordination." 114

Lewis 69

The Culture of Poverty [Inequality - Poverty, Theory]: "The culture of poverty ... tends to grow and flourish in societies with the following set of conditions: (1) a cash economy, wage labor, and production for profit; (2) a persistently high rate of unemployment and underemployment for unskilled labor; (3) low wages; (4) the failure to provide social, political, and economic organization, either on a voluntary basis or by government imposition, for the low-income population; (5) the existence of a bilateral kinship system rather than a unilateral one; and finally, (6) the existence in the dominant class of a set of values that stresses the accumulation of wealth and property, the possibility of upward mobility, and thrift and that explains low economic status as the result of personal inadequacy or inferiority. ... The way of life that develops among some of the poor under these conditions is the culture of poverty. It can best be studied in urban or rural slums and can be described in terms of some seventy interrelated social, economic, and psychological traits. However, the number of traits and the relationships between them may vary from society to society and from family to family. ... The culture of poverty is both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individuated, capitalistic society. It represents an effort to cope with feelings of hopelessness and despair that develop from the realization of the improbability of achieving success in terms of the values and goals of the larger society. ... The culture of poverty can be studied from various points of view: the relationship between the subculture and the larger society [lack of effective participation and integration of the poor in major institutions]; the nature of the slum community [a minimum of organization beyond th elevel of the nuclear and extended family but there may be a sense of community despite low level of organization]; the nature of the family [short childhood, early sex, free unions, absentee fathers, female-centered families, authoritarianism, lack of privacy, competition for limited goods and affection, verbal emphasis on family]; and the attitudes, values, and character structure of the individual [strong feelings of marginality, helplessness, dependence, inferiority]." 187

Western 02

The Impact of Incarceration on Wage Mobility and Inequality [Inequality - Incarceration & Income, Empirical - Survey]: ABSTRACT: "A life course perspective on crime indicates that incarceration can disrupt key life transitions. Life course analysis of occupations finds that earnings mobility depends on stable employment in career jobs. These two lines of research thus suggest that incarceration reduces ex-inmates' access to the steady jobs that usually produce earnings growth among young men. Consistent with this argument, evidence for slow wage growth among ex-inmates is provided by analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Because incarceration is so prevalent—one-quarter of black non-college males in the survey were interviewed between 1979 and 1998 while in prison or jail—the effect of imprisonment on individual wages also increases aggregate race and ethnic wage inequality." 526 INTRODUCTION: "I examine the effect of incarceration on wages in the context of growing inequality in the U.S. labor market. My analysis departs from earlier research by treating incarceration as a key life event that triggers a cumulative spiral of disadvantage. In this approach, incarceration reduces not just the level of wages but also the rate of wage growth over the life course. The life path of ex-inmates diverges from the usual employment trajectory in which earnings mobility for young men is generated by steady jobs with regular career ladders. ... If incarceration slows wage growth at the individual level, the prison boom may have increased wage inequality in the aggregate. Was the growth in wage inequality in the 1980s and 1990s due to the poor labor market performance of low-skill and minority ex-convicts? ... Pervasive incarceration among low-skill minority men may increase wage inequality within and across racial and ethnic groups. I investigate this question by calculating the effects of incarceration on wage inequality using estimates of the impact of incarceration on individual earnings." 527

Pager 03

The Mark of a Criminal Record [Inequality - Incarceration & Labor Market, Empirical - Experiment]: INTRO: "This article focuses on the consequences of incarceration for the employment outcomes of black and white men. While previous survey research has demonstrated a strong association between incarceration and employment, there remains little understanding of the mechanisms by which these outcomes are produced. In the present study, I adopt an experimental audit approach to formally test the degree to which a criminal record affects subsequent employment opportunities. By using matched pairs of individuals to apply for real entry-level jobs, it becomes possible to directly measure the extent to which a criminal record—in the absence of other disqualifying characteristics—serves as a barrier to employment among equally qualified applicants. Further, by varying the race of the tester pairs, we can assess the ways in which the effects of race and criminal record interact to produce new forms of labor market inequalities." 937 CONCLUSION: "There is serious disagreement among academics, policy makers, and practitioners over the extent to which contact with the criminal justice system—in itself—leads to harmful consequences for employment. The present study takes a strong stand in this debate by offering direct evidence of the causal relationship between a criminal record and employment outcomes. ... While certainly there are additional ways in which incarceration may affect employment outcomes, this finding provides conclusive evidence that mere contact with the criminal justice system, in the absence of any transformative or selective effects, severely limits subsequent employment opportunities. ... Second, the persistent effect of race on employment opportunities is painfully clear in these results. Blacks are less than half as likely to receive consideration by employers, relative to their white counterparts, and black nonoffenders fall behind even whites with prior felony convictions. ... Finally, in terms of policy implications, this research has troubling conclusions. In our frenzy of locking people up, our 'crime control' policies may in fact exacerbate the very conditions that lead to crime in the first place." 960

Young 04

The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances [Inequality - Poverty, Empirical - Interviews]: LW: Examines the values and beliefs of young black men around work, mobility and opportunity to understand the "crisis of the black male" from a different perspective. Finds that differing degrees of social isolation and exposure to the world outside of their neighborhood shape these men's perspectives around mobility, opportunity and future life chances. For the most part, the values and beliefs about the world are similar to all Americans, however, these men primarily lack informed and realistic strategies for action on attaining their aspirations. Tries to link cultural and urban sociology. Those who are most isolated held onto the American Dream and individual agency/work ethic most strongly

Alexander 10

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [Inequality - Incarceration & Labor Market, Empirical - Historical]: "In the era of COLORBLINDNESS, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color 'criminals' and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." "What is completely missed in the rare public debates today about the plight of African Americans is that a huge percentage of them are NOT FREE TO MOVE UP at all. It is not just that they lack opportunity, attend poor schools, or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law from doing so. And the major institutions with which they come into contact are designed to prevent their mobility. To put the matter starkly: The current system of control permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy. The system operates through our criminal justice institutions, but it functions more like a caste system than a system of crime control. Viewed from this perspective, the so-called underclass is better understood as an undercaste—a lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society. Although this new system of racialized social control purports to be colorblind, it creates and maintains racial hierarchy much as earlier systems of control did. Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race."

Sampson & Wilson 95

Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality [Inequality - Crime, Theory]: THESIS: "In an attempt to break this stalemate we advance in this chapter a theoretical strategy that incorporates both structural and cultural arguments regarding race, crime, and inequality in American cities. In contrast to psychologically based relative deprivation theories and the subculture of violence, we view the race and crime linkage from contextual lenses that highlight the very different ecological contexts that blacks and whites reside in—regardless of individual characteristics. The basic thesis is that macro-social patterns of residential inequality give rise to the social isolation and ecological concentration of the truly disadvantaged, which in turn leads to structural barriers and cultural adaptations that undermine social organization and hence the control of crime. This thesis is grounded in what is actually an old idea in criminology that has been overlooked in the race and crime debate—the importance of communities." 38 DISCUSSION: "Rejecting both the 'individualistic' and 'materialist' fallacies, we have attempted to delineate a theoretical strategy that incorporates both structural and cultural arguments regarding race, crime, and urban inequality in American cities. Drawing on insights from social-disorganization theory and recent research on urban poverty, we believe this strategy provides new ways of thinking about race and crime. First and foremost, our perspective views the link between race and crime through contextual lenses that highlight the very different ecological contexts in which blacks and whites reside—regardless of individual characteristics. Second, we emphasize that crime rates among blacks nnonetheless vary by ecological characteristics, just as they do for whites. Taken together, these facts suggest a powerful role for community context in explaining race and crime. Our community-level explanation also departs from conventional wisdom. Rather than attributing to acts of crime a purely economic motive springing from relative deprivation—an individual-level psychological concept—we focus on the mediating dimensions of community social organization to understand variations in crime across areas. ... Furthermore, we incorporate culture into our theory in the form of social isolation and ecological landscapes that shape perceptions and cultural patterns of learning. This culture is not seen as inevitably tied to race, but more to the varying structural contexts produced by residential and macroeconomic change, concentrated poverty, family instability, and intervening patterns of social disorganization. ... In our view, macrosocial patterns of residential inequality give rise to the social isolation and concentration of the truly disadvantaged, engendering cultural adaptations that undermine social organization. Finally, our conceptualization suggests that the roots of urban violence among today's 16- to 21-year-old cohort may stem from childhood socialization that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s." 52

Conley 99

Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America [Inequality - Wealth, Empirical - Survey]: "The PREMISE of this book is a relatively simple and straightforward one: in order to understand a family's well-being and the life chances of its children—in short, to understand its class position—we not only must consider income, education, and occupation but also must take into account accumulated wealth. While the importance of wealth is the starting point of the book, its end point is the impact of the wealth distribution on racial inequality in America. ... At all income, occupational, and education levels, black families on average have drastically lower levels of wealth than similar white families. ... In contemporary America, race and property are intimately linked and form the nexus for the persistence of black-white inequality." 5 "Specifically, it is the HYPOTHESIS of book that certain tenacious racial differences—such as deficits in education, employment, wages, and even wealth itself among African Americans—will turn out to be indirect effects, mediated by class differences. In other words, it is not race per se that matters directly; instead, what matters are the wealth levels and class positions that are associated with race in America. In this manner, racial differences in income and asset levels have come to play a prominent role in the perpetuation of black-white inequality in the United States." 7 "TAKEN IN ITS ENTIRETY, the research presented in this book can go a long way toward showing that dynamics previously seen as rooted in an alternative or 'underclass' culture among African Americans should in fact be viewed as a result of economic inequality. In most cases, the effects of race are dramatically obscured by the impact of class dynamics and economic resources. ... While the impact of race varies depending on which outcome we examine, in almost all instances presented in this book socioeconomic variables have a much greater impact in predicting outcomes than does skin color or racial identity for this recent cohort (young adults who have grown up since the landmark civil rights legislation o the 1960s). ... By including property in the concept of social class, the empirical analysis presented throughout this book has shifted, but not ended, the race-class debate. Although race becomes insignificant in predicting a number of important outcomes for young adults when asset levels are included in causal models, wealth itself is nevertheless distributed unequally by race. Thus, one may conclude that the locus of racial inequality no longer lies primarily in the labor market but rather in class and property relations that, in turn, affect other outcomes. While young African Americans may have the opportunity to obtain the same education, income, and wealth as whites, in actuality they are on a slippery slope, for the discrimination their parents faced in the housing and credit markets sets the stage for perpetual economic disadvantage. On the policy side, this study shows the importance of shifting the debate about race from the traditional focus on the labor market to one geared toward rectivying wealth differences. Wealth, not occupation or education, is the realm in which the greatest degree of racial inequality lies in contemporary America." 133

Tyson et al 05

'It's Not a 'Black Thing'": Understanding the Burden of Acting White and Other Dilemmas of High Achievement [Relations - Education, Empirical - Interviews]: "In this article, we review the burden of acting white hypothesis, describe the current debate, and use interview data from eight secondary schools in North Carolina to assess the hypothesis. We find that a burden of acting white exists for some black students, but that it is not prevalent among the group. None of the black middle school informants reported discussions or expressed any concern about acting white related to academic behavior or performance, and only a small minority of the older informants did so. Moreover, high-achieving black students across the sample schools were not deterred from taking advanced courses or striving to do well because they feared accusations of acting white or other teasing. Equally interesting, in some schools, high-achieving white students experienced a similar but more pervasive 'burden' of high achievement. That is, both black and white high-achieving students sometimes encounter forms of hostility from lower-achieving peers. ... We argue that the burden of acting white cannot be attributed specifically to black culture. Rather, it appears to develop in some schools under certain conditions that seem to contribute to animosity between high- and low-achieving students within or between racial and socioeconomic groups. This may help to explain the mixed research findings regarding the existence of an oppositional peer culture or a burden of acting white among black students." 583 "OUR INTERVIEWS REVEALED ambivalence toward achievement among black students at just one of eight secondary schools. Contrary to the burden of acting white hypothesis, the black students in this study who avoided advanced courses did so for fear of not doing well academically." 599 "THIS STUDY CONTRIBUTES to the current debate on the burden of acting white hypothesis in sev- eral important ways. First, few qualitative studies addressing this hypothesis have focused on more than one or two schools. We gathered qualitative data from students and staff at eight secondary schools. The multisite design permitted greater attention to the potential influence of contextual aspects of schools. Second, the in-depth nature of the interviews allowed us to probe more deeply and specifically into issues related to a burden of acting white, including particular academic behaviors and decisions, factors that large-scale surveys generally do not capture. In particular, our focus on the deci- sions students make with regard to the aca- demic level of the courses they take (e.g., electing honors versus regular classes) is unique. Finally, we attempted to distinguish a burden of acting white from other more generic dilemmas of high achievement." 583