367 research outputs found
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Somewhere between Jim Crow & Post-Racialism: Reflections on the Racial Divide in America Today
In 1965, when Dædalus published two issues on “The Negro American,” civil rights in the United States had experienced a series of triumphs and setbacks. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 extended basic citizenship rights to African Americans, and there was hope for further positive change. Yet 1965 also saw violent confrontations in Selma, Alabama, and the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles that were fueled by racial tensions. Against this backdrop of progress and retreat, the contributors to the Dædalus volumes of the mid-1960s considered how socioeconomic factors affected the prosperity, well-being, and social standing of African Americans. Guest editor Lawrence D. Bobo suggests that today we inhabit a similarly unsettled place: situated somewhere between the overt discrimination of Jim Crow and the aspiration of full racial equality. In his introduction, Bobo paints a broad picture of the racial terrain in America today before turning the volume over to the contributors, who take up particular questions ranging from education and family support, to racial identity and politics, to employment and immigration.African and African American Studie
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Inequality and U.S. Society: Review of Douglas S. Massey's Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System
Sociolog
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Claiming Human Dignity
In the concluding line of his opening note to Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois, wrote “I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience” (1934[2007], p. xliii). Doing so was an intellectually courageous step at the time Du Bois wrote. Jim Crow strictures, after all, were almost fully institutionalized across the South by that time and larger cultural motifs stressing redemption and reconciliation were steadily undoing the meager steps toward uplift and equality for African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Enormous progress notwithstanding, we know that great challenges of enduring inequality and persistent cultural racism remain in our time. The spirit of this declaration and the a priori intellectual posture it embraces have, quite fittingly then, animated this journal from our inception.African and African American StudiesSociolog
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Inequality and U.S. Society
Among the advanced industrial nations, the United States has the most unequal distribution of income. Douglas Massey emphasizes that the purchasing power of households in the top five percent of the income distribution rose sharply from the early 1980s to 2000 while the purchasing power of those in the bottom twenty percent of the income distribution remained constant—proving a much larger economic gap between rich and poor households. This book summarizes an extensive array of studies from a variety of disciplines and cogently describes federal policies that promoted income disparity. Many sections of this book provide lucid information about the changing status of women, shifts in racial disparities, and the consequences of immigration from Mexico. It is not, however, a definitive book about inequality in this nation.African and African American StudiesSociolog
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Crime, Urban Poverty, and Social Science
African and African American Studie
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Before We Embrace the Future: Assessing Where We've Been and Where We Are
Barack Obama was elected president of the United States shortly before this issue of the Du Bois Review went to press. The historic nature of the 2008 presidential campaign was evident early in the process, particularly as it became clear that the Democratic Party would nominate either a woman or an African American as its standard-bearer. As scholars who have devoted our professional lives to studying the cancerous effect that racial disadvantage has on American society and politics, we are well aware of the profound hope that many place in the president-elect. We are also aware of the many pitfalls and challenges that await not only President Obama but the nation as well, whose citizens must sort out the new (and old) features of the nation's increasingly complex racial terrain. We devote the next two issues of the Du Bois Review (volume 6, numbers 1 and 2) to scholarship focused on the 2008 presidential campaign and the implications of that campaign going forward. In this issue we focus on research assessing where we have been and where we are regarding racial dynamics within the United States.African and African American StudiesSociolog
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The "Work" Race Does: Back to the Future
African and African American StudiesSociolog
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Thinking about Crime: Race and Lay Accounts of Lawbreaking Behavior
Lay or commonsense accounts of the origins of criminal behavior may play a key role in sustaining a strong public appetite for harsh criminal justice policies and undergird large black-white differences in opinion in this domain. Using data from the nationally representative Race, Crime, and Public Opinion project’s 2001 survey, the authors develop an explanatory mode typology for accounts of involvement in criminal behavior. These include both individualistic and structural accounts of behavior in addition to a mixed-mode category. The authors identify key differences in the demographic and sociopolitical bases of the attributional types and find significant race differences in these attributional types. Attributions strongly affect how individuals wish to see public policy respond to the problem of crime and explain a small but significant fraction of the black-white difference in crime policy views.African and African American StudiesSociolog
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