[Special Issue on SEA Demographics] Response - Sociology: A Portrait of Adaptation

Response to Mark E. Pfeifer\u27s featured article

The Socioeconomic Position of the Louisiana Creoles: An Examination of Racial and Ethnic Stratification

This study suggests that the class-caste argument associated with the Wilson- Willie debate provides a fundamental line of division in theories of racial and ethnic stratification; it maintains that groups that combine minority statuses may be affected by both class and caste influences, a situation of "double jeopardy". and it describes French-speaking Louisiana blacks, or Creoles, as a group that combines minority statuses. Analysis of Census data shows that race and Louisiana French ethnicity are each related to life chances and that ethnic inequality is primarily a matter of class characteristics, while racial inequality is primarily a matter of caste characteristics. There is an interaction between ethnictty and race, however; minority ethnicity shows a weaker relationship to household income for blacks than for whites. We suggest that this may be a consequence of the relative pouier of minority identities

Ethnic Community Involvement and Academic Achievement Among Vietnamese-American Secondary School Students: A Community Study.

In this dissertation, I examine the role of involvement in an ethnic community in the academic achievement of Vietnamese American teenagers. I first describe the social context of these young people by discussing the situation of Vietnamese people in the United States and by offering a detailed description of a Vietnamese American community. Next, I examine how Vietnamese American students are performing in American schools and look at the characteristics of young people in the community in question. Finally, I employ data from a survey administered in the public schools of New Orleans where Vietnamese youth are concentrated in order to determine whether involvement in the ethnic community actually does contribute to the academic achievement of the young people and to examine how it might make this contribution. I find that Vietnamese Americans in this community have formed tightly integrated and cooperative social relations, providing a small alternative society within a low-income neighborhood. These cooperative social relations facilitate advantageous social action, such as the development of home-ownership, self-employment, and the creation of civic organizations, including civic organizations specifically directed at improving the school performance of young people. I also find that because this is a small alternative society in a relatively disadvantaged area, young people who are less involved with the ethnic community, or more marginal to it, tend to be more affected by the social problems that affect young people in American society than are those who are deeply involved with their own ethnic community. In looking at school achievement, I find that those young people who are more involved with the ethnic community in a number of ways tend to do better in school. The data are consistent with the argument that the ethnic community appears to promote academic achievement to some extent because those who are more involved with the community have more access to its supports, but also because the more ethnically involved students tend to less involved with the immediately surrounding disadvantaged segment of American society

New Orleans: The Long-Term Demographic Trends

The City of New Orleans is frequently portrayed as an urban center that underwent great changes following the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and much of the attention given to the city has dealt with its revival and reconstruction following the storm. But what has been ignored has been the long-term decline in the population of New Orleans. If this view is taken, New Orleans is currently about where the population would have been expected to be even without Hurricane Katrina's damages to the community