Inequality and U.S. Society: Review of Douglas S. Massey's Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System

Sociolog

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

On Our Moral Communities

African and African American Studie

Crime, Urban Poverty, and Social Science

African and African American Studie

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

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

The Diversity Challenge

African and African American Studie

A Change Has Come: Race, Politics, and the Path to the Obama Presidency

Has Barack Obama's success transformed the racial divide? Did he somehow transcend or help bring to an end centuries of racial division in the United States? Did he deliberately run a strategically race-neutral, race-evading campaign? Did his race and ingrained American racism constrain the reach of his success? Have we arrived at that postracial moment that has long been the stuff of dreams and high oratory? Or was the outcome of the 2008 presidential election driven entirely by nonracial factors, such as a weak Republican ticket, an incumbent party saddled with defending an unpopular war, and a worsening economic crisis? It is at once too simple and yet entirely appropriate to say that the answers to these questions are, in a phrase, complicated matters. These complexities can, however, be brought into sharper focus.African and African American Studie

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

One Year Later and the Myth of a Post-Racial Society

Many commentators, both conservative and liberal, have celebrated the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States, claiming the election signified America has truly become a “post-racial” society. It is not just Lou Dobbs who argues the United States in the “21st century [is a] post-partisan, post-racial society.” This view is consistent with beliefs the majority of White Americans have held for well over a decade: that African Americans have achieved, or will soon achieve, racial equality in the United States despite substantial evidence to the contrary. Indeed, this view is consistent with opinions found in the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and elsewhere—attitudes that even the tragic events following the Katrina disaster had nothing to do with race.African and African American Studie