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The story of West Indian immigrants to the United States is generally considered to be a great success. Mary Waters, however, tells a very different story. She finds that the values that gain first-generation immigrants initial success--a willingness to work hard, a lack of attention to racism, a desire for education, an incentive to save--are undermined by the realities of life and race relations in the United States. Contrary to long-held beliefs, Waters finds, those who resist Americanization are most likely to succeed economically, especially in the second generation.
Blacks and Latinos have transformed the American city—together these groups now constitute the majority in seven of the ten largest cities. Large-scale immigration from Latin America has been changing U.S. racial dynamics for decades, and Latino migration to new destinations is changing the face of the American south. Yet most of what social science has helped us to understand about these groups has been observed primarily in relation to whites—not each other. Just Neighbors? challenges the traditional black/white paradigm of American race relations by examining African Americans and Latinos as they relate to each other in the labor market, the public sphere, neighborhoods, and schools. ...
"Using rich ethnographic detail, the book illustrates how employers manipulate the labor market using race, gender, class, and legal status, to make labor conditions precarious. The book urges a thorough analysis of the historically prevailing intersecting categories of difference and vulnerability to understand labor market inequality in the 21st century"--
The popularity and globalization of sport have led to an ever-increasing migration of Black athletes from the global South to the United States and Western Europe. While the hegemonic ideology surrounding sport is that it brings diverse people together and ameliorates social divisions, sociologists of sport have shown this to be a gross simplification. Instead, sport and its narratives often reinforce and re-create stereotypes and social boundaries, especially regarding race and the prowess and the position of the Black athlete. Because sport is a contested terrain for maintaining and challenging racial norms and boundaries, the Black athlete has always impacted popular (white) perceptions o...
The United States has the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world. Despite what is often reported, new mothers don’t “opt out” of work. They are pushed out by discriminating and inflexible workplaces. Today’s workplaces continue to idealize the worker who has someone other than parents caring for their children. Conventional wisdom attributes women’s decision to leave work to their maternal traits and desires. In this thought-provoking book, Joan Williams shows why that view is misguided and how workplace practice disadvantages men—both those who seek to avoid the breadwinner role and those who embrace it—as well as women. Faced with masculine norms that define...
While social capital theorists have studied the consequences of having effective social networks, few have examined why some people have better networks than others. This book argues that the answer lies less in people's deliberate "networking" than in the institutional conditions of the churches, colleges, firms, gyms, and other organizations in which they routinely participate.
Broadening the philosophical conversation about race and racism, Living Alterities considers how people's racial embodiment affects their day-to-day lived experiences, the lived experiences of individuals marked by race interacting with and responding to others marked by race, and the tensions that arise between different spheres of a single person's identity. Drawing on phenomenology and the work of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Iris Marion Young, the essays address the embodiment experiences of African Americans, Muslims, Asian Americans, Latinas, Jews, and white Americans. The volume's focus on specific situations, temporalities, and encounters provides important context for understanding how race operates in people's lives in ordinary settings like classrooms, dorm rooms, borderlands, elevators, and families.
How do people become activists for causes they care deeply about? Many people with similar backgrounds, for instance, fervently believe that abortion should be illegal, but only some of them join the pro-life movement. By delving into the lives and beliefs of activists and nonactivists alike, Ziad W. Munson is able to lucidly examine the differences between them. Through extensive interviews and detailed studies of pro-life organizations across the nation, Munson makes the startling discovery that many activists join up before they develop strong beliefs about abortion—in fact, some are even pro-choice prior to their mobilization. Therefore, Munson concludes, commitment to an issue is often a consequence rather than a cause of activism. The Making of Pro-life Activists provides a compelling new model of how people become activists while also offering a penetrating analysis of the complex relationship between religion, politics, and the pro-life movement. Policy makers, activists on both sides of the issue, and anyone seeking to understand how social movements take shape will find this book essential.
How is it that recipients of white privilege deny the role they play in reproducing racial inequality? Racing for Innocence addresses this question by examining the backlash against affirmative action in the late 1980s and early 1990s—just as courts, universities, and other institutions began to end affirmative action programs. This book recounts the stories of elite legal professionals at a large corporation with a federally mandated affirmative action program, as well as the cultural narratives about race, gender, and power in the news media and Hollywood films. Though most white men denied accountability for any racism in the workplace, they recounted ways in which they resisted—whether wittingly or not— incorporating people of color or white women into their workplace lives. Drawing on three different approaches—ethnography, narrative analysis, and fiction—to conceptualize the complexities and ambiguities of race and gender in contemporary America, this book makes an innovative pedagogical tool.