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Argues that the invention of self-report procedures could have resolved the crime measurement problem by showing consistency in results across methods, and that it did not resolve the problem because of misinterpretation of self-report findings. Illustrates arguments by using sex, race, and social class as examples. (Author/GC)

The article presents a reply to the paper titled "A comment on "Anomy,"" by Leo Srole, published in the October 1, 1965 issue of the journal "American Sociological Review." According to the author, Srole understandably has a vested interest in the subject of anomy, but this scarcely justifies his patronizing manner of "welcoming" new work on the subject by others, or his focus on questions that divert attention from the possible significance of results. Srole directs the bulk of his critique to the representativeness of samples. This is disappointing, for the sampling issue, as raised by him, has little bearing on the warranty of findings. What matters is not whether samples are perfect cross-sections of their respective universes, but whether their deficiencies make results spurious or misleading. This he has not shown. The author states that under-representativeness of the grade school sample and the corresponding over-representativeness of the college sample, moreover, are between 9 and 12 per cent, rather than the larger figure that Srole implies. On age, sex, race, rural-urban residence, region, religion, income and party preference, sample characteristics are nearly identical with those of other qualified national samples, or close enough to satisfy all but the most captious critics.

In this paper, career differences by race and sex are analyzed. Careers are defined as trajectories of socioeconomic status and wages and are described by a linear differential equation model. It is assumed that the different groups defined by race and sex tend to be in different labor markets and economic sectors and to face different opportunity structures even within labor market divisions. This assumption guides predictions for and interpretation of results with respect to various aspects of career inequality: initial status and wage level; potential status and wage levels; effects of human capital, family background, and family of procreation variables on initial and potential wage and status levels; speed of advancement. Pooling of cross-sections and time-series techniques are used to estimate the model, with data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of the Labor Market Experience of Young Men and Women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a consistent referential order when children are asked to rank pictures of children with various physical disabilities. This cultural uniformity, which is not explicitly taught, persists when comparisons of subgroups are made. Rankings are not affected by characteristics of the rater, such as sex; presence of a physical handicap; socioeconomic status; race; urban-rural differences; or setting of the interview. Despite the identity of rankings, girls more than boys show a tendency to emphasize social handicaps more than functional handicaps. Various explanations of the basic uniformity are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2023 ASA presidential address, Prudence Carter delves into the landscape of U.S. society, tracing some of its historical progress and confronting contemporary social, economic, educational, and political challenges. Central to her argument is an exploration of the concept of "unrealized integration" and how it has hindered the nation's march toward an inclusive, multiracial democracy. Carter describes and characterizes the current state of integration within education and society. Despite the widespread rhetoric of diversity in our organizations and institutions, she critiques its shallow application, exposing diversity's inability to rectify imbalances of power- and resource-sharing. Incorporating the idea of "tipping points," she discusses how civil rights movements, despite expanding representation and opportunity, have faced recurrent waves of political backlash and reversals. She contends that an erosion of social progress occurs when there is an imbalance in the pursuit of distributional equality (concerning material resources) and relational equality (involving social and cultural dynamics and processes that shape well-being). Additionally, she identifies three other crucial areas that warrant focus to pave the path toward realized integration within education and society. In a forward-looking call to arms, Carter underscores the imperative for sociologists to transcend epistemological and methodological boundaries; and she advocates for robust collaborations across the social sciences and humanities to harness the collective power of knowledge-generation and solution-building for pressing societal issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police culture creates an "us versus them" dynamic, which, at its worst, treats threats to the "thin blue line" as worthy of group response. Prior research documents such a group threat process as a possible mechanism for police misconduct, but few studies have analyzed the precise network relationships that serve as the conduit for a misconduct response. Using data on misconduct, officer injuries, and officer networks within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) between 2004 and 2015, this study examines the extent to which injuries officers receive from civilians might elicit a misconduct response from officers' peers, and especially their direct network associates. Findings demonstrate that network ties to injured officers predict higher levels of subsequent misconduct, especially for officers with stronger ties to the injured officer. Furthermore, the effects of peer injury on subsequent misconduct are contingent on the race of the suspect involved: officers whose peers are injured are linked to more use of excessive force, as well as other types of misconduct, when the suspects involved are Black. These findings support our central hypothesis of a networked group threat response that links peer injuries to police misconduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite large literatures on gender and family wage gaps (e.g., the motherhood wage penalty, fatherhood wage premium, and the marriage premium) and widespread recognition that the two gaps are intertwined, the extent and pattern of their relationships are underexplored. Using data from the 2018 Survey of Income and Program Participation, we show that family wage gaps are strongly associated with the gender wage gap, as long assumed in the literature, but with important caveats. The gender-differentiated wage returns to parenthood contribute 29 percent of the gender wage gap. One third of this is associated with occupation, but very little with other worker and job attributes. The gender-differentiated returns to marriage contribute another 33 percent, two thirds of which is associated with worker and job attributes but very little with occupation. However, 36 percent of the gender wage gap is unrelated to these family wage gaps, and the gender wage gap among childless workers remains substantial. Moreover, for Black and Hispanic workers, the pattern of association is more complex and generally weaker than for White workers. These results caution against focusing solely on the wage gap between "mothers and others" and suggest new directions for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the relationship between race and delinquency have typically found that broken homes lead to greater delinquency among blacks than whites, but have not demonstrated empirically why this is so. This paper derives theoretical mechanisms from differential association theory and social control theory, specifying how broken homes may influence delinquency among both blacks and nonblacks. The analysis specifies a structural equation model of delinquency (Matsueda 1982), derives competing hypotheses from the two theories, and estimates a cross-population model for blacks and nonblacks using data from the Richmond Youth Project. Consistent with previous research, we find that broken homes have a larger impact on delinquency among blacks than nonblacks, but, unlike previous studies, our model explains this effect completely. In both populations, the effects of broken homes and attachment to parents and peers are mediated by the learning of definitions of delinquency, a finding that supports differential association over social control theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a great deal of interest recently in the issue of whether or not race has been declining in significance relative to social class in American society. The present paper evaluates the significance of race for psychological well-being and quality of life over the years 1972 to 1985 using data from the General Social Survey. Our analysis shows that blacks score consistently lower than whites on measures of psychological well-being and quality of life after controls have been introduced for social class variables, age, and marital status. Furthermore, the differences between blacks and whites remained constant between 1972 and 1985. We conclude that the significance of race as a determinant of psychological well-being and quality of lift continues in spite of recent changes in the social and legal status of black Americans. interpretations of these findings are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the theoretical validity of the confluence model in explaining the effects of sibship size and birth order on intelligence. Using a nationally representative sample the effects of age, sex, marital disruption, socioeconomic status, race, and other potentially confounding variables, unincorporated in other studies, are controlled. The results suggest that (a) the inverse relation between sibship size and IQ lessens for the economically advantaged, (b) the only child breaks the otherwise consistent linear decline between sibship size and IQ in the below-poverty condition only, (c) the nonteacher handicap for only children is questionable, and (d) close spacing, as Zajonc defines it, may have detrimental consequences for children irrespective of birth order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the applicability of a recently developed pith model of the process of educational and early occupational attainment to a longitudinal study of a national sample of black and white males. The model that explains the white data does not explain the black. Ten major departures of the black data from the results expected on the basis of studies of whites are noted. It is concluded that these racial differences reflect the existence of two different ideal-typical systems of mobility in America. The implications of this distinction are observed in the operation of social-structural and social-psychological variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the paper is based on five years of field work carried on by undergraduates at Wellesley College, Massacheusets, in connection with a course on American ethnic groups, though use will be made only of the results obtained. The students came in contact with some two or three hundred Armenian-Americans, chiefly of the first and second generation, living in the Boston metropolitan area. Interviews were of some length, ranging from one to five hours. They were chiefly group interviews, with their setting a little more frequently in the home than in the office. For the purpose of qualitative analysis, the home interviews were particularly enlightening, involving as they did informal family interaction around the dinner table. The informants for this study were chosen largely from that section of the ethnic group which has made a more or less successful adjustment to middle class status. Since the interviewers were inexperienced, it seemed best to give them their initial training in informal interviewing and participant observation under conditions which would tax their emerging skill as lightly as possible.

Across various domains of social life, organizational reliance on personal data and exposure to unanticipated financial hardship have transformed Americans' life chances and access to opportunities. This article examines an area where they intersect: the hardship caused by breakdowns in information systems. I focus on the case of identity theft, showing how that event—experienced by tens of millions of Americans annually—contributes to economic insecurity. To do so, I first develop a theory of insecurity that links feelings of precariousness to breaches of trust at three levels: interpersonal, organizational, and systemic. Drawing on an original qualitative study of identity theft resolution, I find that most victims worried about their financial lives because they could no longer count on certain people, organizations, or systems. Beneath this commonality, race and class informed feelings of insecurity and associated coping strategies following identity theft. Low-income people and people of color tended to direct suspicion at personal networks and report ending relationships and informal assistance. In contrast, middle- and upper-income and White individuals disproportionately blamed organizations and demanded their protection. These findings—along with the trust-based theory that helped make them visible—have important implications for the study of insecurity, inequality, and trust in the information age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The connection between racially prejudiced policing and politics has a long history in the United States. In the current period, police organizations have displayed unprecedented support for Republican presidential candidates, and both have organized against social movements focused on addressing racial disparities in police contact. Yet despite strong connections between law enforcement and party politics, we know almost nothing about the relationship between partisan identity and the behavior of police officers. Using millions of traffic stop records from the Florida Highway Patrol and linked voter records, the present study shows that White Republican officers exhibit a larger racial disparity than White Democratic officers in their propensity to search motorists whom they have stopped. This result is robust to an array of alternative empirical tests and holds across varying sociodemographic contexts. I also find that both White Republican and White Democratic officers grew more biased between 2012 and 2020, a period characterized by the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the election of Donald Trump. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The molecularization of race thesis suggests geneticists are gaining greater authority to define human populations and differences, and they are doing so by increasingly defining them in terms of U.S. racial categories. Using a mixed methodology of a content analysis of articles published in Nature Genetics (in 1993, 2001, and 2009) and interviews, we explore geneticists' population labeling practices. Geneticists use eight classification systems that follow racial, geographic, and ethnic logics of definition. We find limited support for racialization of classification. Use of quasi-racial "continental" terms has grown over time, but more surprising is the persistent and indiscriminate blending of classification schemes at the field level, the article level, and within-population labels. This blending has led the practical definition of "population" to become more ambiguous rather than standardized over time. Classificatory ambiguity serves several functions: it helps geneticists negotiate collaborations among researchers with competing demands, resist bureaucratic oversight, and build accountability with study populations. Far from being dysfunctional, we show the ambiguity of population definition is linked to geneticists' efforts to build scientific authority. Our findings revise the long-standing theoretical link between scientific authority and standardization and social order. We find that scientific ambiguity can function to produce scientific authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bridging research in social psychology with scholarship on racialized organizations, this article shows how individual bias and organizational demographic composition can operate together to shape the degree of discrimination in schools. To understand Black and Latino boys' higher rates of discipline that persist net of differences in behavior, I combine an original video experiment involving 1,339 teachers in 295 U.S. schools with organizational data on school racial/ethnic and socioeconomic composition. In the experiment, teachers view and respond to a randomly assigned video of a White, Black, or Latino boy committing identical, routine classroom misbehavior. I find that, compared to White boys, Black and Latino boys face a double jeopardy. They experience both (1) individual-level teacher bias, where they are perceived as being more "blameworthy" and referred more readily for identical misbehavior, and (2) racialized organizational climates of heightened blaming, where students of all races/ethnicities are perceived as being more "blameworthy" for identical misbehavior in schools with large minority populations versus in predominantly White schools. This study develops a more comprehensive understanding of the production of racial/ethnic inequality in school discipline by empirically identifying a dual process that involves both individual teacher bias and heightened blaming that is related to minority organizational composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objects of risk mitigation are typically viewed as neutral items that limit exposure to an established hazard. However, people may refuse to adopt such tools, even when they feel vulnerable. This article explores how people assess their personal risk and mitigation options by examining PrEP use for HIV prevention. Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 40 Black and Latino gay, bisexual, and queer men, I argue PrEP uptake is a socially contextualized decision influenced by relational concerns. I develop the concept of relational inoculation, wherein individuals enact a sense of protection against harm through relational work. As individuals consider PrEP, they also contemplate how it may bolster or undermine intimacy they value for reducing interpersonal HIV exposure, as well as dispelling stigmatized notions of riskiness held by their intersecting ethno-racial and sexual minority communities. I develop testable propositions about how respondents' HIV risk assessments and PrEP use are enmeshed in a societal context of surveillance, in ongoing relations with intimate partners and socially significant others, and in navigation of community belonging within this milieu of risk. This article contributes to sociological research at the nexus of race, sexuality, and health, and offers health policy insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Churches have long been sites of local charity work as well as national political movements. What happens when people engage in more individualistic forms of spirituality, like mindfulness meditation or yoga, rather than participate in religious communities? Might the rise of individualized forms of spirituality lead to a decline in political engagement? Or, among people averse to religion, might spiritual practice operate as a substitute, and potentially contribute to political engagement? Drawing on burgeoning theory of religion and spirituality as socially-situated boundary objects, we use data from the 2020 National Religion and Spirituality Survey to examine the relationship between self-reported spiritual and religious practices and political engagement. First, we investigate whether study participants distinguish spiritual and religious practice as distinct concepts through factor analysis. Next, we use those results to examine the association between these practices and reports of political behavior. We find a consistent, positive relationship between spiritual practice and political engagement of comparable magnitude to that of religious practices. Notably, during an era of heightened political polarization around religious engagement, political progressives, respondents of color, and members of the LGBT community are more likely to report spiritual rather than religious practices. This points us to a theory of spiritual practice as a substitute for religious engagement among groups alienated from religious institutions, with the former capable of fostering similar proclivities for political action as the latter. Our results suggest critiques of a "selfish" spirituality have been overblown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances a comparative conflict theory of racial and ethnic similarities and differences in youth perceptions of criminal injustice. We use HLM models to test six conflict hypotheses with data from more than 18,000 Chicago public school students. At the micro-level African American youth are more vulnerable to police contacts than are Latinos, who are more at risk than whites, and there is a corresponding gradient in minority group perceptions of injustice. When structural sources of variation in adolescents 'experiences are taken into account, however; minority youth perceptions of criminal injustice appear more similar to one another; while remaining distinct from those of white youth. At the micro-level, Latino youth respond more strongly and negatively to police contacts, even though they experience fewer of them. At the macro-level, as white students in schools increase cross-sectionally, perceptions of injustice among both African American and Latino youth at first intensify and then ultimately abate. Although there are again signs of a gradient, African American and Latino responses to school integration also are as notable in their similarities as in their differences. Reduced police contacts and meaningful school integration are promising mechanisms for diminishing both adolescent African American and Latino perceptions of criminal injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although gender is central to contemporary accounts of educational stratification, sexuality has been largely invisible as a population-level axis of academic inequality. Taking advantage of major recent data expansions, the current study establishes sexuality as a core dimension of educational stratification in the United States. First, I analyze lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adults' college completion rates: overall, by race/ethnicity, and by birth cohort. Then, using new data from the High School Longitudinal Survey of 2009, I analyze LGB students' performance on a full range of achievement and attainment measures. Across analyses, I reveal two demographic facts. First, women's rising academic advantages are largely confined to straight women: although lesbian women historically outpaced straight women, in contemporary cohorts, lesbian and bisexual women face significant academic disadvantages. Second, boys' well-documented underperformance obscures one group with remarkably high levels of school success: gay boys. Given these facts, I propose that marginalization from hegemonic gender norms has important—but asymmetric—impacts on men's and women's academic success. To illustrate this point, I apply what I call a "gender predictive" approach, using supervised machine learning methods to uncover patterns of inequality otherwise obscured by the binary sex/gender measures typically available in population research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extensive literature documents racial discrimination in housing, focusing on its prevalence and effect on non-White populations. This article studies how such discrimination operates, and the intermediaries who engage in it: landlords. A fundamental assumption of racial discrimination research is that gatekeepers such as landlords are confronted with a racially heterogeneous applicant pool. The reality of urban housing markets, however, is that historical patterns of residential segregation intersect with other structural barriers to drive selection into the applicant pool, such that landlords are more often selecting between same-race applicants. Using interviews and observations with 157 landlords in four cities, we ask: how do landlords construct their tenants' race within racially segmented housing markets, and how does this factor into their screening processes? We find that landlords distinguish between tenants based on the degree to which their behavior conforms to insidious cultural narratives at the intersection of race, gender, and class. Landlords with large portfolios rely on screening algorithms, whereas mom-and-pop landlords make decisions based on informal mechanisms such as "gut feelings," home visits, and the presentation of children. Landlords may put aside certain racial prejudices when they have the right financial incentives, but only when the tenant also defies stereotypes. In this way, landlords' intersectional construction of race—even within a predominantly Black or Latino tenant pool—limits residential options for low-income, subsidized tenants of color, burdening their search process. These findings have implications for how we understand racial discrimination within racially homogenous social spheres. Examining landlords' screening practices offers insight into the role housing plays in how racism continues to shape life outcomes—both explicitly through overt racial bias, and increasingly more covertly, through algorithmic automation and digital technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of statistical discrimination is a dominant social scientific framework for understanding discrimination in labor markets. To date, the literature has treated this theory as a model that merely explains employer behavior. This article contends that the idea of statistical discrimination, rather than simply providing an explanation, can lead people to view social stereotyping as useful and acceptable and thus help rationalize and justify discriminatory decisions. A preregistered survey experiment with more than 2,000 participants who had managerial experience shows that exposure to statistical discrimination theory strengthened people's belief in the accuracy of stereotypes, their acceptance of stereotyping, and the extent to which they engaged in gender discrimination in a hiring simulation. Reading a critical commentary on the theory mitigated these effects. These findings imply that theories of discrimination, and the language associated with them, can rationalize—or challenge the rationality of—stereotypes and discrimination and, as a result, shape the attitudes and actions of decision-makers in labor markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Threat theory argues that states toughen criminal laws to repress the competitive power of large minority groups. Yet, research on threat suffers from a poor understanding of why minority group size contributes to social control and a lack of evidence on whether criminal law is uniquely responsive to the political interests of majority racial groups at all. By compiling a unique state-level dataset on 230 sentencing policy changes during mass incarceration and using data from 257,362 responses to 79 national surveys to construct new state-level measures of racial differences in punitive policy support, I evaluate whether criminal sentencing law is uniquely responsive to white public policy interests. Pooled event history models and mediation analyses support three primary conclusions: (1) states adopted new sentencing policies as a nonlinear response to minority group size, (2) sentencing policies were adopted in response to white public, but not black public, support for punitive crime policy, and (3) minority group size and race-specific homicide victimization both indirectly affect sentencing policy by increasing white public punitive policy support. These findings support key theoretical propositions for the threat explanation of legal change and identify white public policy opinion as a mechanism linking minority group size to variation in criminal law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary practice of homeownership in the United States was born out of government programs adopted during the New Deal. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC)—and later the Federal Housing Administration and GI Bill—expanded home buying opportunity, although in segregationist fashion. Through mechanisms such as redlining, these policies fueled white suburbanization and black ghettoization, while laying the foundation for the racial wealth gap. This is the first article to investigate the long-term consequences of these policies on the segregation of cities. I combine a full century of census data with archival data to show that cities HOLC appraised became more segregated than those it ignored. The gap emerged between 1930 and 1950 and remains significant: in 2010, the black-white dissimilarity, black isolation, and white-black information theory indices are 12, 16, and 8 points higher in appraised cities, respectively. Results are consistent across a range of robustness checks, including exploitation of imperfect implementation of appraisal guidelines and geographic spillover. These results contribute to current theoretical discussions about the persistence of segregation. The long-term impact of these policies is a reminder of the intentionality that shaped racial geography in the United States, and the scale of intervention that will be required to disrupt the persistence of segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing interest in state race-making, we know little about how race-making plays out in the everyday practice of policy governance. To address this gap, I examine the implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), which sought to end generations of state policies that denied tribal sovereignty and forcibly removed Native children from their tribes. ICWA's protections extend to children based on tribal citizenship, not racial status. Marshalling 40 years of archival data from the government agencies charged with ICWA enforcement, I analyze how ICWA implementers determine a child's Indian status. I find that authorities routinely eschew the requirement to treat Indian as a citizenship category, re-defining it as a race. Yet whether and how state actors racialize Indianness varies by the institutional contexts in which they work. Comparing state child welfare agencies, state courts, and federal courts, I identify three institutional characteristics that organize race-making practices: evidentiary standards, record-keeping requirements, and incentive structures. These characteristics influence whether state decision-makers operationalize "Indian" as a racial category and the cognitive and ideological processes that undergird their classifications. I also demonstrate that changes in these institutional characteristics yield concomitant shifts in whether and how state agents engage in racialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using archival materials from the Domestic Relations Court of New York City, this article traces the conflict between private institutions and the state over responsibility for neglected African American children in the early twentieth century. After a long history of exclusion by private child welfare, the court assumed public responsibility for the protection of children of all races. Yet, in an arrangement of delegated governance, judges found themselves unable to place non-white children because of the enduring exclusionary policies of private agencies. When the situation became critical, the City sought to wrest control from private agencies by developing a supplemental public foster care system. This compromise over responsibility racialized the developing public foster care system of New York City, and it transformed frameworks of child protection as a social problem. The findings highlight the political salience surrounding issues of racial access in the delegated welfare state. Tracing how the conflict over access unfolded in New York City child protection provides an empirical case for understanding how the delegation of social welfare to private agencies can actually weaken racial integration efforts, generate distinct modes of social welfare inclusion, and racialize perceptions of social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that black workers' perceptions of racial discrimination derive not just from being in the minority, but also from their position in the organizational structure. Researchers have shown that black individuals encounter an enormous amount of racial discrimination in the workplace, including but not limited to exclusion from critical social networks, wage disparities, and hiring disadvantages. But fewer studies examine the extent to which black workers believe racial discrimination is a salient factor in their occupational mobility or the factors that might explain their divergent perceptions of racial discrimination. Based on 60 in-depth interviews with black medical doctors, nurses, and technicians in the healthcare industry, we show that black workers' status within an organizational hierarchy fundamentally informs perceptions of the nature and type of workplace racial discrimination. These findings have implications for understanding how racial dynamics at work are linked to mental health, occupational satisfaction, and organizational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial disparities persist throughout the employment process, with African Americans experiencing significant barriers compared to whites. This article advances the understanding of racial labor market stratification by bringing new theoretical insights and original data to bear on the ways social networks shape racial disparities in employment opportunities. We develop and articulate two pathways through which networks may perpetuate racial inequality in the labor market: network access and network returns. In the first case, African American job seekers may receive fewer job leads through their social networks than white job seekers, limiting their access to employment opportunities. In the second case, black and white job seekers may utilize their social networks at similar rates, but their networks may differ in effectiveness. Our data, with detailed information about both job applications and job offers, provide the unique ability to adjudicate between these processes. We find evidence that black and white job seekers utilize their networks at similar rates, but network-based methods are less likely to lead to job offers for African Americans. We then theoretically develop and empirically test two mechanisms that may explain these differential returns: network placement and network mobilization. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for scholarship on racial stratification and social networks in the job search process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial stratification is well documented in many spheres of social life. Much stratification research assumes that implicit or explicit bias on the part of institutional gatekeepers produces disparate racial outcomes. Research on status-based expectations provides a good starting point for theoretically understanding racial inequalities. In this context it is understood that race results in differential expectations for performance, producing disparate outcomes. But even here, the mechanism (i.e., status-based expectations) is often assumed due to the lack of tools to measure status-based expectations. In this article, we put forth a new way to measure implicit racial status beliefs and theorize how they are related to consensual beliefs about what "most people" think. This enables us to assess the mechanisms in the relationship between race and disparate outcomes. We conducted two studies to assess our arguments. Study 1 demonstrates the measurement properties of the implicit status measure. Study 2 shows how implicit status beliefs and perceptions of what "most people" think combine to shape social influence. We conclude with the implications of this work for social psychological research, and for racial stratification more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From kindergarten through college, students perceive boys as more intelligent than girls, yet few sociological studies have identified how school processes shape students' gender status beliefs. Drawing on 2.5 years of longitudinal ethnography and 196 interviews conducted at a racially diverse, public middle school in Los Angeles, this article demonstrates how educators' differential regulation of boys' rule-breaking by course level contributed to gender-based differences in students' perceptions of intelligence. In higher-level courses—where affluent, White, and Asian American students were overrepresented—educators tolerated 6th-grade boys' rule-breaking, such that boys challenged girls' opinions and monopolized classroom conversations. By 8th grade, students perceived higher-level boys as more exceptionally intelligent than girls. However, in lower-level courses—where non-affluent Latinx students were overrepresented—educators penalized 6th-grade boys' rule-breaking, such that boys disengaged from classroom conversations. By 8th grade, lower-level students perceived girls as smarter than boys, but not exceptional. This article also demonstrates how race intersected with gender when shaping students' perceptions of intelligence, with students associating the most superlatives with affluent White boys' capabilities. Through this analysis, I develop a new theoretical understanding of how school processes contribute to the gendered social construction of exceptionalism and reproduce social inequalities in early adolescence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of minority youth experience contact with the criminal justice system. But how does the expansion of police presence in poor urban communities affect educational outcomes? Previous research points at multiple mechanisms with opposing effects. This article presents the first causal evidence of the impact of aggressive policing on minority youths' educational performance. Under Operation Impact, the New York Police Department (NYPD) saturated high-crime areas with additional police officers with the mission to engage in aggressive, order-maintenance policing. To estimate the effect of this policing program, we use administrative data from more than 250,000 adolescents age 9 to 15 and a difference-in-differences approach based on variation in the timing of police surges across neighborhoods. We find that exposure to police surges significantly reduced test scores for African American boys, consistent with their greater exposure to policing. The size of the effect increases with age, but there is no discernible effect for African American girls and Hispanic students. Aggressive policing can thus lower educational performance for some minority groups. These findings provide evidence that the consequences of policing extend into key domains of social life, with implications for the educational trajectories of minority youth and social inequality more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this presidential address, I advance a theoretical sketch on racialized emotions—the emotions specific to racialized societies. These emotions are central to the racial edifice of societies, thus, analysts and policymakers should understand their collective nature, be aware of how they function, and appreciate the existence of variability among emoting racial subjects. Clarity on these matters is key for developing an effective affective politics to challenge any racial order. After the sketch, I offer potential strategies to retool our racial emotive order as well as our racial selves. I end my address urging White sociologists to acknowledge the significance of racism in sociology and the emotions it engenders and to work to advance new personal and organizational anti-racist practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent sociological work shows that culture is an important causal variable in labor market outcomes. Does the same hold for product markets? To answer this question, we study a product market in which selection decisions occur absent face-to-face interaction between intermediaries and short-term contract workers. We find evidence of "product-based" cultural matching operating as a pathway to inequality. Relying on quantitative and qualitative observational data and semi-structured interviews with intermediaries in trade fiction publishing, we show intermediaries culturally match themselves to manuscripts as a normal feature of doing "good work." We propose three organizational conditions under which "encultured biases" come to the fore in product selection, and a fourth resulting in inequalities along demographic lines and other markers of perceived cultural proximity and distance. We close with a discussion of other settings in which product-based cultural matching is likely to occur, call for the investigation of cultural matching beyond previously theorized conditions, and argue for the inclusion of cultural products in the broader movement toward reconsidering culture as a causal factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bachelor’s degree (BA) completion is lower among black students than among white students. In this study, we use data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, together with regression-based analytical techniques, to identify the primary sources of the BA completion gap. We find that black students’ lower academic and socioeconomic resources are the biggest drivers of the gap. However, we also find that black students are more likely to enroll in four-year colleges than are white students, given pre-college resources. We describe this dynamic as “paradoxical persistence” because it challenges Boudon’s well-known assertion that the secondary effect of educational decisionmaking should reinforce the primary effect of resource discrepancies. Instead, our results indicate that black students’ paradoxical persistence widens the race gap in BA completion while also narrowing the race gap in BA attainment, or the proportion of high school graduates to receive a BA. This narrowing effect on the BA attainment gap is as large or larger than the narrowing effect of black students’ “overmatch” to high-quality colleges, facilitated in part by affirmative action. Paradoxical persistence refocuses attention on black students’ individual agency as an important source of existing educational gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration scholars have increasingly questioned the idea that “illegality” is a fixed, inherent condition. Instead, the new consensus is that immigration laws produce “illegality.” But can “illegality” be socially constructed? When initially judging who is an “illegal immigrant,” common observers and even authorities typically do not rely on an individual’s documentation. Instead, people rely on shared stereotypes to assign “illegality” to certain bodies, a condition we refer to as “social illegality.” Ethnographers have documented that individual traits like occupation or national-origin may trigger illegality suspicions, but it is not clear how widespread these stereotypes are, or whether all stereotypes are equally consequential. To address this question, we examine the personal attributes shaping perceived “illegality.” We apply a paired conjoint survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of 1,515 non-Hispanic white U.S. adults to assess the independent effect of each dimension. We find that national origin, social class, and criminal background powerfully shape perceptions of illegality. These findings reveal a new source of ethnic-based inequalities—“social illegality”—that may potentially increase law enforcement scrutiny and influence the decisions of hiring managers, landlords, teachers, and other members of the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite numerous legal interventions intended to mitigate racial discrimination in the United States, racial inequality persists in virtually every domain that matters for human well-being. To better understand the processes enabling this durable inequality, I undertake a case study of the housing market—a domain centrally linked to persistent, systemic disparity. I examine how racial stereotypes permeate the distinct but serially linked stages of the housing exchange process; the conditions under which stereotypes are deployed in each stage; and how such dynamics accumulate to affect ultimate processes of exclusion and inclusion. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork and more than 100 in-depth interviews in the Houston housing market, my findings demonstrate that widely shared, hierarchical stereotypes about race, supported by conditions such as network-necessitated rapport-building and discretion, compound discrimination across discrete stages of housing exchange. I argue that as this accumulation occurs, inequality between minorities and minority neighborhoods and whites and white neighborhoods is rendered durable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine immigrants' earnings trajectories and measure the extent and speed with which they are able to reduce the earnings gap with natives, using a dataset that links respondents of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to their longitudinal earnings obtained from individual tax records. Our analysis addresses key debates regarding ethnoracial and cohort differences in immigrants' earnings trajectories. First, we find a racially differentiated pattern of earnings assimilation: black and Hispanic immigrants are less able to catch up with native whites' earnings compared to white and Asian immigrants, but they are almost able to reach earnings parity with natives of their same race and ethnicity. Second, we find no evidence of a declining "quality" of immigrant cohorts even after controlling for their ethnoracial composition and human capital. Immigrants arriving since 1994 actually experience similar or slightly higher earnings growth compared to immigrants from earlier eras. We identify a pattern of accelerated assimilation in which more educated immigrants experience much of their earnings growth during the first years after arriving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial segregation between U.S. workplaces is greater today than it was a generation ago. This increase happened alongside declines in within-establishment occupational segregation, on which most prior research has focused. We examine more than 40 years of longitudinal data on the racial employment composition of every large private-sector workplace in the United States to calculate between- and within-establishment trends in racial employment segregation over time. We demonstrate that the return of racial establishment segregation owes little to within-establishment processes, but rather stems from differences in the turnover rates of more and less homogeneous workplaces. Present research on employment segregation focuses mainly on within-firm processes. By doing so, scholars may be overstating the country's progress on employment integration and ignoring other avenues of intervention that may give greater leverage for further integrating firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an influential article published in the American Sociological Review in 2009, Herring finds that diverse workforces are beneficial for business. His analysis supports seven out of eight hypotheses on the positive effects of gender and racial diversity on sales revenue, number of customers, perceived relative market share, and perceived relative profitability. This comment points out that Herring's analysis contains two errors. First, missing codes on the outcome variables are treated as substantive codes. Second, two control variables--company size and establishment size--are highly skewed, and this skew obscures their positive associations with the predictor and outcome variables. We replicate Herring's analysis correcting for both errors. The findings support only one of the original eight hypotheses, suggesting that diversity is nonconsequential, rather than beneficial, to business success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that social integration--in the sense of within-community interconnectedness--and venture capital have a complementary relationship in fostering innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Using panel data on metropolitan areas in the United States from 1993 to 2002, our analyses reveal that racial integration--in the microgeography of residential patterns--moderates the effect of venture capital, with more ethnically-integrated places benefiting more from venture capital. We provide evidence for the underlying mechanisms by demonstrating that communities with higher levels of racial integration foster the discovery of more novel and more valuable inventions and the emergence of more ethnically-diverse entrepreneurial groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While influential across a wide variety of subfields, cultural analysis in sociology continues to be hampered by coarse-grained conceptualizations of the different modes in which culture becomes personal, as well as the process via which persons acquire and use different forms of culture. In this article, I argue that persons acquire and use culture in two analytically and empirically distinct forms, which I label declarative and nondeclarative. The mode of cultural acquisition depends on the dynamics of exposure and encoding, and modulates the process of cultural accessibility, activation, and use. Cultural knowledge about one domain may be redundantly represented in both declarative and nondeclarative forms, each linked via analytically separable pathways to corresponding public cultural forms and ultimately to substantive outcomes. I outline how the new theoretical vocabulary, theoretical model, and analytic distinctions that I propose can be used to resolve contradictions and improve our understanding of outstanding substantive issues in empirically oriented subfields that have recently incorporated cultural processes as a core explanatory resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motherhood reduces women's wages. But does the size of this penalty differ between more and less advantaged women? To answer this, we use unconditional quantile regression models with person-fixed effects, and panel data from the 1979 to 2010 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). We find that among white women, the most privileged -- women with high skills and high wages -- experience the highest total penalties, estimated to include effects mediated through lost experience. Although highly skilled, highly paid women have fairly continuous experience, their high returns to experience make even the small amounts of time some of them take out of employment for childrearing costly. By contrast, penalties net of experience, which may represent employer discrimination or effects of motherhood on job performance, are not distinctive for highly skilled women with high wages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-profile cases of police violence—disproportionately experienced by black men—may present a serious threat to public safety if they lower citizen crime reporting. Using an interrupted time series design, this study analyzes how one of Milwaukee’s most publicized cases of police violence against an unarmed black man, the beating of Frank Jude, affected police-related 911 calls. Controlling for crime, prior call patterns, and several neighborhood characteristics, we find that residents of Milwaukee’s neighborhoods, especially residents of black neighborhoods, were far less likely to report crime after Jude’s beating was broadcast. The effect lasted for over a year and resulted in a total net loss of approximately 22,200 calls for service. Other local and national cases of police violence against unarmed black men also had a significant impact on citizen crime reporting in Milwaukee. Police misconduct can powerfully suppress one of the most basic forms of civic engagement: calling 911 for matters of personal and public safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using IPUMS data for five decennial years between 1970 and 2010, we delineate and compare the trends and sources of the racial pay gap among men and women in the U.S. labor force. Decomposition of the pay gap into components underscores the significance of the intersection between gender and race; we find meaningful gender differences in the composition of the gap and in the gross and the net earnings gaps—both are much larger among men than among women. Despite these differences, the over-time trend is strikingly similar for both genders. Racial gaps sharply declined between 1970 and 1980 and continued to decline, but at a slower rate, until 2000. However, at the turn of the millennium, the trend reversed for both gender groups. The growth of the racial pay gap at the turn of the millennium is attributable to the increase in overall income inequality, stagnation in occupational segregation, and an increase in the unexplained portion of the gap, a portion we attribute to economic discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I theorize “complicit masculinity” to examine how access to capital, in other words, making or spending money, mediates masculine identity for un- and underemployed black men. Arguing that hegemony operates around producer-provider norms of masculinity and through tropes of blackness within a system of racial capitalism, I show how complicity underscores the reality of differential aspirational models in the context of severe un- and underemployment and the failure of the classic breadwinner model for black men globally. I draw on participant observation fieldwork and interviews with men from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s informal sector from 2008 to 2009. I investigate two groups of men: political propagandists (orators) for former President Laurent Gbagbo and mobile street vendors. Rejecting racialized colonial narratives that positioned salaried workers as “evolved,” orators used anti-French rhetoric and ties to the political regime to pursue entrepreneurial identities. Vendors, positioned as illegitimate workers and non-citizens, asserted consumerist models of masculinity from global black popular culture. I show how entrepreneurialism and consumerism, the two paradigmatic neoliberal identities, have become ways for black men to assert economic participation as alternatives to the producer-provider ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sizable literature examines whether and why marriage affects men’s and women’s wages. This study advances current research in two ways. First, whereas most prior studies treat the effect of marriage as time-invariant, I examine how the wage effect of marriage unfolds over the life course. Second, whereas prior work often focuses on the population-average effect of marriage or is limited to some particular gender or racial group, I examine the intersection of gender and race in the effect of marriage. Analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I find that the marriage wage premium grows steadily and at a similar pace among white and black men. The marriage wage premium declines toward negative among white women, yet it grows steadily among black women. Furthermore, measured work experience explains a substantial amount of the wage premium among black men, yet it has little explanatory power among white men, pointing to the importance of unobserved factors in white men’s marriage premium. Changes in work experience negatively affect married white women’s wages, yet they positively affect married black women’s wages, pointing to the important differences between black and white families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have documented the emergence of apparently race-neutral discourses that serve to entrench racial stratification following the elimination of de jure segregation. These discourses deny the existence of both present-day racism and the contemporary effects of histories of racial oppression. Researchers posit that individuals are socialized into these views, but little empirical attention has been paid to the processes through which such socialization occurs. Focusing on the South African case study, I draw on five months of daily observations in seventeen 9th-grade history classrooms, content analysis of notes distributed in class, and 170 in-depth interviews with teachers and students to document how and why students are taught not to attend to the effects of apartheid on their society. To mitigate race-based conflict in their local school context, teachers told “both sides of the story,” highlighting that not all whites were perpetrators and not all blacks were victims. By decoupling the racialized coding of victims and perpetrators, and sidelining discussions of beneficiaries, teachers hindered students’ abilities to make connections to the present. In outlining how and why individuals are taught about the irrelevance of the past, this study contributes to literatures on race, education, collective memory, and transition to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that family socioeconomic background influences childhood access to opportunities. Educational reforms that introduce new information about school quality may lead to increased inequality if families with more resources are better able to respond. However, these policies can also level the playing field for choice by equalizing disadvantaged families’ access to information. This study assesses how a novel accountability system affected family enrollment decisions in the Chicago Public Schools by introducing new test performance information and consequences. We show that a substantial proportion of families responded by transferring out when their child’s school was assigned “probation.” Poor families transferred children to other schools in the district, but at a lower rate than non-poor families, who were also more likely to leave for another district or enroll in private school. Most striking, we show that despite family response to the probation label, access to higher-performing schools changed very little under the new policy; students who left probation schools were the most likely of all transfer students to enroll in other low-performing schools in the district. Although new information changed families’ behavior, it did not address contextual and resource-dependent factors that constrain the educational decisions of poor families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organization scholars since Max Weber have argued that formal personnel systems can prevent discrimination. We draw on sociological and psychological literatures to develop a theory of the varied effects of bureaucratic reforms on managerial motivation. Drawing on self-perception and cognitive-dissonance theories, we contend that initiatives that engage managers in promoting diversity—special recruitment and training programs—will increase diversity. Drawing on job-autonomy and self-determination theories, we contend that initiatives that limit managerial discretion in hiring and promotion—job tests, performance evaluations, and grievance procedures—will elicit resistance and produce adverse effects. Drawing on transparency and accountability theories, we contend that bureaucratic reforms that increase transparency for job-seekers and hiring managers—job postings and job ladders—will have positive effects. Finally, drawing on accountability theory, we contend that monitoring by diversity managers and federal regulators will improve the effects of bureaucratic reforms. We examine the effects of personnel innovations on managerial diversity in 816 U.S. workplaces over 30 years. Our findings help explain the nation’s slow progress in reducing job segregation and inequality. Some popular bureaucratic reforms thought to quell discrimination instead activate it. Some of the most effective reforms remain rare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard measures of residential segregation tend to equate spatial with social proximity. This assumption has been increasingly subject to critique among demographers and ethnographers and becomes especially problematic in historical settings. In the late nineteenth-century United States, standard measures suggest a counterintuitive pattern: southern cities, with their long history of racial inequality, had less residential segregation than urban areas considered to be more racially tolerant. By using census enumeration procedures, we develop a sequence measure that captures a more subtle “backyard” pattern of segregation, where white families dominated front streets and blacks were relegated to alleys. Our analysis of complete household data from the 1880 Census documents how segregation took various forms across the postbellum United States. Whereas northern cities developed segregation via racialized neighborhoods, substituting residential inequality for the status inequality of slavery, southern cities embraced street-front segregation that reproduced the racial inequality that existed under slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]