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Many Chicagoans are getting shortchanged, particularly when it comes to money exchange between the Illinois Lottery (IL) and Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). A significant portion of lottery sales is earmarked for education in Illinois. Because these revenues are not generated equally, however, some contribute more to education via the lottery than others. When this money is distributed in a way that transfers it from one community to another, one community's fiscal gain comes at another's expense. So the question stands: Who plays and who pays? To answer this question, I use the city of Chicago as a case study to simultaneously compare the generation and appropriation of lottery revenues. What I found was that this exchange is inherently organized along lines of race and class. Lottery revenues disproportionately come from communities comprised predominantly by people of color and the working class, and then are redistributed across all communities through education finance. When fiscal policy of Illinois public education is structured in such a way, it inequitably distributes economic capital and preserves undeserved enrichment and unjust impoverishment. This represents a state-sponsored process that captures one mechanism for the reproduction of race and class inequality.

Four out of every five vehicles towed in Chicago for snow-related parking violations were seized on days without accumulation of snow. Either unwilling or unable to satisfy the debts required to recover their cars, hundreds were never recovered. Synthesising multiple sources of public data over a five-year span (2013–2017), the authors show how these towing practices disparately devastate segregated communities of colour through impositions of debt and dispossession. Who profits from these impositions? The same politically connected company that represents one of Chicago’s first attempts at privatisation. United Road Towing landed the exclusive city contract in 1989, only nine days after the company’s creation, and its ascendance to Chicago’s political scene stood upon a white racial imaginary that linked parking violations to threats of urban decay. Through a euphemistically named public–private partnership, United Road Towing has since become one of the largest towing companies in the world. This article is an inquiry that parses out a concept the authors label as ‘public–private predation’ by historicising Chicago’s commodification of the streetscape, theorising how racialised hardship results from the draining of neighbourhood resources and quantifying which segregated communities are subject to these new sites of extraction – all within a world of winter parking regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We extend prior studies on racial apathy and monetary sanctions by uncovering the relationship between the two within the realm of preferences for liberal reforms. Our study draws upon the Chicago Area Finances Survey, 2019 to answer three basic questions: (1) Is racial apathy an empirically distinct form of modern prejudice? (2) Is racial apathy of political consequence for liberal reforms on monetary sanctions? (3) Does racial apathy influence other groups besides whites? The reforms we measure feature policies that address the growing debt tied to legal infractions, including the establishment of monthly payment plans, permitting legal debt to be exchanged for community service, and fulfilling debt obligations with the completion of programs that enhance human capital. We find that racial apathy is especially relevant for predicting who withholds support for liberal reforms on monetary sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies that disentangle the relationship between race, crime, and punishment have turned to administrative documents as a central site of power. Speaking to this omission, I use a case study of mandatory financial sanctions in the Criminal Division of the Cook County Circuit Court in the State of Illinois. The analysis draws upon a sample of 89 sanctions imposed upon conviction, at the state and county levels, to identify three bureaucratic aspects that sustain racial inequality. One, these sanctions are represented in ways that abstract the conviction process from its highly racialized context. Two, these sanctions enable legal actors to enact a multilevel mode of decision making, combining compulsory and discretionary judgment, that entrenches racial bias within the broader legal organization of punishment. And three, these sanctions redistribute the operational costs of justice through earmarks onto those who are processed through the system (i.e., disproportionately people of color). Altogether, these bureaucratic aspects paradoxically intensify racial stratification in ways that are seemingly nonracial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between taxation and structural racism is both understudied and undertheorized. Our article introducing the following symposium is a starting point to address this gap, proposing that “a racial tax state” structures the US tax system. Grounded by contemporary race theory, we show how this seemingly innocuous and bureaucratic procedure is structured by and reproduces racial inequality. Far from a neutral and even-keeled practice, taxation is a political tool imbued with stereotypes, values, and emotions to carry out and justify acts of taking. To suggest future directions for this area of research, we propose five initial mechanisms the racial tax state deploys to codify racialized inequalities of socially-defined rewards and penalties: enfranchisement, hoarding, abatement, extraction, and redistribution. We provide both historical and contemporary examples of these mechanisms, drawing especially on the symposium’s contributors, to show patterns in tax contestation and restructuring at moments in which racial justice seemed possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors focus on the concept of sociology and explore for whom and what purpose it serves, citing the highlights of the 50-year career of the Association for Humanist Sociology's first president, Alfred McClung Lee. Topics discussed include the ideas of marketplace citizenship, the move of universities toward an apparent denotative endorsement of corporatization, and an analysis of Lee's statement of purpose for humanist sociology.

Glaeser and Vigdor (2012) recently declared ‘the end of a segregated century’. Because America has returned to 1910 segregation levels, it has allegedly achieved transcendence over racism. After all, the authors note, government no longer endorses housing discrimination, all-white neighborhoods are extinct, and white racial attitudes have liberalized. Despite the proclamation, many questions regarding segregation remain unanswered by Glaeser and Vigdor. Namely, how can segregation be conceptualized and its measurement improved, what might alternative methods for analyzing it yield, and why does it matter in the first place? To prompt an overdue substantive and methodological discussion, we undertake a case study analysis of Cook County, Illinois to address these questions. Our analytic goal is to illuminate how segregation is a much more complex matter than many analyses reflect, and when this is taken into account, it becomes readily apparent that any assertions of racial transcendence are quite premature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]