Abdi M. Kusow

Racial and religious contexts: Situational identities among Lebanese and Somali Muslim immigrants

Abstract This study addresses the racial and religious contexts of identity formation among Lebanese immigrants to the United States of America and Somali immigrants to Canada. Each enters with a different racial status: Lebanese as white; Somalis as black/visible minority. Ethnographic interviews explore the strategies of adaptation and identity development within these groups. Specifically, we compare and contrast the Lebanese and Somali experience through an analysis of ethnic relations in the country of origin, the conditions of immigration, and through accounts of their encounters and identity negotiation with the host society. We demonstrate the strategies each group implements to negotiate both race and religion in identity development. Our findings reveal that each group attempts to make their religious identity evident, however, Somali immigrants must negotiate the effects of ‘othering’ processes with both race and religion, while Lebanese immigrants build a religious identity from privileges afforded to them by virtue of their white racial status.

Do Adolescent Drug Users Fare the Worst? Onset Type, Juvenile Delinquency, and Criminal Careers

Although substance abuse often accompanies delinquency and other forms of antisocial behavior, there is less scholarly agreement about the timing of substance use vis-à-vis an individual’s antisocial trajectory. Similarly, although there is extraordinary evidence that onset is inversely related to the severity of the criminal career, there is surprisingly little research on the offense type of onset or the type of antisocial behavior that was displayed when an individual initiated his or her offending career. Drawing on data from a sample of serious adult criminal offenders (N = 500), the current study examined 12 forms of juvenile delinquency (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, auto theft, arson, weapons, sexual offense, drug sales, and drug use) in addition to age at arrest onset, age, sex, race to explore their association with chronicity (total arrests), extreme chronicity (1 SD above the mean which was equivalent to 90 career arrests), and lambda (offending per year). The only onset offense type that was significantly associated with all criminal career outcomes was juvenile drug use. Additional research on the offense type of delinquent onset is needed to understand launching points of serious antisocial careers.

Adverse Childhood Experiences, Commitment Offense, and Race/Ethnicity: Are the Effects Crime-, Race-, and Ethnicity-Specific?

Adverse childhood experiences are associated with an array of health, psychiatric, and behavioral problems including antisocial behavior. Criminologists have recently utilized adverse childhood experiences as an organizing research framework and shown that adverse childhood experiences are associated with delinquency, violence, and more chronic/severe criminal careers. However, much less is known about adverse childhood experiences vis-à-vis specific forms of crime and whether the effects vary across race and ethnicity. Using a sample of 2520 male confined juvenile delinquents, the current study used epidemiological tables of odds (both unadjusted and adjusted for onset, total adjudications, and total out of home placements) to evaluate the significance of the number of adverse childhood experiences on commitment for homicide, sexual assault, and serious persons/property offending. The effects of adverse childhood experiences vary considerably across racial and ethnic groups and across offense types. Adverse childhood experiences are strongly and positively associated with sexual offending, but negatively associated with homicide and serious person/property offending. Differential effects of adverse childhood experiences were also seen among African Americans, Hispanics, and whites. Suggestions for future research to clarify the mechanisms by which adverse childhood experiences manifest in specific forms of criminal behavior are offered.

Formula Narratives and the Making of Social Stratification and Inequality

Sociological research on inequality has increasingly moved beyond the examination of inequalities as they presumably exist to explore the generic narrative processes that perpetuate that inequality. Unfortunately, however, this research remains concentrated on either individual or ideological grand narratives and ignores the fact that the work narratives do, including the production and structuring of inequality, occurs at multiple levels: cultural, structural, organizational, and personal, and never exclusively at just one of these. In this study, we use Somali origin narratives to describe conceptually the ways in which narratives produced at different personal and societal levels—cultural, institutional, organizational—dialectically structure the generic processes that produce and perpetuate social inequality.

Conceptualizing American Attitudes toward Immigrants’ Dual Loyalty:

The social issue of immigrants’ dual loyalty figures prominently in the 2016 U.S. presidential primaries, yet little is known about Americans’ views on the subject. Drawing on data from a nationally representative telephone survey, the authors specifically explored nonimmigrant Americans’ attitudes toward immigrants’ dual loyalty. The results show that attitudes toward this dual loyalty are informed by multiple boundary-making processes, including the extent to which respondents strongly believe that immigrants should celebrate American values and traditions and share their vision of America, that immigration should be restricted as much as possible, and that American influence in the world is important.