Kasey Henricks

That's When the Neighborhood Went South: How Middle Class Blacks and Whites Police Racial Boundaries of Stigmatized Blackness

Drawing on evidence from a case study of a racially transitioning suburb of Chicago, we argue that both blacks and whites discursively form, maintain, protect, and navigate contradictory class and racial identities. The interactions between race and class are complex, but how do these complexities manifest themselves? We contend that racial groups utilize discursive storytelling to maintain boundaries, and that this is one of the ways in which racial and class inequalities are created and preserved. Furthermore, we explore the interworking of race and class, focusing on how class location helps mediate self-proclaimed middle class blacks’ and whites’ discourse on stigmatized forms of blackness. We conclude with a discussion of the sociological implications of this boundary maintenance, focusing on the ways in which whites and blacks in the middle class utilize various forms of capital to preserve status and power.

Celebrating a Return to Jim Crow? A Reflexive Analysis and Methodological Query on Measuring Segregation

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.

Who Plays? Who Pays?: Education Finance Policy That Supplants Tax Burdens along Lines of Race and Class.

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.

A Second Redemption? Racism, Backlash Politics, and Public Education

It may seem like distant history now, but nearly 150 years ago the United States experienced its first civil rights revolution (Reconstruction). Boundaries of national belonging formally expanded in dramatic fashion under the Fourteenth Amendment, which declared all persons born within U.S. territory citizens. Black men were granted the franchise by the Fifteenth Amendment, and some went on to hold elected office. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 expanded legal protections to black citizens, permitting them to create and enforce contracts, purchase, sell, or lease property, and participate in court proceedings. In sum, initial steps toward black empowerment spanned multiple fronts. It was in the area of education, however, where perhaps the most radical change occurred. Consider the words, for example, of Du Bois (1910):

Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Vietnam

Vietnam is a nation-state located in Southeastern Asia, sharing borders with Cambodia and Laos to the west, China to the north, the Gulf of Tonkin to the east, and the South China Sea to the south. It spans more than 331,210 sq. km, which compares in size to New Mexico in the United States. It is a country historically rife with conflict. In part, this can be traced to ongoing legacies of colonialism. The following chapter is organized under five general themes: (1) general demographic trends, (2) Vietnam in the racialized world system, (3) ethnic conflict and inequality in Vietnam, (4) intergroup conflict outside of Vietnam, and (5) future trends and what can be expected. In each of these sections, we sketch an empirical overview describing various historical and contemporary trends, and then we offer some theoretical assessments and explanations of these data. Though our analysis is not exhaustive, it nonetheless highlights a number of social problems that merit further examination and scrutiny if ethnic inequality in Vietnam is to be reduced.

Black Dollars, White Pockets Looting by Another Name

How far has America come when it comes to race? November 4, 2008. The first black man is elected president of the United States, and journalists like Richard Cohen (2008) of The Washington Post conclude the country has transcended race. Yet in many ways, race continues to color the Obama years as much now as in the past. Indeed, one might say that his election has been a cover to proceed with the state-sponsored looting and pillorying of black communities. ‘‘Black codes’’ that compelled emancipated slaves into involuntary, underpaid, or sometimes unpaid labor are now a criminal justice system that oversees more black people than were enslaved in 1850 (Alexander 2010). Poll taxes, literacy tests, and residency requirements that denied people of color suffrage have evolved into Voter ID laws that thwart participation in electoral politics (Bell [1973] 2008). Racial violence of yesterday has become the ‘‘shoot first, ask questions later’’ practices of today in places like Ferguson, Missouri. Meanwhile, court systems remain complicit (as do numerous other political entities). Their silence on ugly displays of racial violence parallels how lynch mobs would leave bodies to hang for days, like Ida B. Wells (1892) describes, as a message to keep minorities ‘‘in their place.’’ The body of an unarmed, ‘‘hands held high’’ teenager laid lifeless, from being shot at least six times and twice in the head, on cold pavement for four hours. Much like extreme forms of Jim Crow, Michael Brown was transformed into a spectacle—into a warning. Blood is on the hands of police officer Darren Wilson, but he is not the only one. White people are responsible for this tragedy. We are implicated in a social fabric that has long made communities like

Humanist Sociology Rekindling the Spirit of Alfred McClung Lee

Twenty-first century America is a mess. We live in an era where we dismiss, diminish, or deny the discrimination and exploitation that shapes the everyday lives of marginalized groups. We live in a world where, undeniably as Jeffrey Reiman and Paul Leighton ([1979] 2012) have noted, the rich get richer and the poor get prison. Or to paraphrase the words of U.S. Senator, Bernie Sanders, we are quickly becoming a nation of, by, and for the very rich (see Nichols 2014). David Fasenfest (2011) has noted the alarming reality that ‘‘the neoliberal agenda is now in full swing’’ and its wrecking ball will wreck us all (p. 1). It affects all of us who care about the cuts being made to already starving social programs, the dismemberment of deeply needed regulations designed to protect laborers and consumers, and the barricades put up to prevent collective bargaining. When university life and knowledge production were shaped by notions of ‘‘Truth,’’ beauty, and the humanities, like Bill Readings (1996) pointed out, they were bastions, of sorts, for deep thoughts of human worth. Of course, Charles Mills (1997) and Carole Pateman (1988) have rightfully pointed out how this humanistic project emanated from a seriously flawed medieval institution whose membership was exclusive and whose product was myopic. In the United States, social movements throughout the 20 century helped break down some of the formal forces of discrimination that constrained modernist visions of emancipation. Just as radicals succeeded at changing the educational landscape, however, C. Wright Mills (1956) and later G. William Domhoff (1990) were quick to observe how these institutions were commandeered by military money and corporate power. Eventually, they would be corporatized in the expansion of capitalism and broader trends toward