Leonard Gordon

Images of black women among anglo college students

Previous research on popular images of women and of minority groups has looked almost solely at images of minority men and of white women. This article presents survey data on images of black women among 256 white non-Hispanic college undergraduates, using a modified Katz/Braly scale. The article explores the nature, distribution, correlates, and emotional evaluations of these images and the implications of these images for black womens lives. Images of black women differed substantially from those of American women in general. Most commonly, black women were characterized as loud, talkative, aggressive, intelligent, straightforward, and argumentative. In addition, students rated positive traits less positive and negative traits less negative when exhibited by black women than by American women in general, apparently because of their expectations for black womens behavior.

Minorities and women in the pacific sociological association region: A Five-Year Progress Report

Based on a five-year follow-up survey of sociology departments in the Pacific Sociological Association region, we report trends in the representation of women and minorities among faculty members and graduate students. Although men continue to predominate at all but the lecturer/instructor level, women are increasingly represented on faculties overall, in tenured positions, and among the higher academic ranks. Proportionally fewer men and women are now in entry level positions than in 1979. Except for Asians, minority faculty continue to be poorly represented. Women now make up the majority of graduate students at both the masters and doctoral levels, but both the proportion and number of minority students have declined in five years. Still, despite sharply contracting enrollment, both women and minority graduate students receive a larger share of financial assistance awards than they did five years ago.

Aftermath of a Race Riot: The Emergent Norm Process among Black and White Community Leaders

In the years immediately following the 1967 racial disorder crisis in Detroit, there existed between black and white community leadership ideological and policy polarization. Over the next decade such polarization transformed itself into a nonideological pragmatic accommodationist orientation. This analysis draws on Turners emergent norm theory to interpret stages evident in the normative shift in black and white leadership attitudes and behaviors within a context of continuing stressful city conditions. Employing a combination of decisional, functional, and positional selection criteria, 14 black and 22 white community leaders were periodically interviewed and observed between 1968 and 1980. As posited in emergent norm theory, the crystallization and recrystallization of norms held by black and white community leaders involved multiple competing leadership ideas before a dominant norm emerged. While there are signs that a possible new emergent norm stage of repolarization may be developing, this analysis focuses on the interactionist process that resulted in a shift from interracial community leadership confrontation toward policy and pragmatic cooperation for a period of over a decade.

Suburban consensus formation and the race issue

The Detroit suburb of Oak Park, Michigan, attained the status of an independent urban school district in 1952 (Oak Park, 1962, p. 3). Between the years of 1952 and 1960 this suburban community was characterized by a high degree of community consensus in support of increased taxes for the local public school system. Ten school bond and millage elections were held and passed during this period. In 1962 and 1963 additional millage elections were held. Both of these failed. The race issue is of interest in the defeats because they followed the introduction of Negro students into the Oak Park School District. This desegregation was the result of state action to attach the adjacent predominantly Negro Carver school district to that of Oak Park in 1961 (Oak Park, 1960, p. 1). The two school proposal defeats, occurring when they did, raised the following questions. How much of an influence was the issue of race in these initial two defeats? And what long-range effects did the reaction to school desegregation have on community support for school proposals? A