Marlese Durr

Racial submarkets in government employment : African American managers in New York State

This paper reports on a study of the employment situation of African American managers within New York State government. We argue that affirmative action, while having created employment opportunities for minority professionals, has also created racial submarkets in government. We identify three categories of jobs, a mainstream category and two sorts of minority categories, based on the racial composition of incumbents and constituencies that they serve. African Americans in minority submarket positions appear to have equal pay relative to comparable African Americans in mainstream jobs. They are less likely to have civil service job protection. There is limited mobility between submarkets; more professionals move from the mainstream to minority positions than vice versa. In the current period of budget reductions in state government, black professionals experience considerable job insecurity and express dissatisfaction with the policies that created the minority submarket.

Keep Your "N" in Check: African American Women and the Interactive Effects of Etiquette and Emotional Labor

Black professional women report that they must transform themselves to be welcomed and accepted, especially in the workplace. They speak of performance weariness in verbal and nonverbal communicative interaction-exchanges with white colleagues. Many simply state that they feel they are in a ‘parade’, being judged for appearance, personal decorum, communication skills, and emotion management in addition to productivity. The objective of this article is to describe these women’s experiences in line with promotion opportunities. For them, going to work involves a multilayered performance: (1) they must engage in racialized, gendered impression management at the generalized bureaucratic level; and (2) they rely on instructions grounded in race-based survival strategies to cope with challenges they face in unwelcoming work environments with concrete ceilings. Our analysis of these aspects of workplace behavior reveals that black women co-mingle etiquette and emotion management to gain acceptance and promotions, which strengthens race/ethnic group solidarity.

Does race matter? The determinants and consequences of self-reports of discrimination victimization

Abstract Few empirical investigations have explored the determinants of discrimination. Even more rare are studies that explicitly link reports of discrimination to harmful consequences. This article investigates the determinants and consequences of self-reports of discrimination victimization. It addresses how likely different kinds of people are to say that they have been the victims of discrimination. After estimating who is likely to report being victimized by discrimination, the article presents estimates of the relationship of self-reports of discrimination victimization to the earnings of different social groups. Results indicate that African Americans, Latinos, and immigrants report being victimized more frequently than whites with rates that exceed twice the national average. For African Americans, the “cost” of felt discrimination exceeds

What is the Difference between Slave Patrols and Modern Day Policing? Institutional Violence in a Community of Color

6,200; for Latinos, the “cost” exceeds

Sex, Drugs, and HIV: Sisters of Laundromat

11,300. Such findings suggest that reports of discrimination are not just the product of the imaginations of overly sensitive, raceconscious, victim-minded individuals. Rather, these reports appear to represent real experiences that negatively and demonstrably impact the quality of their lives.

Small town life A study in race relations

Do performances of brutality have to be part of institutional social control in African American communities? Are these communities haunted by historical beliefs, practices, and stereotypes that once disenfranchised them? More important, if so, why in a post-civil rights era do African Americans receive abuse from our institutional sentinels – the police? Why do our guardians utilize informal and formal social control mechanisms, similar in nature, type, and in some instance in kind to slave patrols? This article examines criminologists’ analyses of policing in the African American community. Despite a substantial amount of work addressing the complaints of violence and distrust in the Black community, policy-makers as well as police departments have ignored their findings. Does the will exist to bring about a different form of social change in the configuration of justice or does African American marginalization persist as one of the strongest elements of social stratification.

After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movement Activism, and the Post-Civil Rights Generation

I was listening to 98.7 KISS and preparing to walk to the laundromat around the corner from my apartment in Brooklyn, New York, when the hosts of the radio program made the following public service announcement: As of December 2003, according to the Office of Women’s Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 67 percent of all women with AIDS are African American and 16 percent are Hispanic. The accelerating rate of AIDS among Black and Hispanic women stands in sharp contrast to the low rate found among Asian American women and the declining rate among white women and speaks volumes about continuing patterns of class and racial inequality. The hosts of this radio program added that of the 928,188 cases of AIDS that have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control, half are among African Americans, despite the fact that they represent only 12 percent of the U.S. population. Hispanics represent 16 percent of all AIDS cases in the United States and are approximately 13 percent of the population. Although I am aware that Black people are overrepresented among those with AIDS, the figures still startled me. And even with a well-developed sociological imagination, my first thoughts were, What is wrong with Black women/us? Don’t

Guest Editors' Introduction Special Issue on African American Women: Gender Relations, Work, and the Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century

■ Moving to southern Ohio from upstate New York was a necessity: I needed the job. I wondered what it would be like to live in the Midwest as a single African American woman. I soon learned that racial, social, and sexual homogeneity compounded to make my new neighborhood into a cohesive whole from which I was excluded. Confronting daily expressions of hostility from neighbors and pointed comments about race from students, I wrote notes on my kitchen calendar to record these odious events. I was an ‘exception’ but still an ‘outsider’, a reminder of what people who belonged to this nearly all-white gay-partnered community did not want. My ‘outsider-ness’ afforded me some immunity, yet veiled conversation said ‘she’s not so different from the rest of them’. This article discusses my reawakening to homogeneity as the basis for solidifying social bonds, while I learned more about myself.

Reaching Beyond Race

ments: her belief that restaurants are places to work through our private and public selves and her thoughts on food as central to urbanization. With regard to the former, Finkelstein traces how ‘‘the awareness of the other’s gaze’’ became one of the ‘‘important influences on human conduct that have taken centuries to evolve into the commonplace manners and social codes that we now employ in everyday life’’ (p. 27). While the restaurant is a place where we fulfill our private desires, it is also a place where we enjoy participating in the spectacle of public performance. She uses the examples of themed restaurants, the exchange between waiters and patrons, and the evolution of self-control as examples of how the social setting of restaurants influences our behavior. Finkelstein’s documentation of restaurants in the urban setting is particularly insightful. Her section ‘‘The City and Modern Identity’’ in Chapter Five outlines how and why cities shaped not only restaurant culture but social norms in general. Citing everything from William Hogarth paintings to the poet Baudelaire, Finkelstein explains that the city ‘‘is an arena in which social ties that previously bound individuals into self-supporting communities have been loosened and where new techniques for managing the unanticipated need to be acquired’’ (p. 163). Here, restaurants serve as a training ground for how to behave. For the historian, Fashioning Appetite is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on food culture. Finkelstein artfully pulls apart the changing meaning of food and public consumption in western culture over the past millennium. She documents the shift from elaborate and wasteful displays of food at the medieval banquet table to the more courtly fashion for foods that emphasized the small, delicate, and costly. In the latter setting, manners, self control, and awareness of others became primary to the dining experience. Finkelstein also traces the rise of coffee shops in places such as London that housed hundreds of such establishments by 1700. Here, people socialized and, more significantly, ate and drank together with others from across the socioeconomic spectrum. In her discussion of coffee houses, the author uses primary sources like Samuel Pepys with a large dose of sociologist Norbert Elias, whose work on the evolution of manners plays heavily into Finkelstein’s analysis. Psychologists interested in how humans construct personal identities and scholars of consumerism will find much of interest in Fashioning Appetite. The author demonstrates that restaurants are central to how we create self-identities because they offer a place to buy. With consumer culture as a leitmotif, Finkelstein writes, ‘‘The consumer ethic produces an array of identities from which we can select a persona’’ (p. 167). Whether one chooses to eat at a gourmet restaurant or a Jewish deli, what and where we eat is how the modern individual crafts herself. As with many aspects of consumer culture, food is a manifestation of cultural values. Though only 200 pages, this is a ‘‘thick’’ book, laden with ideas and theories. It is simultaneously accessible and obtuse. Finkelstein inspires scholars from across disciplines to consider the restaurant as much more than a place where physical needs are met. Rather, Fashioning Appetite successfully demonstrates that restaurants are constitutive of modern society.

Inner-City African-American Women's Adolescence as Stressful Life Events: Understanding Substance Abusing Behavior

Scholarship on African American women during the past two decades of the twentieth century has enhanced our understanding of the structural forces (e.g., slavery, discrimination, segregation, economic exclusion) that shaped their lives. Much of this work focused on how the racial status and class position of Black women had influenced their gender identities and experiences in ways that transcended the narrow boundaries of femininity, especially notions of women as innately domestic, submissive, and dependent. In addition, this literature highlighted the historic work/family/community roles of African American women, the viability of singlemother families, the strength of intergenerational family ties, and the sharing of child care in female-centered kinship groups. Yet, even as they and we were telling their and our stories, evolving structural forces and social policies were reshaping our lives. This special issue thus builds on existing literature by examining the status of African American women in light of the contemporary economic and social transformations that had occurred by the end of the century. While there is no doubt that African Americans, and African American women in particular, have made significant political, educational, and economic advances in the past 40 years, the good news does not diminish the salience of the enduring patterns of gender, class, and racial inequality for women of African descent, nor can it disguise the fact that African American economic progress has been disturbingly uneven—polarizing the Black population into the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Much of this polarization is the direct result of economic restructuring, specifically the demise of industrial jobs, which led to increased poverty, the development of the so-called underclass, and high rates of nonmarriage, nonmarital childbearing, and welfare dependency. These articles focus on how these forces have changed the personal, work, and family experiences of African American women.