Checkered past
The word on the street: Rumor, “race” and the anticipation of urban unrest
Stephen Young, Alasdair Pinkerton & Klaus Dodds
Political Geography, January 2014, Pages 57–67
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the emergence of Rumor Control Centers (RCCs) across the US during the late-1960s. The Centers, which were operated by municipal government agencies, were formed in response to the racialized violence that flared up in many cities between 1963 and 1967. State officials encouraged citizens to call their local center if they heard a “rumor” that suggested social tensions might be increasing in their neighborhood. Preemptive measures could then be taken to prevent these tensions from escalating into a riot. The paper outlines how the same anticipatory logics that underpinned Cold War civil defense were flexibly redeployed in response to the radicalizing of the civil rights movement within the US. It also shows how security infrastructures are sometimes fragile and may be reworked or rolled back due to political pressure or more mundane reasons such as failing to hold the attention of citizens and political elites.
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Originalism and Brown v. Board of Education
Steven Calabresi & Michael Perl
Northwestern University Working Paper, August 2013
Abstract:
This article offers an originalist justification for the Supreme Court’s landmark decision almost sixty years ago in Brown v. Board of Education. We examine the thirty-seven State constitutions that were in effect in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and we conclude that three-quarters of the States in 1868 recognized access to a public school education as being a fundamental right at that time. Since the Fourteenth Amendment forbids racial discrimination with respect to fundamental rights, i.e. privileges or immunities of national and state citizenship, Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided using the original public meaning approach of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. We show that by 1954 fifteen of the Forty-Eight States had added clauses to their State constitutions specifically providing for racial segregation in public schools. A three quarters consensus about access to a desegregated education which existed in 1868 thus had vanished by 1954. We therefore suggest that Brown v. Board of Education finds more support in State constitutional law from 1868 than it does from State constitutional law in 1954. Contrary to the received understanding, Brown v. Board of Education is better justified using an originalist approach to constitutional interpretation than it is using a living constitution, evolutionary approach. The conventional wisdom about Brown v. Board of Education is thus shown to be completely and totally wrong.
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Antisemitism Affects Households' Investments
Francesco D'Acunto, Marcel Prokopczuk & Michael Weber
University of California Working Paper, December 2013
Abstract:
We propose historical anti-Jewish sentiment as a proxy for distrust in financial markets. Households in German counties where Jews were persecuted the most as far back as in the Middle Ages are less likely to invest in stocks today. A one-standard-deviation increase in historical anti-Jewish violence leads to a 7.5% to 12% drop in the average stock market participation. For identification, we exploit the forced migrations of Ashkenazi Jews out of the Rhine Valley after the 11th century. The distance of a county from the Rhine Valley instruments for the existence of a Jewish community during the Black Death (1349) and hence the early emergence of anti-Jewish sentiment. Results are similar when we use the votes for the Nazi party as a proxy for anti-Jewish sentiment. The magnitude of the effect does not change from 1984 until 2011 nor across cohorts. Anti-Jewish sentiment does not capture generalized trust: its effect on stockholdings is similar across counties and households with different levels of education.
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Segregation and African-American imprisonment rates for drug offenses
Thomas Arvanites
Social Science Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars argue that the dramatic increase in the African-American incarceration rate that occurred after the civil rights era was in part a reflection of the declining utility of residential segregation as a modern form of social control. Existing research has not thoroughly investigated the association between racial segregation and prison admission rates. Using 2002 data for 198 metropolitan counties, this research examines the relationship between two dimensions of racial residential segregation and African-American prison admission rates for drug offenses. The results from a multivariate regression analysis reveal that the prison admission rates of African-Americans for drug offenses are lower in counties where White residents are more residentially isolated from African-Americans. The admission rates are unaffected by the dissimilarity index. Consistent with recent research on the level of coercive control, the findings suggest that the effect of the percentage of African-Americans residing in an area is nonlinear.
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Race, economy and punishment: Inequity and racial disparity in imprisonment, 1972–2002
Henry Jackson
Criminal Justice Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Guided by the Rusche and Kirchheimer thesis, this study examines variation in incarceration rates across states. Time-series regression analysis is applied to 30 years of state-level data to examine how economic factors interact with aggregate measures of race/ethnicity in predicting rates of incarceration. The analysis indicates that income inequality, not unemployment, is the most salient predictor of incarceration rates. That is, state-level measures of income inequality exert a strong, positive effect on state-level incarceration rates, and this effect is particularly salient in the presence of higher percentages of African-Americans.
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The Promise of Freedom: Fertility Decisions and the Escape from Slavery
Treb Allen
Northwestern University Working Paper, December 2013
Abstract:
This paper examines the extent to which the fertility of enslaved women was affected by the promise of freedom. Because women derived greater pleasure from children when they were free, increases in the distance to freedom (which lowered the probability of escape) should reduce fertility. Exploiting the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the particularity of U.S. geography, I demonstrate a strong negative correlation between fertility and the distance to freedom. This negative correlation is stronger on larger plantations, but disappears when the father of the child is white. The correlation varies with the difficulty of the route, and a similar correlation is not present for white children or for slave children born prior to the Fugitive Slave Law. The negative correlation suggests that despite the small number of successful escapes, the promise of freedom played an important role in the everyday lives of slaves.
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Jewish Persecutions and Weather Shocks: 1100-1800
Robert Warren Anderson, Noel Johnson & Mark Koyama
George Mason University Working Paper, December 2013
Abstract:
What factors caused the persecution of minorities in medieval and early modern Europe? We build a model that predicts that minority communities were more likely to be expropriated in the wake of negative income shocks. Using panel data consisting of 1,366 city-level persecutions of Jews from 936 European cities between 1100 and 1800, we test whether persecutions were more likely in colder growing seasons. A one standard deviation decrease in average growing season temperature increased the probability of a persecution between one-half and one percentage points (relative to a baseline probability of two percent). This effect was strongest in regions with poor soil quality or located within weak states. We argue that long-run decline in violence against Jews between 1500 and 1800 is partly attributable to increases in fiscal and legal capacity across many European states.
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Linguistic correlates of Irish-American and Italian-American ethnicity in high school and beyond
Suzanne Evans Wagner
Language & Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
Young Irish-American and Italian-American women from South Philadelphia were recorded in their senior year of high school and then in their freshman year of college. Despite the relative longevity and increasing cultural integration of the Irish and Italian communities in South Philadelphia, some linguistic differences obtain in the Philadelphia English of women from these two groups. In the 1970s (Labov, 2001), the only Irish or Italian ethnic effect on Philadelphia vowels was found in Italians’ relatively retracted bow/boat and boo/boot. This was supported in the present study for boat, for which Italian-Americans are less fronted than Irish-Americans. Yet other ethnolinguistic differences were unexpectedly also found in the speech of these young women. For instance, Irish-American women and ‘tough’ Italian-American women exhibited more retracted bite-nuclei than their peers. Ethnicity also conditions the alternation between alveolar and velar variants of suffixal (ing), with Irish-Americans more likely than Italian-Americans to use the non-standard alveolar variant. However, the strength of this effect on (ing) attenuates after high school, when ethnicity becomes a less salient component of the speakers’ self-presentation. The article discusses the importance of bringing ethnographic observations to the study of within-White ethnicity, and emphasizes the dynamic nature of ‘ethnicity’ as it is constructed and re-constructed across the individual lifespan.
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Andrew Hanson & Zackary Hawley
Regional Science and Urban Economics, January 2014, Pages 94–106
Abstract:
This paper examines racial discrimination across several neighborhood and housing unit characteristics including racial composition, rent, and distance from the urban core. We find that African Americans face higher rates of discrimination than whites in a wide range of racially mixed neighborhoods, in higher rent areas, closer to central cities, and in low vacancy areas. These results are robust to various parameterizations of the local smoothing empirical specification. The location of discrimination supports the current/future customer prejudice and perceived preference hypotheses as a cause of discrimination in housing markets but not the landlord taste-based hypothesis.
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Convergence Between Black Immigrants and Black Natives Across and Within Generations
Alison Rauh
University of Chicago Working Paper, October 2013
Abstract:
The number of black immigrants living in the US has increased 13-fold from 1970 to 2010, increasing their share of the black population from 1% to 10%. Black immigrants' labor market outcomes surpass those of native blacks. This paper determines in how far the relative success of black immigrants is passed on to the second generation. While blacks of the second generation have equal or higher education and earnings levels than the first generation, the return on their unobservable characteristics is converging to that of native blacks. Race premia are put into a broader context by comparing them to Hispanics, Asians, and whites. Blacks are the only group that experiences a decrease in residual earnings when moving from the first to the second generation. Black immigrants do not only converge to native blacks across generations but also within a generation. For Asians and Hispanics, residual earnings decrease monotonically with age of immigration. For blacks, the residual earnings-age of immigration profile is upward sloping for those immigrating before the age of 15. Convergence across generations is mostly driven by low-educated second generation blacks that drop out the labor force in greater numbers than low-educated first generation immigrants do. Similarly, convergence within a generation is mostly driven by low-educated blacks who immigrate when they are young dropping out of the labor force in greater numbers than those who immigrate when they are older. A social interactions model with an assimilation parameter that varies by age of immigration helps explain this phenomenon. When making their labor force participation decision, immigrant men of all races, but not women, generally place more weight on the characteristics of natives the earlier they immigrate.
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Social networks and labor market inequality between ethnicities and races
Ott Toomet, Marco Van Der Leij & Meredith Rolfe
Network Science, December 2013, Pages 321-352
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the relationship between unexplained racial/ethnic wage differentials on the one hand and social network segregation, as measured by inbreeding homophily, on the other. Our analysis is based on both the US and Estonian surveys, supplemented with the Estonian telephone communication data. In the case of Estonia we consider the regional variation in economic performance of the Russian minority, and in the US case we consider the regional variation in black-white differentials. Our analysis finds a strong relationship between the size of the wage differential and network segregation: Regions with more segregated social networks exhibit larger unexplained wage gaps.
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What Does a High School Diploma Get You? Employment, Race, and the Transition to Adulthood
Marla McDaniel & Daniel Kuehn
Review of Black Political Economy, December 2013, Pages 371-399
Abstract:
We compare the employment of African American and white youth as they transition to adulthood from age 18 to 22, focusing on high school graduates and high school dropouts who did not attend college. Using OLS and hazard models, we analyze the relative employment rates, and employment consistency, stability, and timing, controlling for a number of factors including family income, academic aptitude, prior work experience, and neighborhood poverty. We find white high school graduates work significantly more than all other youth on most measures; African American high school graduates work as much and sometimes less than white high school dropouts; African American dropouts work significantly less than all other youth. Findings further suggest that the improved labor market participation associated with a high school diploma is higher over time for African Americans than for white youth.
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Minority Representation and Order Maintenance Policing: Toward a Contingent View
Elaine Sharp
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: This article's aim is to test the impact of black political and bureaucratic representation on the rate at which blacks are arrested for order maintenance violations in U.S. cities.
Methods: Using data from the Law Enforcement Management and Administration Survey, the Census Bureau, and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, for all U.S. cities over 100,000 population, the article first documents the continuing influence of black elected officials in promoting black representation on police forces. After establishing the appropriateness of order maintenance policing as a follow-up focus, the article then tests hypotheses that link variation in the rate of black order maintenance arrests to black political and bureaucratic representation, contingent upon form of government.
Results: Black political representation does constrain black order maintenance arrests, while black representation on the police force does not.
Conclusion: Even with a more racially representative police force in place, black political representation is what matters in constraining controversial patterns of police practice.
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Residential Hierarchy in Los Angeles: An Examination of Ethnic and Documentation Status Differences
David Cort, Ken-Hou Lin & Gabriela Stevenson
Social Science Research, May 2014, Pages 170–183
Abstract:
Longitudinal event history data from two waves of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey are used to explore racial, ethnic, and documentation status differences in access to desirable neighborhoods. We first find that contrary to recent findings, undocumented Latinos do not replace blacks at the bottom of the locational attainment hierarchy. Whites continue to end up in neighborhoods that are less poor and whiter than minority groups, while all minorities, including undocumented Latinos, end up in neighborhoods that are of similar quality. Second, the effects of socioeconomic status for undocumented Latinos are either similar to or weaker than disadvantaged blacks. These findings suggest that living in less desirable neighborhoods is a fate disproportionately borne by non-white Los Angeles residents and that in some limited ways, the penalty attached to being undocumented Latino might actually be greater than the penalty attached to being black.
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Are Urbanites More Permissive? Germany’s Urban Geography of Prejudice
Peter Dirksmeier
Urban Affairs Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Traditionally, bowing to the migration history of Germany, larger proportions of foreigners live in major German cities than in other parts of the country. According to contact theory, famously developed by social psychologist Gordon Allport in the 1950s, intergroup contacts between different ethnic groups reduce prejudice. The main aim of the article is to examine whether the level of prejudice toward foreigners is lower among the German urban population due to greater contact opportunities and habituation among different ethnic groups in Germany’s major cities, which reduces prejudice as well. The presented findings show, first, that prejudice is only slightly lower in the major cities. Second, this finding crucially depends on the quality of contacts. Only friendships between Germans and foreigners show a significant impact on reducing prejudice. Clearly, beyond the level of acquaintance with individual members of an out-group, only voluntary contacts are able to diminish prejudice. Third, in terms of spatial context effects, the switch between majority and minority group positions in residential areas appears to be a tipping point for prejudice, which means that even people with low levels of prejudice wish to live as the ethnic majority in their respective residential area.
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Social Influence in the Housing Market
Carrie Pan & Christo Pirinsky
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
We utilize the decennial U.S. Census to study social effects in housing consumption across 4 million households from 126 ethnic groups and 2,071 geographic locations in the U.S. We find that the homeownership decisions within ethnic groups are locally correlated, after controlling for the homeownership rates within the group and the region. Social influence is stronger for younger, less educated, and lower-income individuals; immigrants; and Americans with ancestors from more unequal, uncertainty-avoiding, and collectivistic cultures. Our results suggest that both status and information considerations play an important role in the social comparison process in capital markets.