Race in time
Racial Inequality Trends and the Intergenerational Persistence of Income and Family Structure
Deirdre Bloome
American Sociological Review, December 2014, Pages 1196-1225
Abstract:
Racial disparity in family incomes remained remarkably stable over the past 40 years in the United States despite major legal and social reforms. Previous scholarship presents two primary explanations for persistent inequality through a period of progressive change. One highlights continuity: because socioeconomic status is transmitted from parents to children, disparities created through histories of discrimination and opportunity denial may dissipate slowly. The second highlights change: because family income results from joining individual earnings in family units, changing family compositions can offset individuals’ changing economic chances. I examine whether black-white family income inequality trends are better characterized by the persistence of existing disadvantage (continuity) or shifting forms of disadvantage (change). I combine cross-sectional and panel analysis using Current Population Survey, Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Census, and National Vital Statistics data. Results suggest that African Americans experience relatively extreme intergenerational continuity (low upward mobility) and discontinuity (high downward mobility); both helped maintain racial inequality. Yet, intergenerational discontinuities allow new forms of disadvantage to emerge. On net, racial inequality trends are better characterized by changing forms of disadvantage than by continuity. Economic trends were equalizing but demographic trends were disequalizing; as family structures shifted, family incomes did not fully reflect labor-market gains.
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The National Rise in Residential Segregation
Trevon Logan & John Parman
NBER Working Paper, February 2015
Abstract:
This paper introduces a new measure of residential segregation based on individual-level data. We exploit complete census manuscript files to derive a measure of segregation based upon the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. Our measure allows us to analyze segregation consistently and comprehensively for all areas in the United States and allows for a richer view of the variation in segregation across time and space. We show that the fineness of our measure reveals aspects of racial sorting that cannot be captured by traditional segregation indices. Our measure can distinguish between the effects of increasing racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to segregate within a location given a particular racial composition. Analysis of neighbor-based segregation over time establishes several new facts about segregation. First, segregation doubled nationally from 1880 to 1940. Second, contrary to previous estimates, we find that urban areas in the South were the most segregated in the country and remained so over time. Third, the dramatic increase in segregation in the twentieth century was not driven by urbanization, black migratory patterns, or white flight to suburban areas, but rather resulted from a national increase in racial sorting at the household level. The likelihood that an African American household had a non-African American neighbor declined by more than 15 percentage points (more than a 25% decrease) through the mid-twentieth century. In all areas of the United States -- North and South, urban and rural -- racial segregation increased dramatically.
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Geographic Migration of Black and White Families Over Four Generations
Patrick Sharkey
Demography, February 2015, Pages 209-231
Abstract:
This article analyzes patterns of geographic migration of black and white American families over four consecutive generations. The analysis is based on a unique set of questions in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) asking respondents about the counties and states in which their parents and grandparents were raised. Using this information along with the extensive geographic information available in the PSID survey, the article tracks the geographic locations of four generations of family members and considers the ways in which families and places are linked together over the course of a family’s history. The patterns documented in the article are consistent with much of the demographic literature on the Great Migration of black Americans out of the South, but they reveal new insights into patterns of black migration after the Great Migration. In the most recent generation, black Americans have remained in place to a degree that is unique relative to the previous generation and relative to whites of the same generation. This new geographic immobility is the most pronounced change in black Americans’ migration patterns after the Great Migration, and it is a pattern that has implications for the demography of black migration as well as the literature on racial inequality.
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Political Parties and Labor-Market Outcomes: Evidence from U.S. States
Louis-Philippe Beland
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper estimates the causal impact of the party allegiance (Republican or Democratic) of U.S. governors on labor-market outcomes. I match gubernatorial elections with March Current Population Survey (CPS) data for income years 1977 to 2008. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that Democratic governors cause an increase in the annual hours worked by blacks relative to whites, which leads to a reduction in the racial earnings gap between black and white workers. The results are consistent and robust to using a wide range of models, controls and specifications.
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Racial Disparities in Savings Behavior for a Continuously Employed Cohort
Kai Yuan Kuan, Mark Cullen & Sepideh Modrek
NBER Working Paper, February 2015
Abstract:
The wealth gap has reached record highs. At the same time there has been substantial proliferation of 401(k) savings accounts as the dominant retirement savings vehicle, and these accounts make up an increasing proportion of overall wealth. In this paper we examine 401(k) saving behavior of continuously employed workers over an eight-year period at a single, geographically diverse employer. We demonstrate substantial difference in 401(k) savings behavior by employee ethnicity even within a single employer 401(k) plan architecture. We show both African American and Hispanic employees are less likely to participate in the 401(k) plans. Moreover, conditional on participation African Americans contribute a lower proportion of their income to their 401(k) plan on average. We also show that African Americans and Hispanics tend to draw down on their 401(k) balances more often. Finally, we document that both African Americans and Hispanics favor safer assets within their plan options. Together these differences substantially impact the level of 401(k) balances accumulated and therefore overall wealth accumulation.
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The Double Role of Ethnic Heterogeneity in Explaining Welfare-State Generosity
Markus Jantti, Gerald Jaynes & John Roemer
Yale Working Paper, December 2014
Abstract:
Based on theoretical models of budget-balanced social insurance and individual choice, we argue that in addition to the well-known empathy mechanism whereby ethnic heterogeneity undermines sentiments of solidarity among a citizenry to reduce welfare generosity, population heterogeneity affects the generosity of a polity's social insurance programs through another distinct mechanism, political conflict. Ethnic heterogeneity likely intensifies political conflict and reduces welfare generosity because heterogeneity of unemployment risk makes it more difficult to achieve social consensus concerning tax-benefit programs. Utilizing two separate regression analyses covering highly diverse polities, the 50 U.S. states and District of Columbia (CPS data), and 13 OECD countries (LIS data), we find strong evidence that empirically distinct empathy and political conflict effects on unemployment insurance programs characterize contemporary politics. Our findings suggest existing analyses of the negative relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and the size of the welfare state likely over- or underestimate the empathy effect. For example, perhaps surprisingly, had our analysis of US data omitted a measure of unemployment dispersion, the negative effect of ethnic fractionalization would have been underestimated.
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A comparative study of the general factor of personality in Jewish and non-Jewish populations
Curtis Dunkel et al.
Personality and Individual Differences, May 2015, Pages 63–67
Abstract:
It was hypothesized that Jews would have a personality profile characterized by high levels of the general factor of personality (GFP). Analyses based on three large samples supported this hypothesis. Additionally, the Jewish/non-Jewish group difference on personality traits exhibited a Jensen Effect with the largest difference between groups being on the traits that had the highest loadings on the GFP. Future research should focus on investigating how the high Jewish GFP is manifested in behavioral and social outcomes.
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Jennifer Glick & Seung Yong Han
Population Research and Policy Review, February 2015, Pages 77-112
Abstract:
Socioeconomic inequality in the United States persists with disparities in education, earnings, and health evident across racial and ethnic groups. Somewhat less attention has been given to the importance of inequality within minority racial and pan-ethnic groups. This paper considers the increasing divergence of socioeconomic status within cohorts of American Indian and Alaskan Native (AIAN) adults in the United States. The analyses rely on US Census data for 1990, 2000, and 2010 to examine the relative contribution of demographic change and change in self-identification to the size of AIAN adult cohorts over time. Decomposition analyses demonstrate that declines in poverty within the AIAN cohorts are largely attributable to the more advantaged status of individuals who select AIAN in combination with other racial identifications.
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The Fluidity of Race: "Passing" in the United States, 1880-1940
Emily Nix & Nancy Qian
NBER Working Paper, January 2015
Abstract:
This paper quantifies the extent to which individuals experience changes in reported racial identity in the historical U.S. context. Using the full population of historical Censuses for 1880-1940, we document that over 19% of black males “passed” for white at some point during their lifetime, around 10% of whom later “reverse-passed” to being black; passing was accompanied by geographic relocation to communities with a higher percentage of whites and occurred the most in Northern states. The evidence suggests that passing was positively associated with better political-economic and social opportunities for whites relative to blacks. As such, endogenous race is likely to be a quantitatively important phenomenon.
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Jeffrey Denis
American Sociological Review, February 2015, Pages 218-242
Abstract:
This article builds on group position theory and the subcategorization model of intergroup contact by illustrating how, in a small-town settler-colonial context, contact tends to reproduce, rather than challenge, the inequitable racial structure. In Northwestern Ontario, Indigenous-settler relations are characterized by widespread intergroup marriage and friendship as well as pervasive prejudice and discrimination. Using 18 months of fieldwork and 160 interviews and surveys with First Nations, Métis, and non-Indigenous residents, I show that although contact is associated with less “old-fashioned” prejudice (i.e., overt categorical hostility), it does not necessarily eliminate whites’ superior sense of group position. Even white individuals who have close Indigenous friends or spouses often express laissez-faire racism. Three mutually reinforcing social processes — subtyping, ideology-based homophily, and political avoidance norms — interact to sustain whites’ sense of group superiority and justifications for racial inequity. These processes are facilitated by historical and structural conditions, in this case colonization and small-town dynamics.
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Mary Fischer & Travis Scott Lowe
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the types of neighborhoods that black and white homebuyers have secured loans in during the recent housing boom and subsequent bust. We expand upon and refine previous research on locational attainment using loan-level data from the 1992–2010 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) combined with tract- and metropolitan-level data from the 1990, 2000, and 2010 Census and the American Community Survey. Multilevel models show that black homebuyers are moving into considerably more racially segregated neighborhoods than their white counterparts and that their access to “whiter” neighborhoods did not expand during the housing boom, even after controlling for the racial composition of the metropolitan area and other key ecological factors. Conversely, new white homebuyers have been moving into neighborhoods with greater percent black residents, which may be a contributing factor in observed declines in segregation during the past few decades. Additionally, black homebuyers in metropolitan areas with greater suburban growth were on average accessing homes in more integrated neighborhoods. Finally, the models explained considerably more of the variation in the neighborhood racial composition of whites compared to blacks. These findings are suggestive of a dual housing market, one in which the experiences of blacks are still systematically different than those of whites, despite expanded access to homeownership.
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Ebonics, to Be or Not to Be? A Legacy of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Michael Takafor Ndemanu
Journal of Black Studies, January 2015, Pages 23-43
Abstract:
This article discusses the historical underpinnings of Ebonics as a product of linguistic influence of Bantu languages spoken in West Africa today. Many teacher educators preparing White pre-service teachers for linguistic diversity in public schools tend to focus mostly on respecting culturally different students’ home languages without employing historical, lexical, grammatical, and phonological evidence to challenge students’ deficit thinking about Ebonics, which is often associated in the mainstream with a physiological deficiency. Thus, the study uses several Niger-Congo languages to explain the origin of Ebonics and the influences of the Niger-Congo languages on the grammatical and phonological structures of Ebonics, and concludes by defining it as a respectable variety of English with its own sophisticated grammar.
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Racial Identity and Well-Being among African Americans
Michael Hughes et al.
Social Psychology Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
How racial identity influences self-esteem and psychological well-being among African Americans remains unresolved due to unexplained inconsistencies in theoretical predictions and empirical findings. Using data from the National Survey of American Life (N = 3,570), we tested hypotheses derived from social identity theory and the internalized racism perspective. Findings support social identity theory in showing that African Americans strongly identify with their group and view it very positively. In addition, those who identify more with their group and evaluate it more positively have greater self-esteem, greater mastery, and fewer depressive symptoms. However, findings also support the internalized racism perspective by showing that when group evaluation is relatively negative, racial identification is related to lower mastery and higher depressive symptoms. We conclude that both social identity theory and the internalized racism perspective are necessary for understanding how racial identity is related to self-attitudes and mental health among African Americans.
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Hsiu-Lan Cheng, Shu-Ping Lin & Chu Hui Cha
Asian American Journal of Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present study examined a mediation model that hypothesized intergenerational family conflicts would mediate the association between perceived racial discrimination and depressive symptoms among foreign-born and U.S.-born Asian American emerging adults (N = 678) recruited from a large university in the Midwest. The model further hypothesized that the connection between intergenerational family conflicts and depressive symptoms would be stronger for foreign-born individuals than U.S.-born persons. Multigroup structural equation modeling results supported the proposed mediation model. Regardless of nativity status, higher levels of perceived racial discrimination were associated with more occurrences of intergenerational family conflicts with mothers and fathers; conflicts with mothers, in turn, were linked to higher levels of depressive symptoms among Asian American emerging adults. The association between intergenerational family conflicts and depressive symptoms, however, was not greater for the foreign-born than the U.S.-born group. Findings suggest the importance of considering racism as a potential contributing factor to intergenerational conflicts arising in Asian American families and highlight the critical role of conflicts with mothers in cascading the effects of discrimination on young emerging adults’ depressive concerns. The present cross-sectional investigation, however, precludes inference about causality. Directions for future research, including verification of the mediation model through longitudinal data, are discussed.