Legacies of Opportunity
Black-White Trends in Intergenerational Educational Mobility: A Positional Analysis
Kristian Bernt Karlson
American Journal of Sociology, May 2023, Pages 1597-1649
Abstract:
This article examines black-white differences in intergenerational educational mobility for cohorts born in the United States during 1915-84. Using a novel mobility measure based on relative educational positions, the author compares racial mobility flows across the entire schooling distribution. The empirical analysis reveals widespread equalization among blacks and whites in upward mobility out of the bottom of the schooling distribution but widespread persistence in black disadvantage in downward mobility out of the top of the schooling distribution. These findings are consistent with a pattern of differentially maintained educational advantage, suggesting a lasting significance of race among well-educated families. The author presents some possible explanations for these findings and discusses how they align with reported black-white differences in intergenerational income mobility.
Reconciliation Narratives: The Birth of a Nation after the US Civil War
Elena Esposito et al.
American Economic Review, June 2023, Pages 1461-1504
Abstract:
We study how the spread of the Lost Cause narrative -- a revisionist and racist retelling of the US Civil War -- shifted opinions and behaviors toward national reunification and racial discrimination against African Americans. Looking at screenings of The Birth of a Nation, a blockbuster movie that greatly popularized the Lost Cause after 1915, we find that the film shifted the public discourse toward a more patriotic and less divisive language, increased military enlistment, and fostered cultural convergence between former enemies. We document how the racist content of the narrative connects to reconciliation through a "common-enemy" type of argument.
The Confederate Diaspora
Samuel Bazzi et al.
NBER Working Paper, June 2023
Abstract:
This paper shows how white migration out of the postbellum South diffused and entrenched Confederate culture across the United States at a critical juncture of westward expansion and postwar reconciliation. These migrants laid the groundwork for Confederate symbols and racial norms to become pervasive nationally in the early 20th century. Occupying positions of authority, former slaveholders played an outsized role in this process. Beyond memorializing the Confederacy, migrants exacerbated racial violence, boosted novel forms of exclusion, and compounded Black disadvantage outside the South. Moving West, former Confederates had larger effects in frontier communities lacking established culture and institutions. Over time, they continued to transmit norms to their children and non-Southern neighbors. The diaspora legacy persists over the long run, shaping racial inequities in labor, housing, and policing. Together, our findings offer a new perspective on migration, elite influence, and the interplay between culture and institutions in the nation-building process.
Racial Segregation in Everyday Mobility Patterns: Disentangling the Effect of Travel Time
Karl Vachuska
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, June 2023
Abstract:
Nascent research documents that U.S. racial segregation is not merely a residential phenomenon but is present in everyday mobility patterns. Better understanding the causes of mobility-based segregation requires disentangling the spatial macrosegregation, which constitutes an obvious confounding factor. In this work, the author analyzes big data on everyday visits between 270 million neighborhood dyads to estimate the effect of neighborhood racial composition on mobility patterns, net of driving, walking, and public transportation travel time. Matching on these travel times, the author finds that residents of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods visit White neighborhoods only slightly less than they visit other Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Distinctly, residents of White neighborhoods are far less likely to visit non-White neighborhoods than other White neighborhoods, even net of travel time. The author finds that this travel time-adjusted visit homophily among White neighborhoods is greater in commuting zones where White neighborhoods are situated closer to non-White neighborhoods.
Highways and segregation
Avichal Mahajan
Journal of Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the impact of the Interstate Highway System, constructed between 1950 and 1990 in the United States (US), on racial segregation. To provide causal estimates, I use the 1947 plan of the Interstate Highway System, a variant of the 1947 plan that connects city center pairs in this plan through shortest-distance and exploration routes in the 16th-19th century, as the instruments for actual highways built. Empirical results from census tracts in the US show that the construction of highways led to sorting along racial lines. I find strong evidence of heterogeneous effects based on the initial black population. I do not find any impact of highways on neighborhoods which have a lower share of initial black population. However, there is an increase in the share of the black population for neighborhoods located in close proximity to highways, and which have a higher share of the initial black population. This increase is driven by the white population moving out and black population moving into these neighborhoods. I demonstrate that whites that moved out of neighborhoods, now commute to work, made possible due to access provided by highways. These residents were on average better educated and had a higher income than the residents moving into the neighborhoods. The reasons for this movement are disamenities emanating from highways, and racial preferences for social interactions. Finally, I show that this relationship between highways and segregation is also observed at the aggregate level. Empirical estimates indicate that one new highway passing through the central city leads to 0.02 units increase in the dissimilarity index for the metropolitan area.
Unlawful Intimacy: The Criminalization of Interracial Relationships in Progressive-Era Chicago
Kate Markey
Law & Social Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article shows how Progressive-Era state actors in Chicago employed open-ended, low-level criminal charges directed at regulating the moral health of the community to criminalize interracial relationships -- even though interracial marriage had been legal in Illinois since 1870. Capacious legal definitions of offenses like vagrancy, disorderly conduct, adultery, and fornication allowed police officers and judges to delineate moral and immoral relationships along racial lines. Using newspaper articles, writing from contemporary social reformers, and court reports, this article reconstructs the treatment of interracial couples in the Chicago legal system to show how discretion in criminal law can reinforce racial hierarchy. I offer three historical arguments: first, that individual arrests and prosecutions of interracial couples labeled lawful, interracial relationships as a form of unlawful "vice," second, that large-scale raids on spaces for interracial socialization reinforced the criminality of interracial intimacy in a segregated city, and third, that singling out interracial couples allowed the state to exercise control through intrusive forms of punishment like probation and institutionalization.
Legacies of Resistance and Resilience: Antebellum Free African Americans and Contemporary Minority Social Control in the Northeast
Matthew Ward
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
To understand the persistence of racial disparities in the United States, inequality scholars have increasingly focused attention on historic regimes of violence and social control. In particular, a burgeoning literature examines the legacy of slavery, generally finding that where slavery was deeply entrenched, today racial inequalities and African-American deprivation are more acute. However, taking seriously the notion that history matters means considering not only the lingering effects of dehumanizing social control institutions like slavery but also the ramifications of antebellum institutions and cultures of resistance and resilience African Americans built for survival. Using quantitative methods, I examine the relationship between antebellum free African-American populations and racial inequalities in modern state-sanctioned social control. Focusing on the understudied Northeast, a region where free African-American communities flourished despite coexisting with slavery, I find that where free African Americans were more prevalent -- and, thus, resistance to White's social control efforts and resilience in the face of White hostility more robust -- those same areas today display reduced levels of racial inequality in social control (i.e., lower Black-White arrest rate disparities) and reduced absolute levels of minority social control (i.e., lower African-American arrest rates). Mediation analyses reveal contemporary civil rights infrastructure, Black congregations, and Black political power operate as structural safeguards and are important components of the legacies of resistance and resilience left by free African Americans.