As French as Anyone Else: Islam and the North African Second Generation in France

Amid growing Islamophobia throughout Europe, Muslims in France have been described as “ethnoracial outsiders” (Bleich 2006, 3–7) and framed as a cultural challenge to the identity of the French republic. Based on ethnographic research of 45 middle class adult children of North African, or Maghrébin, immigrants, I focus on the actual religious practices of this segment of the French Muslim population, the symbolic boundaries around those practices, and the relationship between how middle class, North African second‐generation immigrants understand their marginalization within mainstream society and how they frame their religiosity to respond to this marginalization. How respondents frame their practices reveals their allegiance with the tenets of French Republicanism and laïcité as well as shows how Muslim religious practices are being accommodated to the French context. This religiosity is not a barrier to asserting a French identity. Individuals frame their religious practices in ways that suggest they see themselves as just as French as anyone else.     

LIVED HYBRIDITY: SECOND-GENERATION IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION THROUGH COLLEGE FESTIVAL

Recent research suggests that the children of recent immigrants, the so-called second generation, no longer choose to emphasize one identity over the other but that their identities are more fluid and multifaceted. College campuses are often the arenas in which a new hybrid identity develops. This article addresses how South Asian American college students make sense of and control their various identities through the celebration of Diwali, an event sponsored each year by the Indian Students Association (ISA) on a college campus in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. South Asian students use performative space to help them make sense of their backgrounds in ways that both differentiate them from and allow for association with the majority student population. They also use this space as a safe place for “coming out,” that is, for communicating their hybrid identity to their parents. This hybrid identity is expressed through a discourse of “brownness” that marks something distinctive and that reflects the process by which the children of immigrants choose among a range of identities to create integrated selves. The campus Diwali festival is the expression of those selves.     

Toward a Minority Culture of Mobility: Immigrant Integration into the African‐American Middle Class

Two important social transformations have occurred since the 1960s: the rise of the Black middle class and the influx of immigrants from Latin, America, Asia and Africa. The cultural and economic outcomes for first‐ and second‐generation Black immigrants are often linked to the Black poor/underclass. However, we understand little about the ways in which the Black middle class is a potential pathway of integration for immigrants. This paper reviews the sociological debates on the socioeconomic incorporation of immigrants and the racial and ethnic relations of new and old African‐Americans. It discusses the important contributions of minority culture of mobility hypothesis for class‐based theories of immigrant integration. We draw from the literature on social stratification, race relations and immigrant incorporation in order to chime in on the conversation about how becoming socially mobile in America may mean having similar social experience as the African‐American or minority middle class. The paper also suggests ways to better analyze the relationship between identity, integration, space and generation in minority incorporation.     

Dominican‐American Etbnic/Racial Identities and United States Social Categories

The majority of Dominicans have sub‐Saharan African ancestry, ¹ 1 In the 1980 Dominican census, 16 percent of the population were classified as blanco (‘white’), 73 percent were classified as indio (‘indian‐colored’), a term used to refer to the phenotype of individuals who match stereotypes of combined African and European ancestry and 11 percent were classified as negro [‘black’] (Haggerty, 1991). These categories are social constructions, rather than objective reflections of phenotypes. The positive social connotations of “whiteness,” for example, lead many Caribbean Hispanics to identify themselves as white for the public record regardless of their precise phenotype (Dominguez, 1978:9). Judgments of color in the Dominican Republic also depend in part upon social attributes of an individual, as they do elsewhere in Latin America. Money, education and power, for example, “whiten” an individual, so that the color attributed to a higher class individual is often lighter than the color that would be attributed to an individual of the same phenotype of a lower class (Rout, 1976:287).
which would make them “black” by historical United States ‘one‐drop’ rules. Second generation Dominican high school students in Providence, Rhode Island do not identity their race in terms of black or white, but rather in terms of ethnolinguistic identity, as Dominican/Spanish/Hispanic. The distinctiveness of Dominican‐American understandings of race is highlighted by comparing them with those of non‐Hispanic, African descent second generation immigrants and with historical Dominican notions of social identity. Dominican second generation resistance to phenotype‐racialization as black or white makes visible ethnic/racial formation processes that are often veiled, particularly in the construction of the category African‐American. This resistance to black/white racialization suggests the transformative effects that post‐1965 immigrants and their descendants are having on United States ethnic/racial categories.     

Development of a Culturally Specific Career Exploration Group for Urban Chinese Immigrant Youth

A rapid increase in the number of Chinese immigrants and the specific challenges faced by low‐income Chinese immigrant youth attending urban schools warrant culturally sensitive school‐based interventions and services. However, research and services are limited for this population because of cultural biases in traditional career theories and the “model minority” myth suggesting that Asian students are excelling. The authors developed and implemented a culturally specific career exploration group for low‐income Chinese immigrant youth to address their career concerns with respect to multiple social and cultural factors and to provide social support. Implications for future program development and research are provided.     

A Theory of Minority Students' Survival in College

This paper sets forth a theory to explain the survival of minority students in college. Minority students are faced with barriers such as cultural and racial isolation, unfamiliarity with college life, and hostility. As colleges place greater emphasis on diversity, campuses are more likely to turn into hostile milieus for minority students. In reaction, minority students will close ranks and seek other minority students on campus to form ethnic social networks rooted in their ethnic subculture. The ethnic social networks serve: (1) to reinforce excellence in academics; (2) to provide social support and information for students in navigating the college maze; and (3) to increase solidarity and pride in members. These minority social networks on campus help integrate minority students into the college social and academic systems and thereby maximize the students' survival in college.     

Reinterpreting the relation between motherhood and paid work: second‐generation immigrant women in Norway

A pertinent question in contemporary Europe is whether the children of immigrants will reproduce the gender‐complementary practices and ideals of the immigrant generation, which often include strong expectations that women should prioritize family obligations over the pursuit of paid work. This article analyses the cultural and moral understandings at stake in second‐generation women's reflections on and practices of combining motherhood and paid work, and explores the space for negotiating such understandings in the family. The study is based on in‐depth interviews with second‐generation women of Pakistani descent in Norway, and interviews with some of their husbands. The findings show that the moral understandings and practices of the parent generation are not merely passed on to the second generation; rather they are challenged and reinterpreted in ways that support mothers' participation in paid work. The article argues that this change is facilitated by the cultural and institutional context that the Norwegian welfare state represents.     

Healing the Hidden Injuries of Class? Redemption Narratives,Aspirational Proxies,and Parents of Low‐Income,First‐Generation College Students

Existing scholarship has examined how low‐income individuals conceptualize their socioeconomically constrained positions in relation to the meritocratic ideologies and stratified mobility structures of the United States, but little is specifically known about how these individuals' ideas regarding their own status may be impacted by raising children who surpass their educational and occupational achievement levels. Drawing on interview data from both low‐income first‐generation (LIFG) college students and the parents of those students, this article examines how parents framed the achievements of their upwardly mobile, college‐going children in relation to their own experiences of socioeconomic, educational, and occupational constraint. Engaging qualitative understandings of the “hidden injuries of class,” the analysis demonstrates how parents of LIFG college students reconciled their own experiences of limited mobility despite hard work with their steadfast beliefs in meritocratic ideals by (1) invoking narratives of personal “redemption” from past “mistakes” or “failures” in relation to their children's educational accomplishments, and (2) conceptualizing their upwardly mobile children as “aspirational proxies” through whose accomplishments they measured their own success.     

From Affirmative Action to Diversity: Critical Reflections on Graduate Education in Sociology

This article explores the contradictory results of the shift from a race‐conscious affirmative action discourse to a broader “diversity embrace” that advocates tolerance, equality, and respect for cultural differences on university campuses. Drawing on critical race theory and research on the practice of affirmative action in organizations, we argue that the diversity embrace subsumes recognition of racialized histories, social relations, and practices in favor of a “color‐blind” rhetoric that reinforces negative assumptions about the academic merit and worthiness of underrepresented minority students (URM). Our review of the status and condition of URM graduate students in sociology departments reveals that minority inclusion is part of a larger strategy that emphasizes individual and group differences rather than corrective action for past discrimination. We find that access and inclusion in graduate programs in sociology have been uneven with relatively few departments producing a majority of URM sociology doctorates. The diversity embrace obscures their continual low representation in graduate programs, fosters professionalization practices detrimental to these students, and undermines efforts to create a “critical mass” of faculty of color. Such practices constitute a racial project that preserves White privilege at the individual and institutional levels.     

Bridging and Bonding in the Academic Melting Pot: Cultural Resources and Network Diversity

Understanding how cultural resources shape the formation of social networks is a methodological challenge as well as a theoretical objective, and both are yet to be met. In this study, sociability on college campuses is modeled as a process in which students’ prior cultural experiences and the current social structure of the student body work together, affecting the likelihood of friendships that take place within or across racial boundaries. Structural and cultural perspectives are surveyed to develop hypotheses concerning the determinants of interracial friendship, and these hypotheses are tested against a sample of 3,392 students from the National Longitudinal Study of Freshmen. The results suggest that religiosity, political activism, high arts participation, and athletic activities undertaken prior to college affect the diversity of social networks formed in the first year, but work in different directions. The effects of these cultural experiences may be explained by the racial organization of cultural activity on campus.     

The Invisible Unattended: Low‐wage Chinese Immigrant Workers,Health Care,and Social Capital in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley*

This study investigates the factors affecting the availability of health insurance, the accessibility of health care, and the dissemination of the relevant information among low‐wage Chinese immigrants in Southern California by relying on the concepts of social and cultural capital. Using community‐based research and in‐depth interviews, our study suggests that a severe shortage in health care coverage among low‐wage Chinese immigrants is influenced by the lack of employment with employer‐provided health insurance within the Chinese “ethnoburb” community. Although the valuable social capital generated by Chinese immigrant networks seems to be sufficient enough to provide them with certain practical resources, the lack of cultural capital renders the social network rather ineffective in providing critical health care information from mainstream American society.     

“Police,Public Safety,and Race‐Neutral Discourse”

In the final decades of the 20th century policing in America was refashioned in the public image of community policing. Race‐neutral discourses dominate public and professional support for community‐oriented policing philosophies. In the contemporary era of hyper‐incarceration a focus on ethnoracial divisions grounded in the sociology of peculiar institutions is essential for documenting transformations in how the municipal police services are legitimized. Here I analyze how the public discourses of law‐and‐order center on distortions of social fact and public safety. Today the criminalization of immigrants is the latest turn in public discourses shaping patterns of ethnoracial visions and divisions. The carceral breadth of the neoliberal penal state extends beyond social structure, repackaged as race‐neutral ideology across the public sphere.     

Rural Appalachian High School Students’ College‐Going and STEMM Perceptions

The authors examined perceptions of key social cognitive career theory (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994) variables related to college‐going and science, technology, engineering, math, and medical (STEMM) careers in 10th and 11th graders (N = 892) attending 3 rural Appalachian high schools. The authors examined differences in perceptions related to gender, prospective 1st‐generation college student status, and the presence or absence of aspirations to pursue a STEMM career. Young women and young men scored similarly on all but 1 dependent variable, college‐going self‐efficacy (young women scored higher). Students who had STEMM career aspirations had higher scores on every measure than those who did not. Results suggest examining a 3rd prospective 1st‐generation college student status group—students who are unsure of their parents’ education level—as a distinct group in future research. By examining the college‐going and STEMM attitudes of rural Appalachian high school students, this study advances the literature and informs practitioners on reducing educational and vocational inequalities in this region.     

A New Era in Australian Multiculturalism? From Working‐Class “Ethnics” To a “Multicultural Middle‐Class”

This article analyses the changing socio‐economic profile of the “multicultural” section of the Australian population, in the past officially referred to as people of “non‐English‐speaking background” (NESB). After importing low‐skilled NESB labor to service the manufacturing boom of the post‐war decades, at the end of the 1970s, following economic restructuring, the Australian immigration program was refocused on skilled intake which resulted in immigrants increasingly becoming a middle‐class demographic. Over the past three decades, a “multicultural middle class” (MMC) has been created from two sources: the intake of highly skilled NESB immigrants and upwardly mobile second and third migrant generations. The article documents this demographic change using census and immigration data, and discusses what it may mean for the future of Australian multiculturalism, which, according to many analysts, is in crisis and requires re‐articulation.     

Second‐Generation “Return” to Greece: New Dynamics of Transnationalism and Integration

Based on in‐depth narrative interviews with 64 second‐generation Greek‐Germans and Greek‐Americans who have “returned” to Greece, this article explores intersections between return, transnationalism and integration. Having grown up with a strong Greek identity in the diaspora, second‐generation “returnees” move to Greece mainly for idealistic, lifestyle and life‐stage reasons. However, most find living in Greece long‐term a challenging experience: they remark on the corruption and chaos of Greek life, and are surprised at the high level of xenophobia in Greek society, not only towards foreign immigrants but also towards themselves as “hyphenated Greeks”. The “return” to Greece provokes new “reverse” transnational links back to their birth country, where they still need to keep in touch with relatives and friends, including caring obligations towards parents who remain abroad. Some contemplate another “return”, back to the US or Germany.

Policy Implications

• Policymakers responsible for integration should not assume that the second generation has no connections with its parents' country of origin.
• In the diasporic home country (in this case Greece), more effort should be made to facilitate the reintegration of the second generation returning ‘home’ and to break down discrimination towards hyphenated Greeks.
• Greek policymakers should pay heed to homecoming second‐generation Greeks in order to benefit from their bicultural insights into how Greek society can be improved, especially as regards efficient public services, transparent employment opportunities, better environment management, gender equality, and the elimination of racism and discrimination.

     

Recollection and Relocation in Immigration: Russian‐Jewish Immigrants “Normalize” Their Anti‐Semitic Experiences

This study conceptualizes the relationship between recollection of the past and relocation in the context of immigration. Combining symbolic interactionist and narrative paradigms, it explores how immigrants'representations of past experiences inform their identity construction and the process of entering the host society. Our interpretive analysis of personal narratives related spontaneously by eighty‐nine Russian‐Jewish immigrants in Israel and Germany reveals that they choose to “normalize” their anti‐Semitic experiences by representing them as secondary, expected, and “normal.” They do so via four narrating tactics of normalization: obscuring, self‐exclusion, vindication, and essentializing stigma. Each tactic devalues the cultural depiction (grand narrative) of anti‐Semitic experiences as transformative and traumatic. By normalizing their past, the immigrants deconstruct and resist the authority and moral commands of the national narrative they encounter in both societies. Putting forward normalization as an alternative interpretation, the immigrants claim ownership of their biography and cultural identity.     

More‐than‐human families: Pets,people, and practices in multispecies households

Although humans have coexisted with dogs and cats for thousands of years, that coexistence has taken on various meanings over time. Only recently have people openly included their pets as members of the family. Yet, because of the cultural ambivalence toward animals, what it means for a pet to “be” a family member remains unsettled. Drawing from research on family practices including kinship, household routines, childhood socialization, and domestic violence, this paper considers how pets participate in “doing” family and what their presence means for this social arrangement long considered quintessentially human. Today's more‐than‐human families represent a hybrid of relations, human and animal and social and natural, rather than an entirely new kind of family. Becoming family has always been contingent on a cast of nonhuman characters, and recognition of the “more‐than‐human” can enhance sociological understanding, not only of the family but also of other aspects of social life.     

Eighteen‐Month‐Old Infants Correct Non‐Conforming Actions by Others

At around their third birthday, children begin to enforce social norms on others impersonally, often using generic normative language, but little is known about the developmental building blocks of this abstract norm understanding. Here, we investigate whether even toddlers show signs of enforcing on others interpersonally how “we” do things. In an initial dyad, 18‐month‐old infants learnt a simple game‐like action from an adult. In two experiments, the adult either engaged infants in a normative interactive activity (stressing that this is the way “we” do it) or, as a non‐normative control, marked the same action as idiosyncratic, based on individual preference. In a test dyad, infants had the opportunity to spontaneously intervene when a puppet partner performed an alternative action. Infants intervened, corrected, and directed the puppet more in the normative than in the non‐normative conditions. These findings suggest that, during the second year of life, infants develop second‐personal normative expectations about their partner's behavior (“You should do X!”) in social interactions, thus making an important step toward understanding the normative structure of human cultural activities. These simple normative expectations will later be scaled up to group‐minded and abstract social norms.     

‘Survival Employment’: Gender and Deskilling among African Immigrants in Canada

Recent research points to a growing gap between immigrant and native‐born outcomes in the Canadian labour market at the same time as selection processes emphasize recruiting highly educated newcomers. Drawing on interviews with well‐educated men and women who migrated from countries in sub‐Saharan Africa, this paper explores the gendered processes that produce weak economic integration in Canada. Three‐quarters of research participants experienced downward occupational mobility, with the majority employed in low‐skilled, low‐wage, insecure forms of “survival employment”. In a gendered labour market, where common demands for “Canadian experience”, “Canadian credentials” and “Canadian accents” were uneven across different sectors of the labour market, women faced particular difficulties finding “survival employment”; in the long run, however, women’s greater investment in additional post‐secondary education within Canada placed them in a somewhat better position than men. The policy implications of this study are fourfold: first, we raise questions about the efficacy of Canadian immigration policies that prioritize the recruitment of well‐educated immigrants without addressing the multiple barriers that result in deskillling; second, we question government policies and settlement practices that undermine more equitable economic integration of immigrants; third, we address the importance of tackling the “everyday racism” that immigrants experience in the Canadian labour market; and finally, we suggest the need to re‐think narrowly defined notions of economic integration in light of the gendered nature of contemporary labour markets, and immigrants’ own definitions of what constitutes meaningful integration.     

Application of Psychological and Sociological Theory to Teaching Social Work with the Group

Ethnic minority content as a substantive curriculum area in social work education evolved as a response to the times. However, the “what” and the “why” have never been fully addressed. In fact, ethnic minority content is not based on any discernable theoretical framework. A questionnaire was mailed to all ethnic minority doctoral students in the United States. The responses supported the need for a theoretical framework. A curriculum model was proposed utilizing the concepts of socialization, pluralism, and sociocultural dissonance. The focus was on the presentation of seminal ideas that would propel others toward development of more definitive models appropriate for their educational situations.