Social Relations, Core Values, and the Polyphony of the American Experience

This essay examines social relations and cultural values in the United States, paying special attention to recent characterizations of Americans as increasingly isolated, disconnected, and dangerously individualistic. In this essay, I refute such claims. And building on earlier work ( Cerulo, 2002 ), I show that U.S. social relations and cultural values are more multifaceted than such "new individualism" arguments suggest. Indeed, as Robin M. Williams Jr. discovered 50 years ago, when studied in a systematic way, U.S. values and beliefs present us with a multiplex system—a system in which individualism plays only a supporting role. This is true, I suggest, because Americans'"value focus"—that is, the prioritization of one value over another—shifts in concert with certain social events and structural conditions. In this way, we can think of U.S. values as part of a "cultural toolkit," with actors selecting or foregrounding the values needed to support certain strategies of action.     

Robin Williams, Race, and American Sociology

In this essay, I discuss Robin M. Williams Jr.'s unique sociological approach to the study of race and the ways his background and the historical moment in which he wrote contributed to his sociological vision.     

The Sociological Study of Values

Fifty years ago, Robin M. Williams Jr. described eight notable changes in U.S. sociology, one of which was the “widespread diffusion of a relatively clear and sophisticated conception of the place of values in sociological study, as an object of research, as a factor in behavior, and as an element to be controlled in the prosecution of research” (Williams, 1958:621). In this essay, I ask what has become of that rising interest in the sociological study of values? I follow three distinct trajectories of sociological research on values, briefly describing the contributions of each, and identifying several lines of inquiry that strike me as particularly important and promising for the future.     

The Ebb and Flow of Sociological Interest in Values

Contemporary sociology and social psychology have largely ignored the study of values. In this essay, I explore the reasons for that condition, the exceptions to the rule, and the areas that would most benefit from the consideration of values.     

Robin Williams and the Long Twentieth Century of American Sociology … or Back to the Future

In this essay, I reflect on the ways elements of Robin M. Williams Jr.'s research agenda might be carried forth in a meaningful way to sociological studies of twenty-first-century phenomena—in particular identifying the ways in which the facts of human interaction, of human expectation, and of human influence shapes outcomes of significance for our present, our future, and, therefore, our past.     

Lethal Policing: Making Sense of American Exceptionalism

Thanks to the creation of a national database of police killings, the social distribution, causes, and consequences of police violence are finally amenable to analysis. This article focuses on why the rate of police killings in the United States towers over that in other industrialized nations. Elevated police lethality is deeply rooted in two distinctive aspects of American society and culture. Police violence is both a tool and product of strategies to maintain racial segregation and inequality. However, racism cannot explain the fact that police lethality is greatest in states where African Americans are least prevalent. Elevated police killings are also rooted in America's prevailing ideology (and mythology) of self‐reliance and limited government. Neoliberal ideology helped some politicians cut gaping holes in the social safety net, leaving ill‐equipped and fearful police officers to deal with desperate people who lack adequate treatment and support, yet who have easy access to weapons. It also limits the legislative and regulative authority that centralized policy actors exert over policing. Nevertheless, police overreliance on deadly force is increasingly understood as a national problem requiring large‐scale solutions.     

(Dis)unity and Diversity in Post-9/11 America

Drawing inspiration from the work of Robin M. Williams Jr., I map out the complexities of ethnic and racial relations in the contemporary United States by focusing on the impacts of 9/11—particularly in relation to immigration policy. Because the attackers entered the country through regular immigration channels (i.e., as foreign students) the U.S. government has introduced policies to enhance border security, restrict immigration, increase the surveillance of immigrant populations, and more actively enforce immigration policy. These national-security-related immigration policies, however, are exacerbating existing tensions and producing new sets of ethnic and racialized conflicts in the United States. In this article, I first provide an overview of the key national-security-related immigration policies that were passed in the wake of September 11, 2001. Then, I review some of the recent sociological literature, as well as draw from my own preliminary research in the State of New Jersey, to illustrate the social impacts of these policies on ethnic and racial relations. I conclude with an outline of the ways the sociology of ethnic and racial relations specifically, as well as other subfields of the discipline, might approach analyses of social conflict in the contemporary United States, post–September 11.     

The Legacy of Robin M. Williams Jr. in the Short Twenty-First Century

This essay describes Robin M. Williams Jr.'s maturation from a precocious college student to a fully formed sociological researcher by describing various personal and professional encounters with significant events of the twentieth century. I reflect on the ways the historical cataclysms of depression and war galvanized Williams and his peers to work toward radical change, both in their lives and in the world about them. The result was a remarkable societal transformation that improved the lives of ordinary citizens in many and diverse ways. The essay concludes with the hope that sociologists will once again be in the vanguard of social action, as Robin Williams was during his long career of teaching, research, and public criticism.     

African American family life in societal context: Crisis and hope

Since 1965 hundreds of articles and books have been published about African American families. Nevertheless, our understanding of these families continues to be limited. There is a tendency to gloss over important within-group differences; thus, monolithic, stereotypic and inaccurance portrayals of Black family life are common. This paper sets aside debates of Black family pathology or viability, focusing instead on these families' essential character. The paper seeks to understand Black families on their own terms, locating them in relevant social, historical, political and cultural contexts. Key empirical patterns and trends reveal dramatic changes in Black family geographic location, headship, quality of life and socioeconomic status since 1950.A complex picture is revealed. There has been gradual but steady overall improvement alongside persistent, extreme racial disparties and pronounced class disparities among Black families. The proposed Black Family Socio-Ecological Context model specifies and connects institutional, interpersonal, environmental, temporal and cultural facts that shape the essential character of Black family life in such a way as to produce characteristics simultaneously shared and idiosyncratic. The model also provides an organized, systematic accounting of research and public policy issues relevant to the study of African American families.An early version co-authored with Richard A. English was presented during the National Council on Family Relations Meetings in Portland, Oregon, October 1980.     

Appropriation of African American slang by Asian American youth1

This article explores the ways in which Asian American teenagers creatively appropriated two African American slang terms: aite and na mean. While some teens racialized slang as belonging to African Americans, other teens authenticated identities as slang speakers. Through close analysis of slang‐in‐use and particularly of the metapragmatic discussions such uses inspired, this article examines how the teens specified relationships between language, race, age, region and class, while achieving multiple social purposes, such as identifying with African Americans, marking urban youth subcultural participation, and interactionally positioning themselves and others as teachers and students of slang. As slang emerged with local linguistic capital, the teens used slang to create social boundaries not only between teens and adults, but also between each other. The discursive salience of region implicitly indexed socio‐economic status and proximity to African Americans as markers that teens drew on to authenticate themselves and others as slang speakers.     

A Brief Talk of Chinese and American Charity Culture

In recent years, ＂charity＂ has become a hot topic in China increasingly. Charity culture is not only the embodiment of modern civilization, but also an important impetus for the development of human civilization and moral consciousness. It has far-reaching effects on charity development, which is important for the construction of a harmonious society.     

Manifest destiny,American exceptionalism,and the city on a hill seen through Winthrop,O'Sullivan,and Bush: Opportunities for religious peacebuilding

A dominant theme in the story of the American, city-on-a-hill experience is manifest destiny, a term literally expressing a sense of a rightful, westward expansion across the continent in the late 19^th century, but more broadly expressing a general entitlement granted, it is often understood, divinely to an exceptional United States of America. The origins, the political-versus-religious undergirding, and the implications of manifest destiny are widely discussed in the literature. Here I focus on three primary texts by John Winthrop, John O'Sullivan, and George W. Bush to argue that, even though Winthrop's and his fellow Puritan immigrants' understanding of their role in the new land was a far cry from that of O'Sullivan—who coined the term “manifest destiny” – the seeds of manifest destiny were brought with these first immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, later sprouting and blossoming in O'Sullivan's coining, and eventually bearing some of its many fruits Bush's foreign policy. Finally, I will discuss the sociological and other implications of the divine endorsement of such ideas.     

An Analysis of the American Dream in the Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’ s classic twentieth-century story of Jay Gatsby’ s quest for Daisy Buchanan, examines and critiques Gatsby’s particular vision of the 1920’s American dream. F. Sc...     

Patterns of age‐based linguistic variation in American English1

In prior sociolinguistic research, speaker age has been considered the principal correlate of language change, but it ‘has not yet been explicitly studied as a sociolinguistic variable’ ( Eckert 1997 : 167). Consequently, little is known about how language varies across the life span. The present study employs key word analysis on a large corpus of casual conversation in American English to explore age‐based linguistic variation in spontaneous conversation. Analyses of the key words point to two major patterns of age‐based lexico‐grammatical variation: use of slang, and use of stance and involvement markers. Younger speakers' talk is characterized by an unusually frequent use of slang and swear words, and by a marked use of features indexing speaker's stance and emotional involvement, including intensifiers, stance adverbs, discourse markers, personal pronouns, and attitudinal adjectives; older speakers favor modals. These patterns are suggestive of functional differences in the discourse of youth and adults. It is argued that the expression of personal stance is more explicit and plays a key role in younger speakers' discourse.     

Coming of age in African American English: A longitudinal study1

This study examines trajectories of development in the use of African American English (AAE) for 32 speakers through the first 17 years of their lives based on a unique, longitudinal database. Temporal data points in the analysis include 48 months, Grade 1 (about age 6), Grade 4 (about age 9), Grade 6 (about age 11), Grade 8 (about age 13), and Grade 10 (about age 15). Complementary methods of analysis for assessing AAE include a token‐based Dialect Density Measure (DDM), a type‐based vernacular diversity index, and frequency‐based variation analysis. The study reveals different trajectories and peak periods for the use of AAE, including a ‘roller coaster’ and a curvilinear trajectory; at the same time, there is a common dip among speakers in the overall use of vernacular AAE from Grade 1 through Grade 4. Examination of a selective set of demographic and self‐regard measures shows no significant differences for gender, school racial density, racial peer contacts, and measures of Afro‐centrality, but does show a significant correlation between mothers’ and child use of AAE as well as age/grade.     

Social networks,stress and child abuse

The study investigated the relationship between situational stress, strength of informal social networks and maternal child abuse. Structured interviews were conducted with 41 abusive mothers and 59 non-abusing mothers using an author-developed instrument to measure social network strength and situational stress. Abusing mothers, on the average, reported significantly weaker, less supportive informal social networks than the non-abusing mothers. Both the neighbor-friend networks and the kinship networks of the non-abusing mothers were found to be stronger than those of the abusing mothers. The data also supported the positive association of situational stress with child abuse. Both situational stress and strength of social network proved to be significant predictors of abuse. The findings supported the hypothesized mediating effect of strong social networks upon the relationship between situational stress and child abuse. Mothers living in highly stressful life situations who reported strong social networks were less likely to be abusers than mothers living in high stress situations who reported weak social networks. The mediating functions of social networks are proposed, and the implications of the findings for interventions with high risk parents to prevent child abuse are discussed.     

The Resistible Rise of Sarah Palin: Continuity and Paradox in the American Right Wing1

Sarah Palin clearly holds a powerful appeal for a right‐wing constituency although even her most fervent followers may doubt that she is electable. This article examines the basis of her appeal. We argue that it can be summed up as an appeal to American authenticity, which consists of several elements: the valorization of small town ordinary life takes second place to faith and religious commitment; an equal faith in American exceptionality implies that Americans should never be apologetic about their country and never waver in their belief in its special greatness; the final elements are a foundational libertarian creed and a peculiar brand of right‐wing populism. However, for all her affinities with classical right‐wing sentiment, Sarah Palin, we argue, brings something new to the mix: a genuinely maverick right‐wing feminism. That is why in the end, we call the Palin phenomenon a paradoxical one.     

Girls and guys,ghetto and bougie: Metapragmatics,ideology and the management of social identities1

This case study explores the metapragmatic awareness of a young, academically successful, African American, female speaker. It describes some of the identities and orientations that the speaker performs through language and the perceived role of linguistic style in such performances. This study suggests that these linguistic performances are a complex negotiation of ethnicity, gender and class that both draw from and resist the macrosocial indexing of social categories. Further, the understood role of language in the social negotiations of the speaker serves as an illustration of the relationship among metapragmatics, ideology and identity and also highlights the dynamism of identity management as individuals position themselves in allegiance with, or opposition to, various groups that populate their social landscape.     

Behind the Myth of the Matriarch and the Flagbearer: How Korean and Chinese American Sons and Daughters Negotiate Gender,Family, and Emotions

While more studies are exploring the ways in which gender structures the family experiences of American‐born children of immigrants, there is less attention to how gender shapes later views on ethnicity and culture. Based on interviews with Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese Americans in the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area, this article examines the different ways second‐generation children learn, interpret, and pass on the cultural values and family traditions in their adulthood. Because their family roles center on their roles as leaders and carriers of the family name through male heirs, sons—especially oldest sons—can fulfill their filial obligations through relatively orthodox and nonengaging cultural practices that although restrictive, do not threaten their personal goals and privileged status. However, daughters must negotiate more emotionally burdensome expectations and responsibilities by preserving family honor, acting as family caretakers, and juggling multiple responsibilities; thus, they tend to re‐create more subtle, self‐empowering, and emotionally engaging ways of interpreting and preserving their parents’ expectations on family culture. I argue that the gendered ways daughters and sons are taught to practice cultural values and protect family honor has significant bearing on their later views on ethnicity and culture but in complex ways that transcend the generational divide.