Understanding Differences in College Enrollment: Race,Class and Cultural Capital

Scholarship on race and class differences in educational outcomes has identified cultural capital, or cultural resources that can be utilized to increase educational success, as important mechanisms of educational inequality. However, despite substantial interest, the role of cultural capital in producing inequalities among American students remains unclear. In this research, we use nationally representative data from the Educational Longitudinal Study to clarify the relationships among race, social class, cultural capital and 4-year college enrollment. Using a theoretically based approach to operationalizing social class and measures of both cultural capital possession and activation, this research finds that while black students tend to possess fewer resources than their white counterparts at any class level, they activate cultural capital to a greater degree than white students. Results also show that while cultural capital can explain differences between low-income and middle-income students, a persistent middle-class advantage remains for both black and white students. Additionally, results indicate that at any class level, black students are more likely than their white counterparts to attend a 4-year university. Finally, results show that measures of cultural capital possession and activation have generally independent effects on college enrollment.     

Do Expectations Make the Difference? A Look at the Effect of Educational Expectations and Academic Performance on Enrollment in Post-Secondary Education

Despite the belief that education is the great equalizer in American society, previous research has shown that the promises of educational accomplishments have not extended equally across racial/ethnic groups as minorities are less likely to matriculate to post-secondary education. Using data from the second follow-up and base year of the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002, we examine the impact of GPA and students’ expectations on the probability of post-secondary enrollment. Specifically, we assess the impact of low achievement on the probability of post-secondary enrollment across racial/ethnic groups. We find that low achievement acts as less of a barrier to post-secondary enrollment for minority students compared with their non-Hispanic white counterparts. Moreover, students with high expectations and low achievement experienced higher probabilities of post-secondary enrollment than students with low expectations and high achievement. Given that minority students are said to have higher expectations, we examine whether the interaction of expectations and achievement varies across racial/ethnic groups. While we did not uncover racial/ethnic differences for low-achieving students with high expectations, our findings suggest that expectations help propel all low-achieving students with high expectations into post-secondary enrollment. This study moves beyond the traditional black/white differences by including a number of racial/ethnic groups.     

Residential Segregation,Health, and Health Care: Answering the Latino Question

The literature on the relationship between residential segregation and health outcomes for African Americans is well developed, but less is known about this association for Latinos in the USA. The literature for Latinos is limited, demonstrates mixed results, and suffers from data limitations. Using geographic concentration of poverty theory, we analyze the impact of Latino segregation on a series of health and health-care outcomes in order to better establish this relationship. This study uses data from the 2011 to 2012 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System nested within metropolitan area-level data in a set of partial proportional odds and binary logistic multilevel regression models. We examine the relationship between Latino segregation and three health and health-care outcomes for 164 metropolitan areas in the USA. Overall, we find that Latino segregation is negatively related to good self-rated health, having a personal physician, and having health insurance for Latino respondents. Furthermore, for White respondents, no such association exists. As a result, residential segregation for Latinos contributes to the Latino–White health gap.     

Police Endorse Color-Blind Racial Beliefs More Than Laypersons

Racial disparities in the US criminal justice system (CJS) have been extensively documented in scholarly work. Critical race scholars have suggested that color-blind racial attitudes inform the set of beliefs that CJS practitioners use in decision making. If this is the case, factors that are related to color-blind racial attitude trends in CJS practitioners must be better understood. We focus on a single CJS practitioner—the police—to assess their color-blind racial beliefs and compare these to the broader US public. Using the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS), we identified sociodemographic variables associated with high CoBRAS scores in a multiracial lay sample (N = 1401; males and females, mean age = 33.4 years). Police (N = 112) and police recruits (N = 52) CoBRAS scores were compared to CoBRAS scores of lay participants with similar sociodemographics as the police and recruit samples, (respectively, N = 451; N = 291). Police scored significantly higher on the CoBRAS than laypersons even when controlling for sociodemographic variables. Police recruits also have higher CoBRAS scores than laypersons, again controlling for sociodemographic variables. These findings suggest that police work attracts people who endorse color-blind racial beliefs. These findings make understanding the relationship between color-blind racial beliefs and discriminatory behavior of CJS practitioners imperative.     

A “Subterranean Agenda”? Racial Attitudes, Presidential Evaluations, and Tea Party Membership

Recent research suggests that fiscally conservative policy preferences and disapproval of President Obama are significant predictors of Tea Party membership (Maxwell and Parent 2012). Unfortunately, however, we know very little about the reasons why Tea Party members so aggressively disapprove of President Obama. While Tea Party members adamantly deny that President Obama’s race plays any role in their motivations, their critics argue that racial attitudes are a primary reason why individuals choose to join the movement. In this article, using national survey data conducted by Knowledge Networks (n = 1649), we explore the possibility that three unique racial attitudes have been influential in the establishment of the Tea Party. Specifically, we investigate the role of symbolic racism, racial stereotypes, and ethnocentrism as predictors of self-identified Tea Party membership among whites.     

‘I’m Black and I’m Proud’: A Majority Ecological Context Protects Affective Aspects of Black Identity Under Stereotype Threat

We provide evidence that stereotype threat, a phenomenon that causes stigmatized individuals to experience group-based evaluative concerns (Steele in Am Psychol 52:613–629, 1997; Whistling Vivaldi and other clues to how stereotypes affect us, W.W. Norton, New York, 2010), impacts affective aspects of Black identity as a function of majority versus minority ecological contexts. Black/African-American students, enrolled in either Africana Studies (Black ecological majority) or Psychology (Black ecological minority), completed private and public regard subscales from the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (Sellers et al. in Pers Soc Psychol Rev 2:18–39, 1998) at baseline (Time 1) and after being randomly assigned to a stereotype threat or no-threat/control condition (Time 2). In threat, participants were introduced to a ‘puzzle’ task as diagnostic of intellectual abilities, whereas in no-threat the same task was introduced as culture fair, such that people from different racial/ethnic groups had performed similarly on this task in the past. In Psychology, students under threat exhibited a simultaneous decrease and increase in private and public regard, respectively, a pattern shown in the literature to be associated with discrimination-based distress and lesser well-being in Black ecological minority environments. In contrast, Africana Studies students’ racial identity under threat remained intact. We discuss the protective effects of Africana Studies on racial identity and implications for educational reform.     

Diverging Fortunes: Racial/Ethnic Inequality in Wealth Trajectories in Middle and Late Life

The primary aim of this study is to examine whether racial/ethnic inequality in wealth dissipates or increases between middle and late life, and by how much. To address this aim, this study draws on critical race and life course perspectives as well as 10 waves of panel data from the Health and Retirement Study and growth curve models to understand racial/ethnic inequality in wealth trajectories among whites, blacks, and Mexican Americans (N = 8337). Findings show that, by midlife, significant inequalities in net worth emerge between whites and their black and Mexican American counterparts. On average, white households have amassed a net worth of $105k by midlife, compared to less than $5k and $39k among black and Mexican American families, respectively. Moreover, whites experience much more rapid rates of wealth accumulation during their 50s and 60s than their minority counterparts, resulting in increasing wealth disparities with age, consistent with a process of cumulative disadvantage. At the peak of their wealth trajectory (at age 66), whites have approximately $245k more than blacks and $219k more than Mexican Americans. A wide range of socioeconomic, behavioral, and health factors account for a portion, but not all, of racial/ethnic inequality in wealth, suggesting that unobserved factors such as parental wealth, segregation, and discrimination may play a role in the production and maintenance of wealth inequality.     

The road to ‘Yerussalem’ – Asterai and the Hebrew literature of Beta Israel

The immigration of the Beta Israel community from Ethiopia to Israel during the 1980s and the 1990s posed a challenge to Israeli society in relation to its ability to know, understand, and absorb a Jewish community with differing religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. For the Beta Israel, immigrating to Israel created a rift between their dream of returning to Jerusalem, a dream that would only be fulfilled after a journey of suffering, and its realization – in which they became an inferior and excluded minority within Israel. This article discusses Hebrew Ethiopian-Israeli literature, focusing on the major narrative of homecoming – the Journey to Yerussalem. This literature, which is relatively new and small, brings the voice of two generations – those who immigrated to Israel as adults, and the younger generation who were small children during the journey. Presenting various texts, and focusing on Asterai by Omri Tegamlak Avera (2008a Avera, O. T. (2008a). Asterai. Tel Aviv: Yediot. [Google Scholar]) I shall show how Ethiopian-Israeli literature constituted itself as a journey literature, contrasting the old generation with the younger generation's identity formation as it appears in the representation of this journey narrative, constructing a more complex, ambivalent approach to the concepts of immigration and absorption, homeland and diaspora.