Rethinking Families and Community: The Color,Class, and Centrality of Extended Kin Ties1

Although a focus on marriage and the nuclear family characterizes much sociological research and social commentary, this article suggests that this focus ignores the familial experiences of many Americans, particularly those on the lower end of the economic spectrum for whom extended kin are central. African Americans and Latinos/as are more involved with kin than whites, but class trumps race in this regard: African Americans, Latinos/as, and whites with fewer economic resources rely more on extended kin than do those more affluent. The emphasis on marriage and the nuclear family may actually promulgate a vision of family life that dismisses the very social resources and community ties that are critical to the survival strategies of those in need. In contrast to those who have argued that marriage is the foundation of the community or even, in that overused phrase, the “basic unit of society,” this article suggests that marriage actually detracts from social ties to broader communities just as an emphasis on marriage and the nuclear family, to the exclusion of the extended family, distorts and reduces the power and reach of social policy.     

DETERMINANTS OF INDIVIDUAL NEIGHBORHOOD TIES AND SOCIAL RESOURCES IN POOR URBAN NEIGHBORHOODS

Studies on life in poor urban neighborhoods suggest the importance of kin and non-kin ties for support. Research also notes the dearth of certain ties that are important to locate economic and social resources. This research evaluates the determinants of certain types of social resources for residents in poor urban neighborhoods. Specifically, I consider the relationship between five types of neighborhood ties for residents--religious, kin, friendship, neighbor, and informal jobs--as well as race/ethnicity, and neighborhood poverty and social resources. Using the Urban Poverty & Family Life Survey and OLS and logistic regression analyses, results show religious and friendship ties are important predictors of individual social resources and support. Also, neighborhood poverty is insignificant in most of the analyses and when it is important, residents in more impoverished areas are more likely to seek out social resources than their counterparts in non-poor and moderately poor areas. These findings support variants of Compression and Composition theories as possibleexemplars for explaining ways in which residents secure social resources in poor urban neighborhoods.     

Neighborhood Poverty and Children's Academic Skills and Behavior in Early Elementary School

Neighborhoods provide resources that may affect children's cognitive and behavioral outcomes. However, it is unclear to what degree associations between neighborhood disadvantage and outcomes persist into elementary school and whether neighborhood disadvantage interacts with household disadvantage. Using data from the 2010–2011 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study‐Kindergarten Cohort (N = 15,100 children) merged with census data from the American Community Survey, this study examines associations between neighborhood poverty and children's math, reading, and behavioral outcomes at kindergarten and first and second grades. Findings indicate that as tract‐level poverty increases, children's achievement worsens after controlling for child and family characteristics. These associations persist into second grade and are stronger for children in poor versus nonpoor households. Findings suggest that neighborhood disadvantage may contribute to poorer achievement scores, particularly among children with few household resources, but that household disadvantage and other characteristics largely explain behavioral outcomes. Research and policy implications are discussed.     

Anger in black and white: race, alienation, and anger

Using data from the 1996 General Social Survey and the 1973 Chicago Crowding Study, we test the hypotheses that African Americans feel and express more anger than whites, that sense of control (versus powerlessness) lessens anger and mistrust increases anger, and that these indicators of alienation affect anger differently for African Americans and whites. We find that when age and gender are controlled, African Americans neither feel nor express more anger than whites, despite having a lower average sense of control and higher mistrust. This is partly because the effects of sense of control and mistrust on anger differ by race. Sense of control reduces feelings of anger and anger expression more for African Americans than whites. Mistrust increases feelings of anger for whites, but not African Americans. The results provide further evidence that, in the stress process, social structural location may moderate the effects of "detriments" and "resources" on emotional upset.     

Segregation and Mortality: The Deadly Effects of Racism?

Elevated rates of mortality for African Americans compared to whites, coupled with the persistence of high levels of racial residential segregation, have directed attention to the structural manifestations of racism as potentially important pathogens for health. Using national mortality and census data for 1990 and a measure of black social isolation from whites, we examine the association between residential segregation and mortality in 107 major U.S. cities. Our analyses revealed that black social isolation tended to predict higher rates of mortality for African American males and females, although the strength of the association varied by cause of death. Socioeconomic deprivation explained a modest part of this association for black males but not for black females. Our analyses also found that a positive association between social isolation and mortality was more pronounced, for both blacks and whites, in cities that were also high on the index of dissimilarity. These findings highlight the need for research to identify the specific mechanisms and processes that link residential environments to adverse changes in health status.     

African Americans,U.S. Poverty,and International Law

ABSTRACT

Statistical rates of poverty among African Americans often hide the cultural and historical nature of their intended consequences. Unfavorable outcomes for social change can occur when viewing poverty among African Americans in isolation from their unique historical and cultural experiences and U.S. social, political, and capitalistic influences. While pressures to subordinate African Americans continue, African Americans also exert pressure (e.g., social movements) as human agents in their efforts toward self-determination. In order to understand and/or ameliorate poverty in the US, policy makers, researchers, and educators must first deal with the cultural hegemony undergirding it.     

Race,Neighborhood Poverty,and Participation in Voluntary Associations

This paper examines racial differences in participation in voluntary associations. It extends past research by accounting for the influence of neighborhood poverty on participation. Using unique data from the 1993–94 Los Angeles Survey of Urban Inequality (LASUI), the analysis reveals that neighborhood poverty influences the number of associations to which individuals belong, even when considering differences in personal and other residential characteristics. Moreover, once the negative influence of neighborhood poverty is taken into account, blacks participate in more voluntary associations than do whites and other groups, while Asians participate the least. Evidence supports the ethnic community theory of blacks' greater participation, as blacks living in black communities participate in more organizations, particularly in ones that are political, than blacks who do not.     

Neighborhood isolation in Chicago: Violent crime effects on structural isolation and homophily in inter-neighborhood commuting networks

Urban sociologists and criminologists have long been interested in the link between neighborhood isolation and crime. Yet studies have focused predominantly on the internal dimension of social isolation (i.e., increased social disorganization and insufficient jobs and opportunities). This study highlights the need to assess the external dimension of neighborhood isolation, the disconnectedness from other neighborhoods in the city. Analyses of Chicago's neighborhood commuting network over twelve years (2002–2013) showed that violence predicted network isolation. Moreover, pairwise similarity in neighborhood violence predicted commuting ties, supporting homophily expectations. Violence homophily affected tie formation most, while neighborhood violence was important in dissolving ties.     

The Impact of Migration on Poverty Concentrations in the United States, 1995–2000

Poverty is frequently conceptualized as an attribute of either people or places. Yet residential movement of poor people can redistribute poverty across places, affecting and reshaping the spatial concentration of economic disadvantage. In this article, we utilize 1995 to 2000 county‐to‐county migration data from the 2000 United States decennial census to explore how differential migration rates of the poor and nonpoor affect local incidence of poverty, and how migration reconfigures poverty rates across metropolitan, micropolitan, and noncore counties. We further examine the impact of differential migration rates on African American and Latino poverty rates, two groups that have experienced higher than average poverty rates and have a sizable presence in rural areas. Our analysis indicates that during the 1990s the poor moved at rates equal to or greater than the nonpoor, and that, especially in micropolitan counties, this movement tended to deepen existing poverty concentrations. Both African American and Latino migration patterns tended to reinforce existing poverty concentrations, a result similar to that of the population as a whole, although the migration patterns of both groups more severely exacerbated poverty in high‐poverty noncore counties.     

A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON RACIAL RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION:

This article takes a first step to compare the residential segregation of blacks and Asians from whites in American and Canadian cities. The analysis is based on census data from 404 American and 41 Canadian cities. African Americans in the United States experience a higher level of residential segregation than Asians in U.S. cities. On the other hand, blacks in Canada experience the same low level of segregation as Asians. To explain the different experiences of blacks in the United States and Canada, a multivariate model is proposed and tested. The results reveal several patterns. First, African Americans are consistently obstructed much more than Asian Americans by their proportion in the city. In contrast blacks in Canada are not. Second, the residential segregation patterns of African Americans are affected strongly by the labor market and strucutral changes of the economy in the city. However, the structural change of the economy in the city has a very weak effect on the level of residential segregation of Asian Americans, black Canadians, and Asian Canadians.     

Metropolitan Heterogeneity and Minority Neighborhood Attainment: Spatial Assimilation or Place Stratification?

Using geo-referenced data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, in conjunction with decennial census data, this research examines metropolitan-area variation in the ability of residentially mobile blacks, Hispanics, and whites to convert their income into two types of neighborhood outcomes-neighborhood racial composition and neighborhood socioeconomic status. For destination tract racial composition, we find strong and near-universal support for the "weak version" of place stratification theory; relative to whites, the effect of individual income on the percent of the destination tract population that is non-Hispanic white is stronger for blacks and Hispanics, but even the highest earning minority group members move to tracts that are "less white" than the tracts that the highest-earning whites move to. In contrast, for moves into neighborhoods characterized by higher levels of average family income, we find substantial heterogeneity across metropolitan areas in minorities' capacity to convert income into neighborhood quality. A slight majority of metropolitan areas evince support for the "strong version" of place stratification theory, in which blacks and Hispanics are less able than whites to convert income into neighborhood socioeconomic status. However, a nontrivial number of metropolitan areas also evince support for spatial assimilation theory, where the highest-earning minorities achieve neighborhood parity with the highest-earning whites. Several metropolitan-area characteristics, including residential segregation, racial and ethnic composition, immigrant population size, poverty rates, and municipal fragmentation, emerge as significant predictors of minority-white differences in neighborhood attainment.     

Grandfather caregivers: race and ethnic differences in poverty

We use data from the 2006 American Community Survey to examine race and ethnic differences in the effects of marital status and co-residence of the middle generation on the likelihood of poverty among grandfathers who have primary responsibility for co-resident grandchildren (N = 3,379). Logistic regression results indicate that race/ethnicity and household composition are significant predictors of poverty for grandfather caregivers: non-Hispanic white grandfathers, those who are married, and those with a co-resident middle generation are the least likely to be poor. The effects of race/ethnicity, marital status, and the presence of a middle generation are, however, contingent upon one another. Specifically, the negative effect of being married is lower among grandfathers who are Hispanic, African American, non-Hispanic, and non-Hispanics of other race/ethnic groups compared to whites. In addition, having a middle generation in the home has a larger negative effect on poverty for race/ethnic minority grandfathers than for non-Hispanic whites. Finally, the combined effects of marriage and a middle generation vary across race/ethnic group and are associated with lower chances of poverty among some groups compared with others. We use the theory of cumulative disadvantage to interpret these findings and suggest that race/ethnicity and household composition are synergistically related to economic resources for grandfather caregivers.     

Helping Hands: Race,Neighborhood Context,and Reluctance in Providing Job‐Finding Assistance

In order to explain persistent racial inequality, researchers have posited that black Americans receive fewer job benefits from their social networks because of their reluctance to provide assistance to others who are looking for work. We test this idea on a national scale using geo‐coded data from the General Social Survey. Our results show that, on average, blacks offer more frequent job‐finding assistance to their friends than do whites. However, additional analyses reveal that race‐based job‐finding assistance is context dependent, as blacks living in areas characterized by concentrated black poverty have lower odds of helping others search for jobs than members of other races and in other community contexts.     

The “American Dream” in Poor Urban Neighborhoods: An Analysis of Home Ownership Attitudes and Behavior and Financial Saving Behavior

Abstract

The desire for home ownership and saving to accumulate wealth are two hallmarks of the “American Dream” that are typically associated with middle class values. Much urban research has suggested that continual exposure to neighborhood poverty has produced attitudes and behavior that differ dramatically from these values. In this study, we examined whether residents in poor urban areas embraced these tenets of the American Dream. Based on the Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey of Chicago, logistic and multivariate analyses were used to assess the relationship of neighborhood poverty, race/ethnicity, household economics, and social variables to attitudes and behavior about home ownership and saving. The effects of “ghetto poverty” and neighborhood poverty “tipping points” were evaluated. Findings showed varying effects of race / ethnicity, neighborhood poverty, and social indicators depending on whether attitudes or behavior were under consideration. We also found that household economic status consistently was better in explaining participation in these tenets of the American Dream than variables that directly measure neighborhood poverty.     

Ethnic and class factors affecting mental health clinic service

Service delivery by a mental health clinic to clients from an older suburban catchment area containing both lower and middle class blacks and whites was studied. The epidemiologic method was employed, relating service delivery to the characteristics of the various population groups within the catchment. The findings indicate that low service rates for blacks were not related to ethnicity alone, but to the combination of black ethnicity and low social status; however, middle class blacks and middle class whites who entered treatment received similar service. Poor blacks had higher admission rates than poor whites with similar need indicators. In continued treatment, poor blacks received lowest service rates while minority status poor whites living in a predominantly black area received highest service rates. Social class mediated black service utilization. Severity of illness, interacting with social class and minority status mediated white service utilization. Outreach is suggested not only for poor blacks but also for poor whites, especially those living in areas in which they represent an ethnic minority.     

A Case Study of Mortgage Refinancing Discrimination: African American Intergenerational Wealth*

A case study approach is taken to examine differences between African Americans and white Americans in their respective approval/denial rates for home mortgage refinancing. Data from a regional banking institution is used for the case analysis. These data indicate that African Americans are significantly more likely to be turned down for mortgage refinancing than their white American counterparts. We suggest that refinance discri‐mination is one contributing factor to the continuing wealth or net worth gaps between blacks and whites. The inability to access the potential capital resident in one's home impedes the ability of African Americans to transmit advantage from one generation to the next.     

The Portrayal of Blacks in Magazine Advertisements: 1950-1982

This article compares the frequency and social characteristicsof blacks and whites in advertisements in Time and Ladies' HomeJournal during 1950 and 1980. The occupational level of blacksportrayed has risen considerably, and blacks are no longer presentedas maids or servants. However, white authority figures are stillfrequently shown aiding poor blacks or supervising black children.Furthermore, ads show friendly and informal social relationshipsbetween individual whites much more frequently than they showsuch relationships between whites and blacks. Finally, in anextended analysis the frequency of black ads in 1980, 1981,and 1982 is examined for Time, Newsweek and LHJ. Blacks arestill somewhat underrepresented, and recent fluctuations inthe use of black advertisements are considered. The articlebegins and ends with a discussion of three different modelsthat might account for the way blacks are presented in advertisementsin the United States.     

The status of race in public sector work: Implications for emotion management and job satisfaction

ABSTRACT

African Americans consistently report lower levels of job satisfaction relative to whites. Using survey data from 1,456 public service employees, we examine whether racial disparities in job satisfaction are related to how African Americans and whites manage their emotions while at work. We contend that race acts as a master status within the workplace that locates African Americans in a subordinate social position to whites and may contribute to greater emotion management effort and greater work-related consequences. The results indicate that, together with traditional indicators of job satisfaction, extensive emotion management efforts of African Americans explain their lower levels of job satisfaction relative to whites.     

A Step Closer to Slavery? Free African Americans,Industrialisation, Social Control and Residency in Richmond City, 1850–1860

This article explores the ways that Richmond City's municipal authorities applied Virginia's pass-code laws governing free African American residency between 1850 and 1860. In Virginia, a free African American had to have a pass – a legal document attesting to one's free status – but that pass had to be renewed every three years, and it had to be approved by the city or county in which the free African American currently resided. Legally, undocumented free blacks included persons who did not have a pass, ones who may have had a pass but failed to carry one on their person, or African Americans with expired passes. Without such attestation, free blacks in antebellum Virginia were subject to incarceration and had to reimburse the city for all attendant fees. If they could not pay the fees, the court hired them out to the highest bidder. While historians have spent considerable time debating the legal status of free African Americans, they have not focused on how municipal authorities, particularly in rapidly industrialising southern cities, used pass codes not only as a way to maintain social control over free African Americans, but also increasingly as a means to provide cheap and accessible unfree labour to local businesses and industries.     

African American and White Managers:

Research points to differences in the experiences and response of African Americans and whites to organizational situations. This paper presents the results of a study which investigated differences in the management styles in eight local social service agency offices managed by African Americans and eight managed by whites. When the environment was turbulent, white managers responded by becoming more supportive of staff, while African American managers increased problem-solving communications. Staff in African American offices in turbulent environments had higher levels of job satisfation than either white offices of African Americans in nonturbulent environments.