The Understudied Case of Black Professional Men: Advocating an Intersectional Approach

This paper considers potential new areas for sociology of work research. Specifically, we review some key studies in the sociology of work that identify the processes by which workplaces and labor markets recreate racial and gendered inequality. We then examine the ways that intersectionality theory has generated additional insights into how certain groups are disadvantaged at work. Finally, we make the case that using an intersectional approach to explore the occupational challenges, opportunities, and issues facing black professional men offers a new and important direction for research in the sociology of work.     

The Racial Dialectic: President Barack Obama and the White Racial Frame

This paper introduces the concept of the ??racial dialectic?? to describe the ways racial dialogues and policies have transformed in the wake of Barack Obama??s historic election to the presidency of the United States of America. Using public statements and behaviors from elected officials, pundits, and Obama himself as case study data, we examine the tension between what we term the hard racial frame, the soft racial frame, and the racial counterframe in the public discourses. We conclude that these competing frames produce a dialectic that has transformed the way racial issues are discussed and interpreted in the wake of Obama??s election.     

(IN)VISIBILITY BLUES: THE PARADOX OF INSTITUTIONAL RACISM

In this article, we demonstrate how the taken-for-granted, inner-workings of culture can become implicated in the (in)visibility of minority members. We seek to illuminate ways in which institutions may unwittingly facilitate (in)visibility through their organizational habitus. We begin by providing further evidence of invisibility and visibility as real and commonly experienced psychosocial phenomena among minorities within predominantly white, institutional settings. In particular, we argue that a minority's inconspicuousness can be simultaneously fused together with one's conspicuousness to form what we call racial/ethnic (in)visibility. This study employs focus-group data collected from a sample of administrators and faculty from elite K-12 independent (private) schools, an institution that admittedly has been slow to make cultural change in its racial/ethnic ideologies and practices.     

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.     

Getting Angry to Get Ahead: Black College Men,Emotional Performance,and Encouraging Respectable Masculinity

This article draws on two years of ethnographic fieldwork to explore how a group of black men on a college campus displayed anger in order to encourage other black men to adopt a respectable form of masculinity. Although prior research suggests that black men may work to avoid public displays of anger to evade negative stereotypes of black men, we uncover the contexts in which black men were comfortable expressing feelings of anger, frustration, annoyance, and irritation. Specifically, group leaders displayed these emotions when they observed recruits to their group engaging in actions or behaviors that threatened to reinforce certain stereotypes about black men.     

Still a Man's World? Revisiting Men Who Do Women's Work

In 1995, Christine Williams built on the well‐versed theory of tokenism and introduced the concept of the glass escalator to describe the social processes by which men maintain advantages in female‐dominated occupations. This paradigm has proven extraordinarily useful as a way of understanding the pathways that reproduce men's opportunities and benefits in culturally feminized jobs. In this paper, we review the literature in this area and consider how new perspectives have contributed to insightful and interesting ways of understanding the experiences of men who do “women's work.”     

Moving Past Picket Fences: The Meaning of “Home” for Public Housing Residents

The literature on the meaning of “home” has generally focused on creating lists without giving much attention to the context that shapes meanings. Recently, scholars have argued that to understand “home” it is important to know the range of meanings that different people in different contexts give it. In this article, we focus on the meaning of “home” for public housing residents and consider how they construct the meaning of “home” and if they find that meaning in public housing. Our findings suggest that respondents consider their public housing residences to be “home,” and they construct this meaning using the dimensions of home identified in the literature. However, how respondents used these dimensions were, in some ways, different because of the context of living in public housing. Respondents emphasized the social dimension, and this dimension appeared to organize the other dimensions. As such, our findings support arguments that context matters to the meaning of “home.” They also suggest that policymakers need to broaden their understandings of public housing, as places that can be “home,” and use this understanding when making decisions about housing transformations.