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This book explores issues of trust and distrust among low-income women in the United States—at work, around childcare, in their relationships, and with caseworkers—and presents richly detailed evidence from in-depth interviews about our welfare system and why it's failing the very people it is designed to help. By comparing low-income mothers' experiences before and after welfare reform, the author probes women's struggles to gain or keep jobs while they simultaneously care for their children, often as single mothers. By offering a new way to understand how structural factors impact the daily experiences of poor women, the book highlights the pervasiveness of distrust in their lives, uncovering its hidden sources and documenting its most corrosive and paralyzing effects. The author's critique and conclusions hold powerful implications for scholars and policymakers alike.

This book reframes one of the most important, controversial, and misunderstood issues of our time in this far-reaching reassessment of the growing debate on black reparation. It shifts the focus of the issue from the backward-looking question of compensation for victims to a more forward-looking racial reconciliation. Offering a comprehensive discussion of the history of the black redress movement, the book puts forward a powerful new plan for repairing the damaged relationship between the federal government and black Americans in the aftermath of 240 years of slavery and another 100 years of government-sanctioned racial segregation. Key to the author's vision is the government's clear signal that it understands the magnitude of the atrocity it committed against an innocent people, that it takes full responsibility, and that it publicly requests forgiveness—in other words, that it apologizes. The government must make that apology believable, the author explains, by a tangible act which turns the rhetoric of apology into a meaningful, material reality; that is, by reparation. Apology and reparation together constitute atonement. Atonement, in turn, imposes a reciprocal civic obligation on black Americans to forgive, which allows them to start relinquishing racial resentment and to begin trusting the government's commitment to racial equality. The author's bold proposal situates the argument for reparations within a larger, international framework—namely, a post-Holocaust vision of government responsibility for genocide, slavery, apartheid, and similar acts of injustice. The book makes the case that only with this spirit of heightened morality, identity, egalitarianism, and restorative justice can genuine racial reconciliation take place in America.

What do people think of when they hear about an African American Republican? Are they heroes fighting against the expectation that all blacks must vote democratic? Are they Uncle Toms or sellouts, serving as traitors to their race? What is it really like to be a black person in the Republican Party? This book considers how race structures the political behavior of African American Republicans and discusses the dynamic relationship between race and political behavior in the purported “post-racial” context of US politics. Drawing on vivid first-person accounts, the book sheds light on the different ways black identity structures African Americans' membership in the Republican Party. Moving past rhetoric and politics, the everyday people working to reconcile their commitment to black identity with their belief in Republican principles can be seen. And at the end, the importance of understanding both the meanings African Americans attach to racial identity and the political contexts in which those meanings are developed and expressed is illuminated.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of an economic trend that has been reshaping the United States over the past three decades: rapidly rising income inequality. It provides an overview of how and why the level and distribution of income and wealth has changed since 1979, sets this situation within its historical context, and investigates the forces that are driving it. Among other factors, the book looks closely at changes within families, including women's increasing participation in the work force. The book includes some surprising findings—for example, that per-person income has risen sharply among almost all social groups, even as income has become more unequally distributed. Looking toward the future, the book suggests that while rising inequality will likely be with us for many decades to come, it is not an inevitable outcome. This book considers what can be done to address this trend, and also explores the question: why should we be concerned about this phenomenon?

Chocolate Cities is built on a simple premise: our current maps of black life are wrong. As Malcolm X made clear in Detroit over a half century ago, the geography of the black American experience is best understood as existing within and across varying versions of “the South”—regional areas with distinct yet overlapping and similar patterns of racism, white domination, and oppression alongside place-inspired black strivings, customs, and aspirations for a better and more equal society. Chocolate Cities offers a new geography of the United States based on the lives, experiences, and histories of black Americans called “the Black Map.” Using both cultural sources (film, music, fiction, and plays) and more traditional academic data—U.S. decennial census data (1900–2010); oral histories; multiyear ethnography; photographs; national, state, and local health and wealth data and reports; and archives—this book maps and analyzes black life since Emancipation in America’s “chocolate cities”—cities, towns, neighborhoods, streets, and communities wherein black life and culture are concentrated, maintained, created, and defended.

In The Chosen Ones, sociologist and feminist scholar Nikki Jones shares the compelling story of a group of Black men living in San Francisco's historically Black neighborhood, the Fillmore. Against all odds, these men work to atone for past crimes by reaching out to other Black men, young and old, with the hope of guiding them towards a better life. Yet despite their genuine efforts, they struggle to find a new place in their old neighborhood. With a poignant yet hopeful voice, Jones illustrates how neighborhood politics, everyday interactions with the police, and conservative Black gender ideologies shape the men’s ability to make good and forgive themselves—and how the double-edged sword of community shapes the work of redemption.

Dreams and Nightmares takes a critical look at the challenges and dilemmas of immigration policy and practice in the absence of comprehensive immigration reform. The experiences of children and youth provide a prism through which the interwoven dynamics and consequences of immigration policy become apparent. Using a unique sociolegal perspective and based on extensive interviews with immigration attorneys, immigrants’ and children’s advocates, and government officials, this book examines how prosecutorial discretion, deferred action, and other forms of executive action play into immigration policy issues such as parental detention and deportation, unaccompanied minors, Dreamers, and mixed-status families. The book explores a set of structural mechanisms that have potential for mitigating or exacerbating harm to youth and families, and it considers whether these mechanisms meet the best interests of children, how they mightserve both to prioritize immigration enforcement and ease the plight of families, and why they remain controversial and vulnerable to political challenges.

This personal memoir is the coming-of-age story of a white boy growing up in a neighborhood of predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. Vividly evoking the details of city life from a child's point of view—the streets, buses, and playgrounds—this book poignantly illuminates the usual vulnerabilities of childhood complicated by unusual circumstances. As he narrates these sharply etched and often funny memories, the author shows how race and class shaped his life and the lives of his schoolmates and neighbors. A case study for illuminating the larger issues of inequality in American society, the book brings us to a deeper understanding of the privilege of whiteness, the social construction of race, the power of education, and the challenges of inner-city life. The author's father, a struggling artist, and his mother, an aspiring writer, joined Manhattan's bohemian subculture in the late 1960s, living on food stamps and raising their family in a housing project. We come to know his mother: her quirky tastes, her robust style, and the bargains she strikes with Dalton—not to ride on the backs of buses, and to always carry money in his shoe as protection against muggers. We also get to know his father, his face buried in racing forms, and his sister, who in grade school has a burning desire for cornrows. From the hilarious story of three-year-old Dalton kidnapping a black infant so he could have a baby sister to the deeply disturbing shooting of a close childhood friend, this memoir touches us with movingly rendered portraits of people and the unfolding of their lives. This book story provides a sophisticated example of the crucial role culture plays in defining race and class. Both of the author's parents retained the “cultural capital” of the white middle class, and they passed this on to their son in the form of tastes, educational expectations, and a general sense of privilege. It is these advantages that ultimately provide him with his ticket to higher education and beyond.

May I Help You? is Deepak Singh’s insightful and thought-provoking account of disillusionment when, as an educated upper-class Indian, he moves with his American wife to the United States and discovers that America doesn’t care if he has an MBA from India or had worked for the BBC. Like many immigrants before him, Singh discovers that in America employers only trust him with a minimum wage job as a clerk, but his disappointment and embarrassment soon give way to shock when he realizes that in this world of low-wage work he is joined not merely by other immigrants, but by many Americans, a whole swath of the citizenry who goes unacknowledged and unassisted in their struggles to make a living wage. In sincere and straightforward prose, Singh takes the reader along on his journey full of dismay and compassion when the expectations he had of the United States, built around interactions in India with well-educated, affluent expatriates, collide with the reality of a coworker who must skip lunch until payday and the customers who buy in anticipation of a paycheck.

Since late 2001 more than fifty percent of the babies born in California have been Latino. When these babies reach adulthood, they will, by sheer force of numbers, influence the course of the Golden State. This essential study, based on decades of data, paints a vivid and energetic portrait of Latino society in California by providing a wealth of details about work ethic, family strengths, business establishments, and the surprisingly robust health profile that yields an average life expectancy for Latinos five years longer than that of the general population. Spanning one hundred years, this complex, fascinating analysis suggests that the future of Latinos in California will be neither complete assimilation nor unyielding separatism. Instead, the development of a distinctive regional identity will be based on Latino definitions of what it means to be American. This updated edition now provides trend lines through the 2010 Census, as well as information on the 1849 California Constitutional Convention and the ethnogenesis of how Latinos created the society of “Latinos de Estados Unidos” (Latinos in the United States). In addition, two new chapters focus on Latino post-millennials—the first focusing on what it’s like to grow up in a digital world, and the second describing the contestation of Latinos at a national level and the dynamics that transnational relationships have on Latino post-millennials in Mexico and Central America.

What do Americans think “race” means? What determines one's race — appearance, ancestry, genes, or culture? How do education, government, and business influence our views on race? To unravel these complex questions, the book takes a close look at how scientists are influencing ideas about race through teaching and textbooks. Drawing from in-depth interviews with biologists, anthropologists, and undergraduates, the book explores different conceptions of race — finding for example, that while many sociologists now assume that race is a social invention or “construct,” anthropologists and biologists are far from such a consensus. It discusses powerful new genetic accounts of race, and considers how corporations and the government use scientific research — for example, in designing DNA ancestry tests or census questionnaires — in ways that often reinforce the idea that race is biologically determined. Widening the debate about race beyond the pages of scholarly journals, this book dissects competing definitions in straightforward language to reveal the logic and assumptions underpinning today's claims about human difference.

Challenged by Ku Klux Klan action in the 1920s, labor protests culminating in a general strike in the 1940s, and the rise of the civil rights and black power struggles of the 1960s, Oakland, California, seems to encapsulate in one city the broad and varied sweep of urban social movements in twentieth-century America. Taking Oakland as a case study of urban politics and society in the United States, this book examines the city's successive episodes of popular insurgency for what they can tell about critical discontinuities in the American experience of urban political community.

Race and Ethnicity in America examines patterns and trends in racial and ethnic inequality in the United States. Drawing upon information collected in surveys such as the decennial census and the American Community Survey, it documents levels of inequality in educational attainment, income, poverty, wealth, residential conditions, and health among whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, American Indians, and the multiracial population. It illustrate the main findings with in-depth stories gathered from ethnographic work and in topical news stories, and includes international comparisons as well. A recurrent theme in the book is that race and ethnicity are social constructions, as exemplified by how racial and ethnic group definitions and divisions vary over time and place, both within the United States and in other countries. The overarching conclusion is that color lines have generally softened over time in the United States, as there has been some narrowing of differences across many indicators for most groups over the past 60 years. Nevertheless, some deep-seated inequalities remain, especially between blacks and whites. Thus, despite some progress over many decades, illustrated by the substantial growth of the black middle class, African Americans are still more likely to be poor, unemployed, incarcerated, and suffer from worse health than whites. The books evaluates a number of theories that have been used to explain patterns of racial ethnic inequality, including human capital, social capital, culture, assimilation, and racism and discrimination. All play a role, though to a differing extent depending on the groups being considered.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant's Racial Formation in the United States remains one of the most influential and widely read books about race. This book, arriving twenty-five years after the publication of Omi and Winant's influential work, brings together thirteen essays by leading scholars in law, history, sociology, ethnic studies, literature, anthropology and gender studies to consider the past, present and future of racial formation. The chapters explore far-reaching concerns: slavery and land ownership; labor and social movements; torture and war; sexuality and gender formation; indigineity and colonialism; genetics and the body. From the ecclesiastical courts of seventeenth-century Lima to the cell blocks of Abu Grahib, the essays draw from Omi and Winant's racial formation theory and adapt it to the various criticisms, challenges, and changes of life in the twenty-first century.

This book, an ethnography of pregnancy and birth at a large New York City public hospital, explores the role of race in the medical setting. The book investigates how race—commonly seen as biological in the medical world—is socially constructed among women dependent on the public healthcare system for prenatal care and childbirth. It argues that race carries powerful material consequences for these women even when it is not explicitly named, showing how they are marginalized by the practices and assumptions of the clinic staff. Deftly weaving ethnographic evidence into broader discussions of Medicaid and racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality, the book shines new light on the politics of healthcare for the poor, demonstrating how the “medicalization” of social problems reproduces racial stereotypes and governs the bodies of poor women of color.