Histories of Race
Emergent Strategy from Spontaneous Anger: Crowd Dynamics in the First 48 Hours of the Ferguson Shooting
Ravi Kudesia
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The fatal August 9, 2014, officer-involved shooting of a Black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked a series of local protests that culminated in a national social movement: Black Lives Matter. In this study, through a minute-by-minute analysis of crowd dynamics, I find that the eventual social movement strategy emerged from spontaneous acts of anger in protest crowds within the first 48 hours of the shooting. This finding is surprising in light of social movement scholarship, in which strategy is thought to follow from rationality and decision making within formal organizations, not emotionality and spontaneous action within informal crowds. By coupling a historical analysis of protest and policing practices with a comparison of prominent theories of crowds, emotion, and strategy, I theorize how strategy can emerge from spontaneous acts of anger as part of a distributed sensemaking process in crowds, rather than conflating strategy with rationality and deliberate planning in organizations. Taken in sum, this study challenges prevailing ideas about the wisdom of crowds and exemplifies the immanent potential for change, in which our seemingly “micro” actions are not trivial but can influence even the most “macro” of strategic outcomes.
Monetary Policy and Racial Inequality
Alina Bartscher et al.
Federal Reserve Working Paper, January 2021
Abstract:
This paper aims at an improved understanding of the relationship between monetary policy and racial inequality. We investigate the distributional effects of monetary policy in a unified framework, linking monetary policy shocks both to earnings and wealth differentials between black and white households. Specifically, we show that, although a more accommodative monetary policy increases employment of black households more than white households, the overall effects are small. At the same time, an accommodative monetary policy shock exacerbates the wealth difference between black and white households, because black households own less financial assets that appreciate in value. Over multi-year time horizons, the employment effects are substantially smaller than the countervailing portfolio effects. We conclude that there is little reason to think that accommodative monetary policy plays a significant role in reducing racial inequities in the way often discussed. On the contrary, it may well accentuate inequalities for extended periods.
Reparations and Persistent Racial Wealth Gaps
Job Boerma & Loukas Karabarbounis
NBER Working Paper, February 2021
Abstract:
Reparations is a policy proposal aiming to address the wealth gap between Black and White households. We provide a first formal analysis of the economics of reparations using a long-run model of heterogeneous dynasties with an occupational choice and bequests. Our innovation is to introduce endogenous dispersion of beliefs about risky returns, reflecting differences in dynasties' experiences with entrepreneurship over time. Feeding the exclusion of Black dynasties from labor and capital markets as driving force, the model quantitatively reproduces current and historical racial gaps in wealth, income, entrepreneurship, mobility, and beliefs about risky returns. We use the model to evaluate reparations and find that transfers eliminating the racial gap in average wealth today do not lead to wealth convergence in the long run. The logic is that century-long exclusions lead Black dynasties to enter into reparations with pessimistic beliefs about risky returns and to forego investment opportunities. We conclude by showing that entrepreneurial subsidies are more effective than wealth transfers in achieving racial wealth convergence in the long run.
Evaluating associations between area-level Twitter-expressed negative racial sentiment, hate crimes, and residents' racial prejudice in the United States
Thu Nguyen et al.
SSM - Population Health, March 2021
Methods: We collected 30,977,757 tweets from June 2015-July 2018 containing at least one keyword pertaining to specific groups (Asians, Arabs, Blacks, Latinos, Whites). We characterized sentiment of each tweet (negative vs all other) and averaged at the state-level. These racial sentiment measures were merged with other measures based on: hate crime data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program; implicit and explicit racial bias indicators from Project Implicit; and racial attitudes questions from General Social Survey (GSS).
Results: Living in a state with 10% higher negative sentiment in tweets referencing Blacks was associated with 0.57 times the odds of endorsing a GSS question that Black-White disparities in jobs, income, and housing were due to discrimination (95% CI: 0.40, 0.83); 1.64 times the odds of endorsing the belief that disparities were due to lack to will (95% CI: 0.95, 2.84); higher explicit racial bias (β: 0.11; 95% CI: 0.04, 0.18); and higher implicit racial bias (β: 0.09; 95% CI: 0.04, 0.14). Twitter-expressed racial sentiment was not statistically-significantly associated with incidence of state-level hate crimes against Blacks (IRR: 0.99; 95% CI: 0.52, 1.90), but this analysis was likely underpowered due to rarity of reported hate crimes.
Economic Competition and Police-caused Killings
Stephanie Bohon & Ruben Ortiz
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Blacks, Latinx, and American Indians are killed by police at a disproportionately higher rate than Whites and Asians, but whether racial discrimination accounts for these killings remains disputed. We contribute to this debate by examining structural conditions in U.S. metropolitan areas that are associated with the expected count of police-caused killings. Using an economic competition model, we find that the size of the metropolitan Black population (relative to the White population) positively predicts the expected count of police-caused killings for Blacks. Moreover, the size of the Latinx population (relative to Whites) predicts the expected count of police-caused killings of Latinx civilians. Furthermore, we find that metropolitan areas with more mixed-race neighborhoods experience higher expected counts of police-caused killings, specifically, for all, Black and White civilians. Finally, we find that overall population size also predicts the expected number of people killed by the police but violent crime does not, calling into question accounts that deaths are a function of crime. Our findings suggest, first, that the underlying conditions that lead to the deaths of Black and Latinx people at the hands of police are different than police-caused deaths of people of other races. Second, in developing solutions to the serious social problem of police-caused deaths, we need to look beyond the proximal causes of these deaths (i.e., the police) to the distal factors operating at the metropolitan level that promote White supremacy.
Eric Williams and William Forbes: Copper, colonial markets, and commercial capitalism
Nuala Zahedieh
Economic History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Eric Williams placed the Caribbean centre stage in discussions of Britain's industrial revolution and historians are increasingly persuaded by his intuition that the Atlantic trading system, underpinned by enslaved labour, played a major role. Early critics focused discussion on the profits of the slave trade but his thesis was broader, and more sophisticated, than they acknowledged. It left room for linkages of many kinds and it is now time to take a broader look at the connections between the rise of merchant capitalism, in which slavery played a central role, and British economic growth. This study looks at one small, fast‐growing industry, wrought copper, largely through the lens of William Forbes, a London smith. Quantitative data from output and trade records are combined with Forbes's business records to show how the demands of sugar cultivation, a particularly concentrated form of agro‐industrial activity, stimulated the development of a supply network which chained thousands of workers in Cornwall, South Wales, Bristol, and London to enslaved labour in the fields and factories of the Caribbean. Market opportunities allowed Forbes to amass great wealth but also directed investment, innovation, and the accumulation of skills that shaped Britain's particular path to industrial revolution.
Women’s Disempowerment and Preferences for Skin Lightening Products That Reinforce Colorism: Experimental Evidence From India
Arzi Adbi et al.
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Global racism and colorism, the preference for fairer skin even within ethnic and racial groups, leads millions of women of African, Asian, and Latin descent to use products with chemical ingredients intended to lighten skin color. Drawing from literatures on the impact of chronic and situational disempowerment on behavioral risk-taking to enhance status, we hypothesized that activating feelings of disempowerment would increase women of color’s interest in stronger and riskier products meant to lighten skin tone quickly and effectively. In two experiments (Experiment 1: N = 253 women and 264 men; Experiment 2: replication study, N = 318 women) with distinct samples of Indian participants, we found that being in a state of psychological disempowerment (vs. empowerment) increased Indian women’s preference for stronger and riskier skin lightening products but not for milder products. Indian men’s interest in both types of products was unaffected by the same psychological disempowerment prime. Based on these findings, we recommend increased consideration among teaching faculty, research scholars, and clinicians on how feeling disempowered can lead women of color to take risks to lighten their skin as well as other issues of intersectionality and with respect to colorism. We also encourage the adoption of policies aimed at empowering women of color and minimizing access to harmful skin lightening products.
Addressing Emotional Health while Protecting Status: Asian American and White Parents in Suburban America
Natasha Warikoo
American Journal of Sociology, November 2020, Pages 545-576
Abstract:
The emotional dimensions of parenting among upper-middle-class parents have not been fully theorized or measured. In this article I employ 60 in-depth interviews with professional white, Chinese, and Indian parents living in the same well-off suburban town to show how parents think about and attend to their teenage children’s emotional well-being. I find that attending to children’s emotional well-being sometimes competes with attending to achievement in ways not predicted by previous theories of class and parenting. Further, within the upper middle class, immigrant Asian and U.S.-born white parents employ different cultural repertoires to address their children’s emotional well-being, bolstering their own group status as they do so. The findings suggest that scholars of class influences on parenting should pay greater attention to affective dimensions, including how parents address concerns about emotional well-being, and how strategies vary by ethnicity, generation, and other lines of difference.
Don’t Shoot! The Impact of Historical African American Protest on Police Killings of Civilians
Jamein Cunningham & Rob Gillezeau
Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March 2021, Pages 1-34
Objectives: There is a long-standing history of protests in response to police killings of African American citizens. However, it remains a largely unanswered question as to whether these protest events have had any impact on subsequent police killings of African American civilians. To answer this question, we turn to the over 700 racial uprisings that occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s that were largely triggered by negative and often violent interactions between the African American community and police.
Methods: To determine the impact of racial uprisings on police killings of civilians, we conduct an event-study analysis with a robust set of controls. We employ data on civilian deaths by legal intervention by race, county-level uprising occurrence, and county demographic characteristics. We take advantage of variation in the location and timing of a county’s first uprising to determine the impact of uprisings on police killings of civilians. Our identification strategy relies on pre-existing trends in deaths by legal intervention being uncorrelated with the date of the first uprising in a county.
Results: The results show that counties saw a marked increase in both non-white and white deaths due to legal intervention in the years immediately following an uprising. This initial increase is substantially larger for non-whites relative to white civilians. Deaths due to legal intervention for non-white and white civilians diverge over the medium-to-long run. Non-white deaths resulting from legal intervention remain elevated after nearly a decade while deaths of whites revert to their pre-existing trend after a handful of years. Additional analysis regarding the impact of uprisings on policing shows that total crime and police employment do not change in a significant manner over the long run, however, officers are more likely to be killed or injured on duty.