Out of the darkness
Nazi indoctrination and anti-Semitic beliefs in Germany
Nico Voigtländer & Hans-Joachim Voth
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Attempts at modifying public opinions, attitudes, and beliefs range from advertising and schooling to “brainwashing.” Their effectiveness is highly controversial. In this paper, we use survey data on anti-Semitic beliefs and attitudes in a representative sample of Germans surveyed in 1996 and 2006 to show that Nazi indoctrination – with its singular focus on fostering racial hatred – was highly effective. Between 1933 and 1945, young Germans were exposed to anti-Semitic ideology in schools, in the (extracurricular) Hitler Youth, and through radio, print, and film. As a result, Germans who grew up under the Nazi regime are much more anti-Semitic than those born before or after that period: the share of committed anti-Semites, who answer a host of questions about attitudes toward Jews in an extreme fashion, is 2–3 times higher than in the population as a whole. Results also hold for average beliefs, and not just the share of extremists; average views of Jews are much more negative among those born in the 1920s and 1930s. Nazi indoctrination was most effective where it could tap into preexisting prejudices; those born in districts that supported anti-Semitic parties before 1914 show the greatest increases in anti-Jewish attitudes. These findings demonstrate the extent to which beliefs can be modified through policy intervention. We also identify parameters amplifying the effectiveness of such measures, such as preexisting prejudices.
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Us and Them: Black-White Relations in the Wake of Hispanic Population Growth
Maria Abascal
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
How will Hispanic population growth affect black-white relations in the United States? Research on intergroup relations operates within a two-group paradigm, furnishing few insights into multi-group contexts. This study is based on an original experiment that combines behavioral game and survey methods to evaluate the impact of perceived Hispanic growth on attitudes and behavior. Results reveal opposite reactions among blacks and whites. Whites in the baseline condition contribute comparable amounts to black and white recipients in a dictator game, whereas whites who first read about Hispanic growth contribute more to white recipients than to black ones. By contrast, blacks in the baseline condition contribute more to black recipients than to white ones, whereas blacks who first read about Hispanic growth contribute comparable amounts to black and white recipients. Patterns of identification mirror patterns of contributions: whites exposed to Hispanic growth identify relatively more strongly with their racial group than with their national group, whereas blacks exposed to Hispanic growth identify relatively more strongly with their national group than with their racial group. Together, these results suggest that people respond to the growth of a third group by prioritizing the most privileged identity to which they can plausibly lay claim and which also excludes the growing group.
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Fair Housing Enforcement in the South and Non-South
Charles Bullock, Eric Wilk & Charles Lamb
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: We compare outcomes in racial discrimination fair housing complaints processed by southern state and local civil rights agencies to those handled by state and local agencies outside the South and the federal agency, HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development).
Methods: Based on data obtained directly from HUD, we rely on a fixed effects logistic regression model with cluster-correlated standard errors.
Results: First, southern local agencies are significantly more likely to provide outcomes favorable to complainants in racial discrimination fair housing cases than are local agencies outside the South. Second, state and local agencies in the Deep South provide favorable outcomes to the same extent as their nonsouthern counterparts. Third, southern local agencies are more likely to provide favorable outcomes than is HUD, whereas southern state agencies provide favorable outcomes at roughly the same rate as HUD. Variations within the South partially explain these findings.
Conclusion: We find evidence of progressive changes in southern fair housing enforcement, although those changes occur in an uneven fashion depending on the state or locality.
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Are People Willing to Pay for Less Segregation? Evidence from U.S. Internal Migration
Junfu Zhang & Liang Zheng
Regional Science and Urban Economics, July 2015, Pages 97–112
Abstract:
It is difficult to determine whether racial housing segregation is socially desirable, because segregation has some effects that are hard to measure. To overcome this challenge, we estimate a migration choice model to measure the willingness to pay for reduced segregation. The key idea underlying our empirical approach is that if segregation is undesirable, migrants should be willing to give up some earnings to avoid living in segregated cities. Using decennial census data from 1980 to 2000, we provide evidence that segregation is an urban disamenity. It is shown that both black and white migrants prefer to live in less segregated cities. For example, for a one percentage point reduction in the dissimilarity index, the estimated marginal willingness to pay of blacks is $436 (in 1999 dollars) in 2000. Among whites, this marginal willingness to pay is $301.
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Ian Hambleton et al.
American Journal of Public Health, July 2015, Pages S491-S498
Objectives: We investigated changes in life expectancy (LE) and cause-specific mortality over time, directly comparing African-descent populations in the United States and the Caribbean.
Methods: We compared LE at birth and cause-specific mortality in 6 disease groups between Caribbean countries with a majority (> 90%) African-descent population and US African Americans.
Results: The LE improvement among African Americans exceeded that of Afro-Caribbeans so that the LE gap, which favored the Caribbean population by 1.5 years in 1990, had been reversed by 2009. This relative improvement among African Americans was mainly the result of the improving mortality experience of African American men. Between 2000 and 2009, Caribbean mortality rates in 5 of the 6 disease groups increased relative to those of African Americans. By 2009, mortality from cerebrovascular diseases, cancers, and diabetes was higher in Afro-Caribbeans relative to African Americans, with a diabetes mortality rate twice that of African Americans and 4 times that of White Americans.
Conclusions: The Caribbean community made important mortality reductions between 2000 and 2009, but this progress fell short of African American health improvements in the same period, especially among men.
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Emergent Ghettos: Black Neighborhoods in New York and Chicago, 1880–1940
John Logan, Weiwei Zhang & Miao David Chunyu
American Journal of Sociology, January 2015, Pages 1055-1094
Abstract:
This article studies in detail the settlement patterns of blacks in the urban North from before the Great Migration and through 1940, focusing on the cases of New York and Chicago. It relies on new and rarely used data sources, including census geocoded microdata from the 1880 census (allowing segregation patterns and processes to be studied at any geographic scale) and census data for 1900–1940 aggregated to enumeration districts. It is shown that blacks were unusually highly isolated in 1880 given their small share of the total population and that segregation reached high levels in both cities earlier than previously reported. Regarding sources of racial separation, neither higher class standing nor northern birth had much effect on whether blacks lived within or outside black neighborhoods in 1880 or 1940, and it is concluded that the processes that created large black ghettos were already in place several decades before 1940.
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Thomas Craemer
Social Science Quarterly, June 2015, Pages 639–655
Objective: I investigate two problems regarding multigenerational reparations: legal obstacles caused by the passage of time and economic difficulties in obtaining realistic present value estimates.
Methods: To investigate legal precedents, I trace the French spoliation claims, which were paid over a period of 123 years, and Haiti's independence debt, which was paid over 156 years. To investigate present value estimation, I compare existing slavery reparations estimates based on slave prices as expected future income to alternative estimates based on the number of unremunerated work hours multiplied with historical free labor market wages.
Results: I estimate the present value of U.S. slave labor in 2009 dollars to range from $5.9 to $14.2 trillion. Historical precedents suggest that political rather than narrowly legal processes will determine any ultimate claims.
Conclusions: Neither problems nor solutions associated with multigenerational reparations are new. New is the estimation method and the resulting upward correction of reparations estimates.
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Robert Boyd
Sociological Spectrum, May/June 2015, Pages 271-285
Abstract:
The present study uses Census data on occupations to examine the opportunity structures of Black Metropolises in the early twentieth century. The Black Metropolises with the highest odds of blacks’ employment in medicine, retailing, and social work were those with the highest black-white segregation levels, implying that a racially segregated Black Metropolis promoted blacks’ employment in occupations serving black clientele. In addition, the odds of blacks’ employment in many occupations were approximately equal in northern and southern Black Metropolises, casting doubt on the argument that the North was the more favorable region. Finally, when New York (Harlem) and Chicago (Bronzeville) are omitted, the odds of blacks’ employment in most occupations are unrelated to black population size, indicating that, outside the two largest Black Metropolises, additional numbers of blacks were of little consequence for the pursuit of the Dream of Black Metropolis.
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Parental Wealth and the Black–White Mobility Gap in the U.S.
Liana Fox
Review of Income and Wealth, forthcoming
Abstract:
Utilizing longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), this paper examines the relationship between parental wealth and intergenerational income mobility for black and white families. I find that total parental wealth is positively associated with upward mobility for low-income white families, but is not associated with reduced likelihood of downward mobility for white families from the top half of the income distribution. Conversely, I find that total parental wealth does not have the same positive association for low-income black families, while home ownership may have negative associations with the likelihood of upward mobility for these families. However, for black families from the top half of the income distribution, home equity is associated with a decreased likelihood of downward mobility, suggesting a heterogeneous relationship between home ownership and mobility for black families.
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Sunasir Dutta & Hayagreeva Rao
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, July 2015, Pages 36–47
Abstract:
The current paper connects anxiety about disease contamination to that about cultural contamination and the exclusionary behavior toward ethnic outgroups that it incites. We suggest that when individuals are exposed to disease fears, an epistemic groundwork is laid for construing outgroups as sources of contamination. We begin with a pilot experiment showing that contagious disease anxiety primes opposition to legalization of illegal aliens. We then analyze historical data about the diffusion of rumor-based ethnic violence, showing that Indian regiments of the East India Company were more likely to mutiny against their British officers if they had been exposed some months earlier to a cholera discourse. (These mutinies were proximally caused by acceptance of a rumor that the Company administration had violated a cultural taboo.) We discuss implications for studying the cognitive antecedents of the diffusion of beliefs and practices in organizations and in cultures.
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Race-Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors, and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-based Sample
Arline Geronimus et al.
Journal of Health and Social Behavior, June 2015, Pages 199-224
Abstract:
Residents of distressed urban areas suffer early aging-related disease and excess mortality. Using a community-based participatory research approach in a collaboration between social researchers and cellular biologists, we collected a unique data set of 239 black, white, or Mexican adults from a stratified, multistage probability sample of three Detroit neighborhoods. We drew venous blood and measured telomere length (TL), an indicator of stress-mediated biological aging, linking respondents’ TL to their community survey responses. We regressed TL on socioeconomic, psychosocial, neighborhood, and behavioral stressors, hypothesizing and finding an interaction between poverty and racial-ethnic group. Poor whites had shorter TL than nonpoor whites; poor and nonpoor blacks had equivalent TL; and poor Mexicans had longer TL than nonpoor Mexicans. Findings suggest unobserved heterogeneity bias is an important threat to the validity of estimates of TL differences by race-ethnicity. They point to health impacts of social identity as contingent, the products of structurally rooted biopsychosocial processes.
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A Research Note on Trends in Black Hypersegregation
Douglas Massey & Jonathan Tannen
Demography, June 2015, Pages 1025-1034
Abstract:
In this note, we use a consistently defined set of metropolitan areas to study patterns and trends in black hypersegregation from 1970 to 2010. Over this 40-year period, 52 metropolitan areas were characterized by hypersegregation at one point or another, although not all at the same time. Over the period, the number of hypersegregated metropolitan areas declined by about one-half, but the degree of segregation within those areas characterized by hypersegregation changed very little. As of 2010, roughly one-third of all black metropolitan residents lived in a hypersegregated area.
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Exploring the Role of Ethnic Identity in Family Functioning among Low-Income Parents
Eliana Hurwich-Reiss et al.
Journal of Community Psychology, July 2015, Pages 545–559
Abstract:
The majority of research on ethnic identity (EI) has highlighted its role in mitigating risks associated with racial discrimination; however, discrimination is only one of many stressors that ethnic minority individuals face. The current study examined the relationships between EI, emotional distress, and the parent–child relationship among ethnically diverse, low-income parents. Results indicated significant associations between EI and emotional distress, and EI and the parent–child relationship for African American parents, but not for their Latino or European American counterparts. Furthermore, when examined separately by gender, stronger EI buffered the impact of economic hardship on emotional distress for African American fathers. The current study provides preliminary evidence that EI plays an important role in the lives of ethnically diverse parents who are facing economic hardship. Methods for embracing and fostering EI may be valuable to incorporate into therapeutic services and strength-based intervention programming, especially when serving low-income African American individuals.
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Linked Fate and Outgroup Perceptions: Blacks, Latinos, and the U.S. Criminal Justice System
Jon Hurwitz, Mark Peffley & Jeffery Mondak
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies focusing on black–Latino intergroup perceptions in zero-sum environments (e.g., jobs) have found little perceived outgroup discrimination or a tendency for each group to perceive the injustices faced by the other group. In contrast, we examine the non-zero-sum criminal justice domain. Although we find some asymmetry — that is, blacks are somewhat more likely to see discrimination toward Latinos than vice-versa, we mainly find both groups acknowledge the discrimination faced by the other disadvantaged group, especially those who feel closely linked to the fate of their own group. Under such circumstances, blacks and Latinos recognize a common sense of deprivation and discrimination and are likely to regard the other group as facing comparable victimization, potentially seeing the other group as a coalition partner for remediating mutual concerns.
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Community Attraction and Avoidance in Chicago: What’s Race Got to Do with It?
Michael Bader & Maria Krysan
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 2015, Pages 261-281
Abstract:
We argue that the relative persistence of racial segregation is due, at least in part, to the process of residential search and the perceptions upon which those searches are based — a critical but often-ignored component of the residential sorting process. We examine where Chicago-area residents would “seriously consider” and “never consider” living, finding that community attraction and avoidance are highly racialized. Race most clearly shapes the residential perceptions and preferences of whites, and matters the least to blacks. Latinos would seriously consider moving to numerous neighborhoods, but controls for demographics and distance from the respondents’ home make Latino preferences much like those of whites. Critically, the geography of existing segregation begets further segregation: distance from current community significantly affects perceptions of the communities into which respondents might move. While neighborhood perception may cause persistent segregation, it may also offer hope for integration with appropriate policy interventions.