Their Legacy
Net Worth Poverty in Child Households by Race and Ethnicity, 1989–2019
Christina Gibson‐Davis, Lisa Keister & Lisa Gennetian
Journal of Marriage and Family, forthcoming
Method: Data come from the 1989–2019 waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances, on households with at least one resident child under the age of 18. Net worth poverty is measured as household net worth, defined as total assets minus total debts, that is less than one‐fourth of the federal poverty line.
Results: In 2019, 57% of Black and 50% of Latino child households were net worth poor. The majority of these households were not income poor. Racial and ethnic differences in net worth poverty (unlike those for income poverty) persist even when sociodemographic variation predicting income poverty is controlled for.
Economic freedom and anti-Semitism
Niclas Berggren & Therese Nilsson
Journal of Institutional Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine how variation in antisemitism across countries can be explained by economic freedom. We propose two mechanisms. First, the more economic freedom, the greater the scope of market activities. If people perceive Jews as particularly skilful at doing business at the expense of others, a greater reliance on markets can increase antisemitism. Second, a key type of institution undergirding the market is an effective and fair legal system, or the rule of law. The stronger the rule of law, the smaller the risk for exploitative behaviour, and the less hostile people will be towards groups seen as exploiters. If Jews are seen as such, more economic freedom reduces antisemitism. We use the ADL Global 100 survey of antisemitic attitudes and relate them, for up to 106 countries, to the Economic Freedom of the World index and its five areas. Our empirical findings confirm the two predictions: The more economic openness, the more antisemitism; and the stronger the rule of law, the less antisemitism. These findings indicate a complex relationship between markets and attitudes towards Jews.
Voting Rights, Deindustrialization, and Republican Ascendancy in the South
Gavin Wright
Stanford Working Paper, September 2020
Abstract:
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 revolutionized politics in the American South. These changes also had economic consequences, generating gains for white as well as Black southerners. Contrary to the widespread belief that the region turned Republican in direct response to the Civil Rights Revolution, expanded voting rights led to twenty-five years of competitive two-party politics, featuring strong biracial coalitions in the Democratic Party. These coalitions remained competitive in most states until the Republican Revolution of the 1990s. This abrupt rightward shift had many causes, but critical for southern voters were the trade liberalization measures of 1994, specifically NAFTA and the phase-out of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement which had protected the textiles and apparel industries for decades. The consequences of Republican state regimes have been severe, including intensified racial polarization, loss of support for public schools and higher education, and harsh policies toward low-income populations.
Jim Crow in the Saddle: The Expulsion of African American Jockeys from American Racing
Michael Leeds & Hugh Rockoff
NBER Working Paper, December 2020
Abstract:
Between the Civil War and the turn of the nineteenth century there were many prominent African American jockeys. They rode winners in all of the Triple-Crown races. But at the turn of the century they were forced out. This paper uses a new data set on the Triple-Crown races, which includes odds on all of the entrants in all of the races, to explore the causes of the expulsion of African American jockeys. Our conclusion is that although there is some evidence of prejudice by owners and the betting public – for the latter in the Kentucky Derby although not in the other legs of the Triple Crown – historical evidence indicates that the final push came from the White jockeys who were determined to “draw the color line.”
Colonial Legacies and Comparative Racial Identification in the Americas
Lachlan McNamee
American Journal of Sociology, September 2020, Pages 318-353
Abstract:
What accounts for variation in racial identification in the Americas? An influential first generation of race scholarship attributed contemporary racial schemas to the cultural legacies of different colonizers, whereas a second generation has emphasized varying national ideologies like mestizaje. Seeking to adjudicate between these perspectives, the author theorizes the process linking colonial legacies to national racial ideologies and, in turn, contemporary patterns of racial identification. He tests this theory using data from 27 countries and 25 states in Brazil. He finds that colonial demography, not colonizer cultural legacies, best accounts for contemporary racial schemas. As such, he concludes that the importance of colonizer identity to racial formation has been overstated and that national racial ideologies are best understood as the endogenous product of differences in colonial European settlement. By bridging comparative-historical sociology and comparative race and ethnicity, this article helps resolve the discordant arguments of two influential generations of race scholarship.
The Antebellum Roots of Distinctively Black Names
Trevon Logan, Lisa Cook & John Parman
NBER Working Paper, November 2020
Abstract:
This paper explores the existence of distinctively Black names in the antebellum era. Building on recent research that documents the existence of a national naming pattern for African American males in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cook, Logan and Parman 2014), we analyze three distinct and novel antebellum data sources and uncover three stylized facts. First, the Black names identified by Cook, Logan and Parman using post-Civil War data are common names among Blacks before Emancipation. Second, these same Black names are racially distinctive in the antebellum period. Third, the racial distinctiveness of the names increases from the early 1800s to the time of the Civil War. Taken together, these facts provide support for the claim that Black naming patterns existed in the antebellum era and that racial distinctiveness in naming patterns was an established practice well before Emancipation. These findings further challenge the view that Black names are a product of twentieth century phenomena such as the Civil Rights Movement.
A tale of two generations: Maternal skin color and adverse birth outcomes in Black/African American women
Jaime Slaughter-Acey et al.
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examined how sociopolitical context (marked by generational cohort) and maternal skin color interacted to influence preterm delivery (PTD) rates in sample of Black women. Data were from 1410 Black women, ages 18–45 years, residing in Metropolitan Detroit, MI enrolled (2009–2011) in the Life-course Influences on Fetal Environments (LIFE) Study. Because we hypothesized that generational differences marked by changes in the sociopolitical context would influence exposure to racism, we categorized women into two cohorts by maternal birth year: a) Generation X, 1964–1983 and b) Millennial, 1984–1993. Descriptive results showed similar PTD rates by generational cohort, Generation X: 16.3% vs. Millennials: 16.1%. Yet, within each generation, PTD rates varied by women's skin tone (categorized: light, medium, and dark brown). Poisson regression models confirmed a significant interaction between generational cohort and maternal skin tone predicting PTD (P = 0.001); suggesting a salubrious association between light brown skin tone (compared to medium and dark) and PTD for Generation X. However, Millennials with medium and dark brown skin experienced lower PTD rates than their light Millennial counterparts. Research should consider sociopolitical context and the salience of skin tone bias when investigating racial health disparities, including those in perinatal health.
The Voice of Radio in the Battle for Equal Rights: Evidence from the U.S. South
Andrea Bernini
University of Oxford Working Paper, May 2020
Abstract:
Although the 1960s race riots have gone down in history as America’s most violent and destructive ethnic civil disturbances, a single common factor able to explain their insurgence is yet to be found. Using a novel data set on the universe of radio stations airing black-appeal programming, the effect of media on riots is found to be sizable and statistically significant. A marginal increase in the signal reception from these stations is estimated to lead to a 7% and 15% rise in the mean levels of the likelihood and intensity of riots, respectively. Several mechanisms behind this result are considered, with the quantity, quality, and the length of exposure to radio programming all being decisive factors.
Racial Context and Political Support for California School Taxes
Jennifer Nations & Isaac Martin
Social Science Quarterly, October 2020, Pages 2220-2237
Method: Panel regression models are fit to a data set of 293 parcel tax measures and 967 California school districts from 1997 to 2010, including data on the racial composition of enrolled students, the district population, and the school board, with controls for features of the policy and the social, political, and economic context.
Results: School boards were least likely to propose new parcel taxes where there was a high percentage of Latinx students or a large gap between the percentage of white students and the percentage of white residents 65 and older. Once a tax was proposed, these and other measures of racial context had no measurable influence on the propensity of voters to approve it. Policy design influenced outcomes, but not by mitigating racial context.
Race, Risk, and the Emergence of Federal Redlining
Price Fishback et al.
NBER Working Paper, November 2020
Abstract:
During the late 1930s, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) created a series of maps designed to summarize spatial variation in the riskiness of mortgage lending in different neighborhoods. The HOLC maps, in conjunction with contemporaneous maps produced by the Federal Housing Agency (FHA), are at the center of debates regarding the long-run impacts of government-imposed redlining, particularly because black households were concentrated in the highest risk zones on these maps. This concentration, combined with the fact that these formerly redlined neighborhoods largely remain economically distressed today, suggest racial bias in the construction of the maps has had important effects over the long run. Using newly digitized data for ten major northern cities, we assess the maps for the importance of this channel in explaining the prevalence of black residents in redlined neighborhoods. We find that racial bias in the construction of the HOLC maps can explain at most a small fraction of the observed concentration of black households in redlined zones. Instead, our results suggest that the majority of black households were redlined because decades of disadvantage and discrimination had already pushed them in to the core of economically distressed neighborhoods prior to the government’s direct involvement in mortgage markets. As a result, the HOLC maps are best viewed as providing clear evidence of how decades of unequal treatment effectively limited where black households lived in the 1930s rather than reflecting racial bias in the construction of the maps themselves. We argue that the systemized treatment of neighborhood risk vis-à-vis mortgage lending that was adopted by HOLC and the FHA may have played a central role in locking these patterns of inequality in place.
The Case of Cubans: Racial Inequality in U.S. Homeownership and Home Values
Brandon Martinez
Sociological Forum, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research finds that human capital may explain racial housing inequality, whereas others note the historical role that race played in creating unequal housing conditions. This study uses the case of Cubans in the United States to examine whether human capital explains Black–White housing inequalities, or if they are a result of nativity/cohort differences — a proxy for the federal policies that supported Cubans’ economic and social incorporation. Using pooled data from the American Community Survey, I examine how human capital characteristics and nativity/migration cohorts shape odds of homeownership and predicted home values among Cubans. Extended analyses using decomposition methods find that although human capital characteristics are important, they play a smaller role in explaining Black–White differences in homeownership and home values. Indicative of the changing structure of racial stratification in the United States, results reveal substantial inequality among the oldest of Cuban immigrants and U.S.‐born Cubans, despite a trend toward declining inequality among recent arrivals. Supported by the literature of systemic racism, the case of Cubans shows how human capital explanations do not sufficiently explain racial housing inequalities and how the future of racial stratification is one of inter‐ and intra‐ethnic group inequality.