Essays
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Race in Latin America - Telles, Edward
Race has long been a primary cleavage in Latin American societies, where people of African, Indigenous, and European origin have been present in large numbers. Although they have promoted race mixture as central to their national identities and often denied racism and racial discrimination, racial hierarchies have also been prominent features up until the present. Today, most Latin American countries have declared themselves multiculturalist and have begun to recognize their black and indigenous populations, largely in response to minority social movements and as these societies have begun to democratize. At the same time, the academic literature on the subject has blossomed. -
Racial Disenfranchisement - Hutchings, Vincent L.
Inquiries into racial disenfranchisement offer a crucial lens through which to critically assess the capacity of the US political system to sufficiently respond to the demands of an increasingly diverse society. Various social science disciplines have employed a range of theoretical frameworks and methodologies to explore the institutional, cultural, and psychological antecedents of disenfranchisement, as well as strategies to achieve racial equity. This essay reviews a small slice of the scholarly perspectives offered on racial inequity. It provides particular emphasis on theories of racial subjugation, racial attitudes, and the political behavior of racial minorities. The discussion of current and future trends in research on racial disenfranchisement explores the questions raised and insight offered by examinations of the distinct experiences of diverse racial and ethnic minority groups, as well as the potential impact of the “Obama era” on the state of race relations in the United States. -
The Process of Racial Resegregation in Housing and Schools: The Sociology of Reputation - Wells, Amy Stuart
The United States has a long history of racial and ethnic segregation in housing patterns and public school enrollment as well as efforts to dismantle this segregation. This essay discusses what we have learned in the United States about how difficult it is to halt the patterns of housing and school segregation even as our nation becomes more diverse, racial attitudes are reportedly improving, and the twentieth century urban‐suburban racial distinctions disappear. To explain the process of resegregation that occurs repeatedly, the author developed a new interdisciplinary framework to foster a deeper understanding of how racialized perceptions of places or neighborhoods and the schools embedded within them perpetuates segregation despite changing demographics, attitudes and metro migrations across urban‐suburban lines. The sociology of reputation, the bias of crowds, and the choices of home buyers with the most capital amid the existing separate and unequal structures are the bodies of research the author draws upon to help us see familiar segregation patterns anew.