Based on data from some of the larger black communities in the U.S., this book shows the impact of both individual and environmental influences on black homicide. While it primarily addresses black-on-black homicide, its purpose is to illustrate the effect of the environment on increasing the likelihood of victimization. Race, Place, and Risk demonstrates how changes in the urban economy during the past twenty-five years have played a major role in elevating the risk of victimization in large urban communities and in altering the structure of victimization as well.
Based on data from some of the larger black communities in the U.S., this book shows the impact of both individual and environmental influences on black homicide. While it primarily addresses black-on-black homicide, its purpose is to illustrate the effect of the environment on increasing the likelihood of victimization. Race, Place, and Risk demonstrates how changes in the urban economy during the past twenty-five years have played a major role in elevating the risk of victimization in large urban communities and in altering the structure of victimization as well.
In Calculating Race, Benjamin Wiggins analyzes the historical relationship between statistical risk assessment and race in the United States. He illustrates how, through a reliance on the variable of race, actuarial science transformed the nature of racism and helped usher racial disparities in wealth, incarceration, and housing from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Wiggins begins by tracing how the life insurance industry utilized race in its calculations at the end of the nineteenth century, focusing particularly on Prudential and its aggressive battles with state regulators to discriminate against clients and adjust rates on the basis of race. He then turns his focus to the collection of racial statistics in the Illinois state penitentiary system in the late nineteenth century and the state's subsequent development of predictive sentencing and parole formulas in the 1920s that weighed race as a key factor. Next, he investigates the role of race in the state-sponsored mortgage insurance program of the Federal Housing Administration between the start of the New Deal and the beginning of the Cold War and its prolonged effects on mortgage lending. Wiggins concludes with an analysis of the use of race in the statistical risk assessments across financial institutions and government programs during the post-civil rights movement era, and how that practice has been transformed in the twenty-first century through "proxy" variables which stand in for the now taboo category of race. Offering readers a new perspective on the historical importance of actuarial science in structural racism, Calculating Race is a particularly timely contribution as Big Data and algorithmic decision making increasingly pervade our lives.
From a nationally recognized expert, a fresh and original argument for bettering affirmative action Race-based affirmative action had been declining as a factor in university admissions even before the recent spate of related cases arrived at the Supreme Court. Since Ward Connerly kickstarted a state-by-state political mobilization against affirmative action in the mid-1990s, the percentage of four-year public colleges that consider racial or ethnic status in admissions has fallen from 60 percent to 35 percent. Only 45 percent of private colleges still explicitly consider race, with elite schools more likely to do so, although they too have retreated. For law professor and civil rights activist Sheryll Cashin, this isn’t entirely bad news, because as she argues, affirmative action as currently practiced does little to help disadvantaged people. The truly disadvantaged—black and brown children trapped in high-poverty environs—are not getting the quality schooling they need in part because backlash and wedge politics undermine any possibility for common-sense public policies. Using place instead of race in diversity programming, she writes, will better amend the structural disadvantages endured by many children of color, while enhancing the possibility that we might one day move past the racial resentment that affirmative action engenders. In Place, Not Race, Cashin reimagines affirmative action and champions place-based policies, arguing that college applicants who have thrived despite exposure to neighborhood or school poverty are deserving of special consideration. Those blessed to have come of age in poverty-free havens are not. Sixty years since the historic decision, we’re undoubtedly far from meeting the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, but Cashin offers a new framework for true inclusion for the millions of children who live separate and unequal lives. Her proposals include making standardized tests optional, replacing merit-based financial aid with need-based financial aid, and recruiting high-achieving students from overlooked places, among other steps that encourage cross-racial alliances and social mobility. A call for action toward the long overdue promise of equality, Place, Not Race persuasively shows how the social costs of racial preferences actually outweigh any of the marginal benefits when effective race-neutral alternatives are available.
We long for diverse, thriving neighborhoods and churches, yet racial injustices persist. Why? Urban missiologist David Leong reveals the profound ways in which geographic structures and systems sustain the divisions among us and create barriers to reconciliation. For the flourishing of our communities, here is a vision of belonging and hope in our streets, cities, and churches.
"Relying on compelling interviews from the Meacham Park neighborhood--a marginalized Black enclave located in a predominately white affluent St. Louis suburb, this book brings to life the everyday interactions of disadvantaged suburban Blacks as they faced annexation, aggressive policing, two nationally profiled shootings, and intervention from the United States Department of Justice (USDOJ)"--Provided by publisher.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
This volume offers a critical, cross-disciplinary, and international overview of emerging scholarship addressing the dynamic relationship between race and markets. Chapters are engaging and accessible, with timely and thought-provoking insights that different audiences can engage with and learn from. Each chapter provides a unique journey into a specific marketplace setting and its sociopolitical particularities including, among others, corner stores in the United States, whitening cream in Nigeria and India, video blogs in Great Britain, and hospitals in France. By providing a cohesive collection of cutting-edge work, Race in the Marketplace contributes to the creation of a robust stream of research that directly informs critical scholarship, business practices, activism, and public policy in promoting racial equity.
The purpose of this book is to show the important role that space and place plays in the health of urban residents, particularly those living in high poverty ghettos. The book brings together research and writing from a variety of disciplines to demonstrate the health costs of being poor in America’s cities. Both authors are committed to raising awareness of structural factors that promote poverty and injustice in a society that proclaims its commitment to equality of opportunity. Our health is often dramatically affected by where we live; some parts of the city seem to be designed to make people sick. The book is intended for students and professionals in urban sociology, medical sociology, public health, and community planning.
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans leaving death and destruction across the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf Coast counties. The lethargic and inept emergency response that followed exposed institutional flaws, poor planning, and false assumptions that are built into the emergency response and homeland security plans and programs. Questions linger: What went wrong? Can it happen again? Is our government equipped to plan for, mitigate, respond to, and recover from natural and manmade disasters? Can the public trust government response to be fair? Does race matter? Racial disparities exist in disaster response, cleanup, rebuilding, reconstruction, and recovery. Race plays out in natural disaster survivors' ability to rebuild, replace infrastructure, obtain loans, and locate temporary and permanent housing. Generally, low-income and people of color disaster victims spend more time in temporary housing, shelters, trailers, mobile homes, and hotels - and are more vulnerable to permanent displacement. Some 'temporary' homes have not proved to be that temporary. In exploring the geography of vulnerability, this book asks why some communities get left behind economically, spatially, and physically before and after disasters strike.
