Inequality and Stratification Commons^™

Comparable Worth: Pay Equity And Women Of Color, Elizabeth A. Sherman

Trotter Review

The relationship between women of color and community economic development is fundamentally a question of income. And, for women, questions of income more often than not become questions of pay equity - whether or not women and men are receiving equal pay for equal, or comparable work. Because the economy retains entrenched vestiges of sexual discrimination, the solutions to such problems lie within the political realm, where laws to ensure equality are created and enforced. In this regard, women themselves have a vital role to play as activists focusing on mitigating the barriers to opportunity that have depressed women's well …

Haitian Immigrants And African-American Relations: Ethnic Dilemmas In A Racially-Stratified Society, Gemima M. Remy

Trotter Review

This article focuses on Haitian immigrants and how they have attempted to interpret their migration experience and ascribed racial and ethnic status in the U.S. It is argued that the legal and economic positions of Haitian immigrants have not only impacted their perceptions and understanding of their living conditions in this country, but they have also compelled them to reassess their self-definition as a distinct group of individuals with their own history, culture, nationality, and racial identity. Like many other Caribbean immigrants, Haitians "suffer double invisibility... as immigrants and black immigrants or double visibility as blacks in the eyes of …

Cape Verdean-Americans: A Historical Perspective Of Ethnicity And Race, Jean E. Barker

Trotter Review

Cape Verdean immigrants in the United States worked to establish their own unique ethnic identity in an effort not to be grouped with Afro-Americans. On the Cape Verde Islands they were Portuguese citizens and identified as Portuguese. In the United States they persisted in stressing their identification as Portuguese, claiming the right to self-designation rather than accepting one imposed by an exceedingly race-conscious society. As one immigrant stated: "We are not black, we are Portuguese. We know we have black in our blood, and white." In the turn-of-the-century United States any amount of African ancestry guaranteed an identification by society …

Caribbean Migrant Experiences In Church And Society, J A George Irish

Trotter Review

One of the greatest ironies of the Caribbean community in New York is, that it is at one and the same time, both "power-full" and powerless. Its power lies essentially in a relatively untapped and latent potential, whereas its powerlessness rests in its virtual immobilization as an ethnic group. By dint of sheer numbers the Caribbean presence, whether solely anglophone/West Indian, or more broadly representative of the wider Caribbean Basin, is a formidable force to reckon with, since over 30 percent of the immigrant population of New York is Caribbean. In fact, they are among the fastest growing immigrant groups. …

Educational Opportunity Programs For Students Of Color In Graduate And Professional Schools, Sheila Gregory, Harold Horton

Trotter Review

The significant underrepresentation of people of color in all occupational fields is clearly indicative of the exceptionally low percent of people of color in graduate and professional schools in America. Unless drastic actions are taken by universities across the nation to identify and recruit a significant number of students of color in undergraduate colleges it is unlikely that significant numbers of people of color will be available in the near future for potential employment.

Expanding The Pool Of Women And Minority Students Pursuing Graduate Study: The Development Of A National Model, Bernard W. Harleston

Trotter Review

The underrepresentation of women and minority students in certain disciplines in the graduate schools of American colleges and universities is a matter of great national concern. This concern has been intensified by the decline during the last fifteen years, especially from 1978 to 1988, in graduate school enrollments of all categories of American students. But, even before this most recent period of decline and during a time when the enrollment of women and minority students was at its highest (between 1968 and 1974, as a consequence, primarily, of the civil rights movement), the representation of women and minorities in the …

Myths And Realities Of Puerto Rican Poverty, Edwin Melendez

Trotter Review

The following remarks were made as the closing keynote address at the conference, "Mainland Puerto Ricans: Myths and Realities on Poverty," held at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, on October 22 and 23, 1993.

There are two "stories" frequently cited to explain the causes of the poverty among Puerto Ricans: the first suggests that Puerto Ricans are poor because they are going through a transition as they move toward full assimilation; the second proposes that Puerto Ricans are becoming part of an urban "underclass." Neither of these explanations stands the test of reality.

Race, Economic Development, And The Role Of Transportation And Training, Joan Wallace-Benjamin

Trotter Review

As Massachusetts confronts its economic future and develops strategic plans for seizing competitive advantages, accessibility promised by proposed development plans for the transportation infrastructure must not only provide commuters with the means to get to work, but also increase the opportunity for participation in the economy for all citizens of the region. Changes in the transportation infrastructure will not ensure accessibility unless workers receive adequate training for the new types of jobs being offered. According to a recent report issued by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, authored by William P. O'Hare, "Black people who live in urbanized …

Revisiting The Question Of Reparations, James Jennings

Trotter Review

Recent congressional action to award Japanese Americans "reparations" for their internment during World War II, as well as the Florida state legislature's act to award $150,000 to black survivors of a white riot rampage of Rosewood, a black town, in 1923, has contributed to a re-emergence of the call for black reparations. Several black state and local politicians and leaders across the United States have called for legislative action that would compensate blacks for three and one half centuries of racial enslavement. The awarding of reparations to Japanese Americans is not the only precedent for indemnity to a group of …

Providing Quality Leadership In Roxbury: A Profile Of Leon T. Nelson, Harold Horton

Trotter Review

Poor leadership is often the cause for the inept functioning and eventual collapse of an organization or agency. This is because the leader sets the tone and to a great extent determines whether or not an organization will be viable. Leon T. Nelson, president of the Greater Roxbury Chamber of Commerce, has done his utmost to live up to the organization's motto, "Quod facis bene fac," which means doing whatever you do as well as you possibly can.

In a community that underwent drastic demographic changes during the 1970s and 1980s, when numerous businesses led the "white flight" to suburbia, …

The Role Of Black Political Leadership In Economic Development, Curtis Stokes

Trotter Review

One of the most striking things about the United States is the degree to which racial inequality remains a pervasive fact of life. Indeed, since the end of the 1960s the black-white gap in life chances (for example, jobs and income) has worsened for large segments of the black community. To persistently face high unemployment and declining income is especially troublesome in a capitalist economy like that in the United States, where goods and services are rationed by a harsh market and where there is, at best, a very modest social safety net. The United Nation's Human Development Report 1993, …

Black Women And The American Political System, Dorothy A. Clark

Trotter Review

Black women and politics—it is an association rarely made by the American electorate. As a group, black women have never been prominent players in the nation's political arena. In a system of decision making and power holding designed and dominated by white men, black women are an alien group in the formal political process. Their participation in that process has been limited—indeed often blocked—by a hierarchical system of race, gender, and class oppression that relegates black women to the lowest rungs of the political power ladder.

A. Philip Randolph And Boston's African-American Railroad Worker, James R. Green, Robert C. Hayden

Trotter Review

On October 8, 1988, a group of retired Pullman car porters and dining car waiters gathered in Boston's Back Bay Station for the unveiling of a larger-than-life statue of A. Philip Randolph. During the 1920s and 1930s, Randolph was a pioneering black labor leader who led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He came to be considered the "father of the modern civil rights movement" as a result of his efforts to desegregate World War II defense jobs and the military services. Randolph's importance as a militant leader is highlighted by a quote inscribed on the base of the statue …

The School Choice Issue: Remarks Made At The U.S. Department Of Education's Regional Strategy Meeting On Choice In Education, Phyllis Mcclure

Trotter Review

The term choice as it is used by the current administration with regard to education is a cosmetic, simplistic response to the failure of American schools. Choice has become a catch-all term for a whole variety of programs, plans, and theories. We should not let this meeting or the Department of Education delude us into believing that parental choice holds the promise for poor and minority children. The term is being used to describe not only what is happening in District 4 [public school district in New York City], but a plethora of ideas based on the free market. I …

The Foundation Of American Racism: Defining Bigotry, Racism, And Racial Hierarchy, James Jennings

Trotter Review

Despite the fact that current surveys reveal a decline in the level of white prejudice towards blacks, however, the number of hate groups and incidents of racial harassment and violence is rapidly increasing. In addition, while black and white Americans seem to be interacting more in the work place, residential segregation continues to be a major problem. Furthermore, there are indications that the political attitudes of blacks and whites are not only different on many philosophical and economic issues, but are becoming increasingly divergent.

Stratification And Subordination: Change And Continuity In Race Relations, E. Yvonne Moss, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

One of the measures used to gauge progress made by African-Americans in gaining equal opportunity has been to compare and contrast the status of black Americans to that of white Americans using various social indices. Historically, the status of blacks relative to whites has been one of subordination; race has been a primary factor in determining social stratification and political status. Relations between white and black Americans were established during slavery and the Jim Crow era of segregation. In the infamous Dred Scott (1856) decison, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney articulated the fundamental nature of this system of racial …

The Hand That Pushes The Rock, Paula Rothenberg

Trotter Review

Only a very few schools in this country actually require all students to spend an entire semester thinking about issues of race and gender. Many more have found a way to incorporate these issues in required courses in “social problems” where racism and sexism get their two weeks along with environmental pollution and other current issues. I think this approach is dead wrong. Racism and sexism are not “problems” or “topics.” They are ways of defining reality and living our lives that most of us have learned along with learning how to tie our shoes and how to drink from …

Book Review: The Arrogance Of Race: Historical Perspectives On Slavery, Racism, And Social Inequality, Vernon J. Williams Jr.

Trotter Review

The Arrogance of Race is George M. Fredrick son’s latest work, and it is a profound one. This series of articles, many of which have been published previously, was written over a span of some 20 years and represents the mature reflections of one of this country’s leading intellectual historians. The work should be read by all serious students of race and racism.

Miscegenation And Acculturation In The Narragansett Country Of Rhode Island, 1710-1790, Rhett S. Jones

Trotter Review

The histories of most New England states view blacks as a strange, foreign people enslaved in southern states, whom New Englanders rescued first by forming colonization and abolitionist societies and later by fighting a Civil War to free them. The existence of a black population in New England as early as the seventeenth century has been pretty much ignored. Indeed Anderson and Marten, of the Parting Ways Museum of Afro-American Ethnohistory, touched off a furor with their discovery that Abraham Pearse, one of the early residents of Plymouth Colony, was black.

The long neglect of New England’s black history has …

Book Review: The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, And Public Policy By William Julius Wilson, James Jennings

Trotter Review

William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged represents the debate of the last 10 to 20 years about race, poverty, and public policy. Part of Wilson’s rationale for the book is the belief that conservative policy analysts and ideologues have gained the upper hand in presenting their case about black urban poverty. He hopes to provide a framework of liberal analysis that will allow a better understanding of the causes of the intensifying black poverty.

Racial Insularity At The Core: Contemporary American Racial Attitudes, A. Wade Smith

Trotter Review

Survey research scientists have been interested in American racial attitudes ever since the craft has achieved a reasonable degree of precision. White attitudes toward blacks constitute the longest running topic in survey research. However, as a result of dramatic and systematic changes in racial attitudes and because of the changing nature of race relations per se, there may be less agreement now about the structure of American racial values than at any time since World War II. This paper will provide a capsule presentation of the major findings of recent research on racial attitudes and a brief summary of the …