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Minding The Gap: An Assessment Of Racial Disparity In Metropolitan Chicago, Center For Urban Research And Learning, The Human Relations Foundation/Jane Addams Policy Initiative

Center for Urban Research and Learning: Publications and Other Works

In cooperation with the Human Relations Foundation of Chicago (HRF), CURL and the Jane Addams Hull House examined inequalities among racial and ethnic groups in Chicago. Drawing from a broad range of existing data sources, researchers documented areas of reduced inequality as well as other areas of persistent inequality.

Minding the Gap: An Assessment of Racial Disparity in Metropolitan Chicago examines seven quality of life measurements: income, wealth and employment, education, housing, transportation, health, the lives of children and the criminal justice system. This report, by examining these seven systems, not just one, creates a unique context for understanding both …

“Black People’S Money”: The Impact Of Law, Economics, And Culture In The Context Of Race On Damage Recoveries, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

“’Black People’s Money’: The Impact of Law, Economics, and Culture in the Context of Race on Damage Recoveries” is one of a series of articles by the author dealing with black economic marginalization; prior work considered such topics as shopping and selling as forms of deviance, street vending, restraints on leisure, and the importance of informality in loan transactions. This article deals with the linkage between the social significance of black people’s money and its material value. It analyzes the construction of “black money,” its association with cash, and the taboos and cultural practices that assure that black money will …

The Color Of Crime: The Case Against Race-Based Suspect Descriptions, Bela August Walker

Bela August Walker

Law enforcement in the United States relies on racial identifiers as a crucial part of suspect descriptions. Unlike racial profiling, this practice is regarded as both an essential tool for law enforcement and as an unproblematic use of race. However, given the racial history of the United States, such descriptors, particularly “Black,” have developed in such a way to create an extremely large and unreliable category. Due to these factors, the use of race as a physical descriptor in suspect decisions is both discriminatory and inefficient. Employing race as an identifying characteristic allows law enforcement officers broad discretionary powers that …

Poverty And Macroeconomic Performance Across Space, Race, And Family Structure, Craig Gundersen, James P. Ziliak

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

Understanding the link between poverty and economic growth is of long-standing interest, but heretofore it has not received much attention within the context of the dramatic changes in recent business-cycle conditions and social policies. In this paper we use state-level panel data from the 1981–2000 waves of the Current Population Survey to examine the impacts of the macroeconomy and welfare reform on family poverty. We estimate models of before-tax and after-tax poverty rates and squared poverty gaps for all families, by family structure, and by race. Our results indicate that a strong macroeconomy at both the state and national levels …

Getting Into The Game: The Trickster In American Ethnic Fiction, Helen Lock

Ethnic Studies Review

Trickster novels, especially those by Gerald Vizenor and Maxine Hong Kingston, can be used to destabilize and undermine ethnic stereotypes. As many studies show, the trickster him/herself cannot be stable and thus resists the limitations of definition as the embodiment of ambiguity. Both insider and outsider, s/he plays with the whole concept of "sides" so as to erase the distinction between them. The trickster plays the game, including the game of language, in order to break and exploit its rules and thus destabilizes linguistic markers. Kingston and Vizenor use their novels to subvert the rules of the linguistic game and …

The Suppression Of Diversity, Adrian J. Lottie, Phyllis A. Clemens Noda

Ethnic Studies Review

Is it a systematic strategy or a mutation of millennial ferver that drives the escalating challenges to the civil rights of this nation's racial, linguistic, and national origin minorities? Increasing juridical, legislative, and popular assaults on affirmative action policies coupled with the sometimes less heralded emergence of a de facto U.S. language policy are sweeping through the states. These activities draw on a consistent repertoire of approaches from the invocation of the very language and concepts of the civil rights movement to the isolationist "buzz-words" of early twentieth century advocates of "Americanization." In an effort to legitimize their efforts this …

Centering Race And Ethnicity- Related Issues In Social Sciences Curricula, Joseph F. Sheley

Ethnic Studies Review

A 2002 review of the course requirements and electives of Economics, History, Political Science, and Sociology programs in thirty randomly selected state and private, "doctoral-level" and "masters-level" institutions produced 201 courses relating to the study of race-and ethnic-related issues. Only two courses (History offerings on a single campus) were required for completion of a major. While some departments offered "concentrations" with mandated content, the concentrations themselves were elective. Diversity in America today is a truly important component of social (re)organization and change and, thus, a major source of social friction. Why is it, then, that students, those majoring in the …

Race, Sex, And Redemption In Monster's Ball, Celeste Fisher, Carole Wiebe

Ethnic Studies Review

In this paper, we explore the way that interracial relationships between blacks and whites come to be represented as problematic for mainstream audiences. By looking specifically at the film Monster's Ball (2001), we examine how race is used to identify and characterize our culture's standard protagonist, the white male, and at how white male sexuality is constructed through the black female. Particularly striking in this film is how the social and institutional structures that create and reiterate problems of race are used to characterize the movie's central protagonists, yet then evaded and submerged in the discourse of romance.

[Review Of] Claudia Koonz. The Nazi Conscience, Gregory Paul Wegner

Ethnic Studies Review

As the author observed in this engaging work, the expression "Nazi conscience" is not an oxymoron. Nazi morality, profoundly ethnic in nature, sharply defined those accepted and rejected as members of the German Volk. Claudia Koonz describes with great clarity the emergence of an "ethnic fundamentalism" supported by numerous "ethnocrats" under the Third Reich who, during the "normal years" of 1933-1 939, advanced decidedly racial and biological perspectives on ethnicity (141, 217). Especially significant for our understanding of Nazi racial policy is Koonz's exploration of German public opinion, much of which reflected an abhorrence of Nazi brutality. What made the …

[Review Of] Jun Xing And Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Eds. Reversing The Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender, And Sexuality Through Film, Susan Crutchfield

Ethnic Studies Review

The fourteen essays collected in Xing and Hirabayashi's new volume make a strong argument for serious intellectual work involved not only in the college-level study of moving images for their messages about minority groups but also in pedagogical approaches that take film and video as their primary texts. Written by a collection of scholars who work in ethnic and racial studies and various allied fields, the essays share a concern with pedagogy and with showing "how visual media can be used to facilitate cross-cultural understanding and communications, particularly with respect to the thorny topics of ethnicity and race" (3). Indeed, …

Ethnic And Racial Definitions As Manifestations Of American Public Policy, Ashton Wesley Welch

Ethnic Studies Review

Official definitions of race and ethnicity in American law reveal a great deal about public policy in an environment of ethnic pluralism. Despite some ambiguity over who is black or Hispanic or an Aleut, relatively few people fall between the wide cracks in the American patchwork of identity classifications. Those cracks, however, tell us a great deal about the ambivalence of the American polity toward ethnicity.1

Efficiency And Social Citizenship: Challenging The Neoliberal Attack On The Welfare State, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

In the face of rising economic inequality and shrinking welfare protections, some scholars recently have revived interest in T.H. Marshall's theory of "social citizenship." That theory places economic rights alongside political and civil rights as fundamental to public well-being. But this social citizenship ideal stands against the prevailing neoliberal ("free market") ideology, which asserts that state abstention from economic protection generates societal well-being. Using the examples of AFDC and workers' compensation in the 1990s, I analyze how arguments about economic efficiency have worked to characterize social welfare programs as producers of public vice rather than public virtue. A close examination …

African-Americans Within The Context Of International Oppression, Kevin D. Brown

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Critical Praxis, Spirit Healing And Community Activism: Preserving A Subversive Dialogue On Reparations, Christian Sundquist

Articles

African-American reparations have the potential to deconstruct racial privilege, promote racial reconciliation, and heal the psychic injuries of the African-American community. However, many models of reparations have given up on the promise of reparations in exchange for the slim possibility of short-term progress.

A subversive dialogue on African-American reparations, however, will inevitably critique equal opportunity, individualism, and white innocence and privilege. Embraced by the majority, and internalized by the African-American community, the principles of individualism, equal opportunity, and meritocracy reinforce white innocence and privilege to the extent that future, current and past inequality are cast as the natural and inevitable …