Digital Commons Network^™

Living Below The Line: Racial And Ethnic Disparities In Economic Security Among Older Americans, 2020, Jan Mutchler, Nidya Velasco Roldán, Yang Li

Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging Publications

New estimates from the 2019 Elder Index^TM highlight the risk of economic insecurity experienced by older adults, a risk that is especially high for persons of color. The Gerontology Institute compares the household incomes for adults age 65 and above living in one- and two-person households to the 2019 Elder Index for each state and Washington, DC to calculate Elder Economic Insecurity Rates (EEIRs), the percentage of independent older adults age 65 or older living in households with annual incomes that do not support economic security. National averages suggest that among people living alone, 48% of older people who …

Book Review: Desire And Disaster In New Orleans: Tourism, Race And Historical Memory By Lynnell L. Thomas, Casey Schreiber

Trotter Review

Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race and Historical Memory, by Lynnell L. Thomas, challenges the racial messages embedded within dominant tourism narratives in New Orleans. From tour guides, to websites, to travel brochures, Thomas extracts and analyzes a variety of messages to document how competing representations of race—desire and disaster—are two frames through which New Orleans tourism narratives represent black culture. Thomas leads readers to question the extent to which alternative tourism narratives can be constructed to more justly address constructions of blackness.

Expanding A Model Of Female Heterosexual Coercion: Are Sexually Coercive Women Hyperfeminine?, Elizabeth Anne Schatzel-Murphy

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

The present study aimed to replicate a preliminary model of female heterosexual coercion and subsequently expand the model with gender- and race-related variables. The preliminary model, which specified sexual compulsivity, sexual dominance, sociosexuality, and prior sexual abuse, as predictors of female heterosexual coercion, was sufficiently replicated with a racially diverse sample of college women. The model was then successfully expanded by adding rape myth acceptance and hyperfemininity to the model. Hyperfemininity was found to be a core predictor of female heterosexual coercion, challenging the notion that sexual coercion is an inherently "masculine" behavior. Actual minority status, perceived minority status, and …

Poverty In Massachusetts By Race, Randy Albelda, Ferry Cadet, Dinghong Mei

Center for Social Policy Publications

Massachusetts has lower total poverty rates compared to the US average. However, Asian and other minorities in Massachusetts higher poverty rates while Black and White populations have lower poverty rates than compared to US averages.

Poverty rates by race differ considerably across Massachusetts’ ten largest cities. For Blacks, the highest poverty rates are in Fall River (41.7%), for Asians it is Boston (30.2%) and for Whites is it s New Bedford (19.4%). Quincy’s poverty rates are the lowest for Whites (8.0%) and other racial groups (11.2%), while Cambridge has the lowest poverty rates for Blacks at 15.2% and Brockton for …

Risk Factors For Driving Cessation Vary By Race And Ethnicity, Elizabeth Dugan, Frank Porell, Chae Man Lee

Gerontology Institute Publications

Driving is related to our identity and independence as well as allowing us to get needed goods, services, and social opportunities that enrich daily life. Yet with increasing age, the risk for developing threats to medical fitness to drive increases. Driving cessation is related to a long list of negative outcomes, such as: depression, social isolation, diminished access to health care, and diminished quality of life. We investigated risks for driving cessation, paying close attention to racial differences. This study used data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), 1998-2008. The study included N=46, 528 older people (age 65 and …

Grandparent Care In The United States: Comparisons By Race And Ethnicity, Jan Mutchler, Seungah Lee, Lindsey A. Baker

Gerontology Institute Publications

The purpose of this report is to compare information on grandparent caregivers in the United States among members of five different racial and ethnic groups. Many grandparents are responsible for grandchildren who live with them in the same household. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act mandates that statistics be collected on grandparents who serve as caregivers to a grandchild. In response to this requirement, questions were developed for the 2000 Census of Population asking each adult about care for grandchildren living in the same household.2 Data from the 2000 Census 5% Public Use Microdata Sample are used in our calculations. The …

The Impact Of A Culturally Responsive School Environment On Pre-Service Teachers' Willingness To Teach In A School, Delois Maxwell

Trotter Review

In a climate that acknowledges the need for teacher educators to prepare new teachers for culturally diverse student bodies, the study examines the extent to which selected features of an urban school environment affect a preservice teacher's willingness to teach in the school. A survey was administered to 48 preservice teachers after they completed a 7-week student teaching experience in a large urban school district. The survey sample was drawn from a northeastern university which enrolls 90% Caucasian education students. The study pursues the following research questions: does race/ethnicity, gender, program level, school location and major relate to the preservice …

Leadership For Diversity: Effectively Managing For A Transformation, Adrian K. Haugabrook

Trotter Review

Diversity has become a contentious theme woven throughout many different aspects of higher education. Multiculturalism, ethnic studies, women's studies, curriculum reform, strategies for increasing access and opportunity to the under-represented and under-served and improving campus climate have all been vehicles to promote and further diversity initiatives. Diversity stands to challenge much of what has been the traditional views of higher education. The efforts to promote multiculturalism and diversity have caused the academy and the enterprise of higher learning to introspectively examine and reexamine its values, beliefs and relationships to a much larger society. American higher education now sees itself in …

Introduction, James Jennings

Trotter Review

The Summer 1995 issue of the Trotter Review, "Public Health and Communities of Color: Challenges and Strategies," provides a range of essays and two personal commentaries on facets of public health, race, and ethnicity in urban America. The essays are written by scholars and activists familiar with public health and issues of race, access, and diversity. The first article is the Executive Summary of the Institute of Medicine's national report, Balancing the Scales of Opportunity: Ensuring Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Health Professions. This report focuses on the problem of underrepresentation of Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans in the …

Disparities In The Health Care Status Of Women: Implications For Research, Marcia I. Wells-Lawson

Trotter Review

Even a cursory review of data on the health status of women reveals striking differences by race. According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, death rates among Black women from the three leading causes of death (cardiac disease, cancer and cerebrovascular disease) exceed those of white, Asian, Native American and Latina women for each age category from 45-84. With the exception of Black women, the death rates among white women from these diseases exceed those of other ethnic groups of women. Data on two of the risk factors for cardiac and cerebrovascular diseases (hypertension and obesity), show …

Programmatic Responses To The Aids Epidemic By Communities Of Color In Massachusetts, Ron E. Armstead

Trotter Review

The Centers for Disease Control found that minorities now account for more than half of all the HIV cases in the United States. For African Americans, the rate was more than 5 times as high as that for whites. Further, the disease has equally affected women and children in the African American community; 84% of the AIDS cases involving children age 12 and under can be found in the African American community. AIDS has now become the second leading cause of death for African American women. This essay describes a research project focusing on the factors involved in developing and …

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 …

Introduction, James Jennings

Trotter Review

This special issue of the Trotter Review is devoted to a broad range of topics related to race, power, and voting. Although voting is a critically important political tool for black America, the vote does not necessarily guarantee that a group will enjoy power in society. At the same time that we seek greater rates of voter registration and turnout at all levels of the electoral process, we must also continue to struggle towards an agenda that delivers power to the black community.

The issue opens with an explanation of why statehood for Washington, D.C., should be a key item …

Race And Presidential Politics '92: The Challenge To Go Another Way, May Louie

Trotter Review

At presidential election time in 1992, America is once again looking at limited political options for national leadership. The Republican party platform is its most conservative ever. The Democratic party ticket is dominated by southern Dixiecrats. And we who have marched and organized, and risked and sacrificed much for racial equality and political empowerment, must now match our sense of foreboding with our determination to meet the challenge before us. Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 nation-shaking, agenda-setting presidential campaigns took us to places we had never been before and gave us a glimpse at the possibility of racial and economic …

Crime, Drugs, And Race, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

The crime and criminal record statistics of black Americans are frightening; and they keep getting worse. These figures, of course, give us pause. Yet, it must be kept in mind that none of these figures demonstrates that blacks as a race are more prone to crime. Rather, the figures show that the average black person in the United States is more likely than the average white person to be so situated in the social structure that he or she is more likely to be involved in crime, with an even higher likelihood of being arrested, convicted, and imprisoned.

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.