Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Poverty, Homelessness, And Racial Exclusion, John R. Belcher

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This article reviews the societal forces that have made homelessness the end result of racial exclusion and inner city isolation. It is argued that significant societal change is necessary to reduce racial exclusion and prevent homelessness.

Latinos In Massachusetts: Growth And Geographical Distribution, Ralph Rivera

New England Journal of Public Policy

Massachusetts has undergone radical changes in its racial/ethnic composition in the last ten years. The Latino population, owing to its extraordinary growth rate during the last two decades, is the largest racial/ethnic minority group in the state. Yet relatively little is known about this population because of the "information gap." Based on 1990 census data, this article focuses on the growth and geographical distribution of Latinos in Massachusetts. It considers the undercount of Latinos, the growth of Latinos in the commonwealth from a national perspective, and assesses the increase of Latinos in the New England states. It explores the growth …

A Historic Moment: Black Voters And The 1992 Presidential Race, Clarence Lusane

Trotter Review

November 2, 1991, may well be remembered as a watershed date in the unique and quixotic 1992 presidential race. On that day, stating that he would "not seek the nomination for the Democratic Party," Jesse Jackson backed out of the presidential campaign spotlight and started a chain reaction that has put the black vote in perhaps its least influential position since before 1984.

Extremely low black voter turnout was one of the most significant trends of the 1992 primaries. In the Democratic contests, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton won an impressive percentage of black votes, about 70 percent. However, those votes …

Vote Dilution Research: Methods Of Analysis, Sheila Ards, Marjorie Lewis

Trotter Review

Why have issues which disproportionately affect African Americans not been brought to the policy forefront and given attention properly so that effective solutions can be found? Because of their roles as controllers of the government's budget, politicians and other policy makers decide which problems will be addressed. It is important, therefore, that African Americans elect political candidates of their choice. In the past, African Americans largely were outside the arena of public policy setting. Thus, solutions to problems which disproportionately affected African Americans were not pursued.

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 …

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.

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 …

Ron Daniels: Profile Of A Presidential Candidate, Harold Horton

Trotter Review

The mass media has said very little about it, but Ron Daniels, an African American, is a presidential candidate. In 1988, Daniels was the southern regional coordinator and deputy campaign manager for Jesse Jackson's campaign. Daniels, a veteran social and political activist as well as former director of the National Rainbow Coalition, declared his candidacy for president at a news conference October 14, 1991.

From 1974 to 1980, Daniels served as president of the National Black Political Assembly and in 1980, he was the chairperson of the founding convention of the National Black Independent Political Party. Daniels was the convener …

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 …

Black Pink Collar Workers: Arduous Journey From Field And Kitchen To Office, Judith B. Bremner

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The black female workers' journey from field to office was a long and arduous one. This paper examines the transition of black women from agricultural laborers to pink collar workers during the period 1900 to 1980. More black women than white women have had to work in paid employment in order to maintain their families economically. Discrimination against black pink collar workers in career advancement and the better-paying positions, is especially critical because so many black families are female-headed households in need of all the economic resources that the mother-breadwinner can obtain.

Hawaiian Eth(N)Ics: Race And Religion In Kamehameha Schools, Leigh Caroline Case

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

The Reagan Legacy: Undoing Class, Race And Gender Accords, Mimi Abramovitz

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The impact of Reaganomics on women, workers, and person of color is explored by looking at structural forces in the political economy that encourage business and government at one time to support and another time to undermine the welfare state. The expansion of the welfare state from 1935 to the mid-1970s meshed well with the needs of profitable production, political legitimacy and patriarchal control. With the economic crisis of the 1970s, the welfare state became too competitive with capital accumulation and too supportive of empowered popular movements and had to go. Women, persons of color, and the poor ranked high …

Introduction, James Jennings

Trotter Review

This issue of the Trotter Institute Review is devoted to a two-part proposition. The first is that institutions, agencies, businesses, and schools must begin to reflect the increasingly diverse ethnic and racial characteristics of American society. America is in the midst of a demographic revolution. It is unfortunate that some educators have chosen to ignore the social, economic, and intellectual implications of this change and that others have even become angry and attacked efforts to create an appreciation of multiculturalism.

This unfortunate resistance to the implications of America's unfolding demography leads to the second proposition reflected in this issue of …

Du Bois And The Boys' Club Of The 'Great Books', Bill Farrell

Trotter Review

During the autumn of 1990 the Encyclopedia Britannica published the Great Books of the Western World, its selection of Western civilization's sixty best works. Newspapers respectfully reported the event. Commentators acclaimed the set's affirmation of Western culture. A scholarly symposium at the Library of Congress celebrated the collection's publication. The National Press Club, usually concerned with major politicians and famous journalists, invited Mortimer Adler, the series editor in chief, to address it.

In his interviews and public appearances connected with the publication of the series, Adler stressed that to be a great book a work must discuss a large …

Table Of Contents

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

Table of contents for Explorations in Sights and Sounds, Number 12, Summer, 1992

[Review Of] Richard D. Alba. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation Of White America, Phillips G. Davies

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

Believing that a relatively small amount of research has been done with the ethnic identity of white Americans, Alba surveyed 524 whites in the Albany, New York, area. The majority were English, French, German, and Scottish whose forebears had been in this country for several generations. There were also numerous Irish, and among later immigrants, fairly large numbers of Italian and Polish descent.

Explorations In Sights And Sounds

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

No abstract provided.

[Review Of] Gretchen M. Bataille And Kathleen M. Sands. American Indian Women: A Guide To Research, Cynthia R. Kasee

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

This much needed resource is an annotated bibliography of nearly sixteen hundred works in print and on film or video. As the authors note in the "Introduction," the common fallacy is that there is little available research -- either of historic or contemporary focus -- on the topic of Native American women. This is clearly not true, as evidenced by the wealth of materials detailed in this guide.

[Review Of] Kathleen M. Blee. Women Of The Klan: Racism And Gender In The 1920s, Noel J. Kent

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

We need to know more about why people become racists and what their motivations are for joining racial supremacist groups. Scholarly works dealing with the Ku Klux Klan's meteroic [meteoric] 1920s rise usually emphasize how rapid post-World War urbanization, agricultural depression, and fears of immigrants and cultural changes unsettled traditional-minded citizens in small-town and rural American landscapes and made the Klan attractive. By choosing to concentrate specifically upon women in the Klan, and "the complex ways in which race, religion and gender interact," Kathleen Blee, a sociology professor at the University of Kentucky, has opened up new dimensions here.

[Review Of] Edith Blicksilver. The Ethnic American Woman: Problems. Protests. Lifestyle, Ann Rayson

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

The original edition of The Ethnic American Woman was published in 1978 with 381 pages. For the 1989 edition, the author has added two new sections with a total of ninety-three new pages. "Unit Thirteen: Daring To Be Different" contains sixty-three pages of fiction, poetry, and memoirs from contemporary women writers of German, Russian, Jewish, Anglo, African American, Mennonite, Italian, Chicana, Rumanian, Polish and Irish backgrounds. "Unit Fourteen: Scholarly Essays" is a particularly welcome addition of thirty pages containing essays by Evelyn Avery on blacks and Jews in the fiction of ethnic women, Caroline Dillman on the Southern woman as …

[Review Of] Ko-Lin Chin. Chinese Subculture And Criminality: Non-Traditional Crime Groups In America, Evelyn Hu-Dehart

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

This is probably the first monographic study to examine in-depth the present criminal subculture of New York Chinatown, focusing on the youth gangs that have plagued the community during the past thirty years. As such, it makes a valuable contribution to the fledgling field of Asian American studies, whose scholars have yet to tackle this complex and sensitive topic, as well as to the disciplines of sociology and criminology. It will also help puncture the recently created stereotype of a monolithic, "model minority" Asian population singlemindedly pursuing success in schooling and business.

[Review Of] Sandra Cisneros. Woman Hollering Creek And Other Stories, Cortland P. Auser

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

This collection reveals Cisneros as a refreshing writer of a variety of fictional forms. Her work at times may remind readers of Chicana short fiction by Estella Portillo. Cisneros has the distinct ability of writing vividly and imaginatively in her pictorialization of Mexican American life. She creates sketches, short stories, vignettes, and descriptive "essays."

[Review Of] Judith Ortiz Cofer. Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood, Angelo Costanzo

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

This is a rather loose collection of cuentos, or stories, by a person of two very different worlds. In the years of her youth, Judith Ortiz was shuttled between Paterson, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico. Her parents were immersed in the Spanish culture of the Caribbean tropics; but like so many other Puerto Ricans, her father left the island in the 1950s to secure a better life for his family. He joined the US Navy and spent six months of every year at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the rest of the time at sea. When he was stationed in …

[Review Of] Raymond 1. Demallie And Douglas R. Parks. Eds. Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition And Innovation, David M. Gradwohl

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

Most of the papers included in this anthology were presented in Bismarck in 1982 at a conference entitled "American Indian Religion in the Dakotas: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives." The conference was funded by the North Dakota Humanities Council and brought together a wide array of academicians and lay people representing different and sometimes conflicting experiential and philosophical points of view.

[Review Of] St. Clair Drake. Black Folk Here And There , Vol. I, Bamidele J. Bracy, Jean E. Daniels

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

St. Clair Drake, the recently deceased anthropologist, has written an elaborate "summary essay" on the black experience as it relates to the continent of Africa. In his latter years at Stanford University, Drake was head of the University's Black Studies program. It appears obvious that Drake's consciousness was raised during this particular time span. The research and writing of this book is far different from his seminal work with Clayton (Black Metropolis, 1945). In his "emeritus" years, Drake decided to seek the high ground of an historical anthropological-philosopher and address certain issues that W.E.B. DuBois considered paramount to the study …

[Review Of] Charles A. Eastman. Indian Boyhood, Steven R. Price

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

Following his mother's death shortly after his birth, Charles A. Eastman acquired the name Hakadah -- the pitiful last. Not until age four, when his band of the Santee Sioux defeated their friendly rivals in lacrosse, would he he honored with his second name, Ohiyesa -- winner. This name bears importance, for Eastman retains it as the signature to his autobiography, Indian Boyhood. First published in 1902, the work represents one of the earliest examples of Native American biography as it details the life of Eastman from his native birth to his entrance into the white world at the age …

[Review Of] Charles A. Eastman. Old Indian Days, Hartwig Isernhagen

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

This book -- a major literary work by one of the more widely read early Native American authors, and an ethnographic "source" of some interest -- is now again available thanks to the University of Nebraska Press's efforts to reprint Native American classics. It comes with a very useful introduction by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, which establishes both historical and aesthetic contexts for Ohiyesa's stories. Ruoff provides information on the family backgrounds, the education, and the lives of both Mr. and Mrs. Eastman, gives an independent (and corrective) sketch of the 1862 Sioux uprising that forms the historical background of …

[Review Of] Jewelle Taylor Gibbs. Young, Black And Male In America: An Endangered Species, Calvin E. Harris

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

This is a collection of summaries of studies conducted over the past decade or more focusing on such problems or problem areas as: Education and Achievement of Young Black Males, Employment and Unemployment of Young Black Males, Delinquency Among Black Male Youth, and Teenage Fathers -- Issues Confronting Young Black Males. In fact, the central focus of the studies cited in this anthology are on young black males ranging from their mid-teens to mid-twenties. Besides Gibbs, the other contributors are Ann Brunswick of Columbia University; Michael Connors of Cal State University, Long Beach; Richard Dembo of the University of South …

[Review Of] Susan A. Glenn. Daughters Of The Shtetl: Life And Labor In The Immigrant Generation, Noel J. Kent

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

In this meticulously researched and highly readable work, Susan A. Glenn "examines the experiences of a particular group of Jewish immigrants, European-born daughters who, early in this century, went to work in the American garment industry." The author is attempting here no less than to make sense of the intersecting linkages between eastern European Jewish culture, the immigration experience, working class life, the labor movement, and gender identity.

[Review Of] Joseph Hobbs. Bedouin Life In The Egyptian Wilderness, Torrance Stephens

Explorations in Sights and Sounds

It is not often that a person can pick up a book and read it with clarity and understanding, especially ethnographic materials that attempt to describe peoples of various cultural orientations. Joseph Hobbs has managed to accomplish this task in an enlightening manner.