Racial Mobility Research Articles

Black-White Trends in Intergenerational Educational Mobility: A Positional Analysis

This article examines black-white differences in intergenerational educational mobility for cohorts born in the United States during 1915–84. Using a novel mobility measure based on relative educational positions, the author compares racial mobility flows across the entire schooling distribution. The empirical analysis reveals widespread equalization among blacks and whites in upward mobility out of the bottom of the schooling distribution but widespread persistence in black disadvantage in downward mobility out of the top of the schooling distribution. These findings are consistent with a pattern of differentially maintained educational advantage, suggesting a lasting significance of race among well-educated families. The author presents some possible explanations for these findings and discusses how they align with reported black-white differences in intergenerational income mobility.

The Asian American assimilation paradox

ABSTRACT The fastest growing ethnoracial group in the United States, Asian Americans are the most highly educated, the highest earning, and the most likely to intermarry. Once deemed diseased, morally deviant, unfit for citizenship, and unassimilable, Asian Americans have attained unprecedented racial mobility, now boasting socioeconomic outcomes that surpass those of native-born Whites. Their attainment has led some social scientists to conclude that Asians are rapidly assimilating into American mainstream and remaking it in the process. While Asian American attainment defies theories of racial disadvantage, their experiences with xenophobia, racism, and anti-Asian violence vex theories of assimilation – pointing to an assimilation paradox. At no recent time has the paradox become more apparent than during COVID-19 pandemic. We maintain that the paradox reflects three tensions: the ahistorical nature of sociologists’ research on Asian American assimilation; the tautology of using educational attainment acquired from immigrants’ countries of origin as a measure of structural assimilation in their country of destination; and the disjuncture between the way sociologists normatively measure assimilation and the way ethnoracial minorities experience it. By integrating legacies of exclusion into theories of Asian American assimilation, addressing the tautology, and incorporating a subject-centered approach into empirical measures, we advance theory and research, and reclaim narratives of Asian American assimilation.

Racial capital and white middle class territorialization in Salvador, Brazil

ABSTRACT In this article we seek to first conceptualize whiteness as racial capital and then apply this conceptualization to analyze how whiteness functions in structuring social space in Salvador, Brazil. This article thus seeks to put into conversation different bodies of literature, namely race and racialization, critical whiteness studies, class analysis, gender analysis, and territorial analysis. In other words, we seek to provide an intersectional territorialization of how race, class, status, and gender work together to structure urban living space in general and in private, middle-class condominiums in particular. We do so by focusing on the intersection between whiteness and belonging to the middle to upper-middle classes and the mechanisms by which the approach to a white identity functions as a factor of racial capital and socioeconomic mobility.

A Critical Yoga Studies Approach to Grappling with Race: Introducing “Racial Tourism,” “Racial Mobilities,” and “Justice Storytelling” in the Context of Racial Fraud in the Academy

In this Critical Yoga Studies (CYS) examination, I introduce terms, “racial tourism,” and “racial mobility,” and a method, “justice storytelling.” These terms and this method are poised to be used strategically in the quest to grapple with race and racial fraud in the academy. Racial fraud in the academy is exemplified by, but not limited to, infamous scholars such as Rachel Dolezal, Jessica Krug, Andrea Smith, Elizabeth Warren, and BethAnn McLaughlin. The terms “racial mobility” and “racial tourism,” intentionally create space in which to notice and assess racial fraud. In establishing CYS, I aim to provide epistemic space in which pause the cycle of harm (ie. instigated by exposure to racial fraud in the academy) and reaction (outrage, condemnation) and make space to notice, witness, and be (“this is happening”). The terms, method, and guiding questions offered in this study create epistemic space to notice race, to continue to be despite racism, and assess the ongoing project of racial categorizations in order to quell disorientation that results from harm. I add these terms to the basket of more highly circulating terms (such as “cultural appropriation,” and “identity fraud”) used to describe and respond to: (1) the specific phenomenon of white scholars engaging in racial fraud, and (2) the broader experience of living with and within inseparable systems of race, racial categorizations, and racism in the ivory tower. CYS is grounded in legal scholarship and critical race theory. I build on “legal storytelling” in an experimental, poetic form I call, “justice storytelling,” which enables healing. I find the terms I introduce, “racial tourism” and “racial mobility,” reveal a state of movement at the essence of the racial takings and accumulation of racial value enacted by white scholars committed to racial appropriation and fraudulently coding as Black, brown, and Indigenous in the academy.

‘Traveling habitus’ and the new anthropology of class: proposing a transitive tool for analyzing social mobility in global migration

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ‘momentous mobility’ that lays enmeshed in transcontinental migration. It documents how re-emplacement across differently structured privilege regimes affects and partly reconfigures the habitus of those on-the-move. It looks at the impact that a notoriously segregated city like Dubai has on a group of skilled Western laborers who constitute a minority in their EU country of origin, namely second-generation European Maghrebis from Belgium and the Netherlands. In documenting their newfound class sensibilities in the UAE, it develops the ‘traveling habitus’, a conceptual tool which helps capture the interplay between kinetic human mobility and implicit class mobility. This transitive analytic shows that class may function as an 'arrival infrastructure' in its own right, capable of remolding migrants’ habitual character traits, bodily stylings, and sense of self-worth by means of its gravitational force and timely logic. This contribution thus foregrounds the oft ignored fact that migrants traverse not only geographical places and ethno-religious boundaries, but equally engage in ‘class journeys’ in between class locations. In the UAE, this class progression was further characterized and complicated by a perceived sense of ‘racial mobility’.

Hot right now: Diverse girls navigating technologies of racialized sexy femininity

In this paper, we draw upon group interviews in London and New York City to explore how differently classed and racialized groups of teen girls navigate media constructions of hot, sexy, femininity. We explore how cultural ideals of sexiness are shifting to include more skin shades and larger body parts in specific proportions which align to new sexualized and racialized ideals of femininity. Some celebrities embody these new forms of what is termed racial mobility, but these ambiguous mixtures still relate to a standard that references normative white, middle-class femininity. All girls found navigating the contradictory and impossible ideals of sexy femininity challenging, but white girls had internalized the norms and technologies of “perfectibility” the most, and believed that achieving sexy femininity would bring them confidence. In contrast, racially marginalized girls were much more critical of normative ideals of sexiness. Black girls had a heightened awareness of how their bodies were consistently read as either not sexy enough or hypersexualized and they discussed the dangers this posed to them in both their school communities and in other public spaces. Overall, our findings demonstrate how diverse girls must undertake very different forms of work to navigate and manage expectations around racialized and classed sexiness.

Particularism and racial mobility into privileged occupations

We assess whether the “particularistic mobility thesis”, the predominant theory used to explain African American/White differences in mobility dynamics into occupationally privileged positions in the American labor market is applicable across a greater range of occupational destinations than previously considered, and, if so, whether it captures a racialized “glass ceiling”. Findings from a 2009–2014 Panel Study of Income Dynamics sample of men support broadening the scope of theory. Specifically, across four white-collar and blue-collar privileged destinations, African Americans, relative to, Whites, have low rates of mobility and are restricted to relying on a circumscribed and formal mobility route that is structured by a traditional range of stratification-based causal factors, i.e., background socio-economic status, human capital and job/labor market characteristics. In addition, a racialized glass ceiling in mobility prospects emerges across destinations based on two criteria—income and supervisory authority. We discuss how the application of theory in this broader context enhances our understanding of race-based access to occupational privilege in contemporary America and sheds light on the immediate and longer-term patterns of racial stratification in the American labor market.

Ideologia da beleza na América Latina

Na medida em que estudos empíricos apresentam detalhes sobre práticas locais e interpretações sobre a beleza, é necessário discutir a ideologia de beleza ou ideologias em geral na América Latina, pois elas são compartilhadas com a história do colonialismo e o caminho que as referências de beleza viajam facilmente entre as fronteiras nacionais atualmente. Essas imagens não ditam, mas informam o caminho no qual a mulher (e o homem) constrói seu corpo nas sociedades latinoamericanas. O propósito deste artigo é desenvolver uma teoria das ideologias da beleza latino-americana que se apoia e se move através de uma pesquisa empírica. Além de apresentar uma exaustiva tipologia, alguns conceitos devem ser considerados com o objetivo de estimular o debate acadêmico e a discussão. São identificados dois aspectos da ideologia da beleza: 1) a aceitação da artificialidade; e 2) a mobilidade racial.

Hyper-selectivity, Racial Mobility, and the Remaking of Race

Recent immigrants to the United States are diverse with regard to selectivity. Hyper-selectivity refers to a dual positive selectivity in which immigrants are more likely to have graduated from college than nonmigrants in sending countries and the host population in the United States. This article addresses two questions. First, how does hyper-selectivity affect second-generation educational outcomes? Second, how does second-generation mobility change the cognitive construction of racial categories? It shows how hyper-selectivity among Chinese immigrants results in positive second-generation educational outcomes and racial mobility for Asian Americans. It also raises the question of whether hyper-selectivity operates similarly for non-Asian groups. While there is a second-generation advantage among hyper-selected groups, hyper-selectivity has not changed the cognitive construction of race for blacks and Latinos as it has for Asians.

Spain Is (Not So) Different: Whitening Spain through Late Francoist Comedy

This study argues that the popular comedy cinema of late Francoism (roughly 1960-75), known as comedia sexy, comedia celtibérica, or simply landismo, aimed to shift the international perception of Spain away from racialized stereotypes of the nation’s Africanness in order to move it closer to a white European identity. Troubled by the reputation of Francoism as anachronistic in a context of global decolonization, civil rights in the U.S., and rapid social and economic change within Spain, the regime used the popular cinema industry, which was closely aligned with it ideologically, to portray Spain as upwardly mobile on a geopolitical hierarchy that was imagined as a black/white racial paradigm. Specifically, by intertwining the macho ibérico/sueca narrative trope with racist caricatures of blacks, this cinema aimed to accentuate Spain’s upward geopolitical and racial mobility by contrasting it with the fixity of racial others, while simultaneously retaining a deracialized, commodifiable “difference” as a competitive advantage on the world stage.

Racial Passing And Class Mobility In Philip Roth's The Human Stain And Zoë Wicomb’s Playing In The Light

Racial Passing And Class Mobility In Philip Roth's The Human Stain And Zoë Wicomb’s Playing In The Light

Rosa Parks Redux: Racial Mobility Projects on the Journey to Work

The iconic image of Rosa Parks sitting at the front of a bus documents the most famous commute in history. Rosa Parks was traveling home from work when she refused to give her seat to a white passenger in 1955, an act of civil disobedience that set the Montgomery bus boycott in motion and propelled civil rights onto the national stage. Sixty years later, cities in the putatively postracial era continue to generate profound racial inequalities. Drawing on Rosa Parks's defiant commute as a framing device, I situate the journey to work as a racial mobility project that extends from historic urban processes of racial discrimination, reveals lived experiences of intersectional inequality, and generates future racial disparities. I define commuting as a racial mobility project that organizes, redistributes, and mobilizes resources along racial lines in conjunction with the movement of bodies across space. This framework links the discourses of race and mobility, both of which highlight the dynamics of politics and power. By positioning the journey to work as a racial mobility project, this article seeks to resituate the commute for geographers—conceptually, empirically, and politically—at the nexus of geography, mobility, and the struggle for racial justice in the city.

From Undesirable to Marriageable

Asian Americans are at the vanguard of rising intermarriage in the United States. Once deemed “undesirable” and “unassimilable,” Asian Americans have become the most “marriageable” racial minority group in the country. In this article, I posit that the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act altered the socioeconomic profiles of Asian immigrants to the United States, thereby making them more desirable partners in the marriage market. Further, I explain interracial “marriageability” as a social construction and document how the rising rate of intermarriage has resulted in a growing Asian multiracial population that experiences fewer social identity constraints than do other multiracial Americans. Some demographers claim that these trends reflect a “diversity explosion,” in which racial boundaries are upending, especially for Asian Americans. However, the gendered patterns of intermarriage and the persistence of racial and gender stereotypes, including the “model minority” trope in the case of Asian Americans, indicate that while Asians may have achieved racial mobility, racial boundaries persist and inhibit full incorporation.

A “Mulatto Escape Hatch” in the United States? Examining Evidence of Racial and Social Mobility During the Jim Crow Era

Racial distinctions in the United States have long been characterized as uniquely rigid and governed by strict rules of descent, particularly along the black-white boundary. This is often contrasted with countries, such as Brazil, that recognize "mixed" or intermediate racial categories and allow for more fluidity or ambiguity in racial classification. Recently released longitudinal data from the IPUMS Linked Representative Samples, and the brief inclusion of a "mulatto" category in the U.S. Census, allow us to subject this generally accepted wisdom to empirical test for the 1870-1920 period. We find substantial fluidity in black-mulatto classification between censuses-including notable "downward" racial mobility. Using person fixed-effects models, we also find evidence that among Southern men, the likelihood of being classified as mulatto was related to intercensal changes in occupational status. These findings have implications for studies of race and inequality in the United States, cross-national research on racial classification schemes in the Americas, and for how demographers collect and interpret racial data.

Private Eyes and “Little Helpers”: Doormen, Gatekeepers, and Racial Trespass in Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely and Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress

ABSTRACT Raymond Chandler's and Walter Mosley's protagonists move through different neighborhoods of midcentury Los Angeles and interact with various "gatekeepers" whose function is to maintain and reinforce the racialized urban boundaries of access between LA's neighborhoods, institutions, and other highly regulated public and private spheres. These encounters illuminate anxieties about the stability of racial categories, the physical urban space that these categories would control and organize, and notions of racial and class mobility in midcentury America.

Narrative Order, Racial Hierarchy, and "White" Discourse in James Weldon Johnson's <i>The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man</i> and <i>Along This Way</i>

African Americans became increasingly mobile during early twentieth century, exemplified by Great Migration that began around 1910. Reflecting general anxiety about such racial mobility, March 2, 1911, issue of The Independent included an article about racial passing, Is a Not a Caucasian? Referring to downfall of a family whose part-black ancestry, unknown even to themselves, accidentally became public, anonymous author discusses stupidity and cruelty of one-drop law and advises all negroes to leave South and live people so that, as bleaching process goes on, conundrum will cease to concern them, When is a not a Caucasian? Despite author's insight into precarious nature of racial categories, article's logic is predicated on assumption of stable whiteness. On one hand, along with its title, article's rhetorical question Who knows where ... it [the family's tragedy] may strike next? emphasizes that any person can really be nonwhite. On other hand, to highlight stupidity and cruelty of supremacy, writer must posit an unquestionably pure-white man society's representative. Thus, concerning husband who annulled his marriage to an unwitting passer under Louisiana's infamous law against intermarriage, article states that [t]here was no question that he was a full Caucasian (479) despite its ongoing claim of endless questionability of pure whiteness. One finds such simultaneous refutation and affirmation of clear-cut racial classification in James Weldon Johnson's novel about passing published a year later, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). As Samira Kawash points out, novel's scrutiny of racial binary even problematizes the simple 'black passing for white' logic of passing ... and its attendant model of race expression of a prior, embodied so that Ex-Coloured Man's relation to blackness is shown to be inauthentic his relation to whiteness; rather than being 'both black and white,' he is in fact neither black nor white (70). At same time, novel seems to contradict its own racial investigation when it draws plot development, dramatization, and closure from essentialist and binary-predicated assumption that Ex-Colored Man looks but is actually black. (1) Indeed, though character, with his endlessly fluid identity, cannot but feel he has never really been a Negro (Johnson, Autobiography 153), his narrative only suppresses this indeterminacy by beginning with a confession of the great secret of [his] life a passer (1), featuring those scenes that revolve around his alleged blackness (e.g., his dramatic first recognition of not being a scholar at elementary school [11]), and ending with a regret for abandoning black identity his birthright (154). (2) I argue that while Independent article's tacit belief in pure whiteness undermines its own racial critique, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man utilizes narrator's same belief--and his resulting self-identification passing-white, that is, deviation from real, pure whiteness--to show how hegemony reproduces itself by limiting one's ability to speak outside of white/black binary opposition. (3) In other words, Johnson configures text so that, while Ex-Colored Man's body can put idea of whiteness into question, (4) character-narrator fails to convey this subversive potential because white-dominant system of order and hierarchy controls his approach not only to race but also to storytelling itself. Johnson signals this interconnection between racial hierarchy, narrative order, and white-dominant discourse through way Ex-Colored Man fictively stabilizes his indeterminate race--and, accordingly, story itself--to accommodate audience he (the Ex-Colored Man) has in mind. …

Disposable Mothers, Deployable Children (Review Essay)

This essay reviews Randall Kennedy's Interracial Intimacies (2003), a book that explores African American-white interracial adult-adult relationships and African American- and Native American-white adult-child relationships. For Kennedy, such relationships reflect and promote racial liberty or justice. The paper praises the book for highlighting the arbitrariness and destructiveness of racial classifications, but criticizes it for cloaking in terms of racial liberty what is essentially a conservative narrative about race and poverty that limits socioeconomic and racial mobility. The essay explores how the book fails to take into account fallacies of race neutrality and important distinctions between youth and adults, private and public family law systems, men and women, and adoptive and birth families. The essay first outlines the content and structure of the book and then explores the larger contexts the book ignores. Paying particular attention to Kennedy's portrayal of transracial adoption, the paper shows how his depiction and promotion of such adoption fails to account for the needs and experiences of children, masks institutional racism in, and affecting, the child welfare system, and reflects a white supremacist, patriarchal social agenda that seeks to limit the ability of poor women of color to bear and raise children.

Racial Succession and Residential Mobility in Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio

ABSTRACT:This paper examines the differences in residential succession patterns for black, Hispanic, and Anglo-American households in the Dallas-Forth Worth and San Antonio metropolitan areas. Demographic variables such as household income, household size, and age of household head are compared to improve understanding of housing mobility among groups. In addition, relevant variables are analyzed through application of multivariate logistic regressions. It was found that of the demographic variables that play roles in determining interracial residential succession, race was of overwhelming importance. This implies that there is a lack of interaction between housing markets for the different groups in both Dallas-Forth Worth and San Antonio. In San Antonio, however, the Anglo housing market appears to interact more with the other two groups.

Legislators, bureaucrats and locational decisions and beyond

For a volume or conference on political economy, we might note that Professor Arnold's paper does not explicitly employ the theories of political economy. It is not developed upon a public choice model. There is no rationality model exposed, developed, or tested. Nor is it on one of the grand topics of political economy, such as class. Further, there is no mountain of data for us to chew upon, so as to better digest our theoretical ideas. Rather, it is representative of informal work done by political scientists which is relevant to the tasks of political economists. Indeed, Professor Arnold's work raises substantial questions for us. The paper fits within our substantive concerns regarding equilibria in the cyclic logrolling processes (Bernholz, 1978; Oppenheimer, 1979; Fiorina, 1978; Shepsle, 1978; Weingast, 1978). Professor Arnold's work is an extension of the logrolling, pork barrel subject which has fascinated so many of us. His characterization of the politician as election oriented is consistent with that of most formal models. Finally, there is a persistent concern with inefficiency and suboptimality that appeals to us. With this in mind, let us consider his paper. As he promises, his paper "explore[s] how the federal government makes decisions about the geographical allocation of expenditures" (p. 107). 1 Professor Arnold does not treat the entire subject, but rather focuses on particular aspects of the government's decisions regarding geographical distribution of largesse. He hones in on: (1) the methods by which these decisions may be made; (2) the political repercussions of these decisions; and (3) (his-real subject) the hypothesis that the amount (or severity) of the political consequences are a function of the decision method employed and the substantive nature of the program. Professor Arnold is ovenmpressed w~th the subject's tmportance: "With the federal government spending nearly a quarter of national output, one cannot ignore the differential geographic effects of that spending, any more than one couldignore its differentialeffects by income or race." (p. 107) But, certainly,with geographical, rather than racial mobility of individuals in the economy, differential racial allocations are not easily overcome, yet many people can switch residences from one area to another. Thus, it is at least not self-evident that the moral qualifies of the questions have equal claim. But the subject clearly has interest to us both on its own and as it informs us regarding governmental behavior in general for theoretical purposes.