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Profound differences exist in how Americans from various racial and ethnic groups view police and court officials. We argue that vicarious experiences contribute to this racial and ethnic divide. Drawing on research on social communication, social network composition, and negativity biases in perception and judgment, we devise a theoretical framework to articulate why vicarious experiences magnify racial and ethnic disparities in evaluations of judicial actors. Four hypotheses are tested using original survey data from the state of Washington. Results provide strong evidence that vicarious experiences influence citizens' evaluations of both police and courts, and they do so in a manner that widens racial divides in how those actors are perceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I use data from the 2011 Pew Survey (N = 1,033) to examine the prevalence and correlates of perceived discrimination across Muslim American racial/ethnic groups. Asian Muslims report the lowest frequency of perceived discrimination than other Muslim racial/ethnic groups. Nearly, all Muslim racial/ethnic groups have a few times higher odds of reporting one or more types of perceived discrimination than white Muslims. After controlling for socio-demographic characteristics, the observed relationships persist for Hispanic Muslims but disappear for black and other/mixed race Muslims. Women are less likely than men to report several forms of discrimination. Older Muslims report lower rates of perceived discrimination than younger Muslims. White Muslim men are more likely to report experiencing discrimination than white, black and Asian Muslim women. The findings highlight varying degrees of perceived discrimination among Muslim American racial/ethnic groups and suggest examining negative implications for Muslims who are at the greatest risk of mistreatment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article uses the comparative history of federal systems to interpret the citizenship of the European Union as a form of federal citizenship. The general categories of contemporary citizenship law implicitly refer to centralized states. In order to free ourselves from such unitary concepts, we have to consider the forms of tiered, nested citizenship that have characterized empires, (post) colonial arrangements, and earlier federal systems. Research in comparative federalism is particularly useful here. Thus, the article highlights the beginnings of federal citizenship in the early stages of the United States, Switzerland, and Germany, and stresses parallels with the development of European citizenship. The striking similarities between the citizenship of the early federations and EU citizenship should no longer be overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mortality in the United States is 18% higher than in Costa Rica among adult men and 10% higher among middle-aged women, despite the several times higher income and health expenditures of the United States. This comparison simultaneously shows the potential for substantially lowering mortality in other middleincome countries and highlights the United States' poor health performance. The United States' underperformance is strongly linked to its much steeper socioeconomic (SES) gradients in health. Although the highest SES quartile in the United States has better mortality than the highest quartile in Costa Rica, US mortality in its lowest quartile is markedly worse than in Costa Rica's lowest quartile, providing powerful evidence that the US health inequality patterns are not inevitable. High SES-mortality gradients in the United States are apparent in all broad cause-of-death groups, but Costa Rica's overall mortality advantage can be explained largely by two causes of death: lung cancer and heart disease. Lung cancer mortality in the United States is four times higher among men and six times higher among women compared with Costa Rica. Mortality by heart disease is 54% and 12% higher in the United States than in Costa Rica for men and women, respectively. SES gradients for heart disease and diabetes mortality are also much steeper in the United States. These patterns may be partly explained by much steeper SES gradients in the United States compared with Costa Rica for behavioral and medical risk factors such as smoking, obesity, lack of health insurance, and uncontrolled dysglycemia and hypertension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Sarah Gallo and Holly Link draw on a five-year ethnographic study of Latina/o immigrant children and their elementary schooling to examine the complexities of how children, teachers, and families in a Pennsylvania town navigate learning within a context of unprecedented deportations. Gallo and Link focus on the experiences and perspectives of one student, his teachers, and his parents to explore how his father's detainment and potential deportation affected his life and learning across educational contexts such as home, school, and alternative educational spaces. In attending to the ways that this student effectively developed and deployed his knowledge of immigration outside of his classroom spaces, the authors explore the possibilities and tensions of creating safe spaces for students to draw on immigration experiences for learning in school. Rather than maintaining silence around issues of difference like immigration, they call for educational practices and policies that will better prepare educators to recognize and respond to students' politicized funds of knowledge, the experiences, knowledges, and skills young people deploy and develop across learning contexts that are often not incorporated into classroom settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Carola Suarez-Orozco and colleagues investigate how to improve undocumented undergraduate student experiences across a variety of US campuses. The authors draw on a national survey of diverse undocumented undergraduates attending two- and four-year public and private institutions of higher education. Using an ecological framework that accounts for risk and resilience, Suarez-Orozco and colleagues provide insights into the challenges undocumented undergraduates face and the assets they bring as they navigate their educational contexts. The authors also consider the role of campuses in shaping these experiences and make recommendations, based on quantitative data and the perspectives of students, for creating undocufriendly campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High rates of Hispanic fertility raise an important question: Do Hispanic newborn babies start life's race behind the starting line, poor and disadvantaged? To address this question, we link the newborn infants identified with the new fertility question in the 2006-2010 American Community Survey (ACS) to the poverty status of mothers. Our results document the disproportionately large share (40 percent) of Hispanic babies who are born into poverty. The prospect of poverty is especially high in new Hispanic destinations, especially those in rural areas. For Hispanic newborn babies, poverty cannot be reduced to supply-side explanations that emphasize maladaptive behavioral decisionmaking of parents, that is, nonmarital or teen childbearing, low educational attainment, acquisition of English language skills, or other dimensions of human capital. Hispanics in new destinations often start well behind the starting line--in poverty and with limited opportunities for upward mobility and an inadequate welfare safety net. The recent concentration of Hispanic poverty in new immigrant destinations portends continuing intergenerational inequality as today's newborn infants make their way to productive adult roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In St. Louis, as in many other cities, decline and displacement occurred when key policies, prejudices, and plans interacted with broad economic restructuring to devastate poor and minority communities, while leaving White and middle-class communities largely intact. Amidst overall population loss and neighborhood decline are pockets of prosperity and gentrification within the central city. In this article, we analyze three significant planning interventions in St. Louis, Missouri, that spurred displacement of populations--urban renewal, triage, and the foreclosure crisis. We argue that the differential experiences of Black and White during each of these periods represent two faces of development: one in the north of the city that is largely Black, experiencing vacant land, high crime, and crumbling infrastructure; another in the south of the city that is largely White, enjoying pockets of vibrant commercial development, larger homes, and stable real estate markets. We analyze each period through a framework of uneven and unequal development and displacement, which we call the Divergent City Theory. Based on this theory, planners face an ethical obligation to plan for the future of their cities in a way that seeks to reconcile the structured race and class inequalities of the divergent city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on how the 2016 massacre at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida by Omar Mateen reflects the state of homophobia, racism, and xenophobia in the world. He criticizes attempts to connect Mateen to Islamic terror organizations that suggest homophobia is a foreign aggression to the U.S., citing the rise of white nationalist groups and violence against Muslims in Jews in the U.S. since the Pulse shootings.

This paper examines the types of neighborhoods that black and white homebuyers have secured loans in during the recent housing boom and subsequent bust. We expand upon and refine previous research on locational attainment using loan-level data from the 1992-2010 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) combined with tract- and metropolitan-level data from the 1990, 2000, and 2010 Census and the American Community Survey. Multilevel models show that black homebuyers are moving into considerably more racially segregated neighborhoods than their white counterparts and that their access to "whiter" neighborhoods did not expand during the housing boom, even after controlling for the racial composition of the metropolitan area and other key ecological factors. Conversely, new white homebuyers have been moving into neighborhoods with greater percent black residents, which may be a contributing factor in observed declines in segregation during the past few decades. Additionally, black homebuyers in metropolitan areas with greater suburban growth were on average accessing homes in more integrated neighborhoods. Finally, the models explained considerably more of the variation in the neighborhood racial composition of whites compared to blacks. These findings are suggestive of a dual housing market, one in which the experiences of blacks are still systematically different than those of whites, despite expanded access to homeownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social class confers a bundle of capabilities, practices, and beliefs that are conventionally assumed to be hierarchical, rigid, and self-perpetuating. However, this framework often belies the fact that these qualities needn't be necessarily or exhaustively advantageous. In particular, social change may render obsolete class-linked characteristics that were advantageous in previous periods. Drawing on interviews with homeowners at risk of foreclosure and a yearlong ethnography of a housing counseling organization, I find that although the housing crisis of the “Great Recession” affected both working- and middle-class homeowners alike, the practices of working-class borrowers better positioned them to exploit a number of informational advantages in the rapidly changing mortgage modification setting. My findings are a departure from existing research that treats middle-class capabilities and practices as intrinsically advantageous. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study explores the role of white Americans' perceptions of minority groups' socioeconomic status and opportunities in accounting for their racial attitudes in a racially ordered society. It is expected that whites' perceptions of minority group members' status and opportunities have a significant influence on their attitudes toward racial politics in the U.S. The results show that whites' perceptions of a minority group's socioeconomic status and opportunities is an important source for their racial attitudes. But the influence of whites' perceptions of a minority group's status and opportunities on racial attitudes varies depending on the status of each group in a racially ordered society. Whites' perceptions of the socioeconomic status and opportunities of blacks and Latinos are the main sources for their racial attitudes, while their perceptions of Asian Americans have a limited influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers news briefs related to education in the U.S. as of Fall 2015. Topics include the report published by the "The Chronicle of Higher Education" on the median salary of presidents of public and private colleges. The research published in "Scientific American" on children growing up poor hinders brain development and results to poor school performance. The U.S. Department of Education will forgive the loan debts of former students of Corinthian Colleges.

Recent case studies of receiving communities have established that translocal immigrants are transforming their neighbourhoods, producing spaces of identity. While these studies have focused on the reshaping of local power dynamics, less attention has been given to the spaces, themselves, and the qualities that influence identity. This study utilises place identity literature, from environmental psychology, to explore the remaking of MacArthur Park, a public space at the centre of a Mexican and Central American immigrant community in Los Angeles, California. We find that new ‘place identities’ are influenced by the specific physical, social, and cultural elements of the park, as study participants attempt to maintain identities influenced by important places in their sending communities. The result is a park that has emotional significance for participants, significance that leads to agency – everyday and political practices – to protect the park, sometimes in the face of immense challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article expands the theoretical debate on racist nativism and the specific impact that it has on the experiences of interracial mixed-status couples in the USA. In-depth interviews suggest that the costs of racist nativist microaggressions and macroaggressions are experienced differently, depending on the social status of each member of the couple. Microaggressions target Latinos/as, while racial profiling, a macroaggression, is mainly experienced by Latino men; however, in both cases their white partners also experience rebound racism on behalf of their partners. White women partnered with Latinos experience the greatest rebound effects of racist nativism. Larger macro-policies create a precarious position for couples; this leads them to make calculated legal risks to sustain their families and ultimately constrains their freedoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role that the racial identity of whites in the U.S. played in the country's social structure from the end of World War II through the early 21st century, including in regard to whites' alleged reluctance to give up their social position of privilege. An overview of the social conditions of U.S. minorities, including in regard to the alleged capitalist exploitation of minority communities and affirmative action programs, is provided.

Most studies of police–minority relations in America focus on blacks, usually in comparison with whites. This pattern is particularly puzzling in light of the growing population of Hispanic Americans throughout the US, now outnumbering blacks and consisting of the majority in some major cities. Aside from the need for more empirical research on the policing of Hispanics per se, comparing Hispanics’ relations with the police to other racial and ethnic groups offers some important insights into both the dimensions that are shared across groups and those that are distinctive to Hispanics. This article critically evaluates the small body of empirical research literature on this topic – highlighting both deficiencies in this literature as well as suggestive findings – and concludes by identifying a set of issues that should be addressed in future studies. The available evidence largely supports a racial-hierarchy perspective with regard to the policing of different racial and ethnic groups in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we adjudicate between competing claims of persisting segregation and rapid integration by analyzing trends in residential dissimilarity and spatial isolation for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians living in 287 consistently defined metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2010. On average, Black segregation and isolation have fallen steadily but still remain very high in many areas, particularly those areas historically characterized by hypersegregation. In contrast, Hispanic segregation has increased slightly but Hispanic isolation has risen substantially owing to rapid population growth. Asian segregation has changed little and remains moderate, and although Asian isolation has increased it remains at low levels compared with other groups. Whites remain quite isolated from all three minority groups in metropolitan America, despite rising diversity and some shifts toward integration from the minority viewpoint.Multivariate analyses reveal that minority segregation and spatial isolation are actively produced in some areas by restrictive density zoning regimes, large and/or rising minority percentages, lagging minority socioeconomic status, and active expressions of anti-Black and anti-Latino sentiment, especially in large metropolitan areas. Areas displaying these characteristics are either integrating very slowly (in the case of Blacks) or becoming more segregated (in the case of Hispanics), whereas those lacking these attributes are clearly moving toward integration, often quite rapidly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three early studies of the impact of IT on American society suggested that it was having a negative impact on social life, as well as mass media use. This article reviews the results from two large multiyear US national surveys that have been monitoring social change in US daily life with high response rates: (1) the 1974-2012 General Social Survey (GSS; with more than 55,000 adult respondents aged 18+) and (2) the 2003-2011 American Time-Use Survey (ATUS; with more than 100,000 such respondents). The GSS has collected time-estimate data on particular social and media activities, while the ATUS surveys have collected complete 24-h diary accounts across a single day. Our analysis is conducted on two levels to determine whether various social/media activities have changed (1) at the aggregate societal level as new IT have diffused over the last 20 years and (2) among individuals who use these new media more. In both surveys, there seems little if any significant impact of these new media on social/media time, even though they had become the predominant source of information and social contact by 2004. GSS respondents in general have not reported lower levels of social or media contact since the 1990s, and while those GSS respondents who spent more time on the Internet did report fewer social visits with relatives, they reported more visits with friends, compared to those who do not use the Internet. The main difference between users and nonusers in the ATUS was with time at paid work, and that was only partially explained by higher Internet use by teens and on days off from work. For reading and certain other behaviors, Internet use was sometimes associated with increased use in these surveys. Moreover, no consistent decline in either social or media activities was found in either survey across this period of Internet diffusion, much in line with the earlier national studies. At the same time, it seems clear that not only the ATUS but diary studies in other countries are failing to capture the significant social impact of IT on the rest of life in the new digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the individual and family resilience, social conditions and psychology of migrant farmworkers in the U.S., within a particular focus on Mexican and Latin American agricultural workers. An overview of the social conditions of immigrant children, including their education, child care and their tendency to be enrolled in different schools each year, is provided. An overview of the health of immigrant farmworkers and their families, including in comparison to the rest of the U.S. population and their level of stress, is also provided.

Working out large-scale processes through close attention to local-level analysis remained central to Louise Tilly's approach to social history. An ongoing commitment to agency and strategy undergirded her vision for a global history that made connections between large-scale processes across space, between human agency and structure, and between the past and present. Her vision remains an important influence in my coauthored comparative history of the welfare state in England, France, and the United States. This is illustrated by a discussion of unemployment policies in the three countries at one particular moment of crisis, the Great Depression, concentrating on the United States, where the Depression hit first and hit the hardest. Important differences in demography, the mobilization of ordinary citizens, the responsiveness of state structures to democratic pressure, and public attitudes about the legitimate role of government all affected the history of unemployment policy in each country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This Article explores the underappreciated role that agency insiders play in directing outside oversight of their employer agencies and, in turn, manipulating agency policy development. Specifically, the Article defines, documents, and evaluates the phenomenon of "soft whistleblowing"--an agency employee's deliberate, unsanctioned, substantive, and instrumental disclosure of nonpublic information about issues of policy. This phenomenon is ubiquitous but has received no systematic attention in the academic literature. As the Article demonstrates, agency employees regularly engage in soft whistleblowing to congressional staff, journalists, and agency watchdog groups, in an effort to bring outside pressure to bear on their employer agencies to shift policymaking direction. The phenomenon results in a high-volume, employee-generated flow of information out of agencies. This flow has significant implications for the distribution of policymaking power within agencies and for the direction and efficacy of agency oversight. For example, the Article posits that soft whistleblowing empowers those agency professionals whose codes of ethics encourage some information disclosure (engineers are one example), while disempowering agency lawyers, whose codes of ethics all but forbids unsanctioned disclosures about their client agencies' activities. With respect to outside oversight, soft whistleblowing increases agency transparency and strengthens congressional oversight, but undermines so-called "presidential administration." Consequently, the activity likely serves a keel-like function, keeping the agency on a relatively steady policymaking course in the face of shifting political winds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the burdens that colleges in the U.S. would face in restricting the use of student athletes' use of social media and controlling their freedom of speech. It states that it creates friction with the interests of athletes in freedom of expression. It mentions that the tight control of the athlete's speech in all settings can raise serious questions about whether an athlete has reasonable alternatives to social media.

I use data from the 2004 General Social Survey (N=719) and multivariate analyses to: explore the effects of race on attitudes toward Muslims; evaluate the extent to which the racial differences were mediated by psychological and religious factors; and assess whether the race effects differed significantly by gender. The findings show that blacks report significantly more favourable feelings toward Muslims than whites. Those respondents who are female, more educated and Catholic also hold significantly higher scores on the 100-point scale assessing feelings toward Muslims. After controlling for religious and psychological factors, I find that the racial difference in feelings toward Muslims is increased, indicating that the race effect is suppressed by these factors. Moderation analysis reveals that white men hold the highest level of negative feelings toward Muslims, compared to women and black men. The findings suggest challenging the misconstrued perceptions of Muslims through education and endorsement of positive images. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social networking sites are globally popular. In the United States, these types of sites are perceived positively by users and used at high rates, which has likely yielded personal health behavior displays such as substance abuse and depression. Due to possible cultural influence present on these sites, it remains unknown if SNS could be utilized towards identifying health-related displays internationally, specifically in resource-limited countries like Ecuador. The study aimed to explore the perceptions and use of social networking sites in the United States and Ecuador. Perceptions and use were examined through interviews in the US and paper surveys in Ecuador. Interviews and surveys addressed identical items. US university students reported more positive views of social networking sites and more social networking site use than Ecuadorian students, but reported internet use was similar. Thus, US and Ecuadorian students view and use social networking sites differently. These differences illustrate that cultural considerations should be taken when using social networking sites in global intervention research, as well as the potential for this area of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from fifty in-depth interviews, this research examines the role of existing parental language knowledge on the ethnic identity negotiation of two ethnically distinct children of immigrant groups-Vietnamese and Chinese-Vietnamese-whose families have emigrated from Vietnam to the Southern California region of the United States. While previous research focused primarily on the influence of premigration status on first-generation immigrants, this article considers how a central aspect of premigration status ( intranational ethnicity) applies specifically to the children of first generation immigrants. By taking the premigration approach of comparing the experiences of different ancestral-origin groups from a single nation (the intranational ethnicity perspective), this analysis suggests that a family's premigration ethnic status shapes the 1.5 and second-generation's ethnic self-identification choices through the mediation of parental language knowledge. Specifically, for the children of immigrants with twice-minority status (Chinese-Vietnamese Americans), parental language knowledge serves as an easy ethnic identity default during these children's early self-identification process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]