Search

Kobe Bryant is now in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. He entered in what is perhaps the most decorated Hall of Fame class in the history of the institution. Among the events that inform how athletes and other public figures are perceived are off-court activities and events. On the last day of June 2003, Kobe Bryant had a sexual encounter with a young woman in his suite in a Colorado resort. What resulted from that encounter was part sports spectacle, part legal proceedings, and all public privacy. Legal decisions and actions of an NBA African American icon-under-construction became a part of news coverage for nearly 2 years. This coverage was the onset of Kobe’s “carceral shadow.” W.E.B. Du Bois (1899:254, 249) suggested that, “Crime comes either in spite of intelligence or as a result of misdirected intelligence under severe economic and moral strain… We must add to this the influences of social position and connections in procuring whites pardons or lighter sentences.” That young Colorado woman accused Kobe of sexual assault. Graphic accounts and other evidence presented in the court of public opinion led to a large payment to the alleged victim which ended the civil suit and the legal process. Despite the absence of a trial and conviction, one can understand Kobe through the lens of a carceral citizenship. Similar circumstances—on mere allegation alone—often led to the lynching death of many Black men throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kobe’s carceral shadow followed him from that day forward through an arc of post-non-trial redemption. In this work, I consider these themes in relation to Kobe’s iconic “life incomplete.”

Increasing research attention is being given to former felons, or returning citizens, after their release from prison. This paper contributes to that dialogue by exploring the documentary-making process of a grassroots organization founded by and for returning citizens and their families, and the contributions it made when it was completed in 1996, and continues to make today. Little is known about how community organizations can use the making of an organizational documentary to build the capacities of the organization, its affiliates, a neighborhood, and social change. By exploring the collaborations and challenges that took place during the local reintegration process back into family and community, the start and completion of the documentary in the mid-1990s was quite innovative. This article analyzes reciprocal tensions of service (Simmel 1908) reflected in the documentary when it was completed in 1996, and its continuing relevance to the growth of returning citizenship today.

Background: Perceived racial discrimination (PRD) is known to harm youth, yet few studies use large, representative samples or study caregivers' perceptions of their children's experiences with unjust treatment. We examined how such a measure of PRD was associated with demographic characteristics as well as with physical and mental health outcomes for Black youth across Ohio. Methods: The 2019 Ohio Medicaid Assessment Survey was a complex telephone survey with a representative sample of 31 558 adults, 907 of whom completed a proxy interview for a youth in the household who was Black and age 6 to 18 years. One item from an Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) scale assessed PRD: "To the best of your knowledge, has [name] ever experienced any of the following? Treated or judged unfairly because of [her/his] race or ethnic group." Results: Weighted analyses found that PRD was more common among Black youth who were older, from higher income families, and lived in rural counties. Perceived racial discrimination was also associated with frequent mental distress and with having an emotional or behavioral problem that needs treatment or counseling. It was not associated with any physical health outcomes measured. Conclusion: Our findings resemble those from other studies that use more extensive measures of PRD. While no substitute for extensive measures, the ACEs single-item measure may expand opportunities to study PRD in subgroup analyses of larger, representative samples. Yet our findings and those from other studies already provide considerable evidence that efforts to improve Black youth's mental health should consider their experience with PRD.

This article examines contextual models to bring together the disorder and community capacity perspectives, since both are grounded in social (dis)organization theory and cumulative causation. We analyze how individual and neighborhood characteristics, social and physical disorder, and crime affect three individual community capacity outcomes: city quality of life, neighborhood safety, and household moving intentions. The “broken windows” downward spiral suggests that neighborhood incivilities may decrease multiple psychosocial assessments, or, individual community capacities. Consistent with prior research, we find that social and physical disorder decreases all three outcomes. Second, we find that both disorders also mediate neighborhood effects, including socioeconomic status and residential stability. Third, these direct and indirect disorder effects are not altered by prior victimization or neighborhood crime rates. Reducing disorder will, in turn, improve three distinct domains and geographic scales...

This article examines a place utility model of how destination assets influenced inmigration for the 1950s African American urban system. Archival and historiographical data are combined with census data to conduct weighted least-squares regressions that compare economic, ethnogenic, and other place utilities. Despite declines in migrant selectivity and net southern out-migration, ethnogenic characteristics increased the size of in-migrant streams during the 1950s, net of the momentum from prior migration and, most important, net of economic and demographic place utilities. Even as several dramatic changes began or intensified during the period, ethnogenic attractions continued to shape destination selection during this “bridge” decade of civil rights–era migration.

Articles for “From the Schools of Public Health” focus on practice-related collaborations between the schools and non-academicpartners. Abstracts (approximately 250 words) should be submitted to Michael Maetz, School of Public Health, University ofAlabama at Birmingham, RPHB 220, 1530 3rd Avenue S., Birmingham, AL 35294.

Few recent studies of homelessness have focused on the distribution of the phenomenon across different types of community contexts. Nevertheless, claims are often made about the decline of urban skid rows and the increasing spatial ubiquity of the homeless population. Motivated by these claims, our research analyzes 1990 Census S‐night data at multiple geographic levels to determine whether homeless people remain locationally concentrated or have become more dispersed in the contemporary United States. Data from the 2000 Census, though limited in scope, are briefly examined as well. We find that the “visible” homeless are overrepresented in metropolitan and urban portions of the nation, in central cities of metropolitan areas, and in a minority of neighborhoods within these areas. Such an uneven distribution, which favors the concentration over the dispersion perspective, often takes a polynucleated form in large cities. Forces shaping the geography of homelessness are discussed, as are the policy implications and methodological caveats associated with our results.

Why do rates of homelessness differ across metropolitan contexts? Only tentative answers to this question are provided by previous investigations due to their reliance on a limited range of setting...

on the sociopolitical context of social movements. Specifically, I examine historical urbanization and prior racial institutional development in 136 urban counties of the United States, about 95% of the 1930 African American urban system. WLS regression is used to provide a strong statistical basis for understanding the structural power and liberation context of these two distinct types of activism during the uniquely constrained Depression Era. Both insurgency and chapter-building activities increased due to the expanding non-southern location of African Americans and the effects of WWI-era declines in the population of foreign-born whites. They declined as a result of extreme racial-occupational segregation in the local area and being distant from a predominantly African American county. The factors shaping the two types of activism were not equal, in part due to both shared and non-shared determinants. A particularly instructive finding was that wage growth served as a lever of social control, being negatively related to insurgency. Viewed together, the findings clearly point to the joint influence of economic and noneconomic factors in shaping NAACP activism during the 1930s, and enhance our understanding of the broader determinants of African American activism generally.

This paper investigates the relationship of racial composition to neighborhood population change from 1910 to 1990 in the Cleveland metropolitan area. To better understand the long-term dynamics of urban neighborhood change, we focus our analysis upon the longitudinal relationship of race, socioeconomic status, and life cycle stage to changes in neighborhood population densities. First, we find that the more established neighborhoods of the African-American community have experienced dramatic declines in population since 1950, a pattern that represents a clear change from the earlier part of the twentieth century. Second, population loss is experienced through a variety of mechanisms, including the demolition of dwellings, the increase in housing vacancy, and the decline of household size. Third, much of this population loss should be interpreted within the context of high economic distress, occurring most frequently in older African-American communities. Over time, economic distress appears to be more important than race in and of itself in leading to the loss of neighborhood populations.

Urban ethnogenesis is a process by which a group creates and maintains social networks and communication patterns as the basis for institutional and communal life in urban areas. Ethnogenesis is a foundation upon which most historical, urbanward migrations have been built, including the “Great Migration” of African Americans during the first half of this century. Although a period of decreased migration, the Depression was marked by sizeable movement in which nearly 10% of the total African American population moved interregionally. Ethnogenic measures such as NAACP activism, the number of community newspapers directed at African Americans, and the longevity of a chapter of the National Urban League significantly increased migration flows.

In this article, Townsand Price-Spratlen discusses the role that Audre Lorde, W. E. B. DuBois, and Marlon Riggs have played in forming his orientation towards "praxis" as a queer scholar of African descent. He describes his praxis formation as "negotiating legacies," "an introspective process in which we attempt to learn the lessons of history by seeking to understand the contexts and contributions of our ancestors." Using Lorde's The Cancer Journals, DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk, and Riggs's Tongues Untied, the author illustrates how each of these figures contributed to various phases of his personal and professional development. Through this article, Price-Spratlen provides an example to others of how they may negotiate their own individual legacies.