“Living in Each Other's Pockets”: The Navigation of Social Distances by Middle Class Families in Los Angeles

2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alesia F. Montgomery
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Urban Core ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class Families

In Hollywood movies and dystopian critiques, Los Angeles is two cities: one wealthy, white, and gated, the other impoverished, dark, and carceral. This depiction verges on caricature, eliding the diversity and maneuvers of the region's middle class. Drawing upon ethnographies of middle class families (black, white, Latino, Asian) in affluent areas of West Los Angeles and the Valley and in the low‐income areas that are located south and east of downtown Los Angeles, I explore how and why, and at what costs, parents engage in daily maneuvers to place their children in beneficial settings across the region's vast sprawl. I describe these maneuvers that resemble a game of “musical chairs” as selective flight. In contrast to middle class flight to the suburbs, selective flight involves diurnal rather than residential shifts. Enabling middle‐class families who reside amidst the crumbling infrastructure of the urban core to chase cultural capital and physical safety in ever‐receding advantaged areas, the post‐Civil Rights State expands spatial mobility yet does not close racial distances. The pursuit of ever‐receding spaces of advantage is particularly paradoxical and burdensome for black middle‐class parents.

scholarly journals A Critical Review of Bilingual Education in the United States: From Basements and Pride to Boutiques and Profit

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 14-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Flores ◽  
Ofelia García
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Bilingual Education ◽  
Low Income ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Structural Barriers ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Immersion Programs ◽  
Middle Class Families

ABSTRACTIn this article we connect the institutionalization of bilingual education to a post–Civil Rights racial formation that located the root of educational inequalities in the psychological condition of people of color in ways that obscured the structural barriers confronting communities of color. Within this context, bilingual education was institutionalized with the goal of instilling cultural pride in Latinx students in ways that would remediate their perceived linguistic deficiencies. This left bilingual educators struggling to develop affirmative spaces for Latinx children within a context where these students continued to be devalued by the broader school and societal context. More recent years have witnessed the dismantling of these affirmative spaces and their replacement with two-way immersion programs that seek to cater to White middle-class families. While these programs have offered new spaces for the affirmation of the bilingualism of Latinx children, they do little to address the power hierarchies between the low-income Latinx communities and White middle-class communities that are being served by these programs. We end with a call to situate struggles for bilingual education within broader efforts to combat the racialization of Latinx and other minoritized communities.

scholarly journals Russian Pro-Natalist Policy and Its Hidden Dilemma

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-402
Author(s):  
Y.V. Latov ◽  
◽  
N.V. Latova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Birth Rate ◽  
Population Decline ◽  
International Studies ◽  
Russian Government ◽  
Less Is More ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Middle Class Families

The demographic policy of the Russian government, which aims to ‘preserve and increase the people’, combines two qualitatively different approaches to understanding the problem of population decline. Most often, the emphasis is placed on stimulating fertility, although there is also an understanding that it is important to raise the quality of their upbringing and education. While the focus on increasing human capital is economically justified, the desire to increase the birth rate has no such justification. The theory of demographic transition proves that stimulating the birth rate is an erroneous goal. The ‘cash for babies’ policy applied in Russia is based on the conviction that children, even those born in poor and dysfunctional families, inevitably ‘pass’ through the education system and become qualified workers. On the basis of this stereotype, the system of pro-natalist incentives is built in such a way that, in accordance with the law of diminishing marginal utility, it creates stronger incentives for poorer families and is therefore actually aimed at increasing the birth rate primarily in the poor strata, having little effect on middle-class families. Meanwhile, modern theories of social capital and labor market signals prove the limited ability of schools and universities to play the role of social elevators. International studies (in particular, in the USA) shows that state benefits for children of poor and disadvantaged families contribute to the reproduction of a culture of poverty. Therefore, when the Russian authorities provide assistance primarily to low-income and single-parent families with children, they create problems for the future. The study proposes to replace the current policy based on the principle ‘more babies but cheaper’ with a policy aimed at middle-class families and based on the principle ‘less is more’. Thus, an orientation towards stimulating population growth is replaced by an orientation towards fostering human capital.

Western Literature at Century's End: Sketches in Generation X, Los Angeles, and the Post-Civil Rights Novel

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krista Comer
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Generation X ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Racial Formations ◽  
The Status ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Under Construction ◽  
Post Civil Rights

Since the early 1990s several "serious" southern California writers have begun writing science fiction, detective stories, mysteries, comic satires, even magical realism, finding freshly relevant ways to represent western life at century's end. Through novels by Sandra Tsing Loh and Cynthia Kadohata, I locate this turn to the popular within a larger political and cultural context we might call "post-Civil Rights." In such novels, texts do not take racial alterity as a starting, radically disruptive fact, although they do not claim that America has outgrown racism. Rather, a new racial subject and/or series of racial formations is under construction, invested in updating and reformulating the status of the nonwhite racial other, to account for the enormity of change in recent years, especially the place of youth within globalization discourse.

scholarly journals Modigliani Meets Minsky: Inequality, Debt, and Financial Fragility in America, 1950-2016

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-77
Author(s):  
Alina K. Bartscher ◽  
Moritz Kuhn ◽  
Moritz Schularick ◽  
Ulrike I. Steins
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Low Income ◽  
House Price ◽  
The United States ◽  
Financial Fragility ◽  
Income Growth ◽  
Household Debt ◽  
Housing Wealth ◽  
Home Equity ◽  
Middle Class Families

This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level dataset that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in the United States over the past seven decades. The data show that increased borrowing by middle-class families with low income growth played a central role in rising indebtedness. Debt-to-income ratios have risen most dramatically for households between the 50th and 90th percentiles of the income distribution. While their income growth was low, middle-class families borrowed against the sizable housing wealth gains from rising home prices. Home equity borrowing accounts for about half of the increase in U.S. household debt between the 1970s and 2007. The resulting debt increase made balance sheets more sensitive to income and house price fluctuations and turned the American middle class into the epicenter of growing financial fragility.

Socialization environments of Chinese and Euro-American middle-class babies: Parenting behaviors, verbal discourses and ethnotheories

2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 210-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Keller ◽  
Monika Abels ◽  
Jörn Borke ◽  
Bettina Lamm ◽  
Yanjie Su ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
Parenting Behaviors ◽  
Cultural Model ◽  
Parenting Strategies ◽  
Chinese Families ◽  
Chinese Parents ◽  
Parental Ethnotheories ◽  
Middle Class Families

Children's socialization environments reflect cultural models of parenting. In particular, Euro-American and Chinese families have been described as following different socialization scripts. The present study assesses parenting behaviors as well as parenting ethnotheories with respect to three-month-old babies in middle-class families in Los Angeles and Beijing. Euro-American parents' behaviors towards their children, as well as their parental ethnotheories are assumed to express the cultural model of autonomy; whereas Chinese parents' socialization strategies are assumed to be shaped by the cultural model of relatedness. The results reveal that Euro-American and Chinese mothers embody different cultural models in their verbal parenting behaviors and verbalized parenting strategies. However, the differences are not consistent and there are no differences with respect to non-verbal parenting behaviors. The results are discussed as illustrating the complexity of cultural models of parenting, where cultural messages are expressed differently in different domains.

Unification and Its Discontents

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Brian Kovalesky
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School District ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The State ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
City Schools

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of protests and actions by civil rights activists around de facto school segregation in the Los Angeles area, the residents of a group of small cities just southeast of the City of Los Angeles fought to break away from the Los Angeles City Schools and create a new, independent school district—one that would help preserve racially segregated schools in the area. The “Four Cities” coalition was comprised of residents of the majority white, working-class cities of Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Bell—all of which had joined the Los Angeles City Schools in the 1920s and 1930s rather than continue to operate local districts. The coalition later expanded to include residents of the cities of South Gate, Cudahy, and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, although Vernon was eventually excluded. The Four Cities coalition petitioned for the new district in response to a planned merger of the Los Angeles City Schools—until this time comprised of separate elementary and high school districts—into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The coalition's strategy was to utilize a provision of the district unification process that allowed citizens to petition for reconfiguration or redrawing of boundaries. Unification was encouraged by the California State Board of Education and legislature in order to combine the administrative functions of separate primary and secondary school districts—the dominant model up to this time—to better serve the state's rapidly growing population of children and their educational needs, and was being deliberated in communities across the state and throughout Los Angeles County. The debates at the time over school district unification in the Greater Los Angeles area, like the one over the Four Cities proposal, were inextricably tied to larger issues, such as taxation, control of community institutions, the size and role of state and county government, and racial segregation. At the same time that civil rights activists in the area and the state government alike were articulating a vision of public schools that was more inclusive and demanded larger-scale, consolidated administration, the unification process reveals an often-overlooked grassroots activism among residents of the majority white, working-class cities surrounding Los Angeles that put forward a vision of exclusionary, smaller-scale school districts based on notions of local control and what they termed “community identity.”

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