The decomposition of economic outcomes as a result of changes in Brazil’s male age-education structure

In Brazil, the age and education compositions of the male labor force is changing with great regional variation. Based on Demographic Census microdata, results indicate that cohort size has a negative impact on earnings, but this effect is decreasing over time. In this study we consider the impact on earnings by age and education, as well as estimated income inequality reduction and racial differentials. Fertility decline and improvements regarding educational attainment had a significant influence on the decline of income inequality in the country. Moreover, the non-white population has been experiencing less success in relation to educational achievement, compared to the white population.

Racial Differentials in the Components of Population Change and Neighborhood Transitions in New York City, 1980–2010: The Distinct Role of Asian Net Inflows in the Age of Net Outflows of Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics

We examine New York’s components of population change—net migration and natural increase—by race and space to explain increases in integrated and minority neighborhoods, in this era of greater ethnoracial diversity. The city has net outflows of Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, and net Asian inflows, a new dynamic that has reordered its neighborhoods. Asians, often joined by Hispanics, moved into White neighborhoods without triggering White flight, resulting in integrated neighborhoods without Blacks. These neighborhoods constitute a plurality, furthering Black exclusion. Minority neighborhoods saw net outflows, an overlooked phenomenon, but expanded thanks to natural increase, which maintains the existing racial structure. White inflows have helped transition some minority neighborhoods to integrated areas, though integrated neighborhoods with Blacks declined overall. As Asians and Hispanics occupy historically White spaces, this warrants a reconceptualization of race and the emerging racial hierarchy, and a focus on the gatekeeper role of Asians and Hispanics.

Stubborn Materiality: African American Religious Naturalism and Becoming Our Humanity

This chapter describes the emergence of an African-American religious naturalism that has affinities with theoretical developments offering new materialist views of the human. It proposes a humanistic discourse that resists both problematic forms of anthropocentricism implicit in modern humanism and questionable racial differentials reinforced by Enlightenment ideals. The chapter introduces scientific theories advanced by the tenets of religious naturalism that help to envision humanity as a specific life form, or as nature made aware of itself. With the concept of sacred humanity, it explores humans as sacred centers of value and distinct movements of nature itself where deep relationality and interconnectedness become key metaphors for understanding what constitutes our processes of becoming human. This naturalistic view of humanity is set within the context of African-American culture and history to underscore the conceptual richness of the liberationist motif within black religiosity and to celebrate its enduring legacy.

Riding the Stagecoach to Hell: A Qualitative Analysis of Racial Discrimination in Mortgage Lending

Recent studies have used statistical methods to show that minorities were more likely than equally qualified whites to receive high–cost, high–risk loans during the U.S. housing boom, evidence taken to suggest widespread discrimination in the mortgage lending industry. The evidence, however, was indirect, being inferred from racial differentials that persisted after controlling for other factors known to affect the terms of lending. Here we assemble a qualitative database to generate direct evidence of discrimination. Using a sample of 220 statements randomly selected from documents assembled in the course of recent fair lending lawsuits, we code texts for evidence of individual discrimination, structural discrimination, and potential discrimination in mortgage lending practices. We find that 76 percent of the texts indicated the existence of structural discrimination, with only 11 percent suggesting individual discrimination alone. We then present a sample of texts that were coded as discriminatory to reveal the way in which racial discrimination was embedded within the social structure of U.S. mortgage lending, and to reveal the specific microsocial mechanisms by which this discrimination was effected.

What Brown Awakened

Brown v. Board of Education established equality as a central commitment of American schools but launched more than a half century of debate over whether students from different racial, religious, gender, and ethnic backgrounds, and other lines of difference must be taught in the same classrooms. Brown explicitly rejected state-ordered racial segregation, yet neither law nor practice has produced a norm of racially integrated classrooms. Courts restrict modest voluntary efforts to achieve racially mixed schools. Schools in fact are now more racially segregated than they were at the height of the desegregation effort. Talk of this disappointing development dominated the events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision. Instead of looking at the composition of schools and classrooms, policy-makers measure racial equality in American schooling by efforts to reduce racial differentials in student performance on achievement tests, and those efforts have yielded minimal success. Historians question whether the lawyers litigating Brown undermined social changes already in the works or so narrowed reforms to the focus on schools that they turned away from the pursuit of economic justice. Commentators have even questioned whether the Court’s decision itself ever produced real civil rights reform. Although Brown focused on racial equality, it also inspired social movements to pursue equal schooling beyond racial differences, and it yielded successful legal and policy changes addressing the treatment of students’ language, gender, disability, immigration status, socioeconomic status, religion, and sexual orientation. These developments are themselves still news, inadequately acknowledged and appreciated as another key legacy of Brown. Yet here, too, judges, legislators, school officials, experts, and parents disagree over whether and when equality calls for teaching together, in the same classrooms, students who are or who are perceived to be different from one another. Parents and educators have at times pushed for separate instruction and at times for instructing different students side by side. As the twenty-first century proceeds, equality in law and policy in the United States increasingly calls for mixing English-language learners with English-speaking students and disabled with non-disabled students, but students’ residential segregation and school assignments often produce schools and classrooms divided along lines of race, ethnicity, and socio-economic class.

'Differential poverty rates are responsible for the racial differentials in HIV prevalence in South Africa'; an enduring and dangerous epidemiological urban legend?

It is widely held to be axiomatic in South African epidemiological and social science circles that it is not worth comparing the risk factors underpinning the dramatic differences in HIV spread in South Africa’s racial groups, as these are all explained by corresponding differences in socio-economic status. The available evidence, however, suggests that HIV is not simply contoured along lines of socio-economic deprivation; rather, other – largely culturally determined – factors such as the practice and acceptance of multiple concurrent sexual partnerships play a key role. Comparison of sexual behaviours between South Africa’s different races supports the likelihood that cultural and not socio-economic factors are the mediators of differential racial HIV spread. Finally, it is argued that the failure of many South African experts in the study of HIV to consider race as a valid variable for analysis, and allied to this their continued exaggeration of the importance of socio-economic rather than cultural factors, has contributed to the relative failure of our national AIDS strategy.