Carl L. Bankston Iii

• Professor (Full) at Tulane University

This book offers an introduction to thinking about social inequality. It provides a theoretical and historical background to ways of approaching this topic and discusses classic and modern theories of stratification. After identifying the key concepts of this topic, the book lays out evidence on the nature and extent of contemporary social and econ...

This is the introduction to "American Ideas of Equality: A Social History, 1750-2020" (2021). Using historical news sources, statistics, and literary documents, the book provides an interpretive social history of American ideas about the meaning of equality from the colonial period to the present. The book is available from the publisher at: http:/...

In this study, we examine the Vietnamese population of the United States as a case study in the integration of a refugee group. We first offer a brief review of Vietnamese refugee resettlement in the US and the making of a new ethnic community. We then provide a quantitative analysis of socioeconomic mobility among Vietnamese refugees using America...

A central issue in contemporary debates over immigration concerns how immigrants from diverse origins become integrated into their host nation. The children of Asian immigrants in the United States often give the impression of fitting neatly into American society and therefore into the American nation as a model minority. We argue, however, that su...

Disasters provide opportunities to study the social and economic dimensions of large-scale shifts. Drawn by the surge in demand for low-skill construction workers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Latino immigrants represented a substantial share of the New Orleans reconstruction workforce. Scholars, however, have yet to examine how th...

Scholars offer their widely differing takes on the success of charter schools, a "twenty-year experiment" in alternative education systems, largely based in for-profit, inner-city programs.

This chapter discusses the history of immigration in Mississippi and how this compared to the rest of the U.S. South and the nation as a whole. Mississippi received some of the great wave of Southern European arrivals, especially from Italy, that came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Asians in the state dat...

Carl L. Bankston III focuses on the effectiveness of the subsidies being provided by the US Congress to raise the level of higher education industry in the country. Carl says that the more common a good becomes, the more people tend to expect that it should be readily available. The centralized planners may already realize that it is not possible f...

In this study, we look at marriage migration patterns among Thai Americans using US Census data drawn from 5% PUMS sets made available through the IPUMS project. Marriage is one of the most important means of migration to the USA and the overwhelming majority of Thai Americans are foreign-born women married to non-Thai men. Therefore, the sources a...

Carl L. Bankston III focuses on the Rawlsian approach propounded by philosopher John Rawls to social justice. The approach became prevalent in the late twentieth century because it expressed attitudes shaped by two historical experiences: the rise of a mass-consumption economy and the adoption of the civil rights movement as a model for thinking ab...

Introduction Vietnamese is the third most widely spoken language Asian language in the USA, spoken at home by an estimated 1,207,004 people in 2007, or about 2.2 percent of all of those who spoke a non-English language. Only Chinese, with 4.5 percent of non-English speakers, and Tagalog, with 2.7 percent of non-English speakers, were used by more A...

Equality of opportunity, or equality of individuals in a competition to reach unequal positions, has emerged as a fundamental cultural value over the course of American history. However, the ability of individuals to achieve desired occupations and statuses is limited by the structure of available opportunities and by the social origins of individu...

The City of New Orleans is frequently portrayed as an urban center that underwent great changes following the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and much of the attention given to the city has dealt with its revival and reconstruction following the storm. But what has been ignored has been the long-term decline in the population of New Or...

This study considers the relationship between Cajun ethnicity and the intergenerational transmission of the French language. It questions the commonsensical assumption of a positive relationship between ethnic identity and language transmission. It suggests that if an ethnicity is associated with socioeconomic disadvantages, then the greater the et...

In this work, the authors use statistics from the U.S. Census to examine trends in intermarriage, racial and ethnic combinations, and categorizations among Asian Americans. Specifically, the authors want to consider the extent to which family patterns may contribute to Asian Americans and their descendants’ continuing as distinct, becoming members...

In recent years more legal immigrants have entered the United States through marriage than through any other means, while the desirability of current levels and types of immigration has been a matter of controversy. The United States has also been engaged in a heated public debate over the nature and definition of marriage for the past decade. The...

H enry David Thoreau's long essay, fi rst published under the title Resistance to Civil Government, now usually known as Civil Disobedience, is frequently described as one of the founding documents of mod-ern political activism. Thoreau's appeal to the right and obligation of individual con-science to resist political authority certainly infl uence...

Hurricane Katrina struck near New Orleans on August 29, 2005, and resulted in the collapse of the federal protective levee system and the flooding of most of the city. New Orleans East, where the main Vietnamese enclave is located, was especially hard hit. By chance, just weeks before this disaster occurred we collected with our colleagues a wide r...

Background: The existing literature on immigrant's mental health is extensive. While a fairly wide range of mental health problems among immigrants have been identified, the mechanism of migration/mental health dynamics has not been well-understood. And substantively, we know less about the Vietnamese Americans than about immigrants from other coun...

Background: This study examines the differences on waist hip ratio across three groups of Vietnamese. It aims to address key deficiencies in the migration and health literature with a natural experiment research design and to distinguish between migration and selection effects. Methods: Our sample includes 127 Vietnamese immigrants living in New...

This essay attempts to take a broad view of the historical forces that have shaped the discipline of sociology and continue to shape it. It is organized around the concept of crisis, arguing that sociology has been produced by crises and that it has been defined by its responses to crises. It identifies an ethic of control and manipulation as a chi...

Response to Mark E. Pfeifer's featured article

Since the immigration legislation of 1965, marriage to American citizens and resident aliens has been one of the primary paths for migration to the United States. Despite the rapid growth of the Asian American population over the course of the late twentieth century, Asian Americans had still reached only 3 per cent of all Americans by 2000, meanin...

Race conscious school assignment in the United States has been based on two legal rationales: avoiding or remedying discrimination and creating integrated student bodies and ultimately an integrated society. Although the first rationale deals with categories ofpeople, since it deals with discrimina-tion on the basis of category membership, it is es...

The classic, stereotypical U.S. immigrant destination is a large city in the North, Midwest, or far West. New York, Chicago, San Francisco are fixed in our imaginations as the great American immigrant settlements. Until recently, most people rarely considered the U.S. South when they thought of new arrivals from other countries. For much of America...

This case study gauges the perceptions of teachers to the “harm and benefit thesis” of Coleman’s social-capital hypothesis. The study uses data from one de facto segregated southern school system that hastily implemented a court order in 2000. The study collects the perceptions of teachers at five predominantly middle-class White schools that recei...

Caldas and Bankston provide a critical, dispassionate analysis of why desegregation in the United States has failed to achieve the goal of providing equal educational opportunities for all students. They offer case histories through dozens of examples of failed desegregation plans from all over the country. The book takes a very broad perspective o...

There are similarities and differences in the concept of respect as it develops in American children and adolescents whose families came from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and the Philippines. In addition, respect has different effects on adjustment, relationships, and achievement at home and at school, depending on whether cultural groups wer...

By the end of the twentieth century, the United States had witnessed dramatic demographic changes. Among these were shifts in immigration. Since 1965, more than twenty million migrants have entered the United States, more than the largest wave entering between 1880 and 1914 (U.S. Department of Justice 1997). Not only have they arrived in greater nu...

The Brown Decision has received a great deal of journalistic and scholarly attention as we have been celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. Much of the writing about the decision has either celebrated the decision as a great advance in civil rights, or lamented the nation's failure to achieve full school desegregation in the years that followed it....

This article addresses the role of religion in immigrant adaptation through the case of Vietnamese adolescents. Our results show that religious participation consistently makes a significant contribution to ethnic identification, which, in turn, facilitates positive adaptation of immigrant adolescents to American society by increasing the probabili...

Les AA. analysent l'impact de la race et de la composition raciale des classes au sein des etablissements d'enseignement sur le plan de la performance scolaire. Ils presentent un certain nombre de donnees collectees, aux Etats-Unis, en Louisiane en 1990. Ils comparent les resultats scolaires obtenus en langue et en mathematiques en fonction de la c...

This research note presents preliminary research into the relationship between the racial composition of public schools in school districts and the percentages of white students in nonpublic schools in those districts. Specifically, we ask two questions: Is the enrollment of whites in non-public schools associated with minority predominance in publ...

One of the most useful contributions of rational choice theories to the sociology of religion has been the concept of the religious economy. However, this study argues that the rational choice view of the religious economy still suffers from serious short-comings. Here, I argue that the concept of rationality in economic action is more complex than...

Robert D. Putnam has suggested that putatively decreasing civic engagement may result from the growing role of electronic entertainment, especially television, in American life. In this study, I point out that the social capital argument is rooted in a long-standing theoretical perspective on civic life as the realization of human potential through...

This article explores the issue of gender role changes encountered by young Vietnamese‐American women based on our ethnographic study of Versailles Village, a low‐income ethnic community in New Orleans, US. We examine how female Vietnamese high school students deal with conflicts between the stubborn traditionalism of parents and the desire for per...

It has frequently been suggested that the academic achievement of minority students may be hindered by low self-esteem in a white-dominated society. Some researchers and theorists, however, have questioned such assumptions. The self-esteem-academic achievement issue is further complicated by the relatively strong performance of children of immigran...

The concept of the religious economy has been one of the most useful contributions of rational choice theories to the sociology of religion. However, this study argues that religious belief presents a problem for rational choice theories, since it is difficult to see how one can freely choose what one believes to be true in the sense that one can f...

In this study, we suggest that the difficulty in defining, locating, and measuring social capital is at core a philosophical confusion of language, and not just a consequence of excessively wide application. The term “capital” refers to resources for investment. Financial capital consists of specific quantities of assets. Human capital, a metaphori...

Used archival, interview, and demographic data to conduct a historical analysis of school desegregation and its consequences in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana from 1965 through 1997. Findings show the massive white flight to nonpublic schools and adjoining suburban districts and the failure of efforts to reverse this trend. (SLD)

This article examines the process of ethnic self-identification. Utilizing data on Louisiana Cajuns, it proposes that contemporary Cajuns' self-image is rooted in stereotyped descriptions given by outsiders. Content analysis of popular depictions over two centuries shows the features and structure of the image to be quite stable despite considerabl...

Drawing on the example of the Louisiana Cajuns, an ethnic group that has been enjoying a wave of popular revival in recent years, this study suggests that changes in the perception of an ethnic identity are related to socioeconomic transformation. We identify the festival as a key aspect of the Cajun revival since the 1960s. An examination of the h...

This research extends and revises research on the association between the racial composition of schools and academic achievement. Some earlier studies have looked at how the concentration of minority students was related to test performance of both Black and White students, and have found a negative correlation for both groups that could not be att...

Sociologist R. Stephen Warner has recently proposed that immigrant religious organizations in the United States tend to take on a de facto congregational form. By this, he means that they tend to become voluntary gatherings with lay involvement and control and professionalized clergies. In this study, we provide descriptions of two Southeast Asian...

This monograph examines the current state of Vietnamese America, summarizing research findings on Vietnamese children, both those who are native born and those born in Vietnam and raised in the United States. It provides insight into the unique experience of these children in order to help educators, administrators, and social workers deal effectiv...

The authors examined the relationship between individual family structure, school family structure, and school effectiveness—defined as school academic achievement. The relationships were examined while controlling for important school and district-level input and process factors. School family structure had a much stronger relationship with school...

Preface Part I. The Immigrant Generation 1. Cultural Defenders and Brokers: Chinese Responses to the Anti-Chinese Movement K. Scott Wong 2. The Origins of the Chinese Americanization Movement: Wong Chin Foo and the Chinese Equal Rights League Quingsong Zhang 3."Exercise Your Sacred Rights": The Experience of New York's Chinese Laundrymen in Practic...

This study employs 1990 U.S. Census data to examine possible sources of a high rate of endogamy among Louisiana Cajuns. It suggests that a continuing high level of in-group marriage in this ethnicity is surprising, given the group's long residence in the U.S., the ethnic diversity of southwestern Louisiana, and the group's cultural assimilation. Th...

This study examines the applicability of the symbolic ethnicity argument to Louisiana Cajuns . Using data from the Public Use Microdata System of the 1990 census of population , an analysis of spatial concentration , ancestry claims , language use , and patterns of marriage suggests that Cajun ethnicity is not fully apprehended by the symbolic ethn...