Joseph Gerteis

• PhD Sociology
• University of Minnesota

Drawing from recent work on “otherness” and social boundaries in America, we investigate anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish opinion among white Americans. After outlining the logic of the comparison, we use nationally representative data to analyze these forms of othering. Although anti-Muslim opinion is more extensive, the two track together empirically...

The meanings and definition of “diversity” can change across different applications and contexts, but many such meanings have implications for racial difference and racial ideology in the United States. We provide a nationally representative analysis of how everyday Americans assess “diversity” in their own communities. We test how county-level rac...

This paper examines anti-Muslim sentiment in America. Existing research has documented rising hostility to Muslims in Western countries, but has been much less clear about what drives such sentiments or exactly what sort of “other” Muslims are understood to be. Our interest is in the cultural construction of Muslims as a problematic or incompatible...

Goldberg’s Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought examines the central place of Jews within foundational social theory in Germany, France, and the United States. In this essay, I provide my take on Goldberg’s argument and provide some notes of appreciation for the better purchase it provided me on several authors’ positions. I also raise...

Although diversity has become a cherished ideal for Americans, a growing literature suggests that many are also ambivalent about lived experiences of diversity. Focusing on three historically homogeneous neighborhoods in Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, this paper explores the “civic talk” used to express this ambivalence through interrelated...

This paper uses new, nationally representative data to examine how Americans describe their own racial and ethnic identities when they are not constrained by conventional fixed categories. Recent work on shifting racial classifications and the fluidity of racial identities in the United States has questioned the subjective and cultural adequacy of...

Colorblindness is often conceptualized as a set of deeply held but unrecognized ideological tenets. However, we believe that colorblindness has also now become an explicit cultural discourse involving self-conscious claims and specific convictions. To illustrate this point—which has both conceptual and empirical implications—we introduce the notion...

We use data from a nationally representative survey to analyze anti-atheist sentiment in the United States in 2014, replicating analyses from a decade earlier and extending them to consider the factors that foster negative sentiment toward other non-religious persons. We find that anti-atheist sentiment is strong, persistent, and driven in part by...

The concept of colorblind racism has been developed in recent years to explain racial attitudes held by white Americans in the post-civil rights era. The authors use data from a new nationally representative survey with an oversample of black Americans to investigate the prevalence of core elements of colorblind ideology and to see the extent to wh...

Recently, the notion of civil religion has been resurgent in the social sciences, and following in the footsteps of Wilson, this book attempts to bring the concept back to history as well.1 Although the definition of the term has always been problematical, it refers to the way in which visions of the civic order can form into social narratives akin...

This article investigates the problem of ethnic boundary making in a changing context. Our case is Boston’s North End, a historically Italian neighborhood undergoing changes to its social and physical environment, making the ethnic definition of neighborhood identity and belonging more difficult though not less salient. Consequently, participants i...

Pluralism refers to the condition of living amid diversity and also to a positive appreciation for that condition. Historically, pluralism was understood as a divergent goal from assimilation, however much these concepts have coincided in practice. Assimilation – or “Americanization” in an older language – deals with difference by insisting that ne...

Philip S. Gorski's “Barack Obama and civil religion” seeks to revive and reform the concept of civil religion. This response addresses two sets of issues raised by the entwined analytic and normative claims in the chapter. The first concerns the definition of civil religion, including how the civil and religious spheres are connected within it and...

How can we better conceptualize attitudes about difference in an increasingly diverse, multicultural United States? This article uses data from a recent, nationally representative telephone survey with oversamples of African Americans and Hispanics to analyze attitudes about two prominent sources of distinction in the United States. Race and religi...

This paper employs data from a recent national survey to offer an empirical assessment of core theoretical tenets of whiteness studies. Using survey items developed explicitly for this purpose, we analyze three specific propositions relating to whites' awareness and conception of their own racial status: the invisibility of white identity; the unde...

Pluralism refers to the condition of living amid diversity and also to a positive appreciation for that condition. The many similar metaphors describing America as a “melting pot” of different cultures or a “nation of nations” recognize both the historical fact of diversity and its role in shaping the American national character (see Kohn 1961). “W...

Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits of Americans' acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long li...

Since the 1960s, a variety of new ways of addressing the challenges of diversity in American society have coalesced around the term “multiculturalism.” In this article, we impose some clarity on the theoretical debates that surround divergent visions of difference. Rethinking multiculturalism from a sociological point of view, we propose a model th...

As a marker of national identity, the term American is culturally meaningful but also difficult and contradictory. In the first part of this article, we develop the claim that analyzing nationalism as discourse provides a meaningful lens for the study of this boundary-making process. In particular, the distinctions between civic/ethnic and inclusiv...

This article examines the interests expressed by white Populists and black Republicans regarding political coalition in Virginia. Virginia is interesting because it is generally considered a failed site for the Populist movement and for interracial organizing under it. Such a coalition was untenable statewide, but economic, social, and historical c...

This article explores how race is understood within an explicitly class-based movement, the Knights of Labor. The movement presents an empirical puzzle: it simultaneously pursued racial openness and racial closure, and it justified both in the name of class interest. The article examines movement-level narratives of race and class to show how under...

The middle class is central to American political life, yet the political alignment of this occupationally diverse class is unclear. This paper proposes an ideal-typical scheme of alignment structures for the middle class that incorporates several major theories of middle-class politics. Using data from the General Social Surveys and employing Mult...

In this paper we provide a comparative analysis of the political and ideological salience of class in Britain and the USA, using the Comparative Project on Class Consciousness and Class Conflict dataset. We show that class divisions, however measured, are much more salient in British political choices. We then ask whether this difference results fr...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995. Bibliography: leaves [45]-49.