Kris Marsh

University of Maryland, College Park | UMD, UMCP, University of Maryland College Park · Department of Sociology

Recent killings of blacks by police have renewed a national discussion about crime, racism, unjust treatment, and implicit bias. Outfitting police officers with body-worn cameras (BWC) is heralded by federal and state lawmakers as one solution to providing more transparency during police encounters. Missing from this discussion is what everyday cit...

The authors examined the institutional challenges that underrepresented minority (URM) faculty perceive in higher education with use of family support workplace policies. Evidence reveals that faculty encounter differences in access to information and explanations of how to use workplace–family statutes. A qualitative study of 58 URM faculty member...

The social science literature suggests that middle class status, with all that it promises, is precarious for those blacks who have achieved it and remains out of reach for many others in the United States. As members of a minority group, middle-class blacks face historical and persistent marginalization, discrimination, and racism; consequently, t...

Signithia Fordham’s theory of “racelessness” purports that while interacting with teachers, administrators, and peers in the school setting, academically successful Blacks must suppress the racial identities of their home worlds to secure and maintain the label of high achiever. My objectives were to examine how young Black women navigate between r...

Purpose - While existing literature on work-family schemas has focused on white middle-class mothers, we examine how race, class, and gender shape black middle-class mothers' work and family life. Design/methodology/approach - Drawing upon 31 in-depth, semistructured interviews with mothers (and their husbands), this chapter utilizes an intersectio...

Robert Hill (1972) identified strengths of Black families: strong kinship bonds, strong work orientation, adaptability of family roles, high achievement orientation, and religious orientation. Some suggest these strengths sustain the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs of Blacks. This study used narratives and survey data from a cohort...

There are a range of solutions that address asset building challenges for low-wealth women. Here we highlight some solutions that focus on basic needs (child care, child support) and creating economic stability with disposable income (income available after basic needs are met); solutions that address predatory lending and the housing crisis; and s...

The impact of military service on the status attainment of World War II veterans has been studied since the 1950s; however, the research has failed to come to any consensus with regard to their level of attainment. Analyses have focused on cross-sectional or longitudinal data without considering the effects of service over the life course. The auth...

Although past research on the African American community has focused primarily on issues of discrimination, segregation, and other forms of deprivation, there has always been some recognition of class diversity within the black community. This research, on the fringe of most scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century, grew significantly...

Objective. Fordham (1988, 1996) notes that because the larger black community has a culture that is oppositional to mainstream U.S. society, blacks who wish to maintain academic success and achieve upward socioeconomic mobility feel pressure to adopt a raceless identity. The purpose of this study is to examine whether a raceless identity leads to b...

While many studies have examined the intersection of race and class with residential segregation and residential preferences, very little is known about the role played by household composition in shaping residential patterns. This paper focuses on the residential patterns of a particular kind of household: those consisting of persons single and li...

This article examines whether social class differences influences low-income, married and cohabiting African Americans to realize that they are in a “coupled” relationship. To determine the extent to which social class influences the assessment of “couple” status in these partnerships, we examined the qualitative responses of 30 cohabiting and 31 m...

The literature on the black middle class has focused predominantly on married-couple families with children, reflecting a conception of the black middle class as principally composed of this family type. If that conception is correct, then declining rates of marriage and childrearing would imply a decline in the presence and vitality of the black m...

Few scholars examine health outcomes and socioeconomic status among adults, but this same intersection is understudied for adolescents. Even fewer scholars examine the relationship between race, class, and well-being of adolescents from a geographical or an educational achievement perspective. One team of researchers complain that studies rarely us...