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Ethnic America: A History

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... Ethnic entrepreneurship is a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon that impacts various communities in different regions (Guerra-Fernandes et al., 2022, p. 397). Ethnic entrepreneurs are business owners who focus on their ethnic groups and often specialize in a particular industry (Sowell, 1981). It is seen that some ethnic groups have higher business establishment rates than others, especially among firstand second-generation migrants (Aldrich & Waldinger, 1990, p. 113). ...
... The success of ethnic entrepreneurs depends on both their personal abilities and the quality of the social and cultural networks within their community. In this sense, ethnic entrepreneurs contribute to the economic development of both their ethnic groups and society (Light & Rosenstein, 1995;Sowell, 1981). Considering the discussions on ethnic enterprises, three different approaches can be suggested for defining the resources of ethnic entrepreneurship success; first are the traits that migrants bring with them and that predispose them to carry out good business; the second is the importance of opportunity structure as a prerequisite for business success; third are ethnic strategies that emphasize the interaction between newcomers' opportunities and ethnic group characteristics (Waldinger, 1989, p. 49). ...
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Ethnic entrepreneurship is the phenomenon that individuals from certain ethnic backgrounds participate in entrepreneurial activities. Individuals from those ethnic backgrounds are affected by various factors such as entrepreneurial tendencies, cultural values, social networks, and economic opportunities. Although such factors have the potential to explain ethnic entrepreneurship, it is important to continually update research and definitions in this field as ethnic entrepreneurship is an ever-growing topic. The purpose of this article is to be a part of the studies on ethnic entrepreneurship and to contribute to the field by identifying the conditions that influence the entrepreneurial process of Meskhetian Turks, who immigrated to the USA under special laws and became successful in establishing their own businesses. In order to achieve this purpose, in-depth interviews were conducted with entrepreneurs, and the findings are discussed in the context of the interactional model. According to the findings, social, capital, and ethnic networks play a significant role in business establishment and development, knowledge acquisition for business, and labor supply. In addition, due to the differences in the migration experiences of entrepreneurs, it is seen that both ethnic and non-ethnic networks affect entrepreneurship in the dimension of resource mobility. This study confirms the need to evaluate the benefits of ethnic entrepreneurship as a dynamic field.
... Podríem dir que si al principi fou el verb, el procés -ehem!-de reconstrucció vingué després. Sowell (1981: 288) situa el desenvolupament d'aquests processos humans com el fruit del saber, les habilitats, els valors, les tecnologies, l'organització, el comportament i la tenacitat que distingeixen els grups humans a l'hora d'afrontar les necessitats de la reparació i la reconstrucció. ...
... A deeper and complementary cause for the differences between the north and south could be geography. Sowell (1981) explains that the north concentrates most of the arable land and enjoys higher and more frequent rainfall while in the south arable land is scarce and rainfall low and highly variable. Guiso et al. (2006) state that the south has historically been characterized by latifunds, while in the north, cultivation has been undertaken in the context of smaller plots. ...
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We review work that has linked economic inequality and culture to governance quality. We start with contributions that have considered the relationship between inequality and governance from a long-run perspective. This historical perspective yields a range of insights and helps identify the deep drivers of specific cultural traits that relate to both economic inequality and gover-nance in contemporary societies. We then survey work that has linked inequality and culture to governance in present-day settings. We identify the complexity of the relationships with causality between any pair of these variables running both ways. These causal patterns, in turn, imply that countries may end up in either a good equilibrium characterized by lower economic inequality , the "right" culture and good governance, or a bad equilibrium described by greater inequality, the "wrong" culture and bad governance. We conclude with a range of policy implications.
... Since the 1960s, there have been two dominant schools of thought on understanding the origins and nature of black American practical consciousnesses, the ideas, ideals, and values black Americans recursively reorganize and reproduce in their material practices in the United States (US): the pathological-pathogenic and adaptive-vitality schools. The pathological-pathogenic position suggests that in its divergences from white American norms and values black American community life and practical consciousness are nothing more than a pathological form of, and reaction to, American consciousness rather than a dual (both African and American) hegemonic opposing "identity-in-differential" Mocombe (the term is Gayatri Spivak's) to the American one [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Afrocentric Proponents of the adaptive-vitality school suggest that the divergences are not pathologies but African "institutional transformations" preserved on the American landscape [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. ...
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This article, using Mocombeian phenomenological structural theory, phenomenological structuralism, highlights black American community transition from a pathological-pathogenic community to an intersectional one, which dominates the contemporary global order. The work posits that the constitution of black American communities and their identities have been the product of their relations to the means and mode of production within the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. As such, black Americans have never been agents in the constitution of their own identities. They have always been and remain (reactionary) pawns of capital seeking, dialectically or negative dialectically, to integrate the American social structure. Contemporarily, their integration in post-industrial America is marked by their transition from a pathological-pathogenic community to a neoliberal intersectional one dominated by their youth, women, and queers.
... They are portrayed in characters like his social worker, his lover, the woman with her child on the bus, the administrative assistant clerk at the Arkham state hospital, and in the last scene with the psychiatrist. Thomas Sowell (1983) argues that "the black world was ultimately the only world in which slaves could find emotional fulfillment and close attachments, and to become a pariah there meant personal devastation" (p. 187). ...
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The discourse of racism that has been per se attached to colored people is now linked to a wider circle, including whites. The essence of my article is to examine the "new racism" communicated by the Joker film by revisiting theories about modern racism. I will mainly rely on Michel Foucault's state racism and internal racism explored in his lectures, Society Must Be Defended (1976) and his Abnormal Lectures at the College de France (1974-1975). Postmodernism proves that the notion of racism has transcended skin-color differences into distinctive forms of institutionalized discrimination. The fact that this discrimination is governmental, made the discourse of racism more complex. It has even been internalized into the mass population as the new mainstream model. This mainstream model excludes all "abnormals," which could be the mentally ill, disabled people and criminals, or anyone who does not function properly in the capitalist society. The analysis of the film reveals that people with mitigating circumstances like disabled and clowns are otherized and ostracized on the accounts of their difference, thereby entering a pro tanto social invisibility.
... No ethnic group has been wholly unique, and yet no two are completely alike. Income, occupations, and unemployment rates differ substantially among American ethnic groups, as do rates of crime, fertility, and business ownership (Sowell, 1981). ...
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This study discusses and explains the identity building of ethnic minority in American multicultural society. Identity is not given directly as the immigrants arrived in the States, but they had to get through hurdles and adjustment. Hence the comers need to have a negotiation strategy in getting into the mainstream. The analysis is done by using the interdisciplinary approaches to view on the historical, cultural, and sociological elements of the study. The writer develops the identity theory of Sheldon Stryker to reveal the process of identity building of the Asian Indian in American society. The result of this study shows that the Asian Indian immigrants bring their culture that made themselves attractive as well as accepted by the mainstream society. Besides, the Asian Indian immigrants are the people of hard work and clever that they can easily gain success in the United States and consequently support the country in the global competitiveness. The successes of the Asian Indian immigrants have created a positive identity in the American society. Fortunately, the maneuver of being multicultural in American society today has advantaged this minority group to continue their existence.
... Gradually immigrant families saved money and moved out of the tenements of the Lower East Side and into more comfortable quarters of Manhattan and the other boroughs of New York, and into the suburbs. As time went on Italian immigrants started businesses, to the point where by 1960 (Sowell, 2008) the average income of people of Italian origin equaled that of other groups in New York City. By 1934, New York had an Italian-American mayor, Fiorello La Guardia and prominent academics and members of all professions. ...
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In this paper we address the under-representation of Italian-Americans in psychoanalysis in the United States, both as psychoanalysts and analysands. We suggest that this under-representation has arisen from a confluence of cultural biases in traditional criteria for analyzability and pejorative stereotypes about Italian-Americans that have discouraged their participation to the detriment of the field. The paper suggests that contemporary developments across various schools of psychoanalysis open up new opportunities for rethinking the cultural location of psychoanalysis.
... The ''melting pot'' perspective, associated with Park (1928), proposed immigrants naturally and inevitably abandoned their cultural uniqueness and assimilate into the mainstream culture in order to become ''Americans.'' ''Cultural pluralism,'' associated with Gordon (1964) and more recently Sowell (1981Sowell ( , 1996, acknowledged the existence of cultural diversity, but presented it as a transitory stage to complete assimilation over several generations. Immigration researchers have subsequently highlighted the role of ethnic networks in immigrants' ways of relating to both their original and the American mainstream culture and the fact that widespread acceptance of gender practices specific to dominant American culture is not universal among second-generation Arab and Muslim immigrants. ...
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Despite fascination with Muslim, and especially Arab, women s influence and priorities in the United States, the majority of studies focused on Islam and gender have missed their voices. This study highlights the narratives of 20 Yemeni-American second-generation women who described their unique ways of belonging to two cultures. This study found that religious women who practiced hijab challenged biased gender practices within their communities by bringing to light progressive notions in Islam. Moreover, and through expanding their roles inside and outside their families, they crafted a balance between achieving as individuals and maintaining communal bonds. In doing so, they gained self-confidence and critical family support to go beyond the local community's narrow “boarders” (and low expectations for women) and pursue academic, economic and political empowerment in the mainstream. In short, in the latter part of the 20th century and early 21th century, our Yemeni respondents developed hybridized identities as a result of multiple processes: their understanding of Islam, the isolated history of Yemen, chain migration patterns to the US from Yemen, the dynamics of the Southend enclave in Detroit, MI, as well as multicultural spaces that had previously opened in the mainstream American institutions in Detroit.
... In Africa, for example, one thinks of the Ewes and Fantes, who are associated with fishing in the Volta and Central Regions of Ghana respectively, the Luos in Kenya who dominate the fish trade and Kenyan-Asians who dominate the textile manufacturing industry. Each of these ethnic groups, and others in different locales, possess different cultural values that can influence productivity (Hofstede, 1984;Sowell, 1981). Specifically, ethnic groups are endowed with different cultural values as well as social institutions, and this can foster entrepreneurial talent and innovation at various levels (Ibrahim & Galt, 2011;Wilson & Portes, 1980). ...
... (Glazer and Moynihan, 1963 ;Pierre 2004 ;Sowell 1975 ;Tillery and Chresfield, 2012). Thomas Sowell is often cited as an early proponent of the argument that Afro Caribbeans outperform African Americans because of cultural differences (Sowell 1975Sowell , 1978Sowell , 1981Sowell , 1983Sowell , 1984). He states: …[Afro Caribbeans]are a group of great importance, not only in terms of their past achievements and their current roles, but perhaps even more as a means of gauging the socioeconomic effect of being black… as compared to the effect of the many cultural and institutional factors historically associated with the evolution of[African Americans].[Afro ...
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Throughout the twentieth century, Black immigrants from the Caribbean attained greater socioeconomic status than African Americans. Although Black immigrants remain an understudied population, recent studies show that Afro Caribbeans continue to outperform African Americans in the labor market. Given that these groups share a set of racialized physical features, some contend that this gap highlights the role of cultural attributes in the manufacture of Black ethnic and Black-White racial disparities. In this study, I investigate the degree to which cultural attributes associated with a specific form of the model minority hypothesis are responsible for disparities between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans. I use data from the National Survey of American Life in order to test for the relative roles of work ethic, economic autonomy, oppositionality, family structure and function, and racial attitudes in the manufacture of disparate labor market outcomes between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans. I find mixed support for the idea that Afro Caribbeans constitute a model minority vis-à-vis African Americans and that differences in model minority attributes are only partially responsible for these labor market disparities. My findings suggest that racial inequality will not be undone if the racially stigmatized and marginalized simply work harder and complain less about race and racism in the United States.
... In the poet Alurista's famous vision of the Chicano homeland of Aztlan, Mexican immigrants are merely making their return home by journeying north (0 the Southwest. The Aztlan s(Ory is well-suited (0 Chicanos' struggle for equality At the same time, it probably has contributed (0 conservatives' fear of potential political secession by a Chicano-dominated Southwest (e.g., Sowell 1981). Such fears seem misplaced now, because by the late 1970s, the militancy of the Chicano movement had declined, due largely (0 the movement's success in penetrating the middle class. ...
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Many observers of globalization have commented on the impact that global processes appear to be having on group identities. The changing loci of capital accumulation and power, the greater global flows of goods, labor, culture, and information, and the new global political and rhetorical conventions accompanying these changes, are having significant repercussions for forms of social organization, including identity. This should come as no surprise, given our current understanding of ethnic, national, and other identities as products of social relationships and not s imply of cultural inheritance. The anthropologist Jonathan Friedman, one observer of these matters, has explained how globalization should be expected to affect identity (Friedman 1999a, 1999b, 2000). Friedman has focused on two primary tendencies relating to identity: a hybridization and cosmopoli-tanization of identity among class and cultural elites, and an indigenization of identity among lower and middle classes. I have engaged briefly with Friedman’s ideas on the indigenization of identity (Haley and Wilcoxon 2005) to support his contention that people not considered indigenous by standard definitions are now asserting indigenous identities, and to suggest that their reason for doing so may not be to seek territory and autonomy from a weakened state, as Friedman proposes. Here I wish to expand my engagement with Friedman’s ideas on the indigenization of identity by once again taking a look at the Mexican diaspora in the southwestern United States, but widening the discussion this time to address three distinct waves of migration rather than just one.
... Sowell further advocates that blacks shun reliance on government "handouts." Sowell (1981) suggests that neither politics nor education were key to ethnic mobility and success in the United States but rather their middle class orientation and values of discipline, hard work, thrift, diligence and self-reliance. Shelby Steel (1990) argues that affirmative action programs create a kind of implied inferiority among African Americans and other minori-ties who are made to feel that they have acquired their positions not because of their knowledge and competence but because of preferential treatment. ...
... 4 But there is a danger of reifying national origin groups, viewing them as fixed and given categories whose meanings are clear to insiders and outsiders alike. Researchers either implicitly or explicitly take a position on whether American ethnic groups are the residue of pre-immigration cultures (Gans, 1982;Glazer & Moynihan, 1970;Hapgood, 1966;Kramer & Leventman, 1969;Sowell, 1981;Wirth, 1966), or are American creations, as rooted in this country as in the old world (Joselit, 1994;Nagel, 1994;Waldinger, 1996;Yancey, Ericksen, & Juliani, 1976). The former tend to see assimilation (i.e. the disappearance of the ethnic group) and erosion of the original ethnic culture where the latter observe transformation -new emerging forms which blend elements from both worlds. ...
... En conséquence, les difficultés d'adaptation culturelle et les problèmes économiques de la première génération devraient faire place à une incorporation progressive de ses descendants dans les différents secteurs sociaux et économiques de la société de résidence. Ce processus devrait s'achever par l'assimilation de la troisième génération, qui perdrait ainsi ses traits ethniques spécifiques (linguistiques, culturels) et ne serait plus désavantagée, comme la première génération, sur le marché de l'emploi (Alba, 1985; Sowell, 1981). ...
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Résumé Dans cette communication, nous nous interrogeons sur la manière dont les membres de la deuxième génération espagnole et italienne réalisent leur insertion dans la société suisse et vivent leur situation pluriculturelle. En particulier, nous cherchons à savoir si les enfants des primomigrants connaissent une mobilité socioprofessionnelle ascendante par rapport à leurs parents et comment ils se situent culturellement par rapport à la société helvétique, en particulier s'agissant du "choix" de la nationalité. De plus, nous comparons les trajectoires de ces jeunes d'origine immigrée avec un échantillon représentatif de jeunes adultes d'origine suisse, dont les parents ont un niveau de formation comparable à celui des parents immigrés. Ainsi, nous mettons en parallèle les parcours des jeunes d'origine italienne ou espagnole à la fois avec ceux de leurs parents et avec les trajectoires de leurs contemporains d'origine suisse, issus d'un milieu social similaire. Nous cherchons également à savoir si les formes d'insertion socioprofessionnelle et citoyenne des jeunes issus la migration s'accompagnent plutôt de la préservation d'une identité culturelle liée au pays d'origine, ou de l'élaboration d'une identité culturelle spécifique, ou encore d'une tendance à l'assimilation à la culture dominante. La question du lien entre insertion structurelle et identité culturelle est donc au centre de notre présentation. Nous partons de l'hypothèse que l'absence en Suisse d'un mécanisme automatique d'accès à la nationalité fait de la qualité de "naturalisé" un bon indicateur des stratégies identitaires poursuivies par les jeunes. Dès lors, la comparaison entre trajectoires professionnelles et profils identitaires des jeunes devenus Suisses et les parcours et profils de ceux demeurés Italiens ou Espagnols prend toute son importance. Si nous sommes à même de comparer ces deux populations, c'est que la procédure d'échantillonnage que nous avons adoptée nous permet d'avoir accès à une deuxième génération définie par ses contours sociaux -enfants d'immigrés -incluant aussi bien les personnes naturalisées que celles qui ont gardé leur nationalité d'origine.
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This chapter provides an overview of the contributions of several Mediterranean groups in shaping the American landscape. It notes the cultural influence of classical Greek and Roman architecture, and later Italianate architecture, upon America’s public buildings, houses, and religious structures. The spatial distribution of Italian-Americans is discussed. The chapter emphasizes Italian-Americans within northern California, in several cities of New England, and in the greater New York City metropolitan area. The role of Italians in the shaping of California’s wine industry and related landscape is reviewed. Both geographers and landscape historians have noted a paucity of studies of Italian-American ethnic landscapes, and that fact plus the very small number of established Greek communities, limited discussion. Ethnic tourism, shown by the prominence of Little Italys and Greektowns in several cities, is reviewed, as is the religious landscape of Italian neighborhoods.
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This chapter includes all of the peoples from those Northern European countries in which Slavic populations dominated, but it emphasizes three Slavic groups: Czechs, Poles, and Russians. The distributions of these ancestry populations are mapped and discussed, with the greatest proportional representation shown in the Midwestern and Plains states, while the greatest aggregate population is found within several major cities. The chapter focuses upon communities of these Slavic groups in the Midwest and the Great Plains, the Russian colonial influence upon mixed race settlements within portions of southern coastal Alaska, and the Russian—largely Jewish—neighborhoods in greater New York City. In addition, Ukrainian settlements in the Great Plains and Prairie Provinces are mentioned. Because most of the Jewish population of the United States are descendents of immigrants from the former Russian Empire, the Jewish ethnic and religious landscape is introduced in this chapter.
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The history of immigration from Asia has been marked by racial exclusion and for the Japanese, internment during World War II. In contrast, over the past several decades, only Hispanics have rivaled the number of Asian immigrants. This chapter focuses upon describing the population distributions and ethnic landscapes of the Chinese-Americans, the Japanese-Americans, and the Vietnamese and Hmong immigrants from Southeast Asia. It emphasizes both the historic urban Chinatowns and the contemporary establishment of new Chinese enclaves in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City and elsewhere. It notes the expansion of Chinatowns in cities, such as New York and Chicago, where they were previously much more restricted. The chapter also describes the significance of Japanese and Chinese immigration to Hawaii, where these groups have evolved a clearly distinct landscape best shown by their religious structures. It also reviews the recent impacts of the settlement of refugees from Southeast Asia upon the landscape, both in California which has long had significant Asian populations as well as in two Upper Great Lake states, where the Hmong have now become the largest minority group within many counties. The chapter briefly discusses the expanding ethnic populations of Koreans, Filipinos, and South Asians in the United States.
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This chapter largely deals with the contributions of enslaved Africans in building the American landscape—particularly in the Southern states, where the rural African-American population remains concentrated. It notes that Africans significantly contributed to the cultural landscape within the American South, including the introduction of certain crops from Africa. Many slaves and free persons of color came by way of various lands in the West Indies, resulting in distinct West Indian and Creole styles of architecture, particularly conspicuous in coastal cities along the Gulf of Mexico and the southern Atlantic. The African heritage shotgun house had similar origins and dispersed up the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys. The post World War II development of African-American ghettos in Northern cities is described, resulting in several major cities having African-American majority populations. Development of middle class Black business districts and neighborhoods, such as Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue, have shaped Southern cities. Recent developments of African-American settlements within the former plantation South are also reviewed. This chapter also notes the recent patterns of immigration of blacks into the United States, both directly from Africa (many of whom are refugees) and from the West Indies, and it describes how their cultural landscapes may reshape our definition of what comprises an African-American.
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Germans are the most numerous European group to settle the United States, more numerous than the English or the French, yet they were a diverse group whose influence upon the cultural landscape varied from the 17th through the 20th Century. The earliest German immigrants evolved into the Pennsylvania Dutch, whose cultural landscape and history differed from the ethnic landscapes within communities established by Germans who immigrated between 1845 and 1880 into the American heartland. The chapter describes the numerous contributions of German ethnics in shaping the generic American landscape and notes the profound impact of the two World Wars in diminishing the cultural distinctiveness of German-American communities. This chapter focuses upon German settlements, ranging from rural farming villages to urban centers, in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, and Texas as examples. In addition, the far earlier settlement of Germans into Pennsylvania is described, as is the recent spread of the rapidly growing Amish, a splinter group of German-Swiss Anabaptists, from Pennsylvania into the Midwest. The Swiss ethnic landscape is also reviewed.
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Historically, racial and ethnic groups in the United States have experienced discrimination and marginalization as a result of scientific racism. Researchers dispute the legitimacy, validity, and misuse of mental measurements or IQ tests when used to make inferences about the inferiority or superiority of various ethnic or racial groups in comparison to whites or Anglo-Saxons. Race and ethnicity are social and political constructs that have been used to promote supremacy between racial and ethnic groups. Unfortunately, science has been employed as a tool to perpetuate supremacist ideals of racial superiority.
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Proximity, historical, economic, and social ties have funneled West Indians into the United States for centuries, but mass migration from the region to America began in earnest only at the beginning of the 20th century. Spurred by persistently high levels of unemployment, these migrants had spread throughout the Caribbean and Central America since the 1840s. In the 20th century the United States became the latest target of opportunity for a people who had developed a culture of migration to cope with socioeconomic distress (Marshall 1982; Dodson & Diouf 2004). These “West Indians” have traditionally originated in the non-Hispanic Caribbean and settled together, apart from Hispanics, in the United States. Jamaicans, in particular, have dominated the flow to America, being surpassed by Haitian immigrants only since the 1990s (DHS 2010). Keywords: immigration; race; racism; labor supply; development
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Just as World War I catapulted Africans into a fervor of political activity bolstered by the African-American myth, so too it ushered in massive changes in African education influenced by the myth. Up through the early part of the twentieth century, education in Africa was largely the province of the missionaries, who used it as a powerful means of attracting converts. By the end of the nineteenth century, Africa had an extensive network of missionary-operated elementary schools, seminaries, technical schools, teacher-training colleges and some secondary schools, which provided western education for hundreds of thousands of Africans.1
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Discrimination may be said to occur in a market where individuals face terms of trade that are determined by personal characteristics which do not appear directly relevant to the transaction. Most concern has centred on differential treatment by race or ethnic group, and by sex. The primary focus has been on the labour market and housing market, with research motivated, in large part, by controversy over the role of government in maintaining or eliminating observed differentials.
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As Rhonda Williams observes in the lead chapter in this volume, modern labor economics has become, for the most part, an extensive branch of applied microeconomics. Williams’ observation has been echoed by Paul McNulty (pp. 260–1) who, in an interesting recent study of the history of labor economics, made the following comment Perhaps the most fundamental point to be made about the current state of labor economics is that at no other time in the history of the field has it been more closely aligned with its parent discipline. The study of labor by economists is generally characterized by the same analytical approach that their colleagues are bringing to bear upon problems in other subdivisions of the field: the formulation of hypotheses based generally on observations consistent with economic theory and empirically tested with econometric techniques applied to such data as are available.
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Ce texte a cherché à mettre en relief les différences systématiques qui existent entre différents modes d’entrée et d’intégration des groupes immigrants. Cette perspective qui s’articule autour de la question des modes d’intégration structuraux, notamment la notion d’enclave ethnique se situe donc en opposition à deux perspectives généralement acceptées : l’une axée sur les modes d’assimilation et l’autre sur la stratification du marché du travail. À ce titre, le texte marque un progrès par rapport aux descriptions plus générales du processus d’adaptation. La typologie présentée, ici, reste cependant provisoire. De la même façon que des recherches sur les situations particulières de certains groupes ethniques ont permis de modifier, voire remplacer, les hypothèses plus générales existantes, on peut s’attendre à ce que les idées présentées, ici, fassent l’objet de révisions ultérieures. De nouveaux groupes d’immigrants sont en train de changer la composition de l’immigration aux États-Unis. Dans ce contexte, le regain d’intérêt au sujet de l’immigration, ne manquera pas de stimuler de nouvelles études empiriques et de nouvelles hypothèses de recherche.
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In his autobiography This Is Herman Cain, conservative business executive and former Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain attributes his success to the hard work ethic and perseverance instilled in him by his father. Cain asserts that possessing a positive mindset or as he states becoming the “CEO of Self” played a major role in his ability to transcend the various hurdles he faced as a young African-American male growing up in the Deep South during the civil rights era. Cain’s line of thinking fits within the paradigm of the American achievement ideology, but I argue that Cain’s idealized construction of an American society where racism’s impact on the opportunity chances of African-Americans is minimal ultimately allows for the maintenance of an American social structure where “whiteness” reigns supreme.
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In this essay we argue that the ideology of colorblind justice has made resisting the retreat from public school desegregation a hard sell in postracial America. We do not believe that desegregation is the silver bullet for solving all the problems with public education. Nor do we believe that it alone can close the racial achievement gap. Yet there is convincing evidence regarding the potential benefits of desegregation and evidence on its negative consequences is weak. Therefore we believe that it is a policy still worth pursuing. Our hope is that by casting light on the anatomy of colorblind justice and its limits we can contribute to ongoing efforts to ensure that desegregation remains in the conversation about how to address the unfinished business of racial justice.
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Compared to Hispanic and Asian immigrants, black immigrants in the United States have been considerably less researched, and until very recently, black African immigrants remained a relatively understudied group. Using data from three waves of the US Census (1980, 1990, and 2000), we assess differences in earnings (and related measures of socioeconomic status) among male and female African Americans and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. Results of the analysis suggest a sizeable earnings advantage for immigrants. Controlling for a host of human capital variables, however, reduced the gap between the earnings of African immigrants and native-born blacks, although the difference still remained statistically significant. No such attenuation was found for immigrants from the Caribbean. The results also indicate that for females only, the immigrant advantage has grown over time. Moreover, the findings show that additional years of work experience in the USA or in foreign countries correspond to a rather sizable increase in hourly earnings for both males and females, but, for males, this effect has grown weaker over time. Finally, men earned more than women, both overall and within comparison groups with the gap remaining relatively stable over time.
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This article discusses a model of "cultural nesting" based on race/ethnicity, language, and origin. Using data from the High School & Beyond national survey, it demonstrates how this model can be used to examine cultural diversity and disaggregate achievement test results both within and across U.S. racial/ethnic groups. The argument is made that such a model holds greater pedagogical utility than do simple White-non-White academic performance comparisons. The resulting call for culturally sensitive pedagogy leads to a proposition for new assessment strategies that are growth-oriented rather than driven by social comparisons.
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A bstract Past studies have dismissed the claim that retail enterprise among blacks in the urban North during the early 20 th century was suppressed by competition from white immigrant merchants. The present investigation reconsiders the suppression hypothesis, applying the concepts of “niche overlap” and “competitive exclusion” from the literature on ethnic competition. An analysis of Census data on large northern cities offers some support for the hypothesis. The level of retail entrepreneurship of black men was negatively associated with that of white immigrant men in 1910 and 1920, implying that black retail enterprise at these time‐points was discouraged by the presence of white immigrant merchants. These negative associations, though, were only moderately significant in a substantive sense, and there was no evidence that a reduction of white immigrant merchants would have produced substantial gains for blacks in the retail trade, as many black entrepreneurs and activists at the time had claimed.
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This paper systematically analyzes alterations in the employment patterns in 11 different sectors for 1970, 1980, and 1990 for three native-born ethnic groups and four foreign-born subpopulations in New York City. We explicitly contrast two methods of employment-change analysis to unpack the complex urban labor-market process of sectorspecific job succession. Our account builds on Roger Waldinger's recent analysis of shifts in the ethnic division of labor in New York City in the 1970s that used an innovative method of employment change decomposition. Waldinger tested the hypothesis that the upward and outward social movement of native-born whites in the city in this decade created a variegated chain of vacancies that other native-born and immigrant groups differentially filled. This paper expands his analysis to a broader set of ethnicities and explores the extent to which the system of job change altered between the 1970s and 1980s. In doing this, we show how Waldinger's method relates to shift-share analysis—the well-known method of regional employment change analysis. We find support for the theory that a key force behind the recent profound changes in New York's labor market was the redistribution and exit of whites from New York's labor force in the 1970s. In advancing the analysis to understand employment change in the 1980s by ethnic group, we reveal that the role of native whites changed. The native-white exodus from jobs in the city continued but masked sectoral differences in comparative advantage by ethnic category. Immigrant blacks and Hispanics gained jobs in every sector of the economy in the 1970s and in every sector but manufacturing in the 1980s. Immigrant Asians gained jobs in every sector including manufacturing in both decades. Total native-Hispanic employment also increased, but shifted significantly out of manufacturing to advanced services and the public sector in the 1980s. In the 1980s, African Americans lost the competitive advantage they held in the 1970s, largely as a result of significant change in the public sector. FIRE and transportation were the only sectors in which native blacks held labor-market comparative advantage by 1990.
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By some accounts, large Black populations in northern cities aided Blacks’ employment in occupations of the “Black Metropolis” at the start of the Great Migration. Yet, the present study, analyzing Census data, refutes these accounts. Blacks’ odds of employment in such occupations – for example, mass media and cultural expression – were often greatest in major northern cities with the smallest Black populations, consistent with the proposition that small and stable minority communities avoid intense discrimination. Overall, however, there is little evidence that Black population size substantially affected Blacks’ employment in Black Metropolis occupations.
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