RSF Books

In March 1999, U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair made a remarkable pledge before a startled audience: "Our historic aim will be for ours to be the first generation to end child poverty," he said. "It will take a generation. It is a 20-year mission. But I believe that it can be done if we reform the welfare state and build it around the needs of families and children." The unexpected announcement came in the midst of an alarming rise in the country's child poverty, which hovered around the 20 percent level by the mid-1990s. (See Figure 1.3 below for an international comparison; poverty was defined as income below half of the country's median income). But would such an ambitious pledge make a difference? With its echoes of Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty" speech, now often cited in conservative circles as evidence of policy hubris, would Blair's ambition merely reveal the intractable problems underlying poverty?

When sociologist Brian Powell and his team asked more than 1,500 Americans to define what counts as family, he found that respondents fell into three broad categories:

•Exclusionists (roughly 45 percent of his sample) strongly privilege the traditional heterosexual family;
• Moderates (roughly 29 percent) place more primacy on children and extend family status to any arrangement with children;
• Inclusionists (25 percent) have a broad conception of family that is flexible and expansive.

Digging deeper, Powell analyzed the themes and reasons each group invoked to explain why they believed certain living arrangements counted (or did not count) as family. Here are the themes used by people in the 'exclusionist' category:

In his RSF book, Counted Out: Same-Sex Relations and Americans' Definitions of Family, Powell elaborates:

The transcripts of our interviews are replete with phrases such as "the marriage vow," "the marriage covenant," "ceremonial arrangements," "legal marriage," "legal connection," and "legally binding." In their references to marriage, exclusionists also often mentioned the gender of the marital partners—most notably specifying them as "man and wife," "man and wife living together," or "marriage between a man and a woman"—thus making it explicit that their definition excluded gay and lesbian couples.

Editor's Note: Hazel Rose Markus is the co-editor of RSF's volume Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction. At the 2012 Being Human conference, she discussed the psychology of social class. We include video of her lecture as part of our forum on social class in America. Her presentation begins at 27:20.

Being Human: Individual + Society & Morals + Culture from Being Human on FORA.tv

Editor's Note: Susan T. Fiske is the co-editor of RSF's volume Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction. As part of our forum on social class in America, she discusses class hierarchies and resentment below.

Whoever thought it would come down to whether $750K versus $42 million is too much income to be the President? This election season, we are hearing more than we want to know about the income of the two major candidates. Every election, we pit Main Street against Wall Street, and both against Skid Row. It’s as if we think there are only three kinds of people: the haves, the have-nots, and the have-lots.

As I wrote in the Washington Post last year:

What divides the country is what we should do with the low-income have-nots (poor people, old people: deny them?) and the high-income have-lots (rich people: tax them?), from the perspective of the rest of us in the middle, the haves. As a social psychologist, I find this process a perfect example of how status always divides us from each other.

When we, the haves, look up at the have-a-lots, we envy them and aspire to their success, so we do not apparently want to clip their wings by taxing them, because maybe someday we will be rich too…

Looking down from our middle ground to the have-nots, we hardly seem to bother ourselves about them. Although Americans are big-hearted and donate more generously to charity than most places, we begrudge the old and the poor much in the way of government entitlements. We seem to scorn them as unworthy of our attention. In my lab, we find that people do not even want to consider the personal experience of homeless people; we deny them a mind, making it easier to neglect them.

Editor's Note: Diana T. Sanchez and Julie A. Garcia are contributors to RSF's volume Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction. As part of our forum on social class in America, they discuss their research below on the interaction between socioeconomic status and racial categorization.

The recent "Occupy Movement" has fueled the debate about economic inequalities in America. A popular slogan of this movement, "We are the 99%," highlights that wealth in America remains largely concentrated among the top 1% of income earners. This reality runs counter to the "bootstrap myth" that many Americans embrace; achievement, economic or otherwise, can be a reality for anyone that works hard. Rather, the "Occupy Movement" aims to shed light on how the powerful effects of corruption and greed have created a seemingly insurmountable schism between the "haves" and the "have-nots." While economic disparities have been brought to the fore, some correlates of economic markers remain largely unexplored. Namely, little attention has been given to the interplay between socioeconomic status (SES) and race.

THE FLUID PERCEPTION OF RACE

Our work, and others, demonstrates that class and racial identification remain inextricably linked, such that class informs perceptions of race. In other words, SES plays a pivotal role in both racial self-categorization and categorization by others. People higher in SES are more likely to be categorized, and categorize themselves, in higher status racial groups (e.g., White) compared to lower status racial groups (e.g., Black). Stated differently, a person is more likely to categorize another as Black if he or she perceives that person as lower in SES. Also, someone who has a higher SES is more likely to self-categorize herself as White than Black.

Chris Rhomberg is the author of The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor, a riveting analysis of the 1995 Detroit newspaper strike. An associate professor of sociology at Fordham University, Rhomberg studies issues of race, labor, and urban politics in American political development.

Q: By 1995, when the Detroit strike began, the erosion of collective bargaining rights was already firmly established. What drew you to this newspaper strike as opposed to the many other wrenching labor disputes of the 1980s and early 1990s? What did you hope to learn from Detroit?

More Research on Labor Policy
• RSF Program: Future of Work
• RSF Book: They Say Cut Back, We Say Fight Back! Welfare Activism in an Era of Retrenchment
• RSF Book: Low-Wage America
• RSF Book: America Works: Critical Thoughts on the Exceptional U.S. Labor Market

A: The rise of the current anti-union regime began in the 1980s, but my argument is that such macro-institutional changes do not occur neatly in all places all at once. In the 1990s it was not necessarily clear where things would go next. By that time unions had adopted counter-tactics of community mobilization and striking against unfair labor practices in order to gain some protec-tion against permanent replacement. The National Labor Relations Board became more favorable to unions, under the administration of President Bill Clinton. The labor movement as a whole had begun a progressive revival, symbolized in the October 1995 election of Service Employees International Union president John Sweeney as president of the AFL-CIO.

The annual SXSW Festival was marred by controversy this week when a marketing company affixed wireless routers to homeless people to provide internet access to festival-goers. Critics said the plan—labeled a "charitable innovation experiment" by organizers—exploited the homeless and dehumanized them. Deplorable as the plan sounds, there is a deeper problem in the way people tend to perceive the homeless. As Nathan Hefleck of Psychology Today reports, neurological research conducted by RSF author Susan Fiske and other social psychologists has shown that people often view social "out-groups" as less than human:

[An] area of the brain called the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC) activates when people do things that involve perceiving and relating to other people, such as recognizing and distinguishing between faces and empathizing. These researchers hypothesized, however, that like objects such as tables, images of certain groups of people—the homeless—would fail to activate the mPFC.

This is exactly what they found. Images of all other groups besides the homeless activated the mPFC. This suggests that the homeless are not recognized as human relative to other groups. They actually are perceived, at least in this area of the brain, more like objects, such as tables.

Fiske elaborated on this finding in an interview with RSF Review last year:

Scorn is simply not paying attention and wishing the other away. Groups are scorned especially if they are low-status and not-us, such as homeless people and drug addicts. Poor people (regardless of ethnicity) and Latino immigrants are also seen this way. Scorn dehumanizes them and makes us neglect them.

What does it mean to 'dehumanize,' or perceive someone as less than human? In her RSF book Envy Up, Scorn Down, Fiske explained:

Karthick Ramakrishnan, a former RSF Visiting Scholar, spoke this month with a local edition of HLN about changing political attitudes among Asian Americans, a group that grew more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2010. "From 1992, Asians were voting about a third for the Democratic candidate for President," he says in the interview. "In the most recent election, two out of three were voting for Obama, so that's a huge shift." Ramakrishnan also shares insights from his RSF book Asian American Political Participation, which he discussed on this blog last year. Watch the interview below:

Dowell Myers, author of the RSF book Immigrants and Boomers published an op-ed in the New York Times today. Myers first notes data showing immigration from Mexico has slowed to a trickle—some experts believe the number of new Mexicans settled in the U.S. may be zero—while the illegal immigrant population has shrunk by about 200,000 a year. So, Myers argues, we need to shift from a policy focused on restricting immigration to one that looks to assimilate those who are here:

How do Americans define family, and how have their definitions changed over time? In four short videos (see below), RSF author Brian Powell shares some findings from his award-winning book Counted Out, which reports on and analyzes the results of a survey that asked more than 1,500 people to explain their stances on a broad range of issues, including gay marriage and adoption, single parenthood, and the legal rights of unmarried partners.

More from Brian Powell
• Introduction to Counted Out (PDF)
• Interview with NPR: The Remaking of the American Family
• Charts and Figures from Counted Out

In one of the videos, produced by W. W. Norton and Company, Powell says the data shows Americans are becoming more inclusive in their definitions of families. "Single parents and children, people are much more likely to say they count as families," he says. "Gay couples with children, much more likely to count them as families as well." Some changes in opinion are occurring quite rapidly. In 2003, Powell and his team found about 55 percent of Americans said a lesbian couple with children or gay male couple with children counted as families. By 2010, that number increased to over 67 percent. The guiding principle for many Americans, Powell explains, is to ask: "Does a living group that acts like a family, that feels like a family, that does things like a family—are they a family? And the answer seems to be, for a large proportion of Americans, the answer is yes."