In the wake of the police shooting and charged protests that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri in August, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar argued in TIME that despite the persistence of racial inequality in the U.S., class is quickly becoming the most significant measure of disadvantage. “This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote.

Is class in fact replacing race as the great divider in the U.S.? A new book from the Russell Sage Foundation by Douglas S. Massey and Stefanie Brodmann, Spheres of Influence: The Social Ecology of Racial and Class Inequality, investigates this claim. The authors trace how the civil rights movement, the increase in immigration from Asia and Latin America, and the restructuring of the economy in favor of the rich over the last several decades have begun to alter the contours of inequality in the U.S. They show that rather than operating in isolation, race and class are increasingly interacting in complex ways in order to produce and reproduce disadvantage for certain groups.

Monday, September 8 marked the start of an expanded pre-K program implemented by Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York City. The program, which provides free full-day classes to thousands of four year olds at the city’s public schools, is part of a growing movement in the U.S. toward universal preschool as a means of combating economic and social inequality. In addition to de Blasio, advocates of expanded pre-K access include President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who recently called high-quality preschool “a sure path to the middle class.”

While studies have shown that high-quality preschool indeed has positive effects on low-income children in terms of later educational attainment, some scholars and journalists have voiced reservations about the ability of pre-K programs to diminish inequality. Journalist Sarah Jaffe has noted that with de Blasio’s program in particular, lack of adequate funding for the program may inadvertently create a “patchwork” system that perpetuates other economic inequalities, like low salaries for the preschool teachers, who are overwhelmingly women.

Karl Alexander, co-author of the RSF publication The Long Shadow, further points out in a new op-ed for Quartz, “The reality is that there is no guarantee low-income children will succeed academically simply because they have a good preschool experience.” He continues, “To fully reap the benefits of early childhood education, these students need continued support outside the classroom through strong summer programs and after-school care.”

The Russell Sage Foundation is pleased to announce the appointment of Peter R. Orszag to its board of trustees. Orszag, who will officially join the board in November, is currently Vice Chairman of Corporate and Investment Banking, Chairman of the Public Sector Group, and Chairman of the Financial Strategy and Solutions Group at Citigroup.

Orszag received an A.B. in Economics (summa cum laude) from Princeton University in 1991, and his M.Sc. in 1992 and Ph.D. in 1997, both in Economics from the London School of Economics, where he was a Marshall Scholar. In addition to his work at Citigroup, he is a contributing columnist at Bloomberg View, and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Obama (2009-2010) and has also served as Director of the Congressional Budget Office (2007-2008). During the Clinton administration, Orszag was Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and then Senior Economist and Senior Advisor on the Council of Economic Advisers. As a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, Orszag was the Founding Director of The Hamilton Project, guiding its launch in 2006.

The Russell Sage Foundation welcomes seventeen leading social scientists as Visiting Scholars for the 2014-2015 academic year. During their time in residence, these scholars will pursue research and writing projects that reflect the Foundation’s commitment to strengthening the social sciences and applying research more effectively to important social problems.

Several of the forthcoming scholars will pursue research in socioeconomic and racial inequality. Mona Lynch of UC Irvine will explore how racial imbalances in drug sentencing persist despite changes in federal laws aimed at reducing uneven sentencing. Judd Kessler of the University of Pennsylvania (working with Andrew Schotter) will examine the different decision-making processes between the rich and the poor. Ann Morning of New York University (working with Marcello Maneri) will compare Americans’ and Italians’ differing conceptions of racial and ethnic identity. Sean Reardon of Stanford University will analyze academic achievement gaps in the U.S. by race and class. Aliya Saperstein of Stanford University will explore the fluidity of racial perception by tracing the ways in which concepts of race change both within and across generations. Arden Morris will complete a series of articles on the racial and socioeconomic barriers to cancer care in the U.S.

Below is a first look at new and forthcoming books from the Foundation for Fall 2014. The list includes Labor’s Love Lost, a major new study on the rise and fall of the American working class by former Visiting Scholar Andrew Cherlin; Unequal Time, an in-depth look at how employment schedules reproduce social inequalities in the health care sector; and Redefining Race, a historical analysis of the processes through which “Asian American” became a panethnic label and identity in the U.S. To request a hard copy of the full catalog, please contact Bruce Thongsack at bruce@rsage.org, or click here to visit our publications page.

On September 30, 2014, several RSF grantees and scholars will deliver remarks at a symposium marking the fiftieth anniversary of the International Migration Review. Symposium participants include former RSF visiting scholar Jennifer Lee (UC Irvine), incoming scholar Richard Alba (CUNY Graduate Center), grantee Nancy Foner (CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College), and grantee Katharine Donato (Vanderbilt).

Co-edited by Jennifer Lee, the anniversary issue of IMR features a collection of multidisciplinary articles that explore persisting and emerging topics and trends in the field of international migration. At the all-day symposium, Lee will moderate a panel discussion, “Diversity of Outcomes in Destination Societies,” where participants Alba, Foner, and Donato will present papers on a range of topics including a comparative study of immigration to North America and Western Europe and an investigation of how gender and marital status affect the global labor force.

Over the last two decades, public scrutiny of racial bias in policing has increased significantly. Several high-profile cases in recent years have detailed the use of excessive force and racial profiling by police, including the fatal choking of Eric Garner by NYPD this year and the controversial “stop and frisk” policies that have disproportionately targeted young black and Latino men and. These incidents have made national headlines and prompted community leaders to call for greater accountability and transparency from law enforcement. In 2013, for example, New York mayor Bill de Blasio ran on a platform that included a promise to end the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy. Yet, recently a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri fatally shot unarmed teenager Michael Brown, triggering a wave of community protests and clashes with the police that continued for over a week.

The Russell Sage Foundation’s working group on Racial Bias in Policing was formed in 2009 to research the effects of U.S. police departments’ disparate use of force in dealing with minorities, especially young black men. Blacks, and to a certain extent Latinos, are overrepresented on the receiving end of the criminal justice system, especially in jails and prisons, with significantly negative consequences for the life chances of these groups, and for the future of their communities. The law enforcement system has enormous discretionary power in determining who is stopped, searched, arrested, prosecuted, and how punishment is dispensed.

The Society for the Study of Social Problems named Nancy DiTomaso’s book The American Non-Dilemma the winner of the prestigious C. Wright Mills Award at its annual meeting on August 16, 2014 in San Francisco. Selected from 77 nominated books, The American Non-Dilemma explores the ways in which racial inequality in the post-Civil Rights era plays out in today's economic and political context.

In addition to winning the C. Wright Mills Award, this month The American Non-Dilemma was also named the winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association, as well as the runner-up for the George R. Terry Book Award by the Academy of Management, in which 65 books were nominated.

Drawing from her interviews with working, middle, and upper-class whites, The American Non-Dilemma shows that while the vast majority of whites profess strong support for civil rights and equal opportunity regardless of race, they continue to pursue their own group-based advantage, especially in the labor market where whites tend to favor other whites in securing jobs protected from market competition. This "opportunity hoarding" leads to substantially improved life outcomes for whites due to their greater access to social resources from family, schools, churches, and other institutions with which they are engaged.

As DiTomaso finds, most whites see themselves as part of the solution rather than part of the problem with regard to racial inequality. Yet they continue to harbor strong reservations about public policies—such as affirmative action—intended to ameliorate racial inequality.