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.
Visiting Scholar Wendy Rahn and Philip Chen of University of Minnesota have published a working paper on how voters perceive economic conditions. This is, of course, a crucial question in the midst of an election year, when many assume that that the state of the economy may influence voters' electoral choices. Traditionally, political scientists considering economic voter theories have analyzed three major factors—inflation, unemployment, or economic growth. Rahn and Chen ask whether these models should now also incorporate data on household net worth or the significance of stock assets. Here is an excerpt from the paper's abstract:
American households are buffeted by these macroeconomic forces to different degrees, and when conditions in these various spheres diverge, as in the aftermath of the Great Recession, groups that are differentially affected may respond politically in ways that generate new lines of cleavage that add complexity to our traditional economic voting models. Using monthly survey data from the Michigan Survey of Consumers over the period 1992 to 2011, we examine the impact of unemployment, inflation, house and stock prices, and real income growth on people’s retrospective assessments of family financial well-being. Our innovation is to compare the effects of these variables for different groups of households defined by their asset-holding status: investors (directly or indirectly) in the stock market, homeowners without risky financial assets, and renters. We indeed find that people respond to aggregate economic conditions in heterogeneous ways.
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?
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.
Daniel M. Goldstein is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He studies the global meanings and practices of security and securitization, particularly as these come into conflict with human rights.
As I write, the United States Supreme Court is debating the constitutionality of Arizona’s SB 1070, the state law that imposes extremely harsh penalties on undocumented immigrants, effectively criminalizing the immigrant presence in the state. Whatever the Court decides, this piece of legislation has already had a broad national impact. In states and municipalities across the U.S., legislators and policy makers have introduced laws and ordinances similar to Arizona’s, making it ever more difficult for the undocumented person to obtain a driver’s license, a job, and a place to live, to educate his or her children, and to move about in public.
This legislative trend is part of the “securitization” of immigration in the U.S. – that is, the rendering of immigration (and specifically Latino immigration) as a threat to the security of the American public and the stability of the American way of life. As immigration has become increasingly securitized in recent years, the principal site of immigration control has shifted from the national borders to the spaces within those borders, and from the federal to the local levels of legislation and enforcement, even as the prototypical security threat has extended from the “Islamic terrorist” to the Latino day laborer. In such a context, it is critical to understand the ways in which increasing securitization at the state and local levels is experienced in daily life, and how that experience shapes the perceptions that Latino immigrants and their non-immigrant neighbors have of their own security and how to ensure it. What does security mean in the context of undocumented immigration in the U.S. today, and what effects do laws meant to guarantee it produce in daily life?
STUDYING SECURITIZATION
A Presidential Authority Award from the Russell Sage Foundation in 2011 allowed me to study the impacts that ordinances like those described above have had on undocumented Latino residents of a small New Jersey town, one of the “new destinations” of migrant settlement in the U.S. My research examines the lived experience of securitized immigration, focusing on the ways in which undocumented migrants respond to the increasingly restrictive legal environment within which they must build their lives. As a cultural anthropologist, I rely on a qualitative research methodology grounded in long-term participant-observation in the study community and intensive individual and group interviewing to collect data on local life. This research brings a much-needed ethnographic perspective to the study of immigration and its impacts on local communities in the U.S. Whereas much research on immigration has tended to focus on macro-level policies and politics using surveys and other quantitative methodologies, the ethnographic approach relies on direct personal interactions between ethnographer and research subjects to highlight the daily experience of life in a particular study location. This research site is not understood as a bounded isolate, but rather must be situated within the broader sociocultural, political, and economic context of a wider region, nation, and world. In trying to understand how securitization operates in one town – a place I call, pseudonymously, Hometown, NJ – my intention is not to generalize to all immigrant communities, but to analyze people’s experiences, in depth and detail, in one particular location. By doing so, I hope to suggest the complex and contradictory ways in which anti-immigrant laws can shape local realities.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments today on Arizona Senate Bill SB 1070, widely considered the toughest immigration law in the country. Among its provisions, the statute requires state and local police to check the immigration status of people they have stopped if there is a "reasonable suspicion" they are in the country illegally. While the oral arguments will likely involve a complicated dissection of the preemption doctrine, we wanted to highlight our research on the enforcement of immigration in different localities around the country. Here are some op-eds and research from our scholars, many supported by our immigration program:
Missing from this important legal debate, however, is the larger question of why states and localities are getting involved in immigration enforcement in the first place. The conventional wisdom on these policies is that federal inaction, combined with demographic pressures from immigration, have left these states and cities little choice but to act. According to this logic, new immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, are causing cultural and economic upheavals in places unaccustomed to such transformations. Consequently, laws like Arizona's SB 1070 and Alabama's HB 56 are seen as natural and inevitable responses.These reasons, however, do not stand up to empirical investigation. In our new systematic study of these state and local immigration laws, the data show that commonly assumed factors — e.g., the growth of immigrant populations, immigrant-caused economic stress, prevalence of Spanish speakers and overcrowded housing — make no significant difference in the proposal or passage of these restrictive immigration laws.
By contrast, political partisanship consistently predicts when and where states and localities will introduce restrictive immigration laws, with Republican-heavy areas especially likely to do so. For instance, restrictive ordinances are 93% more likely to pass in Republican counties than in Democratic ones. At the state level, there is a 47% difference between Republican-heavy states and Democrat-heavy states.