“A riveting narrative of how decent people are transformed by conducive structural conditions into malevolent slumlords, Collateral Damages is guaranteed to make you think about the housing crisis in a new light. Meredith J. Greif lays bare how the very regulations meant to protect marginalized tenants stoke landlords’ illegal and immoral behaviors, ensuring even greater precarity in tenants’ lives. If you want to understand housing in America, this book is not to be missed.”
—KATHRYN EDIN, William Church Osborn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs,Princeton University

“Collateral Damages provides a critical window into the understudied practices and motivations of small landlords, who collectively provide homes to most of the nation’s poor renters. Meredith J. Greif highlights the financial vulnerability of these housing providers and shows how structural forces can lead some of them to engage in harmful practices. Balanced and engaging, the book sends an important, cautionary note about how well-intentioned local laws can backfire and harm the very low-income renters they are meant to protect.”
—INGRID GOULD ELLEN, Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, New York University

Changes in federal housing policies over the past several decades shifted the primary responsibility for providing low-income renters with affordable housing from the government to private landlords. Federal, state, and local governments have passed laws to ensure that low-income renters are protected from illicit landlording practices. Yet we know little about how private landlords experience local housing regulations. In Collateral Damages, sociologist Meredith Greif examines how local laws affect private landlords and whether tenants are, in fact, being adequately protected.

For three years, Greif followed 60 private landlords serving low- and moderate-income residents in the Cleveland, Ohio, metropolitan area to better understand how local regulations, such as criminal activity nuisance ordinances (CANOs) and local water billing regulations, affect their landlording practices. CANOs are intended to protect communities by discouraging criminal activity on private properties. Property owners can face financial and criminal sanctions if they do not abate nuisance activities, which can include littering, noise, drug use, and calls for police assistance, including calls for domestic violence. Local water billing regulations hold landlords responsible for delinquent water bills, even in cases where the account is registered in the tenant’s name. Greif finds that such laws often increase landlords’ sense of “financial precarity” – the real or perceived uncertainty that their business is financially unsustainable – by holding them responsible for behavior they feel is out of their control. Feelings of financial uncertainty led some landlords to use illegitimate business practices against their tenants, including harassment, oversurveillance, poor property upkeep, and illegal evictions. And to avoid to financial penalities associated with CANOs and delinquent water bills, some landlords engage in discriminatory screening of vulnerable potential tenants who are unemployed or have histories of domestic violence or drug use. In this sense, by promoting a sense of financial insecurity among landlords, laws meant to protect renters ultimately had the opposite effect.

While some landlords, particularly those who rented a larger number of units, were able to operate their businesses both lawfully and profitably, the majority could not. Greif offers practical recommendations to address the concerns of small- and mid-sized landlords, such as regular meetings that bring landlords and local authorities together to engage in constructive dialogue about local housing policy, issues, and concerns. She also proposes policy recommendations to protect renters, such as establishing the right to counsel for lower-income tenants in eviction hearings and enacting a federal renter’s tax credit.

Collateral Damages is an enlightening investigation on how local laws and practices perpetuate disadvantage among marginalized populations and communities, in ways that are hidden and often unintended.

MEREDITH GREIF is assistant professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University

We recently sat down with Ann Morning & Marcello Maneri to understand how everyday people view race in Italy and the United States. You can watch an abridged video of the interview above, or read or listen to the full transcript below.

Listen to Part 1 of 2 of the interview

Listen to Part 2 of 2 of the interview

Read a transcript of the full interview here.

“An Ugly Word is a terrific book that will make a major contribution to several areas of scholarship. First, it addresses a very important question in comparative race studies—whether the United States and Western Europe have different concepts of race, rooted in biological notions in the United States and cultural notions in Europe. Second, the book is a very careful and nuanced empirical study of how Italians think of and talk about descent-based difference. Third, the book revisits Morning’s important groundbreaking earlier work on concepts of descent-based difference in the United States and extends it by putting it in dialogue with the Italian case, bringing new light to understanding the ways in which Americans think and talk about racial and ethnic differences. Fourth, the book provides a new conceptual apparatus and theoretical tools for researching the conceptual underpinnings of descent-based difference. This is difficult work because it involves unpacking taken-for-granted terms such as race, ethnicity, biology, primordialism, culture, and the like, while also using these terms to understand how ordinary people make sense of the diversity they encounter. An Ugly Word is a great example of using empirical social science to advance theory on an incredibly important social and public policy issue. It is a terrific example of the interplay of evidence and theory.”
—MARY C. WATERS, Harvard University

“By bringing Italian and American ways of thinking and talking (or not talking) about race into fruitful conversation with one another, Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri make a valuable contribution, at once conceptual and empirical, to the comparative study of understandings of descent-based difference.”
—ROGERS BRUBAKER, University of California, Los Angeles

“An Ugly Word invites us to think more deeply about descent-based difference. Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri interrogate in quite fined-grained detail the meanings and nuances of perceived group boundaries and categories in the United States and Italy. In so doing, they advance the cultural sociology and comparative analyses of race as a social phenomena. In an age of global population flows and enduring challenges of inequality, this work will surely engage and prove useful to serious students of racism, identity, and culture.”
—LAWRENCE D. BOBO, Harvard University

Scholars and politicians often assume a significant gap between the ways that Americans and Europeans think about race. According to this template, in the U.S. race is associated with physical characteristics, while in Western Europe race has disappeared, and discrimination is based on insurmountable cultural differences. However, little research has addressed how average Americans and Europeans actually think and talk about race. In An Ugly Word, sociologists Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri examine American and Italian understandings of group difference in order to determine if and how they may differ.

Morning and Maneri interviewed over 150 people across the two countries about differences among what they refer to as “descent-based groups.” Using this concept allowed them to sidestep the language of “race” and “ethnicity,” which can be unnecessarily narrow, poorly defined, or even offensive to some. Drawing on these interviews, the authors find that while ways of speaking about group difference vary considerably across the Atlantic, underlying beliefs about it do not. The similarity in American and Italian understandings of difference was particularly evident when discussing sports. Both groups relied heavily on traditional stereotypes of Black physicality to explain Black athletes’ overrepresentation in sports like U.S. football and their underrepresentation in sports like swimming – contradicting the claims that a biological notion of race is a distinctly American phenomenon.

While American and Italian concepts of difference may overlap extensively, they are not identical. Interviews in Italy were more likely to reveal beliefs about groups’ innate, unchangeable temperaments, such as friendly Senegalese and dishonest Roma. And where physical difference was seen by Italians as superficial and unimportant, cultural difference was perceived as deeply meaningful and consequential. In contrast, U.S. interviewees saw cultural difference as supremely malleable—and often ascribed the same fluidity to racial identity, which they believed stemmed from culture as well as biology. In light of their findings, Morning and Maneri propose a new approach to understanding cross-cultural beliefs about descent-based difference that includes identifying the traits people believe differentiate groups, how they believe those traits are acquired, and whether they believe these traits can change.

An Ugly Word is an illuminating, cross-national examination of the ways in which people around the world make sense of race and difference.

ANN MORNING is professor of sociology at New York University

MARCELLO MANERI is associate professor of sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca

"Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America offers a compelling study examining the linkage between skin color and politics in the United States. Importantly, Mara Ostfeld and Nicole Yadon embark on a careful comparative analysis that examines the nuances and varied effects of skin color on the political attitudes of the three major ethnoracial groups in the United States."
—MARISA ABRAJANO, professor of political science, University of California, San Diego

"The conception of race as a social construct is not novel. What is novel and what makes Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America an essential read is its nuanced and deeper understanding—from measurement to meaning—of the multifaceted ways that people are stratified by skin shade both across and within broadly defined racial groups, and how that sorting links to power and politics."
—DARRICK HAMILTON, university professor and Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy, The New School

"Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America is a landmark achievement. It provides new and important insights about how skin tone shapes politics within and across ethnoracial categories. By looking beyond broad ethnoracial categories using novel data, Mara Ostfeld and Nicole Yadon carefully reveal the manifold pathways through which race, gender, color, and class influence political ideologies and ethnoracial politics in the United States. In so doing, Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America is an indispensable resource and a must-read for anyone interested in enriching their understanding of contemporary ethnoracial politics in the United States."
—ELLIS MONK, associate professor of sociology, Harvard University

A person’s skin color affects their life experiences including income, educational attainment, health outcomes, exposure to discrimination, interactions with the criminal justice system and one’s sense of ethnoracial group belonging. But, do these disparate experiences affect the relationship between skin color and political views? In Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America, political scientists Mara Ostfeld and Nicole Yadon explore the relationship between skin color and political views in the U.S. among Latino, Black, and White Americans. They examine how skin color influences an individual’s politics and whether a person’s political views influence how they assess their own skin color.

Ostfeld and Yadon surveyed over 1,300 people about their political views, including party affiliation, their opinions on welfare, and the importance of speaking English in the U.S. The authors created a matrix grounded in their “Roots of Race” framework, which predicts the relationship between skin color and political attitudes for each ethnoracial group based on the blurriness of the group’s boundaries and historical levels of privilege. They draw upon three distinct measures of skin color to conceptualize the relationship between skin color and political views: “Machine-Rated Skin Color,” measured with a light-reflectance meter; “Self-Assessed Skin Color,” using the Yadon-Ostfeld Skin Color Scale; and “Skin Color Discrepancy,” the difference between one’s Machine-Rated and Self-Assessed Skin Color.

Ostfeld and Yadon examine patterns that emerge among these measures, and their relationships with life experiences and political stances. Among Latinos, a group with relatively blurry group boundaries and low levels of historical privilege, the authors find a robust relationship between political views and Self-Assessed Skin Color. Latinos who overestimate the lightness of their skin color are more likely to hold conservative views on current racialized political issues, such as policing. Latinos who overestimate the darkness of their skin color, on the other hand, are more likely to hold liberal political views. As America’s major political parties remain divided on issues of race, this suggests that for Latinos, self-reported skin color is used as a means of aligning oneself with valued political coalitions.

African Americans, another group with low levels of historical privilege but with more clearly defined group boundaries, demonstrated no significant relationship between skin color and political attitudes. Thus, the lived experiences associated with being African American appeared to supersede the differences in life experiences due to skin color.

Whites, a group with more historical privilege and increasingly blurry group boundaries, showed a clear relationship between machine-assessed skin color and attitudes on political issues. Those with darker Machine-Rated Skin Color are more likely to hold conservative views, suggesting that they are responding to the threat of losing their privilege in a multicultural society.

At a time when the U.S. is both more diverse and politically divided, Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America is a timely account of the ways in which skin color and politics are intertwined.

MARA OSTFELD is an assistant research scientist at the Gerald R. Ford  School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

NICOLE YADON is an assistant professor of political science at The Ohio State University.