Results by title

Stereotyped as “model minorities” who excel in the classroom, Asian Americans are more highly educated than all other U.S. groups. Once in the labor market, they outearn White Americans. Some believe this is evidence that White privilege, racial bias, and gender discrimination are fictitious narratives of a liberal “woke” agenda. Others use it as proof that confirms their stereotypes that Asian Americans are inherently smarter and harder working than other groups. While much attention has focused on Asian Americans’ academic achievement, far less research considers whether their later careers mirror their early success. In this issue of RSF, sociologists Jennifer Lee, Kimberly Goyette, Xi Song, and Yu Xie, management scholar Jackson G. Lu, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how Asian Americans fare in the workplace.

The ten articles in this issue examine the ways in which Asian Americans, due to geographic clustering, are advantaged at a national level but disadvantaged at the regional level, how gender, family, and marriage impact Asian Americans in the workplace, and the different ways Asian Americans strategically adapt to the labor market. Robert Manduca and Jane Furey reveal that while, on average, Asian Americans outearn White Americans at a national level, when compared to Whites living in the same metropolitan area, Asians earn only 88 percent as much. Sharon Sassler and Gabrielle Sorresso find that among computer science professionals, Indian women have a larger gender wage gap than White and Chinese women and experience larger marriage and parenthood penalties in earnings. Sojung Lim and Wonjeong Jeong show that Asian women are more likely to live with extended family than White women, leading to higher rates of employment among Asian women with children. Angelina Grigoryeva finds that while Asian Americans are more likely to receive stock-based compensation than White Americans, this is because they are more likely to work in jobs where stock options are provided. Asians and Whites working in the same types of jobs are equally likely to receive stock-based compensation and in similar amounts. Shih-Chun Chien and colleagues find that despite being the fastest-growing racial minority group entering the legal profession, Asian Americans are underrepresented in leadership positions. They find this pattern is attributed, in part, to employers’ pervasive stereotypes that Asian Americans lack traits typically associated with leadership, such as creativity and assertiveness.

This issue of RSF reveals that the perception of the Asian American advantage in the workplace is illusory and sheds light on the lived experiences of the “model minority” when they go to work.

The United States is home to the largest deportation system in the world: Between 2001 and 2022, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out nearly 6.5 million deportations. Deportation is often framed as a singular event that happens to an individual. However, as public policy scholar Caitlin Patler and political scientist Brad Jones argue in this issue of RSF, deportation is a system that encompasses premigration, within-U.S., and post-deportation contexts and outcomes. With Congress recently approving a massive expansion of the US deportation system, understanding its consequences is more important than ever before. 

In this issue, an interdisciplinary group of contributors explore the wide range of impacts of the U.S. deportation system. The introductory chapter by Patler and Jones defines the U.S. deportation system and provides a comprehensive historical context for understanding its causes and consequences. Mass deportation is enabled primarily through the merging of U.S. immigration and criminal laws. Ian Peacock explores the proliferation of 287(g) agreements, which deputize local law enforcement to enforce immigration law. He shows that counties with stronger ties to public official associations, such as the National Sheriff’s Association and the Major County Sheriffs of America, were more likely to adopt identical 287(g) agreements, devote more jail space to ICE detainees, and comply with ICE detainer requests at higher rates. The issue also presents empirical analyses of the consequences of the US deportation system. Articles by Youngjin Stephanie Hong and colleagues, Cora Bennett and colleagues, and J. Jacob Kirksey and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, link deportation to reduced Head Start enrollment, lower K-12 test scores, and declines in college enrollment, respectively. The remaining articles turn to the aftermath of deportation. Erin R. Hamilton and colleagues show that between 2015 and 2020, 11,000 individuals were de facto deportees—family members who leave the country because another family member has been deported—in Mexico, with a disproportionate number being women and children. Further highlighting the importance of family, Ángel A. Escamilla García and Adriana M. Cerón analyze survey data from recently deported Central Americans and find those who left minor children in the U.S. were more likely to intend to remigrate to the U.S. 

This issue of RSF sheds light on various dimensions of the increasingly punitive U.S. deportation system and the many ways it harms individuals and communities. In the current era of mass expansion of immigration law enforcement, it will be a valuable educational tool for students, faculty, policymakers, and many other stakeholders.

Beyond the battlefield: How race and gender redefined war, identity, and memory in Civil War America.

Race and Gender at War is a collection of essays that illuminates ways that race and gender have persistently shaped the military history of the United States. Editors Lesley J. Gordon and Andrew J. Huebner showcase historians with varied research agendas in the field of “war and society,” a fertile area of inquiry that shares space (and often overlaps) with operational studies inside the broader field of military history. Chronicling more than 150 years of American history, the essays in this volume demonstrate that the tensions and injustices surrounding race, gender, and the military remain relevant and controversial, and continue to roil American politics, society, and culture to this day.

Spanning the two centuries from the 1830s to the present, the collection examines topics such as Choctaw Natives who served in the Confederate Army, the trailblazing but fraught experiences of Black servicemen from the Civil War through World War I, the hypersexualized images of World War II servicemen, and the varied and mutable roles of women in the armed services. Utilizing diverse methodologies, the book examines how these factors influenced everything from military policy to civilian experiences, encompassing topics like martial rhetoric, citizenship, propaganda, and patriotism.
 

CONTRIBUTORS

Kevin Adams / Amanda Bellows / Kari L. Boyd-Weisenberger / Michele Curran Cornell / Lesley J. Gordon / Andrew J. Huebner / Gregory Mixon / Caroline Wood Newhall / Heather Marie Stur / Patrick T. Troester / Chad L. Williams / Fay A. Yarbrough

The contemporary rethinking and relearning of history and racism has sparked creative approaches for teaching the histories and representations of marginalized communities. Cristina Stanciu and Gary Totten edit a collection that illuminates these ideas for a variety of fields, areas of education, and institutional contexts.

The authors draw on their own racial and ethnic backgrounds to examine race and racism in the context of addressing necessary and often difficult classroom conversations about race, histories of exclusion, and racism. Case studies, reflections, and personal experiences provide guidance for addressing race and racism in the classroom. In-depth analysis looks at attacks on teaching Critical Race Theory and other practices for studying marginalized histories and voices. Throughout, the contributors shine a light on how a critical framework focused on race advances an understanding of contemporary and historical US multiethnic literatures for students around the world and in all fields of study.

Contributors: Kristen Brown, Nancy Carranza, Luis Cortes, Marilyn Edelstein, Naomi Edwards, Joanne Lipson Freed, Yadira Gamez, Lauren J. Gantz, Jennifer Ho, Shermaine M. Jones, Norell Martinez, Sarah Minslow, Crystal R. Pérez, Kevin Pyon, Emily Ruth Rutter, Ariel Santos, and C. Anneke Snyder

Winner, Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Reference/Primary Source Work in Popular and American Culture, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2016

Known for their violence and prolific profanity, including free use of the n-word, the films of Quentin Tarantino, like the director himself, chronically blurt out in polite company what is extremely problematic even when deliberated in private. Consequently, there is an uncomfortable and often awkward frankness associated with virtually all of Tarantino’s films, particularly when it comes to race and blackness. Yet beyond the debate over whether Tarantino is or is not racist is the fact that his films effectively articulate racial anxieties circulating in American society as they engage longstanding racial discourses and hint at emerging trends. This radical racial politics—always present in Tarantino’s films but kept very much on the quiet—is the subject of Race on the QT.

Adilifu Nama concisely deconstructs and reassembles the racial dynamics woven into Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained, as they relate to historical and current racial issues in America. Nama’s eclectic fusion of cultural criticism and film analysis looks beyond the director’s personal racial attitudes and focuses on what Tarantino’s filmic body of work has said and is saying about race in America symbolically, metaphorically, literally, impolitely, cynically, sarcastically, crudely, controversially, and brilliantly.

In Racism in a Racial Democracy, France Winddance Twine asks why Brazilians, particularly Afro-Brazilians, continue to have faith in Brazil's "racial democracy" in the face of pervasive racism in all spheres of Brazilian life. Through a detailed ethnography, Twine provides a cultural analysis of the everyday discursive and material practices that sustain and naturalize white supremacy.

This is the first ethnographic study of racism in southeastern Brazil to place the practices of upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians at the center of analysis. Based on extensive field research and more than fifty life histories with Afro- and Euro-Brazilians, this book analyzes how Brazilians conceptualize and respond to racial disparities. Twine illuminates the obstacles Brazilian activists face when attempting to generate grassroots support for an antiracist movement among the majority of working class Brazilians. Anyone interested in racism and antiracism in Latin America will find this book compelling.

For over a century, National Geographic has shaped American visual culture, captivating audiences with stunning photography and compelling storytelling. Yet behind its iconic yellow border lies a fraught legacy of gender bias, racial misrepresentation, and colonialist narratives.In this incisive study, Leland G. Spencer examines the brand's recent attempts to reckon with that legacy across its magazine and television platforms. From special issues spotlighting transgender lives, to a public acknowledgment of past racism, to a magazine edition created entirely by women, these efforts signal a move toward inclusivity. But as Spencer reveals through rigorous rhetorical analysis, these gestures often fall short. The texts themselves frequently echo the same systemic inequalities they seek to redress. National Geographic's progressive rebranding, he argues, remains tangled in the very histories it aims to transcend.
 

There exists today a tragic rift between Americans and the world’s Muslims. Yet in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was widespread sympathy for the U.S. throughout the Muslim world. This book explores what happened. It examines the disconnect that leads Americans and Muslims to view the same words and images in fundamentally different ways. Partly a result of a centuries-old 'us' against 'them' dichotomy, the problem is exacerbated by an increasingly polarised media and by leaders on both sides who either don't understand or don't care what impact their words and policies have in the world at large.

Journalist-scholar Lawrence Pintak, a former CBS News Middle East correspondent, argues that the Arab media revolution and the rise of 'patriot-journalists' in the US marginalized voices of moderation, distorting perceptions on both sides of the divide with potentially disastrous results.

Built on the author's extensive journalistic experience, the book will appeal to policymakers, students of media studies, Middle East studies and Islamic studies, and general current affairs readers.

Winner of the 2019 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities

Kateřina Kolářová’s Rehabilitative Postsocialism offers a timely interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis of how disability, race, class, and gender operate as ideological tools within the postsocialist Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia). Kolářová presents postsocialism as an analytic that can and should be brought to bear to understand cultural politics, economic formations, and state politics through the present day. 

Rehabilitative Postsocialism names disability, sexuality, and race as central yet invisible to negotiations of the postsocialist consensus. Drawing from a rich and varied archive, Rehabilitative Postsocialism maps the formation of new structures of inequalities and social imaginaries of wellness, merit, and justice in order to understand current articulations of global disenchantment with democracy, social justice, and solidarity. The book also makes clear that disability, race, and ethnicity continue to circulate in depictions of Eastern Europe as suspended in a chronic developmental “delay.” Rehabilitative Postsocialism both situates this positioning within its political and historical formation and offers the analytical tools to challenge its continued deployment.

Centered on the trajectory of the emancipation of Roma people in Scandinavia, Romani Liberation is a powerful challenge to the stereotype describing Romani as passive and incapable of responsibility and agency. The author also criticizes benevolent but paternalistic attitudes that center on Romani victimhood.

The first part of the book offers a comprehensive overview of the chronological phases of Romani emancipation in Sweden and other countries. Underscoring the significance of Roma activism in this process, Jan Selling profiles sixty Romani activists and protagonists, including numerous original photos. The narrative is followed by an analysis of the concepts of historical justice and of the process of decolonizing Romani Studies. Selling highlights the impact of the historical contexts that have enabled or impeded the success of the struggles against discrimination and for equal rights, emphasizing Romani activism as a precondition for liberation.

The particular Swedish framework is accentuated by a stimulating preface by the international activist Nicoleta Bitu, and afterwords by two prominent Romani advocates, the politician Soraya Post and the singer, author, and elder Hans Caldaras.