We've been focusing on the 1 percent and the 99 percent for the past year, thanks to the Occupy movement. But here's another way of slicing American society -- right down the middle. How is the 50 percent doing these days? The answer seems to be, not very well. And the conservative assault on the …
Culture or jobs?
Stephen Steinberg contributed a provocative but important piece to Boston Review a year ago on current academic thinking about race and poverty. The piece is titled Poor Reason: Culture Still Doesn't Explain Poverty, and it is now available as a short Kindle publication. The topic Steinberg focuses on is deeply important -- fundamentally, how to explain and remediate …
Race and the Chicago School
The Chicago School of sociology has often gotten a fair amount of credit for bringing the study of race into the academic discipline of sociology in the early decades of the twentieth century. Robert Ezra Park, in particular, is taken as a pioneer with his theories of a "race relations cycle", his work with Booker …
A peaceful world?
Many people around the world are celebrating Christmas this morning. A central wish around this holiday is "peace and good will for all." Why is enduring peace so difficult to achieve? What are the prospects for us in the twenty-first century? Peace and conflict are related, but they aren't precise opposites. Conflict between individuals and …
Structural adjustment for the middle class?
Working people in the US have suffered big economic losses in the past four years. Losses of jobs in the economy have pushed many working people from high-wage to low-wage jobs, and as we all know, many people have been pushed out of jobs altogether. The national unemployment rate was 8.6% in November, and very …
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David Graeber on the anarchist movement
Progressives seem to be confronted with some real conundrums (or is it conundra?), here in the early part of the 21st century. We want to see a world that is genuinely committed to some basic principles of social justice, equality, and personal freedom. And we generally acknowledge the point that the modern world can only …
Race and American inequalities
Douglas Massey is a leading US social scientist who has worked on issues of inequality in America throughout his career. His 2008 book (Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System) is a huge contribution to our understanding of the mechanisms producing inequalities in American society, and it amounts to a stunning indictment of racism and anti-poor …
Health disparities in the US and China
Health disparities across a population are among the most profound indicators of social inequalities that we can find. And the fact of significant disparities across groups is a devastating statement about the circumstances of justice under which a society functions. These disparities translate into shorter lives and lower quality of life for whole groups of …
Can justice be causal?
Is social justice an empirical characteristic of a set of social arrangements? And can social justice be a causal factor in processes of social change or social stability? Before justice could be considered an empirical feature of a set of social arrangements, we would need to have a more specific understanding of what we mean …
The racial equity dividend
Racial justice organizations around the United States are struggling to find the resources from the corporate and foundation worlds needed to support their continuing work. One part of the problem seems to be that business leaders simply aren't convinced that racial inequalities are a fundamental and debilitating problem in the United States that presents a …
Understanding Society 