Browsing by Author "Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo"

Because identity is a continuously evolving process, it is important to question whether and how immigrant groups contend with U.S.-based ideas about race. This is especially the case for Afro-Latinxs, who sit at the intersection of two identities, Blackness and Latinidad, that are constructed as mutually exclusive. This dissertation uses Dominicans in the U.S. as an empirical case for understanding how Afro-Latinx groups think about their racial identity and create racial meaning around labels like “Latinx” and “Black.” I also theorize the concept of ethnoracial authenticity and explore how this group navigates normative constructions of Blackness and Latinidad that situate them outside of these identities. Finally, I discuss how Dominicans engage with transnational racial justice movements that create space for Dominicans both in the Dominican Republic and in the diaspora to challenge Dominican xenophobia and anti-Blackness. This work contributes to a broader conversation about the future of Black and Latinx politics and intergroup coalition building and offers insight into how Black Latinxs perceive the benefits of social and political alignment with these larger groups. Understanding the intersections of ethnicity and racial identity and the ways in which these groups overlap is ultimately important for considering what Black, Latinx, and Black Latinx coalition-building will look like in the future and could help us better understand and appreciate the role that these communities could play in global efforts for racial justice.

Black girls who attend elite, predominantly white schools face a host of unique challenges and tasks in achieving a positive, resolved gendered-racial identity; they must learn to reconcile external and potentially negative definitions of Black girlhood while making their own meaning of being a young, Black woman. I take an intracategorical approach to understanding the development and experience of this intersectional identity in a predominantly white, elite independent school. This study highlights Black girls lived experience in this specific context to reveal how their multidimensional identities develop, shape and are shaped by their schools. First, I explore the sources on which the girls relied to better understand their Black girl identities. Second, I examine the relationship between school context and the girls’ romantic experiences and romantic self-concept. Last, I investigate whether and in what manner school settings influence second-generation, Black immigrant girls’ identity development. Using data collected from fifty semi-structured, narrative style interviews, I find that in elite, white school settings, (i) Black girls were the most influential figures in one another’s identity development process; (ii) their white school contexts limited Black girls’ romantic opportunities in ways that contributed to a negative romantic self-concept; and (iii) in elite, white school settings, second-generation Black immigrant girls developed hybrid identities that integrated their ethnic heritage, their experiences in America as Black girls, and their experiences of difference and desire for racial community at school.

Research on the military has historically focused on the potentially de-stratifying effects of service, including reductions of racial inequality and social mobility. Taking a life course approach, this prior research tends to claim that the military is a positive turning point in the lives of disadvantaged men. Scholars point to the educational benefits of the GI Bill, racial integration, and health care to claim that military service, especially during peacetime, is largely beneficial to service members. While it is certainly the case that the military has provided some historical benefits to marginalized groups, recent research has given us strong reasons to question how beneficial military service is to stigmatized groups. Significant racial and gender inequalities remain, and in some cases, are deepening. Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews with veterans this dissertation examines how the organizational habitus of the military, despite organizational proclamations of meritocracy, may contribute to inequality. Focusing on the unintended consequences of military polices surrounding mental health problems, discrimination, and family relations, I create a synthesis of organizational and critical race theories to show how military policies may compound problems for soldiers and veterans. Focusing on the contradictions between stated organizational policies and actual practice, I show how the organizational arrangements of the military normalize overt expressions of racial and gender based discrimination, creating a sometimes-hostile environment for women and minorities and leaving them little recourse for recrimination. When policies protecting the stigmatized undermine the power and prerogatives of commanders or conflict with the militaries mission, it is not the powerful that suffer. Further, I show how military policies promoting family, such as extra pay for married soldiers, are at odds with the multiple deployments and high mental health incidences of this generations wars. Although the military relies on women on the "home front," as a basis of support, the exigencies of service undermine relationship stability.

I argue that traditional findings on the de-stratifying effects of service are partially a product of an analytical frame that neglects internal organizational dynamics.

Recently, research concerning the United States Criminal Justice System has been dominated by discussions of mass incarceration and deadly acts of police violence. Although there is conflicting evidence regarding the impact of racial diversity in criminal justice organizations, it continues to receive consideration as a prescription for racial disparities in policing, sentencing, and incarceration. Few studies have provided a holistic analysis of multiple components of the criminal justice system in one locality. This research focuses on the role of race throughout New York City’s Criminal Justice System. Based on court observations, ethnographic data, and semi-structured interviews I focus on the experiences and perspectives of black and Latino actors involved in the criminal justice process. Findings suggest that race itself is not predictive of active representation, while the link between passive and active representation cannot be completely dismissed. I discuss the implications of these findings for future research and policy initiatives aimed at reducing racial disparities in policing and incarceration.

There is widespread evidence that health disparities between whites and blacks in the U.S. cannot be fully explained by inter-group socioeconomic differences. Further, research shows that racism plays a significant role in explaining racial health disparities. However, there is less research that attends to what psychosocial and socioeconomic resources may be protective of black middle-class health over time. My research starts to fill this gap by examining whether racial identity and childhood socioeconomic status are protective of black health over time.

In Chapter 2, I use data from the American Changing Lives Study (ACL) and examine whether a strong racial identity is a protective mechanism in the relationship between racism and two health outcomes: self-rated health and depressive symptoms. My findings suggest that whether racial identity is protective depends on the health outcome and the frequency of racism respondents experience. My results also indicate that middle-class is not consistently a protective factor for black health.

In Chapter 3, I use data from the National Survey of American Life (NSAL) and the ACL to investigate whether childhood socioeconomic status is associated with adult health for blacks, and particularly black women. I argue that relative childhood socioeconomic advantage is more important for disadvantaged race and race/gender groups. Further, using an intersectional approach, I argue that it is most important for black women. My findings indicate that the association of childhood socioeconomic status and adult health is significant for blacks, but not whites. I also find that childhood socioeconomic status is especially important for black women.

This dissertation focuses on the concept of “quiet neglect” or the institutionalized silence of Americans’ misdeeds during the Vietnam and Secret Wars that subsequently eschewed Southeast Asian Americans’ (SEAA) issues, is a key factor leading SEAAs to reconsider panethnicity. Using 62 in-depth interviews with Southeast Asian refugees who were resettled in North Carolina and the service providers who work with them, I examine how the erasure of U.S. culpability and responsibility to SEAAs has impacted SEAAs’ racial experiences in their new homes. The chapters of the dissertation are as follows: Chapter 1 examines the link between collective memories and quiet neglect, and how the former impact refugees’ present-day encounters with intergenerational trauma and racialized emotions. Following the Vietnam and Secret Wars, the U.S.’s rescue of Southeast Asian refugees was both lauded for its humanitarianism and criticized as a means for obscuring the military’s wartime atrocities. I examine how narratives of U.S. heroism have impacted the former’s encounters with trauma. I argue that our collective memories of the Vietnam War have (1) made refugees into a group whose histories are to be forgotten or “quietly neglected,” and thus (2) indicate that refugees’ trauma is not purely psychological but linked to racialized postwar emotions. First, I observe how collective memories of the Vietnam and Secret Wars have denied refugees’ suffering while bolstering ideas of American benevolence. Second, I explore how these collective memories shaped the institutionalized denial of refugees’ ongoing trauma. Finally, I examine how some respondents challenged the systemic neglect shaping their communities and attempted to construct “countermemories” of the war and resettlement. Chapter 2 looks at how quiet neglect uniquely shaped SEAAs’ experiences relative to those of voluntary immigrants and pushes for a reconsideration of how they are categorized and identified. Namely, Asian American panethnicity is popularly used as an umbrella term housing SEAAs alongside other ethnic groups. Increasingly, scholars have questioned whether panethnicity accurately reflects the diversity of different ethnicities’ experiences and identities. In mainstream culture, “Asian American” has become synonymous with East Asian Americans and stereotypes—albeit biased ones—of their affluence, thus erasing the realities of working-class, South, and Southeast Asian Americans (SEAAs). I focus on the last group and join other scholars in emphasizing how ethnic groups’ unique historical relationships with the U.S. differentially impact their racial identities and attachments to panethnicity. I explore how quiet neglect shapes refugees’ connections to Asian American panethnicity and their decision to align with alternative identities. At stake is our capacity to recognize individuals’ agency to challenge racial boundaries and assert identities that they find meaningful. Additionally, I examine how SEAAs situate themselves within our broader racial structure and harness their identities to connect with other people of color. Chapter 3 considers the connections between quiet neglect and SEAA deportations. Integral to quiet neglect is the casting of Southeast Asian refugees as “good refugees” whose resettlement represented American heroism and humanitarianism. However, starting in the immediate post-9/11 era and ramping up under the Trump administration, these very refugees have been subjected to new deportation agreements that stigmatize them as “violent criminal aliens.” Despite these developments, the “racialization of illegality” has continued to frame deportations as a Latinx issue, eschewing its impacts on Asian Americans. Using 62 interviews with Southeast Asians and service providers in North Carolina, I explore how refugees and their support systems both reify and reject conventions of racialized illegality as they respond to changes in deportation policies. Southeast Asian Americans’ responses indicate the challenges of imagining a highly racialized phenomenon like deportations as an opportunity for interracial cooperation.

Despite the positive benefits of higher education and policy efforts to reduce barriers, opportunities for college access are still not equitably distributed (Perna 2006). An overwhelming body of research reveals several troubling trends in college going, student persistence, and degree attainment. Black, Hispanic and low-income students are less likely to attend college than whites. When they do make it onto postsecondary education, Black and Hispanic students are underrepresented at the most selective and well-funded institutions (Carnevale and Strohl 2013). This is troubling because full-time students at elite universities are twice as likely to graduate within six years as their counterparts at less selective institutions, according to a 2011 report from Complete College America. Because degree attainment can be very consequential for later outcomes in life, the seeming immutability of racial and socioeconomic gaps in college access is perhaps one of the most pressing issues in the United States. This dissertation explores how the process of college entry varies across race, gender and socioeconomic status. In particular, I examine an overlooked factor in the literature on college going by focusing on the role of anticipated barriers to upward mobility in the process of educational attainment. To do this, the dissertation draws on nationally representative data from the US Department of Education’s High School Longitdinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09). The first chapter explores group differences in students’ perceptions of barriers around affordability, accessibility and achievability. The second chapter investigates the relationship between perceptions of limited opportunity and college seeking behaviors. The third chapter assesses whether there are racial differences in the implications of perceived barriers for college seeking. I find that beliefs about the opportunity structure matter differently for various groups, are consequential for the decisions students make about whether and how to invest in education and represent a key dimension of the status attainment process.

My dissertation is a mixed-methods approach to investigate how local law enforcement implements federal immigration enforcement programs throughout the state of North Carolina. I’ve spent time as a participant observer as well as conducted formal and informal follow-up interviews with attendees at 287(g) Steering committee meetings and/or persons previously involved with each program in each of the following counties: 1) Henderson County, 2) Gaston County, 3) Cabarrus County, 4) Wake County, and 5) Mecklenburg County. I’ve supplemented this information with archival data from counties during their adoption phase of the 287(g) program and incorporated related immigration information when relevant.

In this research, first, I document how various entities became crimmigration entities. Second, I theorize how these partnerships became normalized in order to protect a variety of white interests. Lastly, I focus on how this one program might be situated within a broader framework, which attempts to define immigration enforcement practices at the local level.

Research on inequality within disciplines in the academy have often focused on gender, rates of publication, geographic location, and other particularistic criteria; however, much fewer research has looked at race. Using sociology as a case study, this dissertation delineates the racialized nature of collaboration and research specialty areas in the field and theorizes on how this reproduces racialized sociological knowledge. In the first chapter I offer a brief introduction to the topic and discuss its relevance for sociology.Chapter 2 examines the link between race and the structure of collaboration networks. Collaboration is a beneficial way that scholars can share publishing expectations by working together to create and disseminate new scholarship. In sociology, one of the effects of greater collaboration in publishing is that the overall structure of discipline is becoming more cohesive and integrated. At the same time, work on race and publishing in sociology has uncovered differences between whites and people of color in their rates of coauthorship; however, it remains unclear how these differences are situated within the structure of the larger sociological field. Using data from a sample of U.S. black and Latinx sociologists (n = 171), I examine their collaboration networks to investigate differences in the rates of racial integration in the structure of the discipline. I find that both black and Latinx sociologists tend toward racial heterophily in their personal collaboration networks, opposite to what the homophily literature suggests. When these networks are situated within the larger sociological collaboration space, I find that the racial group with the greatest centrality depends on the measure used. I conclude by discussing these findings within the context of social capital and discuss what effects they might have on the career success of these sociologists. Chapter 3 examines the link between race and specialty areas in sociology. Research on the structure of knowledge in scientific fields have recently focused on the increasing rates of area specialization and collaboration across subfields. In sociology, whites and people of color are concentrated in different specialty areas, but there have been no quantitative studies which link race and the structure of the discipline’s subfield integration. When I compare the subfield spanning of a cohort of sociologists of color to the subfield spanning of the discipline as introduced by Leahey and Moody (2014), I find major differences between the networks, suggesting the discipline’s subfield network structure is not an accurate representation of the work of sociologists of color. I conclude by discussing how this skewed depiction of sociological subfield spanning may impact sociologists of color and the conception of the cohesiveness of sociological knowledge overall. Altogether this dissertation illustrates the need for network studies of sociology to consider the role of race and racism in its mappings. In the final chapter of this dissertation, I conclude with a discussion on the implications of the findings from this research for American sociology. Further, I offer several suggestions for future research on the topic of race and networks in sociology, in other disciplines, and in the academy more broadly.

Haitian immigrants and their Dominican-born descendants face sociopolitical exclusion in spite of their contribution to the Dominican economy. This project engages three key theoretical perspectives to explain inequality in the Dominican Republic. First, intersectionality theory informs analyses of gender- and nativity-based social factors that influence mental health. Mental health inequalities based on gender and nativity have been documented independently; however, few studies have examined how the intersection of these social locations influences mental health. Results show that contextual factors shape gender- and nativity-related stressors according to intersectional patterns, revealing the importance of intersectional analyses of mental health that include nativity as a site of structural oppression. Next, I use stress process theory to examine how documentation policy is a key driver of negative mental health outcomes among Haitian immigrants and their descendants. Results reveal two major findings. First, documentation policy can act as a primary stressor that yields additional stressors for affected populations. Second, documentation policy can produce the social locations which contribute to compound disadvantage as ethnic Haitians are excluded from multiple domains of social life at once: education, employment, political and social participation. Finally, I apply assimilation theory to examine how the racial context of reception affects immigrant incorporation. Data show that although anti-immigrant sentiment contributes to Haitians’ context of reception in the D.R., immigration officials use race and racialized characteristics to screen for Haitian ancestry. This points to the need to explore the racial context of reception when theorizing inequality among immigrants’ incorporation trajectories. Collective results from this project underscore the importance of including of nativity in intersectional analyses, examining the social consequences of documentation policies, and measuring immigrants’ social contexts comprehensively.