Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN-13: 9780226734569. pp. 552, $27.50 cloth. Robert J. Sampson’s ...

Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect

refugee children, Watters’ book provides more generally significant insights into a wide array of issues relevant to contemporary refugees. Rather than concentrating on those who receive refugee status from host societies, Watters asserts “the focus of this book is not restricted to legal and administrative definitions of refugee children, but instead accords with what Zolberg has referred to as a ‘sociological’ definition ‘grounded in observable social realities’” (p. 2). In addition, Watters draws extensively from contemporary theorists of inequality, exclusion and domination—Michel Foucault, Aihwa Ong, Pierre Bourdieu, Homi Bhabha, Liisa Malkki among them—to create a refined appreciation of the ways that states and bureaucracies affect refugees’ understandings of themselves, their social position and their ability to act in their own interest. Refugee Children is based upon the analysis of refugees in several (mostly European) countries of settlement, including Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and especially the U.K., which according to the author is regarded by many stateless persons as the most desirable point of settlement. In addition, the book examines populations originating from and travelling through multiple world regions. Drawing from his own research as well as his reviews of journalistic and academic literature, Watters gives readers numerous first-hand accounts of the settings, interactions and assistance programs that refugee youth encounter. The author carefully attends to the origins of refugees, considering their history, religion and cultural background. Based on this, he questions both the assimilationist approach to refugee resettlement that would compel recent arrivals into the acceptance of host society practices in order to facilitate access to jobs and health care, as well as multicultural models that see refugees as inextricably immersed in the cultural and religious patterns of their country of origin, and as such, fundamentally unlike persons native to the host society. Championing neither, he regards both as paternalistic and potentially limiting to refugee children’s ability to make choices based upon their own outlooks, goals and understandings. In a like manner, Watters assesses models of resettlement in terms of their allocation of resources. He critiques both tight-fisted programs that fail to provide minimal levels of support as well as therapeutic regimes that assume all forced migrants to be deeply wounded and as such, in immediate need of culturally alien and sometimes unwanted rehabilitation. Despite its impressive scholarship, Refugee Children: Towards the Next Horizon is not simply an exercise in academic analysis. Rather, it offers valuable information with many practical examples drawn from successful programs devoted to refugee youth. If there is one downside to this book, it is that the volume is so rich in theories, examples, case studies, suggestions for practice and evaluations of the political and ethical implications of various approaches to working with young refugees, that readers may become overwhelmed. Its scholarly exuberance notwithstanding, Refugee Children: Towards the Next Horizon is a thought-provoking and sophisticated resource for scholars and practitioners interested in the experience of forced migrants in general and refugee youth in particular. The book does an impressive job of filling the conceptual, contextual and theoretical gaps that have, until recently, limited the breadth and quality of research on forced migrants.

Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse

We all know that doctors make the worst patients because they always laughingly tell us so. But how do we rate at taking our own medicine?

view from the chair: I go to a friend

Measuring Racial Discrimination

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

Criminologists have long theorized the relationship between race and crime using traditional criminological theories, suggesting that Blacks simply experience more factors conducive to crime than W...

Unpacking the Racial Disparity in Crime from a Racialized General Strain Theory Perspective

This study investigates the impact of various types of discrimination, including injustices from the police, as well as the conditioning effects of a positive ethnic identity on the likelihood of o...

The New Juan Crow? Unpacking the Links Between Discrimination and Crime for Latinxs:

Interest in the Alt-Right has grown due to its apparent influence on the 2016 presidential election. Despite growing literature on the Alt-Right as an entity, limited attention has been given to th...

Alt-White? A Gendered Look at “Victim” Ideology and the Alt-Right

Men and women experience violent victimization at comparable rates. Yet, women are more likely to experience intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and stalking, as well as witness the victimi...

Disentangling the Impact of Female Victimization Across Racial and Ethnic Lines

Purpose
This chapter has two central goals: (1) to present a foundational argument for status dissonance theory and (2) to apply its central propositions to understanding why some White Americans perceive anti-White bias. Building upon status construction theory, status dissonance theory generally posits that one’s overall status value determined by their combined status characteristics influences the degree they internalize normative referential structures. The salience of normative referential structures frames one’s justice perceptions, which creates status dissonance that manifests as a positional lens through which individuals perceive and interact with the social world. In an application of this framework, it is hypothesized that among Whites, one’s gender and class will impact one’s perceptions of resource reallocation (i.e., racial equality), which in turn impacts the likelihood one perceives anti-White bias generally and personally.


Design
Using the Pew Research Center’s Racial Attitudes in America III Survey, this study employs logistic and ordered probit regressions on a nationally representative sample of White Americans to assess the above propositions.


Findings
Among Whites, males, those whom self-identified as lower class, and the least educated have the highest odds of perceiving resource re-allocation, and in turn all of these factors increased the odds of perceiving anti-White bias generally in society as well as perceiving personal encounters of “reverse” discrimination.


Implications
The findings and theoretical propositions provide a foundation for additional investigations into understanding the causes and consequences of within and between group variation in perceptions and responses to social inequality as well as mechanisms to counter status hierarchies.

Deena A. Isom Scott

Papers

Unpacking the Racial Disparity in Crime from a Racialized General Strain Theory Perspective

The New Juan Crow? Unpacking the Links Between Discrimination and Crime for Latinxs:

Alt-White? A Gendered Look at “Victim” Ideology and the Alt-Right

Disentangling the Impact of Female Victimization Across Racial and Ethnic Lines

Understanding White Americans’ Perceptions of “Reverse” Discrimination: An Application of a New Theory of Status Dissonance