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In 1899 the great African American scholar, W.E.B. DuBois,
published The Philadelphia Negro, the first systematic case study
of an African American community and one of the foundations of
American sociology. DuBois prophesied that the color line would be
the problem of the twentieth century. One hundred years later,
Problem of the Centuryreflects upon his prophecy, exploring the
ways in which the color line is still visible in the labor market,
the housing market, education, family structure, and many other
aspects of life at the turn of a new century. The book opens with a
theoretical discussion of the way racial identity is constructed
and institutionalized. When the government classifies races and
confers group rights upon them, is it subtly reenforcing damaging
racial divisions, or redressing the group privileges that whites
monopolized for so long? The book also delineates the social
dynamics that underpin racial inequality. The contributors explore
the causes and consequences of high rates of mortality and low
rates of marriage in black communities, as well as the way race
affects a person's chances of economic success. African Americans
may soon lose their historical position as America's majority
minority, and the book also examines how race plays out in the
sometimes fractious relations between blacks and immigrants. The
final part of the book shows how the color line manifests itself at
work and in schools. Contributors find racial issues at play on
both ends of the occupational ladder among absentee fathers paying
child support from their meager earnings and among black executives
prospering in the corporate world. In the schools, the book
explores how race defines a student's peer group and how peer
pressure affects a student's grades. Problem of the Century draws
upon the distinguished faculty of sociologists at the University of
Pennsylvania, where DuBois conducted his research for The
Philadelphia Negro. The contributors combine a scrupulous
commitment to empirical inquiry with an eclectic openness to
different methods and approaches. Problem of the Century blends
ethnographies and surveys, statistics and content analyses, census
data and historical records, to provide a far-reaching examination
of racial inequality in all its contemporary manifestations."
Migration between Mexico and the United States is part of a
historical process of increasing North American integration. This
process acquired new momentum with the passage of the North
American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, which lowered barriers to
the movement of goods, capital, services, and information. But
rather than include labor in this new regime, the United States
continues to resist the integration of the labor markets of the two
countries. Instead of easing restrictions on Mexican labor, the
United States has militarized its border and adopted restrictive
new policies of immigrant disenfranchisement. Beyond Smoke and
Mirrors examines the devastating impact of these immigration
policies on the social and economic fabric of the Mexico and the
United States, and calls for a sweeping reform of the current
system. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors shows how U.S. immigration
policies enacted between 1986 1996 largely for symbolic domestic
political purposes harm the interests of Mexico, the United States,
and the people who migrate between them. The costs have been high.
The book documents how the massive expansion of border enforcement
has wasted billions of dollars and hundreds of lives, yet has not
deterred increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants from heading
north. The authors also show how the new policies unleashed a host
of unintended consequences: a shift away from seasonal, circular
migration toward permanent settlement; the creation of a black
market for Mexican labor; the transformation of Mexican immigration
from a regional phenomenon into a broad social movement touching
every region of the country; and even the lowering of wages for
legal U.S. residents. What had been a relatively open and benign
labor process before 1986 was transformed into an exploitative
underground system of labor coercion, one that lowered wages and
working conditions of undocumented migrants, legal immigrants, and
American citizens alike. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors offers specific
proposals for repairing the damage. Rather than denying the reality
of labor migration, the authors recommend regularizing it and
working to manage it so as to promote economic development in
Mexico, minimize costs and disruptions for the United States, and
maximize benefits for all concerned. This book provides an
essential "user's manual" for readers seeking a historical,
theoretical, and substantive understanding of how U.S. policy on
Mexican immigration evolved to its current dysfunctional state, as
well as how it might be fixed."
Focusing on three central factors-the physical environment, social
relations at the micro level, and social organization at the macro
level-Professor Massey argues that humans are genetically
programmed to be physiologically, psychologically, and socially
adapted to life in small groups and to organic natural
environments. Despite this, most humans live in dense urban
environments. "As biological organisms," Massey writes, "we are
indeed strangers in a strange land." Strangers in a Strange Land is
part of the Contemporary Societies series.
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Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
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R398
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Discovery Miles 3 300
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