Events

Asian American youth are outperforming all other race groups in the United States, including whites, on measures of academic achievement. What does this portend for the process of ethnic assimilation? In this talk I present findings from a study of a well-off suburban community with a large and growing Asian American population. Parents mobilize their resources to bolster their children's achievements in both academics and extracurricular activities, with Asian parents tending to prioritize academics and white parents tending to prioritize extracurriculars, especially sports. I show how tensions over the 'right' way to parent develop when Asian American youth catapult ahead of their white peers academically. That is, rather than whites and Asians assimilating, either by Asians adopting dominant 'white' parenting practices or whites adopting the strategies of Asians, parents engaged in moral boundary making to defend their parenting, despite well-known stereotypes about Asian parents being too demanding and white children being outsmarted by their Asian American peers. Ultimately, both white and Asian families alike benefit from the class segregation that keeps working class and poor families out of their town altogether, through policies designed to maintain residential segregation, and more.

Springboard To Opportunities launched The Magnolia Mother’s Trust in 2018, creating an initiative that provides $1,000 cash on a monthly basis to low-income Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi—no strings attached—for one year. Now in its third cohort, the Magnolia Mother’s Trust program has supported more than 200 families. While there had been several initiatives for a guaranteed income worldwide, this was the first that specifically targeted extremely low-income families headed by Black women living in affordable housing in the United States. Preliminary findings show significant increases in participants’ ability to pay all bills on time without support, budget more money for food and household costs, save money for an emergency, and purchase health insurance for their family. Since its founding in 2017, the Economic Security Project (ESP) has been at the forefront of the national conversation around guaranteed income. ESP’s support helped launch the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, the first ever mayor-led pilot in the nation that provided 125 Stockton residents with $500 monthly payments for two years. This pilot laid the foundation for the creation of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income and similar guaranteed income initiatives in cities across the country. ESP has also fought for meaningful cash programs in the policy arena through its work advocating for expansion and modernization of the Earned Income Tax Credit, recurring stimulus checks during COVID-19, and codifying the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit. Learn more from Foster and Nyandoro about how findings from their work provide the foundation to make permanent the Biden Administration’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit, and how that could be a stepping stone for a full federal guaranteed income program.

Research has demonstrated a strong link between student characteristics (e.g., gender, social class) and fields of study at the undergraduate level. This research shows that students are often constrained in choosing fields of study, such that they are encouraged to choose fields that are “practical” (in the case of social class) or “feminine” (in the case of gender). But to what extent is stratification in fields of study undergirded by widespread cultural beliefs about what students should study? In this paper, we use data from a large, nationally representative survey experiment (N ~ 5,000) that captures Americans’ beliefs about what students with different backgrounds should study in college. Findings reveal key social cleavages in how Americans think about college on account of students’ gender, social class, and college funding, including disparate beliefs about what higher education is for and should be.

The Graduate School launched the Race and Bias Conversations in fall 2020 to help the Graduate School community better understand the many facets of systemic racism and bias and to keep those issues at the forefront of the community's consciousness as it works toward making Duke a more inclusive and supportive environment. Last year's series included six events featuring graduate students, faculty, administrators, and alumni, exploring topics such as desegregation of higher education in the South; policing and communities; racial economic inequality; and obstacles and opportunities for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in higher education. Tyson H. Brown, Associate Professor of Sociology, will lead the conversation.

During this talk, Tiffany Green will discuss ongoing research investigating the links between structural racism and the ability to achieve intended births. This research studies the prenatal and early pregnancy period with a novel preconception cohort of users who track menstrual cycles and pregnancies using mobile device applications. In turn, these georeferenced data are linked to area-level information on markers of structural racism in housing: residential segregation and mortgage denial. We demonstrate that achieving intended births takes significantly longer for Black people than for white people and that structural racism appears to lengthen the path to parenthood for Black adults in the U.S.

The Milken Institute Global Conference convenes the best minds in the world to tackle its most urgent challenges and to help realize its most exciting opportunities. It is a unique experience in which individuals with the capital, power, and influence to change the world connect with those whose expertise and creativity are reinventing health, finance, technology, philanthropy, industry, and media. The 24th annual Global Conference will center on the theme, “Charting a New Course.” In recent months, the impact of social crisis, economic dislocation, and global pandemic has called us to reflect on how we live, what we believe, and what matters most

Considerable research documents higher levels of depressive symptoms among Black Americans relative to whites. Yet, we know little about the role of other dimensions of race (e.g., skin tone) and early life contexts (e.g., childhood racial contexts) in shaping trajectories of depressive symptoms across adolescence and adulthood. This study asks: 1) to what extent do self-identified race and skin tone shape disparities in depressive symptoms between Black and white adults across ages 12-42? 2) Do the relationships between race/skin tone and depressive symptoms depend on school racial context, as measured by the racial composition of middle and high schools? This study uses five waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and employs growth curve models to address these questions. Overall, results suggest that trajectories of depressive symptoms across ages 12-42 vary by race and skin tone among Black adults. Further, racial and skin tone disparities in depressive symptom trajectories are contingent on school racial context, highlighting competing advantages and disadvantages of navigating majority spaces in early life for Black adults of different skin tones. Findings and implications will be discussed in more detail.

DUPRI will be hosting a virtual workshop, “Working with Big Data, SQL, and Cloud Computing using R”, on September 22. This 2-hour training provides an introduction to working with remote structured databases, performing SQL queries, and accessing and using cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Compute Engine. The training will focus specifically on the R programming language. Some prior experience using R is recommended.

This talk explores racial disparities in mortality during U.S. pandemics, using the 1918 and COVID-19 pandemics to develop general frameworks for understanding inequality in pandemic experiences—and what they reveal about inequality during ordinary, non-pandemic times. The first part of the talk considers racial disparities during the most devastating respiratory pandemic of the 20thcentury, the 1918 flu; shows that those disparities were surprisingly small; and develops new hypotheses, grounded in social immunology, to account for this anomaly. The second part of the talk pivots from 1918 to 2020-21. During the 1918 pandemic, U.S. white mortality was still lower than U.S. Black mortality had been nearly every year. Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the same pattern holds: white mortality during the COVID pandemic has likely still been lower than Black mortality has ever been. Using pandemic mortality as a measuring stick for racial disparities offers a new perspective on the measures we do —and do not —embrace in order to combat racial inequality. I use demographic mortality models to make a new, demographically based case for reparations for racism.