Abigail A. Sewell is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. She is an alumna of Indiana University, Bloomington, where she received her Ph.D. and M.A. Supervisors: Bernice Pescosolido, Peggy Thoits, Quincy Thomas Stewart, Brian Powell, David Heise, and Jason Schnittker Address: 204 Tarbutton Hall; 1555 Dickey Drive;
Atlanta, GA 30322
Systems of race, racism, and racial inequality are of consequence to the prevalence of illness an... more Systems of race, racism, and racial inequality are of consequence to the prevalence of illness and to racial disparities in illness prevalence. Yet a historicized understanding of how racially segregated neighborhoods are created from these systems of racial oppression is absent in neighborhood effect studies documenting the harmful effects of living in racial ghettos. Drawing on insights from the neighborhood change, place stratification, and housing discrimination literatures, this essay illustrates the ways that structural manifestations of racial oppression are implicated in the illnesses experienced via the neighborhood arrangements that arise out of institutionalized forms of racism. These illustrations are demonstrated by focusing on a system of unequal relationships created by racial oppression on the part of the mortgage lending industry. This essay explicates how the unequal distribution of resources by gatekeepers of the mortgage lending industry is implicated in the poor health outcomes of racial minorities, the deteriorated conditions of the environments in which racial minorities spend their lives, and the segregation of ethnoracially marginalized people into socially, economically, and materially deprived communities.
Background A disproportionate number of people who are killed by police each year are Black. Whil... more Background A disproportionate number of people who are killed by police each year are Black. While much attention rightly remains on victims of police brutality, there is a sparse literature on police brutality and perinatal health outcomes. We aimed to explore how Black pregnant women perceive police brutality affects them during pregnancy and might affect their children. Methods This qualitative study involved semi-structured interviews among 24 Black pregnant women in New Haven, Connecticut (January 2017 to August 2018). Interview questions explored neighborhood factors, safety, stressors during pregnancy, and anticipated stressors while parenting. Grounded theory informed the analysis. Results Participants, regardless of socioeconomic status, shared experiences with police and beliefs about anticipated police brutality, as summarized in the following themes: (1) experiences that lead to police distrust – “If this is the way that mommy’s treated [by police]”; (2) anticipating pol...
Objectives: Health studies of structural racism/discrimination have been animated through the dep... more Objectives: Health studies of structural racism/discrimination have been animated through the deployment of neighborhood effects frameworks that engage institutionalist concerns about sociopolitical resources and mobility structures. This study highlights the acute illness risks of place-based inequalities and neighborhood-varying race-based inequalities by focusing on access to and the regulation of mortgage markets.Design: By merging neighborhood data on lending processes from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act with individual health from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, this article evaluates the acute childhood illness risks of four mutually inclusive, political economies using multilevel generalized linear models.Setting: Chicago, IL, USAParticipants: Youth aged 0 to 17 yearsMethods: Multilevel logistic regressionMain Outcome Measures: The prevalence of 11 acute illnesses (cold/flu, sinus trouble, sore throat/tonsils, headache, upset stomach, bronchi...
ABSTRACT This study identifies socioeconomic factors that contribute to wealth advantages or disa... more ABSTRACT This study identifies socioeconomic factors that contribute to wealth advantages or disadvantages across ethnoracial groups in early adulthoods during the Great Recession. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that current and childhood social class partially explain racial disparities in debt, assets, and assistance with housing payments but do little to account for disparities in homeownership. These results underscore the life course perspective that wealth inequality disrupts the maintenance of successful adulthood for minority racial groups. Ethnoracial disparities in homeownership are a critical lever of the wealth-race gap later in adulthood.
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2018
time. As more and more is expected of people operating on perpetually shortening timelines, this ... more time. As more and more is expected of people operating on perpetually shortening timelines, this book provides essential insights into the nature of contemporary life. The Sociology of Speed should be of interest to a broad range readers with general interest in economic sociology, occupations, organizations, work, science and technology studies, sociological theory, and more. The writing is accessible enough to make it appropriate for undergraduate courses in these areas as well, but the theoretical implications are weighty enough that it will be even more valuable for graduate-level work.
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2017
Recent immigration and migration patterns have altered the ethnoracial composition of Alameda Cou... more Recent immigration and migration patterns have altered the ethnoracial composition of Alameda County, California. Sociopolitical leaders have struggled to adjust to these changes. In an effort to facilitate limited English speakers’ access to critical municipal services, Oakland—the largest municipal in Alameda County—passed an Equal Access to Services Ordinance on May 8, 2001, which is a groundbreaking language access legislation for the City of Oakland’s public administration. Using data from the 2000 Census and the 2005–2011 American Community Survey, this study examines the impact of bilingual employment policies on the ethnoracial segmentation of Alameda County workers. Logistic regression reveals that bilingual employment policies have reorganized both targeted (i.e., public contact) and non-targeted occupations within the local government public administration sector. Specifically, Spanish/Chinese bilingual speakers made gains in the public administration sector (the intended...
Scholars of race and racism are hungry for the nourishment that The Racial Order promises. After ... more Scholars of race and racism are hungry for the nourishment that The Racial Order promises. After asserting that “there never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race” (p. 1) and lamenting the lack of theoretical development in sociological race studies that has handicapped race and racism scholars’ understanding of racial change (pp. 2–5), Emirbayer and Desmond lay out a theoretical framework guided by key pragmatist insights embodied in the works of Dewey, Durkheim, and Bourdieu that aims to “provide an effective language with which to think and talk about—and intelligently to address—the problems of race in today’s society” (p. 25). The framework is organized into three important parts: Reflexivity, Relationality, and Reconstruction. The first part, an indictment of the relative nonreflexivity of race scholars regarding their intellectual projects, is largely a rehash of prior published work (Emirbayer and Desmond 2012). The three tiers of unconsciousness—social, disciplinary, and scholastic— work to cloud the objectivity of social theorists in ways that paralyze race theories into circularity. This part, consisting of one chapter, defines the racial object of race in symbolic terms of reification and engages productively in the ongoing debate regarding the collapsibility of race, ethnicity, and nationality (Bonilla-Silva 1999; Brubaker 2004, 2015; Loveman 1999; Omi and Winant 2014; Wimmer 2008, 2015) by insisting that race deserves its own intellectual constructionism despite the fact that ethnic formations predate racial formations. The bulk of the manuscript is devoted to part II, which focuses on the structures (chapter 3), dynamics (chapter 4), institutions (chapter 5), and social psychology (chapter 6) of the racial order. Between chapters 3 and 4, Emirbayer and Desmond break down the false divides among structure and agency, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin (p. 180). (Racial) structures become relational processes, not things—dynamic, not static—a perspective that integrates Bourdieu’s “field” into race theory. Meanwhile, agency (or racial dynamics) becomes iterative propensities to accept the illusions created by racial projects that are necessary to navigate the racial field. Between chapters 5 and 6, the authors disappear the micro/macro divide, arguing instead for an interaction-grounded understanding of institutions (“bounded sets of practices” [p. 204]) and interstices (publics and social movements) as sites where the racial field is reproduced agnostically through routinization. Interactions animate the social psychological forces (attitudes, stereotypes, prejudices) that create a collective racial habitus, which is embodied in the individual via the body, the cognitive realm, the morality of one’s ethics, and aesthetic appreciations. Whiteness, exploitation, appropriation, universalism, and other forms of symbolic violence to dominated peoples are derivatives of these forces. The final portion of the manuscript attends to envisioning a racial future that draws on the assumptions of the prior chapters. The authors suggest that the people have three options—color-blindness, cosmopolitanism, or racial democracy—pointing to points of intervention via individuals, interactions, and institutions. Idealistic to the end, the manuscript closes with an optimistic view of race scholarship headed, of course, by its “comprehensive” theory of the racial order. The efforts of Emirbayer and Desmond are commendable; however, the project they set forth for themselves is built upon dubious claims. Rather than being the first comprehensive and systematic theory of race, The Racial Order, I would argue, provides an alluring, synthetic language of U.S. race relations that marginalizes and colonizes 707201 SREXXX10.1177/2332649217707201Sociology of Race and EthnicityBook Review research-article2017
Systems of race, racism, and racial inequality are of consequence to the prevalence of illness an... more Systems of race, racism, and racial inequality are of consequence to the prevalence of illness and to racial disparities in illness prevalence. Yet a historicized understanding of how racially segregated neighborhoods are created from these systems of racial oppression is absent in neighborhood effect studies documenting the harmful effects of living in racial ghettos. Drawing on insights from the neighborhood change, place stratification, and housing discrimination literatures, this essay illustrates the ways that structural manifestations of racial oppression are implicated in the illnesses experienced via the neighborhood arrangements that arise out of institutionalized forms of racism. These illustrations are demonstrated by focusing on a system of unequal relationships created by racial oppression on the part of the mortgage lending industry. This essay explicates how the unequal distribution of resources by gatekeepers of the mortgage lending industry is implicated in the poor health outcomes of racial minorities, the deteriorated conditions of the environments in which racial minorities spend their lives, and the segregation of ethnoracially marginalized people into socially, economically, and materially deprived communities.
Background A disproportionate number of people who are killed by police each year are Black. Whil... more Background A disproportionate number of people who are killed by police each year are Black. While much attention rightly remains on victims of police brutality, there is a sparse literature on police brutality and perinatal health outcomes. We aimed to explore how Black pregnant women perceive police brutality affects them during pregnancy and might affect their children. Methods This qualitative study involved semi-structured interviews among 24 Black pregnant women in New Haven, Connecticut (January 2017 to August 2018). Interview questions explored neighborhood factors, safety, stressors during pregnancy, and anticipated stressors while parenting. Grounded theory informed the analysis. Results Participants, regardless of socioeconomic status, shared experiences with police and beliefs about anticipated police brutality, as summarized in the following themes: (1) experiences that lead to police distrust – “If this is the way that mommy’s treated [by police]”; (2) anticipating pol...
Objectives: Health studies of structural racism/discrimination have been animated through the dep... more Objectives: Health studies of structural racism/discrimination have been animated through the deployment of neighborhood effects frameworks that engage institutionalist concerns about sociopolitical resources and mobility structures. This study highlights the acute illness risks of place-based inequalities and neighborhood-varying race-based inequalities by focusing on access to and the regulation of mortgage markets.Design: By merging neighborhood data on lending processes from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act with individual health from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, this article evaluates the acute childhood illness risks of four mutually inclusive, political economies using multilevel generalized linear models.Setting: Chicago, IL, USAParticipants: Youth aged 0 to 17 yearsMethods: Multilevel logistic regressionMain Outcome Measures: The prevalence of 11 acute illnesses (cold/flu, sinus trouble, sore throat/tonsils, headache, upset stomach, bronchi...
ABSTRACT This study identifies socioeconomic factors that contribute to wealth advantages or disa... more ABSTRACT This study identifies socioeconomic factors that contribute to wealth advantages or disadvantages across ethnoracial groups in early adulthoods during the Great Recession. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that current and childhood social class partially explain racial disparities in debt, assets, and assistance with housing payments but do little to account for disparities in homeownership. These results underscore the life course perspective that wealth inequality disrupts the maintenance of successful adulthood for minority racial groups. Ethnoracial disparities in homeownership are a critical lever of the wealth-race gap later in adulthood.
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2018
time. As more and more is expected of people operating on perpetually shortening timelines, this ... more time. As more and more is expected of people operating on perpetually shortening timelines, this book provides essential insights into the nature of contemporary life. The Sociology of Speed should be of interest to a broad range readers with general interest in economic sociology, occupations, organizations, work, science and technology studies, sociological theory, and more. The writing is accessible enough to make it appropriate for undergraduate courses in these areas as well, but the theoretical implications are weighty enough that it will be even more valuable for graduate-level work.
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2017
Recent immigration and migration patterns have altered the ethnoracial composition of Alameda Cou... more Recent immigration and migration patterns have altered the ethnoracial composition of Alameda County, California. Sociopolitical leaders have struggled to adjust to these changes. In an effort to facilitate limited English speakers’ access to critical municipal services, Oakland—the largest municipal in Alameda County—passed an Equal Access to Services Ordinance on May 8, 2001, which is a groundbreaking language access legislation for the City of Oakland’s public administration. Using data from the 2000 Census and the 2005–2011 American Community Survey, this study examines the impact of bilingual employment policies on the ethnoracial segmentation of Alameda County workers. Logistic regression reveals that bilingual employment policies have reorganized both targeted (i.e., public contact) and non-targeted occupations within the local government public administration sector. Specifically, Spanish/Chinese bilingual speakers made gains in the public administration sector (the intended...
Scholars of race and racism are hungry for the nourishment that The Racial Order promises. After ... more Scholars of race and racism are hungry for the nourishment that The Racial Order promises. After asserting that “there never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race” (p. 1) and lamenting the lack of theoretical development in sociological race studies that has handicapped race and racism scholars’ understanding of racial change (pp. 2–5), Emirbayer and Desmond lay out a theoretical framework guided by key pragmatist insights embodied in the works of Dewey, Durkheim, and Bourdieu that aims to “provide an effective language with which to think and talk about—and intelligently to address—the problems of race in today’s society” (p. 25). The framework is organized into three important parts: Reflexivity, Relationality, and Reconstruction. The first part, an indictment of the relative nonreflexivity of race scholars regarding their intellectual projects, is largely a rehash of prior published work (Emirbayer and Desmond 2012). The three tiers of unconsciousness—social, disciplinary, and scholastic— work to cloud the objectivity of social theorists in ways that paralyze race theories into circularity. This part, consisting of one chapter, defines the racial object of race in symbolic terms of reification and engages productively in the ongoing debate regarding the collapsibility of race, ethnicity, and nationality (Bonilla-Silva 1999; Brubaker 2004, 2015; Loveman 1999; Omi and Winant 2014; Wimmer 2008, 2015) by insisting that race deserves its own intellectual constructionism despite the fact that ethnic formations predate racial formations. The bulk of the manuscript is devoted to part II, which focuses on the structures (chapter 3), dynamics (chapter 4), institutions (chapter 5), and social psychology (chapter 6) of the racial order. Between chapters 3 and 4, Emirbayer and Desmond break down the false divides among structure and agency, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin (p. 180). (Racial) structures become relational processes, not things—dynamic, not static—a perspective that integrates Bourdieu’s “field” into race theory. Meanwhile, agency (or racial dynamics) becomes iterative propensities to accept the illusions created by racial projects that are necessary to navigate the racial field. Between chapters 5 and 6, the authors disappear the micro/macro divide, arguing instead for an interaction-grounded understanding of institutions (“bounded sets of practices” [p. 204]) and interstices (publics and social movements) as sites where the racial field is reproduced agnostically through routinization. Interactions animate the social psychological forces (attitudes, stereotypes, prejudices) that create a collective racial habitus, which is embodied in the individual via the body, the cognitive realm, the morality of one’s ethics, and aesthetic appreciations. Whiteness, exploitation, appropriation, universalism, and other forms of symbolic violence to dominated peoples are derivatives of these forces. The final portion of the manuscript attends to envisioning a racial future that draws on the assumptions of the prior chapters. The authors suggest that the people have three options—color-blindness, cosmopolitanism, or racial democracy—pointing to points of intervention via individuals, interactions, and institutions. Idealistic to the end, the manuscript closes with an optimistic view of race scholarship headed, of course, by its “comprehensive” theory of the racial order. The efforts of Emirbayer and Desmond are commendable; however, the project they set forth for themselves is built upon dubious claims. Rather than being the first comprehensive and systematic theory of race, The Racial Order, I would argue, provides an alluring, synthetic language of U.S. race relations that marginalizes and colonizes 707201 SREXXX10.1177/2332649217707201Sociology of Race and EthnicityBook Review research-article2017
This essay makes the argument that racial disparities in health are rooted in political economic ... more This essay makes the argument that racial disparities in health are rooted in political economic processes undergirding racial residential segregation. Mortgage financing is considered a key institutional tool whereby already marginalized people are isolated into degenerative ecological environments. A multilevel root cause conceptual framework, the racism-race reification process (R-cubed-p), is proposed to delineate how structural factors shape the health of individuals through the reification of race. After situating the conceptual roots of R-cubed-p in postcolonial theory, the key components of the conceptual framework are detailed and applied to clarify extant understandings of the distal factors informing racial inequalities in health. Exploratory analysis is presented that links political economies to ethnoracial residential segregation at the neighborhood-level. The essay concludes by considering how individual outcomes are artifacts of the structural reality of race and racism.
This essay makes the argument that racial disparities in health are rooted in political economic ... more This essay makes the argument that racial disparities in health are rooted in political economic processes undergirding racial residential segregation. Mortgage financing is considered a key institutional tool whereby already marginalized people are isolated into degenerative ecological environments. A multilevel root cause conceptual framework, the racism-race reification process (R-cubed-p), is proposed to delineate how structural factors shape the health of individuals through the reification of race. After situating the conceptual roots of R-cubed-p in postcolonial theory, the key components of the conceptual framework are detailed and applied to clarify extant understandings of the distal factors informing racial inequalities in health. Exploratory analysis is presented that links political economies to ethnoracial residential segregation at the neighborhood-level. The essay concludes by considering how individual outcomes are artifacts of the structural reality of race and racism.
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