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The pattern of racial segregation in U.S. elementary and secondary schools has changed significantly over the last 25 years. This chapter examines the relationship between the racial composition of schools and the choices white parents make concerning the schools their children attend. Restricted access files at the Bureau of the Census allow us to identify each household's Census block of residence and, in turn, suburban public school districts and urban public school attendance areas. We find that the racial composition of schools and neighborhoods are very important in the school and location decisions of white families.

Organizational approaches to racial inequality have provided contextual insight into a host of traditional stratification outcomes (e.g., hiring, earnings, authority). This chapter extends the organizational approach by drawing on the health-stress framework to explore how organizational context affects experiential and health-related outcomes – discrimination, social support, and psychological distress. Drawing on a sample of Black workers in the United States, we examine the relationship between workplace racial composition and psychological distress, as well as two potential mediators – racial discrimination and workplace social support. Our findings reveal that psychological distress is similar for Black workers in token (<25% Black coworkers), tilted other race (25–49.99% Black coworkers), and tilted same race (50–74.99% Black coworkers) job contexts. Workers in Black-dominated jobs (>75% Black coworkers), however, experience significantly less psychological distress than other compositional thresholds, net of individual, job, and workplace characteristics. This relationship is not explained by either racial discrimination experiences or supervisor and coworker social support. This finding suggests that researchers need to theorize and examine other protective factors stemming from coworker racial similarity.

A varying number of work hours from week to week creates considerable hardships for workers and their families, like volatile earnings and work–family conflict. Yet little empirical work has focused on racial/ethnic differences in varying work hours, which may have increased substantially in the Great Recession of the late 2000s. We extend literatures on racial/ethnic stratification in recessions and occupational segregation to this topic. Analyses of the Survey of Income and Program Participation show varying weekly hours became significantly more common for White and Black, but especially Latino workers in the late 2000s. The growth of varying weekly hours among White and Latino workers was greatest in predominantly minority occupations. However, the growth among Black workers was greatest in predominantly White occupations. The chapter discusses implications for disparities in varying hours and the salience of occupational composition beyond earnings.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

This chapter examines whether the racial identification of mixed-race adolescents can be understood through several theories: Status Maximization Theory, the rule of hypodescent, or social identity theory. Status Maximization theory posits that mixed-race adolescents will attempt to identify as the highest racial status group they possibly can. The rule of hypodescent or hypodescent theory, also known as the one-drop rule, is a legacy of the Plantation-era South and prescribes that mixed-race individuals identify as their lowest status racial identity. Social identity theory posits that the higher frequency or quality of contacts with parents or individuals in mixed-race adolescents’ peer networks affect the racial identification of mixed-race adolescents. Also, social identity contends that a mixed-race adolescent's intergroup dynamic (measured here as a child's level of self-esteem, whether there is prejudice at school, and a child's self-concept) dictates how he or she will racially identify. Through analyses of mixed-race adolescents in the National Longitudinal Adolescent Health (Add Health), I find that Asian-white and American-Indian-white adolescents do not status maximize nor abide by hypodescent, while black-white adolescents do not status maximize but do adhere to hypodescent when forced to choose one race. There is no tendency for the frequency or quality of contact with parents, romantic partners, or school composition to affect racial identity, as predicted by social identity theory. Yet, several of the aforementioned social-psychological variables are found to influence the racial identification of mixed-race adolescents. Specifically, whether they felt positively about school, if they experienced prejudice, whether they had higher levels of self-esteem, and if they felt socially accepted by their peers. Another key finding from this research suggests that racial identification for Asian-white and American-Indian-white adolescents are both fluid and optional; this is not the case for black-white adolescents. I conclude by offering the implications of these findings for black-white multiracial individuals.

Discrimination is defined as negative or harmful behavior toward a person because of his or her membership in a particular group (see Jones, 1997). Unfortunately, experiences with discrimination due to racial group membership appear to be a normal part of development for African American youth. Discrimination experiences occur within a variety of social contexts, including school, peer, and community contexts, and with increasing frequency as youth move across the adolescent years (Fisher, Wallace, & Fenton, 2000; Seaton et al., 2008). Recent research with a nationally representative sample of African American 13–17-year olds revealed that 87% had experienced at least one racially discriminatory event during the preceding year (Seaton et al., 2008). Most of the research on the consequences of youths’ encounters with racial discrimination has focused on mental health outcomes (Cooper, McLoyd, Wood, & Hardaway, 2008), with surprisingly little work examining whether and through what mechanisms discrimination affects achievement motivation.

This study aims to investigate the effects of workplace racial discrimination among Asian American (AA) employees in the restaurant industry and examines what kinds of employee coping responses can mitigate its detrimental effects on their work behaviors.

This paper uses an exploratory sequential mixed-methods approach, starting with a qualitative study using the critical incident technique followed by a quantitative between-subjects experiment to examine the impact of employee coping responses to racial discrimination on employee competence and work quality of life (WQOL).

The study reveals that customer-perpetrated racial discrimination is the most common form of racial discrimination that AA employees face in the restaurant industry. In addition, confrontation is the most effective coping strategy to increase employee’s self-competence. Also, the severity of discrimination moderates the effect of coping strategies on employee’s self-competence. Employees’ self-competence mediates the relationship between their response strategy against discrimination and their WQOL.

The findings of this study suggest that confrontation is an effective coping strategy for targeted employees, compared to support-seeking or avoidance. Confrontation was perceived as competent, compared to other coping strategies, and in turn, enhanced WQOL.

This study expands the scope of racial discrimination research in the hospitality literature for the growing diversified hospitality workforce. In addition, this study provides practical insights into competent ways of coping with racial discrimination.

The purpose of this paper is to present a state-of-the-art review on the topic of neighborhood/ecological influence on police use of force. In doing so, it provides an overview of the theoretical formulation and early ethnographic work on the topic as well as an in-depth critique of the issues that require further discussion.

Using several databases, a literature search was performed to collect the available empirical studies on the topic.

An analysis of the extant literature suggests that neighborhood/ecological influence on police use of force might not be as uniform as previously discussed, and it suffers from the ability to make sufficient comparisons. Tests vary based on the use of force measures, units of analysis, and the neighborhood-level variables examined.

This review should serve as a point of departure for scholars working in this area moving forward. It is hoped that the review provides thought-provoking commentary on the limitations of previous studies and the challenges facing this line of inquiry in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to examine police use of force using individual, contextual, and police training factors, expanding prior research by including multiple police agencies in the sample, thus producing research findings that can be more easily generalized.

The data for the current study were derived from several primary sources: the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Census, Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and 1997 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS).

Among individual level variables, age and arrestee's resistance were significant explanatory factors. Violent crime rate and unemployment rate were significant factors as the neighborhood contextual variables. Finally, in‐service training was a significant organizational‐level explanatory factor for levels of police use of force.

The paper bridges the gap in research between contextual factors and police use of force. It also deepens our understandings of the association between organizational factors and use of force by incorporating police training into the analytical model.