Social Problems 61(2)

Social Problems, May 2014: Volume 61, Issue 2

“Undocumented and Citizen Students Unite”: Building a Cross-Status Coalition through Shared Ideology
Laura E. Enriquez

Social movement coalitions present unique opportunities and challenges for collective action as they bring together organizations, movements, and individuals who hold diverse interests and social positions. The literature suggests that collective identity and shared ideology both offer opportunities for bridging these differences, but few have addressed their relative utility. Drawing on a case study of a university-based coalition of undocumented and citizen students working to build support for the federal DREAM Act, I find that a social justice ideology was used to facilitate fast-paced recruitment, create simplified participation guidelines based on legal status, and allow for the strategic renegotiation of participation. I argue that building a cross-status coalition through a shared ideology has two key advantages: (1) it allows for fast-paced coalition formation and (2) it promotes the mobilization and commitment of organizations and individuals who occupy different identities and social locations. Additionally, I suggest that conflict among members can be best negotiated through the development of discursive and interactive spaces that allow individuals to engage across their different social locations.

Rethinking Coalitions: Anti-Pornography Feminists, Conservatives, and Relationships between Collaborative Adversarial Movements
Nancy Whittier

Social movements interact in a wide range of ways, yet we have only a few concepts for thinking about these interactions: coalition, spillover, and opposition. Many social movements interact with each other as neither coalition partners nor opposing movements. In this article, I argue that we need to think more broadly and precisely about the relationships between movements and suggest a framework for conceptualizing noncoalitional interaction between movements. Although social movements scholars have not theorized such interactions, “strange bedfellows” are not uncommon. They differ from coalitions in form, dynamics, relationship to larger movements, and consequences. I first distinguish types of relationships between movements based on extent of interaction and ideological congruence and describe the relationship between collaborating, ideologically opposed movements, which I call “collaborative adversarial relationships.” Second, I differentiate among the dimensions along which social movements may interact and outline the range of forms that collaborative adversarial relationships may take. Third, I theorize factors that influence collaborative adversarial relationships’ development over time, the effects on participants, and consequences for larger movements, in contrast to coalitions. I draw on the case of the relationship between anti-pornography feminists and conservatives during the 1980s, charting the dynamics of their interaction across arenas and over time.

Children as Brokers of Their Immigrant Families’ Health-Care Connections
Vikki Katz

In an era of ever-increasing population diversity, bilingual intermediaries have become critical to health-care provision in the United States and elsewhere. Professional interpreters fulfill these roles in many cases, but family members frequently do as well. This article focuses on children of immigrants as brokers of language, culture, and media content who facilitate their families’ connections to health-care providers and health-related resources. Children broker in order to compensate for the limited (or nonexistent) accommodations available to their immigrant families when they interact with health-care providers and institutions. As such, children’s brokering constitutes an important, often overlooked, linkage between research on immigrant family dynamics and immigrants’ interactions with host country institutions. Children’s brokering also has implications for their own social, moral, and educational trajectories, which are deeply influenced by their responsibilities to their families. Data collected through field observations and interviews with Latino immigrant parents, their child brokers, and local health-care providers revealed how children’s brokering influences these interactions. This article explores providers’ perceptions of and interactions with child brokers and their families, taken in context of the institutions in which they work and of the intrafamily dynamics that can facilitate or constrain children’s efforts.

Maintaining Racial Boundaries: Criminalization, Neighborhood Context, and the Origins of Gang Injunctions
Ana Muniz

In this article, I examine the City of Los Angeles’s first gang injunction, which was instituted in 1987 against the Playboy Gangster Crips (PBGs) in the Cadillac-Corning neighborhood. Through primary documents and interviews with the authors of the Cadillac-Corning injunction, I offer insight into the primary actors and political struggles behind the prototypical injunction. I argue that prosecutors and police targeted Cadillac-Corning because the neighborhood had undergone demographic change that threatened the boundaries of racial and class separation and control. Despite the sanitization of race in gang injunction policy, fear of black men and stereotypes about black families were central to the rationale of the injunction. The injunction was meticulously designed to control the movement of black youth by criminalizing activities and behavior that are unremarkable and legal in other jurisdictions. The Cadillac-Corning injunction sparked a high-profile court struggle that set the pattern for future injunctions. Today, a protocol is in place that allows the City Attorney’s Office, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Police Department, to implement injunctions quickly and with little tailoring. The rules are in place but the politics that produced them have disappeared from view. What remains is the criminalization of racial groups and spaces under the guise of routine “race-neutral” policy protocol.

Defining “Policeability”: Cooperation, Control, and Resistance in South Los Angeles Community-Police Meetings
Aaron Roussell and Luis Daniel Gascón

Community policing partnerships are built and maintained by community meetings wherein participants coproduce social order by identifying local problems and devising strategies for their reduction and resolution. Coproduction is a dynamic process of meaning construction that takes place through social interaction. These interactions build toward a mutually satisfactory discourse on local definitions of law, crime, and order. This discourse creates a set of understandings about what citizens interpret as problems, disorder, and crime, as well as police officers’ ability to address these issues using a range of enforcement and nonenforcement strategies. Through this interactive process, police and residents define the “policeability” of residents’ interpretations. Drawing on literature in symbolic interactionism, we chart a course for unpacking the contest over policeable discourse using ethnographic data gathered over a four-year period in community-police meetings in South Los Angeles. This article explores participants’ roles and explicates the process of defining policeability through a set of ideal-type interactions (cooperation, control, and resistance). Power, in this setting, is control over the definition of policeability. Residents are locked into a supplicatory role, while officers are akin to legal brokers, accepting, rejecting, or reframing residents’ claims of crime and disorder. Our findings suggest that, in this precinct, while the rhetoric of cooperation abounds, pessimism on the part of policing scholars about the claims toward true partnership is warranted with respect to the power police retain and express in police-citizen interactions.

The Persistent Significance of Racial and Economic Inequality on the Size of Municipal Police Forces in the United States, 1980–2010
Jason T. Carmichael and Stephanie L. Kent

Recent empirical analyses of the social factors that predict municipal police force size support racial threat theory by suggesting that the racial composition of cities leads to enhanced social control efforts; however, these studies largely ignore explanations based on social class or the influence of an ethnic threat. We examine these alternative threat hypotheses by assessing the potential influence that recent increases in economic inequality and the substantial rise in the Hispanic population in the United States may have had on efforts to control crime. Using an advanced estimation technique to isolate the determinants of police force size in a large sample of U.S. cities between 1980 and 2010, we find that racial threat and economic inequality work both independently and jointly to produce substantial shifts in the size of police forces after accounting for levels of crime as well as other important demographic and structural characteristics. Furthermore, period interactions suggest that racial threat appears to have expanded over the last several decades. Together, our study uncovers novel interactive effects and identifies shifts over time, thus refining existing theoretical assumptions.

The Earnings of Less Educated Asian American Men: Educational Selectivity and the Model Minority Image
ChangHwan Kim and Arthur Sakamoto

Asian Americans have long been popularly portrayed as a “model minority” that has achieved approximate labor market parity with whites. However, this characterization has been alternatively described as “a destructive myth,” especially for those who do not have high levels of education. Our analysis focuses on less educated Asian Americans who may be particularly neglected in the labor market because of their incongruence with the model minority image. Consistent with this focus, we specify quantile regression models that estimate net racial effects at both the lower and the higher ends of the distribution of earnings. The results indicate that Asian American men who drop out of high school earn substantially less than comparable whites at the low end of the earnings distribution. This pattern of racial differentials seems to be consistent with the “destructive myth” perspective and inconsistent with the alternative explanation of negative educational selectivity. In general, our findings illustrate the fruitfulness of Kevin Leicht’s (2008) proposed research agenda of studying racial disadvantage by disaggregated class-related groupings and across the entire distribution of earnings rather than focusing exclusively on one overall racial differential that is assessed as a conditional mean.

Are Contemporary Patterns of Black Male Joblessness Unique? Cohort Replacement, Intracohort Change, and the Diverging Structures of Black and White Men’s Employment
Robert L. Wagmiller, Jr. and Kristen Schultz Lee

Employment rates for black men have declined sharply over the last half century. We use data from the 1962–2009 March Current Population Surveys and linear decomposition techniques to examine the mechanisms generating change in employment rates for white and black men with different levels of education. We find that not only did the overall magnitude of change in employment differ by race and education, but so too did the mechanisms generating change. Black men with less than a college degree experienced sharper declines in employment than did white men and more educated black men. Cohort replacement processes played a more prominent role in employment declines for less educated black men than for other men, who were affected more strongly by intracohort change mechanisms. Stronger cohort replacement effects for less educated black men concentrated joblessness to an unparalleled extent among younger black men with the least formal schooling. Declining employment since the 1960s for this group of men was not primarily the result of economic downturns or layoffs later in life, but rather resulted from the inability of more recent cohorts to secure stable employment. Comparisons of the employment experiences of less educated black men in the metropolises experiencing the most deindustrialization to those of men in other areas reveal that these men experienced greater employment declines not only because more recent cohorts had greater difficulty securing stable employment in early adulthood but also because, within cohorts, they experienced additional job losses associated with aging and changes in the economy.