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Considerations of how socioeconomic outcomes are racialized within discrete class categories have been neglected in assessing the race/class determinants of life-chance opportunities of African Americans. This article addresses this shortcoming. Specifically, it synthesizes findings from recent sociological research concerning how segregation in two institutional spheres, residence & employment, produce racialization at two class levels -- among the impoverished & the middle class. The article documents that segregation plays a significant role in producing racial inequality at both class levels, though it exerts different influences across class categories: at the impoverished level, segregation in the residential sphere, & at the middle-class level, segregation in the employment sphere, emerge as critical underpinnings of African Americans' inferior life-chance opportunities. The implications of the findings for using traditional Weberian & Marxist modes of class analyses in assessing the life-chance opportunities for African Americans as well as how the findings contribute to the resolution of the race/class debate are discussed. Tables, References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2007 The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

The prevailing view of both the U.S. Supreme Court and liberal theory in America is that liberal principles are neither essentially religious nor essentially secular, but somehow foundationally neutral, or in the words of the Court neutral between "religion and nonreligion." This essay challenges the cogency of this view through a comparative examination of two strong defenders of religious freedom from the American revolutionary era: Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Backus. Jefferson, the Enlightenment rationalist, and Backus, the Calvinist-Baptist, may initially seem tailor-made for this foundational neutrality, but closer examination reveals that religious freedom for them was not only an extension of their radically opposed views on religion but also an instrument for the promotion of those views throughout society. The ambiguity of America's founding principles is best understood, not through the notion of neutrality, but as the product of a yet unsettled struggle between devout religion and secular Enlightenment.

Although there exists a large and well‐documented "race gap" between whites and blacks in their support for the death penalty, we know relatively little about the nature of these differences and how the races respond to various arguments against the penalty. To explore such differences, we embedded an experiment in a national survey in which respondents are randomly assigned to one of several argument conditions. We find that African Americans are more responsive to argument frames that are both racial (i.e., the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are black) and nonracial (i.e., too many innocent people are being executed) than are whites, who are highly resistant to persuasion and, in the case of the racial argument, actually become more supportive of the death penalty upon learning that it discriminates against blacks. These interracial differences in response to the framing of arguments against the death penalty can be explained, in part, by the degree to which people attribute the causes of black criminality to either dispositional or systemic forces (i.e., the racial biases of the criminal justice system).

This article explores the achievements of industrialisation in Latin America in the period before 1930, the date traditionally considered to be the start of the ISI process. It analyses the development of a basic industrial sector, the cement industry, which was driven by a natural substitution of imports. It quantifies the expansion of demand in each of the countries in the region, and then moves on to consider the growth of the industry in Latin America in the period between 1900 and 1930. Although cement consumption grew briskly, particularly in the most underdeveloped economies, disparities in levels of consumption and production among countries in the region continued to be very great in 1930, while the gap between Latin America and the most industrialised economies grew slightly.

Attitudes toward race and politics continue to show tensions between antiracist norms and racist stereotypes, even among new generations of White Americans raised in an era of consensus on antiracist social norms. I suggest that this "dissonance" stems from a process of "two-tracked socialization" and I demonstrate the persistence of such dissonant attitudes in two ways. First, in the aggregate, the youngest cohorts of White Americans do not greatly differ from older generations in their policy preferences on racial matters and beliefs about race, politics, and inequality. Second, stereotypes still influence policy preferences among younger cohorts. On the second point, I replicate Gilens's work on the racialization of welfare policy attitudes with more recent data and added attention to differences and similarities across birth cohorts.

Using data from multiple sources, including the Characteristics of Business Owners Survey, the authors trace out the relationship between wealth & access to financial capital & the African American-owned business. African Americans are found to have levels of wealth that are one-eleventh those of whites. Starting with this disparity, blacks are much less likely to start businesses than are whites, which results in a substantially lower rate of business ownership. Even for those black entrepreneurs who are successful in starting businesses, the authors find that they invest much less capital at start-up on average than white entrepreneurs. Lower levels of start-up capital among black businesses appear to also limit their ability to grow & succeed. Racial disparities in start-up capital contribute to higher failure rates, lower sales & profits, less employment among black-owned businesses, & less survivability of the business. Tables, Figures, References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2007 The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

The past three U.S. administrations have employed a variety of strategies to establish a "new Pan-American order" that fits the nation's hegemonic interests in Latin America & the Caribbean. They have also devised stratagems to counteract the revolutionary & reform-minded efforts in the region that challenge these U.S. attempts to create a new, univocal world order. References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2007.]

The Mexican American electorate includes large numbers of immigrants as well as people of later generations. In this article, we test whether cross-generational acculturation shapes the ways in which Mexican American voters selected between John Kerry and George Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Although change across immigrant generations has long been a critical question in American political behavior, it is only with the current wave of immigrants and their U.S.-born children and grandchildren that it is possible to measure the relationship between acculturation and vote choice. With generational replacement, changes in the dynamics of vote choice across immigrant generations could herald long-term changes in the mechanisms of vote choice. We find that generation does shape Mexican American vote choice, both directly—in the simple measure of the generational dummy variables—and in the interaction between generation and partisanship, issue evaluation, religion, and state of residence.

The United States is still organized in terms of a hierarchy of race, gender, and class. In the context of challenges to U.S. hegemony and loss of legitimacy at home, a new hegemonic discourse seeks to replace the racial/class hierarchy with a "color-blind" society made up of a plurality of ethnic groups. Interclass racial alliances have long been engineered by the state to prevent the formation of effective interracial class alliances, and therefore as the "color-blind" society is celebrated the significance of race is reasserting itself nationally and globally. To construct an African-American/Latino class alliance that can strengthen the social justice movement on the way to transforming capitalist racial and gender relations, it will be necessary to unveil and resist this discourse and examine the gendered and racialized spaces that affect Latinos and African-Americans alike.

A review essay on a book by Stephen Holmes, The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror (Cambridge U Press).

Enthält Rezensionen u.a. von: Shayne, Julie D.: The revolution question: feminismin El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba. - New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. - 240 S