Getting Respect

Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel

Michèle Lamont, Graziella Moraes Silva, Jessica Welburn, Joshua Guetzkow, Nissim Mizrachi, Hanna Herzog, Elisa Reis

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400883776
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Discriminazione e rapporti razziali

A comparative look at how discrimination is experienced by stigmatized groups in the United States, Brazil, and Israel Racism is a common occurrence for members of marginalized groups around the world. Getting Respect illuminates their experiences by comparing three countries with enduring group boundaries: the United States, Brazil and Israel. The authors delve into what kinds of stigmatizing or discriminatory incidents individuals encounter in each country, how they respond to these occurrences, and what they view as the best strategy—whether individually, collectively, through confrontation, or through self-improvement—for dealing with such events.This deeply collaborative and integrated study draws on more than four hundred in-depth interviews with middle- and working-class men and women residing in and around multiethnic cities—New York City, Rio de Janeiro, and Tel Aviv—to compare the discriminatory experiences of African Americans, black Brazilians, and Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as Israeli Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahi (Sephardic) Jews. Detailed analysis reveals significant differences in group behavior: Arab Palestinians frequently remain silent due to resignation and cynicism while black Brazilians see more stigmatization by class than by race, and African Americans confront situations with less hesitation than do Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahim, who tend to downplay their exclusion. The authors account for these patterns by considering the extent to which each group is actually a group, the sociohistorical context of intergroup conflict, and the national ideologies and other cultural repertoires that group members rely on. Getting Respect is a rich and daring book that opens many new perspectives into, and sets a new global agenda for, the comparative analysis of race and ethnicity.

CHAPTER 1

ACCOUNTING FOR DIFFERENCES

HOW TO EXPLAIN

In this chapter, we develop a multidimensional framework to help account for experiences and responses to ethnoracial exclusion. Our analytical strategy is meant to be suggestive of how patterns are set in place rather than to provide a parsimonious causal analysis of patterns sensu stricto.¹ At the most abstract level, our approach resembles that used by historical institutionalists interested in configurational explanations,² by sociologists of immigration, and by social movement scholars who pursue discursive opportunity structure explanations. The latter group has analyzed emotions and the availability of religious and human rights frameworks and their impact on mobilization (e.g., Williams 2004; Bröer and Duyvendak 2009), while scholars of immigration have argued that discursive opportunity structures influence the claims-making of minorities (e.g., Koopmans and Statham 2000).³ Similarly, we zoom in on a few dimensions to account for the patterns of experiences, responses, and groupness that we identify in the evidence we have collected.

THREE DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CONTEXT

Our explanatory framework analytically distinguishes between three dimensions to make sense of how they influence experiences and responses (see also Falleti and Lynch 2009). More specifically, we focus on the dimensions listed in Table 1.1 that pertain to (1) history and the socioeconomic and institutional context (which we capture by the notion of background factors); (2) the strength and mode of groupness (i.e., the extent to which individuals conceive of themselves as part of a group, which itself includes several dimensions, e.g., self-identification and group boundaries); and (3) available cultural repertoires (themselves the product of history). In the three country chapters (Chapters 2–4), we detail how these various elements are more or less salient as broad contextual factors, how they are connected, and how they may help explain aspects of the puzzle. We also spell out the configuration of groupness for each of the five groups being studied. Although this approach could be criticized for having too many explanatory dimensions for too few cases—what Stanley Lieberson (1992) termed the “small N, big conclusion” problem—again, our goal is not to offer a parsimonious explanation but to improve our understanding of why and how patterns contrast across groups, in line with the classical Weberian tradition in comparative sociology. Each of the three dimensions we focus on has several components that define in important ways the context in which the lives or our five groups evolve. We argue that these components need to be considered when trying to account for individuals’ experiences of and responses to ethnoracial exclusion.

TABLE 1.1. DIMENSIONS ENABLING AND CONSTRAINING NARRATIVES OF EXPERIENCES AND RESPONSES

Historical, socioeconomic, and institutional elements	Cultural repertoires	Groupness
• Size of group and its relative demographic weight • Ethnoracial demographic diversity of the region and society • History of group relations and inequality • Changes in levels and national patterns of inequality • Economic context (e.g., economic recession and expansion)	• National myths and ideologies (e.g., American Dream, Zionism, racial democracy) and models of incorporation in the polity (e.g., melting pot, multiculturalism) • Transnational antiracist repertoires (e.g., human rights, social justice, black diaspora) • Empowering ideologies (e.g., black nationalism)	• Self-definition and self-labeling • Meaning of identity and perceived cultural distinctiveness of group • Salience of racial, class, and national identification in the group • Reported network composition and homophily
• Concentration of ethnoracial minorities across classes and recent transformation of class structure • Spatial and institutional segregation (including incarceration) • Institutional and legal reforms (including those dealing with race, ethnicity, and nationality) • Political transformation (progressive, liberal, and conservative eras)	• Available repertoires of group disadvantages and shared experiences; ready-made scripts about exclusion and universalism • Hierarchy of class cultures (e.g., dominance of middle-class culture, stigmatization of the poor) • Class- and gender-specific cultural repertoires (e.g., masculinity, self-actualization) • General cultural repertoires (e.g., meritocracy, therapeutic culture, identity politics) • Neoliberal repertoires (e.g., competition, privatization of risk, self-reliance)	• Symbolic boundaries toward dominant group and its perceived advantages • Census categories and policies making group identity salient • Homophily in cohabitation/marriage and friendship • Perceived spatial segregation

Historical, Socioeconomic, and Institutional Elements. Among the main background elements shaping experiences and responses, one has to consider the history of the country, particularly as it pertains to ethnoracial relationships. Other relevant factors (see Table 1.1, column 1) include the level of inequality in the country and whether it and the economy are growing or contracting; the size of the group under consideration and its salience; the ethnoracial diversity of the country’s population; the concentration of the stigmatized group in low-income categories; the extent to which the middle class is diversified racially; the extent of spatial and institutional segregation each group experiences; and the historical transformation of politics, which brings about conservative and progressive changes, as well as neoliberal moments (e.g., Phillips-Fein 2009 and Waterhouse 2013 for the United States). Finally, we also include the institutional and legal structures and reforms of the society, particularly those that bear on race, ethnicity, and nationality. The explanatory dimensions under this heading are the mainstay of background explanations for contemporary forms of American racism (e.g., in the analysis of laissez-faire racism by Bobo and...