Race And Ethnicity Sociology

Sociologists of race/ethnicity, poverty, and inequality have turned to culture to explain why some groups (like native-born whites and Asian immigrants) do better socioeconomically than other groups (i.e., native-born blacks and Hispanics/Latinos). While earlier cultural scholars argued that some groups are culturally unassimilable or more inclined to be oppositional to mainstream values, contemporary cultural sociologists argue that it is not necessarily the culture that leads to success for some, but not for others, but how culture is understood, supported, and reinforced within these groups that contributes to a group’s better socioeconomic outcomes. In this paper, I will review how the scholarly discussion of the role of culture in explaining …show more content…
Most notably, Fordham and Ogbu (1986) introduced the “acting white” thesis, explaining that African American students underperform in and disengage from education because of the negative peer pressure—being called “acting white,” as if they are betraying their own race/ethnicity—they experience from academically achieving. Ogbu (1978) further argued that African Americans as “involuntary minorities,” who were forced to migrate, have developed oppositional identity and culture to the mainstream values in response to continuing oppression, discrimination, and blocked mobility imposed by the white society. While these studies were valuable in that they have revealed the social realities of Afrcian Americans’ disadvantages, they have been criticized for “blaming the victim” for their problems, as their theses seemed to imply that people are poor due to their own (personal) problems stemming from culture, and that they would be able to achieve social mobility if they were to change their problematic …show more content…
While Wilson does not directly address the role of culture in his analysis, his rejection of the “culture of poverty” thesis has led to many contemporary cultural sociologists of poverty and inequality to employ both cultural and structural explanations in their empirical investigations. Most importantly, scholars have repeatedly found that culture, on its own, does not explain why some groups, like African Americans and Hispanic/Latinos, continue to be poor and/or underachieve educationally compared to other groups. In the following sections, I will review literatures in poverty and education that employs cultural analysis to investigate socioeconomic disparities among different racial and ethnic