sunday morning sociology, starbucks edition

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A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.

This week we have a short round-up of pieces related to the arrest of two Black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks for the crime of being at Starbucks.

Race & Racism at Starbucks

• Jamelle Bouie draws on Elijah Anderson’s theory of “White Spaces” to make sense of the recent Starbucks arrests.
• Slate hosts a conversation about being Black in White Spaces including Jamelle Bouie, Tressie MC, Gene Demby, and Aisha Harris.
• Starbucks is shutting down 8,000 stores to conduct an “anti-bias training.” As Vox reports, social scientists are skeptical of the impacts of these trainings, and worry that they may even backfire.

Race and Racism Beyond Starbucks

• “hotel employees were significantly more likely to respond to inquiries from people who had typically white names than from those who had typically black and Asian names.”
• For decades, the FBI has refused to go after the White Power movement by not attempting “to tie individual crimes to a broader movement”, creating a misleading perception in the public of a series of isolated individual terrorists.
• Daniel Geary writes in the Washington Post about Enoch Powell and the recent history of transatlantic white nationalism.

Higher Education

• A crowdsourced database of parental leave policies at different universities.
• Harvard grad students voted 1,931-1,523 to unionize under the UAW.

Gun Violence and Trauma

• The NIH has just awarded a large team of researchers $5 million to study gun violence – its largest award for research on guns in decades.
• Sarah Allison writes about surviving the Columbine shooting, and grappling with trauma through Harry Potter.

Political Sociology

• Catherine Rampell analyzes why the GOP is stuck in the 1980s, and makes a strong case for the value of social scientific research.
• Democrats’ gentrification problem.

Demography and Development

• Adi Robertson at The Verge traces the history of the One Laptop Per Child project from over-the-top hype to current (disappointing) reality.
• The Washington Post has a long-read on how China and India’s demographic gender imbalances lead to problems for men and masculinity.