Immigration and Urbanization: Understanding Cities Through Sociological Research

1
Assessment 3
Individual Reflective Report
Semester 1, 2022
Unit
code/name
ICT101 Introduction to Information Technology
Due date
and Time
Report: Week 12, Friday
Time: 5pm
Total marks 40 marks
General
Instruction
for students
Submit your reflective report based on the scenario and
information below.

Your task is choosing a business and discuss the future
applications of information
technology for this business. You can find similar scenarios in
the course contents. You will
apply knowledge accumulated in the unit, labour market data,
research into available
education and training options; and will integrate this
information with a discussion of current
challenges for the business and the contribution that IT can
reasonably be expected to make
in meeting those challenges.
Deliverables
Word length: 2,000
Report Due: Week 12, Friday
Time: 5pm
Report Structure
• Cover Page - your name, ID, subject, date, report title and
WORD COUNT
• Executive Summary
• Table of Contents - listed sections (and sub-sections if
required)
• Introduction - Brief and clear introduction
• Body

• References-listing of all cited literature. A small number of
high-quality references
strategically used is the main aim here.
2
Formatting Guide
Font: Times New Roman 12pt for paragraph text, 14pt bold for
headings, with single
paragraph breaks between paragraphs.
Line Spacing: 1.5, Margins: 2cm all around
Alignment: left-aligned.
Page numbering: Insert page number

3
Marking Rubric Reflective Report
Table 1 – Reflective Report Rubric
Item Good (5) Satisfactory (3-4) Unsatisfactory (2) Poor (0-
1)
Introduction
(5%)
Clear problem
statements,
project objects,
project scope.

Reasonable
problem
statements,
project objects,
project scope.
Problem
statements, project
objects, project
scope not clearly
stated.
Problem
statements,
project objects,
project scope
not given or
unacceptable.
Assumptions
(5%)
Project
assumptions
clearly stated.
Project
assumptions
adequately
stated.
Project
assumptions not
clearly stated.

Project
assumptions
not made or
unacceptable.
Technical
Specifications/
Scenario
developed
(5%)
Technical
specifications
scenario
adequately
identified and
stated.
Technical
specifications
scenario
identified and
stated, but not
complete or
inadequate.
Technical
specifications
scenario not clearly
identified and
stated.
Technical
specifications
scenario not

stated or
unacceptable.
Research
(5%)
Research is
complete,
contemporary.
Research is
mostly complete.
Research is out of
date.
Research is
mostly/wholly
incomplete.
Discussion of
the difficult
Challenges
(5%)
Discussion
adequately
addresses all
business needs.
Discussion
adequately
addresses most
business needs.
Discussion

adequately
addresses some
business needs.
Discussion
addresses
very few
business
needs or
addresses
none.
4
Very significant
contribution
that IT can
reasonably be
expected to
make in
Useful
contribution that
IT can
reasonably be
expected to
make in meeting
those
Not very
significant
contribution that
IT can

reasonably be
expected to
make in
No significant
contribution that
IT can reasonably
be expected to
make in meeting
those challenges.
No
contribution
that IT can
reasonably be
expected to
make in
meeting those
meeting those
challenges (5%)
challenges.
meeting those
challenges.
challenges.
Report
Structure
(5%)
Well presented
report for
business

audience with
appropriate
formatting,
language,
spelling etc.
Reasonably
presented report
for business
audience with
appropriate
formatting,
language,
spelling etc.
Poorly presented
report for business
audience with
appropriate
formatting,
language, spelling
etc.
Report not
presented or
unacceptable.
Language (5%) Uses a wide
range of
vocabulary and
grammatical
structures with
full flexibility and
accuracy
Rare minor

errors occur only
as ‘slips’
Uses a wide
range of
vocabulary and
grammatical
structures to
convey precise
meanings
The majority of
sentences are
error-free
Uses an adequate
range of
vocabulary and a
mix of simple and
complex sentence
forms for the task
Makes some
errors in spelling,
word formation,
grammar and
punctuation but
they do not impede
communication
Uses a limited
range of
vocabulary
and
grammatical
structures

which are
minimally
adequate for
the task
May make
noticeable
errors in
spelling, word
formation,
grammar and
punctuation
that may
cause some
difficulty for
the reader
Immigration and
Urbanization
Patrick Sharkey, Princeton University
Jody Vallejo, University of Southern California

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)
Page 2
Immigration and
Urbanization
P A T R I C K S H A R K E Y , P R I N C E T O N U N I V E
R S I T Y
J O D Y V A L L E J O , U N I V E R S I T Y O F S O U T H
E R N C A L I F O R N I A
INTRODUCTION
URBANIZATION
City life and community life
The liberated community
IMMIGRATION
The new immigration
Who migrates and why
Immigration policy
Immigrant integration

CONCENTRATED POVERTY AND RACIAL SEGREGATION
Concentrated poverty
Racial segregation
The new American city
THE FUTURE OF URBAN LIFE
Page 3
INTRODUCTION
Think back to any moment in your life when you stepped into an
entirely new city, or
even a new neighborhood that was very different from your
own. You might recall hearing
phrases that you hadn’t heard before, or observing customs that
were unfamiliar. You might

not have known whether a particular street was safe or
dangerous, whether you were
welcome or observed with suspicion. You might have spent
some time asking questions about
that strange place, observing the people around you, or
exploring your surroundings to figure
out exactly how the place works, why the people are all from
the same ethnic group, why the
houses look so big and fancy, or why the streets feel so
dangerous.
This is what urban sociologists do. In this chapter we’ll
introduce you to the work of
social scientists who analyze large-scale data on where groups
of city dwellers live, why
immigrants decide to come to the United States (or to leave),
where crime takes place, where
housing is built, where jobs are prevalent and where they are
scarce. We’ll introduce you to
researchers who have spent years living in a community to try
to understand how it works from
the inside.
Let’s start with William Helmreich, a longtime professor in
New York City, who took a
different approach—he decided to walk through almost every

block of his city.1 Helmreich
walked about 6,000 miles over the course of four years, going
through nine pairs of sneakers in
the process. He kept notes on scenes from the city as he passed,
watched to see who was in
the parks and who was on their front stoops, and talked with as
many people as he could.
And he discovered an urban landscape that sometimes
transformed from one block to the
next, where kids took tennis lessons in a pristine park just a few
streets away from where young
men walked down the street conspicuously wearing the colors of
their gang.2 He saw hints of
change up close, and learned that residents had a very different
view of the change in their
neighborhoods than outsiders like journalists or politicians did.
And he saw tremendous, almost
unfathomable diversity, visible in the distinct clothes of
Orthodox Jews and the bustling street
markets of Chinatown.
Walking the city’s streets, he found a population of New
Yorkers who “display both
small-town values and a high degree of sophistication.” But
what united everyone, according

to Helmreich, was their shared claim to the city—the collective
understanding of what makes
their city different, the unflinching acceptance of the wide
variety of people who come
together in the subway cars, the feeling of solidarity that comes
from living in the city where
the towers came down on September 11th, 2001. Their city was
their common identity.
We are very sad to say that William Helmreich passed away
from COVID-19 in 2020. But
we hope his work inspires you to join us as we pursue two goals
for this chapter. The first goal is
Page 4
to introduce you to important ideas and debates about two large-
scale processes,
immigration and urbanization, that affect how every part of
society works. We will examine
how these processes alter how cities function, what they look
like, and the way we live our
lives. We’ll ask questions like, How has the growing movement

of humans to cities affected our
lives and interactions? How can we explain the emergence and
transformation of cities and
neighborhoods? How have American cities changed in the last
century? What are the major
trends and problems in urban areas? Are cities leading us
toward economic growth and
environmental sustainability or are they breeding grounds for
poverty and inequality?
Chinatown, Manhattan, New York City. (Source)
This is the stuff of urban sociology. But the second goal of the
chapter is to get you to
consider different ways to learn about the neighborhoods and
cities that surround us, as well
as communities around the world. William Helmreich walked
through almost every block of his
city, and he learned a tremendous amount about New York in
the process. But is there
anything he might have missed along the way? Do people act
the same way outdoors, on
the street, as they do when they’re inside with their friends and
families? Do residents talk to a

stranger in their neighborhood the same way that they talk to a
neighbor who’s lived next
https://pixabay.com/en/new-york-chinatown-manhattan-labels-
856346/
Page 5
door for years? How might an older White man be perceived as
he walks, alone, down a New
York city street?
“You need to walk slowly through an area to capture its
essence,” Helmreich wrote. As
you read through this chapter, try to keep thinking like a social
scientist. Ask yourself: Do I
believe the ideas I’m reading? What kind of evidence would be
more convincing? If I wanted
to “capture the essence” of an entirely new city or
neighborhood, how would I do it?
URBANIZATION

ok like and how are they connected?
This is a good time to study cities, because they are taking over
the world. Cities have
been around for more than 5,000 years, but they used to look
very different than they do
today. Ancient cities were often the capitals of empires and
centers for trade, surrounded by
walls and protected from the outside. The modern city dates
back only a couple hundred
years. When the factory first emerged in Britain in the 1700s,
people began to move from rural
areas to the nation’s industrial cities. The process of
urbanization, defined by growth in the
proportion of a nation’s population that lives in cities, spread
from Britain to the rest of Europe,
then to the United States, then to much of the rest of the world.
Now, for the first time in human history, more than half of the
world’s population lives in
urban areas.3 From 1950 to 2014, the number of people living
in urban areas rose from around

750 million to almost 4 billion. Urbanization is happening in
every corner of the globe. Tokyo,
Japan, is the largest city in the world, with over 38 million
residents. But cities like Delhi, India;
Shanghai, China; Paris, France; São Paolo, Brazil; Lagos,
Nigeria; and New York City are other
examples of megacities, urban areas with over ten million
people, that have sprouted up in
North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Although
Africa and Asia are the only two
major continents where less than half of the population lives in
urban areas, they are
urbanizing at the fastest pace. By 2050, close to two-thirds of
Asia’s population will live in urban
areas.
In many parts of the world, cities that are near one another are
connected by
transportation lines and economic activity, forming
megaregions, or chains of densely
Page 6

populated areas that extend over long stretches of space. In
satellite images taken in the
evening, these stretches of land appear as wide swaths of space
lit up with activity.4 One
megaregion in England stretches across London to Leeds, to
Manchester, to Liverpool, to
Birmingham; another stretches from Shanghai to Nanjing to
Hangzhou in China. Almost one-
fifth of the entire human population lives in just 40
megaregions throughout the world, and
two-thirds of the world’s economic activity happens in these
places.
Table 1: The World’s 31 Megacities in 2016
Urban Area Country 1990 Population 2016 Population
2016 Population
Rank
Tokyo Japan 32,530,000 38,140,000 1
Delhi India 9,726,000 26,454,000 2
Shanghai China 7,823,000 24,484,000 3
Mumbai India 12,436,000 21,357,000 4
Sao Paulo Brazil 14,776,000 21,297,000 5

Beijing China 6,788,000 21,240,000 6
Mexico City Mexico 15,642,000 21,157,000 7
Osaka Japan 18,383,000 20,337,000 8
Cairo Egypt 9,892,000 19,128,000 9
New York
(metro area)
U.S. 16,086,000 18,604,000 10
Dhaka Bangladesh 6,621,000 18,237,000 11
Karachi Pakistan 7,147,000 17,121,000 12
Buenos Aires Argentina 10,513,000 15,334,000 13
Calcutta India 10,890,000 14,980,000 14
Istanbul Turkey 6,552,000 14,365,000 15
Chongqing China 4,011,000 13,774,000 16
Lagos Nigeria 4,764,000 13,661,000 17
Manila Philippines 7,973,000 13,131,000 18
Guangzhou,
Guangdong
China 3,072,000 13,070,000 19

Rio de Janeiro Brazil 9,697,000 12,981,000 20
Los Angeles
(metro area)
U.S. 10,833,000 12,317,000 21
Moscow Russian
Federation
8,987,000 12,260,000 22
Kinshasa Democratic
Republic of
Congo
3,683,000 12,071,000 23
Tianjin China 4,558,000 11,558,000 24
Paris France 9,330,000 10,925,000 25
Shenzhen China 875,000 10,828,000 26
Jakarta Indonesia 8,175,000 10,483,000 27
Bangalore India 4,000,000 10,456,000 28

Urban Area Country 1990 Population 2016 Population
2016 Population
Rank
London United Kingdom 8,054,000 10,434,000 29
Madras India 3,800,000 10,163,000 30
Lima Peru 5,800,000 10,072,000 31
Source: United Nations (2016)
Cities that are nowhere near each other are also increasingly
connected through
technology and commerce that allow products, services, and
information to move quickly
across national and continental boundaries, otherwise known as
globalization. Much of this
activity occurs in global cities, major urban areas that serve as
the nodes for the worldwide
network of economic activity.5 As city governments try to
attract global firms and become
centers of international commerce, many urban scholars have
documented a growing divide

between the global elite and the city residents who carry out the
service jobs that make the
global economy run.6 As I show later in the chapter, the rise of
globalization goes hand in
hand with the rise of a new form of urban inequality.
The rise of global cities means that we are not only living in an
increasingly urban world,
we are living in a world where cities connect the world
together. But the figures we’ve
presented to you are not sufficient to understand the importance
of cities. A sociological
perspective on cities goes beyond pure description of their size
and growth across the world
and asks how cities change us, change the way we live, and
change the way we interact
with each other.
https://www.un-ilibrary.org/population-and-demography/the-
world-s-cities-in-2016_8519891f-en
Page 8

The megaregion in the northeast U.S., running from Boston to
Washington, D.C., is visible in the top right of this
satellite photo. (Source)
City life and community life
To write his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam analyzed data
from a range of
different surveys asking Americans how they spend their time.7
The title of the book came from
a finding that the number of Americans who enjoyed bowling
had grown over time, but the
number who took part in organized bowling leagues had
dwindled. People across America
were bowling, but they were bowling alone. And it wasn’t just
bowling leagues that were
disappearing. Putnam showed that from the 1960s to the 1990s,
Americans became less likely
to attend religious services, donate blood, vote in national
elections, and volunteer on
parent/teacher associations. He worried that social capital, the
tight connections that people
form with each other through organizations, civic life, and
strong social ties, had withered

away.
https://pixabay.com/en/united-states-space-92367/
Page 9
Putnam’s concerns about
what he called “the collapse of
American community” raised
alarms around the country. But his
worries weren’t new. Since the
early days of the discipline,
sociologists have grappled with
the question of whether
community life has eroded in
modern society. In the late 1880s,
German sociologist Ferdinand
Tönnies (pronounced “Tone-ees”)
argued that pre-modern societies

were characterized by close ties
between members of the same
families and the same communities.8 As Europe industrialized
and capitalism proliferated,
interactions between people started to change, becoming more
impersonal and
instrumental.
Writing during the same period, Georg Simmel (pronounced
“Zimmel”) observed the
crowded streets of Berlin, Germany, and noted how life in the
bustling city changed the
mindset of those within it.9 To protect themselves from the
chaos and anonymity of urban life,
city dwellers developed a “blasé” outlook, according to Simmel,
which allowed them to
adapt to the barrage of stimuli—sights, sounds, lights, and
people—in the urban environment.
Personal relationships became less important, emotional life
was pushed aside, and the
mental life of the individual became more rational, more
intellectual.
Both of these sociologists shed light on a recurring theme of
urban sociology. The type

of community life that existed in tight-knit villages in rural
areas had become less common in
the modern, industrializing world. And many sociologists,
writing from the end of the 19th
Century to the end of the 20th Century, had one primary
explanation: City life had changed us
all.
But what was it about cities that altered the way humans
interact with each other?
Louis Wirth was a sociologist at the University of Chicago in
the 1930s, and it was there that he
wrote one of the classic statements about urbanism, the unique
ways of life in cities.10 Wirth
defined a city as “a large, dense, and permanent settlement of
heterogeneous individuals.”
He focused on these defining characteristics of cities because
large, densely-populated
places with diverse groups of people changed the way that urban
residents interacted with
each other. Because it’s impossible to know everyone in a city,
Wirth wrote, “urbanites interact
with others not as individuals but with others in certain roles.”
The character of our interactions

Rooftops in a German village. (Source)
https://pixabay.com/en/rooftops-village-german-houses-
1446355/
Page 10
changes, becoming less intimate and more formulaic. The
diversity of the urban population
leads residents to sort into groups, creating a segmented city
where different groups of
residents interact with a mix of tolerance, indifference, and
occasional conflict.
Wirth, Simmel, and Tönnies offer a somewhat bleak picture of
our urban world, but other
scholars have put forth a more complex, and in some cases more
positive, theory of urbanism.
Claude Fischer built on some of Wirth’s ideas about city life,
but argued that the scale and
density of cities tends to generate a more diverse, extreme set of
lifestyles or subcultures—
groups that hold values and engage in activities that separate
them from wider society—that
are reinforced by establishments and institutions found only in

cities.11 Because so many
people are crowded together in one place, small groups of
people can find others who share
the same unique tastes, lifestyles, interests, or passions. And
new clubs, businesses, or sections
of a city are more likely to emerge to cater to these subcultures
within the city.
Fischer’s theory helps explain why the most distinctive, eclectic
types of people and
places are often (though of course not always) found within
cities. For example, decades ago,
when heterosexual norms and culture dominated American
society, sections of Manhattan’s
Chelsea neighborhood, San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood,
and Chicago’s Boystown
neighborhood emerged as areas where each city’s gay and
lesbian population
congregated. It’s not an accident, according to Fischer’s theory,
that the first set of
“gayborhoods” arose in cities, not in the suburbs of Chicago,
the sparsely populated area
north of San Francisco Bay, or the suburban and rural areas of
upstate New York.
Other scholars have countered the idea that community life has

eroded, pointing to
the unique ways that people can connect with each other and
create community even
within large, densely-populated cities. One of the most
influential urbanists in modern history is
Jane Jacobs, who observed city life by looking out at the streets
below her apartment in
Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.12 Jacobs argued that city
streets densely populated with
residents and businesses allow a wide range of people to look
out over the street together,
keeping tabs on activity and making sure that vulnerable
residents are safe, while also
absorbing streams of strangers and visitors. While generations
of sociologists have argued that
cities erode community life, Jacobs saw something different; the
city, from her perspective,
facilitated the kind of interaction and communication that
breeds a sense of community—an
urban village.

The Castro District, San Francisco. (Source)
The liberated community
In July 2011, a magazine asked readers to “flood into lower
Manhattan, set up tents,
kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street.” Two
months later, on September 17th,
hundreds of people heeded the call and gathered in the heart of
the financial district of
Lower Manhattan to protest the rise of inequality in the United
States and the growing
influence of the wealthiest Americans, “the 1%.” That was just
the beginning. What came to
be known as the Occupy movement spread across the country,
bringing thousands of people
together at hundreds of sites and starting a social movement
around the issue of economic
inequality.
How did it all happen so quickly? Facebook is one reason.
Almost 1,500 Occupy

Facebook pages emerged, attracting more than 400,000
members. Researchers Sarah Gaby
and Neal Caren analyzed data from all of these pages and
identified the types of Facebook
posts that attracted the most members to the movement.13 The
same features of Facebook
that made it such an expansive, popular social media platform—
photographs of the Occupy
https://pixabay.com/en/cityscape-urban-castro-district-400722/
Page 12
sites, testimonials from people with a unique story, inspirational
quotes from historical figures
like Malcolm X—were also most effective in bringing new
people to Occupy. In other words, a
technology that allowed people to develop an entirely new way
to connect with their friends
and family was used in the exact same way to start a social
movement.
When generations of sociologists and urbanists, from Louis
Wirth to Jane Jacobs, wrote

about community life, they typically focused on the people who
are generally nearest to us—
family members, friends, and neighbors. But the “communities”
of protesters who came
together via Facebook complicate this idea of community life.
With the advent of new
communication and transportation technologies, our
“communities” have spread well
beyond where we live.14 Barry Wellman was one of the first
sociologists to notice this; he
argued that the study of community life should focus on social
networks, defined as the
various types of connections that individuals form with other
people, no matter where they’re
located.
Wellman pointed out that sociologists
who saw a decline in community life may
not have noticed the larger social networks
in which individuals are embedded through
home, work, school, religious institutions,
and now online. Community is neither “lost”
nor “saved,” according to Wellman, but

rather has been “liberated.” Residents of
cities now form networks that extend across
space, and they create different kinds of
networks of friends, colleagues, family, and
acquaintances who share the same
interests.
As of 2018, Facebook had over 2 billion users. It’s easier than
ever before to reach
thousands of people across the world, and we still don’t quite
know how our expanding
network of potential “friends” has changed the way humans
interact with each other. But
there is good reason to believe that community life is not going
away, even if it is evolving.
Some research has even found that online interactions may
provide new information and
contacts in ways that strengthen our offline social ties.15
Online networks can connect
neighbors to each other, allowing people who may pass each
other on the street without so
much as a nod to communicate and share information about
their building or

neighborhood.16
Decades of research make clear that this type of communication
is crucial for
mobilizing groups to take political action, organizing for
neighborhood change, and
facilitating the basic types of supports that are essential when
people face a crisis—whether
Connecting with friends from the beach. (Source)
https://pixabay.com/en/smartphone-iphone-girl-relax-rest-
720684/
Page 13
it’s a heat wave, an earthquake, a terrorist attack, or the threat
of a local fire station being
shut down. Our networks may be evolving, but the ability to
find a way to connect with those
around us remains as strong as ever.17
REVIEW SHEET: URBANIZATION

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES KEY QUESTIONS
AUDIO KEY POINTS
PRACTICE QUIZ KEY PEOPLE
VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLES KEY TERMS
IMMIGRATION
tors affect patterns of migration?
migrate?
In the previous section we described how large-scale migration
to industrializing cities of
Europe dominated the attention of European sociologists at the
end of the 1800s; they
wondered how urbanization had changed the nature of
community life. In the United States,
industrialization and urbanization had an added twist: the

movement to America’s cities
resulted in a major reshuffling of the entire population and
permanent changes in the form
and layout of our urban neighborhoods.
As cities expanded throughout the country, African Americans
began to move out of
the rural South and into the cities of the Northeast, Midwest,
and West—a demographic shift
known as The Great Migration. From 1900 to 1970, over six
million African Americans left the
https://www.sociologyexperiment.com/product/urban-sociology/
Page 14
Deep South and traveled northward to cities that previously had
only small Black populations.
New York City had just over 140,000 African Americans in
1910, but three decades later more
than 660,000 African Americans lived there.18 The population
of African Americans in Detroit
went from just 9,000 in 1910 to almost 169,000 in 1940 and
over 750,000 in 1970.

To understand this mass migration that permanently transformed
the country, historian
Isabel Wilkerson took a novel approach. She tracked down
people who were part of this
stream of migrants and sat down and talked to them about their
lives—she carried out an oral
history.19
In her book The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson recounts the
life of George Swanson
Starling, who was forced to leave Florida when his life was
threatened after he tried to
organize for better wages for citrus workers. His migration
story took him up the East Coast to
New York. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney’s story took her from
Mississippi to Chicago, and Robert
Joseph Pershing Foster’s amazing story took him from
Louisiana to California, where he was
finally able to practice freely as a surgeon.
A segregated drinking fountain. (Source)
These stories, brought to life through personal narratives, reveal
the incredible injustices

that were common in segregated towns and cities in the South,
and the humiliations and
blocked opportunities that led African Americans to leave the
only places their families had
known. In the study of migration, the forces that lead people to
leave a neighborhood, a city,
https://pixabay.com/en/racial-segregation-racism-67692/
Page 15
or even their home country are called push factors. The forces
that draw people to a new
destination are pull factors. The lure of jobs in northern
factories was the primary pull factor for
many African Americans. But they were also drawn by the idea
of living in cities where Black
culture was flourishing, where newspapers like the Chicago
Defender were produced by and
for African Americans, and where they hoped to live freely and
with dignity.20
Wilkerson’s oral history reveals that the “promised land” of the
North didn’t live up to

these ideals. Her research on the experience of Black
communities in the North aligns with the
groundbreaking research carried out by African American
sociologists St. Clair Drake and
Horace Cayton before World War II. Just as the eminent
sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois had
rigorously studied the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia decades
earlier, Drake and Cayton
analyzed every dimension of social, political, and economic life
in Chicago’s predominantly
Black South Side in their multi-volume book Black
Metropolis.21 Their work documented the
vibrant community life in a section of the city known as
Bronzeville, but also the challenge of
unrelenting racism faced by Black migrants in their new homes,
and the new forms of urban
poverty and racial conflict that emerged in northern,
midwestern, and western cities
absorbing large numbers of African Americans for the first
time.
Although African Americans had escaped the most brutal forms
of segregation and
racial violence in the South, they met with fierce resistance in
the North as formal and informal

steps were taken to maintain rigid boundaries that defined
where Blacks could live. Violence
and intimidation were commonly used to keep Blacks from
moving into White neighborhoods,
along with legal tactics such as restrictive covenants, contracts
that prohibited homeowners in
White neighborhoods from selling or renting their home to a
Black family.22 The racial
segregation that persists today had its roots in the large-scale,
rapid movement of African
Americans to northern cities.
The new immigration
The Great Migration provides a striking example of
urbanization in the United States. But
it also provides insight into the dynamic nature of cities, which
are constantly experiencing
flows of in- and out-migration—both of immigrants and of
people moving from place to place
internally—that can alter the urban landscape completely. The
process by which new
populations are sorted into urban environments was a central
focus of a group of sociologists
at the University of Chicago in the first half of the 20th Century
who came to be known as the

Chicago School of Urban Sociology. One of their central
questions was, Why does the city look
the way it does? Why were some neighborhoods landing spots
for new immigrants, while
others were sought out by Americans who have been in the
country for longer periods of
time? Why were shopping centers located in the heart of the
city, while factories were just
outside the city center?
Page 16
Sociologists affiliated with the Chicago School used the city as
their laboratory,
scrutinizing the inner workings of urban life in a rapidly
changing city. Ernest Burgess, one of the
most influential scholars in the Chicago School, analyzed the
slow movement of different
groups across the city’s neighborhoods. He argued that new
immigrants resided in the slums
just outside the downtown business district because it placed
them near other immigrants

going through a similar phase of transition and allowed them to
be near the factories that
dominated the economies of cities in the industrial North. As
these new immigrants established
a foothold in the labor market, he argued that they would
“assimilate” into American culture
and gradually drift away from the culture of their ethnic group.
This led them to move outward
to working-class sections of the city, and then further outward
into surrounding areas of the
city that were less densely settled and provided some separation
from the grit, the crowds,
and the slums found in the heart of Chicago.
Burgess’s theory, which suggested that the city filters groups of
people into the
environment that provides the best “fit,” was known as human
ecology. Burgess’s observations
led him to develop an intricate map showing where different
groups clustered within Chicago
and how they moved across areas of the city over time.23
Mulberry Street in the heart of Little Italy, Manhattan, New
York City. (Source)

https://pixabay.com/en/new-york-city-1890-vintage-559753/
Page 17
Burgess’s model of neighborhood change and migration didn’t
work as well in other
cities as it did in Chicago and quickly became outdated with the
emergence of new
transportation and communication technologies. The model
overlooked how historical
legacies of discrimination in federal housing policy and in the
financial system prevented some
immigrants, and Black Americans, from moving into
neighborhoods outside the central city as
Burgess expected. However, some of his insights remain very
valuable for understanding the
layout of cities today. Burgess focused on the way that
migration shapes the form of
neighborhoods and how they change over time. And part of the
explanation for the form of
urban neighborhoods even today is that groups of people come
to the housing market with

different levels of resources, different ideas of what they want
in their neighborhood, and
different roles that they play within the urban environment.
As an example, new immigrants entering a city often move to
communities with a large
number of other immigrants from the same country. Being part
of an ethnic enclave, a section
of a city where the local culture and labor market are dominated
by a single ethnic group,
can provide immigrants a more gradual, smoother transition to a
new country. Immigrants
often rely on social capital—such as information about jobs and
housing—to help establish
themselves in the new city.24 Living within ethnic enclaves can
allow people to share in a
common cultural life, take advantage of tight social networks,
participate in institutions that
facilitate integration, and enjoy greater political influence
because of the concentration of
people with the same racial or ethnic background.

When Burgess was writing, the new immigrants moving to
Chicago were mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe.
There was no immigration from Asia because immigrant-entry
policies, such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibited
immigration from Asia. However, Mexican immigrants, whose
migration was spurred by the Mexican Revolution on the one
hand and the hope of jobs in Chicago’s railroads and steel
mills on the other, migrated to, and formed ethnic enclaves
in, Chicago. The Mexican-origin population in Chicago grew
after the 1924 Immigration Act, which created numerical
limits based on national origin that suspended immigration
from Southern and Eastern Europe and favored those from
countries considered to be “White,” such as Great Britain and
Germany. The 1924 Immigration Act didn’t restrict Mexican
immigration to the U.S., partly because the powerful
agricultural lobby worried that their labor supply would be cut
off since Asian immigrants, and now Southern and Eastern

Europeans, were no longer allowed to enter the country. The
principle threading these racist immigration laws together
was the desire to maintain White racial homogeneity.25
The racist national-origin quotas instituted by the 1924
Immigration Act remained in place until Congress passed the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Signed by President
Lyndon B. Johnson on Ellis Island at the base of the Statue of
Liberty, the 1965 legislation
created two primary pathways for entry: employment and family
reunification. The Act
opened up immigration from Asia and the Caribbean, but
included restrictive provisions for
Latin America, leading to undocumented migration from the
region.26
Who migrates and why
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ushered in major
demographic changes
that continue to shape the racial and ethnic composition of our
country. In 1970, just 5% of the
U.S. population was foreign-born, but now those born outside
the United States account for
almost 14% of the population (Figure 1).27 As of 2017, almost

44.4 million residents of the United
States were born outside of the country. The regions new
immigrants come from have also
shifted since1965. In 1960, 84% of immigrants were from
Europe or Canada. Today, 87% of
immigrants hail from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean,
Africa, and the Middle East.28 The
largest numbers of new immigrants come from India, China,
Mexico, the Philippines, and El
Salvador. In 2008, Asian immigrants began to outnumber
immigrant arrivals from Latin America
Chinese Exclusion Act handbill for
a public rally (source)
https://search-bcarchives.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/democratic-
chinese-exclusion-bill
Page 19
and they now make up the largest share of recent immigrants to
the U.S. Among Latinos, we
have witnessed a “Latino nativity shift,” as over two-thirds of

Latinos in the U.S. are native-
born.29 Since 1980, the Black immigrant population has
increased fivefold.30
Figure 1: Percent of U.S Population that Is Foreign-Born, 1850
– 2017
Copyright: “Immigrant Share of U.S. Population Nears Historic
High.” Pew Research Center
While the majority of immigrants in the U.S. have entered under
the work or family
pathways created by the 1965 Act, about 10.5 million
undocumented people who generally
do not have access to these pathways lived in the U.S. in 2017.
The U.S. undocumented
population (those who entered the country without legal
documentation) is long-settled. More
than two-thirds of undocumented people have lived in the U.S. a
decade or longer;
undocumented people are embedded in our communities and
live, work, and go to school
alongside documented people. Unauthorized people are also
strongly connected to families

and U.S. citizens: more than 8 million U.S. citizens live with at
least one family member who is
unauthorized.31
Many observers assume that people migrate simply “for a better
life.” However, in order
to really understand why people forge new lives in new places,
we must consider the push
and pull factors that propel people to move and the social
networks that link individuals and
communities across borders.
Neoclassical economic theorists (who focus on supply and
demand dynamics) argue
that people are pushed out of their home country by low wages
and pulled into another
country by high wages. People will make the decision to
migrate if the benefits outweigh the
costs. This perspective, often referred to as rational choice
theory, assumes that the decision to
migrate is made by individuals acting in their own self-interest.
But think about your own life. Do
parents, siblings, grandparents, or others influence the decisions
you make?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/key-
findings-about-u-s-immigrants/ft_19-06-

17_keyfindingsimmigrants_immigrant-share-us-population-
nears-historic-high_corrected/
Page 20
Scholars developed new economic theories of migration to
explain how economic and
social inequality in a city or country can stimulate migration
elsewhere, and they maintain that
the decision to migrate is usually made by collective groups,
like families, not by individuals.
But families are embedded in larger social structures, which is
why scholars also use world
systems theory to explain how the global economy structures
relationships between capitalist
and non-capitalist countries and influences migration. The idea
is that the expansion of
capitalist nations into other countries in search of land, raw
materials, and labor disrupts social,
political, and economic systems. Capitalist exploitation creates
conditions that push people to
move, usually to the country that disrupts social and economic
life in their home country.

Patterns of migration tend to continue over time because social
networks link families and
cities across borders.32
Immigration policy
Many of today’s immigration policies revolve around trying to
control who can enter
the United States. While the 1965 Immigration and Nationality
Act opened up authorized
immigration from Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa, the
legislation restricted immigration from
Latin America, leading to an increase in unauthorized migration
from the region.33 Policies
created to reduce unauthorized migration are generally framed
within the rational choice
model because policymakers often mistakenly assume that
people make a cost-benefit
calculation about migration and that if the benefits outweigh the
costs, they will move. The
reality is that current immigration is more complex than a
simple cost-benefit calculation.
Sociologist Douglass Massey and his colleagues have written
extensively about how U.S.
immigration policies seek to raise the costs associated with
unauthorized migration and why

they continually fail.34 These policies include militarizing the
U.S.-Mexico border by building
border walls and increasing enforcement; record levels of
deportations; separating refugee
children from their parents; caging children and families in
detention centers; stigmatizing
unauthorized status in the U.S.; and stripping asylum
protections from refugees fleeing violent
conflicts or persecution. These policies have not deterred
unauthorized migration, but they
have resulted in deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border and an
increase in the number of
undocumented youth in the U.S. More recently, these policies
have created a humanitarian
crisis of refugees from Central America fleeing violent
conditions resulting from decades of U.S.
social, economic, and political intervention in the region, as
world systems theory would
predict.35
These policies, especially intensified federal immigration
enforcement, have negative
consequences for individuals, families, and immigran t
communities. By conducting

observations and interviews with unauthorized immigrants and
their family members,
sociologists Cecilia Menjívar and Leisy Abrego demonstrated
that immigration enforcement
and criminalizing unauthorized immigrants stirs up fear among
individuals and families, which
Page 21
affects how they interact in institutions —like school and the
workplace—and in city life. They
argue that fear created by harsh immigration enforcement is a
form of legal violence that
can hinder the integration of immigrants and their children into
the country.36
May Day Immigration Protest in Downtown Los Angeles. Photo
courtesy of Jody Agius Vallejo
Immigrant integration
Immigration since 1965 has transformed cities across the
country, particularly those

near the coasts. Instead of urban neighborhoods that are mostly
African American or
White, global neighborhoods that contain at least three different
racial or ethnic groups
have sprouted up in many of the more diverse U.S. cities.37
And immigrants and their
descendants are increasingly moving into new destinations in
the South and Midwest.
America’s growing racial and ethnic diversity makes the
question of immigrant
integration—the process by which immigrants and their
descendants integrate into
American life—of great importance.
Burgess and colleagues used the term “assimilation” to discuss
the process by which
immigrants incorporate into society. However, there is an
underlying ethnocentric bias to the
idea of assimilation which, in America, upholds whiteness as
the cultural model by which
immigrants and their children should be judged. Today, scholars
write about the
multidimensional process by which immigrants become
integrated into American culture and

Page 22
institutions. A recent report by the National Academy of
Sciences, Engineering and Medicine,
led by sociology professor Mary Waters, asserts that
“Integration is a twofold process that
depends on the participation of immigrants and their
descendants in major social institutions
such as schools and the labor market, as well as their social
acceptance by other
Americans.”38
Immigration researchers have demonstrated a range of possible
integration paths that
immigrants and their descendants may take after they arrive in
the United States.39 The
traditional idea of assimilation into the cultural and economic
institutions of the dominant
racial group is one path, but other immigrants have experienced
downward mobility due to
discrimination, punitive immigration policies, and economic
barriers, and have integrated into
the neighborhoods of the urban poor. Others have charted a new

path, partially experiencing
structural integration while remaining in ethnic enclaves and
maintaining strong cultural ties to
their communities of origin. Other immigrants and their
descendants integrate into the racial
and ethnic minority middle class.40
Overall, more than a quarter of people living in the U.S. today
are immigrants—what
scholars refer to as the first generation—or are the U.S.-born
children of immigrants—the
second generation. Given current trends, immigrants and their
children will account for more
than 88% of U.S. population growth by 2065.41 This means that
today’s new immigrants and
their descendants are especially important for the social,
economic, cultural, and political
vibrancy of American cities.
REVIEW SHEET: IMMIGRATION
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Page 23
CONCENTRATED POVERTY AND RACIAL SEGREGATION
oblems arise in high-poverty neighborhoods?
Earlier in the chapter we discussed some of the core ideas of the
Chicago School of
urban sociology. One idea was that the landscape of cities like
Chicago resulted from a

process in which groups of people moved through the city and
found the environments that
provided the best fit. The theories of scholars like Edward
Burgess can give the impression that
the layout, form, and composition of city neighborhoods is like
an ecosystem or a forest, that it
is in some sense “natural.” But is this true?
Writing in the mid-1980s, John Logan, Harvey Molotch, and a
group of sociologists,
planners, and geographers transformed the way social scientists
thought about the city. In
their book Urban Fortunes, Logan and Molotch observed that
the layout of cities was anything
but natural—in fact, it was the result of highly-contested
conflicts where different groups took
part in political battles to determine how city resources would
be used, which neighborhoods
would receive investments, and where development was
allowed.42 To understand the form of
cities, they argued, we need to focus on power, politics, and
profit.
Logan and Molotch documented how local government officials,
real estate

developers, private business interests, and leaders of cultural
institutions (such as museums)
worked together to increase the size of city populations and
expand the level of economic
activity taking place within the city. They referred to this group
of actors as a growth machine.
City growth brings more customers for retailers, more housing
demand for real estate
developers, more workers for business owners, more fans for
local sports teams, and more
taxes and clout for government representatives.
The layout of cities isn’t driven purely by migration into and
out of a city, according to
this perspective, but by the set of policies and investments made
in the pursuit of growth.
Coalitions of economic, political, and cultural elites work
together to regulate land use and
local tax rates, to selectively distribute public services like
policing and road maintenance,
and to invest in some communities and not others, with the
overarching goal of attracting
new populations and expanding economic activity.

Page 24
These efforts can transform entire sections of cities. The
riverfront in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, provides an example. In Pittsburgh, where the
Allegheny and Monongahela
Rivers meet to form the Ohio River, the riverfront had long
been little more than industrial
wasteland cut off from any form of public use. A task force
made up of CEOs, foundation
presidents, a newspaper editor, and the owners of the Pirates
and the Steelers—the
prototypical members of the growth machine—began to plan a
transformation of the
riverfront.43
Years later, the area has two shiny new stadiums that are part of
a larger entertainment
district, and acres of parkland linking the neighborhoods of the
city to the riverfront. And with
new urban amenities come new populations. One of the most
controversial dimensions of
neighborhood change is gentrification, defined as a shift in the
population of a community

bringing in new residents who are more affluent or more
educated—and sometimes from a
different racial or ethnic group—than the original residents.44
Gentrification is so controversial
mainly because it is so visible. As new faces appear in a
community, concerns about rising
rents and displacement of original residents—generally people
of color—who can’t pay more
may surface, and the character and culture of a neighborhood
can transform as well.
The role of public policy
makers is often overlooked in
discussions of gentrification. In
Pittsburgh, for instance, enormous
public investments in the riverfront
paved the way for a new group of
residents to gentrify the area.45 The
resulting redevelopment of
Pittsburgh’s riverfront is seen by some
as an urban success story, a tale of

an industrial wasteland come back to
life. After all, a walk along the river on
a sunny day wasn’t possible just
decades ago. But skeptics would
argue that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by taxpayers
to redevelop the waterfront
and build those new stadiums might have been spent more
wisely in the city’s poor,
segregated neighborhoods that have never received similar
investments. Perhaps the owners
of two of the city’s premier sports teams didn’t need to be
subsidized by the citizens of
Pennsylvania.
No matter which view you hold, the lesson is that the look of
our cities isn’t natural at all,
but rather is the product of long-term battles where politics and
profits are as important as
ideas and urban design. And in many cases, the neighborhoods
that draw the most visitors
PNC Park in Pittsburgh. (Source)
https://pixabay.com/en/action-athletes-audience-ballpark-
1850887/

Page 25
and bring the greatest profits receive the greatest investments.
The neighborhoods often left
behind are those occupied by the urban poor.
Concentrated poverty
In the Culture chapter, you learned about Elijah Anderson’s
book Code of the Street, a
classic ethnographic study of life in Philadelphia’s ghetto in the
1990s—when violent crime in the
United States reached unprecedented levels.46 Anderson
described a social world where the
threat of violence loomed in the background at all times and
structured everyday interactions.
Children were forced to adapt to an informal set of rules about
how to act in public spaces to
avoid being victimized while still maintaining status on the
street. Some embraced the idea that
they could gain respect only by accepting the possibility of
death at any moment. Others lived
in fear, trying to find ways to survive while minimizing the
chance of being jumped or shot. The

brutal reality of life in the poor, segregated neighborhoods of
Philadelphia was portrayed vividly
due to Anderson’s years of work on the streets of the city, spent
trying to understand how
residents made sense of their neighborhoods and their own
lives.
Sociologist William Julius Wilson helped explain how
Philadelphia’s neighborhoods had
reached that point. In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson became
the first scholar to observe,
and document, how urban poverty had transformed since the
1950s.47 Manufacturing jobs
that used to be abundant in America’s major central cities
disappeared as factories closed
down or moved to the suburbs. As stable employment became
less common, joblessness rose.
African American men, in particular, experienced soaring rates
of unemployment. Without the
ability to support a family, use of welfare grew, along with the
number of families headed by
single women.
At the same time, central city neighborhoods began to fall apart.
Taking advantage of

new civil rights that made discrimination in the housing market
illegal, middle-class Black
families began to leave the traditional Black ghettos found in
most northeastern and
midwestern cities. They left behind central city neighborhoods
where residents were poor and
jobless, where institutions like the schools and the church
slowly deteriorated, and where
violent crime increased. They left behind neighborhoods like
those that Elijah Anderson
documented in Code of the Street.
Wilson’s concerns about concentrated poverty, the growth in the
number of urban
neighborhoods with extremely high rates of poverty, changed
the way we understand poverty
in America. Although the poverty rate has remained fairly
steady over the past several
decades, the way poverty is spread across communities has
changed dramatically. The
number of Americans living in extremely poor neighborhoods
rose from about 4 million in 1970
to almost 14 million by 2013.48
But it’s not just poverty that has become more concentrated.
Economic segregation,

defined as the degree to which the poor live apart from the rich,
has risen steadily. Since 1970,
Page 26
the number of American families living in either extremely poor
or extremely affluent
neighborhoods has risen from 12% to 34%.49 Since 2000, the
number of people living in gated
communities has risen by 50%. At both the top and the bottom
of the housing market, then,
we find a growing number of neighborhoods where the rich or
the poor are isolated from the
rest of the population.
A fading mural in Chicago. Photograph courtesy of Michael R.
Bump.
Racial segregation
While William Julius Wilson drew the nation’s attention to the
concentration of urban
poverty, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton argued that the

changes he documented
wouldn’t have been possible without the persistence of racial
segregation in urban
neighborhoods. In their book American Apartheid, the two
researchers showed that despite
major advances in civil rights in the 1960s, African Americans
continued to live in
neighborhoods that were separate from Whites and isolated from
communities that contained
higher-quality schools, well-maintained parks, and greater
economic opportunities.50 Racial
segregation in urban neighborhoods was the “lynchpin” for
racial inequality, they claimed.
Residential segregation is the degree to which different
segments of the population,
typically classified by race, ethnicity, or social class, live apart
from each other in separate
communities. How can we measure how much residential
segregation there is and how it has
changed over time? Perhaps the best way to understand
segregation is to see it. Figure 2
shows the area surrounding Washington, D.C.51 Each dot on the
map represents one person,
with different colors representing different racial and ethnic

backgrounds. The map shows the
nation’s capital as a diverse mosaic of many different people
living together, with African
American (green dots) and Latino/a (yellow dots) residents
concentrated on the east side of
Page 27
the city, Whites (blue dots) on the west side of the city and the
northwest suburbs, and a large
Asian population (red dots) in the Virginia suburbs to the west.
Although the area around D.C.
is remarkably diverse, the wide swaths of red, blue, green, and
yellow reveal how members of
the same groups cluster together in communities within the city.
By some measures,
Washington, D.C., is one of the most segregated urban areas in
the country.
Figure 2: Map of Racial and Ethnic Composition of
Neighborhoods in Washington, D.C.
Source: Copyright 2013, Weldon Cooper Center for Public

Service, Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
(Dustin A. Cable, creator)
Researchers studying residential segregation have developed
several ways to measure
how different groups are sorted among the neighborhoods of a
city. The most common
measure describes how evenly different groups are spread
across neighborhoods. Imagine a
hypothetical city in which 75% of the population is White and
25% is Black. If the
neighborhoods of this city were perfectly integrated, we’d
expect 75% of the residents of
every neighborhood would be White and 25% would be Black.
In this scenario, Black and
White residents are perfectly spread across the city’s
neighborhoods. If, on the other hand,
every neighborhood in the city was either 100% White or 100%
Black, then the city would be
completely segregated.
Among cities with at least 100,000 residents, Chicago, New
York, and Miami have the
highest levels of segregation between Black and White
Americans, according to this

measure.52 In Chicago, 83% of the White or Black residents of
the city would have to move to a
different neighborhood for the city to be perfectly integrated.
Oakland, New York, and Los
Angeles have the highest levels of segregation between Latinos
and Whites.
Page 28
Table 2: Large Cities with the Greatest Segregation of Blacks
from Whites in 2010
Segregation
Rank as of
2010
City Black/White
Segregation
in 1980
Black/White

Segregation
in 1990
Black/White
Segregation
in 2000
Black/White
Segregation
in 2010
1 Chicago, IL 90.6 87.4 85.2 82.5
2 New York, NY 82.8 83.5 83.2 81.4
3 Miami, FL 77.4 74.7 75.1 75.5
4 Fort Lauderdale,
FL
79.3 75.7 77.7 74.2
5 Atlanta, GA 79.6 81.3 81.6 74.1
6 Dayton, OH 81.4 79.0 76.2 74.0
7 Philadelphia, PA 83.9 82.9 76.7 73.4
8 Washington, DC 76.8 78.2 80.0 72.2

9 Newark, NJ 79.7 79.2 77.8 71.2
10 Milwaukee, WI 76.8 73.9 69.0 70.1
11 Boston, MA 78.6 75.3 70.4 69.2
12 Cleveland, OH 88.1 87.6 78.0 69.0
13 Baltimore, MD 79.0 75.9 71.2 68.9
14 Houston, TX 78.7 69.5 71.4 68.6
15 Memphis, TN 75.7 71.2 65.1 67.9
16 New Orleans, LA 64.7 62.5 65.9 67.6
17 Baton Rouge, LA 74.2 72.5 72.3 66.9
18 Los Angeles, CA 85.0 78.4 71.5 66.9
19 Dallas, TX 79.8 67.4 66.1 66.1
20 Buffalo, NY 77.2 72.8 69.5 65.9
Source: US2010 Project
Another common measure identifies the degree to which a
particular group is isolated
from all other groups by capturing the average percentage of
neighbors who are of the same
racial background. In Detroit, which has the highest level of

segregation according to this
measure, the average Black resident of the city lives in a
neighborhood that is 92% Black.
We have already covered the ways that Whites maintained
racially segregated
neighborhoods during the first half of the 20th Centur y, when
hundreds of thousands of African
Americans moved north. But when the Fair Housing Act was
passed in 1968, racial
discrimination in housing and lending markets became illegal
for the first time in U.S. history.
Why did racial segregation continue, and even worsen, through
the 1980s?
One major part of the answer is that White Americans began to
leave central city
neighborhoods and move to new suburban communities, a
process known as white flight.
Many left because advances in civil rights meant that
neighborhoods and schools could no
longer be legally segregated by race; White families would soon
have to share their

communities with African American families and send their kids
to the same schools. As Massey
and Denton document in American Apartheid, Whites were able
to buy homes in the suburbs
because of a federal policy that provided mortgages to millions
of Americans, supporting
homeownership and paving the way for the development of new
suburban communities.53
One reason most suburbs became almost entirely White is that
the mortgages provided
by the federal government were almost never given to African
Americans. When the
government entered the mortgage industry, official policies
determined how risky a loan was
based in part on the racial and ethnic composition of the
community. Neighborhoods that
had more non-White residents were much more likely to be
classified as risky. Redlining was
the practice of taking a map of a city and outlining in red the
sections that were considered
high risk, and then rejecting loan applications from people
living in those areas. This meant

that people living in largely Black or mixed-race neighborhoods
were usually ineligible for
federal loans. This practice spread throughout the mortgage
industry, and effectively meant
that the large-scale exodus to America’s suburbs was only
possible for Whites.
The impacts of these policies still shape the development of
cities and suburbs,
although there are some signs of change. Suburbs continue to
grow more quickly than any
other type of community in the United States, and their
boundaries have extended farther out
in a process called suburban sprawl. Although urbanists have
long critiqued the “boring”
suburban environment, noted the misery of long commutes, and
highlighted the
environmental damage caused by sprawl, Americans are still
moving outward. The desire for
space, and for a home of our own, drives the expanding
landscape of America’s cities and
suburbs.
Though many cities remain highly segregated by race, the
overall level of racial
segregation has fallen steadily since the 1980s. Just over 50

years ago, one out of every five
White Americans lived exclusively with other White Americans.
By 2010, neighborhoods that
are entirely White were almost extinct. Economists Jacob
Vigdor and Edward Glaeser
analyzed racial segregation over the entire 21st Century and
came to a surprising, optimistic
conclusion: racial segregation has declined to the lowest levels
in 50 years.54 Many different
racial and ethnic groups have moved to the suburbs and made
them more diverse than they
used to be.
Although this is welcome news, problems remain. While the
segregation of Black
Americans from Whites has declined over time, the level of
segregation for Latinos has
remained stable or risen slightly.55 And despite the decline in
racial segregation, Black
Americans continue to live in neighborhoods that are quite
different from those where Whites
live. For instance, high-income Black families live in
neighborhoods that are more
disadvantaged, and just as poor, as the areas where White
families with very low incomes

live.56 Despite the positive change that has taken place, urban
inequality has not gone away.
Page 30
REVIEW SHEET: CONCENTRATED POVERTY AND RACIAL
SEGREGATION
CLICK THE LINK FOR:
AUDIO KEY POINTS
THE FUTURE OF URBAN LIFE

inequality, poverty, and protest?
it look
like?
We live in an urban world, but the future of that urban world is
uncertain. When COVID-
19 first began to spread in the United States in March of 2020,
many of our major cities shut
down. Wealthy residents of Manhattan fled to second homes
outside the city, office spaces
closed, and public life in New York City slowed to a halt.57
Millions of workers who were able to
do most of their job online began working remotely; commuter
rail lines and subway cars were
empty. For a long period in 2020, cities no longer seemed like
vibrant areas where ideas
sprouted and culture proliferated. Cities seemed like desolate
areas where the poor were
vulnerable to the ravages of the virus, and the rich were
nowhere to be found. New York City
began to come back to life in 2021, but the question remains:
What will our urban future look
like?

Richard Florida is an intellectual disciple of Jane Jacobs, an
urbanist who has sung the
praises of city life for his entire career. In 2002, he publi shed
The Rise of the Creative Class,
which argued that creativity is now the crucial ingredient for
economic growth, and that the
Page 31
most diverse, tolerant, eclectic cities will attract the most
creative people.58 His vision led cities
all over the country to try to develop the amenities, walkable
streets, cafes, and welcoming
feel that would bring artists, professors, and engineers.
There was one big problem with Florida’s argument: as he
himself documented in
studies over the past several years, the most creative cities in
the country are also some of the
most unequal.59 And it’s not a coincidence. Florida and his
colleagues showed that the most

innovative, creative cities work extremely well for workers who
have the skills for the new
knowledge economy, but they don’t work particularly well for
less-skilled workers struggling to
survive as housing prices and rents skyrocket.
His findings present urbanists with a dilemma. Economists like
Enrico Moretti and Edward
Glaeser show that cities are breeding grounds for innovation
and job creation, places where
talent and ideas cluster together.60 But they’re also settings for
the most extreme, sometimes
brutal, inequality. As cities continue to grow, and as migration
increases around the globe,
cities become linked together in networks that extend across the
planet, making more visible
the tensions of our new unequal urban world.
Beginning in 2011, the Occupy movement brought attention to
the rise of American
inequality in hundreds of cities. In the summer of 2014, protests
in New York; Ferguson, Missouri;
Baltimore; and dozens of other cities brought attention to urban
police departments that have
focused the most aggressive, sometimes lethal, forms of

policing on African American
communities. When George Floyd was killed by a police officer
in Minneapolis in May of 2020,
anger directed toward police violence and racial injustice
bubbled over, leading to protests
and unrest in hundreds of cities.
Some observers suggest that these
different types of protests are related. As
urban inequality has grown, critics like Mike
Davis argue that cities have become places
where coalitions of politicians, real estate
developers, and property holders have
adopted policies of aggressive policing and
rigid land use regulations designed to
create urban communities of extreme
wealth that are shielded from the rest of the
city. Davis points to Los Angeles as a
“fortress of exclusion,” where the glitzy,
affluent sections of the city are protected

and fortified and the run-down, poor sections of the city are
excluded, abandoned, and
punished.61 This vision of city life bears little resemblance to
the optimistic view of urban
prosperity put forth by Glaeser and Moretti.
Black Lives Matter protest. (Source)
https://pixabay.com/en/protest-blm-black-lives-matter-sign-
1567028/
Page 32
Maybe they’re all right. In his most recent book, The New
Urban Crisis, Richard Florida
argues that cities continue to be the ideal sites for innovation
and sustainable growth, but
urban policy must change in order to deal with the rising
problem of inequality. The next city
must continue to inspire innovation, but it also must be
inclusive.
His assessment is relevant
beyond the United States. As
globalization accelerates and more

firms conduct business that crosses
national borders, multinational
institutions play larger roles in
influencing urban policy, often
exacerbating inequality. At the
same time, as more of the world’s
population migrates to cities,
hundreds of millions of people have
moved into slums and shantytowns
at the periphery of the world’s cities.
“The same divides and disparities
that we see in America’s cities and urban areas,” Florida
observes, “are magnified many times
over at the global scale.”
Cities are seen by some as the solution to long-term challenges
of climate change and
economic growth, and by others as the sites of a new form of
extreme, global inequality. Our
hope is that when you come across conflicting perspectives on
the nature of city life, you

won’t automatically adopt any particular perspective – instead,
you will think like a social
scientist and ask the series of questions that we presented at the
start of the chapter: Do I
believe the ideas I’m reading? What kind of evidence would be
more convincing? If I wanted
to answer this question, how would I do so?
A slum in Xiamen, China. (Source)
https://pixabay.com/en/xiamen-slum-dwellers-824233/
Page 33
REVIEW SHEET: THE FUTURE OF URBAN LIFE
CLICK THE LINK FOR:

AUDIO KEY POINTS
Page 34
REFERENCES
1 Helmreich, William B. 2013. The New York Nobody Knows:
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2 Rothman, Joshua. 2013. “A Walker in the City.” The New
Yorker. Retrieved at:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-walker-in-the-
city
3 All of the figures on urbanization come from this report
produced by the United Nations: United Nations. 2014.
“World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision,
Highlights.” Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
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https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-
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4 Florida, Richard. 2008. “Megaregions: The Importance of
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https://hbr.org/2008/03/megaregions-the-importance-of-place
5 Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London,
Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
6 Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of
Los Angeles. London: Verso.
7 Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and
Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and
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8 Tonnies, Ferdinand. 2005. “Community and Society.” Pp. 16-
22 in The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin
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9 Simmel, Georg.1972 [1902]. “The Metropolis and Mental
Life” in Georg Simmel On Individuality and Social Forms.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
10 Wirth, Louis. 1938. “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” American
Journal of Sociology 44(1): 1-24.
11 Fischer, Claude. 1975. “Toward a Subcultural Theory of
Urbanism.” American Journal of Sociology 80:1319-41.
12 Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American
Cities. New York: Random House.
13 Gaby, Sarah, and Neal Caren. 2012. "Occupy Online: How
Cute Old Men and Malcolm X Recruited 400,000 US
Users to OWS on Facebook.” Social Movement Studies 11(3-4):
367-374.
14 Wellman, Barry. 1979. “The Community Question: The

Intimate Networks of East Yorkers.” American Journal of
Sociology 84(5):1201-1231.
15 Ellison, Nicole B., Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe.
2007. “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Exploring the
Relationship between College Students’ Use of Online Social
Networks and Social Capital.” Journal of Computer-
Mediated Communication 12(3):1143-1168.
16 Hampton, Keith, and Barry Wellman. 2003. "Neighboring in
Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and
Social Capital in a Wired Suburb." City & Community 2(4):
277-311.
17 Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American City: Chicago and
the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012.
18 Priceonomics. “The Great Migration: The African American
Exodus from The South.” Retrieved at:
https://priceonomics.com/the-great-migration-the-african-
american-exodus/
19 Wilkerson, Isabel. 2010. The Warmth of Other Suns: The
Epic Story of America's Great Migration. New York: Vintage.
20 Lemann, Nicholas. 1991. The Promised Land: The Great
Black Migration and How It Changed America. New York:
Vintage.
21 Drake, St. Clair, and Horace R. Cayton. 1970 (1945). Black
metropolis: A study of Negro life in a northern city.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
22 Massey, Douglas and Nancy Denton. 1993. American
Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
See also: Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2014. “The Case for Reparations.”
The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-
for-reparations/361631/
23 Park, Robert E. and Ernest Burgess. [1925] 1967. The City:
Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the
Urban Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
24 Aguilera, Michael and Douglass Massey. 2003. “Social
Capital and the Wages of Mexican Migrants: New
Hypotheses and Tests.” Social Forces, 82(20): 671-701.
25 Ngai, Mae. 1999. “The Architecture of Race in American
Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration
Act of 1924.” The Journal of American History, 86(1), 67-92.
26 Douglas Massey and Karen A. Pren, 2012. "Unintended
Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the
Post-1965 Surge from Latin America." Population and
Development Review 38 (1): 1-29.
27 Radford, Jynnah and Luis Noe-Bustamante. 2019. “Facts on
U.S. Immigrants, 2017.” Pew Research Center.
Retrieved from
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2019/06/03/facts-on-u-s-
immigrants/
28 Ibid.
29 Jens Manuel Krogstad and Mark Hugo Lopez. 2014. “The
Hispanic Nativity Shift,” Washington, D.C.: Pew Research
Center. Retrieved from

https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2014/04/29/hispanic-
nativity-shift/
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-walker-in-the-
city
https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-
Highlights.pdf
https://hbr.org/2008/03/megaregions-the-importance-of-place
https://priceonomics.com/the-great-migration-the-african-
american-exodus/
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-
for-reparations/361631/
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2019/06/03/facts-on-u-s-
immigrants/
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2014/04/29/hispanic-
nativity-shift/
Page 35
30 Anderson, Monica and Gustavo López. 2018. “Key Facts
About Black Immigrants in the U.S.” Pew Research
Center. Retrieved from: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2018/01/24/key-facts-about-black-immigrants-in-
the-u-s/
31 Mathema, Silvia. 2017. Keeping Families Together. Center
for American Progress.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/reports/2
017/03/16/428335/keeping-families-together/
32 Massey, Douglass S., Jorge Durand, and Nolan Malone.
Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an
Era of Economic Integration. New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 2002
33 Douglas, Massey and Karen A. Pren, 2012. "Unintended
Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the
Post-1965 Surge from Latin America." Population and
Development Review 38 (1) 1-29.
34 Massey, Douglass, Jorge Durand, & Karen Pren. 2016. “Why
Border Enforcement Backfired.” American Journal of
Sociology 121:5, 1557-1600
35 Massey, Douglass. 2020. “Creating the Exclusionist Society:
From the War on Poverty to the War on Immigrants,”
Ethnic and Racial Studies 43(1): 18-37
36Menjívar, Cecilia and Leisy Abrego. 2011. “Legal Violence
in the Lives of Immigrants.” Center for American
Progress. Retrieved from:
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/repor ts/2
012/12/11/47533/legal-
violence-in-the-lives-of-immigrants/
37 Logan, John R. and Charles Zhang. 2010. “Global
Neighborhoods: New Pathways to Diversity and Separation.”
American Journal of Sociology 115: 1069-1109.
38 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
2015. The Integration of Immigrants into American

Society. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
https://doi.org/10.17226/21746. P. 34.
39 Portes, Alejandro and Min Zhou. 1993. “The New Second
Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants.”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Sciences 530: 74-96.
40 Vallejo, Jody Agius. 2012. Barrios to Burbs: The Making of
the Mexican American Middle Class. Stanford University
Press.
41 Radford, Jynnah. 2019. “Key Findings about U.S.
Immigrants.” Pew Research Center. Retrieved from:
findings-about-u-s-immigrants/
42 Logan, John R., and Harvey Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes:
The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
43 Tierney, John. 2014. “How Green Riverfronts Transformed
Pittsburgh.” The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/how -
green-riverfronts-transformed-pittsburgh/382928/
44 Kennedy, Maureen and Paul Leonard. 2001. “Dealing with
Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification
and Policy Choices.” The Brookings Institution Center on Urban
and Metropolitan Policy. Retrieved at:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/dealing-with-
neighborhood-change-a-primer-on-gentrification-and-policy-
choices/
45 Florida, Richard. 2015. “The Role of Public Investment in

Gentrification.” CityLab. Retrieved at:
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/09/the-role-of-public-
investment-in-gentrification/403324/
46 Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the Street: Decency,
Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York, NY.
WW Norton Company.
47 Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The
Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
48 Jargowsky, Paul. 2003. “Stunning Progress, Hidden
Problems: The Dramatic Decline of Concentrated Poverty in
the 1990s.” Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Jargowsky,
Paul. 2015. “The Architecture of Segregation.”
Washington, D.C.: The Century Foundation.
49 Reardon, Sean, and Kendra Bischoff. 2016. "The Continuing
Increase in Income Segregation, 2007-2012." Retrieved
from Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis:
http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/continuing-increase-
income-segregation-2007-2012
50 Massey, Douglas and Nancy Denton. 1993. American
Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
51 Map was generated from The Weldon Cooper Center for
Public Service at the University of Virginia’s “Racial Dot
Map”: http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/Racial-Dot-
Map

52 Sorted lists of city segregation from the US2010 project are
available here:
http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/SegSorting/Default.aspx
53 Jackson, Kenneth T. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The
Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford
University Press.
54 Glaeser, Edward, and Jacob Vigdor. 2012. “The End of the
Segregated Century: Racial Separation in America's
Neighborhoods, 1890-2010.” New York, NY: Manhattan
Institute for Policy Research.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/24/key-facts-
about-black-immigrants-in-the-u-s/
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/24/key-facts-
about-black-immigrants-in-the-u-s/
017/03/16/428335/keeping-families-together/
012/12/11/47533/legal-violence-in-the-lives-of-immigrants/
012/12/11/47533/legal-violence-in-the-lives-of-immigrants/
https://doi.org/10.17226/21746
findings-about-u-s-immigrants/
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/how-
green-riverfronts-transformed-pittsburgh/382928/
choices/
choices/
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/09/the-role-of-public-

investment-in-gentrification/403324/
http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/continuing-increase-income-
segregation-2007-2012
http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/continuing-increase-income-
segregation-2007-2012
http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/Racial-Dot-Map
http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/SegSorting/Default.aspx
Page 36
55 Logan, John, and Brian Stults. 2011. "The Persistence of
Segregation in the Metropolis: New Findings from the 2010
Census." Providence, RI: US2010 Project.
56 Sharkey, Patrick. 2014. "Spatial Segmentation and the Black
Middle Class." American Journal of Sociology 119(4):
903-954.
57 Quealy, Kevin. 2020. “The Richest Neighborhoods Emptied
Out Most as Coronavirus Hit New York City.” New York
Times, retrieved at:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/15/upshot/who-
left-new-york-coronavirus.html
58 Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And
How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and
Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books.
59 Florida, Richard. 2017. The New Urban Crisis: How Our
Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation,

and Failing the Middle Class — And What We Can Do About It.
New York: Basic Books.
60 Glaeser, Edward. 2011. Triumph of the City: How Our
Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener,
Healthier, and Happier. New York: Penguin Press.
Moretti, Enrico. 2012. The New Geography of Jobs. New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
61 Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of
Los Angeles. London: Verso.
Cover Photo: Source
https://pixabay.com/en/paris-france-skyline-sunset-905108/
Deviance,
Crime, and
Violence
Angela Barian
Patrick Sharkey, Princeton University

Bryan L. Sykes, University of California-Irvine
Deviance, Crime, and Violence (Fall 2021)
Page 2
Deviance, Crime, and
Violence
A N G E L A B A R I A N
P A T R I C K S H A R K E Y , P R I N C E T O N U N I V E
R S I T Y
B R Y A N L . S Y K E S , U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I
F O R I N A - I R V I N E
INTERPRETING DEVIANCE
What does it mean to be deviant?
Social control, stigma , and labeling
THEORIES AND PERSPECTIVES ON DEVIANCE
Functionalist t heories

Conflict t heories
Social bonds, lovable freaks , and criminals
CRIME AND VIOLENCE
What is a crime? Who is a criminal?
The context of crime
VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES AND BEYOND
The rise and fall of American violence
Why is the United States more violent than similar nations?
The Great American Crime Decline
CRIME, PUNISHMENT, AND THE PREVENTION OF
VIOLENCE
Page 3
Mass incarceration
The past, present, and future of policing in the United States

Page 4
INTRODUCTION
In August 2017, white supremacists and neo-Nazis held a rally
in Charlottesville, Virginia.
This Unite the Right Rally was held to promote racist, white
separatist ideologies and to protest
the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
At this time, support for the
Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the United States was
at -5%, meaning more Americans
disapproved of BLM than approved of it.1 While BLM was
well-supported among Black
Americans at this time, it was rare to see any White public
figure, news agency, social media
platform, or corporation openly support the movement.
Now consider more recent events. Since 2017, public opinion
has changed fairly
rapidly. After the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor,
and George Floyd, as well as

data showing the health effects of COVID-19 were far worse for
African Americans than other
groups in the U.S., support for Black Lives Matter grew even
more sharply. As mass protests
occurred around the country, support for BLM grew among
Americans — even White
Americans — while opposition fell. Individuals, public figures,
and corporations from Coca-
Cola to Netflix to Amazon to even Gushers candy expressed
public support for Black Lives
Matter. Many Confederate monuments are being removed.2 The
Mississippi legislature voted
to change their state flag to remove the Confederate symbol
from it.3 Of course, some
Americans always supported the BLM movement. But for many,
voicing public support for BLM
changed from being against the norm, to being the norm.
Figure 1: Public Opinion of the Black Lives Matter Movement
Why? What makes any behavior deviant or not? And what about
criminal behavior? Is
there some objective line for normative versus deviant versus
criminal behavior? Does it

depend upon the number of people who engage in it? Or the
written law where you live?
Does it depend on where—or when—you live?
(Source)
https://twitter.com/CocaCola/status/1268176865967169537?ref_
src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1
268176865967169537&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes
.com%2F2020%2F06%2F11%2Fdining%2Ffood-brands-black-
lives-matter-social-media.html
https://twitter.com/CocaCola/status/1268176865967169537?ref_
src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1
268176865967169537&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes
.com%2F2020%2F06%2F11%2Fdining%2Ffood-brands-black-
lives-matter-social-media.html
https://twitter.com/netflix/status/1266829242353893376?ref_src
=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1266
829242353893376&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2
Fthe-
goods%2F2020%2F6%2F3%2F21279292%2Fblackouttuesday-
brands-solidarity-donations
https://twitter.com/amazon/status/1267140211861073927?ref_sr
c=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E126
7149999659462657&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%
2Fthe-
goods%2F2020%2F6%2F3%2F21279292%2Fblackouttues day-
brands-solidarity-donations
https://twitter.com/gushers/status/1269110304086114304
https://civiqs.com/results/black_lives_matter?uncertainty=true&
annotations=true&zoomIn=true&trendline=true

We’ll investigate these questions in this chapter. We start with
the concept of deviance,
or behaviors that violate social norms. We’ll discuss who
violates societal rules, under what
circumstances, and how.
We then move from deviance to the issue of crime, with a
specific focus on one form of
deviance and crime: violence. We'll trace the history of how
society has explained and
responded to criminal behavior and provide a sociological
perspective on crime and
violence. In the conclusion, we move from the abstract to the
concrete: How has violence
changed over time, and what can be done to prevent it?
INTERPRETING DEVIANCE
isn’t?
eties attempt to enforce certain behaviors among
members?

What does it mean to be deviant?
In 2007, the majority of Americans said they opposed
same-sex marriage. Many states passed gay marriage
bans, and it was only fully legal in one state
(Massachusetts). But since then, public opinion has
moved toward acceptance. One way we can see this is
in positive depictions of gay and lesbian characters,
which have proliferated in the media since 2007. By
2013, over three-quarters of Americans said that a family
member, friend, or coworker had come out to them.4 In
2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all states must
recognize same-sex marriages. And in the last decade,
public opinion has more than reversed itself: Americans
now favor allowing gay marriage two-to-one.5
We can reasonably say that public opinion about
same-sex marriage is a reflection of public opinion about
gay people. That means for some people in the U.S., being
gay used to be considered deviant, but now isn’t. The point

here is that understandings of
deviant behavior rely on social agreement. So what does it mean
to be deviant?
Figure 2: Support for Same-Sex
Marriage
(Source)
http://www.people-press.org/2017/06/26/support-for-same-sex-
marriage-grows-even-among-groups-that-had-been-skeptical/
Page 6
As we noted in the introduction, deviance refers to behaviors
that violate social norms,
or common expectations for behavior. Norms are connected to
the values and beliefs of the
culture in which they exist. In some cultures it’s considered too
informal to remove your shoes
when entering someone’s house. In others, it’s considered
offensive not to remove them.
Norms vary in importance; some violations are extremely
serious, others go unnoticed.
Sociologist William Graham Sumner developed a typology that

can help us understand
different types of norms. Folkways are the least serious norms.
They mainly refer to customs,
traditions, and etiquette. Social sanctions for violating them are
also the least severe.6 Imagine
someone eating a Snickers bar with a knife and fork, as in the
Seinfeld episode “The Pledge
Drive” (search YouTube for a clip). While we might think it’s
odd for someone to eat a Snickers
this way, there aren’t likely to be any long-term consequences if
someone does so.
Mores (pronounced MORE-ays) are more seriously protected
norms. They reflect a
deeper sense of morals and values, and sanctions for violating
them are often much stronger.7
Take the example of Amy Robertson, a Kansas high school
principal who invented the name
of a fake university and used it on her resume. When the high
school newspaper researched
her for a story and discovered she had lied about her
credentials, Robertson resigned in
shame. Finally, laws represent the most highly codified level of
norm; they are usually written
down, and there are serious consequences if you don’t follow

them. These norms are
important enough that the community agrees that violating them
requires binding
punishment. We’ll cover laws in more depth in the second half
of the chapter.
Social control, stigma , and labeling
A common fashion tip is that horizontal stripes should only be
worn by thin people, since
they make people look wider. There are a lot of fashion “dos”
and “don’ts” based on body
shape and size. But there’s also a burgeoning “fatshionista”
movement for fat people who
want to explicitly break rules of what you “can” and “can’t”
wear. One example is the
attention recording artist Lizzo has gotten for her body. She
routinely wears bodysuits onstage,
posts nude photos of herself on social media, and refuses to
apologize for her body, which has
drawn controversy. Also controversial was a TikTok video
montage she posted of herself
working out, with a voiceover that said in part, “So, I've been
working out consistently for the
last five years. It may come as a surprise to some of y'all that
I'm not working out to have your

ideal body type. I'm working out to have my ideal body type.”
Rules may be made to be broken, but no one can deny they
exist. Rules govern what
we can and can’t do, what we can and can’t say, what we can
and can’t wear. But we
might ask, says who? Who makes the rules? And who enforces
them?
Page 7
Most rules aren’t enforced through the formal legal system,
but rather through informal social control, or the ways
societies try to influence members’ behavior to maintain
social order. Societies can exert this social control in many
ways. One is through moral panics – over-heated, short-lived
periods of intense social concern over an issue.8 Sociologist
Howard S. Becker argued that in a moral panic, moral
entrepreneurs push for increased awareness of and concern
over an issue.9 There’s usually heightened social concern

over it, increased hostility toward those believed to be
responsible, and some degree of agreement over both the
problem and who’s responsible.10 In addition, moral panics
burn hot, but quick. There is usually outsized concern over the
problem, given its actual threat to society, and as a result,
the concern usually passes.11
One recent example of a moral panic occurred in
2013, when mass media outlets began covering the then-
new app Snapchat. Because snaps disappeared after a
certain amount of time, moral entrepreneurs raised concern
that it could be used as a “sexting app.” To these
entrepreneurs, Snapchat typified what they called “sexting
culture.” News stories routinely shared instances of teens
sending and receiving (and screen-shotting) lurid images.
Stories even circulated about teenagers who were charged with
child pornography for
sending nude images of themselves. In reality, very few teens
actually sext; the number is
probably around 7%.12 Eventually, the sexting aspect of

Snapchat received less and less
coverage. This moral panic burned hot, but burned out quickly.
Despite the panicked nature of sexting coverage, it’s important
to acknowledge that
some teens have suffered after sending nude images of
themselves over the internet. Some
teens caught sexting had to put themselves on a sex-offender
registry, a designation that
sticks literally for life and can impact where people can live or
what jobs they can get.13 In the
language of sociologist Erving Goffman, those teens bear social
stigma. Stigma occurs when
some characteristic of an individual or group is seen as inferior
or undesirable and leads to
social rejection.14
Fatshionistas like to break
societal fashion rules.
(Source)
http://bit.ly/2vNwtxW

Which attributes are stigmatized varies
greatly by context. For instance, in Mauritania,
fatness is so admired in women that little girls are
force-fed so they gain weight.15 But in modern
American culture, obesity is so stigmatized that
people may make sure to eat only “healthy”
foods in public, or pay for expensive weight-loss
bootcamps. After years of trying to “cover” their
stigma, some fat people even feel the need to
“come out” to their friends and family.16 “Coming
out” for fat people isn’t a simple declaration of
their weight; it’s a “refusal to cover.”17 As
Kathleen Lebesco writes, coming out as fat is making a public
declaration of “choosing to no
longer pass as on-the-way-to thin,” and acknowledging their
stigmatized status.18
The reaction to our behavior can change the way we see
ourselves and our identity,
possibly even reinforcing the behavior. Labeling theory argues

that deviance isn’t really about
the act itself, but is negotiated socially through reactions to the
act.19 When someone is
labeled as an “outsider,” they are treated differently. Smoking
marijuana may not change
someone much, but being labeled a pothead may shift how a
person is treated and how she
sees herself.20 Selling drugs happens in almost every city and
town across the U.S., but in some
communities the police more actively target drug distribution,
prosecutors more aggressively
punish offenders, and the criminal justice system delivers
harsher sentences. Even if the
behavior is the same in a wealthy suburb and a poor city
neighborhood, the treatment of the
behavior may lead to very different consequences.
Taking all of this into account, how do we determine what is
deviant? The key
sociological point is that in any society, deviance is a
relationship between individuals and
larger social landscapes. As morality shifts (and it always
does), enforcement of norms shifts,
too.

Moral panics about Snapchat have largely
subsided. (Source)
https://pixabay.com/en/business-man-smartphone-phone-
2056029/
Page 9
REVIEW SHEET: INTERPRETING DEVIANCE
CLICK THE LINK FOR:
AUDIO KEY POINTS
THEORIES & PERSPECTIVES ON DEVIANCE

do some people engage in deviance, but others don’t?
On July 15, 1974, a Florida television morning-show host
named Christine Chubbuck
decided to start her broadcast of Suncoast Digest with footage
of a shooting that occurred at
a restaurant the previous night.21 When the film footage
wouldn’t roll, she smiled strangely. She
looked down at her desk and read: “In keeping with Channel
40’s policy of bringing you the
latest in blood and guts—and in living color—you are going to
see another first: attempted
suicide.” She then pulled a .38 caliber revolver from under her
desk and shot herself in the
back of the head.22 Christine Chubbuck killed herself on live
television.
Why did she do it? According to news reports, she was
extremely depressed.23 But they
also reported that it was more complicated than that. She didn’t
have any friends or romantic
partners.24 She was socially awkward and had trouble
connecting with others. She felt that the
fact that she was a 29-year-old virgin reflected poorly on her as

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