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A rich vein of data that lays bare pervasive discriminatory environments and their systemic consequences for both targets and non-targets of discrimination
Just Who Loses?
Discrimination in the United States, Volume 2
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Samuel Roundfield Lucas
In Just Who Loses? Samuel Roundfield Lucas continues his comprehensive assessment of sex and race discrimination in the United States that he began with Theorizing Discrimination in an Era of Contested Prejudice.
This new volume demonstrates that the idea of discrimination being a zero-sum game is a fallacy. If discrimination costs women, men do not necessarily reap the gains. Likewise, if discrimination costs blacks, non-blacks do not reap the gains. Lucas examines the legal adjudication of discrimination, as well as wider public debates about policy on the issue, to prove how discrimination actually operates.
He uses analytic methods to show that across the socioeconomic lifecycle—including special education placement, unemployment, occupational attainment, earnings, poverty, and even mortality—both targets and non-targets of discrimination "lose."
In Just Who Loses? Lucas proposes the construction of a broad-based coalition to combat the pervasive discrimination that affects social relations and law in the United States.
Excerpt
Reviews
Praise for Theorizing Discrimination in an Era of Contested Prejudice
“[F]ull of insights, compelling analysis, and provocative (in the best sense of the term) arguments…. Theorizing Discrimination is worth pondering, if only for the many aperçus of a smart and knowledgeable author….. Lucas comes across as a vivid, earnest, smart, iconoclastic thinker. Theorizing Discrimination makes one think.”
—Contemporary Sociology
"This quirky, serious, intelligent book should, at a minimum, force some clearer thinking about the place of sociology.... The book is most compelling when it applies its sharp critical perspective to both societal practices and social science research.... It offers plenty of material to think through, agree with and argue against...it will force readers to reconsider a few tired ways of thinking about discrimination--something this field, in particular, desperately needs."
—The American Journal of Sociology
Contents
List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Evidently, Too
1. Effects of Discrimination in the United States
2. Biological Explanations of Gender and Racial Inequality in the United States
3. Socialization and Cultural Difference Explanations of Race and Gender Inequality in the United States
4. The Comparative Measurement of Expected Exposure to Discrimination
5. Education and Discrimination
6. Opportunity to Work and Discrimination
7. Job Quality and Discrimination
8. Poverty, Earnings, and Discrimination
9. Mortality and Discrimination
10. Just Who Loses?
References
Index
About the Author(s)
Samuel Roundfield Lucas is Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of Theorizing Discrimination in an Era of Contested Prejudice: Discrimination in the United States, Volume 1 (Temple) and Tracking Inequality: Stratification and Mobility in American High Schools. He is also a co-author of Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth.