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showing that prejudice often takes on
forms not well captured by traditional
survey approaches.
Quillian continues to study race and
biases in perceptions of the risk of
criminal victimization. He and Devah
Pager of Princeton University examine
how perceptions of the risk of becoming
a victim of a burglary or robbery compare
with actual victimization rates. By
layering data from the 1994 to 2002
Survey of Economic Expectations and
Census zip code information, they find
more people believe they will become
crime victims than is borne out by victimization
rates. Their results also show
that neighborhood racial composition is
strongly associated with perceived risk of
victimization among white respondents,
although actual victimization risk is
driven by neighborhood socioeconomic
status.
Quillian is also studying how residential
income segregation factors into
educational inequalities between
adolescents with different socioeconomic
backgrounds. He finds that young adults
from poor families were more likely to
drop out of high school and less likely
to attend college if they live in more
income-segregated metropolitan areas.
Adults raised in more affluent families,
on the other hand, were neither more
likely to graduate from high school nor go
onto college in more income-segregated
metropolitan areas; they did not gain
educationally from segregation.
With Rozlyn Redd of Columbia
University, Quillian has completed a
review and analysis of studies of the role
of social capital in maintaining persistent
racial gaps in poverty rates in the United
States. They focus on four prominent
social capital explanations relevant to
poverty disparities: job search networks,
neighborhood collective efficacy,
ethnicity in social networks, and networks
of school friends. They find the latter
three to have a greater effect on racial
gaps in poverty, but argue that social
capital alone can explain only a small
share of racial differences in poverty rates.
Segregation in the job market has been
another challenge faced by all modern
equality movements,
according to historian
Nancy MacLean, who
specializes in the history
of social movements and
public policy. Her most
recent book, Freedom Is
Not Enough: The Opening
of the American Workplace
(Harvard University Press/
Russell Sage Foundation),
reveals how central the
quest for better jobs was
to the black freedom
movement, women’s
movement, and Mexican American civil
rights movement. She concludes that
creating more good jobs for all Americans
is vital to fulfill the vision of human rights
for which these movements labored.
MacLean is now working on a book that
will trace the closing of schools in Prince
Edward County, Va., from 1959 to 1964.
The closings grew out of the state’s policy
of “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board
of Education advocated by Southern
segregationists. This five-year struggle also
generated the first push for the tuition
grants and school vouchers that later
became a national cause of conservatives.
Racial Profiling
From 2002 to 2006, economist Charles
F. Manski led a research network of 11
economists who explored substantive and
methodological issues in analyzing social
interactions. The economists quickly
turned to racial and ethnic profiling,
seeing a pressing need to bring serious
Greg Duncan and Lincoln Quillian
discuss an IPR colloquium on Gautreaux.
P. Reese
www.northwestern.edu/ipr 19