Reordering Occupation, Race, and Place in Metropolitan New York

The New York metropolitan area is one of the oldest, largest, and perhaps most complex urban region in the United States (U.S.). Its 23.7 million residents live across four states, produce a GDP of more than $1.7 trillion, are governed by a fragmented political system, and experience persistently high degrees of geographic and racial/ethnic inequality and segregation. This chapter investigates the evolving spatial organization of occupation and race across the metropolitan area. While white professionals have traditionally lived in an outer ring of suburbs and blue-collar immigrant and minority groups have lived closer to the city center, our research shows that the forces of gentrification and minority and immigrant suburbanization have been turning the metropolitan area inside out. Specifically, young, usually white, professionals are increasingly located in and around the central city whereas many working-class minorities have shifted away from it. At the heart of this spatial reordering lie the diminishing plurality of native-born whites within the region and the increasing share of immigrant minority groups, especially for foreign-born Hispanics and Asians. This trend has lessened the share of white males in better occupations even as the region’s occupational structure slowly but inexorably tilts toward managerial and professional occupations. Technology is transforming white-collar work as blue-collar work continues to disappear. Dramatic shifts are thus afoot, yet inequality and segregation remain high. We argue that these changes in the spatial organization of the metropolitan area challenge us to see these inequalities from a new vantage point. As elites are now more likely to live among less advantaged groups, this may provide the social basis for new thinking.

HEALTH ACTIVISM FROM THE BOTTOM UP: PROGRESSIVE ERA IMMIGRANT CHICAGOANS’ VIEWS ON GERM THEORY, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH, AND CLASS INEQUALITY

Drawing on Chicago immigrant communities’ archives, memoirs, and native-language newspapers, this article advances our understanding of Progressive Era environmental politics by delving into cross-class immigrant communities’ views on and activism concerning health. Everyday ethnic Chicagoans—medical and journalistic professionals alongside working-class immigrants—displayed a sophisticated understanding of health. Well versed in medical and scientific germ theories, they embraced a mixture of germ and environmental theories that made them, in effect, “disease ecologists,” revealing a widespread health ecology orientation not limited to the educated white professionals and reformers about whom scholarship has revealed much more. Such perspectives contribute to reinterpretations of earlier scholarly assumptions that germ theory largely displaced environmental analyses. Moreover, ethnic communities’ interpretations of health as ecological underpinned some of their political activism in pursuit of greater environmental parity. Many ethnic activists from across Chicago's class spectrum fought alongside white reformers to rectify environmental health inequities. They sometimes even initiated efforts, displaying an early version of environmental justice activism. At the same time, other cross-class ethnics at least partly blamed individual or ethnic communities’ habits and failures, mirroring to a degree the condescension visible among many Anglo reformers and professionals.

Guns in their Golf Bags

This chapter discusses golf and black militant movements in the late 1960s and 1970s, exploring how American black nationalist leaders and anticolonial movements in the Caribbean and Africa appropriated the symbolism of black golfers. Popular magazines like Jet and Ebony celebrated black players, organizations sponsored black golf tours throughout the African Diaspora, and a new generation of professionals—led by Lee Elder—more directly confronted racism in the PGA and sought access to its most exclusive enclaves. Meanwhile, the ongoing internationalization of the civil rights movement placed golf squarely within global debates over race and racial discrimination. The game’s popularity in South Africa and Rhodesia made it a target of the antiapartheid movement, especially as more African-born white professionals—like star Gary Player—traveled to play in PGA events. While fans have long been interested in Muhammad Ali’s popularity in Africa or the black protests surrounding the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, they have overlooked golf as a cite of militancy. Coinciding with Ali’s famous 1974 trip to Zaire, Elder’s trips to Africa—including his confrontations with apartheid at South African golf tournaments—and his integration of the Masters Golf Tournament in 1975 are just two examples.

Puerto Rican Social Workers and Racism

White professionals have not utilized a cultural perspective that would enhance practice and capitalize on the uniqueness of an indigenous professional