Login
Elite cultural fields often lack diversity, and the fine dining field is no exception. Though we know that marginalized producers of cultural goods, such as artists and chefs, are often excluded from positions of prestige, much less is known about how racial inequality specifically affects how critics, and even the public, evaluate their products. In Social Problems, Gillian Gualtieri reports on her interviews with 120 critically recognized chefs in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area and her analysis of 1,380 Michelin restaurant reviews.
In “Discriminating Palates: Evaluation and Ethnoracial Inequality in American Fine Dining,” Gualtieri compares what she terms Ethnic restaurants and Classic and Flexible restaurants; the culinary products of the former are associated with non-Whiteness, while those of the latter are associated with Whiteness. Ethnic restaurants, she explains, are systematically devalued by the criteria of authenticity, which relies on subjective interpretation more than standardized measures. Classic and Flexible restaurants, on the other hand, are assessed in relation to standardized institutions of American fine dining. In interviews, Classic and Flexible chefs describe occupying a position of knowledgeable authority over their craft and valuing the opinion of formal institutions like Michelin. By contrast, for their restaurants to survive, chefs at Ethnic restaurants consistently discuss catering to diners’ “inconsistent, and often uninformed,” expectations based on previous experiences outside of the context of fine dining.
The findings reveal how inequality is reproduced through an assumption that White restaurants are the standard against which all U.S. restaurants should be evaluated. The ambiguous criteria of authenticity ensures that Ethnic restaurants are uniquely constrained by the inconsistent expectations of diners and critics. As a result, they tend to earn fewer stars and charge lower prices. Inequitable evaluation processes produce a system of value based on racial hierarchy, inflecting the ways chefs and critics understand and engage with their critical and creative work.
Sociology tends more toward documenting social problems than human joy. But despite the many negative experiences of marginalized groups, like transgender people (who, we know, disproportionately suffer discrimination, violence, and social exclusion), every life has its beautiful moments. In Social Problems, sociologists stef m. shuster and Laurel Westbrook write of their discipline’s “joy deficit” and highlight it by focusing on the accounts of 40 trans people asked what they found joyful about being trans. It turns out, marginalization and joy really aren’t mutually exclusive!
The trans joy comments the authors study elicited themes like authenticity, pride, mental health benefits, and community. Interviewees, they write, “easily answered the question about joy.” After transitioning, for instance, 80% of shuster and Westbrook’s respondents reported enjoying the feeling of not needing “to pretend anymore.” Many also expressed immense pride in belonging to a minority group and considered their trans identity a “gift.” Embracing their identity, respondents said, enhanced their self-confidence, encouraged body positivity, and cultivated a sense of calm—all of which improved the quality of their lives. And where a majority of trans people shared that their journey began with feelings of isolation, they also shared that the process had compelled them to build meaningful, joyful relationships across their marginalized-and-vibrant communities.
By even asking about trans joy—itself a first-time question for many trans people in the study—shuster and Westbrook help undercut the dominant narrative that being transgender is always painful and negative. Addressing the joy deficit in all areas of sociological inquiry, it appears, will help scholars better capture the breadth of contemporary social life.
Well-worn explanations of international migration flows focus on factors such as poverty and political instability. New evidence, however, shows migration is increasingly associated with climate change and food insecurity (or FI)—defined by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization as the “situation when people lack secure access to sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development and an active and healthy life.”
In their recent International Migration Review article, economists Michael D. Smith and Dennis Wesselbaum first establish that significant link, then examine how the distribution of FI impacts regular, permanent international migration flows. They find that the origin country’s FI has a stronger impact on out-migration than does national income or changes in temperature—a fact that’s true on two levels. First, the more severe the FI, the larger the association with migration flows out of a country. Second, individuals suffering more severe FI have a stronger incentive to migrate, leading to uneven migration patterns within the origin country.
Documenting the impact of FI on migration suggests that policies directed at one phenomenon will likely affect the other. Food assistance interventions may influence migration behavior, and migration policies may help alleviate FI. Moreover, reducing inequality by targeting the population below the mean prevalence of FI would have strong impacts on migration flows. To achieve interlinked global targets, such as those set out in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, coordinating approaches to issues like migration and food security strategy may increase policy impacts.
Amid rising scrutiny of police violence, many U.S. departments have implemented “neighborhood policing” strategies meant to facilitate non-enforcement contact between police and the community. For example, in the mid-2010s, the New York Police Department (NYPD) began to hold police-community meetings, inviting residents to informally express concerns with the officers assigned to their neighborhoods. Drawing on ethnographic data, Tony Cheng’s new American Journal of Sociology article reveals that, despite transparency talk, police frequently filter community complaints such that they appear to be endorsements instead.
More pointedly, Cheng finds that police actively curate public complaints in order to justify more policing rather than policing reform. A “selective decision-making” process results in police’s “cumulative discretion” and unfolds in a few key ways. First, departments choose where community meetings are held and who to invite. Second, they decide which complaints should be officially submitted into the organizational record. By Cheng’s reckoning, a full 88% of complaints seeking “police reform” to address “over- and unequal policing” practices are never properly documented. Third, police control reporting from community meetings online and work to publicly present only complaints that demand or are “construed to demand” increases in police services.
Because police actively work to control public perception of their practices, this study suggests scholars must carefully scrutinize administrative data provided by police departments. More broadly, the author demonstrates that when the police control their own complaint processes, public accountability is elusive if not impossible.
FreshRSS