Race/Ethnic Differences in Social Resources as Cognitive Risk and Protective Factors

Overall social network size, often the sum of common lifetime relationships, including children, family, and friends, has been linked to cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease. However, little research has examined the association between network size composition and cognitive function in middle-aged and older adults in the context of race/ethnicity. We investigated the associations between the number of close children, family, and friends independently with executive function (EF) and memory across a subsample of non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White participants who completed the Health and Retirement Study Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (N = 2,395). We found that network size composition was more closely linked to EF than memory and that these associations varied by race/ethnicity. Specifically, the strongest associations existed between EF and quadratic estimates of the number of close children of non-Hispanic Black participants, and number of close family members for Hispanic participants. Among Black participants, a curvilinear relationship indicated that two close children were associated with greater EF, while a smaller or larger number of close children were associated with lower EF. On the other hand, among Hispanic participants, higher EF was associated with fewer (0–1) and greater (4-5+) numbers of family member contacts. Overall, these results indicate that examining children, family, and friends independently may be more useful than the common practice of aggregation of overall network size, especially in the context of race/ethnicity.     

On the Origin of Concept of “Intersectionality” in Criminology: The Civil Rights Movement and the Rise of “Scholarship of Confrontation”

ABSTRACT

“Intersectionality” has been a key theory in feminist criminology. However, its origin remains disputed. Some have argued it was produced by black feminists in the 1980s. Others have said it was produced by black women in nineteenth-century. The argument of this paper is that it emerged in the 1960s and became popular in the 1970s. It will demonstrate that the key causes of its emergence were the increasing popular concern with the socioeconomic plight of blacks in those decades, and blacks’ discontent with the American academia and their rejection of mainstream theories that were used to explain their socioeconomic plight     

Explanations of Blacks’ Criminality in America: 1630s-1950s

ABSTRACT

Criminological research about blacks’ criminality proliferated during the 1960s. Since then, a great body of knowledge about them has been produced that has attributed their criminality to various causes. However, prior to that date, such knowledge was scarce. What were the explanations of blacks’ criminality before that (roughly between 1630s-1950s)? I argue that during this period five successive explanations of their criminality emerged: popular, religious, speculative, pseudoscientific, and scientific. This mainly had to do with the gradual transformation of America from an agricultural-rural-communal-religious society to an industrial-urban-individualistic-scientific one.