Begun in 2019, the DLP connects Fordham students and New York City high school students with professors from around the country who have written academic articles about the politics of language and how it can be used to exclude or empower. Working in teams, the students and professors created new versions accessible to readers at the high school level.

“We’re becoming a multilingual, multicultural society as we speak, and we think that students have a right to have access to academic tools that help them think critically about the ways they’re taught language,” said Ayala Fader, Ph.D., professor of anthropology and founding director of the DLP and Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology, at the website launch.

Held at the Lincoln Center campus, it brought together the Fordham students and high schoolers with the DLP’s leadership for the debut of the website where their work will be housed. Also present were DLP co-organizers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and other universities, as well as a UMass student participant.

Changing Ideas About Language

Grants from the Spencer Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation funded the project, enabling collaborations like a three-day workshop last summer.

The teams produced 12 plain-language versions of the professors’ articles. One of them has been uploaded to the site. Titled “Speech or Silence?,” it’s an adaptation of academic writing by Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Ph.D., a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and DLP participant, about language used by children who are undocumented immigrants. 

The other 11 adapted articles produced by the teams will be uploaded this summer. Over the next few years, the center will hold workshops for New York City high school students and teachers to help them put the articles to use in their classrooms and in their lives, as well as workshops to help other academic authors adapt their articles for high schoolers, said the DLP’s co-director, Johanna Quinn, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology.

Nicolle Jimenez, soon to graduate from Harvest Collegiate High School in Manhattan, enjoyed working with the academic authors and looking at language in new ways. “You don’t really think about these things” on your own, she said, referring to how language “plays a part in your life and how you can help change these ideas of language and create something new out of it.”

Unlocking Doors with the Liberal Arts

Her teammate Ashira Fischer, FCLC ’24, who studied anthropology and acting at Fordham, said the program is “unlocking a whole lot of doors for everybody.”

“The scholars get to re-understand their article in a new way, and make sure it hits a wider audience,” and the high school students get exposure to college-level work, she said.

DLP co-director Britta Ingebretson, Ph.D., an assistant professor in Fordham’s languages and cultures department, said it was “immensely rewarding” to take part in the project and “to be cognizant of how much work and effort goes into making writing simple.”

He was buried alongside his wife Susan Rogler, who died in 2011, and his mother, Carmen Canino, at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, New York.

Rogler, a native of Puerto Rico who moved to the United States when he was 11, joined the Fordham sociology department in 1974. He had just moved to the Bronx from Cleveland, where he was a professor at Case Western University. In 1977, he founded the Hispanic Research Center, which he directed until 1990.

Rogler’s area of expertise was in qualitative research on the social and mental health of families in Puerto Rico, the United States, and several Latin American countries.

He published extensively on the topic, from Migrant in the City: The Life of a Puerto Rican Action Group (Basic Books, 1972) to Barrio Professors: Tales of Naturalistic Research (Left Coast Press, 2008), which was his first work of fiction.

He was adept at securing grants for funding, such as “Help Patterns in Intergenerational Puerto Rican Families,” a three-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in 1976. He was sought after for his perspective; in 1985, for instance, he was appointed by New York City Mayor Ed Koch to the Mayor’s Commission on Hispanic Concerns.

Mary Powers, Ph.D., a professor emerita of sociology who was chair of the department when Rogler joined the faculty, said that Rogler was key to the department’s securing of the Schweitzer Chair, which was created in 1964 by the New York State Legislature to entice scholars to universities in the state.

“We were becoming a slightly more national university at the time, and he came as part of our interest in collaborating with Fordham and the University of Puerto Rico,” she said.

“He was delighted to come, and he worked hard at keeping the relationship between the two universities open.”

James R. Kelly, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of sociology who started two years before Rogler, fondly remembers playing squash with Rogler every week and beating him every time.

“Lloyd would always say, ‘Alright, Jim, you got me this time, but I’ll get you next time.’ He would never quit, and he just loved playing, and he never gave up on himself,” he said.

Kelly said that Rogler was a pioneer when it came to combining his own experience as an immigrant with his research.

Rogler’s son, Lloyd Rogler, said his father was driven in part by the fact that his grandfather was also a sociology professor. He was focused on the toll that immigration took on people’s psyches.

“He used to give grand rounds to psychiatrists about culturally sensitive therapy. For example, we might say, ‘Oh, I feel blue.’ But in Spanish, you don’t say, ‘Me siento azul.’ You have to have someone familiar with the culture of the person they are helping,” he said.

“My father was a scholar, an athlete, and intellectually curious about many things. I miss him every day.”

Rogler is survived by his daughter, Lynn Rogler Simonson; his son, Lloyd; stepsons Daniel Kim-Shapiro and David Shapiro-Ilan; grandsons Soleil, Mica, and Shai Kim-Shapiro, Teva Shapiro, and Amitai Ilan; great-granddaughter Chaya Mushka Shapiro; and his beloved caregiver Carmen Pilar Sierra.

On Nov. 28, Silvano Maria Tomasi, C.S., and 12 others will join the College of Cardinals, a group of principal assistants and advisers to the pope. Pope Francis recently gave the archbishop another role as well: On Nov. 1, he named Tomasi his special delegate to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a lay religious order doing service work in 120 countries.

Archbishop Tomasi, 80, and three other cardinals-elect are above the cutoff age for taking part in the conclave that selects the next pope, the Vatican noted in its Oct. 25 announcement. Only cardinals younger than 80 can participate.

The archbishop is a “missionary scholar true to his order’s charism to work with immigrants,” said Gerald Cattaro, Ed.D., executive director of Fordham’s Center for Catholic School Leadership, who most recently saw Tomasi in Rome in December 2019 at a meeting of NGOs associated with the Holy See.

Archbishop Tomasi belongs to the Scalabrinian order, devoted to serving migrants and refugees. A naturalized American citizen, he earned his doctorate in sociology from Fordham in 1972, and is a co-founder of the Center for Migration Studies of New York, which has collaborated with Fordham on migration studies in the past.

He originally came from Italy to the U.S. to work among Italian immigrants, “and never forgot his call to work with those on the periphery,” Cattaro said. “His life’s work has been on behalf of the marginalized, in particular immigrants and refugees. That is, perhaps, why I believe [Pope Francis] chose to honor him with the ‘red hat,’” Cattaro said, referring to a cardinal’s traditional headpiece.

In the 1980s, Tomasi served as the first director of the Office for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He has held high-level Vatican posts including secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples.

From 2003 to 2016, he served as permanent observer of the Holy See to the U.N. in Geneva. He has worked on human rights issues and also led the Vatican’s efforts toward nuclear arms control in recent years.

A Friend to Fordham

Archbishop Tomasi has helped Fordham build closer ties with the Mission of the Holy See to the U.N. and create opportunities for students in the International Political Economy and Development (IPED) program, such as serving the mission as diplomatic fellows at the U.N. in New York, said the program’s director, Henry Schwalbenberg, Ph.D.

Also, interest in Tomasi’s work at the U.N. contributed to IPED founding its annual Pope Francis Global Poverty Index in response to the pope’s call for a broad but simple measure of global poverty and well-being, Schwalbenberg said.

He said he thinks Tomasi’s appointment reflects the pope’s concern with the suffering of migrants. In public statements, Francis has sounded the alarm about the urgent needs of people being displaced around the world.

“Situations of conflict and humanitarian emergencies, aggravated by climate change, are  increasing the numbers of displaced persons and affecting people already living in a state of dire poverty,” he said in a January address to members of the diplomatic corps accredited by the Holy See. “Many of the countries experiencing these situations lack adequate structures for meeting the needs of the displaced.”

In his message for the 106th World Day of Migrants and Refugees in September, he noted the new troubles brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The precariousness that we have come to experience as a result of this pandemic is a constant in the lives of displaced people,” he said.

Cooney, a beloved professor, chair, and associate dean, who dedicated more than 40 years of her life to Fordham, passed away at the age of 73 on Feb. 22 at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx.

“First of all, we were all stunned,” Doyle McCarthy, professor of sociology and American studies, said about her friend and former colleague. “Very strong personality, a tough person, and a heart of gold. She was an extraordinary mentor and teacher. She was the most prepared member in the room at a faculty meeting. She was a very thorough and detail-focused person.”

Cooney started her career at Fordham as an assistant professor of sociology in 1974. She moved up the ranks, becoming a full-time professor who received tenure in 1980, before becoming the associate chair for undergraduate studies, the associate chair for graduate studies and then, the department chair. She was appointed as the associate dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2000 until she retired in 2016.

“I know the Fordham family joins me in mourning Dr. Cooney’s death,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of the University. “During her long tenure here she championed the values and actions that set Jesuit institutions apart from their peers. Rosemary elevated us, instructed us, and loved us. For those qualities and many more, we will miss her deeply.”

Jeffrey von Arx, S.J., who worked with Cooney for the last four years of his tenure as the dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, said that she was a “wonderful person.”

“She did such an incredible job, because she is so efficient and so on top of the numbers,” he said. “She was a wonderful person to have in the office. She was always upbeat. All of the assistant deans really loved Rosemary.”

Cooney earned her bachelor’s degree from Florida State University in 1969. She earned both her master’s in 1971 and her Ph.D. in 1973 in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin.

In 1977, she was recognized in Outstanding Young Women of America and in 1980, she was included in the International Who’s Who in Education.

She published numerous scholarly articles, focusing mainly on labor, family life, immigration, and civil rights in China, Puerto Rico, and the United States. She co-authored many of these articles with her students.

Orlando Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology, said Cooney did a lot of work at Fordham’s Hispanic Research Center, which operated from the late-1970s until the mid-1990s and focused on issues related to the Hispanic population.

“We did one publication … called ‘New York’s Newest Hispanic Populations,’” he said. “She did all the very fine census analysis. That was in 1985 and that was a time when Ecuadorians, Dominicans, Peruvians, Mexicans—groups that were not part of the Hispanic population back then—popped up in the census. She was able to show that the Hispanic profile of New York City had changed quite a bit, so that was a major contribution.”

McCarthy said that she really saw Cooney shine when she worked with graduate students.

“I think she felt most at home as a mentor of graduate students, supervising research projects—that’s where I think she was strongest and best and outstanding, in fact,” she said.

One of those students was Jiali Li, GSAS ’92, who became one of Cooney’s best friends. Li said Cooney was having health issues and trouble speaking Friday night and was taken to the hospital; she died Saturday morning.

“In the classroom, she was the best teacher,” said Li, for whom Cooney served as a Ph.D. mentor. “She was the best professor I had at Fordham. She was very easy to understand and very fun. [In] every one of [her classes]she was very lively and gave great examples; her class was never boring.”

Li said Cooney helped diversify the sociology program’s offerings, adding classes such as those on demography, that gave students like Li an opportunity to learn skills that could be useful in their careers.

The two co-published articles together that include “Son Preference and the One Child Policy in China: 1979-1988,” featured in Population Research and Policy Review in 1993, and “Household Registration Type and Compliance with the One Child Policy in China, 1979-1988,” published in Demography in 1994.

Right after she graduated, Li said that she remembered Cooney saying to her, “you’re just going to call me Rosemary … no more Dr. Cooney.”

From then on, Li said they became best friends, and Cooney was someone she could always depend on.

“She’s a caregiver to everybody, even to me,” she said. “So many people are like, ‘oh I can help you,’ and end up not showing up. She would go out of her way to make sure she did everything she promised.”

She was also known for going above and beyond to help her students, Rodriguez said, particularly those who were the first in their families to pursue an advanced degree.

“She was very interested in mentoring people whose parents were not [academic]professionals, who were new to graduate work, and that required quite a bit of work and she was very good at it,” he said.

Cooney was also supportive of faculty, particularly when they were looking to advance in their careers, McCarthy said.

“If we were going up for promotion or tenure, she would be encouraging to us—those are very difficult things for faculty members who are young,” she said. “If you don’t have a chair that does that, it can be demoralizing for faculty. She was just the opposite, she always encouraged us.”

Cooney’s work was recognized by many at Fordham. The University’s Graduate Student Association named her the “Teacher of the Year” in 1987 and she received both the 20-year and 40-year Bene Merenti Medals in 1994 and 2014, respectively.

After she retired from the University in 2016, Cooney and her husband, Patrick, established a scholarship fund. Named the Santana Cooney Endowed Scholarship Fund, the gift will provide financial aid and foster diversity of the student body by supporting minority students.

“I was always aware that I was different—an outsider—because I tend to be dark, like my father. And I always worked extra hard because I figured as a woman and a minority, you had to work extra hard … I know, sympathetically, how hard these kids who try to make the transition are having to work. And I wanted to make sure that some of them were getting some help,” Cooney said about the scholarship in fall 2019.

Rosemary and Patrick Cooney met in high school and were married during their junior year of college. Patrick, who earned an M.B.A. from Fordham in 1979, collaborated with his wife on Discovering the Mid-Atlantic: Historical Tours, a guide book for amateur historians and parents looking to spark their children’s interest in historical places. Rosemary, who loved to take photos, contributed all of the photographs for the book.

Li said that her friend loved life and loved traveling, particularly to Arizona and Utah, and was looking forward to continuing to grow her other passions.

“She wanted to enrich her life,” Li said. “She was learning piano, she was really into photography—she took tons of pictures.”

Cooney leaves behind her husband and their son, Carl.

Mark C. Smith’s job advising pro athletes, entertainers, and others as a VP of wealth management at UBS Financial Services keeps him plenty busy. Yet somehow, the 2004 graduate of Fordham College at Rose Hill finds time to be a true renaissance man.

Among his pursuits outside of his day job, Smith serves on the board of Safe Horizon, an organization that provides social services for victims of abuse and violent crimes; owns a Harlem tour group company that leads jazz club crawls; acts in the occasional community theater production in his hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut; and, when he has a moment, keeps up practice on the trombone.

“I’m all over the place,” jokes Smith, who says that his varied interests lead a diverse group of Fordham students and recent graduates to seek out his advice, which he shares with them regularly as a member of the Fordham President’s Council. “Politics, Wall Street, entrepreneurship—I get questions from everyone,” he says, referring to the council’s fall leadership series gathering in November.

Smith’s ability to serve as an informed mentor to a wide swath of graduating students and young alumni has its roots in his studies as a history and sociology double major at Rose Hill, along with the University’s core curriculum, he says. When entering Fordham as a first-year student, Smith had every intention of studying political science, but he became enthralled with the new information about familiar topics he got out of history and sociology classes.

After graduating, Smith worked as a campaign coordinator for Charlie King, then a candidate for New York attorney general. When he spoke to his friend Michael Biondo, FCRH ’04, who was working on Wall Street, though, he realized his history studies prepared him well for a job in the financial sector.

“You just needed to be able to explain complex things to people in a simple way,” Smith says. “And that’s one of the things you learn being a history major—how you boil things down into succinct thoughts.”

It’s clear that Smith has found success doing just that, as he was recently named by Forbes as a “2018 Top Next-Gen Wealth Advisor,” an accomplishment that speaks to his dedication within his profession.

“The great thing about working in wealth management is you are your own boss and you kind of determine how you want to run your own business,” he says of why his job has kept him engaged since he started at UBS in 2006. “I’m able to actually add value for folks in a real way that’ll help their family for years to come.”

That desire to help others carries over to his role on the President’s Council, but Smith also appreciates that the council allows him gain valuable insights about the economy from the perspective of job seekers.

“It’s a great way to get a litmus test of what’s going on in the real world,” Smith says. “You get a lot out of it also because the kids are super grateful and you feel like you’re making an impact.”

While not every graduate will be able to find time for as many passion projects as Smith, and while even fewer will wind up in professional circles that allow them to join a group vacation with Oprah Winfrey, as Smith has, he feels confident that Fordham is the best place not only for launching students on their career paths but for developing their overall growth as individuals.

“Being at Fordham, I think you definitely are educated on the whole person—not just your intellectual side, but your spiritual side and your moral side,” Smith says of his alma mater. “Fordham has so much to offer its students in growing who they are in a deeper way, and I think that’s something that sticks with you.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
Right now, I’m most passionate about giving back through Safe Horizon, where I’m on the board. They’re the largest service provider for victims of violence in the country. We serve over 250,000 people, women and children primarily, per year in the five boroughs of New York, and we provide comprehensive health, helping them deal with everything from leaving a violent situation and finding immediate housing to providing them with a lawyer, counseling, job advice, and anything to get them from crisis to confidence.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
That there are 24 hours in a day. What does that mean? In my first job, I was complaining about, “Oh, I don’t get to do this, I don’t get to do that,” and my boss told me, “Mark, there are 24 hours in a day. You can work here, then you go home, do your passion, then give back, then have a girlfriend. You have all this time in the day. Use every single hour, every minute of your day to accomplish what you want to do.”

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
My favorite place in New York City is Harlem. I feel like I’m at home because of the cultural significance it has played in American history, with its renaissance in the 1920s, and it has a very robust political community that is unrivaled around the country. They have great food and great jazz, amazing parks, and beautiful town homes. And it feels like a community.

My favorite place in the world—I’ve traveled to over 30 countries—would have to be Italy. I love the food, the culture, the wine. It’s a really, really cool place to hang out. I fell in love with just being on the Amalfi Coast and looking at the ocean from cliffs, and then going to Florence, and hanging out in one of the coolest cities in the world with the best food, and then being a 20-minute drive from Tuscany with the best wine in the world. So yeah, Italy has a special place in my heart.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. My whole life, I had learned about American history through the lens of public school education and learning the history the school system wanted us to be taught. And Zinn basically slammed the door on all of those thoughts that you had and gave you the raw deal of what happens in this country, unencumbered by people thinking, “Oh, we can’t talk about that.” It really just made you question everything and then question the validity of everything you hear. It really taught me to not just take someone else’s word for things, but to find out for myself. It was just like, “Holy mackerel. Everything I knew to this date was wrong.” This book had a serious impact on me coming out of high school.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
I’m gonna go with Dr. Mark Naison. He really did have a great influence on my Fordham career. I remember being excited to go to his class From Rock and Roll to Hip-Hop because you never knew what kind of food was gonna be laying around that he just ordered for the students to eat and enjoy. You’re listening to old-school hip-hop and discussing what was happening at that point in history with the black experience over Chinese food or ribs from Johnson’s BBQ. He was a great professor to have. And then he also took students to experience life outside the campus walls. So we’d go play golf in Crotona Park, or he took us around on hip-hop tours around the Bronx. He really did make the Bronx a larger campus for us.

For her research, Rodriguez conducted two studies. One study focused on 71 immigrant adults over 18 who had watched American TV in their home country and had lived in the United States for six years or less. The second sampling was an electronic survey of 171 American-born undergraduates from the United States’ Northeast region.

For the foreign nationals living on American soil, the America they recalled seeing on TV in their home countries differed greatly from the one they encountered on arrival, said Rodríguez. For example, the nation proved more racially and economically diverse than the mostly white, middle class depictions of American life that they had seen back home on TV.

However, for the home-grown audience things were different. “American millennials had a fairly high degree of awareness that [their]TV doesn’t reflect the diversity of the country,” she said. “After all, they had lived their whole lives in the United States and could see the difference between what was portrayed on TV and what they experienced in real life.”

In addition, the two groups differed in how American TV influenced their views in other areas. For example, anti-smoking ads on U.S. TV seemed to have influenced the U.S. millennials to see smoking more negatively.

TV: As Influential as Ever

Rodríguez said that despite young people’s growing preference for viewing TV shows on computers and mobile devices, content produced by the major TV networks is still being consumed by young people both in the U.S. and around the world; it is just accessed differently.  Also, studies continue to show that, with regard to race, class, and gender patterns, the content in both traditional TV and newer mediums, such as Netflix, has not changed significantly.

She added that the two studies gave a “great deal of insight into how U.S. television content exerts a strong influence”–even though many believe that no one watches TV any more. “Television still garners the greatest number of eyeballs, even though the average show’s viewership is down from 20 million to about to 11 million viewers,” she said. Even though the average is down, however, certain events continue to draw a great many viewers. “The last 60 Minutes show featuring Stormy Daniels netted 22 million viewers,” said Rodriguez.

Rodríguez said the first sample provided fascinating insights into what people take away from watching American TV in their home countries, particularly as it relates to social norms.  One subtle example deals with open-concept kitchens and the islands around which men and women eat, cook dinner, and discuss the day’s events. We take the design and practice for granted today, while, in other countries, seeing both men and women in the same cooking/preparation space would have been eye-opening and a violation of traditional gender and class norms.

Ripped from the Headlines

“In another example, a foreign-born respondent said ‘I remember when I saw the first gay character; it really made me think differently about gay people,’” Rodríguez recalled. “Research show[s]that television has had a great influence on how viewers perceive the roles of women and men.”

In addition, she noted that “ripped from the headlines” TV, a genre begun with shows like Law and Order, continues to exert influence on contemporary events in a subtle manner. She cited recent episodes of Madame Secretary and Designated Survivor as shows that are delivering news analysis–albeit with creative license–though entertainment.

“These stories are being told within an entertainment paradigm, and since people’s defenses are relaxed, just watching the show in that manner will have an impact,” she said. “Sure, it’s just TV, but the way some of these stories are being told may make you think about an issue in a different light.”

Despite the tendency of many to dismiss the medium of TV today, it continues to have an impact on not just Americans, but viewers all over the globe, said Rodriguez.

“Do you think that Donald Trump would have been elected if he hadn’t had his earlier television career, or that we’d be considering Oprah for president?”

The documentary, entitled In Our Son’s Name, follows the journey of Orlando Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology, and his wife, Phyllis, to reconcile the death of their son. Gregory Rodriguez died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The documentary tells the story of a friendship that formed following the tragedy between Gregory’s bereaved parents and the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the 9/11 conspirators.

In Our Son’s Name premiered at Fordham in the spring of 2015. Since then it has been shown at numerous film festivals, academic institutions, churches, and mosques. It was one of the selections shown in the Global Peace, Peace on Earth, and Atlanta Film Festivals, and has been called: “a compelling message that further violence does not ease the pain of victims’ family members…” complete list of air times can be found at www.inoursonsname.com/tv.php

Locally, the documentary will air on New York stations WLIW21 and on  WLIW21.3 – see air times below.

WLIW21 – September 8 at  2 pm
September 15 at 2 am

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Professor Finds Restorative Justice and Reconciliation After 9/11

In recent decades, religious organizations have increasingly been entering into partnerships with governments to oversee a vast array of social programs. These new connections are leading Evelyn Bush, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology, to ask questions about power and individual rights.

“I’m interested in the shifting boundary between religion and state, and the historical circumstances that allow for religion to exert more influence in politics,” she said. “What leads religions to have more or less power? What are the consequences in people’s day-to-day lives?”

To understand this, Bush, who is also associate chair for graduate studies, focuses on religious engagement with large institutions. Recently, she trained her sights on the U.S. State Department, where instances of religious persecution have been documented since Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998. Although the social movement leading up to the bill’s passage focused heavily on protections for Christian missionaries, the State Department’s documentation covers a far greater diversity of religious groups around the world.

“Human rights reports cover every kind of human rights infraction you can think of—torture, political and civil rights, labor issues, religious freedom issues, anti-Semitism, women’s rights, children’s rights and the rules of war,” she said. “But issues of religious freedom have their own office within the human rights bureau. I think it’s worth asking why.”

Bush noticed that, in reports on religion-based violence, a pattern emerges. Abuses of individuals are classified as violations of “religious freedom” if they are committed by governments or by external religious groups. When they are committed by individuals within a religious community, however, they are still classified as violations of human rights, but they are more often covered in the “secular” human rights reports, and referred to more in terms of “culture” rather than “religion.”

This is consistent with a more general pattern that Bush sees in our social discourses. “If you bring up a practice that—by western standards—is considered a violation of human rights, people are quick to say, “Oh, but that’s not due to religion, that’s their culture.” she said. “Why are people so quick to protect the religion from taking responsibility for whatever this practice might be, when we all know that religion and culture are pretty closely intertwined? What exactly is at stake when we make these distinctions?”

One thing to remember about the “it’s their culture” argument, she said, is that there’s an underlying assumption—sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit—that people who are participating in their cultures are doing so consensually. “But it’s difficult to talk about consent and choice for women if they are born into religious environments where, through generations, religious beliefs and practices have been predominantly interpreted by men,” she said. “Assumptions about choice become especially problematic in religious cultures where women are denied scriptural authority at the same time that they are not free to simply change their religions.”

People need not look outside of the United States to find religious groups attempting to exercise authority over others, including working to influence government policy, she said. Same-sex marriage, for instance, is a topic on which domestic religious groups have focused a great deal of attention. In these cases, “Religious organizations involved in politics are not aiming to convince people to adhere to their religion through persuasion, speech or soft power tactics. They’re trying to get people to conform to their principles by harnessing the power of the state,” Bush said.

“I’m opening up a broader question about what the full implications are of this movement,” she said. “The relationship between religion and government has always been there, but these increased efforts to move into the public sphere raise questions about who has power in political processes.”

One way to look at the behavior of religious movements, she noted, is through a framework known as the religious economies model, which starts with economic assumptions about human behavior, including religious behavior.

“This is not to say that I think religions are intrinsically similar to material goods. Rather, I like the market model because it helps us to think about religions as not only having a spiritual component, but also being competitive and having an interest in expanding,” she said.

The aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, which has caused tension between various charitable groups that traveled to Haiti to help, provides a good example of what sometimes happens when a “market” becomes open to new competitors.

As Bush noted in another forthcoming paper, “U.S. Foreign Policy and Religious INGO Participation in Human Rights,” classic missionary organizations are no longer as prevalent as they once were, because now they take the form of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

“They’re neither just missionaries nor just relief workers,” she said. “They’re this hybrid form of organization,” and they vary widely in their approaches to evangelizing.

Bush notes that, to understand competition, it is still important to consider the state, and the kind of “religious freedom” that states encourage. U.S. policy encourages competition in a free market ofideas.

“If we take the individualist model of religious freedom, in which everyone opens their religious markets to allow free conversion and evangelism, that leads to an interesting economic question: What type of religion is the most likely to succeed in that kind of setting or market?” she said.

“An institutional economic sociologist would say that the groups with the greatest resources would prevail. In many countries, Christians benefit from open religious economies, because they’ve got media, schools, churches and other institutions through which they disseminate their norms. So they have an advantage in countries that are opening their religious markets.”

In all those novels and movies, the immigrant experience in America is the stuff of dreams. Whether you come to America on a plane, a boat, or slip under a fence, the pattern of assimilation remains the same as it was in the 19th century and early 20th—you and your U.S.-born children’s lives improve over generations.

Unless, according to Emily Rosenbaum, Ph.D., professor of sociology and anthropology, you are black.

Rosenbaum’s book, The Housing Divide: How Generations of Immigrants Fare in New York’s Housing Markets (New York University Press, 2006), analyzes data on upward mobility as it relates to housing of different racial and ethnic groups across three generations in New York City. What she and her co-author, Samantha Friedman, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at Northeastern University, found was that for white, Latino and Asian immigrants, housing improves or remains the same over generations. For black immigrants, however, it declines.

“When you walk down the street in New York, you see people from everywhere, and of every different look and skin color,” Rosenbaum said. “But in terms of the neighborhoods where we live, New York City is incredibly segregated. It is one of the few metropolitan areas that has maintained an extremely high level of segregation since the 1970s, where, nationally, segregation has moderately declined.”

In fact, Rosenbaum’s research puts the city’s “index of dissimilarity” at .84 compared to a national average of about .60. More than 8 out of 10 blacks or whites would have to move out of their segregated neighborhoods in order to achieve integration between the two groups. While the segregation of foreign-born blacks from whites is nearly as high, curiously foreign- and native-born blacks tend not to share the same neighborhoods.

What this pattern of housing means is that, on average, the black immigrants will experience the best housing, she said, with a worsening in conditions in future generations.

“If you have, say, an African or Caribbean accent, or some other way of demonstrating to the outside world that you are not native born, you get treated better—better job promotions, better housing,” Rosenbaum said. “You are more acceptable. You are considered to be a hard worker, and of higher social status than native-born blacks. However, once the rising first generation loses that marker of ethnicity such as an accent, and it just blends in, it’s rather grim.

“They become African-Americans, and African-Americans remain relegated to the lower rung of society.”

Surprisingly, the highest incidences of housing segregation exist primarily in the Rust Belt—those hubs of manufacturing that experienced deep shifts in demographics as African-Americans migrated from the South during the 1940s and 1950s for better opportunities.

Once a neighborhood reaches a 5 percent black population, Rosenbaum said, it begins to experience white flight. The levels of white flight are lower in Western cities because the black population is less than 5 percent in many urban areas. In the South, Rosenbaum said that old patterns of employment still affect neighborhoods, which are more integrated than in the North.

“In terms of residence,” she said, “slaves would live close by to the whites they worked for, so they were actually sharing neighborhoods, if not lives,” she said.

And the suburbs don’t integrate much better than urban areas. As blacks move into inner-ring suburbs, white flight pushes other populations further out, she said.

“Housing really is a key indicator of socioeconomic status,” she said. “The consequences of homeownership are serious because home equity makes a major contribution to any given household’s wealth portfolio. It can be leveraged to provide things that contribute to your future generations, such as a college education.”

Rosenbaum’s research also shows that, among Latino immigrants, non-black Hispanics fare better than black Latinos. “This is the legacy of racial discrimination and stratification,” Rosenbaum said.

Earlier this year, Rosenbaum and co-author Friedman were guests on a radio talk show in which people called in to comment on their research findings. During the show, Rosenbaum spoke with a black man of Caribbean descent who had a white girlfriend. When looking for housing on his own, he told Rosenbaum and Friedman, he was steered to poorer neighborhoods; when his girlfriend joined him, however, they were steered to more affluent areas.

Such racial steering, Rosenbaum said, is illegal but infrequently prosecuted because the onus is on the victim to prove discrimination, and that can be a long, drawn out process.

“Segregation starts on a very personal level,” she said. “If fair housing legislation was more easily navigated, enforced or strengthened—so that real estate agents didn’t know they could get away with it—then it wouldn’t happen as much.”

In the meantime, Rosenbaum said that America’s racial segregation is liable to be made worse in the coming decades if demographictrends continue.

“Without changes,” she said, “the future of racial inequality will increasingly isolate blacks from all other groups.”

– Janet Sassi