Public opinion polls frequently demonstrate that the American debate on reparations for slavery falls along racial lines. However, less attention has been paid to how social psychological factors such as views of deservingness mediate that relationship. This manuscript highlights how identity, deservingness, and views of justice affect attitudes about symbolic reparations—a step that many believe is necessary to achieve closure and pave a path for racial equality. Using survey data from an opt-in sample, we demonstrate how both in-group pride and myths of undeservingness of Black Americans function through racial identity to uniquely affect a respondent’s understanding of the lasting harms of slavery. Increases in pride result in opposition to symbolic reparations among white Americans, but they lead to support among Black Americans and Latinx Americans. Racial/ethnic pride has no impact on support for such reparations among Asian Americans. We find that agreement with myths of Black Americans’ undeservingness largely explains the effect of pride among white Americans but not among racialized minority groups, and we argue that this is largely due to the socio- historical context of their identities. We conclude by discussing the implications this has for reparations as a form of justice 155 years after formal slavery ended in the United States.

In August 2022, the Pearl River flooded portions of Jackson, Mississippi and temporarily closed the city’s water treatment plant, leaving most citizens without access to safe drinking and potable water for more than a month. This event punctuated an ongoing water crisis that had lingered for decades in this predominately African American city. We employ a social production of disaster approach to reveal aspects of slow violence perpetrated against disadvantaged peoples that increased their collective vulnerability to flood risks and limited their access to safe water. Using survey data collected one year after the flood, we examine event-related psychosocial stress as measured by the Impact of Event Scale and associated risk factors related to Conservation of Resources Theory. Multivariate analysis indicates that resource losses from the flood, health concerns about water quality, and trust in government were significantly related to elevated levels of psychosocial stress. Although the 2022 Pearl River flood can be treated as a discrete event, a social production of disaster perspective situates the flood in terms of its cascading effects and cumulative impacts on the city’s water infrastructure and citizens who depend on it.

Most research on combat exposure and mental health focuses on outcomes most soldiers do not experience, such as posttraumatic stress disorder and suicide. We focus instead on psychological distress using data from World War II. We find that more than 60 percent of Pacific Theater combat soldiers had very high psychological distress, which likely would have disqualified them for military service for psychiatric reasons in 1944. Their symptoms were normally distributed, like those of psychiatric patients. In our stress process model, structural location in military organizations led to psychological distress through exposure to combat and stressors linked to the combat mission. These stressors undermined some psychosocial resources and mobilized others. We conclude that psychological distress in wartime may be a primary cause of postwar problems in the lives of veterans. We recommend that research on soldiers’ mental health make psychological distress a sustained focus of inquiry.

This research uses longitudinal data from The Beginning Postsecondary Survey 2003-2009 to compare short-term job quality outcomes between for-profit college graduates with an associate’s degree and graduates with the same degree from a non-profit college. While previous research comparing for-profit college graduates with more traditional graduates examined mostly financial and income related outcomes (Lang and Weinstein 2012; Deming, Goldin, and Katz 2012), we include holistic measures of job quality including: job benefits, job satisfaction, and relevance of respondent’s degree to their job. Results showed that for-profit graduates were more likely to be offered health insurance from their employer, but the same graduates were also likely to be working at a job that was the same or like their job prior to graduation. For-profit graduates were also less likely to see their degree as helping their career.