Jennifer Hochschild is the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Professor of Public Policy. A former Chair of the Department of Government, she also holds a lectureship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Jennifer studies and teaches about the intersection of American politics and political philosophy – particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and immigration – as well as educational and social welfare policies. She also studies the politics of genomic science, and reasons for rejecting supposed scientific consensus.
Her most recent book Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat was published on January 25th, and is her twelfth solely- or jointly-authored or co-edited book. The book examines significant policies in four major American cities to determine when race and class shape city politics, when they do not, and what additional forces have the power to shape urban policy choices.
We sat down with Jennifer to discuss her latest publication.
Why did you choose to write this particular book?
I’ve been teaching and writing about the intersection of race and class for approximately 30 years – I actually looked up the first article of mine with ‘race and class’ in the title and it was in the mid-1990s. So it’s a longstanding point of interest for me.
The book idea sparked into existence in 2014 when my former student, colleague, and friend Vesla Weaver, who’s now at Johns Hopkins University, said to me, “you know, everybody talks about race but we don’t really have a detailed, on-the-ground understanding of what the intersection of race and class look like.” With that idea in mind, we applied to the Russell Sage Foundation and received funding for a big national survey of the 12 largest U.S. metropolitan areas – and as a sideline, we also planned to investigate case studies in four cities with four different policies.
We ran the survey and spent the next couple of summers traveling to different cities and conducting interviews. Somewhere along the way Vesla went off in a different direction with her own research so I took on sole responsibility for the project. However, the survey turned out to just not be very interesting and we couldn’t find anything systematic or intellectually productive. But – the case studies turned out to be really interesting and so the book largely revolves around them with the survey data used where relevant.
How and why did you select the four cities and their respective challenges to explore?
We wanted to examine big metropolitan areas with demographic variation. However, we wanted the demographic data to be broader than just race, instead considering historical, contextual, cultural, and social demographics as well. So the cities were pretty obvious in the end, with New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles all fitting the bill.
Urban politics has a lot of different facets, and race and class matter in all of them because race and class always matter in American politics, especially American urban politics. We expected to find race/class patterns in essentially any policy arena, so we looked for an interesting issue in each city – asking what was going on. What was reported in the newspapers? What was the academic literature talking about? Did we know any of the politicians?
We therefore ended up with our final four policy arenas – the Stop-Question-Frisk policing policy in New York City, the development of Atlanta’s Beltline, charter schools in Los Angeles, and Chicago’s pension system.
Did anything in your findings particularly surprise or interest you?
We had clear race/class stories in New York and Atlanta – they differed theoretically, analytically, and empirically but these two examples were exactly what the project was about. This wasn’t the case in Los Angeles and Chicago.
The entire premise and theory that Vesla and I originally set out to prove – that race/class is the foundational framework for each of these cities and all of the policies – just wasn’t the case. I therefore spent several years, with support from research assistants, students, and colleagues, revisiting the data because I was so sure our original theory was correct.
Turns out there is a very strong pattern – just not the one we were initially looking for. In the two cases that are not primarily about race/class conflict (charter schools in Los Angeles, and pension payments in Chicago) I found a genuine threat of financial crisis severe enough to make people fear that each system would fall apart. This has job loss implications, political implications, and huge reputational implications. Race/class implications were present, but the participants didn’t pay attention to them because they had far bigger concerns.
In short, financial crisis trumps race/class dynamics – which is where the second half of the title comes into play. The book therefore balances these two ideas –race/class dynamics are always present, but in some arenas they recede into the background.
However, there is a sting in the scorpion’s tail, which brings race/class back to the forefront, especially in Chicago where cost-saving policies were implemented without considering or recognizing the demographics they will eventually impact. But I’ll let you read the book to find out more!
This is your twelfth book published – did you find this one hard to write?
There’s an old apocryphal quote, that probably was never said by anybody, but has been attributed to Joyce Carol Oates: “How can I know what I think until after I’ve written it down?”. This completely explains my writing style as I write many, many drafts, along with many, many words, paragraphs, and sometimes whole chapters that get taken out.
This one was less linear than others as I got halfway through and discovered what I thought the book was about wasn’t true. I don’t think I’ve ever had to make a flat-out U-turn before, but I really wanted to deliver a concrete and interesting finding rather than leaving an unanswered question – “where did race go?”
It was also a challenge to find the right structure for the book – I knew eventually what the answers were but it took me a while longer to formulate the questions precisely. So this book was probably even more convoluted in the writing process than earlier ones.
What is the one key point we should take away from the book?
Race and class don’t ever go away – the United States is fundamentally structured not only, but certainly, by the intersection of race and class – but there are arenas in urban politics and even national politics where they become sidelined in favor of more pressing issues. The effort to hold both of those views, without one contradicting the other, is what I think the book tackles.
Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat is available to order now via paperback or e-book on the Russell Sage Foundation website.