Summary: “The military has historically been the single largest employer of young men and the largest vocational training institution in the nation.” So how are the benefits? Jay Teachman and Lucky Tedrow examine the long-term impact of military service on men’s income and find that military service gives young men from disadvantaged backgrounds an income boost while they’re active, but things tend to even out for enlistees once discharged. Furthermore, white veterans with at least a high school degree suffer an income deficit when compared to their civilian counterparts.

“Nearly two decades following discharge from the military (and net of many important controls, including several attempts to adjust for selectivity), better educated White veterans earn about 87% of the income enjoyed by their nonveteran counterparts. Thus, on the face of the matter, military service does not appear to be a wise economic choice for many men who could otherwise do better by remaining in the civilian labor market. They lose critical labor market experience and likely lose important information about job networks.”

The noteworthy exception to this trend is that Blacks with less than a high school education receive an income premium from their service. These results have important implications for military recruitment efforts.

Summary: In a recent study, Christina M. Gibson-Davis and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn weigh in on the growing debate over whether diverse family forms influence child well-being. Looking at data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey, the authors examine the links between relationship status, relationship quality, and race and ethnicity in breastfeeding initiation. In line with previous findings, the authors conclude that married women are more likely to breastfeed than mothers in other family forms. At the same time, however, the variability between cohabiting, non-cohabiting partners, and non-romantically involved parents should not be downplayed. Another noteworthy finding is that non-married mothers who received paternal financial support during pregnancy were half as likely to breastfeed. Among non-married African American mothers, paternal emotional support also decreased the likelihood of breastfeeding by 28%.

Summary: So does money whiten in Brazil? In a word, Schwartzman argues yes. This is for two reasons. First, more educated nonwhite parents are more likely to marry white and less likely to marry nonwhites. Second, more-educated interracial couples label their children white more often than do less-educated interracial couples.

The most interesting aspect of this article in my opinion is the structural buffer the upper-class, and especially the white upper-class, has erected. As the author notes, “By maintaining rigid class boundaries with poor nonwhites (by both marrying within their social class and imposing restraints on upward mobility of nonwhites…), the white elite isolates itself from nonwhites and imposes its standards (and incorporates into its families) the few nonwhites who share their elite status. For the same reason, nonwhites who move up are not able to break the system of racial hierarchy in the long run, because their children are often incorporated into the white group.” 958-9

***It is important to note that, in Brazil, educational attainment is a proxy for socio-economic status as we understand it in the U.S. Therefore, the dependent variable used by Schwartzman is parent education.

Summary: Eileen O’Brien and Kathleen Odell Korgen each had two separate projects: O’Brien studied a group of white antiracist activists and Korgen studied black-white friendship pairs. When they brought their data together, they found they made for an interesting comparison. Contrary to the expectations of contact theory, whites with close black friends did not have strong anti-racist views and those whites participating in antiracism activism did not necessarily have many close black friends. They attribute this finding to colorblind attitudes. “Colorblindness” encourages Americans to treat all people purely as individuals and not as members of racial or ethnic groups. As a result, their respondents didn’t re-evaluate their view of a racial group after positive individual contact: they simply exempted that individual from what they thought about the racial group.

UPDATE: This Discovery was published in our Winter 2008 issue.