Decades of racial progress have led some researchers and policymakers to doubt that discrimination remains an important cause of economic inequality. To study contemporary discrimination, we conducted a field experiment in the low-wage labor market of New York City, recruiting white, black, and Latino job applicants who were matched on demographic characteristics and interpersonal skills. These applicants were given equivalent résumés and sent to apply in tandem for hundreds of entry-level jobs. Our results show that black applicants were half as likely as equally qualified whites to receive a callback or job offer. In fact, black and Latino applicants with clean backgrounds fared no better than white applicants just released from prison. Additional qualitative evidence from our applicants' experiences further illustrates the multiple points at which employment trajectories can be deflected by various forms of racial bias. These results point to the subtle yet systematic forms of discrimination that continue to shape employment opportunities for low-wage workers.Despite legal bans on discrimination and the liberalization of racial attitudes since the 1960s, racial differences in employment remain among the most enduring forms of economic inequality. Even in the tight labor market of the late 1990s, unemployment rates for black men remained twice that for whites. Racial inequality in total joblessness-including those who exited the labor market-increased among young men during this period (Holzer and Offner 2001). Against this backdrop of persistent racial inequality, the question of employment discrimination has generated renewed interest. Although there is much research on racial disparities in employment, the contemporary relevance of discrimination remains widely contested.One line of research points to the persistence of prejudice and discrimination as a critical factor shaping contemporary racial disparities (Darity and Mason 1998;Roscigno et al. 2007). A series of studies relying on surveys and in-depth interviews finds that firms are reluctant to hire young minority men-especially blacks-because they are seen as unreliable, dishonest, or lacking in social or cognitive skills (Holzer 1996;Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991;Moss and Tilly 2001;Waldinger and Lichter 2003; Wilson 1996: chap. 5). The strong negative attitudes expressed by employers suggest that race remains highly salient in employers' evaluations of workers. At the same time, research relying on interviews with employers leaves uncertain the degree to which self-reported attitudes are influential in actual hiring decisions (Pager and Quillian 2005). Indeed, Moss and Tilly Direct all correspondence to Devah Pager, Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 pager@princeton.edu. Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptAm Sociol Rev. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 August 4. 2001:151) report the puzzling finding that "businesses where a plurality of managers ...

Despite the relevance of nationalism for politics and intergroup relations, sociologists have devoted surprisingly little attention to the phenomenon in the United States, and historians and political psychologists who do study the United States have limited their focus to specific forms of nationalist sentiment: ethnocultural or civic nationalism, patriotism, or national pride. This article innovates, first, by examining an unusually broad set of measures (from the 2004 GSS) tapping national identification, ethnocultural and civic criteria for national membership, domain-specific national pride, and invidious comparisons to other nations, thus providing a fuller depiction of Americans’ national self-understanding. Second, we use latent class analysis to explore heterogeneity, partitioning the sample into classes characterized by distinctive patterns of attitudes. Conventional distinctions between ethnocultural and civic nationalism describe just about half of the U.S. population and do not account for the unexpectedly low levels of national pride found among respondents who hold restrictive definitions of American nationhood. A subset of primarily younger and well-educated Americans lacks any strong form of patriotic sentiment; a larger class, primarily older and less well educated, embraces every form of nationalist sentiment. Controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and partisan identification, these classes vary significantly in attitudes toward ethnic minorities, immigration, and national sovereignty. Finally, using comparable data from 1996 and 2012, we find structural continuity and distributional change in national sentiments over a period marked by terrorist attacks, war, economic crisis, and political contention.

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Due to a preoccupation with periods of large-scale social change, nationalism research had long neglected everyday nationhood in contemporary democracies. This article proposes to shift the focus of this scholarly field toward the study of nationalism not only as a political project but also as a cognitive, affective, and discursive category deployed in daily practice. Integrating insights from work on banal and everyday nationalism, collective rituals, national identity, and commemorative struggles with survey-based findings from political psychology, I demonstrate that meanings attached to the nation vary within and across populations as well as over time, with important implications for microinteraction and for political beliefs and behavior, including support for exclusionary policies and authoritarian politics. I conclude by suggesting how new developments in methods of data collection and analysis can inform future research on this topic.