We know the myths: The recent waves of immigrants, particularly those from Mexico, don’t want to assimilate into American culture. They won’t learn English. They don’t pay taxes. They merely add to a perpetual and ever-burgeoning underclass of the barely educated who exist on the fringes of society.

But that's far from the truth, according to researchers  Michael J. White and Jennifer E. Glick, who examined the issue in a new study, “Achieving Anew: How New Immigrants Do in American School, Jobs, and Neighborhoods.”

I talked to White about the study, which was sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation and looks at immigrants from around the country and the assimilation process.

“We would say on balance that immigrants are assimilating and are doing reasonably well,” he said.

Think of it in terms of how people climb the ladder of success. Just as native-born Americans start out on different rungs, that is true also for immigrants.

“On average, immigrants start out behind,” he said. “But we find that immigrants make good progress. In the study, we talk about how the trajectory of people in the United States is not determined by whether they are born inside the country or outside. That doesn’t’ really affect the story.”

What matters more are factors such as a person’s socioeconomic background and whether he or she comes from an intact family. But those are factors that matter regardless of where a person was born.  White said that an immigrant’s skin color also may be an obstacle in that a person coming from sub-Saharan Africa or a Latin background may face a degree of prejudice.

“And yet, for immigrants who excel in school and have the opportunity to complete their primary and secondary education and beyond, they will do quite well,” said White. “If immigrants have the opportunities, they will do well and they weave themselves into the fabric of the country. 

“We see evidence that people are trying to make their way in American society and achieve economic success. We see this in people’s residential patterns. What we find is that over time all the groups become less segregated or more intermingled.” 

That doesn’t necessary mean that immigrants see the need to give up specific things that make their culture unique, White said. “If you turn the clock back 100 years, you can look at immigrants back then who have integrated themselves into American society and many of them still celebrate their heritage,” he said. “Food carries over; holidays are recognized.”

He said that the long-term story that we have about immigration in the United States is that newcomers find their way and become a part of the American mosaic. That story is still very much alive in this more recent wave of immigration.  Click here to see the study. 

The Michael Jackson my 14-year-old daughter knew was this tabloidy, iconic figure created from a combination of things: In news stories (which were too often lurid) she saw Jackson as this pale and pinched, odd-looking character whose shoulders were slightly slumped and whose demeanor was slightly off-kilter. On YouTube, however, she watched a cute little brown boy perform with a sure-footedness that would have been remarkable for any kid---but was especially so for a black boy from Gary, Ind., coming of age under the black mantra, “Black is Beautiful.”  My daughter felt sad and conflicted upon hearing about Jackson’s death today; I felt conflicted and nostalgic.

    In October 1984, Michael Jackson and his brothers –aka The Jackson Five---came to Chicago’s South Side as part of their national “Victory Tour.” They performed at what was then Comiskey Park, the 35th Street home of the Chicago White Sox. The ballpark was about nine blocks from my high-rise apartment building. I didn’t go to the concert but I could see the fireworks and laser show from my 11th floor bedroom window.  I could hear the singing and the screams of a crowd of about 40,000, which for several hours was on the edge of an apoplectic fit. 
    Back then, Jackson’s hair was slightly straightened and his features, though changing, hadn’t gotten to the point of unforgivable.  In the beginning, it was easy to overlook his eccentricities (before the taint of pedophilia ) because he was so gifted  and gifted people sometimes lean toward the kooky.  
    In recent years, I always was amazed when some girls and younger women swooned over his new look.  My daughter was not one of them. She kept asking me why he changed himself. The most obvious reason was that his definition of beauty stemmed from more of a white standard. And, he could more than afford to remake himself---even to the point of making a mess of things. 
    What I remember is the Jackson with the full cottony Afro, the broad nose, the coffee-colored skin. Watching Michael Jackson and his brothers gave a lot of people of my generation permission, maybe the freedom, to redefine beauty. 
    The confidence he displayed during his performances in the 1970s suggested that he was so secure in himself and his look. But over the years, we knew that wasn’t the case.

Rinku Sen is the executive director of the Applied Research Center and the author of “The Accidental American.” 

Over the past two weeks, Americans struggled to make sense of tragic shootings that seemed disconnected at first glance. Anti-Semite James Von Brunn killed Stephen T. Johns, a black security guard at the Holocaust Museum. George Tiller’s murder a few days earlier seemed to be about abortion, yet his shooter, Scott Roeder, also had roots in the racial purity movement.  This week,  it was reported that the murders of Raul Flores and his daughter in Arizona were charged to three people with white supremacist ambitions.

There’s been lots of discussion about why hate crimes are rising and how to prevent future tragedies, yet we’ve largely missed the relationship between extremist racism and the less obvious version that plays out in our political debates. These shooters all felt that people of color (along with women and Jews) have stolen the birthright of white men.  In his book “Kill the Best Gentiles,” Von Brunn rails against  “the calculated destruction of the White Race.” Roeder was a member of the Montana Freemen; commenters on white supremacist websites praised him for ensuring that Tiller would never “kill another White baby.”  Flores’ alleged murderers appear to have been preparing for a white uprising.

Our discussion of these events has boiled down to the idea that racism is an intentional, violent act of a lone crazy white man. Underlying this idea, however, is the unspoken assumption that since we criminalized such hatred through civil rights laws, there’s nothing else we can do as a country. Collectively, we bemoan the backwardness of “some” people before we move on, thinking of racism as isolated extremism.

But social psychologists who developed the Implicit Associations Test at Harvard and the Universities of Virginia and Washington in 1998 tell us that notions of the innate goodness of white people and the equally innate badness of people of color are so deeply imbedded in our minds that we’re totally unaware of making such judgments. Even I, a woman of color and racial justice activist for 25 years, have taken their online test with dismaying results. White supremacists speak their beliefs aloud, but we all have similar ideas and act on them in tiny ways that add up.

The notion that people of color get more than our share plays out again and again in our institutions and policies, expanding the racial divide. If we think that Black people manufactured the foreclosure crisis in order to get a handout, the law limits their ability to get relief. If we think that undocumented immigrants are leeching off the U.S., we will not pass an immigration reform that changes their status. If we think that children of color can’t learn, we don’t do what’s needed to improve public schools.

As a nation, we are about to make critical decisions about all our systems. Unconscious biases already permeate these debates every time we ask who deserves how much of health care, education, jobs. Our discourse is heavily coded. There’s no need to say that “illegal” equals Mexican, or that the “irresponsible” homeowner is black, or that “unqualified” means woman of color. Even if we don’t rhetorically attach these ideas to particular groups of people, our brains have been conditioned to make the connections anyway.

There’s particular danger in characterizing racism as isolated madness during the greatest recession in 60 years. We now have to rebuild our economy – will we continue with a model that includes stark inequality? That seems likely if we can’t grapple honestly with the racial gap, since structural inequality will always make our economy more vulnerable to a crash. That inequality is also what keeps us apart, in separate neighborhoods, schools and workplaces.  That distance makes it much easier for violent extremists to recruit struggling white people into their ranks.

As white communities, particularly men, face conditions that have been chronic in communities of color, their vulnerability to racist ideas could disrupt the possibility of working together for real solutions. The unemployment of white men has more than doubled over the past year, from 4.2 to 8.5 percent. They are shocked, angry, and ready to direct all that heat somewhere. The most productive place for that energy is in alliance with communities of color, so that together, we can focus on changing the policies that allowed elites to run off with all our assets.

It is possible to craft truly universal social and economic policy that can both generate racial equity and improve life for everyone, including unemployed white men. There were racially-fueled murders before last week, and there’s every reason to think there will be more. As we grieve, the Obama Administration and Congress continue the immense task of rebuilding the economy and reforming immigration and healthcare. Something positive can emerge from these tragic events if our efforts to understand them led to policies that actually brought us together – in our lives, as well as in our minds.

Rinku Sen’s essay first appeared on the Huffington Post site.

A new study in an upcoming Academy of Management Journal takes on why white men continue to earn 25 percent more than equally well performing women and minorities.  Managers and business owners must pay a premium for white men employees because customers prefer them, says David Hekman, assistant professor in the Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and one of the study's researchers. “Customers, from students buying textbooks to patients in an examining room, are consistently biased in favor of white men,” says Hekman. “Because customer satisfaction is critical for organizational survival, business owners and managers will hire white men when possible and will pay lower salaries to the women and minorities they do hire.”

Persistent workplace wage inequality is rampant according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2007, women made 77 cents to a man's dollar. Black women made 68 cents to the dollar and Hispanic women made 59 cents to the dollar. The earnings gap exists between men and women across a variety of professions. For women physicians (one sample studied in the research article) the wage gap is 61% of a man's dollar, and 63% in sales related occupations. And in some areas, women and minorities are even losing ground. (Click here to a see a story in the Washington Post. )

Hekman says this happens because customer satisfaction is critical for organizational survival, and customers irrationally prefer white men. For the average Fortune 500 company, a 1 percent increase in customer satisfaction leads to an increase in $275 million in firm value, a $55 million gain or loss in cash flow in the next year, and a 5.03% change in Return on Investment. For this reason, among 681 senior executives surveyed by The Economist Intelligence Unit during October–December 2002, 65% reported customers as their main focus over the next three years compared to only 18% who reported shareholders as their main focus. Mercer Consulting Group reports that in 2006 customer satisfaction surveys were of primary importance for strategic decision making and over two-thirds of organizations used such surveys to determine some aspect of employee compensation.

It’s true that not everybody has a job that relies so heavily on customer service. But keep in mind that the service industry comprises 82 percent of the economy.

This quote, which some have called racist, is from a speech titled,“A Latino Judge’s Voice,” that Judge Sonia Sotomayor gave in October, 2001, in Berkeley, California. She was the keynote speaker at a ceremony commemorating the 40th anniversary of the first judicial appointment of a Latino to a federal court. The Berkeley La Raza Law Journal sponsored the ceremony.
Here is the quote in a larger context:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases…I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor [Martha] Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life. (Bold, mine)…

Sotomayor is saying that we fundamentally are shaped by our experiences and although a judge’s decisions should be rooted in the letter of the law and the facts of a case, a person’s decision-making process is neither antiseptic nor devoid of his or her experiences. One’s history should not overwhelm that process but it also can’t completely be disentangled from it.

Will Sotomayor’s personal views weigh too heavily on her jurisprudence? We can only look at her past decisions to try to glean what may happen if she’s confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice.

Rush Limbaugh used Sotomayor’s above statement to brand her as a “reverse racist.”  That’s too simplistic a brand.

I do think she’s guilty of using a kind of shorthand that assumes everybody understands that her comments focus on a specific type of Latina and a specific type of white male. Sotomayor is referring narrowly to the woman of color who has come up from humble beginnings and the white male who has not. She’s saying that when the two sit on their respective benches in their respective courtrooms---with the fate of a minority defendant  in their hands—the person who has a more intimate experience with poverty and struggle and being a minority may be able to render a fairer judgment.

In the speech, Sotomayor goes on to say that women and people of color are not monolithic in their ideas or ideals. And a person’s background is not at all a perfect predictor of how he or she will act in the future.  Sotomayor also realizes that her statement falls apart if the Latina judge comes from a place of privilege; or if the white male judge grew up in poverty; or if the defendant is not a minority; or if the defendant is a minority but is from an elite background. 

She also acknowledges that no one person or group has a corner on any one particular experience and that empathy doesn’t have to derive from experience. Indeed, it was overwhelmingly white and male Supreme Courts that delivered historic rulings in race and sex discrimination cases. (Were some merely moved by the law, or some measure of empathy?)

Sotomayor’s speech also included:

For all of us, how do change the facts that in every task force study of gender and race bias in the courts, women and people of color, lawyers and judges alike, report in significantly higher percentages than white men that their gender and race has shaped their careers, from hiring, retention to promotion and that a statistically significant number of women and minority lawyers and judges, both alike, have experienced bias in the courtroom?

Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

What do you think?

On Tuesday he said his criteria for a nominee was as follows: "First and foremost is a rigorous intellect, a mastery of the law, an ability to hone in on key issues... Second is a recognition of the limits of the judicial role... that a judge's job is to interpret, not make law. Yet these qualities alone are insufficient. We need something more.''

The president said that extra something was a type of "experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion, an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.''

But we all know that our pasts don’t always inform us in neat ways.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the high court’s only black justice, also grew up on the rough side and has benefitted from affirmative action policies. And yet he has supported decisions that scaled back affirmative action and limited the creation of election districts intended to elevate minorities. (If you recall, Chief Justice John Roberts spent a summer working in a steel mill; Justice Samuel Alito often was described as the son of working-class immigrants.)

Sotomayor has ruled in a discrimination case that is now before the Supreme Court. As an appellate judge, she sided with the city of New Haven, Conn., in a case brought by white firefighters after the city threw out results of a promotion exam because too few minorities scored high enough. The case is likely to be overturned.

What role does empathy, or a person’s backstory, play in his or her ability to carry out the law?  Let me know what you think…

Photo: US President Barack Obama stands alongside his nominee for Supreme Court Justice, Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, May 26, 2009. Sotomayor is to serve as the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court.  AFP PHOTO / Saul LOEB

Who were predatory lenders targeting most in the subprime mortgage debacle? A new report by the Applied Research Center (ARC), a racial justice think-tank, suggests that policies and institutional practices that create racial inequity are among the root causes of the subprime mortgage crisis and economic downturn. 

"Racial disparities in income leave communities of color making about 60 cents for every dollar earned by whites,” said Seth Wessler, the report's author and lead investigator. “This huge difference is a direct result of institutional policies and practices that collectively block people of color from opportunity." Here’s a piece Wessler wrote for The Huffington Post: