Jennifer Lee

Picture of Jennifer Lee
Chancellor's Fellow and Professor, Sociology
School of Social Sciences
ON LEAVE OF ABSENCE
PH.D., Columbia University
University of California, Irvine
3253 Social Sciences Plaza B
Mail Code: 5100
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
Immigration, Race/Ethnicity, Social Inequality, Culture, Education, Asian American Studies
Academic Distinctions
Pierre Bourdieu Book Award from the Sociology of Education Section of the American Sociological Association for The Asian American Achievement Paradox. New York: Russell Sage Foundation (2016).

Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association The Asian American Achievement Paradox. New York: Russell Sage Foundation (2016).

Best Book on Asian American from the Asia and Asian American Section of the American Sociological Association The Asian American Achievement Paradox. New York: Russell Sage Foundation (2016).

Chancellor's Fellow, University of California, Irvine (2016).

Elected Member, Sociological Research Association (2015).

Fellow, Center for Social Cohesion (2011-Present).

Visiting Scholar, Russell Sage Foundation (2011-12).

Otis Dudley Duncan Award (2011) from the Population Section of the American Sociological Association for The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in 21st Century America (with Frank D. Bean).

J. William Fulbright Scholar to Japan (2008).

Distinguished Lecturer, Nagoya American Studies Summer Seminar, Nagoya, Japan (2008).

Fellow, Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, University of Chicago (2006-2007).

Outstanding Book Award (2006) from the Asia and Asian America Section of the American Sociological Association for Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity. (with Min Zhou).

Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA (2002-2003).

Jane Addams Award from the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association for "From Civil Relations to Racial Conflict: Merchant-Customer Interactions in Urban America." American Sociological Review 67 (1): 77-98 (2003).

Honorable Mention for the Thomas and Znaniecki Distinguished Book Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association for Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America (2003)

University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow (1998-2000).

President’s Fellow, Columbia University (1996-1998).

Fellow, Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, Columbia University (1997).

Andrew W. Mellon Scholar (1993-1995).

University Professors’ Fellow, Columbia University (1993-1995).
Research Abstract
Jennifer Lee is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, who has published award-winning books and articles about immigration, the new second generation, education, and race relations.

Her most recent book (with Min Zhou), The Asian American Achievement Paradox, received a trifecta of ASA Book Awards: The Pierre Bourdieu Book Award; The Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award; and the Best Book Award on Asian America. She is also author of Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America for which Lee received Honorable Mention for the Thomas and Znaniecki Distinguished Book Award, and co-author of The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in 21st Century (with Frank D. Bean), which earned the 2011 Otis Dudley Duncan Award from the ASA. She is also co-editor of Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity, which was named the 2006 Outstanding Book Award from the Asia and Asian America Section of the ASA. In addition to her books, Lee has also published dozens of articles about race/ethnicity, immigration, and the second generation.

Lee has received numerous prestigious grants, fellowships, and awards for her research. She was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and a Fulbright Scholar to Japan. In 2015, she became one of 12 new members elected to the Sociological Research Association—an honor society recognizing the most successful researchers in the field since its founding in 1936—and this year, she is Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on International Migration.

Lee established her career with Civility in the City, published by Harvard University Press. In Civility in the City, she sheds new light on the topics of immigrant entrepreneurship and interethnic relations. By going beyond the single group study implemented by prior scholars, and instead comparing Koreans with Jewish and African American merchants, and also contrasting two different urban environments (New York and Philadelphia), Lee shows just how ethnicity and nativity matter, demonstrating also the ways in which the environment generates conflicts, but also how those conflicts are managed and negotiated to produce civility in everyday life. Her findings dispel the popular myth of the ubiquity of interethnic conflict, and show that social order, routine, and civility are alive and well in America's inner-cities.

In The Diversity Paradox, Jennifer Lee and Frank D. Bean take two poles of American collective identity -- the legacy of slavery and immigration -- and address the question of whether today’s immigrants are destined to become racialized minorities akin to African Americans or whether their incorporation into U.S. society will more closely resemble that of their European predecessors. They also tackle the vexing question of whether America’s new racial/ethnic diversity is helping to erode the tenacious Black/White color line. For the first time in 2000, the U.S. Census enabled multiracial Americans to identify themselves as belonging to more than one race, and eight years later, African American Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. For many, these events give credibility to the claim that America is now a "post-racial" society.

In this major contribution, Lee and Bean recast our understanding of race, and in particular Blackness, by doing something that previous generations of scholars had mostly avoided: studying Blacks in relation to Latinos, Asians, and Whites. By doing so, they provide insight into the unique plight of Black Americans. Asians and Latinos are much more likely to intermarry with Whites, and their unions are understood by each partner and other observers as intercultural unions rather than interracial ones. Differences between Asians and Latinos on the one hand, and Blacks on the other are framed through an immigrant narrative -- a considerably smoother and easier path of understanding, and one that is less fraught with the tension and potential for conflict than the slavery narrative that characterizes differences between Blacks and Whites. Moreover, through captivating in-depth interviews, they deftly show how multiracial Asians and Latinos are little constrained by racialization processes that force Blacks into discrete racial categories through the legacy of the "one-drop rule. Boundary crossing at the individual level does not lead to the shifting of racial/ethnic boundaries at the group level for Blacks.

Consequently, we appear to be entering a new phase in the U.S. system of racial/ethnic relations, in which the boundaries of the dominant group appear to be expanding to encompass populations historically excluded from the ranks of the accepted, all the while maintaining the boundary that has kept Blacks as perpetual outsiders. These rich findings say much about racial inequality in the United States and the existence of a racial hierarchy, in which Blacks are far more likely to find themselves in positions of exclusion than Asians and Latinos -- pointing to a persistent pattern of "black exceptionalism."

Jennifer Lee's most recent book, Asian American Achievement Paradox, was published in July 2015. In the book, she and Min Zhou tackle the vexing question: Why do second-generation Asians exhibit exceptional academic outcomes, even when controlling for socioeconomic factors like parental education, occupation, income, and residential segregation? They bring culture back into the debate about second-generation outcomes and address the "Tiger Mother" controversy head on by bridging research in immigration, race/ethnicity, and social psychology in a novel way.

Building on the cultural concept of frames, they explain how Chinese and Vietnamese immigrant parents and their children frame success, how "success frames" differ by ethnicity, and how frames are supported by institutional and ethnic resources. Greater access to resources help second-generation Chinese and Vietnamese from disadvantaged class backgrounds override their low parental human capital. Moreover, Asian American students benefit from a "stereotype promise" -- the promise of being viewed through the lens of a positive stereotype that leads one to perform in such a way that confirms the positive stereotype, thereby boosting performance. As a result, Asian American students gain an advantage over their non-Asian peers in the context of U.S. schools. No other scholar has been as vocal nor as effective as Jennifer Lee in refuting the cultural fallacy that Asian American achievement can be reduced to essential traits and values of Asian culture.

Strongly committed to public engagement, Jennifer Lee has written opinion pieces for The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, CNN, The Guardian, TIME, Los Angeles Magazine, The Conversation, and Zocalo Public Square, and has done interviews for NPR, CBS2 News, Fusion TV, and Tavis Smiley. In addition, her research has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Economist, Slate, Buzzfeed, and a number of other national and international media outlets.
Publications
2015. The Asian American Achievement Paradox. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. (with Min Zhou).

* Winner: Pierre Bourdieu Book Award; Thomas and Znaniecki Distinguished Book Award; Best Book on Asian America
2014. Guest Co-Editor of 50th Anniversary Issue of International Migration Review 48 (S1): Fall 2014 (with Jørgen Carling and Pia Orrenius).
2014. "From Unassimilable to Exceptional: The Rise of Asian Americans and ‘Stereotype Promise’." New Diversities 16 (1): 7-22 (with Min Zhou).
2014. "Assessing what is cultural about Asian Americans' Academic Advantage." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111 (23): 8321–8322 (with Min Zhou).
2014. "The Success Frame and Achievement Paradox: The Costs and Consequences for Asian Americans." Race and Social Problems 6 (1): 38-55 (with Min Zhou).
2014. "The International Migration Review at 50: Reflecting on Half a Century of International Migration Research and Looking Ahead." International Migration Review 48 (S1): 3-36 (with Jørgen Carling and Pia Orrenius).
2012. "A Postracial Society or a Diversity Paradox? Race, Immigration, and Multiraciality in the Twenty-first Century." Du Bois Review 9 (2): 419-437 (with Frank D. Bean).
2010. The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in 21st Century America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press (with Frank D. Bean).

* Winner: Otis Dudley Duncan Award
2009. "The New U.S. Immigrants: How Do They Affect Our Understanding of the African-American Experience?" Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621: 202-220 (with Frank D. Bean, Cynthia Feliciano, and Jennifer Van Hook).
2009. "Plus ça change...? Multiraciality and the Dynamics of Race Relations in the United States." Journal of Social Issues 65 (1): 205-219 (with Frank D. Bean).
2009. "Brown Picket Fences: The Immigrant Narrative and ‘Giving Back’ among the Mexican Middle-Class." Ethnicities 9 (1): 5-31 (with Jody Agius Vallejo).
2008. "Success Attained, Deterred, and Denied: Divergent Pathways to Social Mobility in Los Angeles’ New Second Generation." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 620: 37-61 (with Min Zhou, Jody Agius Vallejo, Rosaura Tafoya-Estrada, and Yang Sao Xiong).
2007 "Reinventing the Color Line: Immigration and America's New Racial/Ethnic Divide." Social Forces 86 (2): 561-586 (with Frank D. Bean).
2007 "Becoming Ethnic or Becoming American? Reflecting on the Divergent Pathways to Social Mobility and Assimilation among the New Second Generation." Du Bois Review 4 (1): 189-205 (with Min Zhou).
2007 "Redrawing the Color Line?" City & Community 6 (1): 49-62 (with Frank D. Bean).
2006 "Constructing Race and Civility in Urban America." Urban Studies 43 (5-6): 903-917, Review Issue on (In)Civility and the City.
2006 "Cultural Assets or Structural Advantages in Numbers Gambling: Comment to Darrell Steffensmeier and Jeffery T. Ulmer – ‘Black and White Control of Numbers Gambling: A Cultural Assets—Social Capital View.’ " American Sociological Review 71 (1): 157-161.
2005 "Who We Are: America Becoming and Becoming American." Du Bois Review 2 (2): 287-302.
2005 "Immigration and Racial/Ethnic Relations in the United States." People and Place 13 (1): 1-13 (with Frank D. Bean and Susan K. Brown).
2004 "America's Changing Color Lines: Race/Ethnicity, Immigration, and Multiracial Identification." Annual Review of Sociology 30: 221-242 (with Frank D. Bean).
2004 "Immigration and Fading Color Lines in America." Census Bulletin (with Frank D. Bean).
2004 "Immigration and the Black-White Color Line in the United States." Review of Black Political Economy, Special Issue on "The Impact of Immigration on African Americans" (with Frank D. Bean).
2004 Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity (Edited Volume with Min Zhou, New York: Routledge).

*Winner: Best Book in Asian America
2002. Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

*Honorable Mention: Thomas and Znaniecki Distinguished Book Award
2002 "From Civil Relations to Racial Conflict: Merchant-Customer Interactions in Urban America." American Sociological Review 67 (1): 77-98.
2001 "The Racial and Ethnic Meaning behind Black: Retailers’ Hiring Practices in Inner-City Neighborhoods," in Color Lines: Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America, edited by John D. Skrentny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
2000 "Immigrant and African American Competition: Jewish, Korean, and African American Entrepreneurs," in Immigration Research for a New Century, edited by Nancy Foner, Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Steve J. Gold (New York: Russell Sage Foundation).
2000 "The Salience of Race in Everyday Life: Black Customers’ Shopping Experiences in Black and White Neighborhoods." Work and Occupations 27 (3): 353-376.
1999 "Segmented Assimilation and Minority Cultures of Mobility." Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (6): 945-965 (with Kathryn Neckerman and Prudence Carter).
1999 "Retail Niche Domination among African American, Jewish, and Korean Entrepreneurs: Competition, Coethnic Advantage, and Disadvantage." American Behavioral Scientist 42 (9): 1398-1416.
1998 "Cultural Brokers: Race-Based Hiring in Inner-City Neighborhoods." American Behavioral Scientist 41 (7): 927-937.
Grants
"Immigration, Racial/Ethnic Diversity, and Multiracial Identification." Frank D. Bean and Jennifer Lee, Principal Investigators. Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, $265,000.
"Immigrant and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles." Ruben Rumbaut, Frank D. Bean, Leo Chavez, Min Zhou, Jennifer Lee, Susan Brown, and Louis DeSipio, Principal Investigators. Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, $1.7 million.
"Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles." Ruben Rumbaut, Frank D. Bean, Leo Chavez, Min Zhou, Jennifer Lee, and Susan Brown, Principal Investigators. Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, $136,000.
"Immigration and Race/Ethnicity: America's Changing Color Lines." Frank D. Bean and Jennifer Lee, Principal Investigators. Funded by the Population Reference Bureau and the Russell Sage Foundation, $15,000.
"The Mexican Minority Culture of Mobility: Coethnic Ties among Mexican Middle-Class Immigrants in Suburban Los Angeles." Jennifer Lee, Principal Investigator, University of California, Irvine, Single Investigator Innovative Grant, $3,200.
"Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles: A Qualitative Study." Jennifer Lee, Leo Chavez, and Min Zhou, Principal Investigators. Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, $30,000.
"Becoming 'Ethnic,' Becoming 'Angeleno,' and/or Becoming 'American': The Multifaceted Experiences of Immigrant Children and the Children of Immigrants in Los Angeles." Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, Principal Investigators. Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, $210,000.
"Los Angeles' New Second Generation: Mobility, Identity, and the Making of a New American Metropolis." Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, Principal Investigators. Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, $108,088.
"Meritocracy, Racial Divisions, and the Politics of SCA 5." Jennifer Lee, Principal Investigator. Funded by the Center for the Study of Democracy, $2,500.
“2016 National Asian American Survey.” Funded by the National Science Foundation. Karthick Ramakrishnan, Jennifer Lee, Taeku Lee, Janelle Wong, Principal Investigators. $507,132. Award No: 1558986
“Asian Americans: Affirmative Action, Intergroup Attitudes and Racial Group Formation.” Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. Jennifer Lee, Janelle Wong, Taeku Lee, Karthick Ramarkrishnan, Principal Investigators. $114,535. Award No: 93-17-07.
Professional Societies
American Sociological Association. Section Memberships: Asia and Asian America; Community and Urban Sociology; Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility; International Migration; Population.
Research Centers
Faculty Affiliate, Center for Research on Immigration, Population, and Public Policy; Demographic and Social Analysis Program; Asian American Studies
Last updated
08/03/2017