race

Photo by Philip Cohen, Flickr CC

Recent social movements in the United States, like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, have sought to challenge the status quo. While such movements often make the news, less attention is paid to how they achieve success. A recent article in the New York Times by sociologist Kenneth T. Andrews argues that social movements bring about change through exercising different types of power — cultural, disruptive, or organizational.

We are used to seeing cultural or disruptive power from movements in the media, but organizational power is also important. Organizational power is reflected in a movement’s ability to sustain its agenda through ties to other groups. Recent research suggests that after the Tea Party built upon disruptive power gained from initial protests, it established local organizations and supported political candidates that shared its ideas, ultimately transforming the Republican Party. However, as with each mechanism of power, organizational power also has constraints. Andrews explains,

“Staging the occasional protest and raising money are one thing; developing leaders and building constituencies are another. Despite substantial resources and hundreds of organizations, the environmental movement, for example, has not generated the sort of participation sufficient to meet the environmental challenges we face.”

In short, the pathways to power that different social movements utilize are very important to the movement’s success in encouraging change. A movement may have the most success when it combines all three types of power, which helped movements like the Civil Rights Movement. And even if a movement itself is short-lived, the cultural effects may remain long after a movement has fizzled out, and even small-scale changes can still have the cultural power to affect the status quo well into the future.

Over the past few years, Hollywood has come under fire for its continued exclusion of women and racial minorities, both in front of and behind the camera. With controversies surrounding the perpetual whiteness of Oscars nominees to disappointing statistics coming out of the annual Hollywood Diversity Report, there is a renewed conversation about the lack of diversity in the media we consume. However, a new report finds that television showrunners and writers are still mostly white, which has important consequences for the ways people of color are represented in the shows we watch.

The report finds that less than 10% of the 234 major series studied were led by minority showrunners, and only 14% of writers for these shows were members of a minority group. The Washington Post talked to Darnell Hunt, author of the report and co-author of the annual Hollywood Diversity Report, who explained that this lack of diversity in the writers’ room leads to unequal and inaccurate representations of racial minorities on the screen. Hunt said,

“White men dominate the major positions, and people of color and women have a long way to go to attain any type of equity … We need to change that because television is not just entertainment. Media images do matter, particularly for people who don’t have a lot of face-to-face encounters with people who are not like them. A lot of what they learn about people is what they see in these images.”

Hunt explains that shows led by black showrunners, like FX’s “Atlanta,” and shows with a diverse writing room are more likely to acknowledge racial inequality, whereas predominantly white writers’ rooms more often portray minority characters as one-dimensional “sidekicks.” An especially troubling example from the report concerns depictions of the criminal justice system. The article explains,

“None of the [crime-drama] episodes acknowledged the systemic racial profiling of black Americans, that black people are more likely to be pressured into plea bargaining for crimes they did not commit, or that they routinely face harsher penalties than whites for committing the same crimes … [These] depictions of policing and the court and prison systems, combined with viewers’ existing biases, undermine public support for policies that could help advance racial equity in American society.”

In short, when people of color are left out of the writers room, their stories are left out too.

U.S. Census, 2010. Photo by Joe Wolf, Flickr CC

Recent celebrations of National Hispanic Heritage Month call our attention to the growing importance of Hispanic culture, histories, and contributions in the United States. As the Hispanic population has grown, so too has the interest in defining what exactly it means to be “Hispanic.”  Research suggests that administrative agencies, particularly the U.S. Census Bureau, played a significant role in unifying different identities under this single pan-ethnic umbrella category. In a conversation with sociologist Cristina Mora, NPR’s Code Switch uncovers the complicated history behind the term “Hispanics.”

Prior to the 1960 census, Latin communities did not have an identifiable option or category matching their ethnic identity. Initial attempts in the 1960 and 1970 census resulted in a massive undercount. Following these largely unsuccessful efforts, Mexican and Puerto Rican communities mobilized to come up with a sufficient term for the 1980 census. Terms were heavily contested, agencies and experts debated various phrasings, and, with reservations, they eventually decided on Hispanic. And the importance of finding a proper category cannot be underestimated — having “Hispanics” as a category in the census enabled communities to address pressing political issues. Mora told NPR,

“Once the category was made, everything from political groups to civic organizations to every other media group that would emerge, would draw on census data. As soon as the census numbers came out, Latino lobby groups could then run the numbers and say, ‘Look, this is what Latino poverty looks like; this is what Latino educational attainment looks like.’ They could go up to the Department of Education, for example, and say, ‘Latinos are the second-largest minority group. And yet, our educational attainment pales to that of whites. Send money to our schools.’”

Despite its contested nature, the use of the ethnic category of Hispanic and its incorporation into administrative counts has proven to be an effective tool for mobilization of Latinx populations. Mora’s research indicates that defining ethnic categories in this way may create opportunities to increase political representation and power among minorities in the U.S.

Photo by Wonder woman0731, Flickr CC

The goal of increasing “diversity” has become a common focus in university admissions, meaning strengthening the presence of underrepresented minorities within the student body. This kind of rationale also appears in businesses and government, with rhetoric that emphasizes how diverse groups can be more productive and innovative. In essence, most see pursuing diversity as a good thing because of the benefits of diversity.

That said, researchers question whether “diversity” policies and programs really overcome existing racial inequalities, and some argue that organizations are more interested in boasting about their diversity than they are in actually increasing minority representation. Ellen Berrey has researched the meaning and use of the word “diversity” in a variety of sites. Her research, as described in The New Yorker, suggests that touting the benefits of diversity can have an unintended consequence: glossing over issues of inequality, exclusion, and discrimination. As an example, Berrey describes an investigation of diversity in a Fortune 500 company,

“The diversity-management program functioned mainly as a surreal exercise in internal branding, entirely separate from the legal department (which handled claims of discrimination). So-called diversity managers worked to foster an “inclusive” environment, but they seemed to spend much of their time “reiterating the good that would come from diversity,” as a way of justifying their own positions.”

The New Yorker article also discusses research by Natasha Warikoo, who examines the ways that white students at Ivy League colleges describe diversity on campus. Their accounts point to what Warikoo calls “the diversity bargain” — white students accept the existence of racialized admissions programs with the expectation that students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds will expose them to new ideas, cultures, and experiences. In general, these researchers find that “diversity” rhetoric often misses the bigger picture of continued racial inequality in the United States.

Photo by Tony Webster, Flickr CC

Over a year after 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first knelt during the national anthem in protest of police brutality, protests in the NFL spiked dramatically after President Trump attacked players who followed Kaepernick’s example. In recent weeks many more players knelt, locked arms, or stayed in the locker room during the anthem in response to Trump’s speech and series of tweets. During the flurry of media attention on the NFL, scholars Rashawn Ray and Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve wrote an Op-ed for NBC News about not losing sight of the original purpose of the protests.

Instead of focusing on the political implications of the president’s tweets or changes in protests over the past week (such as owners joining their players on the field), Ray and Van Cleve reiterate research on the violent repercussions of racial bias in policing. They emphasize that black athletes, even NFL stars, are subject to the same dangers of racial profiling as all other African Americans. In an MSNBC spot discussing the Op-ed, Ray told the panel,

“We really have to reorient the narrative. This isn’t about someone standing or sitting, this is about the fact that black lives matter. This is about the fact that football players, basketball players, baseball players, once they leave those stadiums they are black and brown men. And unfortunately in our society it doesn’t matter if you are affluent or less affluent, unfortunately you might be actually profiled by the police, and unfortunately that particular profiling can turn deadly.”

Photo by blogtrepreneur.com/tech, Flickr CC

Surveillance technology dominates policing in many major cities, and software companies continue to develop tools that allow law enforcement to collect and analyze data on traffic violations, citizen complaints, and even license plate photographs. A recent CNN Tech article highlighted sociologist Sarah Brayne’s research on the Los Angeles Police Department’s use of one such data collection software, Palantir.  Brayne’s findings suggest that while the utilization of big data in policing facilitates communication, it also raises some major concerns of privacy and potential bias.

With the help of Palantir, LAPD officers use a point system to measure the risk of individuals with extensive criminal records, awarding points for a variety of law infractions and police interactions. However, Brayne found that individuals from low-income communities of color are more likely to have their risk measured — she cautions that such systems can be cyclic, with more points leading to more police contact, and vice versa.

Another potential problem is that of privacy. Palantir has improved location tracking abilities and allows law enforcement to gather and connect more information about individuals than ever before, but this often includes information on individuals without police contact. Certainly there are clear benefits; sharing data can help connect related crimes and more information helps police to work more efficiently and effectively. But challenges arise as technology develops. Brayne warns,

“I’d caution against the thinking that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. That logic rests on the assumption of the infallible state. It rests on the assumption that actors are entering information without error, prejudice or discretion.”

For more on the biases behind surveillance technologies, check out this TROT on computer code as free speech.

Photo by Mark Dixon, Flickr CC

Americans’ views on race and racism have changed in many ways from those during the Civil Rights movement in the Jim Crow era. Today, most Americans agree that racism is not acceptable, and social norms have generally dictated that racist ideologies should not be part of the mainstream of American culture. Social norms are supported by institutions and leaders, however, and recent controversies over organized white supremacist groups call their stability into question. In The New York Times’ Upshot blog, sociologists Tina Fetner and Sarah Sobieraj describe how quickly these norms can change, especially amid criticism that the Trump administration has been slow to condemn white supremacist groups. From Fetner:

“It’s not because all of a sudden there is more racism now than there was a few weeks ago. It’s that the absolute condemnation of those most abhorrent views is crumbling away…”

And from the article:

“When norms of acceptable behavior and speech start to shift, it can disturb the shared beliefs, values and symbols that make up our culture.”

Leaders and institutions have the power to respond to controversy or to ignore it. Either way, their actions can change whether ideas appear to be part of the mainstream or the fringes of a society.

Photo by Nicki Dugan Pogue, Flickr CC

Companies like Ancestry.com use DNA samples to educate people about their genetic ancestry. This relatively new service is used by a growing number of people, and a recent article on STAT explains how has caused some uncomfortable moments for white supremacists who learn of their non-white ancestry. The article covers research by Aaron Panofsky  and Joan Donovan who studied posts on Stormfront, a white nationalist website, wherein users discuss their genetic ancestry results.

While one might assume that white nationalists would avoid posting their non-white ancestry online, Panofsky and Donovan found that members of Stormfront are quick to support each other in the face of genetic testing results which show non-white heritage.

“Instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said, the conversations are ‘overwhelmingly’ focused on helping the person to rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques — while emerging from deep-seated racism — are close to scientists’ own qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.”

Users discuss the potential failings of genetic testing, or posit that individual knowledge of one’s history is more useful than some findings in a remote laboratory. In other cases, individuals were told that they could remain in Stormfront so long as they didn’t “mate” and spread their non-white genes, and others even claimed that a sprinkling of non-white ancestry bolstered the community’s “diversity”. In sum, though genetic ancestry testing undermines the narratives that white supremacists utilize, users on Stormfront are negotiating their community boundaries with each new genetic test, and “rethinking who counts as white” in the process.

Photo by Ted Eytan, Flickr CC. Mural by Anieken Udofia in Adams Morgan Neighborhood, Washington, DC

“White flight” describes the uncomfortably common phenomenon in the mid-to-late 20th century wherein whites would quickly move out of a neighborhood once blacks started moving in. This would often lead to neighborhoods that were mostly-white, but quickly ended up mostly-black. Today, American neighborhoods are not as mono-ethnic as they once were, and the picture has expanded beyond blacks and whites to other populations, such as Latinos and Asians.

That said, however, segregation within neighborhood contexts is still present. A recent article in Slate detailed research showing that at the aggregate level, neighborhoods and residential areas are becoming more diverse in the U.S. However, this diversity does not necessarily mean that multicultural, cross-racial social relationships are thriving. Derek Hyra conducted research in parts of Washington, D.C. and found that even in a diverse neighborhood, people’s social associations—such as choice of church, schools, and restaurants—is often in a mono-ethnic context, leading to microsegregation or “diversity segregation.” 

This isn’t to necessarily suggest, however, that diverse neighborhoods have no potential to become more integrated.  Camille Z. Charles tells Slate that consistent exposure and contact with people of different races can foster integration. Places like public schools and community centers provide the opportunity for these kinds of relationships to develop and lead to diverse neighborhoods where people have diverse friends. Charles explains,

“We are often friendlier with people we actually interact with. We do find there is lasting benefit to that, which is why we think it is important to have [diversity] in schools because kids spend so much time in classrooms and on school campuses.”

Photo by Quinn Dombrowski, Flickr CC

Since his time in office, President Trump has put in place a travel ban on Muslim immigrants from seven different nations in the Middle East, has increased the number of border agents at the Mexican border, and has high hopes of building a new wall at the US-Mexican border.  Despite all of this attention being paid to immigrants, Trump has yet to fully address the issue of businesses and individuals who keep hiring illegal immigrants. A recent article in the Huffington Post looks to sociologist Tanya Golash-Boza to explain this disconnect. 

In her research, Golash-Boza explains that Trump dumping more resources into border patrol is a complete waste of resources, as the average border agent apprehends about only two people a month. She states, “it’s like pouring money into a sieve…They’re mostly just sitting there.”

Golash-Boza has written extensively on the “immigration industrial complex,” which refers to the revolving door of business practices, law enforcement tactics, and cheap labor from immigrants of color. Businesses hire illegal immigrants and pay them a cheaper wage, but before they can make a respectable income, the immigrants are dismissed or reported to law enforcement (where border patrol, prison systems, and local law enforcement all benefit). Meanwhile, businesses simply replenish this cheap labor force with new immigrants.  

For more on the immigration industrial complex, check out this TROT on for profit prisons and immigrant detention rates.