culture

New & Noteworthy

We have two new Discoveries for you to read:

Check out some of our ‘Best of 2023’ pieces including:

From the Archives

Government shutdown avoided? Read our TROT on shutdowns to learn more about how impactful.

Children and adults experiencing homelessness are particularly vulnerable to cold weather, especially in Minnesota. Check out this World Suffering piece by Ron Anderson The Intractable Suffering of the Homeless to understand some of the complexities, and risks.

More from our Partners & Community Pages

The latest from Contexts includes:

Council on Contemporary Families a piece on love and loss:

New & Noteworthy

TSP board member Eleanor Nickel has a new Discovery, “Love Behind Bars.” Based on a recent article by Kristin TurneyKatelyn Rose MalaeMacKenzie A. Christensen, and Sarah Halpern-Meekin, the ripple effect of jail incarceration is strongly felt by women and children of incarcerated persons.

Our latest Media Report on Clippings features some Spookiology from Margee Kerr, Lars Birger Davan, Marc Eaton, and Dennis Waskul in Axios and Atlas Obscura, Patricia Romero-Lankao on transitioning to green energy and equity in NPR, and Alexei Levinson on the war in Ukraine and Putin’s career in The Bell.

From the Archives

How do we relate to people around the world experiencing war and trauma? Read our ‘There’s Research on That’ by Brooke Chambers to learn more about how distant war and the degree media coverage can impact our selective empathy of conflicts.

Student loan forgiveness developments continue to make headlines. Read our ‘There’s Research on That’ by Amber Powell on how student loan debt disproportionately impacts students of color and women.

Backstage with TSP

We are growing! New board members are joining the TSP team and bringing new perspectives and energy! Podcast planning is also our primary project. We are currently looking for recent sociological books to add to our current SOC 101 episodes.

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Contexts has new pieces to check out:

Council on Contemporary Families latest include:

New and Noteworthy

The children of undocumented migrants pulled over by police experience both short and long-term emotional harm, fearing their parents detainment or deportation. Expanded access to driver’s licenses could change that according to new research from Robert Smith and colleagues written up by Leonardo LaBarre.

Worth a (Watch) Sociologically Speaking

Watch board member Jacob Otis’s roundup of research on the Child Tax Credit. As parents file their 2022 taxes, they won’t receive the expanded CTC despite evidence that it improved parent and child health.

From the Archives

This week Wellesley, a historically women’s college, voted against admitting any transgender or nonbinary students. For some social scientific context, read this archive piece summarizing research on how transgender policies at women’s colleges actively construct gender.

From Our Partner and Community Pages

Contexts spoke with Dr. Chiara Cooper about her new article in the magazine, exploring the double-binds, compromises, and unwanted sex heterosexual college women experience.

For Council on Contemporary Families’ blog, Marta Soler and Ane Lopez de Aguileta wrote about how the book Creative Friendships can help children learn friendship skills and develop values that support their wellbeing.


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Photo Credit: Nathan Rupert, Flickr CC

In case you were otherwise occupied, on Christmas Day the Associated Press named the “NFL National Anthem Protests” the top sports story of 2017. In a year of many huge sport stories both on and off the field, the AP said the story was the “runaway winner” for its staff. This doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve studied sports-based social activism for a long time, but I’ve never had more media calls and requests for interviews in my career than these past few months.

The single biggest reason for the story, I’m pretty sure, involves our President’s seemingly unprompted and unusually profane attacks in September on football players who had engaged in demonstrations and the NFL. For better or for worse, Trump’s attention provoked a tidal wave of unprecedented gestures of protest and support across the league (and across both racial lines as well as those of management and ownerships) that gave the story its scale, scope, and intrigue. But there’s much more to say about it than that, much more.  I’ve been tracking this all fall as part of my own research project on the “new era” of African American athletic activism we are currently witnessing, and I am going to pull some of that together in a commentary with my sport and politics collaborator Kyle Green.  We are hoping to run that piece in the lead-up to the Super Bowl here in the Twin Cities at the end of January, so stay tuned!

There are two points I’d like to address here, by way of year-end retrospective: “kneeling” and “remembrance.” On kneeling, why do athletes feel the need to protest?

“Why do they do it?” is far and away the most common question I get from journalists and regular folks alike. Underlying this inquiry is the sense (a) that these demonstrations are disrespectful and (b) that professional athletes are super-rich, superstars who should be so satisfied with their lives and salaries and fame that they’d have no reason to complain or be angry, much less act out in public. At best, they see African American athlete activists as spoiled complainers, more interested in politics, making news, and making money than anything else. For many Americans, athletic protests are as incomprehensible as they are inappropriate.

Based on the athletes I’ve talked to and my earlier research on black athletic activism in the 1960s, I see the issue quite differently. and commitments. In a society that continues to be plagued by disproportionate police brutality, persistent racial gaps, and overt bigotry and bias, they feel compelled to do or say something. Sometimes it is in support of communities of color—their communities—who continue to face persistent racism and discrimination. Sometimes it is quite personal, stemming from their own ongoing individual experiences with racism and discrimination. And almost always it is quite principled and reasoned, with a clear understanding of the costs and consequences (which are far more real and extensive than most of us realize). Athlete activists don’t take their activities lightly or think of them as disrespectful or anti-American. Quite the contrary, they understand activism as consistent with the higher moral standards, ideals, and aspirations of both American democracy and sport culture.

But there is something else here too: It is also the fact that many —to make it seem like everything is okay. This was a major motivator for the African American athletes who participated in protests in the year leading up to the 1968 Olympic Games. As high jumper Gene Johnson explained in support of the “Olympic Project for Human Rights:”

“The United States exalts its Olympic star athletes as representatives of a democratic and free society, when millions of Negro and other minority citizens are excluded from decent housing and meaningful employment” (Race, Culture, and the Revolt, 2003, p. 84).

Or, as the OPHR organizing pamphlet put it: “We must no longer allow this country to use black individuals of whatever level to rationalize its treatment of the black masses.” 

So, that’s kneeling, now for remembrance. A few weeks back I was interviewed by a Time reporter for a special 50th anniversary retrospective issue on the tumultuous year of 1968. Among other things, the reporter asked me what my research on Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s iconic victory stand demonstration taught me about the meanings and implications of the protests of Colin Kaepernick and his NFL brethren. “How will we remember what is going on today, 50 years from now,” she wanted to know?

Social scientists like me, I told her, are loath to make predictions. However this topic is one where I was willing to make an exception. I’m pretty confident that one day in the not-to-distant near future, Kaepernick and company will be remembered far more positively across the American populace than is currently the case. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if, once the specifics of this moment and the larger racial politics that are unfolding are behind us, these athlete activists come to be revered as courageous, admirable, or even heroic—certainly ahead of their time. If you’re interested, my little quote to this effect can now be found in print on page 92 of the latest issue of Time (dated Dec. 25/Jan. 1) as well as online here.

Such historical re-remembering is a familiar pattern in American culture. It happened to our collective conceptions of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Muhammad Ali. Perhaps most pertinent to this discussion are the memories that surround the perpetrators of one of the most iconic sports demonstrations of all time, Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s 1968 clenched first, victory stand demonstration at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Today, most Americans celebrate Smith and Carlos as heroes of the Civil Rights Movement; back in 1968, they were seen as villains, traitors, and worse.

History and memory—what happened and how we think about what happened—are two different things. All too often, the way we remember and romanticize images, individuals, and events comes at the cost of forgetting all of the actual social issues and context that gave rise to them in the first place. As this year draws to a close and we begin to look to the future, let us not lose sight of the racial disparities and social injustices at the root of the biggest sports story of 2017.

Photo by Lorie Shaull, Flickr CC

Thanksgiving break once again provided me with some time for reflection mingled in with all the feasting and football. This year I found myself dwelling upon two rather random bits of reading I had come upon in earlier in the month. One was the reviews of a new biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, she of “Little House on the Prairie” fame. The other was a small series of confessions on my social media feed from sociologists who “admitted” to being fascinated with or even inspired by Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead in adolescence. Both Wilder and Rand, their stories and the worldviews embedded in them, have long held sway over me and (I think) many Midwestern, middle class folks like me.

When many of my ilk and generation think of “Little House,” they recall the 1970s NBC television series featuring Melissa Gilbert as the young Laura and Michael Landon as “Pa.” But for me it is the books. I remember my second grade teacher, Miss Froemsdorf, reading through the series to us in afternoon break times and study halls. In my faded, fuzzy, and probably totally erroneous memory, it seems like my classmates and I spent the entirety of our primary years at Trinity Lutheran listening to the stories from Little House in the Big Woods onward.

Was that even possible? Could we possibly have devoted that much classroom time to listening to these books rather than studying multiplication tables or learning to read and write? Probably not, but my recollection reflects as much on the power of the stories as the accuracy of memory. And indeed what captured my imagination and thus represents such an essential aspect of my elementary school education was Pa’s restlessness, his relentless (if often ill-fated) desire for land of his own, his drive for independence–and the almost complete and utter devotion of his wife and girls to the cause. This was the freedom and self-reliance I was learning to revere. The pioneering, frontier spirit made manifest. American individualism at its finest. 

I didn’t really read and engage the works of Ayn Rand until the summers of my early college years. This was when “objectivism” was experiencing one of its periodic renaissances among conservative students on campus during the Reagan era. Remember the Oliver Stone movie “Wall Street?” “Greed is good,” Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko told us. By then, I was a bit more inclined to be critical. Still, it wasn’t hard for me to see the appeal, to see how that self-reliant worldview –buttressed by Rand with an unrelenting celebration of the magic of markets and overt attacks on the state–would speak to my grade school self, my inherited midwestern German Lutheran sensibilities.

How to make sense of these works and ideas now? First and most important is to point out all that is missing from these romanticized visions of America and social life more generally: the institutional and technological complexities of modern society; the power of industry (especially railroads and banks and other titans of industry in “using” settlers to create towns and tame land that they knew was not fit for farming); the government role in regulating–and indeed making–markets; cities, technology, supply chains. And this is not to mention poverty and inequality, the dispossession and near extermination of Natives Americans, the great violence of the military, and the realities of hard lives full of death, disease, debt, devastations of all kinds for the masses. I’m talking, in short, of the invisibility of all things sociological.

That said, those of us who care about “the social” need to remember the deep, enduring appeal of these books and stories. Limited and problematic as they may be, stories about families like the Ingalls or of Howard Roarch or Horatio Alger embody in narrative form the core values and beliefs of vast swaths of our citizens and the nation itself. They are the vehicles by which the values of self-reliance and competition and individual responsibility have been inculcated in so many of us, and become such a deep, enduring part of our selves. In fact, I realize now that a great deal of my intellectual development in college and then graduate school was unlearning (or at least complicating) the intuitive logic of these ideas, remaking my own intuitive, organic sensibilities and beliefs.

I pondered these themes over a weekend where I heard and saw friends all over the country posting thoughts about “being thankful” and “feeling blessed.” Yes, yes–such sentiments are appropriate. But thankful for what and blessed by whom? Is it ourselves, our individual selves? Perhaps. For many Americans, such sentiments also go to some larger, less easy to explain force or powers. Again, fine as far as it goes. But gratitude is also, I’m convinced (and I think we too often neglect to realize or acknowledge this), about us as communities. All of us have tons of support and assistance from others along the pathways of our lives. We don’t do it on our own. Ever. There are many others around us, upon whom each of us depends and relies.  We should be thankful for and feel blessed by all of these folks, and of the communities in which we are all embedded.

And thinking about others brings me to one other point. It also gets me thinking about those of us in America and all over the world who haven’t been so blessed or so lucky. What do we think of them? Do we turn a blind eye? Do we blame them for their own misfortune, or even for other problems in our communities? Too often, I’m afraid that’s exactly what we do. I wish we could do better. And I wonder whether an understanding of thankfulness more attentive to others might not also help make us feel thankful but act in more generous and compassionate ways to others, towards those whom our religious icons have often called “the least of these.” 

There is an episode in one of the recent reviews of the Ingalls biography where either Laura or her daughter Rose (who did so much to bring the Little House books to fruition) bring an interviewer down to the fruit cellar of their farm house to show them all of the produce that has been bottled and canned and put away for the winter. “This,” they tell the interviewer, “is all the welfare we need.” I am convinced the Ingalls women totally believed this–and believed that canned food for the winter is all anyone else needed or could ask for as well. Heck, this is a family who suffered through and saw many family and friends die difficult deaths of famine and disease; this was a family who even believed that a plague of grasshoppers who destroyed their crops in the 1930s was divine retribution for the New Deal. They lived their self-reliance. However, I also believe it doesn’t have to be that way. I believe that we, together, can do better.

In other words, I ended my weekend thinking not about being thankful as an individual, but rather by looking for hope for our collective lives together.

I turned 50 this summer so maybe I’m feeling a little sentimental. Nevertheless, in this season of tumult, Trump, and 140 character tweets that pass for news, I have found myself sustained by the some of the most old-fashioned modes of media—weekly and monthly news magazines, and, more specifically, long-form journalism. Here are some of my favorites from the past few weeks, categorized in the ways that I think my sociology friends and colleagues would find meaningful:

Social movements: Nathan Heller’s analysis of the efficacy of collective protests “Out of Action: Do Protests Work? The New Yorker, August 2017.

Popular culture: “How American Lost its Mind,” a piece on culture and populism by Kurt Andersen in The Atlantic, September 2017. (Other solid treatments roughly in this category/vein: “The New Paranoia by Colin Dickey in July’s The New Republic; and “European Disunion: What the Rise of Populist Movements Means for Democracy” by Yascha Mounk, also in TNR, August/September).

Sociology of knowledge: David Session in The New Republic, “The Rise of the Thought Leader: How the Superrich have Funded a New Class of Intellectual,” June 2017.

Media studies: a trip down memory lane by my favorite television critic of how Donald Trump built his popularity (and personality) in and through the small screen, Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker, July 2017.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Traditional journalism doesn’t (and can’t) solve all the problems of our fractious world, and indeed I sometimes worry that all of this great writing and reading can be its own kind of distraction or delusion. But the clear-thinking, the ability to put things in broader context, and the commitment to synthesizing social facts and cultural complexities—all qualities that us sociologists aspire to—displayed in these pieces is admirable and much needed. And I can only shake my head in awe for the way these writers, reporters, and critics are able to produce such great, insightful content in such timely and engaging fashion.

 

Photo by Disney|ABC, Flickr CC
Photo by Disney|ABC, Flickr CC

Okay, so I’m short on time and more than a little bit intimidated by Beyonce and all her brilliance. But I grew up listening to country music, have long loved the Dixie Chicks, and I’ve been thinking so much lately about trying to cultivate cross-racial understanding and interactions in our culture that it seems like I need to say something about the remarkable rendition of “Daddy’s Girl” that was part of the CMA country music awards the other night. Fortunately, this new piece on the Atlantic entitled “What Beyonce’s ‘Daddy’s Lessons’ Has to Teach” says many of the things I’ve been thinking about. From the intriguing lack of media buildup, to Beyonce’s blending of feminism, religiosity, and guns, to the racial dynamics of the performers and some of the predictable (and easily repudiated) social media backlash, this piece has it all–and this isn’t even to mention the amazing musicality and rip-roaring entertainment value. Fortunately, there is a link to the performance embedded in the post. And in case you haven’t heard of any of this, here’s the lyrics to wet your appetite.

BEYONCE Daddy Lessons lyrics

[Beyonce]
Yee-haw!
(Oh, oh, oh)
Texas, texas (oh, oh, oh) texas…

Came into this world
Daddy’s little girl
And daddy made a soldier out of me
(Oh, oh, oh)
Daddy made me dance
And daddy held my hand
(Oh, oh, oh)
And daddy liked his whisky with his tea
And we rode motorcycles
Blackjack, classic vinyl
Tough girl is what I had to be

He said take care of your mother
Watch out for your sister
Oh, and that’s when he gave to me…

With his gun, with his head held high
He told me not to cry
Oh, my daddy said shoot
Oh, my daddy said shoot
With his right hand on his rifle
He swore it on the bible
My daddy said shoot
Oh, my daddy said shoot
He held me in his arms
And he taught me to be strong
He told me when he’s gone
Here’s what you do
When trouble comes to town
And men like me come around
Oh, my daddy said shoot
Oh, my daddy said shoot
Oh, oh, oh…

Daddy made me fight
It wasn’t always right
(But he said girl it’s your second amendment, oh, oh, oh)
He always played it cool
But daddy was no fool
And right before he died he said remember…

He said take care of your mother
Watch out for your sister
And that’s when daddy looked at me…

With his gun, with his head held high
He told me not to cry
Oh, my daddy said shoot
Oh, my daddy said shoot
With his right hand on his rifle
He swore it on the bible
My daddy said shoot
Oh, my daddy said shoot
‘Cause he held me in his arms
And he taught me to be strong
And he told me when he’s gone
Here’s what you do
When trouble comes to town
And men like me come around
Oh, my daddy said shoot
Oh, my daddy said shoot
Oh, oh, oh
Oh, oh, oh

My daddy warned me about men like you
He said baby girl he’s playing you
He’s playing you
My daddy warned me about men like you
He said baby girl he’s playing you
He’s playing you
Cause when trouble comes in town
And men like me come around
Oh, my daddy said shoot
Oh, my daddy said shoot
Cause when trouble comes to town
And men like me come around
Oh, my daddy said shoot!
Oh, my daddy said shoot!

(Good job Bey, hahaha…)

Source:http://www.directlyrics.com/beyonce-daddy-lessons-lyrics.html

Saturday Night Live has been having great fun with the presidential campaigns and debates all fall, with Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon headlining in the roles of Trump and Clinton. These skits have been entertaining to be sure, but they haven’t–at least in my opinion–plumbed the depths of social significance in the way that great, memorable, and truly meaningful comedy often achieves. Perhaps it is the source material. In any case, there was a bit this past week that I believe did achieve something quite powerful and sociologically insightful, even while being outrageously hilarious. I’m talking about the Black Jeopardy skit.

“Black Jeopardy” has been something of a recurring bit on the show. The concept is a play off of the quiz show that Alex Trebec has made famous where contestants must provide the questions that go along with various facts about culture, history, and science. In the SNL version of the game, the categories and questions are all based upon knowledge and information associated with black culture and/or unique in African American communities, and typically one of the three contestants–usually someone who is white–has little or no knowledge of any of this. The running gag is how obvious the answers and questions are for black contestants as opposed to the fish-out-of-water, racial other. What is both funny and revealing, then, are both the unique characteristics  and distinctive knowledge of black culture and community (even the categories are often pretty funny but only if you have some knowledge of the culture) as well as what it is like to be a complete outsider. In short, Black Jeopardy is an almost straight-up inversion (and take down) of white culture and privilege.

In this week’s installment, the SNL crew inserted Tom Hanks into the mix. He plays an earnest if uncomfortable white, working-class contestant. The results were not only laugh-out-loud hilarious, but also revealed points of agreement–ranging from distrust of the government and anyone in power, to taking pride in thriftiness to a dislike of thin women–between members of the black community and erstwhile white Trump supporters. The unexpected points of agreement were the key to both the humor and the sociological insight. Such points of commonality are almost never realized or appreciated in our currently polarized, black versus white racial-political climate. The skit not only brought them to the fore, they made them funny.

You probably need to watch it for yourself to fully appreciate my point, and if you haven’t yet seen it, here’s a link.

 

But just to help underscore the brilliance of the concept and execution (and with a little help from my research assistant and TSP board member, Sarah Catherine Billups), here’s a condensed narrative of some of the best moments in the skit.

The Skit: Black Jeopardy with a Trump Player

“Whaddup, whaddup, whaddup! Welcome to Black Jeopardy—the only TV game show where the audience is in church clothes,” host Darnell Hayes (cast member Kenan Thompson) booms before introducing the contestants: Keely (Sasheer Zamata), Shanice (Leslie Jones), and Doug, a white guy sporting a “Make American Great Again” cap.  One of these things is not like the other.  Doug, played by guest host Tom Hanks, looks clearly out of place with his red cap, American flag and eagle t-shit under his blue denim work shirt and white goatee.  All he’s missing is a shotgun and a Budweiser.

“Doug? Are you sure you’re ready to play Black Jeopardy?” Darnel asks with worry pushing his eyebrows to the ceiling.

“They told me a fella could win some money so let’s win me some money, GIT ‘R DONE,” Doug/Hanks explains kind of quietly.

The audience roars with laughter at this fish-out-of-water-fella as Darnell shrugs and then goes on to introduce the categories “Big Girls,” “You Better,” “Mm I don’t know,” “I’m Gonna Pray on This,” “They Out Here Saying,” and “White People.”

Keely and Shanice hit their buzzers with lightning speed to correctly answer the first few questions–which, as is the usual bit for this skit, plays off of the knowledge and experiences that are supposedly unique to the black community.  When Doug nods his head in agreement to an answer and shares that he plays Monopoly Millionaires Club every week too, Darnell brushes him off.

Much to everyone’s surprise, however, Doug buzzes to the answer to the prompt: “They out here saying: the new iPhone wants your thumbprint ‘for your protection.’” He responds, a bit hesitantly, “No no, I don’t think so. That’s how they get’cha.”

“YES!…YES! That’s it!” Darnell points to him in shock.  Did this white guy really just answer correctly?

Keely purses her lips, thinking for a second before nodding in agreement, “Yep. I don’t trust that.”

“Me either,” Shanice joins in.  Both black women turn and look at Doug, fascinated but still a little cautious. “I read that goes straight to the government,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, not bad dog. The, the board is yours,” Darnell announces, his eyes still wide with newfound curiosity about this white guy in a bright red Trump hat.

Keely chooses the category “They Out Here Sayin” for $800: “They out here sayin’ that every vote counts.” This time, Doug buzzes in a bit more quickly. “What is ‘oh come on, they already decided that weeks ago–who’s gonna win even before it happens.”

“YES! YES! YES! YES!” Darnell shouts in excitement,” elaborating further himself, “The Illuminati figured that out months ago! That’s another one for Doug!” Is this really happening? Is Doug actually getting answers correct? The audience laughs as Doug says with new confidence, “Okay, we’re doin’ it.”

Next question: “The mechanic says you owe $250 for new brake lines.”

Doug rings in again! “What is ‘you better go to the dude in my neighborhood who’ll fix anything for $40.’”

“Oh, you know Cecil?!” Darnell asks as if Doug is a long lost cousin.

“Yeah, yeah. My Cecil’s name is Jim and he fixed my refrigerator, my air conditioner, and my cat,” Doug replies with pride.

“Yeah, everybody’s got a guy,” replies Darnell. “Wooo, you all right, Doug.” The audience applauds almost politely, with genuine appreciation.

Next, Doug selects the category “Big Girls” for $200. “Skinny girls can do this for you.”

“Doug?”

“What is ‘not a damn thing.”

This time the audience erupts in wild hoots and hollers as Darnell exclaims, “You damn right!”

“Yes! Yes!” Keely and Shanice agree.  Shanice even gives him a high five.  Both the women are smiling and nodding vigorously at this point, no longer looking at Doug like he’s a two-headed giraffe in the zoo.

“My wife—she’s a sturdy girl,” Doug explains.

“That is my MAN right there!” Shanice approves.

“Go Doug, Go Doug, Go Doug!” The host and the other contestants sing and dance to cheer for this white man getting the right answer, again!

As the fictional contest draws to a close, Darnell crosses his hand over his heart and says, “Doug. I got to say, it’s been a pleasure,”

“Well, right back at ya my buh-rau-thuh,” Doug replies in a somewhat uncomfortable attempt to return the complement and stay on common ground.

Now it’s time for the Final Jeopardy.  What else does Doug know? Can he really win this thing? Is it possible that his knowledge and understanding is really on par with that of the black audience, host, and contestants? The audience is ready to find out, and waits for the final category to be revealed.

“Lives that Matter.”

“Oooooh” the audience grimaces and hesitates as Keely’s and Shanice’s eyes shoot daggers in Doug’s direction.  Darnell smiles biting his lower lip, shrugs his shoulders, and shakes his head, “Well, it was good while it lasted, Doug.”

“Hey, I got lots to say about this—,“ Doug insists.

“I’m sure you do!” Darnell says. “When we come back, we gonna play the National Anthem just to see what the hell happens. We’ll be right back!”

As the screen fades out, we see Doug talking and gesturing wildly with his hands as Shanice watches, perplexed and Keely slowly wags her finger.

 

Final Analysis: There are other great moments in the skit of both unexpected commonality and obvious, if amusing, cross-racial tension that we’ve glossed over here. But the insights about race relations and American culture that I see so brilliantly, entertainingly represented and revealed in SNL’s Black Jeopardy can be easily summarized: the initial skepticism and distrust that defines so many inter-racial interactions in our culture; the points of common understanding about culture and society that may actually exist under the surface for some of us; and yet, ultimately, the existence of issues where there is almost certainly going to be a huge disconnect and major disagreements. Great concept. Brilliant execution. SNL and comedy at its sociological best.

Click to visit the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality website.
Click to visit the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality website.

Our friends over at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality are at it again—this time with a special, election-year issue focused on the positions of the various parties and presidential candidates on the issues of poverty, mobility, and inequality in contemporary American society. While these topics may not be as popular, provocative, or controversial as others which have dominated campaign coverage so far, this attention to social stratification and public policy—especially for those on the bottom end of our socio-economic system—is basic, bread-and-butter stuff for any sociologically-inclined reader or researcher.

Three pieces in particular caught our attention. The first two, written by Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Harry J. Holzer, actually work best as a paired set. Each provides a short synopsis of how Republicans and Democrats, respectively, think about the challenges of poverty reduction in the United States. Holzer’s take on the Democrat approach doesn’t have a lot of surprises, though you can be the judge of how the various points of emphasis he lays out have played out in the Democratic primaries of late, especially considering that Holzer is the former Chief Economist of Bill Clinton’s labor department and advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign. (“The views expressed,” he writes in a wry footnote, “are strictly my own.”) And while you might not agree with Holtz-Eakin’s reframing of poverty as a problem of “self-sufficiency,” I find it refreshing to hear a conservative both acknowledge the depth of the policy challenge as well as put social scientific research and data at the foundation of a prospective policy agenda.

The other piece I’d really recommend is Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks‘ article “Why Aren’t Americans Angrier about Rising Inequality?” The question comes from the realization that in spite of four decades of rising income and wealth disparities along with “stagnating or even declining real wages,” General Social Survey data suggests that Americans are not nearly so concerned (or at least, are much less outraged) than we might expect. Manza and Brooks believe this disconnect is “an important, yet under-acknowledged, challenge for scholars seeking to understand the politics of risking inequality in the United States.” They go on to suggest that the persistent strength of optimistic beliefs about opportunity and mobility is a key reason explaining why Democratic politicians have such difficulty getting public traction beyond their party base.

With the benefit of observing the last few months of presidential campaigning on both the Right and the Left, I’m wondering if perhaps these discontents aren’t quite as absent or one-sided as it once might have seemed, expressing themselves in the political arena more than public opinion polling. In a topsy-turvy political era, where anger is becoming all the rage, this possibility makes me think that we will need to be careful what we wish for when it comes to public attention to and partisan packaging of public policies affecting our economic systems and social hierarchies.

Beyonce and her dancers practice their entrance before the performance. Via Beyonce, Instagram.
Beyonce and her dancers practice their entrance before the performance. Via Beyonce, Instagram.

Okay, I’ll make this quick since it’s a bit dated. After I wrote that little post about Saturday Night Live’s “Beyonce is Black” spoof a couple of weeks back, I had a number of students and friends wanting to know what I actually thought about her Superbowl performance (well, her part in the Coldplay performance featuring Beyonce and Bruno Mars). I’m no music critic (or big Beyonce fan, for that matter) so I hadn’t really taken the bait. However, I did spend some time reading what other people were saying—both about the performance and about the backlash it seems Beyonce experienced.

One piece that really caught my attention was by the Salon blogger Lasha. She was struck by the very different reception that Beyonce experienced than the one that met rapper Kendrick Lamar after his racially pointed and politically charged performance at the Grammys just days later. According to Lasha, it was one more instance of the unfair, sexist policing of African American women’s political expression.

Lasha’s point about the marginalization of black women’s radicalism is well-taken. I also think there is some additional social context worth considering. For one, there are expectations and previous record. I think part of the thing with Beyonce is that her Superbowl performance was perhaps her first “socially conscious art.” This surprised folks—it defied their expectations of the “Single Ladies” singer, upsetting those who didn’t see it coming or didn’t understand where she was coming from (witness my previous post on the SNL spoof).

Even more important, in my view, is the actual social context of the performances: the music industry versus the sportsworld. We Americans have come to expect and accept social consciousness and political radicalism in the music context. We not only do not expect such expression in sports, we actually oppose it. Not all cultural arenas are unique, and there are many things about the world of sport that make it uniquely powerful and complicated. As I written on many occasions—for example, in the piece Kyle Green and I did on this site about politics and sport being strange bedfellows—there are deep cultural norms about sport that make any kind of social statement in the realm of sport extremely complicated and typically controversial, especially where race is involved.

I won’t try to rehearse all of the ways this works, much less how racial movements and politics are implicated (there’s a lot on this in my book on the 1968 African American Olympic protests, if you are interested). But when it comes to statements of protest, unrest, and activism, Americans tend to see sport as somehow unique or special—either because we see sport as somehow sacred or sacrosanct (that is, above politics) or because don’t want our entertainment complicated or sullied by the realities of the non-sport world. So while sexism is clearly at play, there’s at least one other important thing going on—the idealization of sport on its highest, most holy day in America: Super Bowl Sunday.