privilege

As we head into tomorrow’s Super Tuesday contests, statistics, analytics, and minutia of all sorts are being bandied about, examined for their possible predictions and the clues they can give us about how those who turn out to caucus will make their choices for the presidential candidates who want to represent them. In a classic piece, Skidmore College’s Andrew Lindner looks at how such numbers and stats remain a form of elite knowledge in “The Sociology of Silver,” published online and in our first TSP volume with W.W. Norton & Company, The Social Side of Politics.

So, did you see the Saturday Night Live spoof “The Day Beyonce Turned Black” yet? It’s pretty amusing—from the opening sequence (“For white people, it was just another great week. They never saw it coming. They had no warning…”) to the line “Maybe this song isn’t for us… but usually everything is!” and finally the white mom who was so freaked out she thought the music turned her daughter black (forgetting they had invited her African-American friend and mom for a play date). The SNL send-up is also, in my view at least, a pretty good example of comedy rooted in sociological analysis and commentary.

I don’t know who actually wrote the skit, but it reminded me of a line that one of the newest cast members Leslie Jones offered in a profile in The New Yorker (January 4, 2016) last month. (She plays the African-American mom in the play date scene of the sketch). Jones said, of working with the mostly white men on the SNL writing team, “One thing I learned: they’re not racist. They’re just white. They don’t know certain things.”

I don’t know if she meant to get a laugh here (Jones’s comedy can be as unsettling as it is hilarious, at least for a white guy like me), but there’s solid sociological insight behind it. In recent years, scholars studying white culture and identity have emphasized at least two different kinds of things whites don’t really know about or are blind to:

• Privilege. Too often, whites just don’t realize that the disadvantages and injustices people of color face in this country and all over the world are intimately connected with their own advantages. Where there is disadvantage, there must be advantage, so…
• The normativity of white culture. This speaks to the fact that white cultural beliefs and values are so dominant culturally, so taken-for-granted, that they aren’t even realized as something specific or unique. The idea that there are other ways to see things, other ways to make sense of events, music or movies, political causes or candidates—it’s incredibly easy to think there’s a unique “black point of view” without recognizing that means a “white point of view,” as well.

None of this is too suggest that there isn’t racism, or that some, perhaps many, whites, are racist in some quite basic ways. But it is to say that more than a few of the problems of race in this country spring from a lack of awareness of the realities and nuances of others’ lives (not to mention their own) that white people have the privilege of never attuning to. And some sociologists have even upped the ante with terms such as “colorblind racism” (Eduardo Bonilla Silva) or “laisse faire racism” (Laurence Bobo), which are intended to suggest that this ongoing unawareness, this comfortable complicity of white Americans with the racial status quo, is itself a form of racism.

Confucius is often credited for the saying, “True wisdom is knowing what you don’t know.” Whoever said it, they were on to something. When it comes to race in the United States, many of us white folks would do well to pay more attention to the basic facts of the society we live in, as well as how Americans of color understand and experiences these realities on a daily basis. And maybe then we’d be less astounded by Beyonce suddenly becoming black (though her transformation has been dramatic and somewhat unexpected I think, even for people of color), and more interested in the visions of Blackness and race relations more generally she is now trying to call attention to in this Black Lives Matter moment.

This week, on The Editors’ Desk*, Doug Hartmann enumerated and tried to define** six elements of the sociological worldview. Elsewhere on The Society Pages, our many contributors worked to demonstrate that worldview—enjoy!

*That’s right: we all share one desk. It’s adorable. Possibly even adorkable.

**See what I did there? The man never met a conjunction he didn’t like. more...

This week on TSP!

The Editors’ Desk:

“Sociology in Retired Football Player’s Past,” by Doug Hartmann. He makes it sound so sordid!

There’s Research on That!

“Olympic Flame Relay Goes Lunar,” by Amy August. Transnational ritual lifts off.

“Texas Abortion Restrictions Take Effect,” by Jacqui Frost. New laws change the mechanics, but not the incidence, of abortion.

Citings & Sightings:

“Redesigning Work to Find Balance,” by Erin Hoekstra. U of M sociologists tell the Huffington Post that flexibility increases productivity—they’ve got the research to prove it.

“Angry White Men and Aggrieved Entitlement,” by John Ziegler. Michael Kimmel on the defenses that go up when unrecognized privilege is challenged. The Real World: White Male America.

“Libraries, Coffee Shops, and Natural Disasters,” by Molly Goin. Eric Klinenberg on civic spaces and disaster response.

A Few from the Community Pages:

• Football! Sociological Images: Cliff Leek on hazing and masculinity in pro football and ThickCulture: “Gender Socialization and the NFL” and “Turning away from Football.”
• Feminism! Miley et al. with Girl w/ Pen!
• Cyborgs! WWIS, you don’t know me! Post-LOLcat lingo! Currency, privacy, and competing values!

Scholars Strategy Network:

“Are Job Training Programs a Good Way to Fight Poverty?” by Harry Holzer.

“The Value of Providing Continued Healthcare to People Leaving America’s Prisons,” by Emily Wang.

My colleague Teresa Swartz (full disclosure: I’m also married to her) has this writing exercise that she does with all of her Intro students at the end of the semester. In a nutshell, she asks them to write a brief paper situating themselves in the social contexts that have most profoundly shaped and determined their lives and identities. The exercise, which she calls a “sociological memoir,” is inspired by C.Wright Mills‘ famous definition of the sociological imagination as becoming aware of the intersection of one’s personal biography with larger social and historical forces. The book she often has the class read as an illustration is Dalton Conley’s wonderfully idiosyncratic early life narrative Honky. In the last couple of days I’ve read another couple of pieces I think I’m going to recommend to her as well.

Andrew Lindner’s “Epilepsy, Personally and Sociologically,” on TSP’s ThickCulture blog, is one of them. more...