Sociological Images

I absolutely love this photograph of a collage on the wall of an activist in the rather new national movement to hold colleges and universities accountable for sexual assault.  Referencing Title IX and the “bigger picture,” it documents cross-college efforts to use the amendment to ensure that sex crimes on campuses don’t interfere with women’s rights to equal access to education.

What is exciting is that this is a national movement. The many college names pinned to the board are just some of the schools that have filed, are filing, or will file Title IX complaints with the Office for Civil Rights. “Oxy” is my school.

I’ve been somewhat involved with Oxy’s role in this movement — the credit goes to Drs. Caroline Heldman and Danielle Dirks and the dozens of survivors who, as part of the coalition, have publicly and confidentially shared their stories — but I’ve had the pleasure of talking to journalists about our case.  Regarding the national movement, they often ask me “Why now?”

Why Now?

This is a tough question to answer and, first and foremost, credit goes to the extraordinary people at the center of this fight, such as Annie Clark, Andrea Pino, Dana Bolger, and Alexandra Brodsky at Know Your IX.  As Margaret Mead famously said:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Importantly, though, the efforts of this small group have been greatly enhanced by the internet and, specifically, social networking sites.  Students (and sometimes faculty, staff, and administrators) are no longer confronting these issues alone.  They are reaching out across campuses and talking with each other; they are teaching each other how to file federal complaints; they are building and sharing templates; they are sharing stories of institutional foot dragging and spin and developing effective resistance and protest strategies.

For example, Annie Clark, who filed federal complaints against the University of North Carolina, helped Profs. Dirks and Heldman at Occidental College file their complaints: “Over the past few months,” she writes:

I have spent countless hours with them on Skype and the phone in order to share information and help the[m] write their complaints. Yet, six months ago, I had never even heard of Occidental College — and many of the 37 women there who filed had not yet heard about Title IX protection against gender discrimination beyond athletics.

These coalitions are creating both activist networks and fast friends. This is a picture of students at Swarthmore (Swat) showing their love for students at Occidental (Oxy). Both campuses filed Title IX complaints on the same day:

As Prof. Dirks explains, this collaboration is a big deal:

[L]earning the stories of other survivors who are actively pushing their colleges and universities to create safe and equitable learning environments has opened the floodgates of what students now feel empowered to do.

This is all possible, of course, because the internet is still at least a somewhat democratized technology. You and I are equals on the internet, at least in principle.  So we all have the opportunity to produce content.  In contrast, other forms of media — TV, radio, movies, magazines, books — typically offer us only the opportunity to consume.

The activists in this movement have a platform and a megaphone, then, metaphorically speaking.  The technology — and our regulation of it in ways that preserve its democratic nature — is helping enable this movement.  Just as the TV made a huge difference in shifting popular opinion about the Civil Rights Movement.  Accordingly, we need to remember this when corporations fight to own and control the internet and its distribution.  For reasons like this one, we should be fighting back with the goal of making the internet a public utility.  Democracy depends on it.

Dylan Matthews, blogging in the Washington Post, discusses a very interesting paper that provides evidence showing that politicians seriously underestimate the progressivity of their constituents.

David Broockman and Christopher Skovron, the authors of the paper, “surveyed every candidate for state legislative office in the United States in 2012 [shortly before the November election] and probed candidates’ own positions and their perceptions of their constituents’ positions on universal health care, same-sex marriage, and federal welfare programs, three of the most publicly salient issues in both national-level and state-level American politics during the past several years.”  They then matched the results with estimates of the actual district- and issue-specific opinions of those residing in the candidates’ districts using a data set of almost 100,000 Americans.

Here is what they found:

Politicians consistently and substantially overestimate support for conservative positions among their constituents on these issues. The differences we discover in this regard are exceptionally large among conservative politicians: across both issues we examine, conservative politicians appear to overestimate support for conservative policy views among their constituents by over 20 percentage points on average… Comparable figures for liberal politicians also show a slight conservative bias: in fact, about 70% of liberal office holders typically underestimate support for liberal positions on these issues among their constituents.

The following two charts illustrate this bias when it comes to universal health care and same sex marriage.

As Matthews explain:

The X axis is the district’s actual views, and the Y axis their legislators’ estimates of their views. The thin black line is perfect accuracy, the response you’d get from a legislator totally in tune with his constituents. Lines above it would signify the politicians think the district more liberal than it actually is; if they’re below it, that means the legislators are overestimating their constituents’ conservatism. Liberal legislators consistently overestimate opposition to same-sex marriage and universal health care, but only mildly. Conservative politicians are not even in the right ballpark.

The authors found a similar bias regarding support for welfare programs.  Perhaps even more unsettling, the authors found no correlation between the amount of time candidates spent meeting and talking to people in their districts while campaigning for office and the accuracy of their perceptions of the political positions of those living in their districts.

One consequence of this disconnect is that office holders, even those with progressive views, are reluctant to take progressive positions.  More generally, these results speak to a real breakdown in “the ability of constituencies to control the laws that their representatives make on their behalf.”

Many of you may have seen a video featuring Reverend William Barber speaking out against North Carolina’s Amendment One, which banned same-sex marriages (and which was approved by voters on Tuesday). The video is heartfelt and passionate, and is also a great example of the importance of how we frame issues in social movements.

Reverend Barber argues that media coverage of the amendment has asked the wrong questions. Whether same-sex couples should be allowed to get married isn’t the core issue here, he says; what’s really at stake is whether the majority should get to vote on which rights will be guaranteed to those in the minority, a decision he sees as a dangerous standard in a nation that has used it previously to exclude racial/ethnic minorities, women, and the poor from the full benefits and protections of citizenship. This reframes the amendment from an issue about same-sex marriages to a broader question about rights, equal protection, and the dangers of codifying inequality into our governing documents:

Behold, I present to you a video parody of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” rewritten as “Bad Romance: Women’s Suffrage,” an account of the fight to get voting rights for women in the U.S.:

I just wanted you to know that this exists.

Lyrics and info available here. Thanks to Kristina Killgrove for the tip!

Last Friday at the University of California-Davis, a group of student Occupy Wall Street protesters were pepper sprayed by university police for refusing to vacate the campus quad. As Lisa pointed out, thanks to the widespread availability of phones with cameras, the incident was photographed and recorded by dozens of onlookers. As a result, images and videos of the pepper spraying incident have flooded the internet. One video has received over 1.7 million views on Youtube; another shorter clip has almost 1 million.

One image, taken by Louise Macabitas, has become iconic (via San Francisco Citizen):

The image is striking in several ways. First, nearly everyone watching has a camera or cell phone and is documenting the event. Second, there is a strong visual separation of the police and protesters — the police are standing, while the protesters are seated. Third, the police officer who is spraying protesters has a very casual, removed demeanor and stance. There is no direct confrontation occurring to seemingly warrant such an action. The image depicts an imbalance of power, as students crouch and hide their faces from the pepper spray wielded by campus police.

The image has so much visual power that it has taken off as an online meme. Consider these variations, all posted at Wired:

I think this meme is itself a form of visual protest. The variations on the original image reinforce the perception that the police officer’s actions were inappropriate and an abuse of power. The use of famous scenes and works of art creates a cartoonish depiction of inequality and injustice, of someone using their power unjustly against those who obviously have less power — children, kittens, the unemployed, etc. (via the Pepper Spraying Cop tumblr):

Other images present the officer’s actions are an affront to justice, by using images associated with freedom, democracy, or peaceful resistance (found at the Pepper Spraying Cop tumblr and CyBeRGaTa:

This one merges the image with another iconic photo of an abuse of police power on campus, the shooting at Kent State University in 1970 (via CyBeRGaTa):

Reproducing this image of injustice online is a form of visual protest, spreading images of perceived injustice in different visual contexts across the internet. The meme is a commentary on how we culturally and historically understand power inequalities and the limits of appropriate uses of power.

Yet, while this is a powerful form of protest that draws important connections, the meme also removes the officer, Lt. John Pike, from the original context of his actions. This runs the danger of focusing on Pike as a lone actor, and not an individual whose actions are shaped within the larger institutional system of justice. As Alexis Madrigal warns us in “Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike“:

Structures, in the sociological sense, constrain human agency. And for that reason, I see John Pike as a casualty of the system, too. Our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let’s not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.

In Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, Jeff Manza and Chris Uggen discuss the implications of state laws that bar convicted felons from voting, some even after their release and completion of all parole or probation requirements. The result? Over 5 million Americans are prohibited from participating in the democratic process.

But because African Americans are disproportionately likely to be in prison, they are particularly affected by the restriction of voting rights. The Prison Policy Initiative posted this map by Uggen and Manza showing the percent of voting-age African Americans in each state prevented from voting in 2000 as a result of a felony conviction:

For a thorough discussion of the history and consequences of laws barring felons from voting, see Uggen’s excellent Felon Disenfranchisement site.

In his book Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, Doug McAdam discussed the combination of social and political factors that facilitated the emergence, and significant successes of, the Civil Rights Movement. One of his arguments is that discussions of the movement often overlook the way that non-violent civil rights protesters were able to strategically use violent responses by white supremacists as a resource. While in some cases violent responses were unexpected, most of the time activists understood that they were likely to be met by violence. In fact, McAdam argues, many activists counted on that public brutality. Images such as Sheriff Bull Connor’s officers turning fire hoses and police dogs on non-violent protesters galvanized public opinion in support of the civil rights movement and produced the political pressure necessary to push an often-reluctant federal government to intervene. Thus, McAdam argues that public use of violence by state authorities against protesters can provide essential tools for social movements: a visible, concrete sign of repression, evidence of the vulnerability of citizens in the face of a brutal, intransigent state, and dramatic images that draw media and public attention.

I thought of McAdam’s book when Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link from Five Thirty Eight about how police actions affected media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests. The article was written on October 7th, so it doesn’t include the impacts of the most recent clashes with police, particularly the Oakland PD’s tear gassing of OWS protesters a couple of nights ago. But already, a noteworthy pattern was emerging. Nate Silver looked at OWS coverage in a database of about 4,000 U.S. news sources. He found that media coverage was basically nonexistent until NYPD pepper sprayed some protesters. Coverage shot up again after NYPD arrested a few hundred protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge on Oct. 1st and after more incidents on Oct. 5th:

As Silver points out, we can’t discern any clear causality here; perhaps media coverage would have gone up over time anyway. But coverage of OWS doesn’t show a smooth, slowly-increasing trend; coverage jumped after each of these instances of violence, and after the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, remained much higher than it had been before. At the very least, it appears that violence by the police drew media attention, providing an opening for the concerns of OWS protesters — and the persistence and growth of OWS protests around the country — to be defined as legitimate news stories in their own right.

UPDATE: For more on the persistence of the OWS movement and protesters’ tactical and organizational skill, check out Steven Vallas’s post at Organizations, Occupations and Work.

[Full Cite: Doug McAdam. 1999. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.]