Sociological Images

On this last day of Black History Month, let us return to posts past.

We have been urged to celebrate Black History Month…

• …with fried chicken and collard greens.
• No really, with fried chicken and collard greens!
• …by relaxing our hair and drinking kool-aid.
• …by conflating them with “underprivileged” people.
• …by feeling badly about how fat we are and thinking about surgery.
• …with a “Compton Cookout” complete with blackface and nooses! (pictured)
• …by buying stuff from companies that do nothing but acknowledge Black History Month.

<sarcasm> Good times. </sarcasm>

For 100 years Valentine’s Day was not only associated with sweet sentiments, but was an occasion to send a cruel and biting message to someone you didn’t like.  These cards — called “vinegar valentines” — were popular from 1840 to 1940 in both America and the U.K.

Annebella Pollen, an art and design historian who talks about the valentine’s at Collector’s Weekly, explains that there was a valentine for many types of people and occasions:

 You could send them to your neighbors, friends, or enemies. You could send them to your schoolteacher, your boss, or people whose advances you wanted to dismiss. You could send them to people you thought were too ugly or fat, who drank too much, or people acting above their station. There was a card for pretty much every social ailment.

Pollen insists that people did send them to one another, albeit anonymously, and they were not meant to be jokes. Instead, they were meant to say: “Your behavior is unacceptable.”  For much of the 1800s there was no such thing as a pre-paid stamp, so the person who got the mail paid for it, so often they were forced to buy their own insults, a twist of the knife from the sender.

Many, many more vinegar valentine’s at Collector’s Weekly, where I also stole this great title.  Via BoingBoing.

Originally posted in 2010. Re-posted in honor of the holiday.

In the U.S., Valentine’s Day is pretty much for women. While women do give Valentine’s gifts to male partners, the emphasis among adults is on men giving items to women: flowers, candy, cards, taking them out to dinner, and so on. In many cases women aren’t expected to reciprocate, or can give a less expensive/significant present, and I doubt many give flowers or chocolate in heart-shaped boxes.

In Japan, however, the roles are reversed: women give chocolates to men, as well as often buying gifts and providing meals. It apparently isn’t entirely clear how this tradition emerged.

There are two types of chocolates that women give men. Giri-choco, or “obligation chocolate,” is relatively cheap and is what you give to coworkers and the like:

Honmei-choco is higher-quality chocolate reserved for men a woman is close to–partners or perhaps a family member:

The big heart on the left costs around $35:

Some women choose to make their own honmei.

Men aren’t off the hook, however. A month later, on March 14th, is White Day, a day when men give candy and other gifts to women:

According to wikipedia, these gifts are supposed to be more expensive than what the men received on Valentine’s Day.

A lot of websites say that White Day was invented by a marshmallow company in the ’60s as a way to increase sales, but I can’t find any reliable source for this explanation.

It’s a good example of the social construction of holidays and food. In the U.S., chocolate is highly feminized–we think of it as a food that women particularly like, and ads about chocolate, especially fancy chocolates, are usually aimed at women (or men buying for them). Valentine’s Day and big heart-shaped boxes with large bows on them are likewise feminized. Valentine’s Day is, primarily, a day when men are expected to show their affection for women through the purchase of these things (and, as a side note, the chocolate that comes in those heart-shaped boxes is often pretty unappealing). Insofar as women reciprocate with gifts for men, they’re unlikely to come in a similar heart-shaped box. When I brought up this possibility to my students, they said that would be really unusual and the male recipient would probably feel strange about it.

In Japan, clearly chocolates for Valentine’s Day (even expensive, fancy chocolate), heart-shaped boxes, and big bows are considered appropriate gifts for men. It makes it clear how our association of chocolate with women is culturally specific.

Of course, the fact that on White Day men are supposed to give women more expensive gifts than they received indicates that, while Valentine’s Day specifically is for men, the expectation is that overall, the balance of gift-giving requires men to show more affection-via-spending, similar to U.S. expectations surrounding the holiday.

Other posts: the social construction of chocolate and marketing chocolate to men.

On previous Valentine’s Days, we’ve featured vintage holiday cards caricaturing African Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians.  This year I stumbled upon a card that draws upon stereotypes of the Scottish.

Though it has largely disappeared as a well-known stereotype, at one time in American/British history, the Scottish were stereotyped as cheap.  Accordingly, this 1932 Scotch-themed valentine boasts that it’s box of dates (a type of dried fruit) can last all year if “ye use them sparingly.” A great example of a bygone stereotype (I think):

Valentine found at Kitsch Slapped.

Originally posted in 2011. Re-posted in honor of the holiday.

I recently posted a vintage cartoon featuring men showering. Today, in the context of “don’t drop the soap” jokes, it seems obviously homo-erotic (or -threatening).   At the time, however, it likely didn’t because homosexuality didn’t hold such a central place in our collective imagination.

Dmitriy T.M. sent along a series of vintage Valentine’s Day cards that, similarly, have a different effect given our contemporary cultural sensibilities. After decades of efforts to draw attention to and problematize men’s violence against women, these cards seem misguided at best:

Cards borrowed from Funny or Die.

Few people outside of the South know that the first Mardi Gras celebration was held in Mobile, Alabama in 1703, 15 years before New Orleans was a city.  A 2008 documentary, The Order of Myths, chronicles the politics of the town’s Mardi Gras celebration today, which remains almost entirely segregated by race. The black and white communities throw two separate Mardi Gras celebrations. In this clip, starting at 40secs, a woman describes this segregation:

The documentary isn’t heavy-handed about it, but the film does a wonderful job of showing how race is, isn’t, and is sorta talked about in Mobile.  The trailer gives you an idea:

Manohla Dargis, reviewing the movie for the New York Times, tries to capture the uncomfortable co-existence, separation, and choreographed intersections of the black and white communities:

The black queen and king — Stefannie Lucas and Joseph Roberson, both schoolteachers — are cautious yet optimistic about their city and its racial divide. They see change, glimmers of real progress, but they don’t have the luxury of naïveté. Most of the white revelers — including the queen and king, Helen Meaher and Max Bruckmann — all of whom appear significantly wealthier than the black participants, are either vaguely or keenly aware of race. Mr. Bruckmann, a jovial type with the round face of a well-fed baby, and Ms. Meaher, a willowy blonde who’s all but swallowed up by her heavily jeweled costume, are swaddled in privilege, tradition and culture. It’s hard not to notice that every hand that serves them is black.

I highly recommend the film not only for it’s coverage of the role race plays in Mardi Gras, but for it’s portrayal of the unique racial politics of the South more generally.

This post originally appeared in 2011.  Revised and re-posted in honor of Mardi Gras.

If you attend a Mardi Gras parade this year, you’ll likely notice that the float riders will be all-White or all-Black and all-female or all-male.  In fact, the majority of krewes — clubs that sponsor parades and other festivities — are race- and gender-segregated.  This is not de facto, but according to official krewe policy. And it remains legal to discrimate along these lines.  How did this happen?

According to Kevin Fox Gotham‘s book, Authentic New Orleans, Mardi Gras was transformed from an unorganized local festival to a rationalized tourist attraction by white elites. The first organized parade occurred in 1857 and was organized by the Mystick Krewe of Comus, several dozen social elites. This krewe, like many that followed, was race, gender, and class specific. Only white males who could afford membership in the krewe (essentially a social club) could participate.

Krewe of Comus (1867):

White only parades were part of a strategy to make New Orleans a tourist destination for white travelers. Unlike today, when New Orleans capitalizes on its multicultural heritage, for a very long time New Orleans tried to suppress popular knowledge of its non-white population, disinvested in that population, and drove them out of touristy areas.

It was not until 1991 that the City Council proposed banning racial segregation of the krewes and the Council voted unanimously to make bias illegal. Krewes that refused to integrate (in principle, if not in reality) would be denied “city services and parade permits, and would require jail time and fines” (p. 182). Mayor Sidney Barthelemy said:

We close off streets. We deny the taxpayer the right to drive down the street to give a segregated club the opportunity to parade. Now that’s unbelievable in 1991.

The decision brought simmering racial tension to a boil. Two krewes, the Krewe of Comus and the Knights of Momus, cancelled their parades in 1992 rather than comply with the new law. Another, the Krewe of Proteus, canceled the following year. An African American krewe, the Krewe of Zulu, mocked the decisions of the all-white krewes in 1992.

Krewe of Zulu:

Ultimately the anti-bias law came under fire from all-female krewes. Wanting to preserve their exclusive membership, Iris and Venus “opposed any discrimination ordinance because they recognized that it would undermine their power to exclude men” (p. 185).

Krewe of Iris:

In the end:

…the City Council voted to remove the jail sentence provisions in the ordinance and shifted the burden of proof onto individuals who maintained that they had been discriminated against if they attempted to join a krewe (p. 185).

But even this did not hold. Courts decided that the anti-bias laws violated laws of free association and, when the case came before the Supreme Court, they declined to revisit it. So, race and gender segregation of krewes remains legal.

Today, krewes segregated by race and gender still persist (and people without means are excluded from krewes generally, as they are very expensive), though newly formed krewes are often integrated on both axes, including Harry Connick Jr.’s Krewe of Orpheus:

For previous posts on Mardi Gras, see here, here, and here.