Sociological Images

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

By now, you have heard about the killing of Trayvon Martin.  But when did you first hear about it?  If you’re a news junkie and were watching the national news channels,  the answer to that question might well depend on which one you watch.  ThinkProgress counted the number of stories about this killing on three cable news outlets in the week following the event.

Megan McCardle interprets the data as an example of “the Availability Heuristic, a rule of thumb that says the frequency of an event should correspond to how quickly you can think of examples of it.”  The Availability Heuristic makes us overestimate the risk of shark attacks.  The Availability Heuristic is probably behind my students’ writing confidently that teenage pregnancy has been steadily rising (thank you, MTV).

McCardle looks at the graph and sees a reason for different perceptions of racism as a problem:

…the disparity here may have something to do with whether one thinks institutional racism remains a serious problem in the United States. Conservatives often seem to think it isn’t, and that if anything, the real problem is how often spurious charges of white racism are deployed by their political opponents, while liberals more often tend toward the opposite view. Maybe both groups are drawing justified inferences from the data they’re seeing.

Do Fox viewers discount racism because of what they see?  Or is the network disparity more an example of another cognitive wiring problem – Confirmation Bias?  Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek out and to remember information that fits with our existing ideas.  Faced with information that clashes with that world view, we ignore, forget, distort, or misinterpret.

In Foxland — the world of both those who create Fox news and those who consume it — racism is not a real problem.  A story of a white Hispanic man armed with a 9mm chasing down and shooting a black teenager armed only with Skittles has no place in that world.  The Fox news producers don’t want to tell that story, and the viewers don’t want to hear it.  In the days since this graph appeared, the story has become too big for even Fox to ignore. I would imagine that Fox will instead interpret the events so as to fit with the view that McCardle suggests — that whites are the victims.  If you watch Fox, get ready to hear a lot about self-defense.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

A recent Time cover story was adapted from The Richer Sex, a forthcoming book by Liza Mundy. I provided a few numbers for the story (see here). The content is behind a pay wall here, but the cover gives a taste:

It’s an interesting piece on the (very partial) convergence in roles among married couples. Despite the current stall in progress toward equality, I’m glad to see an article with a positive take on the idea of equality (for middle class straight couples, at least) without focusing on the demise of men.

Of course, women are not yet the richer sex, so the evidence in the article is about trends in that direction. The text says, for example:

Assuming present trends continue, by the next generation, more families will be supported by women than by men.

By the time the graphics department got to it, the “assuming…” part was gone, and this was the header:

The numbers that support this are the trend from 24% of wives out-earning their husbands in 1987 to 38% in 2009 (helped considerably by the mancession’s crimp on men’s jobs in 2008 and 2009). Here’s their graph:

Going from 24% to 38% in 22 years doesn’t mean we’ll pass 50% in another generation. It might be OK for rhetorical purposes to say something like, “at this rate it’ll take 300 years for the U.S. to catch Sweden’s welfare state” — but not OK to say it will happen in that time. If that were true, I could show you this graph and say, “the Earth will be a ball of human flesh expanding at the speed of light in less than 1,000 years!”

Besides projecting from the trend, the other reasonable way to make guesses about the future is to look at young people. For that Liza Mundy reuses a statistic that Time first used in 2010, showing that among those who are single, child free, under 30 and living in metro areas, women have higher earnings than men.

Great, you’re thinking, stay young and single, and don’t have children, and equality is yours!

I do believe our children are the future, but predicting the future from this subset is not a safe bet. The original Time piece is critiqued here and here, although the New York Times hit on this formula for gender equality in 2007 (critiqued here). The basic manipulation here is limiting the comparison to men versus women within a group where women are more likely to have completed college but not yet experienced the wage-diminishing events that now largely begin in the late 20s (marriage, children, and slower earnings growth). It’s an interesting comparison, but shouldn’t be used for projecting the future — or even characterizing the whole present.

Anyway, interesting story.

Last week Andrew, Michael S., Will S., Katrin, and Tom Megginson all brought our attention to some of the racist tweets that appeared after the premiere of The Hunger Games. Apparently some viewers were shocked to find that some of their favorite characters from the books were played by African American actors (and some critics seem to have felt that Jennifer Lawrence didn’t look starved enough for her role). Buzzfeed and Jezebel posted some examples of the response to the African American characters:

In fact, Suzanne Collins did include descriptions that would seem to clue a reader in that they’re not supposed to assume that every character in the book is Caucasian (cropped from Buzzfeed):

But of course, the apparent lack of reading comprehension of many fans of the book is rather beside the point by now. What these reactions indicate is the invisibility of non-White people in pop culture, and the sense of distress, disappointment, and even outrage some can feel when they are expected to accept non-Whites in what they see as “neutral” roles. And, more disturbingly, it illustrates the degree to which the humanity of non-Whites can be erased, and highlights racialized associations. “Some black girl” is, by definition, not an “innocent girl.” It’s funny to say that the death of a character that touched you in the book is less moving if you imagine the character as African American. We’ve seen this type of reaction before, such as when Idris Elba was cast in Thor. Or the equally negative response to the suggestion that Donald Glover, an African American actor, should audition for the starring role in the newest Spider-Man remake, as Lindy West points out at Jezebel: “…it’s a proprietary thing-if Spider-Man is black, then he isn’t ours anymore. He’s theirs.”

I think the best discussion of the implications of the Hunger Games tweets comes from Anna Holmes, whose take was posted by The New Yorker. I’ll leave you with a quote and strongly suggest you go check out the full article:

Hunger Games Tweets—there are now more than two hundred up on the blog—illuminated long-standing racial biases and anxieties. The a-hundred-and-forty-character-long outbursts were microcosms of the ways in which the humanity of minorities is often denied and thwarted, and they underscored how infuriatingly conditional empathy can be…If the stories we tell ourselves about the future, however disturbing, don’t include black people; if readers of “The Hunger Games” are so blind as to skip over the author’s specific details and themes of appearance, race, and class, then what does it say about the stories we tell ourselves regarding the present?

The people over at Sociological Cinema did an interesting experiment, searching Google images for the continents.  Tell us what you see:

“European”:

“North American”:

“South American”:

“African”:

“Asian”:

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Hennessy Youngman is one of things-on-the-internetz that validates the entire enterprise. In the fast and fascinating 10 minute clip here, Youngman traces the history of performance art, linking it to Occupy and our contemporary engagement with the internet. Oh, and totally worth watching to the end.

(Hennessy, if you’re reading, I was the one that tweeted at you to do a video about The Levitated Mass.  Nobody could do it quite like you! PS – whisky is my drink too.)

Also from Hennessy Youngman:

• How to Make an Art
• How to Be a Successful Artist and How to Be a Successful Black Artist

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Sociologists sometimes use the word “overdetermine” to describe the ability of the dominant group to control representations of less-powerful groups.  White people, we might say, overdetermine representations of racial minorities, they exert an out-of-proportion influence.

In this vein, we’ve previously featured objections to simplistic portrayals of the enormous continent of Africa, especially as a place that is primitive and hopelessly burdened by death, disease, poverty, corruption, and other problems.  Chimamanda Adichie, for example, objects to the “single story of Africa” and Binyavanga Wainaina tell us how not to write about Africa.  Elsewhere, we’ve illustrated how the bustling city of Nairobi is portrayed as a savanna with giraffes and elephants.

An organization called Mama Hope, sent in by Jennifer C., seeks to challenge this perception.  They want the world to think of Africa as a place of hope and possibility.  To this end, Mama Hope is producing videos that “…feature the shared traits that make us all human— the dancing, the singing, the laughter…”  They look like this:

The effort reminds me of the “Smiling Indians” and “More Than That” videos, sent in by Katrin and Anna W.  The first addressed the stereotype of the “stoic Indian,” while the second is designed to counterbalance the common portrayal of reservations as miserable places full of one-dimensional hopeless people (something we are certainly sometimes guilty of).

Smiling Indians:

More Than That…:

These videos are examples of the way that the democratizing power of new technologies (both the internet in general and the relatively easy ability to take video and edit) are offering marginalized peoples an opportunity to contest representations overdetermined by dominant groups.

UPDATE: Commenters are pointing out that “overdetermined” is also used to mean determined by many factors.  Mirriam-Webster agrees, although they also include the definition “excessively determined.”  So… I hope I’ve been using the term right!  Thoughts?

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

A while back, we featured a post by Mary Nell Trautner and Erin Hatton about the gap in depictions of men and women on Rolling Stone covers. Their study found that women on the cover are not just sexualized, but are generally hypersexualized, whereas men are generally not sexualized at all, and this gendered trend has grown over time.

An anonymous reader sent in an example that highlights this pattern. The British version of GQ is putting out a comedy issue in April. The issue has two covers, one featuring actress Olivia Wilde (via):

The fully-dressed men are “kings of comedy,” while Wilde is a “fantasy figure.” Notice also that the cover on the right that the four female comedians at the bottom are introduced as “sexy.” While these women may be funny, it’s clearly essential that they be hot while being funny; comedic skills alone just won’t do.

GQ created a trailer featuring some of the comedians in the issue. The video consists of 17 male comedians. One woman does make it into the video; at 0:14, Wilde jiggles her boobs:

Because apparently none of those female comedians are worth including as representatives of comedy in the same manner as the men, but only in an explicitly sexualized manner.