Sociological Images

Last week, the Census Bureau announced that as of July 1, 2011, for the first time the majority (50.4%) of babies under age 1 in the U.S. were not non-Hispanic Whites. Animal New York posted a video by Jay Smooth discussing the reactions to and implications of this news:

You can see the NYT article Jay Smooth parodies here, but note that the graph is mislabeled. The line labeled “White” actually only represents the data for non-Hispanic Whites, while the line labeled “Non-White” includes births to White Hispanics, so the terminology they used doesn’t accurately reflect what the graph illustrates.

Race, sex, religion, color, national origin, age, disability, and veteran status are all what are called protected classes under federal law — characteristics that cannot be used as the basis for discrimination in hiring, housing, or other arenas. There are loopholes, however; one is that it is acceptable to discriminate based on a protected characteristic if you can show that it is “bona fide occupational qualification” (BFOQ). So, for instance, if you can show that being female is a legitimate requirement for being able to perform a particular job, you can refuse to hire men. Hooters used the BFOQ argument when they were sued for sex discrimination because they would not hire men as servers.

The exceptions are race and color, which are not legally seen as ever being legitimate qualifications for doing a job. As the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission website states, “Nor may race or color ever be a bona fide occupational qualification under Title VII.” That is, there is absolutely no good reason that being of one race or another would ever be a legal basis for hiring.

And yet, there’s still at least one arena where race is blatantly and openly used as a basis for hiring: Hollywood casting. Back in 2006, Russell Robinson, a faculty member at the UCLA School of Law, looked at the sex and race/ethnicity characteristics specified in “breakdowns” — the summaries of characteristics presented in casting announcements. As Robinson explains in the article “Casting and Caste-ing: Reconciling Artistic Freedom and Antidiscrimination Norms,” his sample certainly doesn’t include all roles in the process of being cast during that period. Roles aimed at big stars who don’t go through the typical audition process may never be released as a breakdown, since there’s no intent to recruit for the role. But

Robinson’s team looked at all breakdowns for feature films released between June 1 and August 31, 2006, excluding calls for extras and stunt people. As they reported in the research brief “Hollywood’s Race/Ethnicity and Gender-Based Casting: Prospects for a Title VII Lawsuit,” the vast majority of the breakdowns explicitly state the race of the character, with only 8.5% of roles open to any race/ethnicity:

Notice that African Americans and Latinos are particularly under-represented compared to their proportion of the total U.S. population. And while 22.5% of breakdowns specifically said the character should be White, almost half included language that designated the role as implicitly White — for instance, including only White actors in a list of prototypes for the role. In fact, interviews with casting directors indicate that roles are presumed to be White unless the breakdown specifically says otherwise.

Almost all breakdowns specified the sex of the character; 59% of the breakdowns specified the role was for a man, while 35% of roles were for women.

Robinson also analyzed the cast of 171 films released in 2005 that made at least $1 million. The majority of all roles were reserved for men. An overwhelming 73% of leads were men, and even supporting roles were predominantly for men:

Of the leads in those films, 81.9% were White non-Hispanic:

Robinson’s work shows that Hollywood still explicitly uses protected classes in hiring decisions, including race/color, which have been excluded from the BFOQ loophole. For more on this, see our posts on race and roles in recent trailers, casting Whites in Asian roles, Hollywood’s discomfort with Asian lead roles, gendered positioning in promotional posters, race and representation in Hollywood, the Smurfette Principle in movies, who goes to see movies, anyway?, Anita Sarkeesian on male-centric plots, and the lack ofra African Americans on Friends.

Thanks to Dolores R. for the tip about Robinson’s study, which she originally saw at Racialicious.

The U.S. Census Bureau has started releasing data from the 2010 Census. This map shows the change in the racial/ethnic minority (i.e., anything other than non-Hispanic White) population over the last decade:

Legend:

They released a report, An Overview: Race and Hispanic Origin in the 2010 Census (available here), which includes data on those who reported more than one race. Among those who reported more than one race, the vast majority listed two. Here are the most commonly reported combinations:

AIAN = American Indian/Alaska Native, NHPI = Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and SOR = some other race.

Laura E. pointed out that New Geography posted some maps based on 2010 Census data. Here’s the Hispanic population as a percent of the total population, by county (notice that the legend need to be multiplied by 100 to get the percent):

The African American population (alone or in combination with another race, and again, multiply by 100):

Jamie Keiles, of  the Seventeen Magazine Project and Teenagerie, wondered how racially representative Seventeen was compared to the U.S. population.  So she offered some data based on the May 2010 issue.  Her methods:

There are 332 faces in this month’s issue of Seventeen. I counted a face as a head with at least one visible eye. That is, backs of heads and disembodied mouths or eyes were not included in my data. I researched the races of the models and celebrities that I could identify. Those whose race I could not determine with reasonable certainty I’ve excluded from my data, making for 319 surveyed faces.

Different countries formalize different racial categories.  Below are examples of the ”race” questions on the Censuses of 9 different countries.   They illustrate just how diverse ideas about race are and challenge the notion that there is one “correct” question or set of questions.

The categories in the drop down menu include:

White
Chinese
South Asian
Black Filipino
Latin American
Southeast Asian
Arab
West Asian
Japanese
Korean
Other

The categories in the drop down menu include:

White
Black, African Am., or Negro
American Indian or Alaska Native
Asian Indian
Chinese
Filipino
Japanese
Korean
Vietnamese
Other Asian
Native Hawaiian
Guamanian or Chamorro
Samoan
Other Pacific Islander
Some other race

These images were borrowed from an American Anthropological Association website on race.

Social and biological scientists agree that race and ethicity are social constructions, not biological categories.  The U.S. government, nonetheless, has an official position on what categories are “real.”  You can find them on the U.S. Census (source):

Alvaro V. asked us to talk a little bit about the Census.  So, here are some highlights from the hour-long lecture I give in my Race and Ethnicity course.

In the year of the first Census, 1790, the race question looked very different:

Free white males
Free white females
All other free persons (included Native Americans who paid taxes and free blacks)
And slaves

By 1870 slavery is illegal and the government was concerned with keeping track of two new kinds of people: “mulattos” (or people with both black and white ancestors) and Indians:

White
Black
Mulatto
Indian (Native Americans)

Between 1850 and 1870 6.5 million Europeans had immigrated and 60,000 Chinese.  Chinese and Japanese were added for the 1880 Census.

By 1890, the U.S. government with obsessed with race-mixing.  The race question looked like this:

White
Black (3/4^th or more “black blood”)
Mulatto (3/8^th to 5/8^th “black blood”)
Quadroons (1/4^th “black blood”)
Octoroons (1/8^th or any trace of “black blood”)
Indian
Chinese
Japanese

This year was the only year to include such fine-tuned categories, however, because it turned out it wasn’t easy to figure out how to categorize people.

In the next 50 years, the government added and deleted racial categories. There were 10 in 1930 (including “Mexican” and “Hindu”) and 11 in 1940 (introducing “Hawaiian” and “Part Hawaiian”).  In 1970, they added the “origin of descent” question that we still see today.  So people are first asked whether they are “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” and then asked to choose a race. 

You might immediately think, “But what do these words even mean?”  And you’d be right to ask.  “Spanish” refers to Spain; “Latino” refers to Latin America; and “Hispanic” is a totally made up word that was originally designed to mean “people who speak Spanish.” 

Part of the reason we have the “Hispanic” ethnicity question is because Mexican Americans fought for it.  They thought it would be advantageous to be categorized as “white” and, so, they fought for an ethnicity category instead of a race category (see Foley, “Becoming Hispanic”).

Funny story:  The U.S. once included “South American” as a category in the “origin of descent” question.  That year, over a million residents southern U.S. states, like Alabama and Mississippi checked that box.

Three recent changes and proposed changes:

1. 2000 was the first year that respondents were allowed to choose more than one race (which, paradoxically, both undermines and reifies racial and ethnic categories).

2. Native Hawaiians have been agitating to be considered Native Americans in order to get access to the rights and resources that the U.S. government has promised Native Americans on the mainland. The government thus far has said “no.”

3. Whether or not Arab American should be considered a unique race or an ethnicity is also being discussed. Currently, they are instructed to choose “white” “non-hispanic.”

The changing categories in the U.S. Census show us that racial and ethnic categories are political categories. They are chosen by government officials who are responding not to biological realities, but to immigration, war, prejudice, and social movements.

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For more on the social construction of race, start with this simple lesson, then see these great posts: black and white twins! wha’!?, Obama looks just like his white grandfather, judging racial phenotypes in China, and figuring out “Creole”.

The Original Creole Orchestra.

If we go by Wikipedia, the term refers to Louisiana-born people with a mixed racial background (including French, Black, and American Indian).  New Orleans is a tourist draw, in part, because of a claim to authentic creole food, culture, and people.  The Laura Plantation outside of New Orleans (discussed previously), for example, proudly claims itself to be a creole plantation.

But creole, like all other racial and ethnic designations, is a social construction.

In his book, Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy, Kevin Fox Gotham explains that originally, and as late as the late 1800s, the term meant “indigenous to Louisiana.”  It was a geographic label and no more.

But, during the early 1900s, the city of New Orleans racialized the term.  In order to bring in more tourists, they needed to whiten the city.  White city elites, in search of white travel dollars, needed to convince tourists that New Orleans was a safe and proper destination.  Creole, then, was re-cast as a white identity and mixed-race and black people were excluded from inclusion in the category.

The current definition of creole as mixed race, that you may be familiar with today, is actually a rather recent development.  The push to re-define the term to be more inclusive of non-whites began in the 1960s, but didn’t really take  hold until the 1990s.  Today, still racialized, the term now capitalizes on the romantic notions of multiculturalism that pervade New Orleans tourism advertising: from the New Orleans Multicultural Tourism Network, to this image from a New Orleans travel website…

… to this portion of an essay from another travel website:

The term continues to be contested. For example, this website claims that it carries cultural and not racial meaning):

This book seems to define creole as free people of color (and their descendants) in Louisiana:

Whereas this food website identifies creole as a mix of French, Spanish, African, Native American, Chinese, Russian, German, and Italian:

In short, “creole” has gone through three different iterations in its short history in the U.S., revealing that the term, like other racial and ethnic terms, is an empty signifier that can be defined and re-defined according to political and economic need. No doubt, the meaning of creole will continue to evolve.

For more posts on the social construction of race and ethnicity, see here, here, and here.