Sociological Images

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

In recent Democratic primaries in Appalachian states, Obama lost 40% of the vote.  The anti-Obama Democrats voted for candidates like “uncommitted” (Kentucky), an unknown lawyer (Arkansas), and a man who is incarcerated in Texas (West Virginia).

Could it be that there’s racism at work in Appalachia?  Or is the anti-Obama vote based entirely on opposition to his policies?

The 2008 Presidential election — Obama v. McCain — offers some hints.  For those with short memories, the Bush legacy — an unpopular war and an economic catastrophe — may have hurt the GOP.  In that election, the country went Democratic.  The Democrats did better than they had in 2004, the Republicans worse.  But not everywhere.  The Times provides this map:

Still, it’s possible that those voters in Appalachia preferred the policies of candidate Kerry to those of candidate Obama.  As Chris Cilizza says in in a Washington Post blog (here), the idea that race had anything to do with this shift is…

…almost entirely unprovable because it relies on assuming knowledge about voter motivations that — without being a mindreader — no one can know.

Cilizza quotes Cornell Belcher, the head of a polling firm with the Monkish name Brilliant Corners:

One man’s racial differences is another man’s cultural differences.

Right.  The folks in Appalachia preferred John Kerry’s culture.

I’m generally cautious about attributing mental characteristics to people based on a single bit of behavior.  But David Weigel, in Slate, goes back to the 2008 Democratic primaries – Obama versus Hillary Clinton.  A CNN exit poll asked voters if race was an important factor in their vote. In West Virginia and Kentucky, about 20% of the voters in the Democratic primary said yes.  Were those admittedly race-conscious voters more anti-Obama than other Democrats?

As Weigel points out, this was before Obama took office, before voters really knew what policies he would propose.  Besides, there wasn’t all that much difference in his policies and those of Hillary Clinton.

Cilizza is right that we can’t read voters’ minds.  But to argue that there was no racial motivation, you have to discount what the voters said and what they did.

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.

We’ve posted a number of times on the use of non-Western locations, and their residents, as background props in ads, catalogs, and fashion spreads, and the examples keep coming. A while back, Rebecca Smith-Mandin sent in this ad for Conrad hotels, in which the implicitly wealthy, White audience is invited to indulge in “the luxury of being yourself,” which includes the ability to have authentic, off-the-beaten-path experiences in far-flung locales, while remaining clearly distinct from them:

Similarly, last year Anna-Sara H. found this image in the German women’s magazine Freundin:

Anna-Sarah’s translation (which she says loses some of the poetic intent of the original):

We are playing mermaid. And wrap ourselves in light-bright outfits now, adorned with large-sized ethnic accessories. The only things missing are an innocent gaze and hair being played with by the wind.

In both cases, we see a very common trend in ads or photo shoots for fashion and luxury services: non-White individuals may be included in the photo shoot, but they are not used to model the use of the product or service itself. As Ashley Mears argues in her ethnography of modeling, Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model, non-White bodies are generally seen as incompatible with the idealized fantasy of inaccessibility and sophistication that is the guiding aesthetic for fashion mag editorials and advertisements for luxury goods. In these images, we see that non-Whites are included in a way that superficially increases diversity in a magazine’s pages, without disrupting the assumption that the imagined consumer — the subject of these images — is White.

Johnny Depp will be playing the character of “Tonto” in the 2013 movie re-make of The Lone Ranger.  Critics of the original series have observed that Tonto, the American Indian sidekick of the White hero, was a negative racial stereotype.  He was subservient to the Ranger, spoke poor English, and seemed generally dumb (his name translates into “stupid” in Spanish).  Depp has insisted that he wants to play a different kind of Tonto and reinvent the characters’ relationship.

So far so bad, as least according to recently released publicity photos revealing Depp’s costume and make up (coverage suggests that Depp himself is designing the character’s appearance).  Thanks to YetAnotherGirl and Dolores R. for sending in the tip.

Depp’s look was inspired by the art of a man named Kirby Sattler.

Sattler is famous for painting images of Native Americans, but has been criticized for stereotypical representations.  “Indian art” is a contentious issue: many non-Indian artists have made careers painting the “noble savage” and the “young girl with wolf.”  According to Native Appropriations, Sattler “…relies heavily on stereotypes of Native people as mystical-connected-to-nature-ancient-spiritual-creatures, with little regard for any type of historical accuracy.”  Sattler himself has written that his paintings come out of his own imagination or, as NA puts it, “he makes these subjects up based on the (heavily stereotyped) images in his own head.”  Here’s a Google image search for the artist’s name:

This, unfortunately, is playing out an all-too-common story.  It goes like this:

1. There are very few roles for non-White characters in Hollywood.
2. When we have a non-White character, a White actor is cast into the role (e.g., The Last Airbender and Iron Eyes Cody, the crying Indian).
3. That actor shows a lack of understanding of the real issues at hand. Depp, for example, has claimed a right to play the role because he has a little bit of Indian in him.  ”Cherokee or maybe Creek,” he says, because he doesn’t actually know.
4. So, the portrayal is consistent with harmful stereotypes.  In this case, when deciding on a costume, Depp doesn’t choose to represent a tribe as they really were (“are” is out of the question), but instead draws on the work of an artist who admits that he makes up an idea of “the Indian” that appeals to him, a White man with no interest in true-to-life portrayals.

So, there you have it.  Again.

For more, see Representations of the “Primitive” Indian and Anachronism and American Indians.

—————————

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

Erin Hatton sent in a 1937 redlining map of Philadelphia, so I decided to update our earlier post on segregation and redlining in the city.

—————

One historical cause of residential segregation was redlining. Lenders would color-code different neighborhoods on residential maps; red was generally the color used to designate a neighborhood as “dangerous,” meaning mortgages would not be approved in those areas, since they were considered to be high-risk areas for mortgage defaults. This was generally a blanket rule: people found themselves unable to get mortgages to buy property in redlined areas, regardless of their income or the value of the particular house they wanted to buy. And a high proportion of Black (and sometimes White immigrant) residents generally meant that a neighborhood would be automatically tagged as a high-risk area.

The University of Pennsylvania Redlining in Philadelphia project provides an example of a map created to guide lending in Philadelphia. The map was created in 1934 by J.M. Brewer, who owned a real estate consulting company and later was chief appraiser for Metropolitan Life Insurance.

This legend was adapted from the original for the U. of Pennsylvania website:

The legend looks like the “colored” areas are coded yellow, but it’s actually red on the map. Brewer created another map in 1935 and helped draw the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) map of Philadelphia in 1937.

Erin Hatton sent a link to that 1937 HOLC map, which reflects the governmental institutionalization of racism, marking some groups as inherently undesirable:

If you go to Redlining Philadelphia and click on areas of the map, it links to the survey sheets used to rate each neighborhood. All include a section on detrimental elements and a demographics breakdown, with areas to note the presence of immigrants, African Americans, poor families, and so on, such as this section of a survey sheet for area 22, giving a security grade of D:

African Americans were not the only group targeted by redlining. For instance, the survey sheet for area 5 mentions the “danger of Jewish encroachment”:

Redlining made it difficult for Blacks (and some White ethnics) to buy homes. Racial discrimination meant Blacks often couldn’t buy homes outside Black neighborhoods, but Black neighborhoods were often redlined by lenders, meaning Blacks couldn’t get mortgages to buy houses inside them, either. As a result, African Americans were disproportionately barred from one of the major avenues to acquiring wealth (building equity through home ownership), leading to increasing racial disparities in wealth and home ownership over time.

Also check out our post on segregated Durham.

Cross-posted at Global Policy TV.

Publicizing the release of the 1940 U.S. Census data, LIFE magazine released photographs of Census enumerators collecting data from household members.  Yep, Census enumerators. For almost 200 years, the U.S. counted people and recorded information about them in person, by sending out a representative of the U.S. government to evaluate them directly.

By 1970, the government was collecting Census data by mail-in survey. The shift to a survey had dramatic effects on at least one Census category: race.

Before the shift, Census enumerators categorized people into racial groups based on their appearance.  They did not ask respondents how they characterized themselves.  Instead, they made a judgment call, drawing on explicit instructions given to the Census takers.

On a mail-in survey, however, the individual self-identified.  They got to tell the government what race they were instead of letting the government decide.  There were at least two striking shifts as a result of this change:

• First, it resulted in a dramatic increase in the Native American population.  Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. Native American population magically grew 110%.  People who had identified as American Indian had apparently been somewhat invisible to the government.
• Second, to the chagrin of the Census Bureau, 80% of Puerto Ricans choose white (only 40% of them had been identified as white in the previous Census).  The government wanted to categorize Puerto Ricans as predominantly black, but the Puerto Rican population saw things differently.

I like this story.  Switching from enumerators to surveys meant literally shifting our definition of what race is from a matter of appearance to a matter of identity.  And it wasn’t a strategic or philosophical decision. Instead, the very demographics of the population underwent a fundamental unsettling because of the logistical difficulties in collecting information from a large number of people.  Nevertheless, this change would have a profound impact on who we think Americans are, what research about race finds, and how we think about race today.

See also the U.S. Census and the Social Construction of Race and Race and Censuses from Around the World. To look at the questionnaires and their instructions for any decade, visit the Minnesota Population Center.  Thanks to Philip Cohen for sending the link.

—————————

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

Anderson Cooper 360 posted a video based on a study they sponsored of kids’ perceptions of race and friendships. The results are not surprising: kids pick up on larger social patterns, such as the fact that the adults around them often have few significant friendships across racial lines, and struggle to make sense of what they see. By age 6 they are highly aware of race and have formed clear ideas about how adults feel about people of other races than their own. Moreover, they’ve internalized cultural messages about race. As the clip shows, the race of the children themselves, as well as the race of children in images they are shown, impacts how they interpret the events in the pictures, with White children attributing more negative behaviors to African Americans in the photos:

Also check out Anderson Cooper’s earlier segments on children’s attitudes about skin color.