Sociological Images

Cross-posted at Ms.

Abby F. and an anonymous reader sent in an Acuvue contact lens commercial aimed at teens that reinforces both gender and racial stereotypes. The teens look forward to their futures. For the boys, these involve future career success — notice the African American teen dreams of being a famous athlete, while the White boy’s future involves moving up the corporate career ladder. And what does the girl’s life hold? A boy who currently ignores her will want to dance with her:

As the submitters said, the boys are future role models and leaders, while the height of the girl’s future is that she gets to be desired.

UPDATE: James McRitchie, who posts at Corporate Governance, linked to our post last week and has spoken to someone in the PR department at Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Acuvue. The company has since pulled this particular ad, and provided this explanation, which James posted:

The Acuvue Brand Contact Lenses 1-Day campaign was designed to portray defining moments in teens’ lives that often involve the desire to wear contact lenses rather than glasses, such as when playing sports, in social situations, and at life events (i.e., moving to a new school).  As the campaign evolved, we continued to ask teens and their parents to share their thoughts about how wearing contact lenses could play a role in helping teens achieve their dreams.  We received thousands of responses that helped us add new ideas to the campaign.

We recently received feedback about one ad in the campaign that regrettably appeared to reinforce stereotypes.  While this was clearly not our intent, we appreciate consumer feedback and have removed this ad.  We are currently reassessing elements of this campaign so that we can continue to share how contact lenses can play a role helping teens’ realize their hopes and aspirations.

I think James makes a very good point in his post as well:

I’m sure kids have all kinds of dreams that play into society’s stereotypes. Many little girls love Barbies and dream of being a princess. Many young black boys hope to be NBA stars. How does J&J reflect the dreams of its customers while ensuring they don’t reinforce stereotyping?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these representations in and of themselves, if they existed among a diverse array images of other dreams boys and girls of all races should aspire to. Unfortunately, however, they don’t exist in a vacuum; they appeared in a cultural context in which young women are told, via a variety of messages that they encounter over and over again, that their primary concern should be their attractiveness to boys and where African American teens often find themselves valued for their athletic ability more than their academic successes. When you live in a society with gender and racial inequality, sometimes messages intersect with existing stereotypes in ways that reinforce negative messages just because of their pervasiveness; figuring out how to negotiate such potential problems is an ongoing challenge for all of us concerned about racial and gender representation.

A couple of years ago I posted a segment from the PBS series Faces of America focusing on the legal efforts by Syrian immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s to be officially recognized as White (and thus eligible for naturalized citizenship). It nicely illustrates the social construction of race and ethnicity, and the way  power struggles are embedded in the categories we recognize and who is assigned to each one.

In Not Quite White: Arabs, Slavs, and the Contours of Contested Whiteness, directors Jamil Khoury and Stephen Combs integrated scenes from Khoury’s play WASP: White Arab Slovak Pole and interviews with scholars from the Arab American and Polish American communities to “reflect upon contested and probationary categories of whiteness and the use of anti-Black racism as a ‘whitening’ dye.”

Thanks to Katrin for the link!

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow, I thought I’d re-post this one from 2010…

Some recent ads making fun of redheads has brought gingerism — or hateful attitudes and behavior towards people with red hair, light skin, and freckles — into the news lately.

It appears to be an ongoing form of discrimination, especially in Britain.  Men and boys appear to be more frequent targets than women and girls, who at least are sometimes seen as uniquely beautiful.  A recent series of verbal and physical attacks  is nicely documented at Wikipedia.  They include a stabbing, a family who has had to move twice after their children were bullied, a woman who won a sexual harassment suit after being targeted for her red hair, and a boy who committed suicide after being teased relentlessly.

The prejudice may be related to the long-standing antagonism between Britain and Ireland; discrimination against the Irish by the British crossed the Atlantic with early Americans.  As late as the 1800s the Irish were demeaned, negatively stereotyped, and compared with apes in the United States.

Katrin brought our attention to these three examples.  An ad for Tesco:

An ad for an energy company, npower:

This latter ad generated a handful of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.  The Authority declared that the humor was unlikely to cause widespread offense (BBC).  Tesco voluntarily withdrew their ad after complaints.

Katrin also sent in M.I.A.’s video for the song “Born Free.” It was pulled from YouTube for excessive violence and inappropriate content. Among other themes, it shows red-headed, freckled adolescents being rounded up by the police (this becomes clear at about 2:45), taken out to a deserted area, shot at or bombed, and physically attacked. The video is supposed to highlight ethnic cleansing, though a number of critics argue the gratuitous violence overshadows any political point. It’s about 10 minutes long, but you don’t have to watch the whole thing to get the idea:

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

Trudi Abel, who directs the Digital Durham Project at Duke University, sent in a map she thought we might like to post. Created by the Department of Public works in Durham, NC, in 1937, the map illustrates the legal and taken-for-granted racial segregation of the time. The map indicates which parks and residential areas were for Whites and which for African Americans:

The map:

Obviously you can’t see much, other than a general idea of which parts of town each race lived in. Go to the Digital Durham website and click on the map for a version that lets you zoom in to read all the details.

You might also want to check out our posts on a 1934 redlining map of Philadelphia and 2010 Census data on segregation.

This Sunday is the 2012 Oscars ceremony. The Oscars are awarded based on the votes of nearly 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; however, the Academy keeps the identities of the voting members secret, so there’s little knowledge of who, exactly, determines the recipients of Oscars, prestigious awards within the industry that can increase interest in a film, increase job opportunities, and generally raise the profile of winners.

Sangyoub Park sent in a link to an article at the L.A. Times story about Academy voters. Times reporters were able to verify the identity of 89% of current voters, and the paper provided this breakdown of their demographics; as it turns out, those deciding who wins an Oscar are overwhelmingly White non-Hispanic and male:

Within some categories of voting members, Whites are even more dominant; they make up 98% of writers and executives. Voters are also disproportionately older; the median age is 62, and the Times reports that only 14% were under age 50.

As the Times story illustrates, many inside and outside of the film industry believe the make-up of Oscar voters influences which movies, actors, and directors have a serious chance of winning, with those that appeal to middle-aged White men inherently advantaged because of the lack of diversity among voters.

Sangyoub Park sent us a link to a post by the Brookings Institution about the changing racial/ethnic demographics of the 100 largest metro areas in the U.S. While White non-Hispanics still make up the majority in those areas (at 57% of the population), the minority population has grown rapidly in a number of cities; 22 of the top 100 metro areas are now majority-minority:

A detailed map of the majority-minority metro areas, with the largest racial/ethnic minority group in each (and the White non-Hispanic population in parentheses):

This demographic shift in metro areas should accelerate, given the racial/ethnic makeup of the population of children under age 1:

The Washington Post has an interactive map that lets you select an area and get detailed demographic information at the Census tract level (racial/ethnic makeup, household type, etc.) from 1990 to 2010.

Of course, as Sangyoub points out, being in the numerical majority doesn’t imply that a group no longer meets the definition of a minority group in a social sense. In many areas, racial/ethnic minorities continue to have less access to or control over economic resources, social prestige, and political power than do non-Hispanic Whites. Accumulated advantages do not get automatically redistributed when demographics change.

The phrase “Magical Negro” refers to the phenomenon in which a white character in a tv show or movie finds enlightenment through the wisdom of a Black character.  It is widely considered an offensive trope in which Black people — imbued with special spiritual, religious, or primitive powers of insight, often ostensibly due to some disadvantage like poverty — serve only to support a white person’s transformation.  The white person, and their ultimate redemption, remains the central story.

I couldn’t help but think of this when I watched the trailer for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, sent in by Katrin.  In this trailer, the Magical Negro isn’t a Black person; it’s not even a person.  It’s the entire country of India.

See if you see what I saw:

For examples of the Magical Negro, see our post on The Secret Life of Bees, the Magical Negro at Ikea, and the Magical Aboriginal Child in an Australian tourism ad.

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