Sociological Images

In analysis of Presidential pardons during the George W. Bush administration, ProPublica has found that whites were four times as likely as non-whites to be granted a pardon.  Pardons were granted to 12% of whites, 10% of Hispanics and Asians, and zero percent of Blacks and Native Americans. The disparity remained even when investigators controlled for type of crime.

ProPublica explains:

…President George W. Bush decided at the beginning of his first term to rely almost entirely on the recommendations made by career lawyers in the Office of the Pardon Attorney.

The office was given wide latitude to apply subjective standards, including judgments about the “attitude” and the marital and financial stability of applicants…

Bush followed the recommendations of the pardons office in nearly every case… President Obama — who has pardoned 22 people, two of them minorities — has continued the practice of relying on the pardons office.

Sometimes disparate decisions in pardon cases were eyebrow raising:

An African American woman from Little Rock, fined $3,000 for underreporting her income in 1989, was denied a pardon; a white woman from the same city who faked multiple tax returns to collect more than $25,000 in refunds got one. A black, first-time drug offender — a Vietnam veteran who got probation in South Carolina for possessing 1.1 grams of crack – was turned down. A white, fourth-time drug offender who did prison time for selling 1,050 grams of methamphetamine was pardoned.

ProPublica traces the disparity to age, leniency given to people who are seen as “upstanding” members of society (e.g., they’re married, have little debt), the influence of money and politics (letters from Congresspersons and donations to lawmakers by convicts’ spouses), and simple prejudice.  Nevertheless:

When the effects of those factors and others were controlled using statistical methods, however, race emerged as one of the strongest predictors of a pardon.

The New York Times recently reported the results of a study of racial disparities in bankruptcy filings. When filing personal bankruptcy, most people have two options: Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. With Chapter 7, you have to turn over all non-exempt assets, which will be used to pay off as much of your debts as possible; you’re then free from any further obligation regarding the debts included in the case. Under Chapter 13, on the other hand, you have to continue to try to pay your debts for 3-5 years. There are reasons a person might sometimes prefer Chapter 13 (especially if they have particularly valuable assets they do not want to turn over), but generally it’s more expensive to file for and, obviously, provides less financial relief from debts. According to Braucher et al. (2012), the authors of the study, overall about 30% of personal bankruptcies are filed under Chapter 13.

But in their study, Braucher et al. found that African Americans were significantly more likely to file for Chapter 13, and more likely than they would expect when controlling for things that might make Chapter 13 more attractive. As this NYT chart shows, over half of African Americans file under Chapter 13, compared to just over a quarter for Whites and even less for other groups:

Rates of Chapter 13 filings vary quite a bit across different judicial districts, but African Americans consistently filed Chapter 13 at a higher rate than other groups, regardless of what the overall rate was:

Braucher et al. suggest that attorneys play a key role here. They sent surveys to 596 randomly-selected attorneys who represent individuals filing for bankruptcy, providing information about a married couple considering bankruptcy; 262 of the attorneys responded. When the potential filers gave the names Reggie and Latisha, attorneys were more likely to recommend Chapter 13 than when they gave the names Todd and Allison, suggesting that attorneys may play a role in tracking clients toward different bankruptcy options based on race.

The result is that African Americans are, overall, more likely to use the version of personal bankruptcy that costs them more and requires them to continue struggling to pay their debts for several more years, reducing the immediate relief most people assume bankruptcy provides.

Source: Braucher, Jean, Dov Cohen, and Robert Lawless. 2012. Race, Attorney Influence, and Bankruptcy Chapter Choice. Forthcoming in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Available free online here.

In a previous post, Lisa referred to Peggy McIntosh’s famous essay on White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. One of the many privileges that McIntosh identifies is that, as she writes, “I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.”

This statement resounded when I saw the images below from a 2011 Scottish Woolovers catalogue. Further, I was reminded that it’s not only a matter of whether we see people of our race widely represented, but also of how the media makes these portrayals.

The white woman in this ad is modelling a cardigan sweater. Meanwhile, the woman of colour in the photo is…well, that’s an interesting question. Nothing that she is wearing is for sale; she’s just there, wearing clothing that has no relevance to the advertisement.

Normally, you’d expect that a woman in a fashion catalogue would be there to model clothing, but in this case, the woman of colour doesn’t have such a role. She is a prop for the white model, there to frolic and help illustrate the benevolent and fun-loving nature of the fashionable white model, clad in an apron that marks her as potentially a servant of some kind. She’s not there to directly market clothes to a white target market.

SocImages has addressed other examples of privileged representations of white women in catalogues; a discussion of a Punjammies catalogue highlighted the exclusive reliance on white women as models, while portraying women of colour as labourers and beneficiaries of the good will of the white, female target market. In a similar vein, we also had a post illustrating a comparable trend in the representation (and lack thereof) of people of colour in films. It is a function of our unearned privilege that, when those of us in a privileged position come across racialized images and representations like these, it is all too easy to miss or ignore their problematic nature.

Thanks to Flickr user Wishiwerebaking for sending us these images.

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Hayley Price has a background in sociology, international development studies, and education. She recently completed her Masters degree in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

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Originally posted at Religion Bulletin.

Now that Denver has fallen out of the playoffs, I want to write an homage to a figure I, like so many others, find fascinating: Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow.  Carter Turner over at Religion Dispatches has suggested that the “real reason” for “Tebow fever” was the theological investment that atheists and theists alike had in watching Tebow succeed or fail.  I think that’s absolutely right: Tebow’s body became a sort of theological battleground for broader religious and cultural forces.  But I also think there’s an even more elementary reason, one that becomes apparent when we think about Tebow not just as a proxy for doctrine, but as a particular religious body.

Feminism, poststructuralism, and decolonial studies in the humanities have made scholars more and more aware of the importance of bodies.  Whereas the logocentric western tradition focused on words — the creations of the intellect — 21st century global scholarship sees words as a secondary function of embodiment.  In religious studies, scholars such as Talal Asad, Kimerer LaMothe, and Saba Mahmood have called on us to explore how bodies, through practices, are constituted as religious subjects.  Bodies become religious through performance, through embodied exercises that, through repetition, inscribe us with the modalities of a religious “ethics.”  But embodiment is more than just practices.  I here want to suggest a different direction for understanding the relationship between religion and bodies.

Here’s something I often ask my students to do: Look at this body.  How does religion converge on this body?

Let me tell you what I see, using my own bodily practice, martial arts, as a lens.  This is a body I would not want to fight.  It’s not just about dense muscle lines, the sheer evidence of physical strength, reach, and an intricately arranged posing that suggests bodily self-awareness and sharp muscular intelligence.  This body is compelling.  It draws the eye.  You want to watch it.

This is more dangerous than physical strength — the kind of strength you build on the bench press or the curl.  It’s a “presence.”  The kind of strength that stops bodies in their tracks without landing a punch.  And the kind of strength that draws allies, that rewrites the broader bodily landscape on which conflict happens.  This body has what we might call, following Max Weber, “charisma.”

This way of looking at bodies helps us think again about a fact that has become dramatically apparent in the past two years: Tebow is fascinating.  People love to talk about him, love to love him, love to hate him.  Tebow fever didn’t just happen.  It was and is something is felt–viscerally–by millions of bodies around the world.

On the one hand, Tebow is a leader–an emblematic body — for millions of Christians who see in him a dignification of their faith.  Faith here is not an abstract personal belief.  It is an identity formation, an Us.  Tebow is the champion of a certain Christian Us, an embodiment of values and a leader who rallies the believers.  As a champion, he doesn’t win through debate, he wins through charisma.  He is a hero, resplendent on the battlefield.

At the same time, Tebow is fascinating to other groups — to other bodies — that are frustrated with or skeptical of the Christian Us — and particularly the Christian Us that has managed to insinuate itself into the corridors of power in America through one (but only one) of its instantiations, the Christian Right, a major driver in contemporary Republican politics.  These bodies, as Turner pointed out, are interested in Tebow’s failure, the fall of the enemy’s flag.

My argument, however, is this: this profile of the divergent responses to the nexus of religious and cultural forces that converge on the image of Tebow’s body would be irrelevant and unread if Tim Tebow were a schlub–a homely, uninteresting, modest body, the kind of body that bus drivers drive past at the bus stop.  It is also an open question to me how we would be responding to Tebow if he were not a white body.  Those who want to challenge Tebow, to fight Tebow, to talk about Tebow are drawn in by the seductions of this image–the power of Tebow’s body — no less than those who are so ardently admiring of Tebow that criticism of him becomes a political rallying cry.  Tebow’s body is a magnetic body, a charismatic body.  It bends other bodies towards it–in both positive and critical ways.

This, then, is one of the main ways that religion happens — how identities, beliefs, and affects form and fuse: not through the advance of doctrine, but through the magnetism of religious bodies.

Thanks to William Eric Pedersen for talking this post out with me and pointing me in the direction of the unanswered question on race.

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Donovan O. Schaefer is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His interests involve the relationship between religion, bodies, and emotion. In his dissertation, Animal Religion: Evolution, Affect, and Radical Embodiment, he argues for understanding religion in terms of a set of affective bodily practices that are shared by human and non-human animals.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

In “Portraying Tiger Woods: Characterizations of a ‘Black’ Athlete in a ‘White’ Sport,” Andrew Billings discusses how race plays a role in sports commentators’ evaluations of golfers, and particularly in how they describe and comment upon Tiger Woods. A content analysis of 37.5 hours of coverage of golf tournaments between April and August of 2001 by CBS, NBC, and ABC, during which 2,989 evaluative comments occurred, revealed patterns in how sportscasters described Tiger Woods compared to other golfers. When he was losing, Woods was more likely than other golfers in the same position to be described as lacking composure or concentration, of “self-destructing,” and of lacking control over his emotions. Overall, Billings found that the types of language other students have found to be applied to Black athletes were applied to Woods only when he was losing. When he was doing well, commentators did not significantly stereotype Woods.

The study is interesting in light of a video sent in by Jason Eastman. This Wall Street Journal segment discusses the results of a study that investigated how media depictions of college quarterbacks’ performances. A recent study published in the Academic of Management Journal found that media coverage rarely gave African American quarterbacks credit for leadership. When their teams do well, it is because of their natural athletic talent; when they do poorly, it is lack of leadership — blame not equally placed on White quarterbacks when their teams do poorly. So Blacks are blamed more for losses but get less credit for successes — an outcome of stereotyping that has disturbing implications for hiring and promotion in the workplace (sorry for the ad):

Full cites:

Andrew Billings. 2003. “Portraying Tiger Woods: Characterizations of a ‘Black’ Athlete in a ‘White’ Sport.” The Howard Journal of Communications 14: 29-37.

Andrew Carton and Ashleigh Shelby Rosette. 2011. “Explaining Bias against Black Leaders: Integrating Theory on Information Processing and Goal-Based Stereotyping.” Academy of Management Journal 54: 1141-1158.

Since outright hatred and discrimination of people because of their race is no longer socially acceptable in our post Civil-Rights era, many argue racism no longer exists.  But sociologists suggest that racism simply changed, becoming more implicit and indirect.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that the new racism entails individuals saying and doing things that perpetuate racial stereotypes and inequalities, but they do so in such a way that the offender is able to deny being explicitly racist.  One of the many types of new racist strategies Bonilla-Silva highlights is the use of racially charged code speak, or using indirect racial rhetoric and semantic moves to express an ideology that serves to reinforce white dominance over minorities.

The Daily Show’s Larry Wilmore illustrates the code speak implicit in presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that we combat poverty by hiring poor children to clean the restrooms at their schools.  In the clip below, Wilmore notes that “it’s 2011, and you can’t just call Black people lazy,” and then points out Gingrich’s racial code speak.  He notes Gingrich’s statement about “neighborhoods where they may not have that experience [of working]” is “code for inner-city, which is code for urban, which is code for Black.”   Gingrich’s statement about poor children having “no habit of showing up [to work] on Monday” is “code for shiftless, which is code for lazy, which is code for black.” Wilmore then plays more of Gingrich’s speech where the presidential candidate cites statistics about Black unemployment, thereby making his implicit racial assumptions explicit:

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The clip also points out how racial ideology engages very different explanations for the causes of poverty depending on the race of those affected.  Wilmore notes, “when Black people are poor it’s their fault because they are lazy and on welfare, but down in poor Appalachia it’s not your fault; it’s China’s fault, or India’s fault, or all the money we’re spending on Black people on welfare.”

When John Stewart asks why this is important, Wilmore points out how the causes of poverty “matter to the solutions,” thereby pointing out Gingrich’s implicit prejudices of nonwhite inferiority with his proposal that Black poverty could be eliminated by hiring children to clean toilets (and Gingrich reaffirmed his support for this idea at a GOP primary debate last week, to wild crowd applause). Similarly, Rick Santorum is now defending himself after saying, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” ignoring the fact that most recipients of government aid are White and the vast majority of Blacks are employed and do pay taxes to support the social safety net citizens of all races use. In both cases, the message is clear: African Americans are deficient, with no work ethic, and the solution to poverty is entirely at the individual level, with no need for larger structural changes.

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Jason Eastman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Coastal Carolina University who researches how culture and identity influence social inequalities.

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Another example, forwarded by Aaron P., of the trivialization of holidays meant to celebrate the triumphs of the marginalized: