Archive: Apr 2014

Or: On Snark and Solutions

Eds note: This is a guest post from Max Fitzpatrick of Central New Mexico Community College and the University of New Mexico.

Recently there has been a lot of righteous finger-wagging at racist comments uttered by older white personalities. When celebrity chef Paula Deene, Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, and rebellious rancher Cliven Bundy spoke bad words about black people, mainstream and social media pounced.

Deene and Sterling are economic elites who have made fortunes employing black labor and selling black culture. It is sadly ironic that they disparage the very group whose alienated labor they exploit and whose culture they have commodified. But the popular criticism of their racist statements has not approached such a systemic analysis—remaining instead at the surface level of the individual. The uproar chastises these people as racist celebrities, when the real danger is that they are authority figures presiding over economically powerful institutions with broad cultural influence. Racism matters most when it is combined with power. But the internet snarkfest has avoided that point almost entirely. more...

So a number of students, media members, and colleagues have been asking this afternoon what I think of NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s lifetime ban of Clipper’s owner Donald Sterling following the release of racist comments apparently directed at his mixed-race mistress. (Silver says the league will also fine Sterling $2.5 million and do “everything in his power” to force Sterling to sell the franchise.) I guess I’m glad that the league came down hard and did so quickly. Sterling’s most recent comments are obviously just the tip of the iceberg—his whole history of racist attitudes and behaviors, and the fact that he had the wealth and power to actually act upon these views reminds of the familiar definition of racism: prejudice + power. I still have no idea how this guy was set to receive a Lifetime Achievement award (was it his second?) from the NAACP in LA.

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Pretense: Dropped.

That’s right, we’re just going with it. I sometimes don’t have time to do the Roundup on Fridays, but I know you, the adoring TSP public, need to know! Hence, most likely the Friday Roundup will continue on Mondays for a bit, but hey, sometimes I’ll mix it up. Isn’t that what good Internetz users do? Wait. I’ve gotta go check with the hip kids…

Here’s what’s happened on TSP in the last week!

Brilliance: Also Dropped.

Features:

“Music and the Quest for a Tribe, with Jenn Lena,” by Sarah Lageson. From rockabilly kids to dubsteppers and punks, finding our musical tribe can be a key part of creating identity. more...

Sometimes, it turns out to be Monday.

But there’s still great stuff to read from last week!

Office Hours:

“Matt Wray on the ‘Suicide Belt’,” with Scott DeMuth. A podcast on the wide swath of the Western U.S. where suicides cluster.

There’s Research on That:

“On Heartbleed and Hackers,” by Evan Stewart. What sociologists know about the subcultures and criminal habitus of the hacker.

Citings & Sightings:

“Young Girls Consider Sexual Violence Normal,” by Kat Albrecht. #EverydaySexism in full effect. more...

Procrastination? No way. When it comes to economics, it’s just that I’ve spent my past few weeks thinking about the topic in sociological rather than personal terms.

It started back around spring break, when a group of political scientists proposed a reading group on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.  The book is a little windy and Piketty may be an economist, but he thinks like a sociologist—not only in taking on the problem of inequality itself but in seeing it as a problem, in understanding its roots in social and political systems, and in using graphs and charts to bring complicated and troubling economic trends to life.

It continued a week or two later when Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff sent us a synopsis of the new edition of their book on corporate diversity (or the lack thereof) in the contemporary United States. I love this long-term, fairly basic  project because so often when we sociologists study social inequality we focus on disadvantage, marginalization and poverty. Zweigenhaft and Domhoff—or, as I like to call them, Richie Z. and the Big B.D.—turn this on its head, tracking the social demographics of the other side of the economic coin, the most privileged of Americans, the corporate elite. We published that just last week as “Trends at the Top: The New CEOs Revisited.”

And, after lecturing on the cultural and political foundations of capitalism last week in my Intro class, I’ve spent the last few days reading Lane Kenworthy’s bold, visionary call for better government involvement in our economy and collective lives, Social Democratic America. The timing isn’t accidental, nor all just about taxes. Kenworthy is going to be here on campus at Minnesota tomorrow, as part of our ongoing Scholars Strategy Network series. It should be good.

Okay, now that I’ve got that off my chest, I’ve got a little paperwork to prepare for tomorrow’s mail.

A tag-cloud for this week’s roundup might be astounding and jarring, since it runs the gamut from candy and cohabitation to affirmative action revision, diversity trends among the powerful, community health centers in Texas, and 20 years of remembrance in Rwanda. Herewith: what we’ve been up to this week.

Features:

“Trends at the Top: The New CEOs Revisited,” by Richie Zweigenhaft and Bill Domhoff. A look at who’s sitting in the corner office—or just outside it, nose pressed to the glass—reveals a new trend in diversity.

“How Recent Immigration Complicates Our Racial Justice Policies,” by Asad L. Asad. Should affirmative action be reformed to include newer, but still marginalized, groups within the U.S.?

Office Hours:

“Samira Kawash on Candy,” with Kyle Green. The self-proclaimed @candyprofessor joins us for a look at the rise and fall and rise and fall—oh god, is this a sugar high?—of candy’s rep in American culture. more...

Well, we’re pretty sure you can, too—no dance-offs required. Still, there are some guidelines that will help you in pitching an article idea and getting from proposal to finished product. We work hard to make sure that this is a rewarding, relatively painless process in which your words get the special treatment from our editorial staff and your graphics get spiffed up by our excellent graduate student Suzy McElrath. Here’s how to get started:

1. TSP is not a typical journal. Broadly, we want to publish big picture articles that can provide basic data and information missing from public debates, supply context to the news, or add sociological insights to the general public.
2. Jargon lover? Strip it out to the extent that you can. Again, we have an enormous and lively audience of readers, and there’s no way all million of them are sociologists. They don’t speak academic-ese, so you’ll have to try to drop it. When it’s useful, use the terminology but add a parenthetical that explains it informally.
3. Now, if you’re still feeling excited and want to get a little feedback before diving in to a full-length draft, send us the following:

• Your hook. What’s the intriguing first sentence? What’s the five-word title of true interest? We prefer titles without colons or question marks, so try to go for interest over explanation in your title. Let the paper do that work.
• Your first paragraph; we’d like an idea of what your style is and where you’re going with the piece.
• The overall point. What do you want readers to take away from the piece?
• Your recommended readings. We’d like to see 4-6 recommended readings that will help the lay reader who is interested in learning more about your topic. If it’s not behind a paywall, awesome! Eventually, we would also like a descriptive sentence that explains why each reading is particularly useful or ground-breaking.

Now you’re ready! Get that sociological imagination in gear, because open-access AND the chance to make it into a print volume is just too cool to pass up.

letta@thesocietypages.org
hartm021@umn.edu
uggen001@umn.edu

What’s up with what’s up on The Society Pages this week:

Features:

“Health, Science, and Shared Disparities with Brian Southwell,” by Sarah Lageson. Social networks may be great for getting the word out, but that’s highly dependent on the network. more...