So, I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the controversy that has emerged over Newt Gingrich’s repeated use of the line that Barack Obama is the “greatest food stamp President.” If not, the main question is whether the phrase is racially motivated—that is, if it is a racial code designed to play upon white fears and resentments about African Americans in general and the President in particular. (Clearly, some of the invective hurled against the President has to do with his social difference—not just his race, but the fact that he is believed (incorrectly of course) to be an immigrant, a Muslim, and an egghead, as Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson report in their new book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservativism.) You can read more about the current kerfuffle is a Sociological Images post by guest blogger Jason Eastman called “Newt Racism.”

Still, as this is something you’re likely to hear more about in the wake of Gringrich’s victory in the South Carolina primaries this weekend and it’s something that I do research on, it seems like a good time for me to bring a little social scientific research and perspective to bear.

First, some basic facts about food stamps and welfare from this weekend’s Chicago Tribune. One: more whites than blacks receive food stamps (34 percent white, 22 percent black, and 16 percent Hispanic, according to the Agriculture Department). Two: the racial breakdown for public assistance more generally is about 1/3 African American, 1/3 white, and 1/3 Hispanic. Three: funding for foodstamps actually started to rise under George W. Bush’s presidency, though it has increased under the current administration. And four: the percent of Americans receiving public assistance has declined dramatically since the welfare reform act of 1996 which imposed strict work requirements and a 5 year lifetime cap on benefits.

What the Tribune story didn’t say that is crucial is all of this is that welfare has long been and continues to be associated with race and with African Americans in particular. See Martin Gilens’s book Why Americans Hate Welfare. This perception is actually a key piece of information in itself—perhaps the key fact about welfare. It is, in short, racially coded.  So even if Gingrich doesn’t intend it, this is how such references are likely to be understood by the majority of Americans. It may not be the only reason Gingrich continues to reference and discuss food stamps, but it is obviously part of the conversation.

The real question, of course, is not intent but effect. Do such racially coded messages matter? Do they impact politics, policies, and campaigns? According to Tali Mendelberg’s The Race Card, one of the most meticulously researched studies of the phenomenon, they do. Racially coded words and phrases play upon white fears about and resentment against African Americans in order to implicitly or explicity shift public opinion on and support for various candidates, campaigns, regimes, and policy initiatives.

Mendelberg, whose initial research was occasioned by the Willie Horton ad that appeared during the 1988 Presidential campaign, based her work on a wide variety of techniques and data including simulated television news experiments, national surveys, content analyses of campaign coverage, and archival cases. Key to Mendelberg’s explanation for the phenomenon is that, in a post-civil rights era there are strong norms (of equality, fairness, individualism) that prevent overt radicalized and racist images to be referenced and mobilized; however, anti-black stereotypes and perceptions remain in place—and can be mobilized in subtle, coded ways to powerful political effect.  It reminds me of the old line by Malcolm X. “Racism,” he used to say, “is like a Cadillac: they make a new one every year.” In a country that is supposedly colorblind and race neutral, driven by individual opportunity and meritocracy, it can be almost no other way.

Mendelberg’s message has one ray of hope for those interested in combating radicalized political messages coded or otherwise, though:  implicitly racial messages tend to lose their appeal when their content is exposed. We shall see if this is the case in the days to come as the charges and defenses are waged.

Finally, there is another point I want to highlight: race cards don’t always work and it is not just Republicans who play them. Democrats do too, though often to different effect and for different purposes. Indeed, my own work on midnight basketball and the 1994 crime bill debates with Darren Wheelock revealed that “the race card” as it pertained to  midnight basketball was not played first or even most self-consciously by Republicans. Rather, that would be left to the Democrats under the leadership of Bill Clinton during the 1994 crime bill debates. And that wasn’t exactly a winner—indeed, Republicans kind of turned that against the Democrats, and it wasn’t long before Gingrich himself unveiled the “Contract” that made him famous.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, we are in the midst of a slow and steady renovation of The Society Pages. Over the next few weeks, we will tweak our design, add some new features (including The Reading List, as described earlier this week–look over to the left), become more interdisciplinary, and develop and publish more of our own original content. We believe  these changes will help us do an even better job of meeting our  mission of bringing sociology and its aligned social scientific disciplines to broader public visibility and influence, and doing so in an even more timely and regular manner. Even better: it’s our free gift to you. As we said in our post on why we’re doing a SOPA black screen earlier in the week, we want academic research and knowledge to be directly relevant, and that means it needs to be accessibly written and accessibly posted. You can read it, you can understand it, you can apply it. And hopefully you can share it with others (or, like The Reading List says, use it to impress others at parties).

In one interesting new direction, I am personally beginning to work on a new project with the Twin Cities-based documentary photographer Wing Young Huie. We’re calling it “Changing Lenses.” The collaboration grows out of a profile of Huie’s landmark images I produced for the final Minnesota issue of Contexts: “Up Close and Communal,” and the basic idea is for the two of us to explore the connections between sociology and photography by exchanging comments and ideas on each other’s work. Specifically, I will provide sociological context and commentary on some of Huie’s various projects and famous images, and Wing will  supply images and observations on some of my recent papers and studies. We are particularly interested in delving into themes related to race, identity, different, culture, and otherness in contemporary American life, and there will probably be some sports stuff thrown in there as well (Wing and I actually met playing pickup basketball).

Anyway, we are going to workshop this collaboration this coming Friday night at Wing’s studio in south Minneapolis (see press release below). In the event, I will provide an overview of my vision and goals for TheSocietyPages, then Wing and I will test pilot our concept a bit through a conversation on difference, diversity, and otherness in which I discuss a few of Wing’s landmark images, and he engages some of my academic research in images. Then we’ll then invite input and feedback from the audience—and, as is always the case for events at Wing’s studio, the event will conclude with ping pong and karaoke. Anyway, if you are local, I hope you can join us in workshopping our project and beginning to chart the future of the new Society Pages content.

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(k)now launch party featuring Doug Hartmann
Friday, January 20th at The Third Place

One of the new features of our new and improved TSP site is “The Reading List.” Essential links to new and classic social science research, The Reading List should be a resource to inform your reading of the news, research in the field, and showing off at fancy cocktail parties (or on Twitter). It’ll feature short blurbs on research we believe to be timely, relevant, and interesting, and include classic books and articles, original new research in the field, and other exemplary studies on topics and stories in the current media and debate. The goal is to be kind of a screening service and gate keeper for students, the media, and the public at large for social scientific research and writing that is provocative, informative, and relevant.

The first official installments are a couple of pieces from Aldon Morris that remind us of the origins and impacts of the civil rights movement in honor of MLK day.

We hope you like it and will let us know if you’ve got ideas or suggestions to help build the list. Our goal is to supply new ideas every two or three days—which might not sound like a lot, but there are so many topics out there and so much great social science to choose from. As we move into tagging these, you should find a simple way to pull a reading list on a specific topic, too (a little something for those educators out there).

Here’s to an exciting set of changes, with more to come!

Edited to add: Chris and I talk through some of these changes—The Reading List and more—in a new podcast over on Office Hours. Hope you’ll take a listen!

Having spent much of the last week of 2011 out of town and away from my usual, everyday routine provided me prime time to ponder and reflect on things I often otherwise forget about or take for granted. In this unencumbered mindset, I happened upon the following line in a New Yorker piece by James Wood: “At present, the American magazine essay, both the long feature piece and the critical essay, is flourishing, in unlikely circumstances.” The comment caught my eye because it crystallized something I have kind of been thinking myself in recent years (though I didn’t have the audacity or reading range to actually say so).

Folded into a review of a recent collection by the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan,Wood’s central theme is to explore how a new generation of essayists and reporters employs the conventions of fiction writing honed in and usually reserved for “literature.” Indeed, the piece can be read as much as a commentary on the limits of contemporary fiction as of the creative applications of the journalistic, non-fiction essayist.  (Wood enlists Milan Kundera and others to develop the point.)

My thinking actually goes in the opposite direction.  I am more interested in the parallels and overlaps of the magazine essay with social scientific writing and analysis, especially in its more ethnographic and interpretive forms. I am interested, in other words, in the lessons and applications and provocations of great magazine writing and reporting for those of us working with the methods, conventions, and expectations of social science.

Three points that Wood makes about Sullivan’s representative body of work shaped my reflections. The third, on which Woods spends the most time, is about the nature of reality in contemporary life. (The piece is titled: “Reality Effects.”) Sullivan develops the theme in dialogue with David Foster Wallace’s “lost in the fun house” framing most directly and extensively in context of an extended treatment of the television series “The Real World,” the essay with which I was most familiar.  This is a deep and important theme—and has significance and consequence well beyond my end-of-year speculations. But my basic thought was this: we sociologists are both well positioned and absolutely obligated to make a contribution here (especially in connection with our notions of identity and authenticity). Still, we have only done so sporadically and in pockets since the founding of the discipline.

Nonetheless, it was actually the other two aspects of Sullivan’s writing, as rendered by Wood, that really set my mind ranging: his attention to detail and his serious, non-ironic engagement with the subject (and subjects) of religious belief and practice.

The Society Pages’ wondrous Monte Bute (that’s him, above, flashing the peace sign to the police) was picked by one MPR reporter as his favorite story/interview of the year, and so the reporter has published a quick update from the land-of-Bute: http://oncampus.mpr.org/2011/12/checking-in-with-monte-bute/

If you want to get a little more backstory on this “Backstage Sociologist,” you can check out his TSP blog, his exchange in our last U of M issue of Contexts, or get really modern and just Google him!

Happy new year!

In her forthcoming Indiana University Press book Pink & Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America, American studies scholar Jo B. Paoletti explores how it is that we’ve ended up with a blue section and a pink section in virtually every kids’ store in the U.S. An April 2011 Smithsonian Magazine article gives a primer on this color-coded development, Paoletti’s research, and gender socialization, including the intriguing paragraph:

For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti. [emphasis added]

“Today’s color dictate,” the Smithsonian reporter writes, “wasn’t established until the 1940s as a result of American’s preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers.’It could have gone the other way,’ Paoletti says.”

To read more about Paoletti and her research (including new work on how older women communicate through their dress), check out her website here.

And as a kicker, here’s a little girl who’s really not ready to accept the pink-and-blue paradigm:

Sometimes, when we were editing Contexts, Chris and I would set out to try to arrange an issue around a given theme. More often, though, we simply found that, as the issue started to come together, it also started to coalesce around a topic or two and take on a life of its own. That would be how we found ourselves thinking of the issues as “Oh, you know, The Aging Issue,” or “The Problems Issue,” or, well, “The Sexy-times Issue.” As it turns out, that’s starting to happen on The Society Pages, too.

Right now, it’s religion that’s caught our eye. As I got ready to post an aside here on the incredibly interesting Huffington Post piece “If Tim Tebow Were Muslim, Would America Still Love Him?” by the clearly poetic environmental policy consultant Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, it dawned on me that, just this morning, our own wunderkind Alex Casey had just put up a Citings & Sightings post on an in-depth Salt Lake Tribune article about new research on the gender gap among Utah’s Mormons and why some other social scientists are arguing with the conclusions (though not the data). And of course, last week, I’d written about my own work and new Canadian research on Americans’ lack of trust in the Atheists among us. All of a sudden, religion was becoming a mini-theme here on The Society Pages.

And no wonder: religion’s hard to talk about, but often on our minds. For many, it’s the grounding of their every day, of the ways they try to move in society, and so understanding–or attempting to understand–others’ religions is both essential and tricky. Questioning their faith or the dogmas of their faith is, in many ways, questioning another’s place in the broader society. It seems to me that these sorts of “diversions” are what The Society Pages is all about.

A couple of weeks back, I posted on some of my various dealings with the media as a specialist in sport sociology. I’ve had a few more such experiences over the last few weeks, including two that appeared in Star Tribune stories over the weekend. The first was a fairly somber story in the Sunday Variety section on how sports can provide cover for sexual predators and abusers. That one was a fairly in-depth follow-up on the Penn State interviews I talked about a few weeks back. “Sport in America has always been celebrated for touting high ideals and making great contributions [to society]. Those ideals make it difficult for people in authority to acknowledge and deal with problems that show cracks in their integrity and honor–and that provides a cover for people who are corrupt to take advantage.” I don’t know that I actually said all that in exactly that fashion, but I was gratified to see that the writer had taken our conversation seriously enough not only to quote me but to use my contribution to help situate and frame the entire story.

The other media moment was a much lighter take in the Saturday paper on the challenges of being a fan of a losing team like the Vikings. I’ve had a lot of these kind of interviews in Minnesota over the past few months, so it wasn’t really  hard for me to comment on. But one aspect of the story did remind me of the challenges and risks of being quoted in the public record.

During the interview I told the reporter about a documentary in which I served as a talking head last year. It was called “Skol: The Documentary.” (“Skol, Vikings!” is one of the favorite cheers of fans of the local squad.) I told him how one quote from the documentary ended up being used out of contexts in the publicity materials: “…[Y]ou can change your wife or your religion more easily than you can change your football team.” (To watch the trailer, click the link above)… and, as you might be guessing, here’s how the reporter quoted me in this weekend’s paper: “There have been studies that show it’s easier to change a religion than a football team.”

That line got a lot of laughs from my colleagues and students, and I worried that they were laughing at me more than with me. Indeed, I quickly tried to explain that I thought the quote had been taken out of context–that even in the movie I had really been talking about European football (soccer) and quoting from research and writing out of Europe, and in the paper I was just relating an anecdote about the film.

And about the film, I needn’t have worried. When I finally saw the documentary, the full context of my quote was indeed used. Not only that, my interview was featured prominently throughout the documentary, spliced in to help audiences make sense of the various Vikings fans and fanatics that were the focus of the film. It was actually a fun and rewarding experience. I received great accolades from those in attendance at the “Skol!” premiere (and others since who have seen the film), and I actually feel that the editing of my various quotes and comments gave my thinking more structure, coherence, and focus that I probably exhibited in the interview itself. It just goes to show, you have to put yourself–and your knowledge out there. Occasionally, it won’t work to your advantage, but sometimes it’ll be really gratifying and you’ll feel very much like you’ve done your job.

A new post over at Sociological Images is not only fascinating (Siskel and Ebert, in 1980, giving a feminist critique of a horror flick), it can’t help but bring to mind an article (Andrew Welsh’s 2009 Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture piece) that Sarah Lageson covered in Contexts‘ discoveries section back in Summer 2010. Both of these are worth checking out, even if the latest slasher film’s not worth the ticket price.