Hello hello! This week we have a slew of great new stuff on a wide array of current events, including diversity at the Oscars, environmental inequality in Flint, and working family policies across the country. Be sure to stop by or see below for more!
It wasn’t long ago that America’s talking heads worried whether John F. Kennedy, Jr.—a Catholic—could really be elected president. Today, some candidates tailor their rhetoric to reach out to large swaths of Evangelical voters, some voters refuse to believe the president when he declares his own religious affiliation, some wonder if Bernie Sanders’ campaign will be hampered because he is Jewish, and still others wring their hands over how to court the “nones.” The ties between religion and political power remain as knotty as ever, and we look to the University of Minnesota’s Joe Gerteis for insight with “The Social Functions of Religion in American Political Culture,” published online and in our first TSP volume with W.W. Norton & Company, The Social Side of Politics.
Good morning! As we head into the Nevada caucuses this weekend and next week, TSP has a host of great research coverage on current political issues. Check out our politics page for more!
In our first TSP volume with W.W. Norton & Company, The Social Side of Politics, Stanford sociologist Corey Fields‘ essay “The Paradoxes of Black Republicans” explored the idea that minorities and the GOP were simply incompatible. This takes on new meaning and significance today, as we watch candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz grapple over their Hispanic identities and commitments and their Spanish speaking abilities, while also adhering to the Republican line on limits to immigration and expanded deportations. As Ben Carson’s star seems to fade on the Republican stage, revisiting this article reveals how a sociologists’ perspective on conflicting identities helps all of us understand political jockeying.
So, did you see the Saturday Night Live spoof “The Day Beyonce Turned Black” yet? It’s pretty amusing—from the opening sequence (“For white people, it was just another great week. They never saw it coming. They had no warning…”) to the line “Maybe this song isn’t for us… but usually everything is!” and finally the white mom who was so freaked out she thought the music turned her daughter black (forgetting they had invited her African-American friend and mom for a play date). The SNL send-up is also, in my view at least, a pretty good example of comedy rooted in sociological analysis and commentary.
I don’t know who actually wrote the skit, but it reminded me of a line that one of the newest cast members Leslie Jones offered in a profile in The New Yorker (January 4, 2016) last month. (She plays the African-American mom in the play date scene of the sketch). Jones said, of working with the mostly white men on the SNL writing team, “One thing I learned: they’re not racist. They’re just white. They don’t know certain things.”
I don’t know if she meant to get a laugh here (Jones’s comedy can be as unsettling as it is hilarious, at least for a white guy like me), but there’s solid sociological insight behind it. In recent years, scholars studying white culture and identity have emphasized at least two different kinds of things whites don’t really know about or are blind to:
Privilege. Too often, whites just don’t realize that the disadvantages and injustices people of color face in this country and all over the world are intimately connected with their own advantages. Where there is disadvantage, there must be advantage, so…
The normativity of white culture. This speaks to the fact that white cultural beliefs and values are so dominant culturally, so taken-for-granted, that they aren’t even realized as something specific or unique. The idea that there are other ways to see things, other ways to make sense of events, music or movies, political causes or candidates—it’s incredibly easy to think there’s a unique “black point of view” without recognizing that means a “white point of view,” as well.
None of this is too suggest that there isn’t racism, or that some, perhaps many, whites, are racist in some quite basic ways. But it is to say that more than a few of the problems of race in this country spring from a lack of awareness of the realities and nuances of others’ lives (not to mention their own) that white people have the privilege of never attuning to. And some sociologists have even upped the ante with terms such as “colorblind racism” (Eduardo Bonilla Silva) or “laisse faire racism” (Laurence Bobo), which are intended to suggest that this ongoing unawareness, this comfortable complicity of white Americans with the racial status quo, is itself a form of racism.
Confucius is often credited for the saying, “True wisdom is knowing what you don’t know.” Whoever said it, they were on to something. When it comes to race in the United States, many of us white folks would do well to pay more attention to the basic facts of the society we live in, as well as how Americans of color understand and experiences these realities on a daily basis. And maybe then we’d be less astounded by Beyonce suddenly becoming black (though her transformation has been dramatic and somewhat unexpected I think, even for people of color), and more interested in the visions of Blackness and race relations more generally she is now trying to call attention to in this Black Lives Matter moment.
Hello everyone! Whether you are going to spend the weekend celebrating Valentine’s Day, Galentine’s Day, or none of the above, we’re confident you’ll love the new pieces we have this week.
“Taking Good Risks,” by Chris Uggen. “Perhaps fields and disciplines also prosper when they simultaneously create space for safe and risky agendas. As Wayne Coyne once said, ‘It’s probably a good thing to be considered stable, but with a capacity for madness.'”
When universities invite me to visit, I often do a second talk for graduate students on “safe and risky research agendas.” Many students around the country seem stuck between the jobs crisis of the recent past and an uncertain future of disruptive technology, tenure battles, and mounting student debt. Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that many of our best and brightest seem to oscillate between a full-on “strategic” concern for maximizing their employability and a full-on utopian disregard for their market prospects. When they ask for advice, I first advise them that not all advice is good advice. But I do suggest they invest a bit more in teaching and that they consciously pursue both a safe and a risky research agenda. Such advice, I hope, will be good for them as individuals and good for the collective sociological enterprise.
By safe agenda, I’m referring to a line of research in which the student builds up specific authority and expertise in an established topic or area. This can arise from long-term interest in a subject or intensive interest stemming from dissertation or research assistant work. Once one has written a paper or two in an area, the start-up costs of publishing an additional piece diminish – it isn’t as though they have to master a completely new field with every article. They are also likely to find an established and active research literature surrounding their safe agenda, with obvious next steps to pursue. This means that it is pretty easy to identify which journals will be interested in a study, the editors can readily identify knowledgeable experts to review it, and the reviews will be relatively consistent and predictable. Pursuing a safe agenda in a series of book or article publications is likely the single best way to establish a reputation as an expert and authority in a field or subfield – and that can lead to jobs and promotions. In short, “safe” in this context represents the foundational work of good social science, rather than, say, boring or easy research.
Risky agendas, in contrast, tend to be messier. The field might be new to the researcher and her advisors, so the start-up costs are higher. There may be few good studies to draw upon, or perhaps a lot of the action on the topic is taking place in other fields or disciplines. This means she will likely need to frame her research in ways that convince people in the field they should be interested in the topic. This isn’t an easy process. When a reviewer told Jason Houle that his research on debt was not sociology, for example, he suggested creating a new journal: The American Journal of Not Sociology. Even when successful in framing the article for sociology, such work tends to elicit polarized reviews and evaluations. Moreover, there is little agreement on the “next logical steps” to be taken and there is no consensus that even the very best work on the topic merits publication or funding. Still, if and when such research is published, the author tends to develop a reputation as a “mover and a shaker” with fresh ideas and energy.
Research time is scarce for social scientists, but I try to reserve at least 10 percent of my research energies for my risky agenda. This includes new ideas with a high probability of immediate failure and/or quixotic ideas that will not pay off for years or even decades. This is because I most admire the sociologists (and artists, for that matter) who somehow manage to sustain a safe and a risky agenda throughout their careers. Over time, they’ve developed well-earned reputations and careers as both productive “finishers” and creative wild-cards. Perhaps fields and disciplines also prosper when they simultaneously create space for safe and risky agendas. As Wayne Coyne once said, “It’s probably a good thing to be considered stable, but with a capacity for madness.” I’d wager that the same holds true for individual sociologists and for sociology as a collective enterprise.
Happy February and happy Friday, everyone! From family leave policy to the facts behind the latest Netflix drama, we have a feast of new sociology to kick off your weekend.
C.J. Pascoe on Ethnographic Research. This week’s podcast discusses the joys of being an ethnographer, the difficulties of accessing youth culture, and how entering a school allowed a more nuanced understanding of contemporary masculinity.
Happily, many of our fellow sociologists are showing off their spider-senses in public writing with big audiences and broad, synthetic ideas woven from rigorous research.
Sociologists are uniquely positioned to pull together research and provide perspective on almost any of the major problems that confront the human species today—from climate change to terrorism and war, inequality, food scarcity, human rights, criminal justice policies. Anything. You name it, there are sociologists working on it and writing about it and helping large public audiences to understand what we are up against. I’ve believed that at least since I was editor of Contexts, and probably long before that.
One example I’ve given numerous times over the past couple of years is an article Eric Klinenberg wrote for The New Yorker in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. It called attention to how unprepared most American cities are for the effects of climate change. Klinenberg’s piece was big picture and beautifully written. It also synthesized research findings from other fields (including the natural sciences) and packaged them in a way that not only made the work coherent, but really highlighted its implications for citizens and social life (for an overview from our Clippings team, click here.)
This week brings a few more wonderful examples. One comes from the most recent class of MacArthur Genius Grant recipients, Matt Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard. Writing in The New Yorker (again!—it was only about a year ago that I christened the magazine “champion of serious sociology“), Desmond helps draw our attention to the crisis in housing and evictions that is so deeply implicated in the problems of urban policy, crime, and poverty all across the country:
For decades, social scientists, journalists, and policymakers have focused on jobs, public assistance, parenting, and mass incarceration as the central problems faced by the American poor, overlooking just how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly everyone has a landlord.
“For many poor Americans,” he writes with authority and conviction, “eviction never ends.”
Writing—and writers—like this show off many things, not least of which is the synthesizing and contextualizing ability that characterizes the discipline of sociology, that enterprise I told my intro students last night is can be called the “big tent” of the social sciences.
Hello and happy Friday! Before you leap into February, stop by TSP and check out our awesome new pieces on everything from participatory budgeting to Sarah Palin’s sweater.
“Finding Firmer Ground,” by Chris Uggen. “While many of us are struggling mightily to nurture and defend something important, I am increasingly convinced that we’re not mounting our defense from very firm ground. As a professor and administrator, I’d like to see a stronger collective commitment among the faculty on a few no-brainers.”
