Our partner organization, the Harvard-based Scholars Strategy Network, is a natural go-to for those looking for cross-disciplinary academic findings in what’s been a turbulent and confusing political season. Here are a few that have piqued our editorial interest recently:
Trust us, there’s plenty more where that came from—be sure to check out the SSN’s page here on TSP, as well as their full site, for topic-specific questions and policy recommendations.
Beyonce and her dancers practice their entrance before the performance. Via Beyonce, Instagram.
Okay, I’ll make this quick since it’s a bit dated. After I wrote that little post about Saturday Night Live’s “Beyonce is Black” spoof a couple of weeks back, I had a number of students and friends wanting to know what I actually thought about her Superbowl performance (well, her part in the Coldplay performance featuring Beyonce and Bruno Mars). I’m no music critic (or big Beyonce fan, for that matter) so I hadn’t really taken the bait. However, I did spend some time reading what other people were saying—both about the performance and about the backlash it seems Beyonce experienced.
One piece that really caught my attention was by the Salon blogger Lasha. She was struck by the very different reception that Beyonce experienced than the one that met rapper Kendrick Lamar after his racially pointed and politically charged performance at the Grammys just days later. According to Lasha, it was one more instance of the unfair, sexist policing of African American women’s political expression.
Lasha’s point about the marginalization of black women’s radicalism is well-taken. I also think there is some additional social context worth considering. For one, there are expectations and previous record. I think part of the thing with Beyonce is that her Superbowl performance was perhaps her first “socially conscious art.” This surprised folks—it defied their expectations of the “Single Ladies” singer, upsetting those who didn’t see it coming or didn’t understand where she was coming from (witness my previous post on the SNL spoof).
Even more important, in my view, is the actual social context of the performances: the music industry versus the sportsworld. We Americans have come to expect and accept social consciousness and political radicalism in the music context. We not only do not expect such expression in sports, we actually oppose it. Not all cultural arenas are unique, and there are many things about the world of sport that make it uniquely powerful and complicated. As I written on many occasions—for example, in the piece Kyle Green and I did on this site about politics and sport being strange bedfellows—there are deep cultural norms about sport that make any kind of social statement in the realm of sport extremely complicated and typically controversial, especially where race is involved.
I won’t try to rehearse all of the ways this works, much less how racial movements and politics are implicated (there’s a lot on this in my book on the 1968 African American Olympic protests, if you are interested). But when it comes to statements of protest, unrest, and activism, Americans tend to see sport as somehow unique or special—either because we see sport as somehow sacred or sacrosanct (that is, above politics) or because don’t want our entertainment complicated or sullied by the realities of the non-sport world. So while sexism is clearly at play, there’s at least one other important thing going on—the idealization of sport on its highest, most holy day in America: Super Bowl Sunday.
“The Sociology of Nate Silver and 538: #TSPpolitics” With Super Tuesday come and gone, but polling and projections still going strong, our editors brought back a classic piece by Andrew Lindner from The Social Side of Politics.
“Safer Sex for Male Inmates” by Sara Anderson. A guest post this week rounds up research on the growing problem of sexual health in America’s prison system. more...
As we head into tomorrow’s Super Tuesday contests, statistics, analytics, and minutia of all sorts are being bandied about, examined for their possible predictions and the clues they can give us about how those who turn out to caucus will make their choices for the presidential candidates who want to represent them. In a classic piece, Skidmore College’s Andrew Lindner looks at how such numbers and stats remain a form of elite knowledge in “The Sociology of Silver,” published online and in our first TSP volume with W.W. Norton & Company, The Social Side of Politics.
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.'”
Our partner organization, the Harvard-based Scholars Strategy Network, is a natural go-to for those looking for cross-disciplinary academic findings in what’s been a turbulent and confusing political season. Here are a few that have piqued our editorial interest recently:
