What’s that? You needed two weeks’ worth of sociology after you noticed soc is so hot even Stephen Colbert’s getting on the bandwagon? Oh, we’ve got you.

Features:

“Violence and the Transformation of Ethno-Racial Categories in Rwanda,” by Marie Berry. Perpetrators of genocide rely on division, hardening ethno-racial classifications like “Hutu” and “Tutsi” as resentments and violence build.

“The Homoegenization of Asian Beauty,”  by C.N. Le. Watching one culture converge on an ideal of beauty, Le shows a process at work around the world. more...

Big news! The Society Pages is absolutely delighted to welcome the Council on Contemporary Families to TSP. Over the past two decades, CCF has built an outstanding reputation as a go-to source for authoritative social research on family life. Much like the Scholars Strategy Network, CCF will work with our staff and students to post selected policy briefs and research statements on timely topics, all of which can be found here. In addition, the CCF’s peerless contributors, including Barbara Risman, Philip N. Cohen, Adina Nack, Virgnia Rutter, and others will soon be blogging in TSP’s Community Pages (several already write for Sociological Images, Girl W/ Pen!, and more). We look forward to great conversations, cutting-edge research, and an ongoing examination of American families—as they really are. You can follow CCF on Twitter at @CCF_Families.

The World Cup was the subject of local media and culture reporter John Rash’s column this past weekend. He interviewed me for the piece and we had a wide-ranging conversation about a number of different dimensions of soccer in contemporary U.S. culture–the status of its main professional league (MLS), soccer’s relation to other major league sport in terms of viewing, consumption, and cultural influence, rates of participation among youth, recent sociological research on soccer and international awareness, the tremendous international success of the women’s national team, its popularity among immigrants, etc. Here are the ideas and quotes he ended up using:

Hartmann, who focuses on the sociology of sport, detects an interesting inversion of how Americans perceive global sporting spectacles.

“Americans often watch the Olympics only as a nationalistic competition with a patriotic idea of ‘How is the U.S. doing?’ I think fans of the World Cup are a little less interested in how the U.S. is doing, and more interested in the international competition,” he said. “If you think of the long ideals of sport creating cross-cultural understanding, [the World Cup] is a little bit true to the Olympic ideal.”

Hartmann points out that because soccer is “not a dominant part of our hegemonic sports culture, but a little bit more peripheral,” the fan base is a bit different. Given its global nature, soccer has always been popular with immigrants, who make up a higher proportion of the population than at any time since Ellis Island. And American-born fans tend to be worldly, compared with the general population, he added.

Suffice to say, I am fairly happy with all this, and feel like Rash, the good reporter and thinker that he is, made me sound fairly knowledgeable and smart. Still, perhaps because I took Rash’s call in the middle of a media training session for academics organized by Theda Skocpol’s Scholar’s Strategy Network (coincidence?), I find myself reflecting more than usual on the process and my own participation in it. For example, I don’t remember if I actually used the phrase an “interesting inversion” of typical perceptions of global sporting spectacles, though I kind of like the phrase and wouldn’t put it past myself to have talked my way into a line like that. (I definitely said “global sporting spectacles” a time or two.) I also find it funny that I said “a little bit true” to the Olympic ideal as it is the kind of qualifier I am often critical of professionals in the sports media for over-using.

More significantly, I definitely recall stumbling over the question of how to label the more Olympian ideals of cross-cultural understanding (“internationalist,” or “cosmopolitan,” or something else altogether ) and whether to set them directly in contrast to nationalism or patriotism. I’m still not sure which set of terms make my interpretation (and soccer itself) more palpable to ordinary Americans. But the one that thing really makes me cringe in retrospect is the phrase “dominant part of our hegemonic sports culture.” I know I used it, and maybe the term “hegemonic sports culture” made me sound smart. But hegemony is one of those words we often work hard to avoid here at TSP because so few folks out there in the regular world know what the word means.  If only our editor Letta Page had been on hand to clean up my spoken prose.

The idea of paying reparations to African-Americans for slavery is not new, but it is usually relegated to the fringes of lefty radicalism or scholarly academic critique. Not anymore. With a piece from Ta-Nehisi Coates called “The Case for Reparations,” a recent issue of The Atlantic magazine has suddenly, if unexpectedly, mainstreamed the topic.

Coates’s article is comprised of ten chapters illustrating the enduring impact of slavery on contemporary African-American families. Coates identifies countless examples of the way whites have benefited from state-sponsored programs including Social Security and the GI Bill, reminding readers that there was a time “when affirmative action was white.” As much manifesto or treatise as conventional reporting, Coates’s piece argues forcefully for the need for America to grow up and repay its outstanding debt to its most vulnerable citizens. Failing to fulfill this promissory note, Coates insists, will leave all Americans morally impoverished.

Among its many exemplary characteristics is the way in which Coates draws directly and extensively on the works of numerous sociologists and political scientists. For example, Coates uses the work of sociologists Doug Massey and Nancy Denton to describe the role of residential segregation in the construction of inner-city ghettos, as well as their wealthier spatial counterparts-the suburbs (in 1993’s American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Urban Underclass, from Harvard University Press). Crim-Soc scholar Rob Sampson’s research on “neighborhood effects” is at the core of Coates’ discussion of the enormous power the ghetto wields in conditioning the lived experiences of its residents (see his 2012 Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect from the University of Chicago Press). And Coates engages political scientists Michael Dawson and Rovana Popoff’s studies of pre- and post-election survey data from 2000 (including views on reparations and racial apologies for Japanese American internment during World War II) to show how racialized views of politics shape public opinion as well as remind us that reparations are not unprecedented (for more on this, see Dawson and Popoff’s 2004 DuBois Review article “Reparations: Justice and Greed in Black and White”).

There’s a lot more where this came from—including Rodney. D. Coates’ 2004 scholarly treatment (“If a Tree Falls in the Wilderness: Reparations, Academic Silences, and Social Justice,” Social Forces 83(2): 841-864). And as you read it, remember that while you may or may not agree with Ta-Nahesi Coates’s opinion on reparations, the social scientific data and research about the social foundations of persistent African-American inequality are not up for debate.

Features:

“Coded Chaos and Anonymous, with Gabriella Coleman,” by Kyle Green. Anonymous and the contested space of the Internet.

Citings & Sightings:

“Under God or Over It? New Data on Religion and Politics,” by Evan Stewart. Americans are now slightly more trusting of atheists, but they’re still not rushing to elect one.

“Can a Rise in Rape Reports Be Good?” by Molly Goin. Unlike other crime numbers, when rape stats go up, it might mean a city’s doing something right.

There’s Research on That!

“Mass Shootings and the ‘Man’ifesto,” by Evan Stewart. “Mass shootings are rare, but the culture that creates them is not.” more...

Last week I danced in my first flash mob, saw a powerful set of storytellers at a live Life of the Law event, and pontificated on public outreach with super sharp friends from JustPublics, OpenDemocracy, and LOTL. In my #LSAMN14 session for graduate students and new professors, I offered 5 bits of advice for those eager to write for a public audience.

1. Use your expertise. Make it about your expert knowledge as a social scientist rather than your views as a citizen. Use the command and authority you’ve developed on a project to really break it down for the rest of us.

2. Don’t wait for tenure. Graduate students and assistant professors today should develop an online presence. And writing short pieces for the public can often offer accessible calling cards to your work and interests.

3. Timing matters. Don’t just react to the news by beginning a new piece. Have some ideas and drafts that you can work up quickly when the time is right. Many events are seasonal or predictable (e.g., back to school season, election season, release-of-crime-statistics season), so write now for August or December.

4. Avoid zero-sum thinking. Public work need not detract from your research. In my experience, my journal articles and public posts tend to be mutually reinforcing and complementary rather than competing substitutes for one another. Staying in touch with journalists, for example, helps me stay on top of new developments in my field. And the more you write, the easier writing becomes.

5. Use your editor! There’s a premium on brevity & clarity in public writing. My first op-eds were a sea of red ink, as sharp editors reduced both my word count and my syllable-per-word count by at least 50 percent. And, in my experience at TSP and Contexts, the most famous and highly regarded experts in the field tend to be most amenable to smart editing. They get it.

In the spirit of brevity and humility about the limits of my own expertise, I’ll close by repeating the best bit of advice I learned in school — what I’ve come to call the Wu Admonition: “Remember, Chris, that not all advice is good advice.”

With Elliot Rodger in the news and the discussions around violence and misogyny, we’ve been getting questions–especially from genuinely concerted and disconcerted white men–about how to acknowledge gender inequality and violence without feeling terrible for being men. These are a variation on the questions about white guilt that I often field in the context of teaching about white privilege.  Fortunately, there’s a great clip from a response to a question by Tim Wise posted a while back on Soc Images that links the two (racism and sexism) directly for white men.

According to Wise, problems of racism, sexism, and violence aren’t best addressed just by feeling guilty. Far better is to take responsibility in the search for collective solutions. In the clip, Wise uses the problem of pollution to make the point and, more to the point, suggests that anger rather than guilt is the appropriate emotional anchor. Here’s a portion of the transcript:

“No. You should feel angry. And you should feel committed to doing something to address that legacy. It’s like, for instance, with pollution, right? We think about the issue of pollution. Now none of us in this room, to my knowledge, are individually responsible for having belched any toxic waste into the air, or injecting toxic waste into the soil, or done any of the things… we didn’t put lead paint into the housing, you know?

Individually we’re innocent of that. But someone did that stuff, and we’re living with the legacy of it right now, or in this case might be dying with the legacy of it, getting ill, right?.

So it isn’t about feeling guilty about what someone did, even if you were the direct heir of the chemical company that did the pollution, but it is about saying, all of us in the society have to take responsibility for what we find in front of us. There’s a big difference between guilt and responsibility.”

What is great about these “Wise words” is how they help us realized that we don’t need to feel shamed by our privilege or hopeless about the immensity of trying to address or even overcome it. They help us figure out how and where to engage. Sociology proper isn’t always the best on this action side. But I’d also add–and would guess that Wise would be among the first to acknowledge–that this action and engagement necessarily starts from a clear understanding of historical roots and social complexities of privilege, and this is where sociological research and analysis has a real role to play.

Semesters come and go, but The Society Pages, much like the rest of society, keeps on keeping on, summer, spring, winter, or fall. Last week we finished up delivering the content for our next TSP volume (Owned, a look at the new sociology of debt), this week we’ll have our editorial “Retreat to Move Forward” (h/t “30 Rock,” though without the Six Sigma), and next week we’ll deliver the content for the fifth TSP volume, a culture reader. Last week also saw the arrival of the latest issue of the ASA’s Contexts magazine, with all content available online for free for the first time ever. Like anyone, when we’re mired in this much work, it’s often hard to see the milestones as true achievements or notice the big picture project that’s getting accomplished day by day. To that end, let me be the first to say congratulations to The Society Pages on its first five books, its first two years, and its tremendous achievements in using sociology to contextualize the news.

Contexts Magazine:

Spring 2014 includes “The Terrorists Next Door,” “Little Free Libraries,” Ruling Out Rape,” and “Working Class Growing Pains,” among much other great scholarship. Click through to read and share the full issue!

There’s Research on That!

“Mass Shootings and the ‘Man’ifesto,” by Evan Stewart. “Mass shootings are rare, but the culture that creates them is not.”

“How to Give Birth the ‘Right’ Way,” by Jacqui Frost. On the medicalization of childbirth, safety, and social control. more...

What’s new at “online sociology’s place to be” (yes, someone great said that about TSP; yes, we’re still proud).

Roundtable:

“The Enduring Effects of Online Mugshots,” by Sarah Lageson. We look to Danielle Dirks, Travis Linneman, Naomi Sugie, and Kate West to talk privacy and information in the age of the viral mugshot. No, we did not check to see if they have online mugshots.

There’s Research on That!

“#BringBackOurGirls Needs More than a Media Boost,” by Molly Goin. Slacktivists can still put a spotlight on an issue, but the international community has to rely on hostage-taking data for more concrete action.

“Michael Sam, Sport, and Sexuality,” by Stephen Suh. Even in professional contact sports, sexuality’s taking a backseat to talent. OR: That time ESPN reporters saw an interracial gay kiss live on camera and commented only on the excitement of athletes’ families. more...

Great graphic, and I love the title–though I’m not sure if why I like it so much (the title, I mean) is intentional or not. Click for the original.