Archive: Aug 2011

Cross-posted at Scientopia.

Sadie M. sent in an example of the reproduction of the idea that “Africa” is an arid, desolate place where nature still dominates civilization.  The snapshot Sadie sent in was of Nairobi.  Nairobi is the 12th largest city on the continent of Africa with a population of over 3 million in the city and its surrounding suburbs.  It is the capital of Kenya and an economic, political, and financial hub in the region.

This is Nairobi on Google maps:

This is what comes up if you Google image Nairobi:

Nairobi is also not a desert plain.  The name, in Maasai, translates into “the place of cool waters” and it is popularly known as “Green City in the Sun” (wikipedia).

Despite all of this, Sadie’s snapshot shows that an in flight magazine depicted Nairobi as a savanna full of elephants and bereft of people.  The other two destinations featured — New York and Sydney — are pictured as they are.

So there we have it: Another piece of advertising erasing the bustling, successful economies of Africa, and instead reproducing the idea that the entire continent is an uncivilized desert full of exotic animals.

See also: How Not to Write about Africa and The Single Story of “Africa.”

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Yesterday I posted about some children’s luggage that normalizes gendered occupations. Given that, I thought I’d follow up with several more examples of gendering kids’ stuff that have been sitting in our inbox.

Erin M. saw this image in a Land’s End catalog for kids’ clothing a while back. It draws on the idea that boys and girls are just inherently different, with girls needing things that are “pretty” while boys need stuff that’s “rugged”:

Caspian P. snapped this photo of two video games (by different companies) that efficiently summarize who we assume will be interested in what:

Finally, Cheryl S. noticed that J. Crew decided to market some of their boys’ clothing to girls. Rather than designating the clothes as unisex, or listing them as boys’ items in the boys’ section and girls’ items in the girls’ section, they instead created a section in the girls’ part of the website called Borrowed from My Brother:

As Cheryl points out, there is no “borrowed from my sister” section for boys. We accept the idea of women wearing men’s clothing, even seeing it as potentially sexy, in a way that we don’t tolerate or condone men crossing gender lines to wear women’s items or take on other aspects of femininity. J. Crew simply applies this wider cultural acceptance of women taking on some aspects of masculinity (as long as they balance it with enough signs of femininity), which we see in the marketing of “boyfriend jeans” to women, and applies it to kids.

Cross-posted at Scientopia.

One year ago today six black teenagers died in the Louisiana Red River.  They were wading in waist deep water when one, 15-year-old DeKendrix Warner, fell off an underwater ledge.  He struggled to swim and, one by one, six of his cousins and friends jumped in to help him and each other.  Warner was the only survivor.  The family members of the children watched in horror; none of them knew how to swim.

This draws attention to a rarely discussed and deadly disparity between blacks and whites.  Black people, especially black women, are much less likely than white people to know how to swim.  And, among children, 70% have no or low ability to swim.  The figure below, from the International Swimming Hall of Fame, shows that 77% of black women and 44% of black men say that they don’t know how to swim.  White women are as likely as black men, but much less likely than black women to report that they can’t swim.  White men are the most confident in their swimming ability.

This translates into real tragedy.  Black people are significantly more likely to die from drowning than white people (number of drownings out of 100,000):

Why are black people less likely to learn to swim than whites?  Dr. Caroline Heldman, at FemmePolitical, argues that learning to swim is a class privilege.  To learn to swim, it is helpful to have access to a swimming pool.  Because a disproportionate number of blacks are working class or poor means that they don’t have backyard swimming pools; while residential segregation and economic disinvestment in poor and minority neighborhoods means that many black children don’t have access to community swimming pools.  Or, if they do, they sometimes face racism when they try to access them.

Even if all of these things are in place, however, learning to swim is facilitated by lessons.  If parents don’t know how to swim, they can’t teach their kids.  And if they don’t have the money to pay someone else, their kids may not learn.

I wonder, too, if the disparity between black women and men is due, in part, to the stigma of “black hair.”   Because we have racist standards of beauty, some women invest significant amounts of time and money on their hair in an effort to make it straight or wavy and long.  Getting their hair wet often means undoing this effort.  Then again, there is a gap between white men and white women too, so perhaps there is a more complicated gender story here.

These are my initial guesses at explaining the disparities.  Your thoughts?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Reports from the Economic Front.

Congress has finally agreed on a deficit reduction plan that President Obama supports. As a result, the debt ceiling is being lifted, which means that the Treasury can once again borrow to meet its financial obligations.

Avoiding a debt default is a good thing. However, the agreement is bad and even more importantly the debate itself has reinforced understandings of our economy that are destructive of majority interests.

The media presented the deficit reduction negotiations as a battle between two opposing sides. President Obama, who wanted to achieve deficit reduction through a combination of public spending cuts and tax increases, anchored one side. The House Republicans, who would only accept spending cuts, anchored the other. We were encouraged to cheer for the side that we thought best represented our interests.

Unfortunately, there was actually little difference between the two sides in terms of the way they engaged and debated the relevant issues. Both sides agreed that we face a major debt crisis. Both sides agreed that out-of-control social programs are the main driver of our deficit and debt problems. And both sides agreed that the less government involvement in the economy the better.

The unanimity is especially striking since all three positions are wrong. We do not face a major debt crisis, social spending is not driving our deficits and debt, and we need more active government intervention in the economy, not less, to solve our economic problems.

So what was the deal?

Before discussing these issues it is important to highlight the broad terms of the deficit reduction agreement. The first step is limited to spending cuts; discretionary spending is to be reduced by $900 billion over the next ten years. Approximately 35% of the reduction will come from security-related budgets (military and homeland security), with the rest coming from non-security discretionary budgets (infrastructure, energy, research, education, and social welfare). In exchange for these budget cuts the Congress has agreed to raise the debt ceiling by $1 trillion.

The agreement also established a 12 person committee (with 6 Democrats and 6 Republicans) to recommend ways to reduce future deficits by another $1.2-1.5 trillion. Its recommendations must be made by November 23, 2011 and they can include cuts to every social program (including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid), as well as tax increases.

Congress has to vote on the committee’s package of recommendations by December 23, 2011, up or down. If Congress approves them they will be implemented. If Congress does not approve them, automatic cuts of $1.2 trillion will be made; 50% of the cuts must come from security budgets and the other 50% must come from non-security discretionary budgets. Regardless of how Congress votes on the recommendations, it must also vote on whether to approve a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. Once this vote is taken, the debt ceiling will be raised again by an amount slightly smaller than the deficit reduction.

Check out this flowchart from the New York Times if you want a more complete picture of the process.

Why is this a problem?

Those who favor reducing spending on government programs generally argue that we have no choice because our public spending and national debt are out of control, threatening our economic future. But, the data says otherwise.

The chart below, from the economist Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser, shows the movement in the ratio of publically held debt to GDP over the period 1970 to 2011; the area in yellow marks the Obama administration. While this ratio has indeed grown rapidly, it remains well below the 100% level that most economists take to be the warning level. In fact, according to Congressional Budget Office predictions, we are unlikely to reach such a level for decades even if we maintain our current spending and revenue patterns.

The sharp growth in the ratio over the last few years strongly suggests that our current high deficits are largely due to recent developments, in particular the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Great Recession. Their contribution can be seen in this chart from the New York Times.

The effects of the tax cuts and economic crisis on our deficits (and by extension debt) are especially visible in the following chart (again from Menzie Chinn), which plots yearly changes in federal spending and federal revenue as a percentage of GDP (the shaded areas mark periods of recession). As we can see, the recent deficit explosion was initially driven more by declining revenues than out of control spending. Attempts to close the budget gap solely or even primarily through spending cuts, especially of social programs, is bound to fail.

To summarize:

Tragically, the debate over how best to reduce the deficit has encouraged people to blame social spending for our large deficits and those large deficits for our current economic problems.  As a result, demands for real structural change in the way our economy operates are largely dismissed as irrelevant.

Recent economic data should be focusing our attention on the dangers of a new recession.  According to the Commerce Department our economy grew at an annual rate of just 1.3% in second quarter of this year, following a first quarter in which the economy grew by only 0.3%.  These are incredibly slow rates of growth for an economy recovering from a major recession.  To put these numbers in perspective, Dean Baker notes that we need growth of over 2.5% to keep our already high unemployment rate from growing.

Cutting spending during a period of economic stagnation, especially on infrastructure, research, and social programs, is a recipe for greater hardship.  In fact, such a policy will likely further weaken our economy, leading to greater deficits.  This is what happened inthe UK, Ireland, and Greece—countries with weak economies that tried to solve their deficit problems by slashing public spending.

We need more active government intervention, which means more spending to redirect and restructure the economy; a new, more progressive tax structure; and a major change in our foreign policy, if we are going to solve our economic problems.  Unfortunately for now we don’t have a movement powerful enough to ensure our side has a player in the struggles that set our political agenda.

Emily H. sent in a great example of gendering kids’ products. She looked at kids’ luggage on the Target website and noticed a significant difference in the boys’ and girls’ version of one brand. The boys’ version, in the standard blue, is called “Embark Boy Pattern Pilot”:

The girls’ version is identical in size and construction. The girls’ versions are pink and purple, but that’s not the difference that drew Emily’s attention. Take a look:

Notice the name? Where the boys’ version is for pilots, the girls’ appears to be for the pilot’s assistant. Just a nice little example of the normalization of the idea that girls are supportive helpers to the boys who direct the show.

Cross-posted at Scientopia and Racialicious.

Several years ago I took this photo of the posted dress code for Brothers Bar in Madison, Wisconsin.   As an alumnus, I can tell you that the relationship between the college community and the community at large was strained, as it is in many college towns.  The college community was, on average, better off economically than much of the non-college community, with greater (potential) educational achievement, and overwhelmingly white.  There was less mingling between the “town” and “gown” than we might expect by random chance, and some businesses tried to attract the latter exclusively.

This was the case with Brothers Bar. Brothers sits within a block of campus, they wanted to attract the college students but push away young “townies,” as they were derogatorily called.  Of course, it’s illegal to say “Poor Black people keep out,” so, instead, they use symbolic codes to warn especially Black members of the non-college community that they’re not welcome: no crooked hats, no skullcaps, headbands, or bandanas, and no sports jerseys.

An enterprising journalist sat outside Brothers Bar to see just how the dress code was enforced.  Not “strictly,” it turned out.  The people who were turned away were overwhelmingly Black.  Meanwhile, they let in students wearing UW sports jerseys and other Bucky the Badger-themed “athletic wear.”  So much for color-blindness, this was a racist dress code with no reference to color at all.

I was reminded of this incident when Stephen Wilson sent in photo of a similar dress code taken at Kelly’s in Kansas City.  Again we see racially-coded restrictions: the same no crooked hats rule, doo rags and bandanas are disallowed, as are hoods actually worn on the head (but not the preppy hoodies apparently), and “excessively” baggy clothes.

So, sure, Black people are allowed in these establishments, just not Black people “of a certain type.”  If they want to enter, they have to assimilate to white culture.  These dress codes seem to say:

Turn those hats on straight forward or straight back, pull up those pants, and take off whatever’s on your head!  It’s not that we don’t like Black people, we just prefer our Black people to defer to white standards.  See?  Not racist at all!  Cheers!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

The news each month is usually on unemployment rates, weekly filings of new claims, layoffs and new hiring. And the Pew report on widening race/ethnic wealth gaps was eye-opening. But you can take the measure of the recession overall maybe best with the employment rates — how many people have jobs? By that measure, the news is flat-to-down without letup. The Black-White discrepancy in the trends is increasing.

Here is the employment trend for White and Black women, showing that Black women had higher employment rates before the recession, but they’ve fallen more than twice as much as White women’s (a drop of 5.7% versus 2.4% as of June):

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

For men, the gap is bigger and the lines further apart, so I added a ratio line to help show the gap. Black men’s rate has fallen 5.6%, compared with 3.8% for White men:

The Christian Science Monitor has an article reviewing some of the factors that contribute to the unemployment gap for men, including education, incarceration and discrimination. And the Center for American Progress has more detail in this report, which argues that declines in manufacturing and public employment are increasing the Black-White gaps especially in this recession.

What the broader statistics don’t show as well is the tenuousness of the jobs Black workers have compared to Whites generally — working for weaker firms, in more segregated jobs, as a result of a racialized sorting process, which put them at higher risk of job loss in a recession (even without discrimination in firing decisions, which there is, too).

HAPPY AUGUST!

New Contributor:

First and foremost, Sociological Images is pleased to welcome Marty Hart-Landsberg to our team of Contributors!  Marty is a professor of Economics at Lewis and Clark College. He’s been blogging, excellently, at Reports from the Economic Front, and he brings much needed expertise and insight into economic issues. We’re so pleased that he’s joined us!

New Publications and Appearances:

Catch contributor Caroline Heldman talking about the debt ceiling debate on Fox Business Channel’s Follow the Money tonight at 10 p.m. EST.  Heldman appeared on The Factor, Neil Cavuto’s Show, The Hannity Show, Freedomwatch, Bulls & Bears, and Follow the Money 14 times last month.

I’m very excited to have a new publication out in the journal Ethnography. My first using ethnographic methods, the paper is an analysis of lindy hop (a social dance from the 1930s and ’40s) with which I argue that the habitus has liberating as well as conservative potential: The Emancipatory Promise of the Habitus: Lindy Hop, the Body, and Social Change. And there’re pictures!

I also wrote about 500 words on hook up culture on college campuses for the Canadian website, The Mark.  I argue that hook up culture isn’t bad, it’s just-as-bad and no worse than the rest of society.

Gwen and I will both be guest blogging at Scientopia for the next two weeks.  You can catch all the same material here, but check out Scientopia if you’re interested in

Finally, SocImages showed up on TIME and BoingBoing this week. Always a good time…

New Pages:

We’ve added an “Editors’ Pick” tab to our menu. Gwen and I will be slowly culling our favorite posts from the last four years and adding them.  We’re excited to be able to highlight our best and most well-received stuff.

We’ve also added a “For Instructors” tab.  We’ve got some stuff for you there already, but are also asking for volunteers to help make the site more useful to instructors. We’re especially excited about the possibility of putting together Course Guides that collect the best posts for common sociology courses. Check it out!

Party in Las Vegas:

The American Sociological Association is having its annual conference in Las Vegas this year.  We invite all of you to the Blogger Party at 4:30pm on Sunday, August 21st at the Seahorse Lounge at Caesar’s Palace. Come by and say “hello”!

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

This is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter and Facebook.  Learn more about your editors at my website and Gwen’s.  And a bunch of us are on twitter @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, and @jaylivingston.