Archive: 2011

The U.S. is not a very race-literate society.  We aren’t taught much about the history of race relations or racial inequality in school and almost nothing about how to think about race or how to talk to one another about these theoretically and emotionally challenging issues.  Many Americans, then, don’t have a very sophisticated understanding of race dynamics, even as most of them want racial equality and would be horrified to be called “racist.”

In teaching Race and Ethnicity, then, I notice that some of the more naive students will cling to color-blindness.  “Race doesn’t matter,” they say, “I don’t even see color.”   Being colorblind seems like the right thing to be when you’ve grown up being told that (1) all races are or should be equal and (2) you should never judge a book by its cover.  It is the logical outcome of the messages we give many young people about race.

But, of course, color blindness fails because race, despite being a social invention, still matters in our society.  Enter the ongoing scandal about the Cadbury candy bar ad featuring Naomi Campbell, sent in by Dolores R.,  Jack M., and Terri.  The ad compares the Dairy Milk Bliss Bar to Campbell.  It reads: “Move over Naomi, there’s a new Diva in town.”

The ad has been called racist because it compares Campbell to a chocolate bar; chocolate is a term sometimes used to describe black people’s skin color or overall sexual “deliciousness.”  The ad, then, is argued to be foregrounding skin color and even playing on stereotypes of black women’s sexuality.

So what happened here?  One the one hand, I see the critics’ point.  On the other, I can also imagine the advertising people behind this ad thinking that they want to link the candy bar with the idea of a diva (rich, indulgent, etc.), and choosing Campbell because she is a notorious diva, not because she’s a black, female supermodel.  They could argue that they were being colorblind and that race was not at all a consideration in designing this ad.

The problem is that being colorblind in a society where race still colors our perceptions simply doesn’t work.  The truth is that race may not have been a consideration in designing the Cadbury ad, but it should have been.  Not because it’s fun or functional to play with race stereotypes, but because racial meaning is something that must be managed, whether you like it or not.  This is where Cadbury failed.

In my classes, I ask my earnestly-anti-racist students to replace color-blindness with color-consciousness.  We need to be thoughtful and smart about race, racial meaning, and racial inequality.  Racism is bad, but color-blindess is a just form of denial; being conscious about color — seeing it for what it is and isn’t, both really and socially — is a much better way to bring about a just society.

Cadbury, for what it’s worth, has apologized.

See also the Oreo Barbie, the Black Lil’ Monkey Doll, the Obama Sock Monkey, Disparate Pricing for Black and White Dolls, and Accidentally Illustrating Evil with Skin Color.

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.

Michael M. sent in a news segment from WBTV, a CBS affiliate, about the video game Portal 2. The segment focuses on a scene in which a character is ridiculed for being adopted, with another character saying kids who were adopted suffer from a “lack of parents.” In addition, the game includes the line, “Alright, fatty. Adopted fatty. Fatty, fatty no parents” (at 55 seconds in). The news crew expresses dismay as they introduce the segment (and again at the end), which features a father who was upset when his family, including his adopted daughter, encountered the scene:

What struck Michael was the framing of this story by the news outlet, and the focus on ridiculing adopted children while entirely ignoring the use of “fatty” as a put-down, implying that insults based on body size aren’t problematic or hurtful. As Michael puts it,

In a story entirely about insensitivity, this statement, which is even subtitled on screen, seems to be parsed to only be an insult to the adopted. For some reason the weight-based [insult] is completely ignored…What makes one outrageous and another not even cause us to blink?

As a consequence of the “drug war” that began in the 1980s, the U.S. prison population has skyrocketed and, despite dramatic increases in corrections spending, many prisons are now grossly overcrowded.  This issue rose to the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court which has ruled that California must release or relocate more than 33,000 prisoners because prisons are so crowded as to amount to cruel and unusual punishment (source).

A recent issue of Mother Jones included a frightening exposé of the overcrowding in these prisons.  

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.

On the heels of our post about race, ideas of beauty, and the controversy about Satoshi Kanazawa’s blog post at Psychology Today claiming Black women are “objectively” less attractive than women from other races, Lisa C. sent in the 9-minute trailer for the documentary Dark Girls. In it, African American women discuss their own experiences of bias toward dark-skinned women, both in pop culture broadly and from people in their own lives. It’s a stunning and heart-breaking illustration of the personal costs of beauty standards that define dark skin as inherently and automatically problematic:

Dark Girls: Preview from Bradinn French on Vimeo.

In recent years, as states around the country have been faced with the worst budget deficits on record, funding for many social service programs has been slashed or cut entirely. A new report from the NAACP demonstrates that during these budget clashes, funding for prisons has won out over spending for education. The report argues that these “misplaced priorities” are ultimately destructive.  Expanding prisons at this point does little to reduce crime and by spending these limited budget dollars on prisons rather than education, we are condemning the next generation of kids in poor neighborhoods to this same cycle of poor education, high crime rates, and mass incarceration.

However, the NAACP report only describes the first half of the problem—the failures of schools and the expansive role of the criminal justice system. The other half of the story is the legacy of these failures—strikingly low levels of education among those who wind up in our nation’s prisons—and the fact that corrections departments today are doing a worse job than ever in providing education inside of prisons as a way out of the revolving door of corrections.

This is important because we know that over 90 percent of inmates are at some point released and roughly half of them will return to prison within the next 3 years. Slashing prison education funding may provide a very small benefit to the current budget, but it also helps to fuel the growth in prisons that has suffocated education funding in the first place.

It is simple to document the dire educational needs of prisoners.  According to the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities, over 60 percent of state inmates never made it past 11^th grade in school.  Among young inmates under 25 years of age, only 20 percent have completed high school.  If G.E.D.’s are included in this measure, only 66 percent of inmates 25 years or older have completed their basic education, compared to 85 percent of adults in the non-institutionalized population.

Sadly, the programs that serve these inmates’ needs have been on the chopping block for years.  In work recently published in Law & Society Review, I show that the ratio of inmates to teachers for academic and vocational education in prisons nationwide has more than doubled since the 1970s, growing from 53 inmates per teacher in 1974 to 112 inmates per teacher in 2005. Much of this change occurred in the most recent decade: in 1990, the ratio was only 67 inmates per teacher.

These declines in staffing investments are clearly translating into declining participation in prison education programs. Between 1991 and 2004, the percent of inmates reporting past or current participation in academic classes dropped precipitously from 43 percent to 27 percent.  If the rate of high school attendance had dropped by almost 50% in the span of a decade and a half, pundits would be railing against state legislators.  But since this happened behind prison walls, there has been very little awareness (let alone outrage) about these changes.

This strategy is a flawed attempt to cut costs since we know that education is one of the more successful ways to reduce recidivism.  In study after study, inmates who participate in educational programming are less likely to commit new crimes after release and to be re-incarcerated. This is in part because basic academic education and vocational training makes it more possible for ex-felons to find the kind of employment opportunities that forestall re-incarceration.

In recent years, this disinvestment in prison education has been even more brutal. In California, state lawmakers have taken $250 million away from rehabilitation programs in the last two years and are planning to cut another $150 million in the coming year. These losses in funding translate into a third of the adult programming budget. These cuts are an ironic move after Governor Schwarzenegger’s 2004 decision to change the name of the state agency from the “Department of Corrections” to the “Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation”.

Although some states have begun looking into ways to reduce correctional populations as a more sustainable way to manage costs, in the next few years, we can expect to see even more slashes to prison education funding.  Ultimately, this strategy is likely only to cut a small percentage of states’ immediate costs and will increase the need for incarceration spending in the near future.

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Michelle Phelps is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University.  Her work focuses on the punitive turn in the criminal justice system, examining how the daily operations of prisons changed (and remained the same) during the massive recent shift in the rhetoric and politics of punishment.  Her dissertation project is on the rise of probation supervision and you can find her new blog on the strange media surrounding probation at Probation Research.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Sorry for the late post today! We’re both busy with travel plans. Lisa is on her way to New Orleans as I type. I will be in Oklahoma from June 2-8 and won’t be able to check comments or update posts while I’m there, so be patient with slower than usual responses from me.

NEWS:

We have a new Sociological Images essay, “Secrets of a Feminist Icon,” now available in the Spring 2011 issue of Contexts magazine. The essay, based on a post on the same topic, discusses the famous “You Can Do It!” poster associated with Rosie the Riveter, including several myths about its creation and use. You can download the essay here.

We’re always excited when we get linked to BoingBoing. This month they reposted a video we posted by Jay Smooth about media, agenda setting, and the Donald Trump “presidential candidacy” fiasco/joke.

Gwen was quoted in a Globe and Mail story about a used car dealership that compared sexually experienced people to used cars. She was also quoted in a Huffington Post article about racial representation and a recent Dove ad.

If you’re interested in writing a post for Soc Images, check out our Guest Post guidelines.

This is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook.

Finally, if you’d like to learn more about us, you can visit our personal websites here (Lisa) and here (Gwen).

Melissa H.J., Lizzy F., Dmitriy T.M., Kari B., Kalani R., Lisa C., and Anna C. all sent us links about the recent blog post at Psychology Today that many of you have probably already heard about, since it caused quite the outcry. The article, by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, apparently went through multiple title revisions, starting out as “Black Women Are Ugly,” changing to “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?”, and eventually becoming “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?”, before being removed from the Psychology Today website altogether. However, as we know, nothing on the internet is ever really gone, and images of the original post are widely available. I’m using one from BuzzFeed.

Kanazawa apparently specializes in claiming that there are clear, definite, “objective” differences in attractiveness (and also intelligence, and also everything else important) between different races. Also, you can tell who is a criminal and who isn’t just by the way they look (an article illustrated with an image of O.J. Simpson) and, as an added bonus, “virtually all ‘stereotypes’ are empirically true”. We know this is objective because there are graph-y science things, with numbers:

To summarize his point: Women are more attractive than men. And when one of his Add Health interviewers measures a study participant’s attractiveness on a 5-point scale, this is “objective.”  Because they are researchers, and therefore anything they say is objective. And according to objective measurements, Black women aren’t attractive at all. In fact, they’re “far less attractive” than other groups of women. See?

It turns out White women are most attractive. Man! Who would have thought?

There are a lot of other gems, such as the fact that Black women, though objectively less attractive, bizarrely rate themselves subjectively more attractive. It’s like they don’t know they’re ugly!

I’m sick of this article and will leave it to you to click over and read the whole thing if you feel so inclined. Let’s just summarize some of the major issues, and then all move on with our lives:

First, he treats race like a real, biological, meaningful entity. But race is socially constructed; there is no clear biological dividing line that would allow us to put every person on the planet into racial categories, since societies differ in the racial categories they recognize and “race” doesn’t map along unique sets of genes — there is more genetic variation among members of a so-called race as there are between members of different races.

Aside from that, the idea of measuring beauty objectively, completely separated from all cultural influence, is problematic, especially when you start looking at differences by race/ethnicity. In The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, Deborah Rhode discusses how perceptions of attractiveness have varied over time and across cultures and discusses the global history of slavery, colonialism, and race-based systems of domination that make it impossible to separate out our perceptions of what is beautiful and sexually appealing from historical ideologies that insisted that non-White peoples were unattractive (unless in an exotic way, when that was useful, and also, the Irish were hideous despite being European). Joane Nagel’s book Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersection, Forbidden Frontiers is another good source on this topic.

It is simply impossible to separate out even scientists’ ratings of attractiveness from the cultural context, one in which supposedly “Caucasian” features and light skin are repeatedly held up as the ideal of attractiveness (so even famous non-White people often find themselves lightened in media images) while dark skinned people are constructed as unattractive or even scary.

Given that history, it’s not shocking that White women would be rated most attractive and Black women least. What’s shocking is that a scholar at the London School of Economics would think you could uncritically accept those rankings as proof of objective reality, rather than the outcome of constant, long-standing cultural messages about attractiveness that resulted from efforts to legitimize and justify social and political inequalities.

UPDATE: Reader JA provided a link to another post at Psychology Today in which researchers looked at the data Kanazawa used and question his analysis and results.

UPDATE 2: The comments section has largely devolved into a flame war with lots of insults flying around, so I’m closing comments since I won’t be around to moderate them for the next week. I will go in and clean out the comments threads when I get a chance.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Tyrone Forman wrote a wonderful article* examining the discursive strategies white college students use to distance themselves from racism, while still blaming people of color for their own disadvantage or being, straightforwardly, racist.  Among other strategies, they noted that these students would often preface their comments with the phrase “I am not a racist but…”

We’ve documented this strategy before with a series of PostSecret confessions and we certainly saw it used by UCLA’s Alexandra Wallace in her famous anti-Asian rant.  Now Karen alerted me to a new blog collecting instances of this type of language on Facebook, titled simply I’m Not Racist But… It’s pretty stunning what often follows.  Here are some examples (trigger warning for, um, some seriously racist talk):

That was just a selection from the first two pages.  They are lots more.  In a similar vein, you might visit our post about racist tweets and updates after the tsunami hit Japan.

* Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo & Tyrone A. Forman.  2000.  ‘I am not a racist but…’: Mapping White college students’ racial ideology in the USA.  Discourse and Society 11, 1: 50-85.

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.