Archive: 2012

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

About two weeks ago, Chris Hayes said, “It is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other.”

The case, it turns out, is very deniable.  Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution denied it with data from the 2002 and 2008 General Social Survey (GSS).  He looked at three questions…

• Favor laws against interracial marriage
• Would vote for a Black for president
• Blacks should not be pushy

…and concludes:

It is undeniable that some Americans are racist but racists split about evenly across the parties.

Hayes then tweeted a retraction.

End of story?

To begin with, the sample sizes Tabarrok uses are small.  In the 2002 GSS, only 87 respondents went on record against interracial marriage, and in 2008, only 80 said they wouldn’t vote for a Black for president.  (All the tables and graphs presented here and in Tabarrok’s post are based on Whites only.)

Only about 5% of the sample takes the racist response to these items.  But I would run the table differently.  Instead of asking what percent of each party is racist, I would ask where do those few racists go.

The differences are small, but the edge goes to the Republicans.

Second, there is a difference between party identification and political ideology.  If you ask not about party but about political views, the differences become sharper.

The GSS has other questions that might stand as a proxy for racism.  For example:

On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are because most (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty?

Again, the differences are small, with White Republicans slightly more likely (50% vs. 45%) to say Blacks’ economic problems are caused by lack of motivation and will power.  And again, the differences are larger when the independent variable is political ideology rather than party identification.

In that same GSS question about the cause of Black economic troubles, another choice is:

Do you think these differences are mainly due to discrimination?

The differences for both Party ID and Political views are clear.  White Democrats and liberals are much more likely to see discrimination as a major cause.

But is this racist?  Not necessarily.  It might well be part of a general view of the causes of human behavior, one that emphasizes personal factors (ability, motivation, etc.) and downplays structural forces the individual has little power over (discrimination).   Conservatives might use that same  explanation for unemployment and low income among Whites as well.  But I do not know of any GSS questions about the causes of White economic problems.  (Perhaps these exist, but I am not a GSS expert.)

We do know that racists (those who say they would not vote for a Black president) are more likely to take the conservative position on the “Willpower” explanation (76% vs. 50%) and on the Discrimination explanation (78% vs. 64%) compared with those who say yes, they would vote for a Black president.  But that does not mean that the other conservatives who agree with them and who deny that racial discrimination affects the lives of Black people are also racists. People can come to the same position from different places.  But people can also hide their racism behind seemingly non-racial issues.  In the 1960s ,70s, and 80s, many observers thought that the Republicans were using first school busing and then crime as a proxy for race, as Republican strategist Lee Atwater famously explained.  And some observers today (Tom Edsall, for example) argue that the Republicans are using welfare in the same way this time around.

Other bloggers have written about the questions Hayes raised — Tabarrok has links to three of these.  The most interesting I’ve come across is Will Wilkinson’s (here).  His original views apparently were individual-centered and much in line with Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no such thing as society.”  But that was “when I was a Rand-toting libertarian lad.”

He has now come to see that individuals, with their ideas and attitudes and “non-coercive” behavior, can add up to something greater than the sum of its parts, i.e, society.  But he got to this idea by walking down the left fork of the libertarian road – the road not to serfdom but to sociology.

Eventually I realised that actions that are individually non-coercive can add up to stable patterns of behaviour that are systematically or structurally coercive, depriving some individuals of their rightful liberty. In fact, rights-violating structures or patterns of behaviour are excellent examples of Hayekian spontaneous orders—of phenomena that are the product of human action, but not of human design.

Tip: This may look like a boring update post, but you really, really, really want to scroll down to the bottom.

SocImages News

• Gwen was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition this week!  She had the pleasure of talking about one of SocImages Readers’ favorite topics: pointlessly gendered products.  In this interview, she discusses reactions to the new “Bic for Her.”
• Lisa appeared on the Everyday Sociology blog talking about what is and isn’t wrong with hook up culture (in all of two minutes).
• We were quoted twice in Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Beast column, the Dish.  Once drawing attention to our post on the social construction of color (Is the Sky Blue?) and again in response to the New York Times article about gender diversity in boys.

Resources for Instructors (and Other Curious Types)

If you haven’t yet, please visit our For Instructors page.  Here are some highlights:

Course Guides

As you begin the Fall semester, don’t forget about our amazing Course Guides!  These organize SocImages posts in a way that follows standard syllabi for frequently-taught sociology courses.  We currently feature the following:

• Introduction to Sociology, by Gwen Sharp (Nevada State College)
• Sociology of Gender, by Mary Nell Trautner (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
• Sociology of Sport, by J.A. Carter (University of Cincinnati)
• Sexuality and Society, by Amanda Jungels (Georgia State University)
• Sociological Research Methods, by Lisa Wade (Occidental College)

For those of you that already use them.  Thank you so much!  Our guides have been visited, collectively, 43,000 times.  We’re thrilled.

Have a Guide you might like to put together?  We’re looking for volunteers — sociology professors or graduate students — who are willing to browse our archives, pull out the most compelling posts, and arrange them in ways other instructors would find familiar and convenient.  The Guides can cover entire courses or be designed to help illustrate a theory, article, or book.  (We’re even happy to have duplicate Guides, since every instructor is different.)  Send us an email at socimages@thesocietypages.org.

Pinterest Pages

Our Pinterest pages are fun for everyone, but they’re useful for professors looking for just the right image to illustrate an idea.  We currently have one page with all SocImages material (over 9,000 pins!) and 17 pages on specific topics.  Please feel free to browse!

• Social Construction
• Re-Touching and Photoshop
• Sexually Suggestive Advertising
• The Great Recession
• Vintage Ads and Products
• Comics and Cartoons
• Deconstructing Disney
• Sexy Toy Make-Overs
• Racial/Ethnic Objectification
• What Color is “Flesh”?
• The Social Construction of Race
• Heteronormativity
• Gendered Parenting and Housework
• Sexualized/Gendered Food
• The Tyranny of Pink and Blue
• Glamorizing Violence in Fashion

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

Lisa has started booking talks and lectures for the fall.  Her first talk will be at Indiana State University (Sept. 17th-19th) where she’ll be giving a featured lecture at the International Crime, Media & Popular Culture Studies Conference.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, @jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

In Other News…

We totally went to an aerobics class taught by Richard Simmons! It was every bit as wacky and amazing as you would think it would be. He even took a  photo with us. If you’re in L.A., you can take a class with him for only $12, and we highly recommend it. Here we are with Richard in all our post-workout glory:

The recession is over in the U.S.. We’re now in the recovery period.

This would be more comforting if the pace of the recovery weren’t glacial. If you pay attention to weekly unemployment numbers or monthly economic reports, you’ve gotten used to the word “disappointing.” Yes, the economy is gaining jobs, but slowly. At this rate, it would take years to climb out of the hole the recession left us in.

But the slow pace of growth isn’t the only concern. The New York Times discusses the types of new jobs being created. While the majority of the jobs lost were midwage jobs, so far most of the new jobs are low-wage:

We’re not gaining new jobs very quickly. And when we do, it’s hard to find a job that provides a solidly middle-class income among those that are being added, continuing the trend of job polarization that economists have shown is reinforced during economic downturns.

Sociological Images owes a great debt to Jean Kilbourne, a pioneer in the feminist critique of advertising.  She’s most famous, probably, for her video series, Killing Us Softly.

In those videos, she offers a typology of ways that women are subordinated in media content.  One of those is silencing.  Sometimes this means actually covering a woman’s mouth (forcibly, but also playfully), other times copy simply says that she need not (or shouldn’t) speak.  Below are a series of images we’ve collected that illustrate this.  Some of them are dated, but they give you an idea of what the mechanism of silencing looks like.

Canada’s Next Top Model (Cycle 3), sent along by Julie C., included a photoshoot in which the models’ mouths were covered with duct tape.

Erin S. sent in a link to a set of fashion photos in New York Magazine that show faceless women.

Reanimated Horse sent us an American Apparel ad in which the woman’s body is highlighted but her face is obscured:

The next two ads are examples of one’s that suggest that women need not speak, that products can speak for them.

“Eye contact is speaking without words”:

“Make a statement without saying a word”:

Finally, Sarah B. sent along a form of resistance to these kinds of images.  Colin von Heuring, who just started a brand new blog on media subversion, saw an ad with the copy  “You don’t need words to make a statement.”  He decided to “ma[k]e it explicit” (original on the left, modified on the right):

For more on Jean Kilbourne and the subordination of women in advertising, here’s the trailer to Killing Us Softly 4:

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.

Today is the first day of school at the college where I teach, so I thought it would be a nice time to re-post this oldie-but-goodie on the relationship between income and SAT scores.  I’m sure all of our students are brilliant, of course, but whether the SAT measures intelligence fairly is up for debate.

The College Board is an education association that, among other things, administers the SAT college entrance examination.  A report on the scores from 2009, reviewed by the New York Times, included a break down of scores by the household income of the student. Scores correlate strongly and positively with income:

I can think of two explanations for the correlation.

First, it is certainly true that children with more economic resources, on average, end up better prepared for standardized tests.  They tend to have better teachers, more resource-rich educational environments, more educated parents who can help them with school and, sometimes, expensive SAT tutoring.

Second, the test itself may be biased towards wealthier students.  These tests tend to be written and evaluated by privileged individuals who may inadvertently include class-based knowledge, not just knowledge, in the exam (asking questions, for example, that rely on background information about golf instead of basketball).

In any case, this correlation should give us pause; it calls into question, quite profoundly, the extent to which the SAT is functioning as a fair measure.  Perhaps it measures preparedness for college, but whether it measures potential is up for debate.

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.

August 29th is the anniversary of the day that Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and side-swiped New Orleans, breaching the levees.  These posts are from our archives:

Was Hurricane Katrina a “Natural” Disaster?

• Profits Over People: The Human Cause of the Katrina Disaster
• An Iconic Image of Government Failure: Empty, Flooded School Buses

Racism and Neglect

• Racial Violence in Algiers Point
• Hurricane Katrina and the Demographics of Death
• The Fate of Prisoners During Hurricane Katrina (pictured)

Disaster and Discourse

• “Finders” vs “Looters” at the Associated Press
• Disaster Tourism
• The Politics of Hurricane Humor

Devastation and Rebuilding

• Slow Recovery on the Gulf Coast (pre-oil spill)
• Population Recovery in New Orleans
• Rebuilding in the Lower 9th Ward

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.

The Pew Research Center has released the results of a poll of 2,508 adults about social class and life experiences.

An important caveat to start with: the poll asked people to categorize themselves as upper (2% of respondents), upper-middle (15%), middle (49%), lower-middle (25%), or lower class (7%). We know that there’s a tendency among people in the U.S. to identify as middle class, even when their actual income falls far below or above what could reasonably be considered middle class, and the survey didn’t ask about incomes or assets to compare to individuals’ self-identification. There’s likely to be some overlap between the categories if we actually looked at the income/wealth of participants. The graphs below combine those who defined themselves as upper or upper-middle class together into the “upper class” category, while those who said lower-middle are assigned to the “lower class” group.

Not surprisingly, there were large differences by social class in a number of quality-of-life areas. The higher one’s class, the more likely they were to say they were better off than they were 10 years ago and were happy with life and rarely experience stress (though apparently we’re generally pretty stressed overall):

The lower class is much more likely than the other groups to say they are in worse shape than they were before the recession, indicating that they continue to suffer disproportionately from the effects of the economic meltdown and the slow recovery:

Those defined as lower class were much less satisfied with family life, their level of education, and their housing situation:

They were also much more likely to report specific difficulties in the past year, including trouble paying rent/mortgage and other bills, losing a job, and problems paying for medical care:

The results show a consistent, unsurprising pattern: the rich are weathering the slow recovery relatively well, while the poor suffer disproportionately. Check out the full report for information on participants’ perceptions of the wealthy, the fairness of the tax burden across classes, and which political party best represents each group.

[Note: The last item on this page might be NSFW in some workplaces; it’s behind a jump, but if you came to the post directly, be careful about scrolling down past the raincoats.]

Seven readers — Aneesa D., mouskatel, Brandi B., Lisa B., Jared B., Tom Megginson (of Work that Matters), and sociologist Michael Kimmel — all let us know about the attention Bic’s “for Her” pens have been getting, so I thought it was a good day for another round-up of the many items we have decided must be differentiated into versions for men and women. We’ve featured pens like this before; Bic’s are designed just for us ladies and our special pen needs, which apparently include the colors pink and purple and “easy glide” and “smoothness”:

The pens are for sale on Amazon in the UK, and they’ve inspired a lot of push-back over the gendering, with people writing reviews mocking the product and its packaging. Buzzfeed featured a number of the reviews, which highlight the way that internet marketing certainly helps companies, but also opens up more avenues for the public to complain about or ridicule products in a very direct, immediate way that can quickly attract others to do the same — a much faster form of complaint than the days when you had to write a letter to a company’s headquarters:

But don’t worry, guys! There are products just for you, too! J.V. is happy to report that there’s now a hair dryer for men, called the Man Groomer. After all these years of wishing you had some way to quickly dry your hair the way women can, a solution is at hand:

And Sean discovered that Planters is helpfully now selling cans of mixed nuts that are specifically chosen to support men’s health. Obviously women may eat almonds, peanuts, and pistachios separately, but when combined, these form a magical Man Food that addresses men’s unique needs for protein, vitamins, minerals, and fiber:

UPDATE: Reader Kat says,

The Men’s Health on the can of nuts is because they are a product the editors of the magazine Men’s Health felt were a healthy option…The can of nuts aren’t gender specific they are just boasting their “award” of being well liked by the editors of this particular magazine. No different than when any other product has the label “recognized by *fill in the blank* magazine.”

In other gendered products news, Jessie L. noticed these face masks for sale in Taiwan. They are different sizes, but instead of simply presenting them as Medium and Large, for whoever might need those sizes, those size differences are clearly connected to expectations about gender. They’re differentiated by color, by the person shown wearing each one, and the pink package even has a heart-shaped hole that lets you feel the mask.

Similarly, Joonas L. saw his-and-hers versions of disposable raincoats for sale in Helsinki, Finland, and couldn’t see anything different about them except the color and the use of language (miesten = men’s, naisten=women’s) to explicitly gender them:

Finally, Megan C. pointed out an example of gendered personal lubricant. The exact same product it “Tush Eze” when it’s pink and features a woman, but “Anal Eze” in the blue bottle featuring a man. I’m putting it after the jump, just in case it’s not safe for some workplaces:

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