Breck C. sent in a video of the original “Wassup” Budweiser ad. What strikes me about the commercial is the portrayal of male friendship: men don’t actually talk meaningfully, they just mention sports and yell catchphrases at each other. Yet this is associated with “true” friendship (as is Budweiser).

After watching it, I was trying to decide to what degree I thought race was an important factor in the commercial–were viewers likely to read this as how Black men interact, specifically, or just what men are like, more generally? African Americans are sometimes stereotyped as loud and more boisterously expressive than other groups, but lots of commercials portray men in general as sort of loud idiots (or children or animals) of some type or another.

I looked for some more “Wassup” commercials and came upon this one:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDTZCgsZGeA[/youtube]

The only male shown being annoyed by the screaming–and not part of the friendship group–is the White guy at the end. I got the impression that he’s used to hearing it from them, so presumably he could have learned to like it as much as they have.

Both Breck C. and Burk sent in this update of the video, made by an independent director with all the original “Wassup” actors (and not in any way related to the Budweiser company):

Apparently this commercial became sufficiently imprinted in the public consciousness that it occurred to someone to update it as a political ad, assuming people would still remember and feel affection for the catchphrase and the characters. I had no idea.

Thanks, Breck and Burk!

Here are some graphs about income inequality over time:

From the Working Group on Extreme Poverty.

Teresa C., from Moment of Choice, sent in the trailer for the movie “The Secret Life of Bees.” What brought her attention to it was that it had a female voiceover, which is very uncommon. Voiceovers are almost always male. Unfortunately, she hasn’t been able to find a video of the trailer with the female voiceover online; if anyone finds it, let us know. This trailer just has some of the characters’ lines from the movie as narration.

What struck me about it–and Owen Gleiberman over at Entertainment Weekly–was that this seems to be another movie in which wise, long-suffering African American characters protect or enlighten White characters who are, at their core, good, kind liberals (we know that Dakota Fanning’s character is a Good White Person because she knows about the Civil Rights Act). As Gleiberman says in his review,

Isn’t it time that Hollywood took a sabbatical — maybe a permanent one — from movies in which black characters exist primarily to save the souls of white ones?…Over the years, we’ve all seen too many anachronistic ”magic Negroes” in movies like Forrest Gump and The Green Mile.

I would add “The Legend of Bagger Vance” to the list. They have important Black characters, but those characters’ main role is to facilitate the moral development of the White character through their wise advice and unending patience. I may be totally off, since I’ve only seen the trailer (though Gleiberman has seen the whole film), but “The Secret Life of Bees” seems to have a lot of the same themes.

Thanks for sending in the clip, Teresa!

Here are some graphs on the income and wealth gap between Whites and Blacks in the U.S.

This next one shows homeownership rates. I know some people are going to point out that Blacks are more concentrated in urban areas than Whites are, and so it might make more sense to break down homeownership by area (rural, urban, suburban). While that might be a legitimately useful comparison, it also brings up the question of why African Americans would be more concentrated in urban areas, which could lead to a discussion of government programs that encourage Whites to buy homes in the suburbs after WWII while denying those opportunities to Blacks.

One way of explaining higher unemployment rates among Blacks is that there is some individual or cultural deficiency–African Americans are lazy, or want a hand-out, or don’t look for work, etc. etc. I like to show trend comparisons like these because they undermine those types of explanations. If African American unemployment was due to laziness, a “culture of poverty,” or other deficiencies, it would be unlikely for Black and White unemployment rates to show the same pattern (or, for that matter, any pattern–unless you believe African Americans just got a lot lazier in, say, 1982). What we see here is that Black and White unemployment rates follow a very similar pattern, but that during hard economic times, sugh as the early 1980s and around 1992, African Americans suffer disproportionately.

This one shows the slow but steady trend toward resegregation of our schools:

All of these were found at the Working Group on Extreme Inequality website.

The following graphs all show how much of American’s wealth is (or, um, was) in the form of home equity. They are all based on 2002 data, several years before housing prices hit their peaks, which means by the time the housing bubble burst, home equity was an even larger proportion of all net worth.

It’s not that I didn’t already know the economy was in trouble. That’s obvious–I live in Vegas, all I have to do is drive around a little and see all the houses sitting empty. But looking at these images I kept thinking, “a good portion of that home equity wealth is just gone.” On paper, we had all this wealth, and people borrowed based on it…and a lot of it is simply gone. Just…poof. Gone!

This one shows what percent of all net worth in the U.S. falls into various categories.

Here we have median net worth in 2002 for different age groups…and then the lighter purple bar, which is median net worth if you took out home equity:

A similar breakdown, except by race, not age this time. Notice how much Blacks and Hispanics lag behind Asians, and how much they lag behind non-Hispanic Whites in terms of net worth:

On the up side, if the stock market keeps going down, then home equity as a percent of our net worth will go up again because we’ll have lost so much in stocks. So, you know, look on the bright side!

All of these graphs came from “Net Worth and the Assets of Households: 2002,” written by Alfred O. Gottschalck and published by the U.S. Census Bureau in April 2008.

Below are two photos — one of Barack Obama as an adult and one of a young Obama and his Grandfather, Stanley Dunham (found here and here).  I tried a little experiment in class. I put up the photo of adult Obama and I had my students make a list of what characteristics made him identifiably Black, in their view. Every one of them put on their list his nose, lips, and hair, and several made comments about his ears or just that “the combination of all his facial features” was “clearly” Black.

Then I brought up the photo of young Obama and his grandfather alongside it:

It led to a really interesting discussion. Because my students think of Obama as Black, they saw all his features through that racial lens. It was obvious to them that he had “Black” facial features. After viewing the photos next to one another, they talked about how the two men look very similar, but their facial features seem “clearly” Black on one person and “clearly” White on the other because we’re used to believing that Blacks and Whites look very different. Because they believe in racial differences, they see them. This activity seemed to really help students grasp what I meant when I talked about the way we identify things as racial differences when they’re really variations that occur in many different groups that we swear are physically distinct from one another.

It’s interesting because I’d halfway expected my students to argue that Obama doesn’t “really” look Black at all — that they would say his skin color and hair, perhaps, were identifiable as African American, but that they would point out that he’s half-White and argue that in fact he doesn’t have stereotypically Black or White features. I mean, that would made sense, right? But I’ve tried this with three classes now, as well as several random individuals I’ve subjected to it to see if it might work as a class activity, and no one has yet failed to identify a number of the facial features Obama and Dunham share as specifically African-American features when they see them on Obama.

What a great example of racialization and the social construction of race.

See also our Pinterest pages: what color is flesh? and the social construction of race.

Breguet watches are extremely expensive luxury products; I found them for sale online starting at $11,000 and going up to $235,060 (on sale–$51,000 off!). I saw this ad for them in The New Yorker (where else?) and thought it was interesting how the company evokes a certain class sensibility by highlighting a flattering reference to Breguet written by an Important Literary Figure (Pushkin):

It’s also kind of interesting that the company clearly did not think their image would be damaged by the statement that the watch was worn by a “dandy,” a term often used to imply a man is overly feminine (though how negative the term is varies; recently, some hip hop stars like Andre 3000 of Outcast have adopted the term “dandy” and used it in a positive sense to indicate a man who is stylish and well-dressed, but without the negative implications of being effete).

I went to the Breguet website and read a bit about the watches. Each one has a “secret signature” and an individual number to guard against forgery. One section of the website is dedicated to “celebrated patrons”:

The House of Breguet was privileged to create timepieces for the diplomatic, scientific, military and financial elite. Among its clients, Queen Marie-Antoinette, Napoleon Bonaparte, Talleyrand, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Caroline Murat, Tsar Alexander I of Russia, Queen Victoria, Sir Winston Churchill and Arthur Rubinstein who put their confidence in the taste and artistry of Breguet.

There is also a section on “Breguet in Literature”:

The number of references to Breguet watches in French and foreign literature is an indication of the remarkable reputation enjoyed by both the firm and its founder. Breguet is now so deeply rooted in European culture that the name is virtually a sine qua non of any depiction of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie or, quite simply, a life of luxury and elegance. Stendhal, Mérimée, Pushkin, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Thackeray and Victor Hugo are only some of the writers who have made reference to Breguet in their works…

The ad might be useful for a discussion of social class and the way “class” is often used not just to indicate a level of income, but as a personal characteristic: you “have class” or are “classy” if you like the particular things, speak and dress a certain way, etc. Here we see a connection between wealth, an appreciation for (French and foreign!) literature, an affinity for aristocratic figures who recognized “taste and artistry,” and a particular (extremely expensive) product that connects you to those ideas and symbolizes “luxury and elegance.” By wearing a Breguet watch, you’re associating yourself with all those indicators of classiness and status…in addition to screaming, “I’m rich enough to wear a quarter of a million dollars on my wrist,” of course.

Um…

Jean Kilbourne, in the video “Killing Us Softly 3,” argues that women are often encouraged to substitute food for romantic relationships with men; this ad plays on the same ideas. See this post for a humorous video about how women are also encouraged to think of cleaning products as their “special friends.”

You might also compare this ad to some in this post about ejaculation imagery in ads.