A couple of weeks ago I posted about American Indian sports mascots. An interesting comparison to spark discussion, and an example students often bring up, is the University of Notre Dame’s mascot. The name of the Notre Dame athletic teams is the Fighting Irish, and the official mascot is the leprechaun (image found at Wikipedia):

Each year a student is chosen to be the leprechaun. Here is an image (found here) of the Notre Dame leprechaun performing at a game:

According to the Notre Dame website, the leprechaun did not become the official mascot until 1965; before that, the university was represented by Irish terrier dogs.

You might compare this to the Chief Illini logo, as well as the University of Illinois student performing as Chief Illini, both in the original mascots post. It brings up some interesting issues for discussion. Is there any difference between the the Fighting Irish and the Fighting Illini (or the Fighting Sioux, the Redskins, etc.)? Does the existence of the Fighting Irish invalidate opposition to American Indian mascots? Opponents to Indian mascots often argue that they objectify American Indians in a way that would not be allowed if used against African Americans or Asians–that this modern form of blackface is acceptable only when used to mimic Native American groups or cultural traditions. Those who support American Indian mascots often use the Fighting Irish to try to invalidate that criticism–to argue that Whites are also used as mascots and don’t seem to mind (to my knowledge, there is no movement against the Notre Dame mascot based on the idea that it is offensive to the Irish), and thus that critics of American Indian mascots are over-sensitive whiners.

Opponents of American Indian mascots respond that, first, this is one example, compared to the many, many American Indian mascots found throughout the U.S., and second, whereas Americans of Irish descent face no systematic ethnicity-based discrimination in the U.S. today (and haven’t for several decades), Native Americans still do. In addition, they argue that many American Indian groups openly oppose Indian mascots, and that their voices deserve to be heard; presumably, if Irish-Americans began to protest the Fighting Irish mascot, the same logic would hold and, indeed, those opposing American Indian mascots would oppose the Fighting Irish as well.

This might be useful not just for a discussion of sports mascots, but more generally for a discussion of the idea of equivalency in discrimination. I see this a lot with students–if, for instance, we’re discussing sexual harassment and they can point to an example when a man was sexually harassed by a woman, then they argue that men are affected just like women, and thus it has nothing to do with gender inequality or power. I suspect those who bring up Notre Dame in an effort to invalidate arguments against Indian mascots are doing the same thing–if a White ethnic mascot exists, then charges that Indian mascots are racist can be dismissed. It’s a false form of equalizing because it ignores the lop-sidedness of the “equality” (the tiny number of non-Indian racialized mascots compared to the number of Indian ones) and the role of systemic inequality (that American Indians are underrepresented at colleges and universities and face racial discrimination in a way that Irish-Americans do not). And it also serves to discount opponents’ voices by saying that if any social group wouldn’t be opposed to a particular type of portrayal or treatment, then no one else has any right to be offended by it, either, regardless of their different histories, treatment, or social positions.

p.j. sent me two images that she received in an email forwarded to her. The subject line of the email was “Harley…Any questions?” and the text said,

Food for thought.  I’m telling you folks, this should be all you need to know to make the right choice.

Here is the first image, of Sarah Palin sitting on a Harley:

The second image showed Barack Obama on a bicycle:

The email also said,

Note:  Her Harley is made in the US and his bike is made in China…..

There are a couple of things going on here. Clearly we’re supposed to take from this that because Palin once sat on an American-made form of transportation and Obama once sat on a form of transportation made in China, that Obama is unAmerican and, thus, unworthy of the presidency. Because trying to use less imported oil and reduce pollution by riding a bike totally makes you unworthy of running the country.

But there’s also a clear gender message here. We are supposed to take from the first image that, because she leans on American-made tough motorcycles, Palin is tough and strong. On the other hand, the picture of Obama riding a bike (in a bike helmet, no less) is, I believe, meant to imply that he is a weak, effete city boy who wouldn’t know how to shoot a moose if the need arose. The effect is that Palin, a woman, is depicted as more masculine than Obama. It’s a good example of how masculinity and femininity are characteristics of not just people, but also things, and that both men and women can adopt symbols of masculinity and femininity. However, because masculinity is more valued in our culture, women usually benefit from associating themselves with aspects of masculinity, whereas men are usually ridiculed for appearing feminine in any way. In this case, Palin’s connection to the hyper-masculine Harley makes her seem, to those forwarding this email around, tough and cool. Obama, on the other hand, can’t benefit from appearing more feminine in the way that Palin can benefit from appearing more masculine, because being feminine is stigmatized.

Of course, you might also discuss how big motorized machines are associated with masculinity, while caring about the environment (including things such as riding a bike to work) is often associated with femininity.

Thanks, p.j.!

UPDATE: Lea R. made a good point in a comment:

I’m not entirely convinced that what’s going on here is the “masculinization” of Sarah Palin. The “Harley babe” is a pretty standard trope of advertising those bikes, particularly when it comes to staking the objects out as masculine in themselves. Palin isn’t riding the motorcycle, after all– she’s posing with it. Pretty women posing with motorcycles aren’t really being presented as “masculine;” they set off the implied masculinity of the motorcycle, and reinforce it as a heterosexual accessory.

I think that’s an excellent point, and well said. I do think the Harley pic plays into Palin’s image as a rough, outdoorsy type of woman who engages in other masculine activities, like hunting, which have been been used to make her seem cool, strong, and “authentic.” But at the same time, she reinforces her femininity with her clothes and make-up, so she’s not in danger of being too masculinized, to where she’s threatening or stereotyped as a lesbian.

JT, in another comment, pointed out:

It looks like Obama might have a child on a trailer bike behind him — see the front of the trailer?  Another piece of info that might contribute to the gender roles discussion.

Thanks for the excellent commentary!

UPDATE 2: In another comment, Will asked if the bike Obama was riding is actually manufactured in China, as the email claims. It is a Trek, a very popular brand. According to Wikipedia, there is some “high-end” domestic production and “assembly,” and “Trek also imports bicycles manufactured in Taiwan and mainland China.” I suspect this means that some of the expensive models are made in the U.S., and some cheaper models have the parts imported and put together here, but that most of the cheaper, regular-use bikes, like the one in the picture, are imported. I suppose the type of reader who would make a decision about voting based on these images would not care that Taiwan is not, in fact, China, and so if the bike was manufactured in Taiwan, the statement is technically incorrect.

Tony S. brought my attention to this yard sign about Obama that has become quite famous (found at BlackPoliticsontheWeb):

A Florida man put it up in his yard, and it has, not surprisingly, led to some complaints and a lot of online discussion.

Obviously this is fascinating for a discussion of how Obama’s race continues to be emphasized by some opponents, despite the chorus of media voices saying that we’re a “post-racial” nation now. This is a bit of a new twist, in that most examples of opponents referring to Obama’s race have tended to focus exclusively on his Black ancestry. Here he’s referred to as a “half-breed.” Whereas highlighting his Blackness brings up one set of stereotypes that might seem threatening to White voters, “half-breed” brings up a whole other issue that might make some voters uncomfortable–racial mixing. There’s also the association with Islam.

Aside from the specific reference to Obama, there’s an interesting linguistic element here. Why would calling someone a half-breed Musli[m] be automatically recognizable as a slur? It says something about how Muslims are currently viewed in our society that, for at least some Americans, all you have to do is refer to someone as a Muslim to imply that they are unworthy of office. Similarly, the word half-breed is stigmatizing in a way that, say, “multiracial” isn’t. Imagine a similar sign that said, say, “Obama: Multiracial Lutheran.” Doesn’t have quite the same effect, because being multiracial and Lutheran aren’t stigmatized the way half-breed and Muslim are. It might also be good for a discussion of how groups might adopt new terms (such as multiracial) to try to counter the negative associations of others, like half-breed.

However, the other thing I found interesting about this was how every account I could find of this sign online mentioned that he misspelled Muslim as “Muslin.” I’m a stickler for language and misspellings actually give me pain in any kind of formal writing, but I was struck by the fact that many of the comments about the sign focused not on the offensive racial element, but on the misspelling. It seems many people dismiss this guy as a nutjob not because he’s trying to draw on the old knee-jerk fear of racial mixing, but because he misspelled something on his handmade sign. That’s…well, weird.

Thanks, Tony!

NEW!  In our comments, Zach also pointed us to this picture he took in Ohio:

ALSO NEW!  Velanie W. sent in this clip from Al Jazeera English where people associated Obama with Islam and terrorism:

Thanks, Velanie!

This is a famous photograph of Clell Pruett, a farm worker, burning a copy of The Grapes of Wrath while two leaders of Associated Farmers, an organization made up of California agricultural producers, look on. I heard about this incident on NPR this morning; click here for a link to the story.

As might be expected, members of Associated Farmers were not too pleased about The Grapes of Wrath, which they thought portrayed them unfairly and also encouraged union organizing, which they very much opposed. In some counties in California, the book was banned from libraries. According to the NPR story,

Camp [leader of a local Associated Farmers branch] wanted to publicize the county’s opposition to The Grapes Of Wrath. Convinced that many migrants were also offended by their depiction in the novel, he recruited one of his workers, Clell Pruett, to burn the book.

Pruett had not read the book at that point, though he had heard about it and did not like what he had heard, and when he got around to reading it a few years ago (after the NPR reporter gave it to him), he said he “had no regrets” about burning it.

I thought this might be useful for a discussion of protests and how dominant groups may orchestrate protests that denounce or invalidate criticisms of their positions of power. We see a somewhat similar phenomenon today with the so-called “Astroturf” organizations, a term coined to refer to what appear to be citizen advocacy groups but that are basically fronts for corporations or industry groups to push their agenda, often with little or no support from anyone not directly connected to the corporations involved–the term makes fun of their attempts to portray these groups as “grassroots.”

It also brings up interesting issues about agency. I suspect many on the left who are generally sympathetic to organized labor would view Pruett as a traitor or a dupe–an ignorant fool who was used by those in power to undermine the very cause that would have improved his life. But there’s a big assumption there–that it would be impossible for a farm worker to simply be offended by the depiction of workers in The Grapes of Wrath (or to be opposed to the labor movement more generally). So this might spark a discussion about the ideas of “interests” (i.e., that workers’ interests are served by organizing) and who gets to decide what they are (or which set of interests should be prioritized). Is Pruett a traitor to organized labor? Did he betray other farmworkers? Is he just a tool of the wealthy landowners who often exploited workers, or was there a legitimate reason some workers might have been offended by The Grapes of Wrath?

This isn’t to discount the fact that those in power often search for an “authentic” voice they can use to delegitimize criticisms. For instance, universities using American Indian mascots have often looked for a group of American Indians willing to state that they either don’t oppose or actively support the mascot. In some cases these supporters were from other states and might have been offered scholarships or other incentives that led many mascot opponents to question whether they were basically being bribed.

I just thought it might make a good addition to a discussion of social movements and protests in general–how do we conceive of counter-movements and the role of the dominant group in them? When and in what way do the powerful use members of the supposedly aggreived group to delegitimate criticism? And who gets to decide when someone is being used and when they are, of free will and presumably sound mind, in agreement with the group that others perceive to be oppressing him or her? Who gets to decide you’re being oppressed, even if you don’t feel like it?

Of course, it would also make a nice image for a discussion of freedom of the press.

As always, we are busy behind the scenes.  Here are some of the posts we have enhanced over the course of this bizarre election month:

We added several images to this post about the media’s sexualization of Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin, as well as another image to this post about the “Drill Baby, Drill” t-shirt featuring McCain doing Palin doggy-style (which we thought, for some reason, merited its own post).

We added an interview with the creators of Obama Waffles to the post about “On the Campaign Trail.”

We have a fantastic collection of ads that demonstrate how white standards of beauty are applied to black women.  In them, the black and white women look almost identical.  We added another couple ads for Maybelline where “diversity” looks surprisingly like twins.  Scroll to the bottom here.

We added two more examples to our lists of ways in which people of color are used in advertising aimed at white people: to associate the product with a racial stereotype and to signify human variation. 

Ben O. had another image of a scale conflating health and weight.  We added it to our other example here.

We added two new images to this post about the frequently contradictory messages we get about eating healthier. The first image shows a sticker on a vending machine encouraging people to make healthy choices about what to eat. The second shows a picture of the products actually for sale in the vending machine, which don’t exactly provide consumers with a panoply of healthy options.

We added three new images to our post on The Frightened Sperm.  One is a cartoon depicting Michael Phelps as the winning sperm, one is a clip from The Family Guy showing Stewie in a spermship, and the last depicts an egg actively guiding some sperm while providing barriers to others.  Thanks to commenters Noumenon, MW, and Ranah respectively for these images!

We added another vintage douche ad (this one for a douche made from Lysol).  Thanks to Holly Mac. for this one!

We added another image of sexualized food to this post, this time the cow used to advertise Skinny Cow ice cream (scroll all the way to the bottom). Thanks to Blanca for pointing it out!

We added to this post about how Dove, a brand with the much-touted “Real Woman” ad campaign, and Axe, a brand marketed to men using highly sexualized images of women, are both manufactured by Unilever. The new content is a link to a post from Moment of Choice about a woman’s experience auditioning before a panel of men for one of the Dove commercials.

We added another image in our post about the Declare Yourself ad campaign, which we initially discussed in the context of Jessica Alba’s appearance in one of the ads.

To our post showing re-touching of celebrities, we added a link to a photo gallery comparing photos of celebrities to their Photoshopped images on magazine covers.  See it here.

Regarding how girls are socialized to think of themselves as high-maintenance divas, we added another image here.

CONSOLIDATIONS:

We combined two posts about Heelarious, a company making high heels for infants, into one post.

We consolidated two posts about policing masculinity that included Snickers ads featuring Mr. T into one post, found here.

ALSO:

We added another class assignment, this one by Alicia Revely.  Read it along with our other class assignments.

In her book Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America, Mary Waters discusses the ways in which White Americans are able to pick and choose among their various ancestries, deciding which (if any) ones to actively claim and in what context. Certain White ethnicities tend to be quite popular, so that people are likely to actively identify themselves as, say, Italian or Irish, whereas others, such as Scottish or Scots-Irish, are relatively unpopular and people are likely to drop those ancestries from their ethnic identity.

Here is a screenshot from the website of Kathleen Delaney, a candidate for judge here in Las Vegas:

Although there is no explicit mention of it anywhere in her campaign materials, I presume, by the shamrocks and the use of the colors of the Irish flag, that she is Irish American. By using these symbols, she is able to signal her ethnicity, which she clearly is proud of and also feels will not impact her campaign negatively (thus her willingness to actively bring attention to it when there is no clear reason to do so).

This illustrates some important aspects of Waters’ argument. Whereas non-Whites often cannot get others to ignore or forget their race, Whites generally have the option of going unmarked–as just “plain” Americans, if you will. That doesn’t mean White ancestries are meaningless or unimportant, but it does mean they have different consequences. Whites can choose when to emphasize their ethnicity, and doing so has few negative consequences. Today there are no significant differences among White ethnic groups in terms of major indicators of quality of life or economic status. So the vast majority of the time there are no real downsides to claiming a White ethnicity, since being White trumps being German or Norwegian or Irish (although of course in the past there was significant discrimination aimed at certain groups of European immigrants, particularly the Irish, Italians, and eastern Europeans).

On the contrary, claiming an ethnic identity lets Whites feel special and interesting. One of the weird things about our racial system is that, though non-Whites are often stigmatized and Whites are at the top of our racial hierarchy, Whites are also often portrayed as culture-less and boring (see this post for an example). So being not just “plain” American but instead Swedish-American seems neater.

This might make a good contrast to the ways in which Barack Obama’s race has been discussed in the presidential election. Whereas he has had to actively address issues of race, and try to downplay it and portray himself as a “post-racial” candidate, Delaney can actively bring attention to an ethnicity that would otherwise probably go unnoticed by most voters, and she clearly thinks that doing so isn’t going to harm her chances of getting elected.

UPDATE: In a comment, Megan pointed out that the ability to “mark” yourself with symbols of your ethnicity can be limited by whether or not those symbols are known well enough by the general public to be recognizable. She says,

Being Swedish-American may be “neat” as you say, but putting some Swedish symbols on a bumper sticker won’t really be understood outside of the upper midwest.

It’s a good point–whereas the shamrock is widely recognized as a symbol of Irishness, I can’t think of any similar symbols of Swedishness off the top of my head, and blue and yellow, the colors of the Swedish flag, certainly don’t immediately signal “Sweden” to me when I see them. So of course anyone can use symbols to signify their ancestry, but not all of those symbols are going to be meaningful to observers. If the Delaney sign had been blue and yellow, and she had some Swedish symbol in place of the shamrocks, I probably never would have written this post because I wouldn’t have even recognized it as ethnic signalling.

Thanks, Megan!

In the 1950s, Clearasil started a new marketing campaign called Clearasil Personality of the Month. These were ads disguised as advice columns that ran in magazines. They featured the stories of real girls who wrote in to Clearasil to talk about their own struggles with acne and, of course, how they finally overcame this horrible affliction with the help of Clearasil. Here is an example (found here), a piece on a college student named Linda Waddell:

Sorry, the resolution isn’t good enough for me to be able to read all the text, so I don’t know what it says. The general layout was that teens and young women wrote in with little bios about themselves and descriptions of the problems they’ve experienced with pimples.

Notice the connection between clear skin and popularity–we see a picture of Linda surrounded by friends in the upper right corner (and, most importantly, a guy is clearly paying attention to her).

I originally read about this feature in Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. She discussed it in the context of talking about increasing concern about acne and the rise of a whole host of products to combat it. However, I think it would be great for a discussion about advertising, particular about efforts to disguise advertising as simple information or entertainment (it’s still often difficult to distinguish these categories in women’s magazines). It’s also a good example of a marketing campaign that attempts to appeal to consumers by getting them to think of a product almost as a friend–here, the product is personified by nice, wholesome-looking girls who were just providing friendly advice to other girls just like them.

You still see the strategy of portraying products as friends that help women–for instance, ads for food products or cleaners that depict them as friends that help women get everything done, since apparently no one in their families will. See this post for a humorous take on some of these ads.

In her book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, Joan Jacobs Brumberg has a chaptered titled “Perfect Skin” in which she looks at the rise of acne as a significant concern among adolescent girls. Because pimples and blackheads were believed by some people to be a sign of immorality–masturbation, lascivious thoughts, or promiscuity–both teenagers and their parents were quite distressed at the appearance of teen acne. Though teens had long been concerned about their appearances, the widespread use of mirrors in bathrooms starting in the Victorian Era gave them many more opportunities to examine their faces and find themselves lacking. And girls tended to be more concerned about their faces than boys, perhaps because girls were judged more harshly for any perceived sexual immorality. A whole industry arose to sell generally useless products to teens, particularly girls, to cure their acne.

Marketers for soap and other products used concerns about morality in their ads. Here is an ad for Hand Sapolio, a popular soap in the early 1900s (found in a 1906 issue of McClure’s Magazine):

Notice how the text in the top box mentions that cosmetics, which might be used to cover pimples, were being “inveighed against from the very pulpits,” meaning good moral girls couldn’t use cosmetics to hide their acne. Also I like how the title (“Be Fair to Your Skin, and It Will Be Fair to You–and to Others”) implies that if you aren’t fair to your skin, it is going to do something dreadful to the people around you…presumably busting out into a hideous display of pimples that will pain people to look upon.

I zoomed in and did a couple of smaller screen captures of some sections of the text that also stress morality or “goodness”:

Be clean, both in and out. We cannot undertake the former task–that lies with yourself–but the latter we can aid with HAND SAPOLIO.

This section of text makes it clear that good skin is essential for popularity, at least among the “best” people:

This Hand Sapolio ad (from a 1903 issue of New England Magazine), sums it up:

The first step away from self-respect is lack of care in personal cleanliness: the first move in building up a proper pride in man, woman, or child, is a visit to the Bathtub. You can’t be healthy, or pretty, or even good, unless you are clean. HAND SAPOLIO is a true missionary.

So there we see a connection being made between having good skin and being “good,” which means that, like missionaries who help save heathens, Hand Sapolio is a “missionary” spreading moral goodness and self-respect. Because what could build up self-respect more than being told that if you have less than perfectly clean skin, you can’t be pretty or good?

These could be useful for discussions of how physical appearances were steadily connected to ideas of morality and how biological processes, like getting pimples in adolescence, were turned into diseases that required (often expensive) intervention to “cure.” They could also be good for a discussion of marketing, particularly how ideas of morality were tied to particular products, such that goodness was commodified–by buying the item, you were buying goodness.