On this day in 1916 the U.S. government passed the 18th amendment prohibiting the “…manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” The rest is history. But where did all the existing booze go and how did the feds dispose of alcohol confiscated in the years it was illegal? Retronaut has a series of photos with the answer to this question. It looks as if liquor fed the fishes and the daisies, marking an unintentionally intoxicating period of American history.
Last month Jet — a magazine marketed to African-American population — featured their first gay male couple in their wedding announcements. The announcement may be a sign that African-American attitudes towards gay marriage may be turning around. While the group has typically endorsed gay marriage at lower rates than White Americans, the gap between Blacks and Whites has been narrowing.
The Pew Research Center reports that the percent of Whites opposed to gay marriage dropped from 51% in 2008 to 41% in 2012. Among Blacks, the percent in opposition dropped from 63% to 49%. African-Americans and Whites are now separated by eight percentage points instead of twelve.
The data above was collected in April of 2012. In May, Obama announced that he supported gay marriage. It remains to be seen whether Obama’s modeling of a pro-gay stance will influence the opinions of the African-American community further.
Advanced quantitative analysis often controls for variables that aren’t of central interest. But what does it mean to “control for” a variable? XKCD offers a fun example.
So, do subscribers to Martha Stewart Living live alongside furries? Probably not. In any case, these maps don’t offer any evidence in favor of this conclusion. This is because of a variable that hasn’t been controlled for: population density.
To control for population, one would have to divide the number of subscribers/furries by the total population. This would give us the percentage of the population that is described by both proclivities, instead of the sheer number of devotees. Then the maps would actually show variance in the proportion of the population instead of variance in the population itself.
In other words, we would have controlled for population in order to get a closer look at what we’re really interested in: furries, of course.
The year during which the U.S. will become a “majority minority” is well discussed. It looks like it’s going to happen sometime around 2050 or earlier. This statistic, however, elides an interesting subplot: the year various age groups will be majority minority.
Over at The Society Pages Editors’ Desk, sociologist Doug Hartmann offered the following table. It shows that children under the age of 18 will be majority minority 32 years earlier, by 2018. Young people ages 18-29 will join them by 2027. By 2035, people aged 35-64 will be majority minority. People 65 and older are quick to follow.
This data reminds us that demographic change is gradual. The year 2018 is just five years away. If young people continue to vote in numbers similar to those in the last two elections, their changing demographics could push forward a change that looks all but inevitable in the long run.
In the meantime, we need to be vigilant about how younger people are portrayed. Today poverty is racialized so as to demonize social programs designed to help the less fortunate. Can we imagine a future in which public education and other youth-oriented programming is similarly framed: as white people helping supposedly undeserving people of color? This is likely something that we should be vigilant against in the coming years.
As politicians negotiated regarding the fiscal cliff, they debated whether to cut social programs aimed at alleviating poverty and deprivation. Most of us imagine that these programs help a minority of the population. In fact, the Pew Research Center reports that more than half of the population has received government benefits from one of the six most well-known programs:
This isn’t the so-called 47% that Romney claimed would vote for a Democrat no matter what. In fact, people who received one of these six benefits were only slightly more likely to vote Democratic:
In fact, receiving benefits is pretty well spread out among the population. Except for people over 65, there seems to be significant consistency in the receipt of at least one benefit:
Notably, these programs also go to help the poor, women (largely because they end up single with young children), and people in rural areas.
Interestingly, many of us who have benefited from targeted government programs (“targeted” because we all benefit from programs like, oh, transportation initiatives and environmental protection and [insert dozens more here]) don’t know that we do. In a previous post, we showed that large proportions of people who’ve benefited from social programs don’t recognize that they have unless their thinking is sparked by asking them about specific programs. (It’s kind of like responding “No I don’t do drugs” and then being asked specifically about marijuana and saying, “Oh yeah, well that one I guess!”).
Since it is indeed the majority of Americans who benefit from targeted programs, it shouldn’t be too hard for politicians to find it in their hearts to support these programs. That 57% of conservatives and 52% of Republicans have used them suggests that the political right is more interested in purporting an ideology than serving its constituency.
Alternatively, they realize that a certain proportion of benefit recipients also believe that the government “does not have the responsibility to care for those who cannot care or themselves.” About a third of people who hold onto this principle have used benefits:
It seems that data like this might be very useful for what we really need: an educational campaign designed to help Americans understand what social programs do and who benefits from them. Maybe then we could have sensible policy discussions.
Cross-posted at Racialicious. Sociologist Jooyoung Lee is writing what sounds like a truly fascinating book. Titled Blowing Up: Rap Dreams in LA, it follows a series of young Black men who are trying to make it as rappers. “Together,” Lee writes, “their stories show how rapping — and Hip Hop culture more generally — transform the social worlds of urban poor black youths.”
The video below gives us a taste of his findings. In it, he’s asked why he thinks rappers are “so maligned in our culture.” He explains that it’s because people often “take violent and misogynistic lyrics” literally. Doing so, however, is to misunderstand “how the creative process works.” He goes on to explain how one of the men he studied was pressured by a music label to cultivate an image that conformed to stereotypes of young, urban Black men.
In an earlier post, Caroline Heldman offered a typology of objectification. No. 6 was a conflation of a person with a commodity. This photo of a display at the 1936 Los Angeles Electrical Exposition seems to qualify, but somehow that doesn’t make it any less charming!
“Silver Linings Playbook,” the new David O. Russell movie, starts off by making the audience uncomfortable. We want to like Pat (Bradley Cooper). We root for him to overcome the internal demons that landed him in a mental hospital for eight months. We do like him. But he keeps doing things we don’t like. He is socially insensitive and often offensive, utterly absorbed in his own deluded ideas and obsessions, and although we know that these emanate from his psychiatric condition, it’s impossible to separate the personal from the psychiatric. He is his mental illness, and it’s often not pretty. We’re actually glad to see the cop who shows up to enforce the restraining order. (Usually in American films, when a uniformed cop restrains the hero, the moral question is so clear the cop might as well be wearing a Nazi uniform.)
At some point, the film takes a turn away from the complicated and difficult. It calls on a smooth, familiar recipe and gives us comfort food — sweet chocolate pudding, spoonful after spoonful. It’s made from good chocolate, but it’s predictable pudding nonetheless.
It all leads up to a climactic scene that we all know from countless other movies. In this case, it’s a ballroom dancing competition:
The movie plays on one long-standing idea in American movies and TV: all moral questions, all questions of character, can be settled in a contest. Typically, the story sets out some difficulties for the hero — conflicts with the society, conflicts with some other person or organization, conflicts within himself. It all leads up to some climactic contest. Usually the hero wins, occasionally he loses. But the outcome doesn’t matter so much as the nobility of the fight, for win or lose, the hero has fought, and that seems to resolve all issues. Rocky is the obvious example…
That’s from six years ago in one of the first posts on this blog. (I’ve edited it lightly.) That post was about the first episode of Friday Night Lights. But it could have been about “Silver Linings Playbook” — “Rocky” meets “Dancing With the Stars.”
For a nearly complete plot summary, watch the trailer.
The contest seems to melt all problems no matter how complicated, no matter how seemingly unrelated to the competition itself – problems between a man and a woman, a son and father, friend and friend.
“Silver Linings Playbook” hits all three of those plus husband and wife, brother and brother, and maybe some others. Other seemingly insoluble problems – from Pat’s obsession with his estranged wife to the side effects of medications – vanish. And in case the pudding wasn’t already sweet enough, there’s an added Hollywood-ending bonus involving a large bet on the Cowboys-Eagles game, an outcome so predictable I’m not even putting in a spoiler warning.
And they all live happily ever after.
These themes are not inherent in movie contests. In British films of the sixties – “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” or “This Sporting Life” for example – athletic contests bring a heightened consciousness of the class system. But in American movies, regardless of the setting – the boxing ring, the pool hall, the poker game, the karate dojo, the dance floor, etc. – competition works its magic and allows the heroes to overcome all personal and interpersonal problems.
Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry. Read more…
