Autism appears to be on the rise. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that there are 20 times more cases of autism today than there were in the 1980s. This figure, from the Los Angeles Times, shows a 200% increase in California:
The rise in cases of autism led scientists to ask whether there was an actual increase in incidence or if we were just getting better at identifying it. The evidence seems to suggest that it’s (at least mostly) the latter. Said anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker: “Once we are primed to see something, we see it and wonder how we could have never seen it before.”
But how to explain disparities like this?
Often regional differences in health and mental health can be traced to heavier environmental toxin loads. In most of those cases, though, clusters of illness occur in poor and often disproportionately non-white neighborhoods. Autism clusters were happening in class-privileged places.
Sociologist Peter Bearman discovered that these clusters were the result of conversation. Class-privileged parents had the resources to get their child diagnosed, then they talked to other parents. Some of these parents would recognize the symptoms and take their child to the doctor and… voila… a cluster. “Living within 250 meters [of a child diagnosed with autism], reports the Los Angeles Times, boosted the chances by 42%, compared to living between 500 and 1,000 meters away.”
How does a scientist measure your unconscious mind? It turns out, it can be done. With a technique called the Implicit Association Test, psychologists can measure your unconscious beliefs about anything: whether, deep down, you associate Black men with weapons, Asians with foreigners, fat people with laziness, men with science, and more. You can test yourself on all manner of implicit beliefs here.
It works by putting a pair of words on each side of a computer screen. Sometimes the pair matches your unconscious mind; like (for most of us, unfortunately) young and good. Sometimes the pair challenges your unconscious mind; like (for most of us, unfortunately) old and good. You’re asked to do a timed test focusing on just one of the pair; we’re all quicker when the terms match than when they don’t. For more, read up about it here.
In any case, it turns out the phenomenon has a name — the Stroop effect — and the best illustration of it I’ve ever seen was featured on BoingBoing. It involves colors and color names. For a lifetime, we’ve been taught to associate certain colors with certain names. Accordingly, our brain fires faster and more confidently when we see the name in the color, compared to when we see the name in an opposing color. See for yourself: can you read both lists of colors equally comfortably, un-self-consciously, and quickly?Probably not. So, for better or worse, scientists see this same effect when they try to get our brains to process paired words like Asian/American and men/science. The results of these experiments are depressing (both abstractly and often personally when we take the tests ourselves), but it’s pretty amazing that we’re able to delve that deeply into the mind with such a simple task.
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow, I thought I’d re-post this one from 2010…
Some recent ads making fun of redheads has brought gingerism — or hateful attitudes and behavior towards people with red hair, light skin, and freckles — into the news lately.
It appears to be an ongoing form of discrimination, especially in Britain. Men and boys appear to be more frequent targets than women and girls, who at least are sometimes seen as uniquely beautiful. A recent series of verbal and physical attacks is nicely documented at Wikipedia. They include a stabbing, a family who has had to move twice after their children were bullied, a woman who won a sexual harassment suit after being targeted for her red hair, and a boy who committed suicide after being teased relentlessly.
The prejudice may be related to the long-standing antagonism between Britain and Ireland; discrimination against the Irish by the British crossed the Atlantic with early Americans. As late as the 1800s the Irish were demeaned, negatively stereotyped, and compared with apes in the United States.
Katrin brought our attention to this ad for Tesco. Tesco voluntarily withdrew their ad after complaints. And an ad for npower generated a handful of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority. The Authority declared that the humor was unlikely to cause widespread offense (BBC).
Katrin also sent in M.I.A.’s video for the song “Born Free.” It was pulled from YouTube for excessive violence and inappropriate content. Among other themes, it shows red-headed, freckled adolescents being rounded up by the police (this becomes clear at about 2:45), taken out to a deserted area, shot at or bombed, and physically attacked. The video is supposed to highlight ethnic cleansing, though a number of critics argue the gratuitous violence overshadows any political point. It’s about 10 minutes long, but you don’t have to watch the whole thing to get the idea:
Hennessy Youngman is one of things-on-the-internetz that validates the entire enterprise. In the fast and fascinating 10 minute clip here, Youngman traces the history of performance art, linking it to Occupy and our contemporary engagement with the internet. Oh, and totally worth watching to the end.
Amid accusations of racism, the European Union (EU) has withdrawn a two-minute video designed to raise awareness about “Neighbourhood Policy,” an approach to establishing “deeper relations” with neighboring state the need for unity among EU nations and acceptance of candidate states hoping to enter. In the video, sent to us by Claire P., the EU is personified by a white woman, who is facing attacks from all sides.
Bruno Waterfield, writing for the Telegraph, describes the scene:
First the EU heroine… is menaced by a Chinese Kung Fu master. Then a second threat appears as a urbaned practitioner of Kalaripayattu, a southern Indian martial art, levitates towards her brandishing a scimitar.
As she turns to face the new menace, a third black assailant with dreadlocks cartwheels aggressively towards her before striking a Capoeira pose, the Brazilian martial art.
Here’s screenshots of all of them, but for the full effect, you’ve got to watch (if just for the music and sound effects):
At this point, the woman takes a deep breath, multiples to represent the many states in the EU, and models peaceful behavior that her would-be attackers adopt.
The EU is expressing surprise that a video featuring a peaceful white person and violent, dangerous dark-skinned people might be considered racist. They have released a classic non-apology that privileges intent over impact, denies that the clip was actually racist (it has just been “perceived” so), and identifies the main problem as other people (who got all hypersensitive and “felt offended”):
The clip was absolutely not intended to be racist and we obviously regret that it has been perceived in this way. We apologise to anyone who may have felt offended. Given these controversies, we have decided to stop the campaign immediately and to withdraw the video.
UPDATE: Reader Katrin says the video was about increasing integration and cooperation of states and the European Commission’s enlargement policy, not about the “neighborhood” policy as reported by the Telegraph:,
It was for greater unity of existing EU member states (which is why the video is entitled “Growing Together”) and candidates for membership (which is why it says “the more we are the stronger we are”) in order to show a united front to the rising powers China, India and Brazil. It was intended to portray that if the EU acts united, then China, India and Brazil will be willing to engage with the EU constructively…Current candidates of accession are e.g. Iceland, Macedonia, Montenegro, Turkey and Serbia. Enlargement and unity as a tool for greater power when facing rising economies was the intended message of the clip, not the ENP.
Last week the Wall Street Journal printed an article describing how CEOs around the world spend their time. The article drew on data from a larger study, the Executive Time Use Project , and relied on reports of time use by CEO’s personal assistants. The article indicates that assistants only tracked activities that lasted over 10 minutes in a single week selected by researchers. That assistants, rather than the CEOs themselves, were keeping track of time use leads me to believe the reports are relatively accurate. After all, the assistant probably does most of the scheduling of a CEOs day and CEOs are likely too busy to track data time or to agree to record their time use.
Here’s the break-down of the typical 55-hour work week for CEOs:
The hype about the findings is about the finding regarding time spent in meetings — 18 hours per week (see “Where’s the Boss? Trapped in a Meeting”). I’m more interested in the task that occupies the greatest amount of a CEO’s time in a typical week—the 20 hours of “miscellaneous” activities. The fine print indicates that the “miscellaneous” activities include time spent travelling, in personal activity including exercise or lunch with a spouse, or in short activities like quick, unscheduled phone calls.
The project website advertises that knowing how CEOs spend their time can tell a lot about management style and differences in cultures and performances. Maybe it can, and here arearticles that tackle these issues. I think it tells us something slightly different and far more basic than this: what constitutes “work” depends on who does it. Would a study of low wage workers calculate as part of the work week “exercise”? Do we count travel time to and from a job as “work” among mid-level managers? The BLS American Time Use Surveys (Table 5, see footnote 2) do not include travel related to work in measures of work time. Why did the authors include as part of a CEO workday things like personal time and activities unrelated to work?
Without this personal time, a CEO’s average work week—35 hours—looks closer or shorter than other workers. For example, among employed people who worked on an average weekday in 2010, the average weekly hours spent working at all jobs (excluding travel related to work), for workers with a H.S. diploma was 40.05 hours, for women who worked full-time, the average was 40.80 hours, for all full-time workers, the average weekly work hours was 41.95 hours (to calculate these weekly averages from the BLS, I assumed people worked 5 days a week which is typical for full-time workers, but may overestimate the work hours of those with a H.S. diploma).
Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate how we measure “work” or at least pay close attention to the ways we do so differently for workers at different levels of the hierarchy. Now I’m headed to the gym for some exercise. Should I all that “work”? I’ll leave it to you to decide.
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Julie Kmec is an associate professor of sociology at Washington State University. She has conducted research on organizations and work, in particular on issues of gender and race inequality at work, the glass ceiling, employment discrimination, and sex segregation. She is part of a working group at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University investigating ways to redefine work.
A recent post on Boing Boing discussed the newly discovered “rules for jazz performers during the Nazi occupation.” Jewish and Black people — two groups targeted by the Nazis — were also the primary innovators of jazz music. But even as the German state denigrated jazz, jazz musicians, and swing dancers, Nazi soldiers loved jazz! How to handle such a contradiction? Rules for playing jazz music: no “Jewishy gloomy lyrics,” no “Negroid excesses in tempo,” and no “hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races.”
It’s well worth a look, as is this post from 2010 explaining how many groups vilified by Nazis survived the Holocaust by playing jazz for Nazi soldiers…
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I have a favorite historical musician: Django Reinhardt.
Reinhardt was a Roma jazz musician. During World War II both Roma and jazz musicians were targeted by the Nazi regime. Over a million Roma were exterminated for presumed racial inferiority and jazz was believed to combine the worst of Blacks and Jews (i.e., “musical race defilement”). Just listening to a jazz record could get you sent to a concentration camp.
Reinhardt, however, enjoyed the most lucrative period of his career during the war, while living and playing openly among Nazi soldiers.
The Germans used Paris basically as their rest-and-relaxation center, and when the soldiers came, they wanted wine and women and song. And to many of them, jazz was the popular music, and Django was the most famous jazz musician in Paris… And it was really a golden age of swing in Paris, with these [Romas] living kind of this grand irony.
Reinhardt, then, survived because the Nazis loved jazz music, even as Hitler censored the music and, on his orders, people who dared to listen to, dance to, or play it were encamped and members of the groups who invented it were murdered. Irony indeed.
For more on Reinhardt, jazz, and World War II, here is a clip from a documentary on Reinhardt’s remarkable talent, career, and luck:
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UPDATE: A commenter, Bernardo Soares, offered an interesting critique/clarification in the thread. Here’s part of what he had to say:
…I think it is grossly misleading to write that Reinhardt “enjoyed the most lucrative period of his career during the war”. He enjoyed the protection of some individuals in the German occupation force. This is not so unusual — the composer Richard Strauss who headed the Reichsmusikkammer used his influence to protect some Jewish composers. But as many other examples show, this was extremely precarious. As long as these individuals had the power to protect him, he was probably relatively safe, but he could still be shot by any soldier at a whim or be accidentally included in a deportation action. Also, these individuals could lose their power, or some higher-ranking officer could order him to be deported. Reinhardt tried several times to escape occupied France.
[Also] …the whole issue of music and art politics in the Third Reich is much more complex than stated in the video. The Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Music Chamber) was not the only institution regulating music politics. As with many other bureaucratic institutions in the Third Reich, several agencies struggled for influence and power. This means that music politics was often contradictory, and the absence of a clear regulation as stated in the video opened the door for arbitrary measures – again emphasizing the precarious situation of musicians. The competition and struggle for power between different agencies led to a radicalisation of racial and cultural politics, and this was even taken further in the occupied countries.
I do love this topic. I also have a post on racial borrowing and lindy hop, the dance that made me love Django. A paper I wrote about gender and lindy hop can be found in the journal Ethnography. And I have a talk based on the paper that I love to give in theory classes.
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…
