Cross-posted at Love Isn’t Enough.

The West has a long history in which Black and African people were stereotyped as more in touch with nature and more like animals than White and European people.  This elision still haunts us, and Sasha H. sent in a link to an example. To be fair, I went through several pages of Google search results and found only two instances of this particular mistake, but I thought it was worth pointing out as a cautionary tale.

Sasha’s link was to an amusement-focused website called Silly Village.  They posted a series of photographs of a little girl, named Tippi Degré, who was born to wildlife photographers in Namibia, where she grew up. The photos are of her with lots of animals and the set of photos is titled “Young Girl Life with Wild Animals.”  The thing is, though, two of the photos do not include animals, but include only her and local Africans, no animals at all.

I found this same mistake at a more serious source, one that should have editors who are more careful than this, The Telegraph.  The story, titled “The Real-Life Mowgli who Grew Up with Africa’s Wild Animals,” includes a slideshow introduced with this language:

A remarkable range of pictures in a new book show Tippi Degre — a French girl labelled the ‘real-life Mowgli’ — growing up with wild animals.

But the slideshow includes three images, again conflating African animals with African people.

If this happened rarely, it could be chocked up to a random mistake, but this conflation is actually rather ubiquitous.  We’ve posted on this many times. Here are three choice posts: animalizing women of color, Africa is wild and you can be too, and choosing girls of color for animal costumes.

After the tsunami in March, we featured a series of hateful Facebook updates suggesting that the Japanese deserved the devastation. Yesterday Japan won the women’s World Cup against the U.S. and we’re seeing the same rhetoric.  The collection below, and more, was up on Buzzfeed as of yesterday night.

Interestingly, in addition to the now familiar racism and jingoism, some of the updates suggest that the gods were smiling on Japan in the aftermath of the tsunami, allowing them to win because they’ve had such a rough time of it lately. Of course, this nicely erases the athletic ability of the Japanese team and the possibility that they were actually just better than the U.S. team.

Trigger warning:

Thanks to Who, Harmony for the heads up on Twitter, a new distraction that I’m enjoyingsuper much!

If you’re not writing a dissertation or taking care of twins, you might have heard that News of the World, a tabloid newspaper in the U.K., has been gathering news by illegally listening to people’s voicemail messages. News of the World is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s firm News Corporation, the second largest media company in the world. News Corporation also owns Fox. This is a great natural experiment testing the potential problems with media consolidation, the fact that more and more media outlets are owned by fewer and fewer companies.

So how does Fox report on this scandal? Rob Beschizza, writing for BoingBoing, highlighted a segment on Fox News in which the host and guest agree that “hacking scandals” are a “serious… problem” and imply that, in this instance, News of the World was the victim, not the perpetrator.  More, the guest “expert” is not a politician, scholar, or even a pundit, he’s actually a public relations professional who specializes in spinning scandals to obviate the negative consequences for corporations. Says James Fallows at The Atlantic:

He is Robert Dilenschneider, former head of Hill and Knowlton and now head of the Dilenschneider Group, who recently was featured in an interview, “How to Manage a PR Disaster.”

So Fox is having an expert on spin as a guest, who just so happens to spin the scandal about their parent corporation:

Partial transcript:

The NOTW is a hacking scandal, it can’t be denied. But the real issue is, why are so many people piling on at this point? We know it’s a hacking scandal, shouldn’t we get beyond it and deal with the issue of hacking? Citicorp has been hacked into, Bank of America has been hacked into, American Express has been hacked into, insurance companies have been hacked into, we’ve got a serious hacking problem in this country, and the government’s obviously been hacked into, 24,000 files.

…

The bigger issue is really hacking and how we as the public going to protect our privacy and deal with it. I would also say, by the way, Citigroup, great bank. Bank of America, great bank. Are they getting the same attention for hacking that took place less than a year ago, that News Corp is getting today?

Of course, as Beschizza at BoingBoing points out, Citigroup and Bank of America were hacked into, whereas News of the World did the hacking.  It’s also an interesting use of the word “hacking.”  Beschizza continues:

Though we all use the term “hacking” broadly, punching in a default PIN number isn’t quite the same thing as the skills required to hack into banks and governments. You can’t pretend these are the same class of problem, unless you’re happy being ignorant of the crisis management issues on which you are being presented as an expert.

Use of the term, then, makes the illegal activity seem more like the mischief of a techy teenager or the nefarious work of anti-establishmentarians, not the plain ol’ straightforwardly criminal behavior it is.

See also: Shameless promotion of the movie, Tinkerbell, at Good Morning America.

An anonymous reader snapped a photo of this ad for Freelancers Insurance Company in the NYC subway.  The ad reads: “Maybe joining a group to buy insurance is communal.  Maybe it’s rational self-interest.  Either way, it’s cheaper.” With the phrase “either way,” the ad draws on a common juxtaposition: the idea that putting the group first is equivalent to sacrificing your own interests.

Certainly in some cases it’s true that privileging the collective hurts the individual, but this certainly isn’t always true.  Yet Americans consistently receive the message that it is rational (i.e., maximizes our personal well-being) to put ourselves first.  A University of Minnesota campaign to encourage students to get the flu shot — “Do it for the herd”— is a nice counter-example.  In some other societies the idea that one should sacrifice the self for others, and even the idea that doing for others is good for you, is a more common cultural theme.

I recently watched a reading of a play, New Jerusalem, with a cast of five men and two women.  One woman was a love interest, the other was an emotional, screechy brat.  By the end of the play I was so tired of the stereotype, I just wanted the play to end.

Thanks to Kristin, Christine, Amanda, Dolores R., Dmitriy T.M., and Nathan Meltz (whose awesome artwork we’ve previously featured), I am now aware that, coincidentally, this is the week that the California Milk Processor Board decided to roll out its new ad campaign. The campaign suggests that milk can save men from their cyclically bitchy girlfriends and wives.  Milk, the claim is, helps alleviate the symptoms of PMS (but see this take down).  And gawd knows there is nothing more annoying than an emotional, screechy, bitchy brat of a woman.  Their website, Everything I Do is Wrong, asks “Are you a man living with PMS?”   It links likelihood of PMS with the availability of chocolate, silver, and gold:

Tracks the “Global PMS Level”:

It suggests that women irrationally punish men for not knowing answers to trivial questions:

And purports to show men how to enhance their apologies with cheesy imagery and self-flagellation:

It’s overall a nasty soup of derogatory ideas about women and how unbelievably annoying they are to live with.  Though, as Christine wrote, it’s also…

…sexist in the way that they stereotype men as ineffective communicators, who are terrified of emotional women and the “feminine mystique” of menstruation because they (obviously) lack the faculties with which to properly negotiate any disagreements they might have with the women in their lives.

Here are some of the more delightful print ads:

The stereotype is ubiquitous. You can also find it at The Daily Cramp, a website sent in by Janine P. that says it will track your woman’s menstrual cycle and let you know when you can expect her to act crazy:

There’s also an app with the same gimmick.

And it’s been around for a long time.  This vintage ad for Midol, sent in by Jillian Y. and Lexi A.-L., tells women to medicate themselves on behalf of their “guy,” so they can be “good to be around, any day of the month”:

The problem with this stereotype is that it encourages people to see women as periodically irrational and also more generally dismiss-able.  It allows us to conflate screechiness and bitchiness with being female.

The milk board’s commentary on the negative response has been, essentially, “Aw come on, it’s all in good fun! Can’t you take a joke!” I get, milk board, that this is humorous. I totally get that. It’s also an offensive stereotype. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

See also: menstruation masculinizes women, a princess with pms who threatens to drown the land with her tears, delegitimating Hillary Clinton with pms-jokes, and our previous post on gender and the rest of the California Milk Processing Board’s website.

In 1919 the U.S. federal government passed the 18^th Amendment, prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.”  Alcohol was banned. Well, kind of.  Two groups were still allowed to buy and disseminate alcohol: clergy and physicians (source).

Clergy were still allowed to purchase wine for sacrament (reportedly leading to many a falsely-devotional newly-certified minister, priest, or rabbi illegally selling bucket loads of liquor to the rest of us). And physicians were allowed to prescribe liquor for medicinal purposes. Alcohol, it was believed, was energizing and it was used to treat anemia, tuberculosis, typhoid, pneumonia, and high blood pressure. Pharmacies did a booming business in those years, as you might imagine.

According to the Rose Melnick Medical Museum:

This new law required physicians to obtain a special permit from the prohibition commissioner in order to write prescriptions for liquor.The patient could then legally buy liquor from the pharmacy or the physician. However, the law also regulated how much liquor could be prescribed to each patient.

…

Patients of all ages used alcohol. A common adult dose was about 1 ounce every 2-3 hours. Child doses ranged from 1/2 to 2 teaspoons every three hours.

Physicians prescribed their “medicine” with prescription pads doled out by the commissioner:

Unfortunately for some, you couldn’t prescribe beer.

Even after Prohibition was lifted in 1933, pharmacies sold plenty of liquor.  In many places women were banned from bars and saloons, so while men visited the bartender, women visited the doctor.  Visit our post on The Stormin’ of the Sazerac to see a great vintage picture of a group of women enjoying the famous cocktail on the first day they were allowed to drink at The Roosevelt Bar, New Orleans.

Rising Immigration and Intermarriage

Today we see both increased immigration and rising rates of intermarriage. In 1960, less than 1% of U.S. marriages were interracial, but by 2008, this figure rose to 7.6%, meaning that 1 out of every 13 U.S. marriages was interracial. If we look at only new marriages that took place in 2008, the figure rises to 14.6%, translating to 1 out of every 7 American marriages.

The rising trend in intermarriage has resulted in a growing multiracial population. In 2010, 2.9% of Americans identified as multiracial. Demographers project that the multiracial population will continue to grow so that by 2050, 1 in 5 Americans could claim a multiracial background, and by 2100, the ratio could soar to 1 in three.

At first glance, these trends appear to signal that we’re moving into a “post-racial” era, in which race is declining in significance for all Americans. However, if we take a closer look at these trends, we find that they mask vast inter-group differences.

For instance, Asians and Latinos intermarry at much higher rates than blacks. About 30% of Asian and Latino marriages are interracial, but the corresponding figure for blacks is only 17%. However, if we include only U.S.-born Asians and Latinos, we find that intermarriage rates are much higher. Nearly, three-quarters (72%) of married, U.S.-born Asians, and over half (52%) of U.S.-born Latinos are interracially married, and most often, the intermarriage is with a white partner. While the intermarriage rate for blacks has risen steadily in the past five decades, it is still far below that of Asians and Latinos, especially those born in the United States.

The pattern of multiracial identification is similar to that of intermarriage: Asians and Latinos report much higher rates of multiracial identification than blacks. In 2010, 15% of Asians and 12% of Latinos reported a multiracial identification. The corresponding figure for blacks is only 7 percent. Although the rate of multiracial reporting among blacks has risen since 2000, it increased from a very small base of only 4.2 percent.

The U.S. Census estimates that about 75-90% of black Americans are ancestrally multiracial, so it is perplexing that only 7% choose to identify as such. Clearly, genealogy alone does not dictate racial identification. Given that the “one-drop rule” of hypodescent* is no longer legally codified, why does the rate of multiracial reporting among blacks remain relatively low?

Patterns in Racial/Ethnic Identity

These are some of the vexing questions that we tackle in our book, The Diversity Paradox, drawing on analyses of 2000 Census data, 2007-2008 American Community Survey, as well as 82 in-depth interviews: 46 with multiracial adults and 36 with interracial couples with children.

Turning to the in-depth interviews with the interracial couples, we found that while all acknowledged their children’s multiracial or multiethnic backgrounds, the meaning of multiraciality differs remarkably for the children of Asian-white and Latino-white couples on the one hand, and the children of black-white couples on the other. For the Asian-white and Latino-white couples, they may go to great lengths to maintain distinctive elements of their Asian or Latino ethnic and cultural backgrounds, but they believe that as their children grow up, they will simply identify, and be identified as “American” or as “white,” using these terms interchangeably, and consequently conflating a national origin identity with a racial identity.

The Asian-white and Latino-white respondents also revealed that they can turn their ethnicities on and off whenever they choose, and, importantly, their choices are not contested by others. Our interview data reveal that the Asian and Latino ethnicities for multiracial Americans are what Herbert Gans and Mary Waters would describe as “symbolic”—meaning that they are voluntary, optional, and costless, as European ethnicity is for white Americans.

By contrast, none of the black-white couples identified their children as just white or American, nor did they claim that their children identify as such. While these couples recognize and celebrate the racial mixture of their children’s backgrounds, they unequivocally identify their children as black. When we asked why, they pointed out that nobody would take them seriously if they tried to identify their children as white, reflecting the constraints that black interracial couples feel when identifying their children. Moreover, black interracial couples do not identify their children as simply “American” because as native-born Americans, they feel that American is an implicit part of their identity.

The legacy of the one-drop-rule remains culturally intact, explaining why 75-90% of black Americans are ancestrally multiracial, yet only 7% choose to identify as such. It also explains why we, as Americans, are so attuned to identifying black ancestry in a way that we are not similarly attuned to identifying and constraining Asian and Latino ancestries.

On this note, it is also critical to underscore that a black racial identification also reflects agency and choice on the part of interracial couples and multiracial blacks. Given the legacy behind the one-drop rule and the meaning and consequences behind the historical practice of “passing as white,” choosing to identify one’s children as white may not only signify a rejection of the black community, but also a desire to be accepted by a group that has legally excluded and oppressed them in the past, a point underscored by Randall Kennedy.

Black Exceptionalism

But regardless of choice or constraint, the patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification point to a pattern of “black exceptionalism.” Why does black exceptionalism persist, even amidst the country’s new racial/ethnic diversity? It persists because the legacy of slavery and the legacy of immigration are two competing yet strangely symbiotic legacies on which the United States was founded. If immigration represents the optimistic side of the country’s past and future, slavery and its aftermath is an indelible stain in our nation’s collective memory. The desire to overlook the legacy and slavery becomes a reason to reinforce the country’s immigrant origins.

That Asians and Latinos are largely immigrants (or the children of immigrants) means that their understanding of race and the color line are born out of an entirely different experience and narrative than that of African Americans. Hence, despite the increased diversity, race is not declining in significance, and we are far from a “post-racial” society. That we continue to find a pattern of black exceptionalism—even amidst the country’s new racial/ethnic diversity—points to the paradox of diversity in the 21st century.

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* The one-drop rule was first implemented during the era of slavery so that any children born to a white male slaver owner and a black female slave would be legally identified as black, and, as a result, have no rights to property and other wealth holdings of their white father.

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Jennifer Lee is a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in intersection of immigration and race and ethnicity. She wrote, with Frank Bean, a book called The Diversity Paradox, that examines patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification among Asians, Latinos, and African Americans.  Lee wrote the following analysis of her research for Russell Sage. And we’re happy to post it here.

Em sent in a 3-minute video by Lernert & Sander, at Nowness.com.  In an attempt to draw attention to the “cosmetic overkill” that characterizes modern societies, they put one year’s worth of make-up on all at once.  It took 9 hours; the model, Hannelore Knuts, drank from a straw.  They used 7 bottles of foundation, two bottles of eye shadow, three lipsticks, and two bottles of blush.  It’s super creepy. Thanks to Em for sending it in!