We know that U.S. stereotypes associate black people, especially black men, with criminality (for examples, see our posts on who looks suspicious, racial profiling, and race-sensitive trigger fingers).  But a new study by sociologists Aliya Saperstein and Andrew Penner shows that being convicted of a crime sometimes shifts people’s racial self-perceptions in related directions.  Saperstein and Penner compared the self-identification of people in 1979 and 2002.  Reflecting the social construction of race, it is typical for there to be some mis-matches between people’s reported race at different times; but the researchers discovered that the experience of being incarcerated shaped if and how one’s racial identification changed.

The Table below compares the self-reported race in 1979 (far left column) with the self reported race in 2002 (next left column).  The third and fourth columns show the reported race of people in 2002 who were not incarcerated and incarcerated, respectively.  We see that, among people who were not incarcerated, 5% of the people who identified as “European” in 1979 identified as “Black” or some other race in 2002.  Among people who were incarcerated, however, we see a much greater defection from whiteness; only 81% of those who identified as white in 1979 still did so in 2002.

Saperstein and Penner argue that this shows that “…penal institutions play an important role in racializing Americans…”  The experience of being incarcerated somehow makes people, even people who feel white, feel somehow less white.

Via Contexts Discoveries.  For great examples of the social construction of race, start with this simple lesson, then see these great posts: black and white twins! wha’!?, Obama looks just like his white grandfather, history and race in the U.S. census, claiming whiteness in court, judging racial phenotypes in China, and figuring out “Creole”.

A secret on PostSecret today nicely captures how women’s magazines are relentlessly guy-centric:

Today is the last day of Oktoberfest in Munich; this has meant a lot of slide shows of people drinking from giant beers steins on the wiesn.  I noticed that the slide show at Boston.com included a disproportionate number of images of young women in (often boob-poppin’) Dirndls.  Men were about as likely to be young as they were to be older, exhibiting interesting character, and more likely to be shown in functional roles.  Women, then, were included primarily as eye candy for a (presumably heterosexual and) male gaze.

Five photos of young girls in Dirndls, two photos of young men in Lederhosen, two photos of older men in Lederhosen, one mixed-sex picture of middle- and older-life characters (the only one that includes a picture of a woman who might be over 25), three photos of men at work, and two photos of women at work (including the only photo of a woman who is not dressed up to be conventionally attractive).

For a slide show without the objectification, see Time.

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UPDATE! Alan Taylor, the editor of the slide show at Boston.com, wrote in with some perspective:

Hi there, just a note from the editor of the blog post in question. First, I’m happy to see the discussion here, believe it or not subjects like this are often in mind when compiling my photo stories.

This seems like fair criticism, and I’m not being defensive. What I will offer is last year’s entry for comparison and contrast: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/oktoberfest_2009.html – not nearly as many “boob-poppin’” dirndls there.

As an editor I am limited by the photos available to me, and their quality. In this case, for example, there may have been a decent photograph of an older woman in a strong functional role, but maybe it was poorly lit or repetitive just not up to par, and was left out. I compile entries three times a week on varied subjects that endup being 30 to 40 photos total, starting with anywhere from 100 to 300 to begin with. The selection process is long, subjective, and can certainly be viewed as flawed from many points of view.

If you think the blog is intentionally objectifying, I invite you to look through my archives: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/09/ and judge for yourself. I can also be reached by email at ataylor@boston.com

Thanks for the discussion,
-Alan Taylor

This 23-minute documentary, The Colony, explores Chinese immigration to Senegal. The immigrants are drawn to Africa by the promise of lucrative entrepreneurship and they are changing the economic landscape, to the pleasure and displeasure of locals.

At Al Jazeera.

NEWS:

Gwen and I were honored to appear alongside no other than media-critic-icon Jean Kilbourne in a podcast for Bitch magazine.

Gwen was also featured in a Sociology Improv podcast (about vajazzling, the Republican party, and how it’s never been good to be a cowboy) and was interviewed about sociology and her super curly hair for The New Naturalista.

Marissa’s guest post about gender and toilet signs was translated into French and posted at Rue89.

Also, SocImages had its highest traffic month ever in September with over 575,000 visits!  After a typical summer dip (oh how we hate the months of June, July, and August around here!), we made a strong recovery with a record month!  Here’s to an excellent year for us all!

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook (where we update with featured posts everyday).

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! Sept. ’10):

We only have one newly updated post for you this month.  Have you seen the recent back-to-school Life cereal commercials?  We added them as another example of how people of color are used to represent flavor.

American politicians are currently wrangling over whether to extend the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Word on the street is that extending these cuts will cost the U.S. treasury $2.7 trillion over the next ten years.  A graphic from the New York Times shows how much people with different incomes benefited from these tax cuts. If you look at the far right column you’ll see the average number of dollars left in people’s pockets between 2004 and 2010; the dollar amount rises from the poorest 29% of Americans (top with $355) to the richest 1% (bottom with $2,326,607).

Click over for a larger image; via BoingBoing.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

V. sent in a delightful video by Levni Yilmaz illustrating how detailed social rules of behavior can be, how others can create consequences for us if we don’t conform, and how some people are targets of others almost no matter what they do. The people at the top of the hierarchy, remember, must maintain the hierarchy, lest they end up no better than anyone else.

See also our post featuring Yilmaz discussing how to sit on a bus.

At Family Inequality, Philip Cohen argues that the rising cost of higher education may be directly related to the cost of homes. In the figure below, he shows that housing prices and college tuition have risen in tandem, at least until recently:

Cohen doesn’t chalk this up to simple inflation influencing both trends. Instead, he argues…

…the connection between home wealth and college attendance was sometimes direct, as when experts advised parents to use home equity loans to send their kids to college (advice you don’t hear so much these days). But even without home equity loans, the wealth stored in middle-class homes — for most such families their largest asset — underwrote millions of college educations.  I guess you could say the federal policies promoting homeownership were big boons for the higher education industry, not just the GIs and mostly-white suburbanites who landed inside the picket fences.

That is, rising home prices meant that people who could afford those homes could pay more for their children’s college educations.  The price of college, then, could afford to increase without pricing out all those middle- and upper-class families.

Cohen asks for ideas about what will happen now that home prices have dipped and the cost of higher education continues to rise.