Martin Hart-Landsberg, at Reports from the Economic Front, offers a provocative hypothesis.  He observes that job loss in the U.S. has been tremendous. One in 20 jobs has disappeared.  Still, Congress drug its feet approving an extension of unemployment benefits.  The extension has been approved, but benefits are hardly generous (on average, $309 a month week).  Further, millions of unemployed people are not collecting unemployment because they’re not eligible under current policy.

Hart-Landsberg asks why there is a lack of “meaningful national efforts” to address the suffering of workers and their families?

His hypothesis:  Economic policy is not responsive to workers’ needs.  Instead, it is heavily driven by what is best for corporations.  And, it turns, out, corporations are doing swimmingly during the recession.  They took a beating at first, but their profits are up.  Downsizing appears to have benefited them.  Consider this chart from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI):

The EPI concurs with Hart-Landsberg.  Looking at this data, Lawrence Mishel concludes:

When employers are able to recover their profits many years before their employees can even hope to attain the income and employment levels they had  prior to recession’s devastation, economic policy is clearly skewed in favor of corporations and not workers.

White people should worry about racism.  They should worry about racism because it’s wrong.  But if that’s not enough of a motivation, they should worry about it for their own damn good.  Philip Cohen of Family Inequality shows us how so with a discussion of a recent paper published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

The Figure below illustrates the percentage of black (grey bar) and white (white bar) residents who went into end-stage renal disease (kidney failure; ESRD) before ever seeing a doctor specializing in kidneys (a nephrologist).  As we move from left to right, the zip codes in which patients live becomes increasingly populated by black people.

What we see is that, in any given neighborhood, black people are always less likely to get access to a kidney specialist before their kidneys fail; but also that white people living in a neighborhood with a higher percentage of blacks are less likely than whites in a more white neighborhood to see a specialist.  So much so that whites living in neighborhoods that are more than 50% black are less likely to see a specialist than blacks living in neighborhoods that are less than 25% black.

Cohen specifies that…

…the relationship still holds even when individual socioeconomic status, and local-area socioeconomic status, are controlled. So it’s not just a poverty effect.

Somehow places that are “blacker”, even when they are not poor, are serviced with inferior health care compared to places that are “whiter.”  And everyone suffers for it (though not necessarily equally).

Monica Y. sent a collection of vintage ads and cartoons illustrating how soap and cleanliness has been used as a metaphor for colonization.  The first two ads show how soap manufacturers and colonialists alike colluded in suggesting that the colonized were unclean/uncivilized and needed to be cleansed/enlightened.

This first ad for Pears’ Soap reads:

The first step towards lightening The White Man’s Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness.  Pears’ Soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances while amongst the cultured of all nations it holds the highest place — it is the ideal toilet soap.

The phrase “White Man’s Burden” refers to the colonial-era idea that white men were burdened with bringing civilization to the uncivilized.  See our post on a modern-day Pamper’s commercial invoking a white woman’s burden for another example.

This ad for Ivory soap depicts Uncle Sam (I think) passing out soap to American Indians (in blankets, no less) (text transcribed below):

Text:

A NEW DEPARTURE
SAID Uncle Sam: “I will be wise,
And thus the Indian civilize:
Instead of guns, that kill a mile,
Tobacco, lead, and liquor vile,
Instead of serving out a meal,
Or sending Agents out to steal,
I’ll give, domestic arts to teach,
A cake of IVORY SOAP to each.
Before it flies the guilty stain,

The grease and dirt no more remain;
‘Twill change their nature day by day,
And wash their darkest blots away.
They’re turn their bows to fishing-rods,
And bury hatchets under sods,
In wisdom and in worth increase,
And ever smoke the pipe of peace;
For ignorance can never cope
With such a foe as IVORY SOAP.”

This political cartoon, circa 1886, uses the metaphor of washing to describe the cleansing of the Chinese from the U.S.  At the bottom it reads, “The Chinese must go.”

See also our set of vintage ads selling soap with depictions of African Americans as dirty.

When I was a young adult there was a pervasive concern with unrealistic expectations of thinness for women and how this contributed to low self-esteem and eating disorders among young girls.  I don’t think this discourse is gone, but it’s definitely been joined by a competing discourse, the one that says that kids are too fat and need to diet.  In the latter category come these limited calorie snack packs from Disney (with Cars and generic princess themes):

When the anti-eating disorder discourse reigned supreme, I think this product would have been protested off the shelves.  They fit quite nicely, however, with the anti-obesity discourse.  From that perspective it makes perfect sense to teach kids to count calories.

The rise and fall of discourses is a fascinating topic.  What do you think?  Do the two discourses co-exist today?  Is anti-obesity winning?  What’s the future of the anti-eating disorder discourse?

Jamie Keiles, of  the Seventeen Magazine Project and Teenagerie, wondered how racially representative Seventeen was compared to the U.S. population.  So she offered some data based on the May 2010 issue.  Her methods:

There are 332 faces in this month’s issue of Seventeen. I counted a face as a head with at least one visible eye. That is, backs of heads and disembodied mouths or eyes were not included in my data. I researched the races of the models and celebrities that I could identify. Those whose race I could not determine with reasonable certainty I’ve excluded from my data, making for 319 surveyed faces.

According to research by economists, sociologists, and psychologists, for challenging cognitive tasks, large rewards means worse performance.  So all of those GIANT bonuses going to workers on Wall Street are not necessary for the health of our economy, they may actually be hurting it.

Or so Dan Pink argues in this 11-minute illustrated lecture from Cognitive Media:

Choice quote: “When the profit motive gets unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen.”

* Hyperbole!

Given the intense publicity given to Chris Brown’s violent beating of singer, Rihanna, and the subsequent release of her domestic violence-themed single, Russian Roulette, it’s hard to interpret her partnership with Eminem on the new song, Love the Way You Lie, as anything but symbolic.  Unfortunately, it’s also hard to interpret this video as anything other than the message that true love is violent.

Eminem sings about how he hates the woman he loves, and alternates between expressing shame for his violence and describing how badly he wants to hurt her.  Simultaneously, Rihanna’s beautiful vocals tug at the heart strings, representing the love side of the coin against Eminem’s angry voice.  Add to this the acting by Lost’s Dominic Monaghan and super-sex-symbol Megan Fox, who alternate between beating each other and appearing to be deeply, profoundly in love.  Eminem closes by threatening to kill her if she ever tries to leave him and, in the end, they lie in each others arms.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a beautiful song.  Rihanna’s vocals are gorgeous; it’s was hard to not feel heartfelt while listening to them.  And that’s the problem.  It’s a powerful form of socialization.  That we might internalize the message that passionate love and incontrollable rage go hand-in-hand is really very scary. It suggests not only that you should tolerate interpersonal violence but that, if there is no violence in your relationship, perhaps you don’t really love one another.  Better go out and find someone who will beat you.

I’ve never been in an abusive relationship of that sort but as a young adult I thought I knew what love felt like.  To me, it felt like fear.  I knew that I was in love when I became deeply frightened that someone would leave me.  It took me until around my 30th birthday to realize that a strong, loving relationship should make me feel secure, not terrified.  These messages are insidious and ubiquitous and I do believe they shape real relationships.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

With the exception of the t-shirt (which only masquerades as gender neutral), in the U.S. clothes are designed for women or men, but never both.  Department stores and retail stores (unless they sell only men’s or women’s clothing) have separate men’s and women’s sections in the store.  There is no option to buy clothes, one must buy women’s or men’s clothes.

This is even true for children’s clothes. One might make the argument that adult males and females have different bodies (an argument I might argue with), but we can’t say that pre-pubertal children do.  Nevertheless, the cultural rules that require boys and men to dress differently than girls and women make such a clothing line seem impossible.

Well, Evie sent in an example of a UK clothing company trying to do the impossible.  The company, Polarn O. Pyret, explains:

Our unisex collection (UNI) consists of clothing that is based on situation and function rather than on gender. As a clothing manufacturer, we want to make it our responsibility to offer an alternative to clothing that is based on gender. There is really no reason to design different models and fits for small boys and girls since there is no great difference in the way their bodies are shaped. We have taken an overall approach to unisex clothing, and consider not only color but also pattern and fit.

Evie’s attention was drawn by this ad in a store window:

Their website, you’ll notice, doesn’t have the regular “girls” and “boys” section seen ubiquitously:

This company is nice evidence that the-way-it-is isn’t the-way-it-has-to-be.

UPDATE: Mary and Cheryl pointed out that, if you click on “babies” or either of the “kids” tabs, you get the option of “boys,” “girls,” or “uni” (unisex) lines.  So the company isn’t making a principled stand here.  They’re still willing to take the money of parents who want to dress their kids in gendered clothes, but they are offering an alternative for those parents who don’t.  It’s pretty telling that even this strategy — offering a unisex line alongside girls and boys lines — is so rare.