This website created by the American Anthropological Association is a great way to explore the social construction of race. There’s an awesome timeline that traces political and scientific trends where you can click on any part of it and get more information. It’s a great resource.It also includes this great 7 minute video called “A Girl Like Me”:

I’d actually love to get some feedback on this video. I really like it, but last time I showed it (in a social psychology portion of a Race and Ethnicity course), the class had a hard time recovering. It was depressing and I wasn’t very successful in DOING something SOCIOLOGICAL with it. Any ideas?

James Watson won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA. He’s a pretty big deal.

The other day he said some very unfortunate things. The article from which I stole this information summarized those things as follows:

The controversy began with an article in The Times of London in October that quoted Dr. Watson, who was on a book tour, as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” According to the article, he said that “there are many people of color who are very talented,” and he hoped people were equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

Well, it turns out that a test of his DNA revealed that he has 16 times more African origin genes than the typical European person: “about the same amount of African DNA that would show up if one great-grandparent were African.”

That’s some awesome irony.

Here is a nice discussion of the scientific merit of his assertion and it’s testability by Janis Prince Inniss from the Everyday Sociology Blog supported by W. W. Norton & Co.

Yan sent me this link to the Brigham Young University dress code. Here are some examples:

One of the things I think is really interesting is how aggressively multicultural the posters are. The Mormon church did not allow black men to be priests (and therefore they could not ascend to the highest level of heaven) until 1978.

Thanks Yan!

Discussion of gender bending and transgender children on The View:[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ND3vqPz90[/youtube] 

Data on the prevalence of cosmetic surgery is notoriously difficult to find. This is data on the five most common procedures, according to one association’s members. Pretty amazing.

Surgical and non-surgical procedures (2006):

10-year comparison:

Most popular procedures by gender:

Found here.

This is an image that graces the cover of a new documentary about intersex individuals called Black and White.

In general, though, I think it’s a really powerful image that refuses to accept that women who are not young, with a teenage girl’s body, and a submissive attitude are somehow offensive.

This is an interesting example of the way in which powerful media companies control what gets out there. MTV refused to show ads, made by the Media Foundation to promote Buy Nothing Day, on its station. They stated that the ad “goes further than we are willing to accept on our channels.”

The ads are here. Thanks to AdBusters for this tip.

I LOVE this image. It’s a fashion spread.

Question:
Who’s taking care of those little tow-headed boys behind the white picket fence when both mommy and daddy go to work?

I use this picture to talk about the way in which middle- and upper-class women are “getting equal” with men by transferring their caretaking responsibilities to less privileged women… who are, as in this ad, invisible.