Congratulations to the amazing Gwen Sharp! She won a state-wide teaching award from the Nevada Board of Regents! She’s the best teacher in the whole state! This is no surprise to me, of course. Dr. Sharp co-founded and wrote for SocImages for many years. I’m so grateful to have worked with her for so long. You can read her posts here or follow her on Twitter.
U.S. Army celebrates “Hispanic Month” (source: wikimedia)
One may well wonder where the term “Hispanic,” and for that matter, “Latino,” came from. The press and pundits are all abuzz about the Hispanic vote, Hispanic organizations, and Hispanic cultural influences. Back in the mid-twentieth century, however, they wrote about Mexicans or Puerto Ricans or Guatemalans, not about Hispanics. Of course, people of Latin American origin have become far more numerous in the United States since then and the immigration itself brings more attention. Nonetheless, the labels have changed. Starting in the 1970s, the media rapidly adopted the “pan-ethnic” term Hispanic, and to a lesser degree, Latino, and slowed down their use of specific national labels.* So did, organizations, agencies, businesses, and “Hispanics” themselves.
As recounted in her important new book, Making Hispanics, sociologist (and my colleague) G. Cristina Mora tells the story of how people as diverse as Cuban-born businessmen in Miami, undocumented Mexican farm workers in California, and third-generation part-Puerto Ricans in New York who do not even understand Spanish were brought together into one social category: Hispanic-Americans.
Politics, Business, and Government
Mora describes an alliance that emerged in the 1970s among grassroots activists, Spanish-language broadcasters, and federal officials to define and promote “Hispanic.”
Activists had previously stressed their national origins and operated regionally – notably, Mexicans in the southwest (where the term “Chicano” became popular for a while) and Puerto Ricans in the northeast. But the larger the numbers they could claim by joining together, the more political clout, the more governmental funds, and the more philanthropic support they could claim. Pumping up the numbers was particularly important given their latent competition with African-American activists over limited resources and limited media attention. Some pan-ethnic term promised to yield the biggest count.
Spanish-language television broadcasters, notably Univision, looked to expand their appeal to advertisers by delivering them a national market. Although the broadcasters faced obstacles in appealing to Spanish-language viewers across the country differing significantly in programming tastes and dialects, they managed to amalgamate the audiences by replacing content imported from abroad with content developed in the United States. They could then sell not medium-to-small Mexican-, Cuban-, or Puerto Rican-American audiences to advertisers, but one huge Hispanic-American audience.
Making the term official as a census category helped both activists and entrepreneurs. Previously, the Bureau of the Census classified Latin Americans as whites with distinct national origins, usually poorly measured. The activists pressed the census bureau, as did some politicians, to provide as broad a label as possible and count everyone who might conceivably fit the category, including, for example, the African-origin Dominicans (although not the French-speaking Haitians nor the Portuguese-speaking Brazilians). This pressure led to the 1980 formulation, used ever since, in which the census asks Americans whether or not they are “Hispanic” separately from whether they are white, black, Asian, or Indian.
The three interest groups worked together to publicize and promote the idea and the statistical category of “Hispanic.” As Mora explains, leaving the label’s meaning somewhat ambiguous was useful in both expanding the numbers and in selling the category – as a large needy population to the government and as numerous, affluent consumers to advertisers. The three parties also campaigned to get other institutions, such as state vital statistics bureaus and big businesses to adopt Hispanic as an official category. Many so-called Hispanics preferred and still prefer to call themselves by their national origins; Mora quotes a 1990s bumper sticker, “Don’t Call Me Hispanic, I’m Cuban!” But the term has taken over.
And, so Hispanic-Americans matter a lot now.
Identities
Categories of people that we take to be fixed – for example, our assumptions that people are old or young, black or white, male or female – often turn out to be not fixed at all. Social scientists have documented the way the definition of Negro/African American/black has shifted over the generations. There was a time, for example, when the census bureau sought to distinguish octoroons and a time when it could not figure out how to classify people from the Indian subcontinent. In Making Hispanics, Mora lets us see close up just how this new category, Hispanic, that we now take to be a person’s basic identity, was created, debated, and certified.
One lesson is that it could have been otherwise. If the pace and sources of migration had been different or if the politics of the 1970s had cut differently, maybe we would be talking about two separate identities, Chicano and “Other Spanish-speaking.” Or maybe we would be classifying the darker-skinned with “Blacks” and lighter-skinned with “Whites.” Or something else. Making Hispanics teaches us much about the social construction of identity.
* Based on my analysis of statistics on New York Times stories and the nGram data on words in American books. Use of “Chicano” surged in 1960s and 1970s, but then faded as “Latino” and, especially, “Hispanic” rose.
We’re previously featured great examples of resistance to sexist advertising, but this example takes it up a level. Clownify describes itself as a “street art project to turn everyday ads into ads for clowns.” I’m not sure what political message they intend to send, but what I see is a super easy, I would even say graceful, way of knocking us into consciousness. If advertisements typically occupy our lives as a taken-for-granted source of psychological coercion, this campaign reminds us to (1) actually look at what we’re seeing and (2) remember not to take ads, their messages, or their products too seriously.
Here are four examples, but there are lots more at the site:
This week Meredith Kleykamp tweeted us a photo of a comment written on her 3rd grade son’s cursive homework. The teacher wrote: “beautifully written! for a boy!”
So what’s the message here?
Some argue that boys are slower than girls to develop the fine motor coordination that facilitates beautiful handwriting. I’ve never interrogated that research, but let’s assume, for sake of argument, that that’s true.
If it’s true, then maybe Kleykamp’s son’s handwriting really is beautiful “for a boy.” But does that make the teacher’s comment innocuous?
Kleykamp observes: “‘Beautifully written’ is sufficient to convey praise.” Then what additional message does the extra commentary send? Given a social context in which boys are encouraged to be unlike girls, Christopher Knorr thought the subtext might be: “you will be forced to choose between your penmanship and your masculinity.”
Scholars call these kinds of lessons the “hidden curriculum.” Here’s another shocking example.
Devoted SocImages readers know that I will make any excuse to put up a video involving animals. I’m going to do it right now.
The video is a dolphin petting a cat. In the first part of the video, you’ll see the dolphin come out of the water and try to put his chin on the top of the cat’s head. In the second part of the video, you’ll see how the dolphin learned to do that. The cat very clearly wants to rub the top of his head, specifically, on the dolphin and the dolphin is paying attention and learning.
This isn’t just adorable interspecies communication, it’s proto-culture. It’s the transmission of an idea. I don’t know if all the dolphins in this video pet the cat this way, or if it’s just one dolphin, but I can certainly imagine one dolphin teaching the next, just as the cat taught the first dolphin.
Or, to put it more simply, humans aren’t special because we’re humans, were special because we’re animals.
Amelia Earhart, aviator. Wilma Rudolph, athlete. Sally Ride, astronaut. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, activist. Josephine Baker, performer. Virginia Woolf, novelist. Rosie the Riveter, archetype. Alice Paul, suffragist. Frida Kahlo, artist. Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State.
What do these women have in common? They are the 10 iconic women featured this year by womenshistorymonth.gov, the official website of Women’s History Month in the United States. A rotating banner across the top of the page shows a photo of each woman, her name, and a one word description, presumably the reason she is worthy of celebration.
Unfortunately, the women singled out for recognition at the site appear to be considered notable mainly because they excelled at what are generally thought to be “masculine” pursuits. This is androcentric, meaning that it values masculinity over femininity. Traits that have been traditionally conceptualized as masculine (such as being a leader and good at sports and math) are now seen as valuable for girls to develop, while boys are often still discouraged from do things traditionally conceptualized as feminine (such as nurturing, cooking, and cleaning).
I am all for questioning the idea that certain jobs are “men’s jobs,” but we also need to challenge the idea that only women can do “women’s jobs.” If we do not, the belief that women should do “women’s work” and, more importantly, that women’s work is not worth celebrating, is left unquestioned.
Women’s History Month tends to follow this trend. None of the women we typically recognize at this time of year, for example, are noted for being good cooks, care givers, or educators of children, nor are they lauded for their nurturing of others, emotional openness, kindness, or compassion — all traditionally “feminine” traits. Caring for others and teaching youth are wonderful things that everyone should be encouraged to do. Our history books should be filled with people of all genders who were exceptional in these areas. But, these traditionally feminine pursuits are not what earns one accolades during Women’s History Month, or any other time. As a consequence, people are not taught to value such jobs or the people who do them. This one-sided celebration is unlikely to solve the very problem that Women’s History Month is ostensibly designed to combat: gender inequality.
“To all the women who quietly made history” (source):
Laurel Westbrook is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University. Her research focuses on gendered violence, social movements, and the inner workings of the sex/gender/sexuality system.
Do Millennials really carry more debt than their parents and grandparents did at their age? Yes, according to a new study by sociologist Jason Houle. “In order to participate in society and gain economic independence,” he writes, “many young adults today must take a massive financial risk.” Or, as he puts it, “out of the nest and into the red.”
The graph below compares the amount of debt held by three generations in young adulthood (adjusted for inflation and controlled for other variables). Notice that the median debt load has grown, but the average debt load has grown much faster. This means that, while debt has grown over all, averages are also pulled up by a small number of young people that have really high levels.
Some evidence suggests that high debt individuals may be coming from lower income families. They take on debt as young people because the adults in their lives have already maxed out. They can’t count on their parents, for example, to take out a second mortgage on the house in order to pay for their college education. So, if they want to go to college, they have to take on the debt themselves.
Houle’s analysis, however, also shows that the kind of debt has changed across the three generations. The pie charts below reveal that the proportion of debt accounted for by home or car loans has shrunk, while the proportion accounted for by education loans and unsecured debt, like credit cards, has risen.
Moreover, Houle argues that this profile of generation Y’s debt is class specific:
The more advantaged are able to take on debt that helps them pursue a middle class lifestyle and build their wealth, while the less advantaged must take on debt to pay their bills and keep their heads above water.
So, is massive financial risk the new recipe for success?
For some, the answer may be yes. But for many, the gamble does not pay off. Students that take out college loans, for example, are more likely to drop out of college than those who have a parent that can pay. The combination of school loans and minimum-wage jobs can add up to a lifetime of economic insecurity. But, without other resources, not risking at all almost guarantees failure in this economy. For this reason, Houle argues, the availability of credit and acquisition of debt may be just another driver of income and wealth inequality. It’s a disturbing story that you can read in more depth here.
A touching BBC story describes a new documentary, Menstrual Man, that chronicles the trials and tribulations of a humble man in India who sought to offer his wife a sanitary napkin. After marrying, he discovered that his wife kept from him a secret: the rags she used and re-used to collect menstrual blood.
Only 12% of women in India used pads; they were simply too expensive for most to buy. Nearly three-quarters of all reproductive diseases were caused by poor menstrual hygiene. A combination of high cost and embarrassment kept women from developing a safe method of managing menstruation. Nearly a quarter of girls dropped out of school when they started their periods.
Arunachalam Muruganantham was driven to offer women a solution. He was going to design a machine that would produce low cost menstrual pads. He asked his wife to serve as an experimental subject, but one woman menstruating once a month wasn’t enough of a sample. He asked medical students to participate, but the responses were slim. He fashioned a fake uterus and collected goat blood, trying to experiment himself.
“Everyone thought he’d gone mad.”
His wife left, his mother left, his friends avoided him; it was suspected he was some kind of diseased or possessed sexual pervert, collecting menstrual blood to do god-knows-what.
Figuring out how to make highly absorptive cotton was a significant challenge. He finally tricked a multinational company into sending him samples of the raw material: cellulose from the bark of the tree. Now he just had to design a cheap machine that would turn the raw material into pads.
Four-and-a-half years later, he was producing affordable menstrual pads for Indian women on a cheaply made machine. He won an award. His wife came back.
He built 250 machines, which he then took to the poorest areas of Northern India. He gave them to women, at no profit, who could then produce the pads and sell them to local women. Each woman now runs her own business. “Over time the machines spread to 1,300 villages in 23 states.” He is now looking to expand to 106 more countries.
About his success, Muruganantham said:
Anyone with an MBA would immediately accumulate the maximum money. But I did not want to. Why? Because from childhood I know no human being died because of poverty — everything happens because of ignorance…. I have accumulated no money but I accumulate a lot of happiness.
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…
Congratulations to the amazing Gwen Sharp! She won a state-wide teaching award from the Nevada Board of Regents! She’s the best teacher in the whole state! This is no surprise to me, of course. Dr. Sharp co-founded and wrote for SocImages for many years. I’m so grateful to have worked with her for so long. You can read her posts here or follow her on Twitter.
