Sociologist Yen Le Espiritu popularized the idea of a pan-ethnic identity.  “Asian American” is a pan-ethnic identity. It is an invented label applied to dozens of different groups with wildly different cultural traditions and languages. Most Americans (Asian and not), over time, came to accept the term as meaningful. American Indian is also a pan-ethnic term, as is African American and most other such labels.

On the one hand, pan-ethnic labels can be empowering. There is power in numbers. A large community identified across ethnic and national identities by race (however fake that racial designation is) can, for example, become a powerful voting bloc to which politicians must attend, or be mobilized to work together to fight for a common cause.

On the other hand, pan-ethnic labels can be disempowering. They tend to ignore the distinctions that make ethnic and national identities meaningful, and the rough categories erase differences among groups, thus making it more difficult to see and, thus, problematize disadvantage.

This latter problem motivated the Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC) of the University of California campuses to run its “Count Me In” campaign. They notice that, though “Asian Americans” were well represented on University of California campuses (they make up 43% of incoming frosh in 2006), certain groups deemed “Asian” remain underrepresented. These include students of Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian descent, among others.

The campaign asked the University of California system to disaggregate their “Asian” category.

In response the University of California added 23 new categories to their application.

For a much more extensive discussion of this issue, see Fatemeh Fakhraie’s post at Racialicious(where I stole this video clip).

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

Feminist scholars argue that patriarchy relies not just on a hierarchy that places men above women, but a hierarchy of men that punishes men who don’t obey rules of masculinity.

An advertising campaign for Oberto Beef Jerky, sent in by Kate S., nicely illustrates the threat to men if they don’t comply with patriarchy.

The threat is: If you’re not an “Alpha,” then you’re a “Sidekick.”

The Alpha is first; the Sidekick is second. The Alpha gets served; the Sidekick serves. The Alpha gets the hot chick; the Sidekick gets the “ugly friend.” The Alpha makes the decisions; the Sidekick takes them.

In one part of the website, it actually encourages you to “establish your dominance.”   It features taunting emails and cards that you can send to your friends to trick them into looking like idiots/being your sidekick.

UPDATE: In the comments thread, Toban B. (T B) had a really nice observation:

As Murray Bookchin has written, language about ‘alpha males’ naturalizes hierarchy.

Bookchin highlights how people have conflated animal and insect interactions (e.g. ‘queen’ bees) with societal structures created by humans — as opposed to the far more instinctual of relations of non-human creatures.  (For Bookchin, there is a continuum between humans and other life forms, so these distinctions aren’t binaries.)  Basically, the point here is that if human hierarchies are the same as instinctual hierarchies (e.g. interactions with a lion ‘king’), then the human hierarchies must be just as natural and inevitable — which just isn’t the case.

Joanne suggests, further, that humans, invested in patriarchy and hierarchy, actually project it onto the natural world:

Using the terms “alpha” and “dominance” just reinforces the belief that nature exists within a patriarchal, hierarchical model.  It actually doesn’t.  I do a lot of work with horses, researching and observing the horse-human relationship, and this whole idea of “dominance” is one that has started with and is kept alive by the patriarchal worldview of Western culture.  Many observers of animal behavior are brought up in and continue to live in that worldview, so they impose it on animals and the natural world.  If you step outside of that worldview, what you find in the natural world is something entirely different.

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

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

From ABC News, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen … is taking fire for its comic relief: a pair of slang-spewing, illiterate Chevy hatchbacks named Skids and Mudflap… the robot duo is being labeled a racist caricature.” According to Yahoo News, “They’re forced to acknowledge that they can’t read. One has a gold tooth.”

I haven’t seen the movie, so it’s difficult to comment directly, but I wonder if this another example of the dehumanizing racial stereotypes. Michael Bay, the director, largely dismisses the concerns. “Listen, you’re going to have your naysayers on anything,” he said. “It’s like is everything going to be melba toast? It takes all forms and shapes and sizes.”

We’re pleased to feature a post by Macon D.  About himself, Macon writes, “I’m a white guy, trying to find out what that means. Especially the ‘white’ part. I live in that heart of the heart of American whiteness, the ever-amorphous ‘Midwest.’”  Macon’s blog, Stuff White People Do, is an excellent source of insights about race and racism.  We thought this post grappled nicely with the complicated phenomenon of (literal and figurative) black face, while addressing a difficult and contemporary form of humor:

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Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Toban B. sent us a link to these two images illustrating the global spread of Starbucks and McDonalds (put together by Princeton):

UPDATE: Toban offered these great insights in the comment thread:

When I sent this in, I was looking at the images as indicators of who is and isn’t part of certain aspects of ‘globalization.’

While there has been increased homogenization, some people also have exaggerated the extent to which we all are part of One world (which some people call a “global village” — a term that I find downright ridiculous, to be frank.) I think that people talk like the world is all One because they are ignoring most of the world — i.e. the spots on the above maps that don’t have many coloured dots on them. Obviously the ‘North’ ‘Western’ areas also are very different in some respects (e.g. linguistically), but there’s more consistency in those areas of the world in terms of McDonaldization, digitization, and other features of the ‘North’ ‘Western’ ends of ‘globalization’ — that is, the sides of ‘globalization’ that people tend to highlight (whereas people don’t pay much attention to international waste trade dumping grounds, for instance).

If the world is all One, it is One in a way that entails different positions (e.g. as producers vs. consumers), and a lot of inequality (e.g. in terms of where the money is). If (for instance) Columbia is part of some sort of globalization, the place of Latin America is a lot different from France (for instance).

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

Miguel of El Forastero told us about an interactive map at the New York Times that presents data on murders in New York City from 2003 to today, broken down in various ways. The data come from NYPD reports, and of course there are definitely issues with taking police reports as a measure of actual crime, but my understanding is that while police reports on things like theft and rape are a poor measure of how often those crimes actually occur, they’re considered much more accurate regarding murder. In each map below, I include all murders from 2003 to 2009, but you can select particular years as well.

As many of us would suspect, the majority of murders occur at night (though the site didn’t specify exactly what hours are defined as “night” and “day”):

The racial breakdown of both victims and perpetrators are extremely similar:

The next two maps show that murder is an overwhelmingly male activity. When I discuss crime with my students, they usually assume most perpetrators are male, but because their ideas of assult and murder often relate to domestic violence or rape, they are always very surprised to find out that most victims of murder are also male. As we see, women are more likely to be victims than they are to be perpetrators, but still, the vast majority of murder victims are men:

Murder is also linked to age, with 18 to 34 year olds being most likely to be murdered or to murder someone else:

I found the accompaning article in the NYT rather interesting as an example of overemphasizing the likelihood of murder. Here are the first two paragraphs:

A young boxer was shot dead outside a Bronx bodega at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday last August. Weeks later, a 59-year-old woman was beaten to death on a Saturday night on the side of a Queens highway. On the last Sunday in September, violence exploded as five men were killed in a spate of shootings and stabbings between midnight and 6 a.m.

Seven homicides in New York City. None connected in any way but this: They happened during the summer months, when the temperatures rise, people hit the streets, and New York becomes a more lethal place.

A few paragraphs down:

Still, the prime time for murder is clear: summertime. Indeed, it is close to a constant, one hammered home painfully from June to September across the decades. And the breakdown of deadly brutality can get even more specific.

Only in paragraph 6 do we get this information:

Of course, the dominant and most important trend involving murder in New York has been the enormous decline in killings over the last 15 years, to levels not seen since the early 1960s.

From reading the first several paragraphs, the impression is that NYC is awash in a “spate” of murders, making it a “lethal” place full of “deadly brutality.” Only in one small section do they acknowledge that, in fact, murders are down significantly. Now, of course, that doesn’t take away from the horror of the murders that do occur, but it feels like a bit of fear-mongering. This is a common trend in the mass media–newscasts often give a lot of coverage to crimes, particularly murders and assaults, for instance–and it gives the public the idea that crime is common (and increasing) and the world is a dangerous place.

The emphasis on how dangerous summer is also seemed a bit disproportionate. As the first map above illustrates, yes, a higher percentage of murders occur June through September, but given the language of the article, you’d expect a much bigger difference between those months and other times of year.

Stephen W. sent us a photograph of a billboard in Rock Valley, IA.  It suggests that keeping your baby, instead of having an abortion, is good for the economy:

Sociologists talk about how nations are invested in reproduction.  Without babies, nations literally disappear; too many babies and nations collapse under the strain of a population they cannot support.  Because nations need babies (but not too many babies), states adopt pro- and anti-natal policies (e.g., the one child rule or medals for mothers) that encourage or discourage childbearing.  This billboard is an interesting example of a call to women to have children so as to help the nation (though it is sponsored by a pro-life organization, not the state).  Women, in this argument, have a responsibility to the nation (perhaps equivalent to military service?) that transcends their individual reproductive preferences.

(See this related post on making babies for the military.)

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

Andrea G. alerted us to a Fisher-Price toy, called My Pretty Learning Purse, for children aged 6 to 36 months. Behold:

The purse comes with a dollar bill, a bracelet, a mirror, and a set of keys.  It also sings songs about purple and pink.

Andrea writes:

With these props, a one year old can properly play “woman.”  I felt this is an example of how we do gender and teach it to children, as young as a year old.

At least they’re admitting that femininity must be “learn[ed]?”

UPDATE: Jane, in the comments, linked to a Fisher Price product for boys that is very similar:

Get it!  It’s a tool box and it includes keys, a screwdriver, a hammer, and a saw.

The play involved in each product is essentially identical (e.g., music, putting things in and taking them out), but the theme of the play is gendered.  Do you think this is to please the parents or the kids?

NEW (Dec. ’09)! Monica C. sent along this page from a Target catalog featuring a girl playing with a kitchen and a boy playing with a tool set:

Also in teaching young children femininity and masculinity, see our posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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