Here are some graphs about income inequality over time:

From the Working Group on Extreme Poverty.

These images capture the Columbia University class of 1909 posing as “Zulu Savages” (found here thanks to Penny R.)  We may not be so surprised to see such mimickry of blacks in 1909, but I think that when compared to these pictures of college students at race-themed parties in 2007, it might make for some interesting discussion of humor, mimickry, racism, and the notion of progress… especially as Halloween approaches.

Beth T. sent us this picture of some books for sale at the NASA John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.  I found some more at the website. They nicely illustrate the gendering of jobs.  Only because we implicitly think that zoologists, oceanographers, paleontologists, and architects are men, is it necessary to modify the term with “woman.”

Teresa C., from Moment of Choice, sent in the trailer for the movie “The Secret Life of Bees.” What brought her attention to it was that it had a female voiceover, which is very uncommon. Voiceovers are almost always male. Unfortunately, she hasn’t been able to find a video of the trailer with the female voiceover online; if anyone finds it, let us know. This trailer just has some of the characters’ lines from the movie as narration.

What struck me about it–and Owen Gleiberman over at Entertainment Weekly–was that this seems to be another movie in which wise, long-suffering African American characters protect or enlighten White characters who are, at their core, good, kind liberals (we know that Dakota Fanning’s character is a Good White Person because she knows about the Civil Rights Act). As Gleiberman says in his review,

Isn’t it time that Hollywood took a sabbatical — maybe a permanent one — from movies in which black characters exist primarily to save the souls of white ones?…Over the years, we’ve all seen too many anachronistic ”magic Negroes” in movies like Forrest Gump and The Green Mile.

I would add “The Legend of Bagger Vance” to the list. They have important Black characters, but those characters’ main role is to facilitate the moral development of the White character through their wise advice and unending patience. I may be totally off, since I’ve only seen the trailer (though Gleiberman has seen the whole film), but “The Secret Life of Bees” seems to have a lot of the same themes.

Thanks for sending in the clip, Teresa!

Data from the Pew Research Foundation, via Andrew Sullivan.

The trivialization of domestic violence + Obama is going to destroy America + the stereotype of black men as violent.  Sigh.  Buy it here.

Thanks to Tim C. for the tip!

In this McCain-Palin ad which, I believe, started running yesterday, it is stated that an Obama presidency will bring on international military conflict (at least that’s my reading of the images), while a McCain presidency means no international military conflict.

Sociologically what is interesting about this ad is the way in which danger can be socially constructed. What we fear most is not necessarily what is most likely to cause us harm. Consider, most of us are more afraid of riding in hot air balloons than cars but, even proportionally, your chances of dying in a hot air balloon crash are much smaller than your chances of dying in a car crash. People around us–e.g., our parents and friends, but also politicians–try to shape the degree of fear we have for any given situation. Politicans, especially, are not necessarily doing it out of a concern for our well-being.

What do we really need to fear in the next four years? This McCain ad nicely tries to draw our attention away from the fear of, say an economic depression or climate change, in favor of an international military conflict. Though he doesn’t say so explicitly, it seems obvious to me that he’s implying a terrorist attack. It’s not obvious to me, though, that a military conflict or terrorist attack is more likely to cause extreme and extended suffering than any other potential crisis, but it would useful to McCain if I thought so, because it’s the one sphere in which it is widely agreed that McCain is superior to Obama. Thus, as an extremely powerful figure, he attempts to shape our collective understanding of what is (most) dangerous, what we should (most) fear, and win the presidency through the cultivation of a culture of fear.

Here are some graphs on the income and wealth gap between Whites and Blacks in the U.S.

This next one shows homeownership rates. I know some people are going to point out that Blacks are more concentrated in urban areas than Whites are, and so it might make more sense to break down homeownership by area (rural, urban, suburban). While that might be a legitimately useful comparison, it also brings up the question of why African Americans would be more concentrated in urban areas, which could lead to a discussion of government programs that encourage Whites to buy homes in the suburbs after WWII while denying those opportunities to Blacks.

One way of explaining higher unemployment rates among Blacks is that there is some individual or cultural deficiency–African Americans are lazy, or want a hand-out, or don’t look for work, etc. etc. I like to show trend comparisons like these because they undermine those types of explanations. If African American unemployment was due to laziness, a “culture of poverty,” or other deficiencies, it would be unlikely for Black and White unemployment rates to show the same pattern (or, for that matter, any pattern–unless you believe African Americans just got a lot lazier in, say, 1982). What we see here is that Black and White unemployment rates follow a very similar pattern, but that during hard economic times, sugh as the early 1980s and around 1992, African Americans suffer disproportionately.

This one shows the slow but steady trend toward resegregation of our schools:

All of these were found at the Working Group on Extreme Inequality website.