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Cross-posted at Asian-Nation.

Today, June 19, marks the anniversary of the day Vincent Chin was beaten into a coma because he was Asian. As summarized in my article “Anti-Asian Racism,” Vincent Chin was a 27-year-old Chinese American living in Detroit, Michigan. On this date in 1982, he and a few friends were at a local bar celebrating his upcoming wedding. Also at the bar were two White autoworkers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz.

Ebens and Nitz blamed the Japanese for the U.S. auto industry’s struggles at the time and began directing their anger toward Vincent. A fight ensued and eventually spilled outside the bar. After a few minutes, Ebens and Nitz cornered Vincent and while Nitz held Vincent down, Ebens repeatedly bludgeoned Vincent with a baseball bat until he was unconscious and hemorrhaging blood. Vincent was in a coma for four days until he finally died on June 23, 1982.

Ebens and Nitz were initially charged with second degree murder (intentionally killing someone but without premeditation). However, the prosecutor allowed both of them to plea down to manslaughter (accidentally killing someone). At the sentencing, the judge only sentenced both of them to three years probation and a fine of $3,780. The sentence provoked outrage among not just Asian Americans, but among many groups of color and led to a pan-racial coalescing of groups demanding justice for Vincent.

Vincent’s supporters got the U.S. Justice Department to bring federal charges against Ebens and Nitz for violating Vincent’s civil rights. In this trial, Ebens was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison while Nitz was found not guilty. However, the verdicts were thrown out because of a technicality and a second trial was ordered. The defense successfully got the trial moved away from Detroit to Cincinnati OH. In this second federal trial, an all-White jury acquitted both Ebens and Nitz of violating Vincent’s civil rights.

Vincent’s death and the injustices he, his family, and all Asian Americans suffered still stand as a stark and sober reminder that, in contrast to the image of us as the “model minority” and the socioeconomic successes that we have achieved, Asian Americans are still susceptible to being targeted for hostility, racism, and violence. We only have to look at recent incidents in which Asian American students continue to be physically attacked at school, and other examples of Asian-and immigrant-bashing and White backlash to see that we as society still have a lot of work to do before Asian Americans (and other groups of color) are fully accepted as “real” or “legitimate” Americans.

The silver lining in Vincent’s case was that it was a watershed moment in Asian American history because it united the entire Asian American community like no event before. For the first time, different Asian groups began to understand that the discrimination committed against other Asians could easily be turned towards them. In other words, for the first time, Asians of different ethnicities, cultures, and nationalities united around an issue that affected them all.

As a result, the Asian American community mobilized their collective resources in unprecedented ways and Vincent’s death was the spark that led to the creation of a network of hundreds of non-profit organizations working at local, state, and national levels to combat not just hate crimes, but also other areas of inequality facing Asian American (i.e., housing, employment, legal rights, immigrant rights, educational reform, etc.). Vincent’s death has had a powerful legacy on the Asian American community — as a result of the collective action demanding justice, it contributed to the development of the “pan-Asian American” identity that exists today.

This is why it is important for all Asian Americans, and all of us as Americans, to remember Vincent Chin — to mourn the events of his death, to reflect on how it changed the Asian American community forever, and to realize that the struggle for true racial equality and justice still continues today.

C.N. Le is a senior lecturer and the director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  He is the founder and principle writer for Asian-Nation.   You can follow him on Twitter.

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.

The fashion industry is not inclusive of racial and ethnic minorities. Many of the industry’s most celebrated and acclaimed fashion houses rarely cast models of color for their runway shows. Fall 2013 was one of the worst seasons in diversity for casting. Almost 83% of the models on the runway were white (source):

The result is an incredibly homogeneous look on the runway.  Check out photos of the Fall 2013 Gucci show (source) and the Fall 2013 Calvin Klein show (source).

Faintly aware of this critique, some designers put a minority model on the runway every odd season. But while look-alike white models are hired en masse, designers often limit just how much color they’re willing to include.  Chanel Iman, an extremely successful multiracial model, told The Times: “Designers have told me, ‘We already found one black girl. We don’t need you anymore.’”

Leila Ananna, a casting director for Burberry, Gucci, Emilio Pucci, Saint Laurent, and more, thinks that this is okay.  Commenting on the lack of runway diversity, she said: “We think we need to keep in mind that these are shows. A show needs to make you dream, and it doesn’t necessarily need to represent reality.”

Ananna’s words pose many concerns. The idea that fashion shows are supposed to make you dream suggests that everyone is white in this idealized world. In contrast, I find the idealization of the homogeneous aesthetic to be a reflection of racism; this is a nightmare, not a dream.

Rebs (Wooyoung) Lim is currently a student attending Occidental College. She is interested in minoring in Sociology and majoring in Urban and Environmental Policy. She does not have a twitter account, sadly.

A guiding principle driving the sociological understanding and analysis of deviance is the recognition that behaviors themselves are not inherently deviant; rather it is the social perceptions and reactions to a behavior that makes a particular behavior deviant.  This explains why opinions and attitudes towards different forms of supposedly deviant behaviors regularly change.  A notable change in one type of deviance, using marijuana, is revealed in a report compiled by the Pew Research Center.

According to David F. Musto, a century ago marijuana was an obscure drug used almost exclusively by Hispanics in the Southwest.  Its limited association with this ethnic group is largely why marijuana initially became illegal.  With the onset of the Great Depression, both federal and state governments sought ways to expel nonwhites from the country as their cheap labor was no longer necessary.  Making one of this group’s pastimes illegal was a way to stigmatize Hispanics and rally public support for a population transfer.  With a populace stirred into a moral panic by racism, nativism and propaganda movies like Reefer Madness, there was little resistance to the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act which effectively made cannibas illegal.

In the 1960s marijuana experienced a cultural comeback when it became the drug of choice for baby-boomers who saw the drug as a safer alternative to the alcohol and methamphetamine that plagued their parents’ generation.  Marijuana was even legal for a brief period after the Supreme Court found the 1937 marijuana act unconstitutional.  However, because of widespread concern that drugs were corrupting the moral fabric of America’s youth, in 1970 marijuana was one of many drugs outlawed by President Nixon’s Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act.  Interestingly, marijuana was the only drug targeted by this act that did not include a medical exception.  In the 1980s, President Reagan increased penalties for breaking drug laws, and subsequently the prison population in the United States swelled to a size seemingly unimaginable in a wealthy democracy.

The graph below from PEW’s report captures how federal action came during times of heightened public support to make marijuana illegal.

Yet, the graph also captures how in the early 1990s, support for the legalization of marijuana started to increase.  According to the PEW report, around this time California pioneered using the drug for medicinal purposes; seventeen other states (including D.C.) have since followed California’s lead while six other states decriminalized possession of small amounts.  In 2012, citizens in Colorado and Oregon voted to completely legalize marijuana despite federal law.  This relaxing and even elimination of marijuana laws mirrors favorable opinions of marijuana and growing support for its legalization.

It is difficult to tell if legalization, medical or otherwise, drives public opinion or vice-versa.  Regardless, an especially noteworthy finding of the PEW report is that right now, more than half of the United States’ citizens think marijuana should be legal.  Sociologists always take interest when trend lines cross in public opinion polls because the threshold is especially important in a majority-rule democracy; and the PEW report finds for the first time in the history of the poll, a majority of U.S. citizens support marijuana legalization.

This historical research data on opinions about marijuana reveals how definitions of deviance, and in many cases the ways those definitions are incorporated into the legal system, grow out of shared social perceptions.  Although there have been some notable genetic and cultivation advances, marijuana has changed relatively little in the last forty years; yet our perceptions of this drug (and therefore its definitions of use as deviant) regularly evolve and we can expect opinions, and therefore our laws, to further change in the future.

Jason Eastman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Coastal Carolina University who researches how culture and identity influence social inequalities.

Last week someone sent me a link to an article about Brad Paisley’s new song, “Accidental Racist,” which features LL Cool J. Given that you’re a Soc Images reader, chances are good you’ve heard about this song. I don’t remember what I was expecting when I saw the title of the song, but man. I really was not prepared for that experience. There’s no official video available on YouTube at the moment, but someone made a video of the song with the lyrics:

In Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva discusses the rhetorical strategies that Whites often use to minimize the existence of racial inequality today. As being openly racist has become increasingly stigmatized in the U.S., a version of “color-blind” racism has emerged.

One argument that underpins color-blind racism is the framing of racial oppression and injustice as elements of the past that, while regrettable, can’t be remedied now. Moreover, it’s history; since African Americans aren’t enslaved or legally segregated today, we need to move on from here and treat everyone as equals, with no special considerations for anyone. As one of Bonilla-Silva’s interviewees explained, “…what happened in the past is horrible and it should never happen again, but I also think that to move forward you have to let go of the past…And it should really start equaling out…” (p. 78).

Along with this is often an attempt to equate the discrimination faced by some groups of European immigrants (Italians, the Irish, Jews, etc.) to the experience of African Americans, as this interviewee did: “…they were slaves back in the past and yet, how often do you hear about the people who were whites that were slaves…Boy, we should get reparations, the Irish should get reparations from the English…” (p. 79). From this perspective, African Americans are just one of many groups that had it bad; the impacts of a legally institutionalized racist system that denied African Americans full citizenship or access to opportunities is ignored. This storyline of “we all had it bad” equalizes various experiences of racial and ethnic inequality.

And this is the problem with Paisley’s song (well, it’s one of the problems, but let’s focus). Take these lyrics (found here):

And it ain’t like you and me can re-write history
Our generation didn’t start this nation
We’re still pickin’ up the pieces, walkin’ on eggshells, fightin’ over yesterday
And caught between southern pride and southern blame

…

And we’re still paying for the mistakes
That a bunch of folks made long before we came

And these contributions from LL Cool J:

If you don’t judge my gold chains…I’ll forget the iron chains

…

The past is the past, you feel me…Let bygones be bygones

While Paisley may mean well, his song presents racial inequality or conflict as the result of long-past history, “mistakes…made long before we came,” something we need to just get past so we can appreciate each other. And it equates wildly divergent issues, presenting everyone has having a fair, legitimate complaint. Slavery (“iron chains”) and adopting an aesthetic style (“gold chains”) that some Whites might not like are, apparently, equivalent issues. Ending racism is just a matter of everybody deciding to be nicer. If Whites can get over not liking what some African Americans wear, well then hey, African Americans will get over a history of institutionalized racial oppression and the impacts it still has today.

In the world of color-blind racism, this is a fair, plausible compromise.

You might also enjoy SNL’s take.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Course Guide for
ASIAN AMERICANS AND PACIFIC ISLANDERS
(last updated 04/2013)

Developed by Calvin N. Ho
University of California, Los Angeles

Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity

• Overview of the Social Construction of Race
• Whites, Blacks, and Apes in the Great Chain of Being
• Race, Ethnicity, and McDonald’s Marketing Strategies
• Editorial Cartoons in the Black Press During World War II
  
• Race and Censuses from Around the World
• Why Be Counted? And How?

Doing race and ethnicity

• Why Do the Japanese Draw Themselves as White?
• Race, Gender, and Likes on OkCupid
• Re-Racializing the Fortune Cookie
• How to Make a Chinese or Japanese Book Cover
• Ann Ducille on “Ethnic” Barbies
• Suomibhangra – The Good Brownface?

Racial mixing and multiraciality

• The New U.S. Racial Ideology
• Interracial Marriage on the Rise
• Race/Ethnicity, Assimilation, and Asian American Marriages
• Race, Response, and Dating Websites
• Interracial Marriage & the Meaning of Multiraciality

Colonialism, Neocolonialism, and Exotification

• Orientalism and the Consumption of the Other
• Colonial Circus: The Case of “Giraffe-Necked Women”
• Race, Subjectivity, and the Centrality of Whiteness
• Travel, Privilege, and the Crush of the Tourist Gaze
• Human Zoos at the Turn of the 20th Century
• “Development” Initiatives and the (In)Visibility of Power
• Colonialism, Soap, and the Cleansing Metaphor

Geopolitics

• Cartooning the US Chinese Exclusion Act
• Life in World War II Japanese American Internment Camps
• More World War II Anti-Japanese Propaganda
• Comedy that Kills Us: Demonizing Arabs and Muslims in the U.S.
• The Tsunami in Japan and the Minds of Americans
• China as a Strategic Political Threat

Racism, Discrimination, and Stereotypes

• Asian Stereotypes T-Shirts
• Racist Caricatures in Vintage Valentine’s Cards
• Why and How People of Color are Included in Advertising
• Jeremy Lin, ESPN Says, has a “Chink in the Armor”
• Responses to UCLA Student’s Racist Rant
• Ethnocentrism and Family Values
• Resistance to Racist Halloween Costumes
• Stereotype Promise
• Distracted by “Linsanity:” Hidden Racism and the Model Minority Stereotype

Gender and Sexuality

• How to Avoid Harassing Asian American Women
• The Dancing Hawaiian Girl, At Your Service
• Google Imaging the Continents
• Selling Feminine Passivity in a Cathay Pacific Ad
• Classy Asian Ladies Dating Site
• Race and the Problems with Measuring Beauty “Objectively”
• “Asian Rhinoplasty”

Statistics on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders

• If Congress Looked Like Us
• 2010 Census Data on Racial/Ethnic Populations
• U.S. Racial/Ethnic Demographics: 1960, Today, and 2050
• U.S. Birth Rate Drops to Lowest on Record
• How Race Changes the Relationship Between Religion and Politics
• Race/Ethnicity and Voter Turnout

Geography of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders

• Racial/Ethnic Shifts in Metro Areas
• Maps of Racial/Ethnic Populations in U.S. Cities
• Interactive Maps of U.S. Racial/Ethnic Distributions
• Interactive Map of Immigrant Settlement Patterns in U.S.
• 2010 Census Data on Residential Segregation
• Maps of Surnames
• Database of Human Development Information
• Modern Language Association’s Interactive Website

Labor Market Segmentation and Socioeconomic Mobility

• Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and the Pay Gap
• Why Variance Matters: Race, Education, and Income
• The Growing Racial Wealth Gap
• Lifetime Earnings Gaps, by Sex and Race/Ethnicity
• Post-High-School Pathways of Men of Color
• Asian Americans and Unemployment
• Ethnic Enclaves, Linguistic Segregation, and Asian Unemployment
• New CEOs: The Diversification of the Corner Office
• Race, Sex, and Casting Hollywood Films

Re-posted to add to the discussion about sexual assault and rape culture in the aftermath of the Steubenville verdict.

On the heels of yesterday’s cartoon making light of lynching published in Eastern Michigan University’s newspaper, Michaela N. submitted an intended-to-be-humorous visual making light of rape in The Purdue Exponent, the Purdue University student newspaper.  Part of a “sex position of the week” series, this one suggests that one man should pass a female partner off to another man without her knowledge.

This is another piece of evidence that suggests that we live in a rape culture: a society that, at best, trivializes and, at worst endorses, sexual assault.

UPDATE: Zoe Hayes, editor-in-chief of The Purdue Exponent, sent along a note asking that we link to their apology.  To their credit, unlike the non-apology issues in the case of the lynching cartoon linked to above, they express genuine empathy, remorse, and responsiveness.

For more indications that we live in a rape culture, see our posts on media coverage of a rape video game and the George Sodini murders, rapists as hyperconformists to ideal masculinity, the rape scene in Observe and Report, and t-shirts endorsing sex with “drunk girls”.

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.

Cross-posted at Racialicious.The Harlem Shake is a syncopated dance form that first appeared on the New York hip-hop scene in the early 1980s. In 2012 music producer Baueer created an electronic dance tune, unfortunately calling it The Harlem Shake. Baueer’s song inspired an Internet meme in which people rhythmlessly shake their upper bodies and grind their hips in a tasteless perversion of the original dance.

This fake Harlem Shake meme has become so ubiquitous that it has been “performed” by the English National Ballet, and gone further globally with a video from the Norwegian army, and in Tunisia and Egypt, where the song and imitation dance has become a protest anthem.

The irony of an African-American cultural relic being white-washed to the point where other people of color perform its bastardized version is not lost, and this takes on a whole new level as teams with majority African-American members such as the Miami Heat and Denver Nuggets add to the fake Shake canon.

A major problematic of this meme is that it takes an already marginalized group in America, one whose history and culture has often been appropriated and co-opted in fetishistic ways by the white majority, and makes a mockery of not just them, but an entire dance tradition.  This is not lost on residents of Harlem, many of whom recognize cultural appropriation and malrepresentation when they see it:

In spite of a number of calls online from African-American writers, artists, scholars and supporters like myself to bring attention to the real Harlem Shake, every day there is instead a new group adding to the misappropriated dance. When you Google “The Harlem Shake” you must scroll through pages before you reach any posts about the actual hip-hop tradition.

This literal erasure of black culture and its replacement with an absurdist movement and meme needs to be considered in light of African-American oppression and institutionalized racism in the United States. Supplanting the sinuous artistry of the Harlem Shake with frenetic styleless arm flailing and hip thrusting is yet another brick in a grand wall of symbolic and structural violence that further relegates an entire culture to the margins, both on and offline.

As the Harlem residents said in response to the meme: “Stop that shit.”

P.S. Here’s how to actually do the Harlem Shake. 

Sezin Koehler is a half-American half-Sri Lankan informal ethnographer and novelist living in Lighthouse Point, Florida.

On this last day of Black History Month, let us return to posts past.

We have been urged to celebrate Black History Month…

• …with fried chicken and collard greens.
• No really, with fried chicken and collard greens!
• …by relaxing our hair and drinking kool-aid.
• …by conflating them with “underprivileged” people.
• …by feeling badly about how fat we are and thinking about surgery.
• …with a “Compton Cookout” complete with blackface and nooses! (pictured)
• …by buying stuff from companies that do nothing but acknowledge Black History Month.

<sarcasm> Good times. </sarcasm>