Search results for white privilege

Rudo M. sent us a great example of how “normal” is socially constructed. The photos below are of the box containing a Vidal Sassoon hair dryer for “normal” hair:

It’s also, “good” hair, as is said, in so many words, the blurb on the box said so:

Not too fine or coarse,  normal hair is the most manageable hair type with the largest range of possible styles.  Though it’s fun to experiment, even the easiest-to-care-for hair requires a regimen of regular maintenance.  Proper styling tools with varying heats are crucial for keeping a healthy-looking shine, maintaining balance, and adding…

Yeah, so just in case it wasn’t clear already, “normal” hair is the bestest!  It’s “not too fine or too coarse,” has the “largest range of possible styles,” is “fun,” and is totally the “easiest-to-care-for”!

Rudo is an African woman who wears her hair natural, so she knew right away that Vidal Sassoon didn’t count her hair as “normal.”  So, what were the other options?  If you’re not normal, what are you? Well, according to Vidal Sassoon, you are, of course, “fine” or “coarse.”

But a lot of good this does Rudo, since even the models on the “coarse” box are white with essentially straight hair!  So much for a range of hair types!  Well, at least we know that even white women with straight hair can be abnormal!

And, just in case you didn’t know already that being abnormal means being WRONG, coarse hair is “hard-to-style,” fine hair is limp, and both tend to “frizz.”   What a difference from Vidal Sassoon practically falling over itself praising normal hair.

Here’s another example, sent in by @adentweets.  There’s “normal” and there’s “thick” hair.

Cara McC. sent us a Covergirl commercial selling foundation for “normal,” “oily,” and “sensitive” skin. Again, they include a range of skin types (and probably include women who represent three different races) in order to point to the diversity of skin types, but nonetheless label one “normal” (the one represented by the white woman).

For more examples of whiteness as normal and people of color as deviant (or, if we measure by Vidal Sassoon, non-existent), see our posts on Michelle Obama’s “flesh-colored” gown, Johnson’s lotion for “normal to darker skin,” bandaids and other “flesh-colored” things, why Sotomayor may be “biased,” families vs. ethnic families, and people of color add “spice.”

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.

Cassidy P., Kailey V., Adèle G., and Allie L. sent in a gift guide put together by the New York Times specifically for people “Of Color” (center bottom):

The guide lumps together all non-white groups, suggests that they are interested in race- and culture-specific products and implies that white people would NOT be interested in these things.  Some examples:

The guide illustrates something we’ve discussed several times on this blog: the fact that there “needs” to be a guide specifically for people of color reveals that all the other products and guides, ostensibly for “people,” are really for white people.  Things that are marketed to non-white people are, supposedly, inherently uninteresting or irrelevant to white people.

Ultimately, this reinforces the idea that people of color are always outsiders in a white world.

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.

V. and Anna G. sent in this ad for a LOLCats T-shirt.  Notice that the woman’s t-shirt is for women only, but the man’s t-shirt also doubles as a unisex shirt.

Both Emily W. and Sabine M. sent in this example of the same phenomenon at Mental Floss:

Mindy J. sent us a third example from Secret Society of Vegans:

From Johanna G:

Finally, Jessica S. sent in this example from Kung Fu Nation:

This is just another example of the phenomenon of how we take one half of a (false) binary (such as man vs. woman) and make one generic and the other specific.   Men can be human, but women are always female humans; white people can be just people, but non-white people are always other; Christian symbols are for everyone, but non-Christian symbols are exclusive; and so on and so on.

For more examples, see these posts on how racial and ethnic identity adds spice, Sotomayor’s racial bias, male neutrality in stick figures (here and here), male-default avatars, flesh-colored products, for normal to darker skin, Michelle Obama’s “flesh-colored” gown.

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.

NEWS:

Lisa was invited to co-host a Racialicious Podcast this week with Tami Winfrey Harris and Minh-ha Pham.  If you’re interested, you can listen here.

Also, in case you’re new to SocImages, you’re welcome to friend us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

Sociologists use the term “racialization” to describe the process by which something that isn’t associated with any racial group, becomes newly associated.  In October of 2007, we offered the pit bull as an example of racialization.  Also features Weird Al Yankovic.

People often use the Gay Republicans as an example of a social organization that brings together two ideas that seem to be at odds.  Another example, detailed in a post in October of 2008,  is the pro-environment/anti-immigrant movement (protecting the environment means restricting immigration).  The post features a couple really interesting ads.

Also, haven’t had enough Halloween yet?  Here are our Halloween posts from previous years:

Two extra-special costumes (the Anna Rexia costume and the Sexy Scholar), Max Weber jack o’lantern (by yours truly), Obama mask sold as terrorist mask, a Sarah Palin effigy, handling sex offenders on trick-o’-treat day, and costume catalog analyses (here and here).    See also, if you like, my Huffington Post about the race, class, and gender politics of Halloween.

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! Oct ’09):

Downright Offensive

It’s been a long time since we linked to our post featuring pictures from racial- and ethnic-themed college parties, but we found another example (this time Auburn University in 2001).  In this one, college students dress up in Blackface and like Klan members.  Delightful.

We added another example of a urinal shaped like a woman’s mouth, sent in my Liz B., to our collection of urinals and sinks meant to look like women’s body parts.

L. sent us a Facebook teaser for the movie DeadGirl (a movie about the rape and torture of a zombie woman) that describes the movie as “hot.”  We added it to our DeadGirl post (NSFW, Triggering).

Like fashion shoots that present female models as dead bodies? We added more to our post of Lanvin ads that show women looking dead.

We added another example of ads featuring bound Asian women, sent in by Penny R.

Katie let us know about El Emigrante, a video game where the player is a bike-riding immigrant trying to avoid the police. We added it to our post about Border Patrol, a game where you try to shoot immigrants crossing into the U.S., including a pregnant woman.

War and Nation

A World War I British recruitment poster that portrayed the British Empire as a team working together reminded us of our post about re-imagining the U.S. military, so we added it.

Class

Steve, my private plane friend, send me some more pictures of the luxury of private aviation.  A free, personal cinema, in this case.

Gender

Amanda C. sent us another example of an instance in which “sex” is conflated with women.

We updated our post comparing beauty pageant standards to standards for judging livestock with a photo taken by Steve P. outside a skincare store, in which a woman’s face is sliced up into parts to apparently help you pick the correct product for each section.

Our post on gendering and sexualizing foods has new additions: sexy fish sticks! And a Vegas restaurant appropriating feminist imagery from the 1960s.

We also updated our post about the controversy surrounding Jennifer Love Hewitt’s weight last summer with images of her in Self magazine showing her new, much slimmer body.

We also updated a post about a website that helps men find their “Ukrainian Beauty” with an image from a protest in Ukraine about sex tourism…that features scantily-clad young women.

Tawny T. sent us a video from Sweden about how heteronormativity affects gays, lesbians, and straight people. We added to our post on an Argentinian bank’s commercial that portrays transgender individuals positively and a Progressive insurance ad that may be portraying a gay couple, since the reason those two ads are so surprising is that we rarely see ones like them.

Rachael H. told us about Maxim’s guides to how men and women argue (Women are crazy! Men put up with their crap so they can have sex!) and we added it to our post of a video showing a range of “men are like this, women are like that!” stereotypes.

Will there ever be a month where we don’t add more examples to our post on pointlessly gendered products?  Maybe not. This month we added gendered tips for choosing a mattress, gendered versions of Windows XP customization software, gendered epsom salts,gendered snuggies, and gendered Target gift cards.  Submitted by Shannon C., Em, Ondi, and Dmitiry T.M.

Race/Ethnicity

We added images from a photo shoot in a Romanian magazine to our post showing people in poor parts of the world posed as props next to expensive fashions or White models.

Speaking of using the “Other” as a prop.  Shakira has been using a set of undifferentiated Asian drummers in her recent performances.  We added it to a previous post on this theme.

To my first post in a series about how people of color are used in advertising aimed (mainly) at white people, I added an example of a black woman being used to represent “rhythm.”

Jackie and Jasmine alerted us to another example of doctored diversity, this one from the University of Texas, Arlington.

Race and Religion

We added an image from Mother Jones depicting Newt Gingrich as a “guru” figure to our guest post on the National Review “wise Latina” cover of Sotomayor and other uses of Asian/Buddhist caricatures.

Jessica G. drew our attention to the promotional material of Panty Raid.  Panty Raid is two guys, Josh Mayer and Marty Folb, who produce dance music.  As you might guess from their name, their materials include a dismissal of women as fans and an endorsement of men’s entitlement to sexual access to women.  Their slogan for their album, Marine Parade, is: “Audio fondling your girlfriend.”

So, “you” are a straight guy.  And, like it or not, these guys are such hegemons that they are makin’ it with your girl, whether she likes it or not.

There is more of this typical misogyny at their website (you can google it), but it was the promo shot below that Jessica felt compelled to send in.

This is a great illustration of what it looks like to embrace both white and male privilege.  We see the bottom half of a black woman sitting with her legs apart and her underwear at her ankles.  Were it not dark between her legs,  you could see her vulva.  Mayer and Folb, both white men, sit in front of her and look at the camera.  Their expression and posture suggest utter disinterest.

This is where I think the privilege is revealed, and embraced, loud and clear.  She is not a human being, she is a vagina and, even as a vagina, she is uninteresting.  She is nothing, really.  Like their sneakers, their trucker hats, and their hoodies, she is only a prop.  What does a sexually available black woman signify?  Urban cred?  Masculine domination of women?  High status in a hierarchy of men?  All of the above?  Congratulations dudes: racist and sexist message sent and received.

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

As a fan of both sci fi and pre-WWII pop culture, I naturally have a lot of affection for Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. There’s much to be enjoyed about the original comic strip (which basically invented the style that led to the creation of super-hero comics), the 1936 serial starring Buster Crabbe, and even the 1980 movie, which I’ve mentioned before.  The 1970’s softcore porn version, Flesh Gordon, is also a lot of fun.  Although the various incarnations get pretty complicated, the basic story is of a regular guy from Earth who ends up on a bizarre alien planet, where he inadvertently becomes a hero in the struggle against Emperor Ming, the tyrant who has been keeping the whole planet under his thumb.  With the recent rebirth of big budget sci fi and comic book adaptations, the time almost seems perfect for a new Flash Gordon movie.  It’s never quite been done cinematic justice, and the basic story would hold up well to a modern interpretation.

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.

As you may know, Disney has a movie coming out later this year called “The Princess and the Frog,” a retelling of the story of the princess who kisses a frog that then helpfully turns into a handsome prince for her to marry. The noteworthy aspect of this film, aimed at a mainstream audience, is that the female protagonist is African American. We’ve seen Disney films with non-White protagonists before–“Mulan” and “Pocahontas,” for instance–but to my knowledge there haven’t been any with a Black main character, unless I guess you count the Uncle Remus stuff, and that’s just a whole lot of ick.

While many people have eagerly awaited “The Princess and the Frog,” Disney’s long history of negative or stereotypical portrayals of non-White characters (i.e., “Fantasia“) meant many were concerned about what the final product might be, expressing concerns based on the trailer and other promotional materials that have emerged so far. Margaret Lyons at EW.com says,

Disney’s track record with racism and racist caricature makes me a little nervous when I see stuff like that toothless firefly.

According to Jezebel, “…Tiana was originally a maid named Maddy (to0 close to mammy?)…” And Leontine says,

…based on this trailer, the other things that Black people get to do are voodoo shit, playing jazz and dancing, and making jokes about their butts.  Charming.

For the record, the protagonist is only African American for part of the movie; for a good chunk of it she’s a green frog. But then, doesn’t the princess turn into an ogre in at least some of the “Shrek” movies? I can’t quite recall.

The movie website has a video game. In the game (from io9),

…Tiana, is sent on a mission to retrieve the rich white girl’s tiara, so she can borrow it, but along the way she’s asked to fetch some hot sauce for the gumbo before she has permission to get to the rich girl’s bedroom.

A screenshot of the hot sauce part:

Rebekah R. pointed out a deck of promotional cards handed out at Comic-Con (also at io9). There are some interesting gender and racial elements. Here are Tiana’s parents; note that her mother is “nurturing” while her father is “inspirational”:

Dr. Facilier is a “witch doctor,” practices voodoo, and looks a bit like cartoonish images of pimps I’ve seen now and then:

I did notice that the valet (is that the same as a butler?) for the prince is White rather than Black:

The text for one of the cards says “It’s not in yo’ cards”:

Here’s Mama Odie, the godmother figure, is a “seer” with a snake:

These images and objections are interesting by themselves, but they also bring up some of the difficulties in portraying groups that have historically been stereotyped negatively and occupied a subordinate social status. For instance, the fact that Tiana was originally going to be a maid wouldn’t, on the surface, necessarily be that different from “Cinderella,” in which the (White) protagonist is basically a maid. And there’s nothing wrong with playing jazz or, for that matter, practicing voodoo (which could be seen as very similar to the magic that is so common in kids’ films).

But of course, an image of a Black woman as a maid carries different connotations than that of a White woman doing the same job. There have certainly been large numbers of White maids  in the U.S. as well as other countries; in the late 1800s many female Irish immigrants to the U.S. took jobs as domestic servants. But they fairly quickly transitioned, as a group, into other types of work. African American women were stuck with jobs as maids a lot longer because of job discrimination. The “Mammy” figure, a happy-go-lucky servant pleased to take care of the White family she worked for, was applied exclusively to Black women.

Depicting Cinderella as a maid doesn’t play into pre-existing stereotypes of White women; it’s just an individual portrayal. A Black character cast as a maid, to many people, reproduces an image of Black women that goes beyond the individual–whether the creators intend to or not, such images bring with them associations to the Mammy character and real oppression of African American women in a culture that saw them primarily as servants for more privileged groups.

Disney may have intentionally tapped into those cultural images when Tiana was originally imagined as a maid for a White character (as well as including other stereotypical elements). Or the creators may have unthinkingly reproduced stereotypes because, when thinking about characters to use in a movie set in New Orleans with a Black protagonist, they drew on existing cultural imagery. In the absence of a concerted, thoughtful effort to avoid reproducing them, it’s not surprising that problematic elements show up in TV shows, movies, and so on.

Anyway, this should be an interesting situation to watch unfold when the movie is finally released.

UPDATE: Commenter John Lewis says,

This movie’s worth analyzing, but Gwen’s commentary here is not among the most insightful I’ve read on this blog. From my viewing of the trailer, without knowing much else about the film, I think she’s really reaching.

I don’t know that I’m “reaching,” exactly–we know quite a bit of other stuff about the film, such as the fact that Disney originally had Tiana cast as a maid, and that many people who want this to be a good film are very frightened about how it might turn out, which I think is fascinating in and of itself–but he’s right about it not being the best commentary ever. Meh. It’s free content, people, and this is the first week of classes. My brain works better at putting together a coherent argument some days than others. Taking the post down b/c it’s not my best, or b/c people say I’m off-base, seems sort of intellectually dishonest, like I’m trying to hide anything that gets criticized, so I guess I’ll just leave it up and people can read the critical comments.

And in my defense, it also turns out Disney has recut the trailer and some of the scenes that were in it when I first started writing up some commentary aren’t in it any more. I didn’t realize when I found a link to the trailer after the original link disappeared that it had been changed to leave out some things I found odd in the first one.

See also this post that includes a discussion of concerns that the movie “Up” wouldn’t be popular because it had an Asian lead character as well as our post on gender in Pixar films, gender roles in “Bee Movie,”

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

Sam Yoon is running for mayor of Boston. Yoon is Korean Korean-American. It only makes sense, then (*sarcasm*), that the Boston Phoenix illustrated a story about his race against incumbent Mayor Tom Menino with the follow picture:

Screen shot for context and posterity:

Race is made to matter. Sotomayor can’t just be a judge, Gates can’t just be a suspect, and Yoon can’t just be a candidate. If you are not white, then your race will likely be used to denigrate you, make fun of you, or question your competence and entitlements. This may not happen all the time, but it will happen often enough.

Via Resist Racism and Slant Eye for the Round Eye.

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