Search results for stand your ground

Thank you all for a truly fantastic year!

We rounded it out with more than six and a half million page views.  We almost doubled our Facebook followers — from 35,000 last December to more than 68,000 today. We are honored to enjoy over 21,000 Twitter followers, 13,000 on Pinterest and 20,000 on our one-year-old Tumblr page.  Much gratitude to everyone for your enthusiasm and support!

Highlights:

Two of us published textbooks!

• Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions, coauthored by myself and Myra Marx Ferree. I started accounts for it on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest and you’re, of course, welcome to join.
• Frequent contributor Philip Cohen is also super proud to announce his new book, The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change.

What else!

• Our 7th birthday happened.
• We were Tumbld by Wil Wheaton! And that post — about how activists are motivated by logic, not emotion — was liked or tumbled over 50,000 times!
• A SocImages post got me interviewed at NPR.
• Sezin Koehler’s post on gender and nudity on HBO made TV Guide.
• We shared a 7-year-old girl’s letter to Lego about the lack of adventure to girls, sent to us by her parent, and it struck a nerve. It was covered by dozens of major news outlets.
• We recieved the 2014 award for Exemplary Online Learning Resources from the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching.
• We made two new Pinterest pages: Pinkwashing Ridiculousness and Racist Antics at High Schools and Colleges (see them all here).

I’ve also signed contracts to write two more books, one on hookup culture and a Introduction to Sociology text. I’m excited to keep writing!

Best of 2014!

Over the last week I’ve highlighted my favorite and your most loved posts from 2014.  Here’s are the lists in case you missed it last week!

Reader’s Choice (plus # of likes/shares before we re-posted)

• When force is hardest to justify, victims of police homicide are most likely to be black (24,700+)
• #instagrammingafrica: The narcissism of global tourism (17,300+)
• Teachers offered personal loans to buy school supplies (15,000+)
• What do professors do all day? (11,400+)
• Doing gender with the face, featuring Erika Linder (6,900+)
• How to change the world one shrug at a time (5,900+)
• Snickers mocks the idea that men can respect women (5,400+)
• Concern for equality linked to logic, not emotion (5,100+)
• A little theory of homophobia (5,000+)
• In employers’ eyes, for-profit colleges are equivalent to high school (4,300+)
• How to lie with statistics: Stand Your Ground and gun deaths (4,200+)
• The sexual politics of veganism (2,700+)
• U.S. schools teach children that Native Americans are history (2,700+)

Most loved humor!

• Marx, Weber, and Durkheim on a tree falling in the forest… (5,000+)
• Girl pants: No pockets, no justice (2,800+)
• Muggle Studies and Defense Against the Dark Arts (1,600+)
• Statistically significant others (1,500+)
• Academic writing MadLib (1,300+)
• How professors argue (1,100+)
• Confirmation bias expert convinced everyone suffers from confirmation bias (1,100+)
• The best thesis defense is a good offense (1,000+)

Editor’s picks

• That’s fishy: From scent to suspicion and back
• “Trophy scarves”: Race, gender, and the woman as prop trope
• What sociologists can tell us about serial killing
• A reluctant defense of sunscreen for men
• Girl-on-girl action: A new visual landscape
• Cuteness-inspired aggression is actually a thing
• A proper entrance: Creole culture and the front door
• How the bird hat craze almost killed the dinosaurs… and inspired the Audubon Society
• Reading the camouflage: “You are now enemy combatants”
• The baby dolls of Mardi Gras

Happy New Year everyone!  Here’s to wonderful things in 2015!

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.

You approve!  Here are our most appreciated posts this month:

• What do professors do all day? (9,100+ likes)
• How to change the world one shrug at a time (5,600+ likes)
• How to lie with statistics: Stand your ground and gun deaths (3,200+ likes)
• Girl pants: No pockets, no justice (2,600+ likes)
• U.S. Army releases racially biased hairstyle regulations (1,300+ likes)
• Chicago’s disappearing middle class (1,200+ likes)
• The Illusionists: A new documentary (1,200+ likes)

Editor’s pick:

• Girl-on-girl action: A new visual landscape

Thanks everybody!

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.

Michael Dunn shot ten bullets into a car filled with four teenagers after a dispute over the volume of their music.  He claimed self-defense, though the gun he said he saw was never corroborated by anyone or found.  This weekend he was found guilty of attempting to kill the three teenagers who survived, but not of murdering the one he shot dead, 17-year-old Jordan Davis.

When George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin, I put up a post reviewing a study on stand your ground laws.  The research found that these laws increase the likelihood that a homicide will be considered “justified,” but only in cases where a white person is accused of killing a black person.  Here is the data:

At the previous post, I argued that these data — made to feel real by decisions like these — show that we are “biased in favor of the white defendant and against the black victim.” Stand your ground laws make it worse, but the far right column shows that:

…white people who kill black people are far more likely to be found not-guilty even in states without SYG and black people who kill whites are less likely to be found not-guilty regardless of state law.

Or, to put it more bluntly, we still value white men’s freedoms more than black men’s lives. On average, of course.

Cross-posted at Huffington Post.

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.

We rounded out the year with 6,850,000 visits and nearly 10,000,000 page views.  We are proud and honored to enjoy over 35,000 Facebook friends and 15,000 Twitter followers, plus nearly 10,000 on Pinterest and almost 1,000 on our two-month-old Tumblr page.  A huge thank you to everyone for your enthusiasm and support!

Highlights:

• Our 6th birthday.
• A home page.
• A shiny new Tumblr.
• A 5,000th post.
• New Pinterest pages: the social construction of flavor, “women” vs. “people”, marketing feminism, the mean girls meme, and rape culture (see them all here).
• Two new syndication relationships with Business Insider and Policy Mic.
• Tweets from Piper Kerman, Shankar Vedantam, and Amanda Palmer.
• New Course Guides: sociology of work and occupations, family and society, the sociology of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and women’s history (see them all here).
• A gig writing for Salon.

Best of 2013!

Over the last week we’ve highlighted our favorite and most loved posts from 2013.  Here’s the list in case you missed it!

Reader’s Choice (plus # of Facebook likes before we re-posted)

• From the Mouths of Rapists: The Lyrics of Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines (174,000)
• The Balancing Act of Being Female; Or Why We Have So Many Clothes (31,000)
• Gender and the Body Language of Power (21,000)
• Stand Your Ground Laws Increase Racial Bias in “Justifiable Homicide” Trials (20,000)
• Surprise! Your Flight Attendants are all Strangers! (16,000)
• My Two Cents on Feminism and Miley Cyrus (15,000)
• Men Feel Bad around Smart, Successful Women (7,500)
• Shifting Discourses of Motherhood: The Victorian Breastfeeding Photo Fad (7,000)
• How Do Physicians and Non-Physicians Want to Die? (5,800)
• Double Standards and Blurred Lines at the VMA Awards (5,400)
• Most Women Would Rather Divorce than be a Housewife (5,100)
• Re-Touching the Consequences of Extreme Thinness (5, 100)

Editor’s Picks

• African-American Travel and Jim Crow Segregation
• Why Are People Changing Their Minds About Same-Sex Marriage
• The Marketing Tactics of Firearm Manufacturers
• Children’s Books and Segregation in the Workplace
• Men and Women Use Uptalk Differently: A Study of Jeopardy
• What are Rappers Really Saying about the Police?
• On the Sexualized Insult (Not for the Faint of Heart)
• The Unsung Heroes of the Crash Landing in San Francisco

And this Happened…

…the fruits of my obsession with flight attendants.   If you read these, you might be obsessed too!

• The Surprisingly Racist Reason We Don’t Tip Flight Attendants
• Before the Stewardess, the Steward: When Flight Attendants Were Men
• Domestic Behavior as Both Gendered and Raced: Who Does What for Airlines?
• International Politics and the First African American Flight Attendants
• Are Flights Full? Airline Advertising vs. Real Life
• Hanging onto the Stewardess at Delta Airlines
• Surprise! Your Flight Attendants are all Strangers! (also a reader’s pick)
• The Unsung Heroes of the Crash Landing in San Francisco (also an editor’s pick)

Happy New Year everyone!  Here’s to wonderful things in 2014!

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.

SocImages News:

We celebrated our 6th birthday this month.  As a present, we were gifted a launch page!

We’re super grateful to Jon Smadja for building it and enabling us to highlight all of the cool things going on at SocImages: not just new posts every day, but an active Twitter feed, a far-reaching Facebook page, and an interesting, funny, and sometimes disturbing Pinterest presence (yes, we’ve been flagged for inappropriateness).  Meanwhile, the slideshow helps us keep  some of our favorite older posts at the forefront of the site.  We love it!

For those of you who want to read the site the old way: just click on “blog” on the upper left under our logo.

Big Posts this Month:

We are eager to try and make public discourse more sociological, so we were really pleased when three of our posts this month made a significant impact:

• Our post in the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict, showing that stand your ground laws exacerbate already racially biased court outcomes, received over 20,000 Facebook “likes” and was shared over 500 times.
• Our post about the divergent news coverage of two young boys who went for a joyride in their families’ cars, one white and one black, was re-posted at Huffington Post, where it received almost 30,000 “likes” and inspired almost 5,000 comments.
• And a SocImages Slate exclusive looking at hook up culture as a raced and classed phenomenon was picked up at TIME, Ebony, The Atlantic, and Jezebel.

Cross-post highlights…

• PolicyMic, Flight Attendants are Unsung Heroes in the San Francisco Crash
• Racialicious, What Current Demographic Facts Do You Need to Know?
• Huffington Post, How Do Physicians and Non-Physicians Want to Die?
• Pacific Standard, What “Literacy Tests” Looked Like in Louisiana Before the Voting Rights Act
• BlogHer, Why Do Firefighters Take Such Risky Jobs?
• Ms., Stand Your Ground Increases Racial Bias

Upcoming Visits:

I just booked a four month sublet just outside the French Quarter (February through May).  So, all you New Orleanians out there, get ready to be my friend!  (Meanwhile, if anyone wants to sublet a place in Los Angeles…).  I’ll hopefully be travelling quite a lot this academic year for public speaking.  I’ll be at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and Macalester College in the Twin Cities. I would love to come to your school too!

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on the social medias!  I’m on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, and @jaylivingston.

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.

Trayvon Martin was a black teenage boy. He was walking home from the convenience store when he caught the attention and ire of George Zimmerman. Perceived as a “punk” and a threat, Martin was accosted by the older man, and a physical altercation ensued. Trayvon Martin died when he was shot through the heart at close range. Though Florida’s expansive “Stand Your Ground” laws were invoked in media conversations, that defense never even entered into the trial. Zimmerman was acquitted when a jury decided he’d killed Martin in self-defense. Zimmerman has since said Martin’s death was “God’s plan.”

Some Americans believe that race was not central to this killing or to the case that followed—they have believed it from February 2012 right up until today. But ask yourself: How many times you have been stopped and harassed because you looked threatening or suspicious wearing a hooded sweatshirt? For me, an Asian American female, that number is zero.

Yes, my gender alone distinguishes me from Trayvon Martin, but my partner Mike is a white male, and he, too, can only say “Zero.” We have never been stopped nor questioned, no matter how many times we’ve pulled on our hooded sweatshirts for warmth (and, in my case, to hide sea-tangled hair) after early morning surfing.

Stopping for breakfast or to run errands, Mike and I may not look polished in our hoodies, but we’ve also never had to worry that our appearance would cause suspicion. That’s privilege. It’s such a privilege, this presumed innocence of ours, that the morning after Zimmerman was acquitted, we went ignored even while acting suspiciously. Hoodies up, we casually stopped to look at a condo for rent in an affluent beach community in southern California. We knew from the online ad that the condo was vacant, so we parked outside, walked up the stairs to the unit, and peered into its windows. We sauntered around the grounds and walked into the unlocked community laundry room and garage. Several neighbors saw us, and they smiled.

I couldn’t help but think that the scenario would have been very different if Mike and I were black. Mike and I don’t have to wear our class in order to obviate being treated like threats or criminals; we can wear hoodies and board shorts without worrying that others will be suspicious, fearful, or make assumptions about our class status. Just being “not black” affords us this benefit of the doubt. It is a privilege because it is not something we have earned, but it is gifted to us every day regardless. I have always known about my privilege intellectually, but I felt it keenly last Saturday.

That some are afforded this privilege while others are systematically denied should make us all more empathetic. People perceive and experience the same event differently, depending on visible status markers such as race, gender, age, and class. Such status markers are more than just categories, they form a “system of social practices” that organize social relations. Status markers presume difference, and so people will react to and engage with Mike or with me differently than they would with someone like Trayvon Martin, even when we’re dressed the same.

We would like to believe that we don’t make assumptions based on race or gender, but evidence proves otherwise, as this social experiment of three individuals (a white male, a black male, and white female) trying to steal a bike clearly reveals:

As the sociologist Robert K. Merton insightfully observed nearly three-quarters of a century ago, “The very same behavior undergoes a complete change in evaluation in its transition from the in-group to the out-group.” As the video above indicates, the behavior of a black male (an out-group member) is regarded entirely differently than the same behavior of a white male and white female (in-group members).

The in-group/out-group divide goes further, with grave consequences in our criminal justice system. For example, Jennifer Eberhardt’s research has shown that race affects the severity of sentences that juvenile offenders receive, even for the same crime. Just the idea of a black juvenile offender leads people to imagine juveniles more like adults. Even liberal white Americans who claim low levels of prejudice project more blame onto black boys and sentence them more harshly. As Eberhardt has shown, “race has the power to dampen our desire to be merciful.”

I don’t have children, but if I did, I don’t know how I would explain Trayvon Martin’s death or the acquittal of his killer. But even just imagining being a parent to a black son makes me feel immense empathy for the parents of young black men. Can just that simple exercise make others more aware of race and class privilege, more aware of the power they have to recognize and even challenge that privilege and its consequences? As Henry David Thoreau asked, “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”

References:

Jennifer Eberhardt and Aneeta Rattan, “The Race Factor,” New York Times, June 12, 2012.

Robert K. Merton. 1968 [1948]. “Self-fulfilling Prophecy,” in Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 2^nd edition. New York: Free Press.

Cecilia L. Ridgeway. 2011. Framed by Gender. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cross-posted at The Society Pages.

Jennifer Lee is a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine. Her book, The Diversity Paradox, examines patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification among Asians, Latinos, and African Americans.

Julie C. sent us this clip from a 1987 interview between Barbara Walters and Sean Connery:

In case you think that this is out-of-date, check out the comments.  Here is the first page of comments, in their entirety:

what a ho, sean should’ve given her a demonstration

Big up Sean, he’s from a time when men were still men. Speak the truth.

AGREED

you’ve just been schlapped by sean connery woman!

maby a slap is to far but i believe you need to stand your ground and not let your women have too much power..

Fuck that… no time for half measures. Slap the bitch.

He’s right of course. ‘ a woman a dog and a walnut tree, the more you beat them the better they be’ :)

i love connery but i’d beat the shit outta him if he hit me.

Thanks Julie!

One of the goals of this blog is to help get sociology to the public by offering short, interesting comments on what our discipline looks like out in the world.

We live sociology every day, because it is the science of relationships among people and groups. But because the name of our discipline is kind of a buzzword itself, I often find excellent examples of books in the nonfiction world that are deeply sociological, even if that isn’t how their authors or publishers would describe them.

Last year, I had the good fortune to help a friend as he was working on one of these books. Now that the release date is coming up, I want to tell our readers about the project because I think it is an excellent example of what happens when ideas from our discipline make it out into the “real” world beyond academia. In fact, the book is about breaking down that idea of the “real world” itself. It is called IRL: Finding realness, meaning, and belonging in our digital lives, by Chris Stedman.

In IRL, Chris tackles big questions about what it means to be authentic in a world where so much of our social interaction is now taking place online. The book goes to deep places, but it doesn’t burden the reader with an overly-serious tone. Instead, Chris brings a lightness by blending memoir, interviews, and social science, all arranged in vignettes so that reading feels like scrolling through a carefully curated Instagram feed.

What makes this book stand out to me is that Chris really brings the sociology here. In the pages of IRL I spotted Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas, Mario Small’s Someone to Talk To, Nathan Jurgenson’s work on digital dualism, Jacqui Frost’s work on navigating uncertainty, Paul McClure on technology and religion, and a nod to some work with yours truly about nonreligious folks. To see Chris citing so many sociologists, among the other essayists and philosophers that inform his work, really gives you a sense of the intellectual grounding here and what it looks like to put our field’s ideas into practice.

Above all, I think the book is worth your time because it is a glowing example of what it means to think relationally about our own lives and the lives of others. That makes Chris’ writing a model for the kind of reflections many of us have in mind when we assign personal essays to our students in Sociology 101—not because it is basic, but because it is willing to deeply consider how we navigate our relationships today and how those relationships shape us, in turn.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, on Twitter, or on BlueSky.