Search results for racism

On this second-to-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! (pictured)
• …by relaxing our hair and drinking kool-aid.
• …by conflating them with “underprivileged” people.
• …with a “Compton Cookout” complete with blackface and nooses!
• …by buying stuff from companies that do nothing but acknowledge Black History Month.

<sarcasm> Good times. </sarcasm>

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.

Los Angeles Meet Up:

Plan ahead! We’ve scheduled a SocImages Meet Up for March.  Please join us The Escondite (downtown L.A.) on Sunday, March 4th.  All ages.  Food and drink.  Great company guaranteed.

(P.S.: If you’re in Boston, I’ll be visiting Harvard and Boston University at the end of March. Will try to schedule a meet up then as well.)

SocImages News:

Amanda Jungels has put together a fantastic SocImages Course Guide for Sexuality and Society.  Check out all of our Course Guides here.

We’re having great fun with our Pinterest account; our collection of sexy toy makeovers showed up as a slideshow at the Huffington Post.  We’ve also added two new boards:

• what color is flesh?
• sexualized/gendered food

A super big “thank you” to Ron Anderson!  Dr. Anderson notified us that he nominated us for the ASA Section on Communication and Information Technologies Public Sociology Award.

We’re in Portuguese!  Thanks to Dr. Claudio Cordovil, some of our posts are appearing at the University of Brazil’s Conhecimento Prudente.

I think this is our first appearance as a source on Wikipedia… on the page about the online game, Evony… of all things.

Are you on Google Plus? So are we!

Authors and Contributors in the News:

Contributor Philip Cohen was discussed in an NPR story about using Google searches as data.

I was quoted in an NPR story about photographer Shelby Lee Adams’ portrayal of Appalachia and I enjoyed a few fun minutes on air with CKNW’s Bill Good talking about the recent trend of sexualizing toys for young girls.

Best of January

Our hard-working intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from this month.  Here’s what she found:

• Heather Cromarty, The Marilyn Meme
• Lisa Wade, Beauty and the New Lego Line
• Caroline Heldman, Voter Suppression: The New Disenfranchisement
• Jason Eastman, Newt Racism: The Racially-Coded Language of Presidential Candidates
• Lisa Wade, Income Ineqaulity is Bad for Society
• Gwen Sharp, National Geographic Genders Animal Sexuality
• Sarah Wanenchak, Disabled Bodies and Ablest Acceptance
• Gwen Sharp, Fotoshop by Adobé
• Lisa Wade, 125 Years of Holding Women Responsible for Laundry
• Lisa Wade, Mariah Careys All I Want for Christmas Is You: 1994 vs 2011

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Gwen and I and most of the team are also on twitter:

• @lisadwade
• @gwensharpnv
• @familyunequal
• @carolineheldman
• @jaylivingston
• @wendyphd

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011.

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Last week Lisa posted about the racist “Asians in the Library” video from UCLA student Alexandra Wallace, and how the responses to it have often drawn on very sexist, demeaning language, as though the only way we know to combat one type of stereotyping or prejudice is to use another. Yuki T. send in a video response by slam poet Beau Sia that, as Yuki says, “stands out as a real examination of the white privilege and fear that underlies the racism that Alexandra Wallace displays,” rather than just trying to degrade or mock Alexandra in whatever way possible:

UPDATE: I found a transcript at dandelionchild, via Common Pitfalls of the Amateur Poet, though it appears the first place the transcript was posted was Madame Thursday. It’s after the jump. Thanks for reminding me, WellWheeled!

more...

2013

• What Are Rappers Really Saying About the Police?
• Family, Race, Religion: The U.S. is Becoming More Diverse
• Race, Rehabilitation, and the Private Prison Industry
• Rap, the Creative Process, and Power

2012

• Black and White Vernacular in American Sign Language
• Nature, Nurture, and the Pro Athlete

2011

• Tower Heist Acclaim Reveals Hollywood Racism
• Racist “Color-Blind” Dress Codes
• Representation of the “Primitive” American Indian

2010

• Framing Children’s Deviance
• The Flip Side of Racial Profiling
• Who Do Americans Prefer Not to Have as Neighbors?
• Spanish Ads Compare Women with Genital Cutting to Fuck Toys
• Race, Clothes, and Perceptions of Criminality

Cross-posted at Love Isn’t Enough.

Jay Smooth, of Ill Doctrine, recent gave an excellent Tedx talk at Hampshire College about the difficulties of talking constructively about race and racism in the U.S. These conversations are tricky to navigate because they often devolve from discussions about structural inequalities and the consequences of certain positions or policies to individualistic arguments about whether a specific person is racist. As he points out, this backs people into corners. Because people are extremely defensive at anything they see as an accusation they are racist, there is little room to listen to someone who challenges a comment, and perhaps then acknowledge that a statement was hurtful, or based on incorrect information, or connects to larger cultural discourses and structural inequalities that we might want to examine critically.

It’s a great 11-minute video on how we might try to discuss race, and racism, constructively:

Also see Jay’s video on boundaries in mixed-race communities and Brother Ali talking about White rappers and the “n word.”

Cross-posted at The Sociological Cinema.

Back in 2007, Dr. Oz stood on the set of The Oprah Winfrey Show and infamously promoted to an audience of 8 million viewers the idea that African Americans experience higher rates of hypertension because of the harsh conditions their ancestors endured on slave ships crossing the Atlantic. This so-called “slave hypothesis” has been roundly criticized for good reason, but I was struck that it was being promoted by such a highly educated medical professional.

The episode got me thinking about the sociologists Omi and Winant’s notion of a racial formation as resulting from historically situated racial projects wherein “racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (p. 55-56). These projects take multiple forms but in at least one version, there is an attempt to collapse race—a socially constructed concept—into biology. Such projects are similar insofar as they suggest that the socially constructed distinctiveness between people of different racial categories roughly approximates a meaningful biological distinctiveness. Scientists have been centrally involved in this effort to establish a biological basis for race. In the middle of the 19th century Dr. Samuel Morton attempted to show that average cranial capacities of people from different racial groups were significantly different. Today, many people scoff at the misguided racism of the past, but I think Dr. Oz’s promotion of the slave hypothesis demonstrates that the search for a biological, and therefore “natural,” basis for race continues.

So how do proponents of the slave hypothesis explain hypertension? In 1988 Dr. Clarence Grim first proposed the theory, which is the idea that the enslaved people who survived the Middle Passage were more likely to be carriers of a gene that allowed them to retain salt. Grim argued that this ability to retain salt, while necessary for a person to survive the harsh conditions of a slave ship, would ultimately lead to hypertension as the person aged. Thus Grim proposed that African Americans living in the United States today are the descendants of people who have this selected feature. As I mentioned above, this theory has been soundly refuted but reportedly still remains in many hypertension textbooks. Looking at the clip above, which is from January of this year, it seems that medical professionals like Dr. Oz may be still promoting it.

I think it is important to recognize that this particular racial project persists in many forms, and one final example is from 2005, when the FDA approved BiDil as a customized treatment of heart failure for African Americans. The approval was based on highly criticized research, but the approval also implicitly makes the case that a racial group might be so biologically distinct from others as to warrant its own customized medication. Much like the search for different cranial capacities, the propagation of the slave hypothesis, and the marketing of drugs designed for different racial groups, BiDil’s emergence can be seen as an attempt to deploy racial categories as if they were immutable in nature (see Troy Duster’s article in Science).

Criticizing this racial project is more than an academic exercise. As a social construct, race is already a central principal of social organization, which benefits whites at the expense of other racial groups. It is already a powerful basis upon which privileges are meted out and denied. In my view, the effort to loosen race from its moorings as a social construct and anchor it again as a biological fact of nature is an attempt to fundamentally alter the discussion on racial inequality. If this project prevails and race comes again to reflect a biological truth, then fewer people will acknowledge racial inequality as the result of a human-made history. It will instead be seen as the result of humans being made differently.

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Lester Andrist is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in the role of social capital and personal networks in finding jobs in India and Taiwan and cultural representations of groups in indefinite detention. He is a co-editor of the website The Sociological Cinema.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Cross-posted at Cyborgology.

As part of my research into the popularization of tattooing, I have accumulated quite a few interesting links on tattoo toys for children. I don’t mean those temporary tattoos we all used to get from the vending machines at popular chain restaurants. This toys I am talking about have drawn flack from parents as being “inappropriate” for kids, creating an example of a burgeoning “moral panic”. Some examples include: tattoo inspired toddler wear, tattoo machines for kids, and of course, tattooed Barbie dolls.

Tokidoki Barbie:

Toys like these have been released every few years since the 1990s, when tattooing was ranked as the 6^th fastest growing industry in the country (Vail 1999). But we are now seeing more children’s tattoo toys spring up, dovetailing with the increasing popular interest in the craft. We may very well be observing a second Tattoo Renaissance (Rubin 1988), especially given the expansion of the industry and the artistic flowering that has occurred since the tattoo reality TV shows first emerged in summer 2005. 

I believe we are we observing a cultural paradigm shift (Kuhn 1962) regarding tattooing.  Cultural trends are slowly reshaping popular conceptions of tattooing, turning them from “marks of mischief” (Sanders 1988) into an “ironic fad” (Kosut 2006) of consumer capitalism. Whereas tattooing was once largely reserved for working-class men, sailors, carnival performers, and exotic dancers, we have since seen the practice become widely popular amongst all races, genders, and classes.

G8 Tat2 Maker by Spin Master Toys:

Beginning with the Tattoo Renaissance of the 1960s (Rubin 1988) and more recently with the expansion into reality television (Lodder 2010), we have seen the cultural cache of tattooing shift in favor of middle-class notions of identity work (Atkinson 2003); that is, towards seeing the body as a vehicle for expressing oneself, towards actively controlling and crafting the body as a form of empowerment, and towards the development of “distinctive individualism” through appearance (Muggleton 2002). The highly narrative focus of tattooing contained in popular reality TV shows like “LA Ink” or “NY Ink” only bolster these trends, as new tattoo enthusiasts invest deeply-held meanings into each tattoo.

But these trends do not mean that tattoo toys aimed at children are any less offensive to some. Largely, it appears to be a generational divide: youth are much more supportive (in fact, largely celebratory) towards body art like tattoos and piercings, but the baby boomers continue to view tattoos through the lens of deviance.

For people of my parents generation, tattoos continue to be a symbol of deviant proclivities. Some have even called it a “disease” plaguing the youth of today. I have taken issue with such an interpretation of tattooing, especially by social scientists who continue to conceptualize the practice as an indicator of mental pathology or emotional instability, and have proposed a “pro-social” conception of contemporary body modifications like tattooing and piercing [you can read my work here]. In my opinion it is just a matter of time before prominent and visible tattoos become commonplace in professional and public settings, tattooed Barbie notwithstanding.

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David Paul Strohecker (@dpsFTW) is a PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park. He studies issues of intersectionality, consumption, and popular culture. In addition to his work on the popularization of tattooing, a project on the revolutionary pedagogy of public sociology, and more theoretical work on zombie films as a vehicle for expressing social and cultural anxieties. He previously wrote for the blog Racism Review and currently blogs at Cyborgology.

For more from Strohecker, see his posts on facial tattoos, the origins of zombies, QR codes and the digital divide, and laughing at disability.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.