If plain ol’ chocolate isn’t exciting enough this Easter, try:
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.
It is Easter Sunday. How about other places on the globe such as Japan? Christians are less than 1% of the population of Japan. Yet, because of globalization, geographic locations plays less and less of a role in defining culture. Many people around the world now consume the same food, clothing, music, movies, and technology.
Global corporations play a role in transmitting culture from place to place. Recently, American corporations in Japan have been trying to popularize and commercialize Easter. Disney’s theme park in Tokyo, for example, has promoted Easter with the Disney Easter Wonderland since 2010:
Likewise, beginning last year, Baskin Robbins has been promoting the holiday. This year they have a month-long Wonderful Easter Campaign:
It will be very interesting to see how Easter becomes part of Japanese culture. When the Japanese adopted Valentine’s day, for example, they added their own twist. Women are expected to give chocolate to men; men are supposed to return the favor by giving candy to women on March 14th, White Day. I would not be surprised to find that Easter becomes popular in Japan, but celebrated with a twist – a Japanese flavor.
—————————
Sangyoub Park is an assistant professor of sociology at Washburn University, where he teaches Social Demography, Generations in the U.S. and Sociology of East Asia. His research interests include social capital, demographic trends, and post-Generation Y.
Recently we posted a comparison of the types of jobs Americans held in 1940 and 2010, based on Census data. Now NPR has posted an interesting image showing how spending on different categories has changed:
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
[Note: Sorry I initially accidentally left out the link to the original NPR story!]
The change in spending on food is especially noteworthy, given the role that cost of food plays in determining the poverty line in the U.S. It is still based on a calculation developed in the 1960s, which assumed that the average family spent about a third of its income on food. To figure out how much a family needed to survive, the minimum cost of a nutritionally-complete diet for a particular family size was calculated; multiplying it by three provided the poverty line. It was then adjusted over time. This is the number generally used to determine eligibility for government assistance programs.
But since then, food prices have fallen significantly, while other necessities, such as housing and medical care, have often gotten more expensive. Many have criticized the poverty line calculation, including the National Academy of Sciences, arguing that as food has gotten cheaper, the official poverty line does a worse and worse job of capturing exactly how much it costs to survive in the U.S.
NPR also provided a more detailed breakdown of spending on a number of major categories in 2011:
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
Thanks to my friend Kathy B. for letting me know!
Cross-posted from cyborgology.
On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black high school student, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a White Hispanic neighborhood watch captain. The case has become a symbolic battleground. Artist Israel McCloud was inspired to paint a mural in his honor in Houston.
As Jessie Daniels points out at Racism Review, battles over racism have shifted into the realm of social media, where digital and physical race relations persist in an augmented relationship. We see this in both anti-racist discourses and the racial smear campaigns surrounding the Martin/Zimmerman case.
Although it is important to expose the overtly racist tactics utilized by some of Zimmerman’s defenders, I want to talk about a more subtle, and so perhaps more problematic, form of racial discourse. A prominent strategy of protest arising from the left may inadvertently perpetuate, rather than challenge, racial hierarchies in their most dehumanizing form.
This tactic has made the rounds on my own Facebook Newsfeed, and is one in which I, prior to more critical thought, actively participated: the creation of images and texts that couple Black bodies with prestigious social positions and ask viewers to problematize racialized assumptions that often lead to faulty first impressions—which in turn lead to physical danger for the racialized subject. This tactic comes in two forms: political memes and case examples.
The memes, such as the one pictured below, are direct and general. They argue that Black bodies are assumed dangerous unless proven otherwise. This meme warns us that we might treat a doctor as a criminal purely based on skin color:
I (regretfully) posted this meme to my own Facebook wall. Rather than delete the meme, I added this post to the comment thread as a public declaration of my error.
The case examples are more in depth, but accomplish a similar task. They picture a clean-cut, Black male body. They list his credentials, and then tell of his physical abuse at the hands of scared, racist White authority figures:
Copied from my Facebook Newsfeed.
Activists strategically link these memes and cases to Trayvon Martin’s story, highlighting his clean record and child-like face. This protest tactic honors Martin (and other Black boys and men who have been hurt because of a racist culture) and spotlights the problematic racialized lens within which Americans largely operate.
Both forms of this protest tactic tell an empirically accurate story. Simultaneously, however, they are gross oversimplifications that perpetuate oppressive hierarchies that lie at the intersection of race and class. They work to differentiate the “good” from the “bad” kind of racial minority—and imply that the life of the former is more valuable.
We are warned that our racial assumptions may lead to the wrongful and tragic harm of a “good” racial minority—reinforcing the devaluation of poor, under-educated, over-policed and under-protected people of color. Indeed, as the left fights accusations that Trayvon Martin sold drugs, we forget to ask: “SO WHAT IF HE DID?!” Would he somehow be less human? Would his murder be less atrocious? As the left justifiably decries the accusative investigations into Trayvon’s life, some protest tactics effectively present the opposite side of the same coin.
The empirical reality of Blackness in America is that it often intersects with poverty, which in turn, intersects with crime. A poor Black man with a criminal record is an artifact of a deeply embedded racial system. The memes and case examples discussed above perpetuate the devaluation of the Poor Black subject, marginalizing him against those who are upwardly mobile. In utilizing this protest tactic we fail to address the grittier realities of race in America that led George Zimmerman to perceive an anonymous, unarmed Black boy as a threat. We not only ignore these realities, but become naively complicit in their reproduction.
—————
Jenny Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. She studies self, identity, and human-technology interaction. She blogs for cyborgology.org. Follow Jenny on Twitter @Jup83
Anderson Cooper 360 posted a video based on a study they sponsored of kids’ perceptions of race and friendships. The results are not surprising: kids pick up on larger social patterns, such as the fact that the adults around them often have few significant friendships across racial lines, and struggle to make sense of what they see. By age 6 they are highly aware of race and have formed clear ideas about how adults feel about people of other races than their own. Moreover, they’ve internalized cultural messages about race. As the clip shows, the race of the children themselves, as well as the race of children in images they are shown, impacts how they interpret the events in the pictures, with White children attributing more negative behaviors to African Americans in the photos:
Also check out Anderson Cooper’s earlier segments on children’s attitudes about skin color.
Cross-posted at Global Policy TV.
A great story at the New York Times, sent in by Katrin, reveals how the evolving science of marketing is creating its own set of challengers for advertisers. Target, like many companies, tracks its customers purchases and uses the data to send packets of coupons tailored to individuals and households. In this way, they tempt us into the store by offering us deals on things they know we want.
Target is also in the business of predicting what a person will want. So the marketing company decided to try to use costumer shopping habits in order to predict pregnancy. If they could start sending the woman baby-related before she started shopping for them in earnest, the company figured, she might end up always thinking of Target when she needed to spend money on the baby.
Using an algorithm that considered the purchasing patterns typical of newly pregnant women — e.g., prenatal vitamins, scent-free instead of scented lotion, a sudden uptick in the acquisition of cotton balls — they were able to make a pretty good guess as to whether a female customer was expecting. Suddenly these women were getting coupons like this:
This caused two problems.
First was the father of the teenage girl who started getting coupons for diapers in the mail. This led to an angry phone call to Target and, later, a chagrined apology by the stunned grandpa-to-be (story here).
The second was the reaction of the intended target, the expectant moms. Some were pretty freaked out that Target knew they were pregnant! It’s one thing, it turns out, for Target to know you like vanilla better than chocolate ice cream, or you fancy scented candles; it’s different, perhaps, to suddenly realize that it knows your you’re having a baby. That could feel like a serious invasion of privacy.
So Target learned that the ability to predict our needs and desires comes with the need to do some psychological management as well. Accordingly, they began sneaking baby-related coupons into coupon books that also included other things. So far, Target reports, these women are none the wiser… and thinking of Target as their one-stop baby shop.
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.
In her excellent article “Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families,” Annette Lareau looks at differences in childrearing strategies, finding that class differences were more important than racial differences. Lareau argued that childrearing methods are one way in which class-based advantages are reproduced. Middle-class parents use a “concerted cultivation” model, which involved high levels of involvement in extracurricular activities. Working-class parents engaged in what Lareau calls an “accomplishment of natural growth” model, which emphasizes loving children and providing for them and giving children much more leisure time that is self-directed and unstructured. As Lareau writes,
Working-class and poor children spent most of their free time in informal play; middle-class children took part in many adult-organized activities designed to develop their individual talents and interests. (p. 761).
There are downsides to the concerted cultivation model. The range of activities children are involved in “dominate family life and create enormous labor, particularly for mothers” (p. 748). The emphasis on organized activities led to generally weak family ties, as well as weak social ties more generally, since they were based on participation in activities (extracurricular sports, classes, etc.) that have high turnover rates in membership and often last a few weeks regardless. However, Lareau argues that the concerted cultivation model ultimately transmits class advantages, given that the behaviors and assumptions it socializes children into prepare them well for a social world dominated by other middle-class professionals. And she argues that these different models are not just based on preferences; existing class inequalities make it much more difficult for working-class parents to follow the concerted cultivation model:
Enrollment fees that middle-class parents dismissed as “negligible” were formidable expenses for less affluent families…Moreover, families needed reliable private transportation and flexible work schedules to get children to and from events. These resources were disproportionately concentrated in middle-class families. (p. 771)
The Russel Sage foundation recently posted a graph that highlights class differences in spending on activities and products meant to aid child development, learning, and general enrichment. The graph, from Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, shows how the gap in spending on such items — which includes things such as tutoring, private schooling, summer camps, high-quality childcare, and computers — has grown between the poorest and wealthiest Americans in recent decades, illustrating Lareau’s argument about differential access to the products and activities central to the concerted cultivation model:
Full cites:
Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane. 2011. Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, ed. Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane. NY: Russell Sage. [Graph from p. 11.]
Annette Lareau. 2002. “Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families.” American Sociological Review 67(5): 747-776.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Last week Andrew, Michael S., Will S., Katrin, and Tom Megginson all brought our attention to some of the racist tweets that appeared after the premiere of The Hunger Games. Apparently some viewers were shocked to find that some of their favorite characters from the books were played by African American actors (and some critics seem to have felt that Jennifer Lawrence didn’t look starved enough for her role). Buzzfeed and Jezebel posted some examples of the response to the African American characters:
In fact, Suzanne Collins did include descriptions that would seem to clue a reader in that they’re not supposed to assume that every character in the book is Caucasian (cropped from Buzzfeed):
But of course, the apparent lack of reading comprehension of many fans of the book is rather beside the point by now. What these reactions indicate is the invisibility of non-White people in pop culture, and the sense of distress, disappointment, and even outrage some can feel when they are expected to accept non-Whites in what they see as “neutral” roles. And, more disturbingly, it illustrates the degree to which the humanity of non-Whites can be erased, and highlights racialized associations. “Some black girl” is, by definition, not an “innocent girl.” It’s funny to say that the death of a character that touched you in the book is less moving if you imagine the character as African American. We’ve seen this type of reaction before, such as when Idris Elba was cast in Thor. Or the equally negative response to the suggestion that Donald Glover, an African American actor, should audition for the starring role in the newest Spider-Man remake, as Lindy West points out at Jezebel: “…it’s a proprietary thing-if Spider-Man is black, then he isn’t ours anymore. He’s theirs.”
I think the best discussion of the implications of the Hunger Games tweets comes from Anna Holmes, whose take was posted by The New Yorker. I’ll leave you with a quote and strongly suggest you go check out the full article:
Hunger Games Tweets—there are now more than two hundred up on the blog—illuminated long-standing racial biases and anxieties. The a-hundred-and-forty-character-long outbursts were microcosms of the ways in which the humanity of minorities is often denied and thwarted, and they underscored how infuriatingly conditional empathy can be…If the stories we tell ourselves about the future, however disturbing, don’t include black people; if readers of “The Hunger Games” are so blind as to skip over the author’s specific details and themes of appearance, race, and class, then what does it say about the stories we tell ourselves regarding the present?
