Search results for privilege

Nicole sent in this Australian commercial for P&O Cruises. Nicole was struck by the obvious racial divide, in which the privileged customers are all White, while non-Whites serve them, either literally (and with a smile!) or as a form of cultural entertainment:

It’s another example of a common tourism marketing theme, in which supposedly “traditional” and/or “native” cultures are provided as cultural experiences to “modern” tourists. This commercial just stands out because of the particularly stark division of the world into those who are entertained and attended to, and those who do the attending.

Count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball, then continue after the jump:

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In 1989 Peggy McIntosh published an essay that is assigned in nearly every Sociology of Race and Ethnicity course in America.  Titled White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, the essay included a list of things that white people, but not others in a white-dominated society, can count on.  Here are a few:

I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.

If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

I thought of Peggy McIntosh when I saw this personal confession at PostSecret:

For more on white privilege, see our posts on Colin Powell being called a traitor, Sotomayor’s Supreme Court hearings, the privilege to shoplift, and “flesh” and “nude” colors.

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.

Leah S. asked us to talk about Beyoncé’s new video, Why Don’t You Love Me, and I think Ann at Feministing had some interesting things to say, so I’m going to borrow her insights.

Noting both Beyoncé’s video and the recently released video for Babyfather by Sade, Ann observes:

…both Sade and Beyonce are cast as “traditional” homemakers in retro-styled videos. Beyonce’s retro romp seemed (at least to me) a bit tongue-in-cheek, whereas Sade pretty earnestly makes Jell-O and keeps house. But regardless, they’re both wearing vintage-looking sexy slips, making dinner, hanging out at home during the day, etc.

But they’re not simply nods to the ’50s.  Because both women are black, the videos also potentially subvert the idea of the perfect housewife of that era.  Ann continues:

I know there were certainly upper-middle-class women of color in the ’50s and ’60s, but this image of the happy-but-secretly-unhappy housewife is stereotypically white. By virtue of race, Beyonce and Sade are twisting that stereotype.

And that twist is very political.  Consider this: In American politics today, the “perfect” mother is one who does not work and stays home with her children.  Unless she’s poor.  Poor women who want to stay home with their children are called lazy, welfare cheats.  If you’re poor, you can only be a good mother by working.

Because race and class are correlated in U.S. society, and the “welfare queen” is a race-specific trope that usually refers to poor, black women, these videos might very well challenge the white-middle/upper-class-homemaker conflation.

Beyoncé, Why Don’t You Love Me:

Sade, Babyfather:

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.

Today’s XKCD strip bothers me, a little. It reminds me of the discussion about assertiveness amongst nerd guys brought up when Gabe and Tycho at Penny Arcade were talking about “pick-up artists” (PUAs) a while back.

Here’s my issue: I get that a lot of straight guys (and women, but I want to primarily talk about men here) who identify as nerds (or don’t, for that matter) have confidence issues, especially around romantic or sexual interests*. But I also think that messages like the XKCD strip really reinforce that idea of isolation and make the world out to be filled with potential mates — if only you’d just talk to them! There’s some truth here, in that it’s pretty hard to meet people if you find it hard to talk to communicate with others. But the more insidious, unintended message I’m seeing is one that just feeds into the PUA logic — given enough confidence and skills, all women are yours for the taking.

I know some people are probably going to think I’m reaching here, and are going to say that it’s just a comic, and maybe just meant to make a cute little statement about how everyone just wants to make a connection. Sure, and I think there’s something to be said for nerd guys shedding the whole Nice Guy complex and acting assertively. The problem is that there’s a fine line between that and the PUA viewpoint I described earlier. That woman next to you might not want to talk about her netbook. She might not be interested in you, specifically. She might not be interested in men, generally. She probably wouldn’t have the same reaction as in the strip, because society teaches women that they should expect male attention, and calling it out isn’t usually looked too kindly upon.

So this is the crux of the issue for me: nerds really are members of a subordinated masculinity, and from within that viewpoint it’s easy to dismiss anything which says that you are privileged and not downtrodden. Once you’re in that space, it’s really easy to start thinking in a certain way that says you’re not privileged just because you’re a man — and I think things like this XKCD strip can contribute to that way of thinking.

Of course, any man who falls farther from the pinnacle of hegemonic masculinity is less privileged than his more “masculine” counterparts, but he’s still a man. Nerd discourses sometimes let us forget that, and let us think we operate outside the system, because we’re not like those other, sexist guys — but it’s a fantasy. We can be better than that, but it means telling ourselves the truth, and not pretending that our interactions with women — even a simple conversation on a train — aren’t influenced and structured by the patriarchy.

*Note: I realize that I don’t mention queer nerds here. I don’t have a lot of experience with the topic, besides an understanding that nerd communities can be just as homophobic as more mainstream groups. Also, most of the discussions I’ve seen around nerd shyness have been in terms of male shyness towards women — summed up in the Nice Guy trope. I think this definitely speaks to the silencing of queer nerds in certain communities, but it also leads me to believe that this phenomenon is primarily an issue for a certain type of (self-identified) heterosexual masculinity.

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About his interests, Matt Kopas writes:

In a famous misattribution, Andre Malraux was held to ask “What is a man?” I feel like most of the answers to this question that men have available to them these days are at best outdated and at worst oppressive and restrictive. What does it really mean to be a man? How can men recognize their privilege and become better allies? As a first-year graduate student at the University of Washington, these are some of the questions I’m interested in. I blog about masculinity issues at The Disenchanted World, where I also talk about other topics such as sexuality, evolutionary theory, and really anything else that strikes me as sociologically interesting.

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

Eugene Robinson:

Republicans’ outrage, both real and feigned, at Sotomayor’s musings about how her identity as a “wise Latina” might affect her judicial decisions is based on a flawed assumption: that whiteness and maleness are not themselves facets of a distinct identity. Being white and male is seen instead as a neutral condition, the natural order of things. Any “identity” — black, brown, female, gay, whatever — has to be judged against this supposedly “objective” standard.

Thus it is irrelevant if Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. talks about the impact of his background as the son of Italian immigrants on his rulings — as he did at his confirmation hearings — but unforgivable for Sotomayor to mention that her Puerto Rican family history might be relevant to her work. Thus it is possible for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to say with a straight face that heritage and experience can have no bearing on a judge’s work, as he posited in his opening remarks yesterday, apparently believing that the white male justices he has voted to confirm were somehow devoid of heritage and bereft of experience.

Stephen Colbert:

If you can’t view the video, there’s a transcript after the jump, thanks to Macon D at Stuff White People Do.

Jay Livingston:

In the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, Republicans have swarmed on Ricci v. DeStefano, the New Haven firefighters case. To hear them tell it, Sotomayor flung the law aside in upholding the lower court decision. She, the majority of the Second Circuit Court, the Federal judge who wrote the original opinion, and the four dissenting Supreme Court justices all based their opinions entirely on a preference for blacks and Hispanics and an animus towards whites. They didn’t consider the law.

By contrast, the five males (four of them white) on the Supreme Court who sided with the white male plaintiffs based their decision wholly and impartially on the law. Their race had nothing to do with it.

The Republican strategy depends on the tendency for privilege to remain invisible.

The transcript after the jump:

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Michaela N. alerted us to the Oreo Barbie. According to Monica Roberts at Transgriot, Mattel once marketed an Oreo-themed Barbie (image here):

The doll sold so well that Mattel decided to make a Black version (image here):

The Black version of the doll triggered protests.  Monica explains it nicely:

…Oreo has another connotation in the Black community beyond just being a slammin’ cookie.

Calling someone an ‘Oreo’ is fighting words. It means that you are calling them Black on the outside and white on the inside. Translation, you call a Black person an Oreo, you are accusing them of being a sellout or an Uncle Tom to the race.

The doll was eventually recalled. (This was all about four years ago.)

Did Mattel intentionally produce a doll that embodied a well-known insult in the Black community?  If they didn’t (and let’s just go with that theory), it means that no one at Mattel involved in the production of this doll had the cultural competence to notice the problem.  This points to both (1) white privilege and the ease with which white people can be ignorant of non-white cultures and (2) a lack of diversity on the Mattel team.  Less employee homogeneity might have saved Mattel both face and money in this instance.  Diversity, then, is often good business.

For more on Barbie and racial politics, see this post inspired by Ann DuCille.

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

This ad — found at the height of the foreclosure crisis in a magazine for the obscenely rich — points out that, for obscenely rich people, the crisis is a bonus.  What struck me most was the double meaning in the headline. “Above It All” has both descriptive and moral meaning. 

It is also a good example of how the rich see the economic struggle of the masses as an “opportunity” to get richer.

Text below.

Text:

Above It All.

Despite the headlines, high-end properties still in demand among affluent set.

What do recent headlines proclaiming a dip the [sic.] current real estate market mean for upper-income vacation-home buyers? Opportunity! A survey released in April by American Express and Harrison Group revealed that among Americans with a household income of more than $500,000, 77 percent say real estate presents a ‘real opportunity’ right now, and 40 percent say they’re in the market for property this year. Of those in the market, 33 percent are looking for a second home, and 25 percent are looking for a third.