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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.

SocImages News:

I didn’t catch the moment, but suffice to say we reached 25,000 Facebook friends and counting.  Hello to all our friends out there and thanks so much!

New Logo!

Congratulations to Avery Wagner, Grace Wong, James Dunphy, Letta Page, and Laura Bertocci!  These were the five finalists in our logo contest!  Keep your eyes open for a new logo, currently being polished by Letta and Laura.

Elsewhere on the Net:

Gwen Sharp’s post featuring photographs of Victorian women stoicly breastfeeding their babies struck a nerve! It received over 6,500 likes here, was featured at Jezebel and the Daily Mail, and was cross-posted at the Huffington Post.

I did an unprecedented number of TV/webcast programs this month, appearing on National Geographic’s Taboo, in a Huffington Post Live debate about food stamps, and in a Bloomberg News short on sexual assault on college campuses.

Cross-post highlights!

• Pacific Standard: Should Moms Hate Childless Women?
• Huffington Post: The Hook Up Culture Bogeyman
• BlogHer: The Difference Between How Doctors and their Patients Want to Face Death

Nathan Vanderford kindly featured me in his project tracing the career trajectories of people with PhDs. A neat idea offering great perspective!

Finally, I had the pleasure of contributing to stories at CNN, the LA Weekly, The Raw Story, and Opposing Views.  Some of this was ongoing interest in our advice that college students shouldn’t try to follow their dreams.

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

I am on sabbatical writing in earnest, but I’d love to use my flexible schedule to do lots of public speaking as well.  Visit my website if you’d be interested in having me.  I’ve already scheduled my first talks for next year: Westminster College in Utah and Macalester College in Minnesota.  Looking forward to it already!

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, and @jaylivingston.

In Other News…

Here’s a picture I took of lava entering the ocean on the big island of Hawaii. I am lucky to have family there and the opportunity to hike out to the flow. It was extraordinary and felt as dangerous as it looks!

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.

Elana M. sent along a fascinating study revealing the gender binary in our brains.  The researchers, Homayoun Javadi and Natalie Wee, asked subjects to look at a series of gendered objects — either (a) or (b) — and then judge the masculinity or femininity of a series of androgynous faces.  Gender mattered, but not how you might think.

Condition 1:

Condition 2:

The findings were counter-intuitive to me.  Subjects who saw the feminine objects judged the faces to be more masculine, and vice versa for subjects who saw the masculine objects.  The researchers interpret this as an “adaptation effect,” a neurological phenomenon in which “looking at something for a long time makes you more likely to see its opposite” (source).  For example if you look at a white screen after looking at a red one for a while, the white screen will appear green (red’s opposite).  Or, if you look at lines moving right for a while and then look at static lines, they will appear to move left.

Javadi and Wee’s findings suggest that our brains give gender to both objects and people and that we place masculinity and femininity in a binary.  We are “opposite sexes,” then, but only in our minds.

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.

Please enjoy these posts from Father’s Days past:

Stereotyping Men on Dad’s Day

• Happy Father’s Day to Middle Class Breadwinners
• Representations of Gender in Father’s Day Cards
• Feed Them Meat! and “We Call it a MENu for a Reason”
• Buy Them Non-Emasculating Cooking Supplies!
• What Men Want: The Vintage Edition (pictured)

Also…

• Are You Coming on to me Daughter?
• Including Daughters in Father’s Day

Fashion designer Vera Wang is known world-wide for her bridal gowns, costing from thousands of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.  She opened her first store — in New York City — in 1990.  In 2011, her gowns started appearing at the discount David’s Bridal, for as little as $600.  Today she has a line at Kohl’s.

Why would someone who can sell a $25,000 wedding dress turn around and sell their name to a low-end department store?  The answer has to do with money, of course, but it also tells a story about class and distinction.  Typically trends start at “the top” with wealthy and high-profile elites.  Elites embrace an expensive new look, designer, or product (e.g., men and high heels) in order to distinguish themselves from the rest of the population.  The rest then imitate the trend-setters, such that the trend diffuses down throughout the population one class strata at a time.  That’s why Wang’s David’s Bridal and Kohl’s collections are called “diffusion lines.”

Vera Wang is hanging in there, but lots of trends die when they diffuse down to the working class.  If the working class can take part in the trend, the rich can’t use it to show that they’re special (which is why they sometimes defend their exclusive rights).  So it gets dropped.  Once the elites move onto something new, the process begins again.

Interestingly, Whitney Erin Boesel, writing for Cyborgology, applies this process to cell phones, or what are better described as “mobile devices.”  It applies, of course, to the never-ending stream of newer, faster, shinier devices, but also to the very idea of a cell phone/mobile device.  As much as we make fun of the clunky cell phones of the 1980s and ’90s, very few people had them, so having one suggested that you were a Very Important Person. She writes:

When you picture someone using one of those cumbersome early cell phones, whom do you picture? Is it a white guy in a suit, maybe wearing a Rolex and 1980s sunglasses? Yeah, I thought so. When they first came out, cell phones — like pretty much every brand new, expensive technology — were status markers. A cell phone said, “I am wealthy, I am powerful, and I am so important that people must be able to reach me even when I am away from my home or office.”

Today, of course, though certain models do a little to distinguish one user from another, the possession of a mobile device doesn’t signify elite status.  As Boesel points out, more people have cell phones than toilets.

Enter Google glass.

Slate reports that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is arguing that smart phones are “emasculating.”  Using masculinity is a metaphor for power, he is appealing to the elite to move on to the next technology.  A smart phone, in other words, “no longer signifies [that is a person is] a member of the power elite.”  It’s a pretty snappy — and downright Bourdieuian — way of marketing a new technology to the very people who will drive its success.

Brin starts his discussion about this at 4 minutes, 25 seconds:

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.

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.

The fashion industry is not inclusive of racial and ethnic minorities. Many of the industry’s most celebrated and acclaimed fashion houses rarely cast models of color for their runway shows. Fall 2013 was one of the worst seasons in diversity for casting. Almost 83% of the models on the runway were white (source):

The result is an incredibly homogeneous look on the runway.  Check out photos of the Fall 2013 Gucci show (source) and the Fall 2013 Calvin Klein show (source).

Faintly aware of this critique, some designers put a minority model on the runway every odd season. But while look-alike white models are hired en masse, designers often limit just how much color they’re willing to include.  Chanel Iman, an extremely successful multiracial model, told The Times: “Designers have told me, ‘We already found one black girl. We don’t need you anymore.’”

Leila Ananna, a casting director for Burberry, Gucci, Emilio Pucci, Saint Laurent, and more, thinks that this is okay.  Commenting on the lack of runway diversity, she said: “We think we need to keep in mind that these are shows. A show needs to make you dream, and it doesn’t necessarily need to represent reality.”

Ananna’s words pose many concerns. The idea that fashion shows are supposed to make you dream suggests that everyone is white in this idealized world. In contrast, I find the idealization of the homogeneous aesthetic to be a reflection of racism; this is a nightmare, not a dream.

Rebs (Wooyoung) Lim is currently a student attending Occidental College. She is interested in minoring in Sociology and majoring in Urban and Environmental Policy. She does not have a twitter account, sadly.

In this short video, Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown of AsapSCIENCE discuss the neurological processes behind porn addiction. High levels of porn consumption, they argue, can create a feedback loop that molds sexual desires and behaviors.

Looking at porn, then, doesn’t just reflect a person’s existing desires and preferences; it’s a mechanism for creating new ones or channeling them in particular directions. This is the problem critics such as Cindy Gallop see with the narrow, unrealistic (and often violently misogynistic) set of messages about sexuality that porn offers us.

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

Cross-posted at Tim Wise’s website.

It’s one of those stories that can leave even the most jaded and cynical critic of racist thinking scratching their head; the kind that manages to shock even those of us for whom acts of bigotry and intolerance seem all-too-typical, and who have, sadly, come to expect them in a culture such as this.

And so it was that in Flint, Michigan recently, a new father — and this is a term he has earned in only the most narrow, biological sense — demanded that when his recently arrived child was sent to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of the hospital where she had been born, no African American nurses were to attend to her needs, to care for her, to do what neonatal ICU nurses do, which is to say keep sick babies alive. White hands only for this white, fresh as snow child, whose father, sporting a shiny new swastika tattoo (a Christmas present no doubt from his pathetic skinhead bride) prioritized his own hatreds above and beyond the needs of his precious little girl.  That the future does not bode well for her seems hardly worth saying. To be delivered from an ICU into the arms of one as unhinged as this can only, by reasonable people, be seen as a turn for the worse. Incubators and breathing machines might be preferable to having parents such as she has, through no fault of her own, inherited.

But what is worse, perhaps, than the bigotry of this one neo-Nazi — which is at least to be expected and so, can, despite its irrationality in a case such as this, remain somewhat within the realm of the banal — is that the hospital in question, Hurley Medical Center, actually capitulated to his psychotically racist demands, posting a sign on the little girl’s chart instructing the unit to disallow any black nurses from as much as touching this baby.

Presumably, were Tonya Battle, a black Hurley neonatal nurse since 1988 the only nurse within arms reach of the girl as she entered cardiac arrest or as her kidneys began to shut down — both of which have been known to happen to those in a NIC-U — Battle was to scream loudly for a white nurse to come and save the child’s life. Because God forbid a black woman with 25 years experience do the job. And if she dies, well, at least her precious white skin wouldn’t have been sullied by black hands.

Hurley’s acquiescence to this insanity, in contravention of all ethical responsibility, not to mention legal obligations to treat their employees in a non-discriminatory fashion, is going to cost them no doubt, as they are apt to discover once the lawsuit currently brought against their witless administrators plays out. They are going to pay, and pay big, as they should, for their enabling of overt white supremacy. But that is hardly the most important part of this story. Just as it was not the most important part of the story back in 2000 when a heart specialist at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville did a similar thing, agreeing to the lunatic ravings of another racist white man, who demanded that his wife, who needed open heart surgery to save her life, not be attended to by any black doctor, because he didn’t want a black man to see his wife naked.

More interesting, I think, is what this story (and the earlier one from Nashville) says about racism in America, and not just of the sort evinced by one bottom-feeder, troglodytic fan of Adolf Hitler. For while we are too quick to presume racism to be merely an individual pathology manifested by individually bad people, much like the father in the story from Flint, the fact is, an incident like this illustrates as well as anything can, the way that racism continues to operate as a systemic force in the United States, civil rights laws and all our vaunted post-raciality notwithstanding.

To understand what I mean by this, consider something I am often asked as I travel the country, speaking about racism, or in reply to one or another column or book that I’ve written: namely, it is queried, why don’t I ever talk about black racism, or, just generally, racism against white people? Why, it is wondered, do I focus on racism only when it’s deployed by whites?

There are many things I could say, and do, when asked something like this. But for now, let it suffice to say that this story, from Michigan, involving a white institution as respected as a hospital bending to the whims of a fucking Nazi, is more than enough of a reason for my selective attention. And this is true for multiple reasons.

First, what the story demonstrates is how much more potent white racism is than any potentially parallel version practiced by peoples of color. Simply put, there is no way that any bigoted black person, or Latino, or Asian American, or indigenous person, could possibly have made a similar demand in the reverse direction — that no white nurses attend to their newborn — and expect to have that insistence met with approval and acquiescence. Anyone who thinks a hospital would have agreed to such a thing — to actually deny opportunity to white nurses or doctors, and to limit the care of such a child to same-race caregivers because of the expressed bigotry of a patient — is either so overly medicated or mentally damaged as to make further discussion impossible. In other words, even when a white racist who is likely not of substantial economic means makes a racist demand, his desires can get ratified, and in ways that not even the wealthiest person of color could expect to have happen.*

And this is because — and this is what is especially pertinent to the matter of institutional racism — even if a hospital was willing to go along with the ridiculous and bigoted demands of a hateful person of color, that no whites be allowed to touch their black or brown baby, it would be virtually impossible to fulfill such a request. And why? Simple. Because given the history of unequal opportunity in medical professions, from doctoring to nursing — and also just given the demographic and power dynamics within pretty much any institution you can name — to work around white professionals, even if one wanted to, is almost impossible.

Bottom line: the hospital in this case went along with the demand to exclude blacks from attending to this child because they could. Given the history of discrimination in access to the medical profession, including nursing, and the barriers to professional practice faced by too many people of color, there exists today a more limited number of such professionals from which to draw. As such, excluding them from a particular hospital unit or assignment is hardly a huge burden for the institution in question.

But imagine what would happen if the situation were reversed, and a racist black man had demanded the exclusion of whites from caring for his child. Even if there were a doctor willing to agree to such conditions, it would be virtually impossible for him or her to follow through, because whites — having received the opportunities needed to enter the nursing profession in larger numbers — are hard to work around. “No whites” policies would result in a lot of empty NIC-Us, whereas “No blacks” policies require only a small administrative headache at best, so fewer are such professionals in the first place. And so, given the history of racial inequity, the consequences of which we still experience, white bigotry of the individual type is operationalized and activated if you will, by the institutional injustices that have resulted in the over-represantaion of whites and under-representation of black and brown folks in certain jobs to begin with.

In other words, institutional racism is akin to the gasoline, allowing the otherwise stationary combustion engine of individual racism to function: the former gives the latter life, and the ability to impact others in a meaningful and detrimental way. Without the power to enforce one’s racism, or expect it to be enforced or enforceable by others, that racism is largely sterile. Which is why white racism is simply more worthy of our attention and concern than any other form.

Much the same would be true in other realms of life, beyond medical and hospital settings. Blacks who wish to avoid whites in their neighborhoods will typically find themselves limited to the poorest, most crowded areas of town — places whites long ago abandoned — since finding Caucasian-free zones in more prosperous suburbs can be a tough task. Whites can more or less live wherever we wish. If we are not to be found in a particular census tract you can bet it’s because we’ve chosen to be absent. Such cannot be said for why blacks are often absent from more affluent areas, however. Money or no money, good credit or bad, millions face discriminatory barriers in residential opportunity every year.

Once again, even if people of color despise whites and seek to avoid us, their ability to do so will be directly constrained by the larger opportunity structure that has skewed power and resources in our direction. Whites seeking to avoid blacks and Latinos on the other hand, can do so readily, with the help of mortgage discrimination, redlining, zoning laws and so-called “market forces” pricing many blacks out of the better housing markets (even though we only got into those markets because of government subsidies and preferences, both private and public).

So for those seeking to understand what racism is — and the difference between the merely individual as opposed to institutional forms of it — and why white racism is more potent and problematic than any other potential form, you need look no further than the recent headlines. When institutions can and will collaborate with and directly empower the racism of even the most deranged of bigots, you know that we have yet to arrive at that place of racial ecumenism claimed for us by those who would rather gloss over the ongoing injustices we face, and pretend to have attained, as a people, a perch to which we have no ethical right to lay claim.

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*Please note, I wish to differentiate here between those patients whose desire for same-race/ethnic nurses or doctors is motivated by apparent bigotry, on the one hand, and those whose desire for such a thing might be motivated by such things as linguistic familiarity, on the other. So, for instance, a Spanish-speaking, or for that matter, German or Russian-speaking mother-to-be might request a nurse, or anesthesiologist who speaks their language, for reasons of comfort and communication. Additionally, it is possible that given the history of difficulties in cross-cultural communication between authority figures who are white and patients/clients who are persons of color (which has been studied and documented for years), a black patient might prefer, if possible, to have a black nurse or anesthesiologist to wait on them. Although even these cases are likely rare, they would not be remotely comparable to a blatant bigot demanding same-race care for reasons comparable to the facts in this story, or the 2000 story from Nashville.

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Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and educators in the United States.  The author of six books on race in America, he has spoken on over 800 college and high school campuses and to community groups across the nation.  His new book, The Culture of Cruelty, will be released in the Fall of 2013.