activism/social movements

Crusaders against male circumcision (intactivists) face the same sorts of challenges as activists on a wide range of other causes.  They want parents to choose not to circumcise their sons AND they want the government to prohibit circumcision — and punish adults involved in circumcisions.

[This really is a recurrent movement story: Think about animal rights activists who want to promote vegetarianism as a personal choice — as well as legal restrictions on the use of animals; think about anti-abortion activists who wish to promote adoption — as a personal choice — while simultaneously limiting legal access to abortion.]

It looks like the intactivists are making progress on the first front, individual choice — or at least riding some sort of wave of history: the percentage of newborn boys circumcised in the US has declined substantially in the last few years.  All the physicians I’ve seen quoted in the run of news accounts have emphasized parents’ choice.  With parents making different choices, boys and men are far less likely to face social stigma or discrimination on the basis of foreskin status.

Promoting non-circumcision means making that choice attractive — and making a very widely accepted choice — problematic.  Here, rhetoric matters, and strategic choices about images and language are consequential in mobilizing support — and provoking opponents.

Jena Troutman, the Santa Monica activist who abandoned her referendum campaign, pushes non-circumcision as healthy, natural, and attractive.  Her website, WholeBabyRevolution, is chock full of pictures of happy baby boys–diaperclad.

Matthew Hess, the author of the Foreskin Man comic, projects more alarm — and more vitriol.  He, literally, demonizes those who perform circumcisions, thus far, a doctor and a mohel.   Here you see his hero battling a physician who takes sadistic pleasure in performing a procedure that is, by all other accounts, quick and routine.  The rhetoric is provocative and polarizing — hardly peculiar for social movement activists — but maybe not the smartest strategy.

Most of us are not inclined to see physicians treating children as monsters who derive pleasure from a baby’s pain.  We might distrust someone who offered a portrayal at odds with our own understanding of the situation.  The portrayal of the mohel — understandably —  spurred a debate about anti-Semitic imagery.  (But Hess is clear that he has nothing against Jews or Muslims — only those who circumcise.  Arrgh.)  Identifying and demonizing an enemy is likely to inspire — and mobilize — those who already agree with you.  It’s likely to be off-putting to others, and may well provoke your opposition.

I’m ill-inclined to offer psychological explanations for why someone believes what he does.  That said, Hess’s description of his analysis and his commitments is likely to stir pause among would-be supporters.  San Diego’s City Beat reports, quoting Hess:

I was in my late 20s when I just started to notice a slow decline in sensation… Year after year, it started to get a worse and worse after sex. I went to a urologist, and he didn’t have much of an answer. It struck me that my circumcision could have something to do with this. I researched online and quickly found a lot of information about what’s lost. That made me pretty angry.

City Beat reports that Hess has been engaged in therapies to restore sensation — and, for nearly a decade, working on legislation to ban circumcision.

The extraordinarily committed are at the heart of any social movement, and opponents will look to counter a movement by disparaging its champions.  Successful movements are always comprised of coalitions, and the recurrent question is how rhetoric, tactics, and personnel aid or hinder in recruiting allies.  The controversy over Foreskin Man led Jena Troutman to put her referendum campaign on the back burner, suggesting that Matthew Hess brings energy, commitment, and liabilities to his cause.

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David Meyer is a political science professor at the University of California, Irvine.  At his blog, Politics Outdoors, he tries to understand when social movements emerge, how they develop and decline, and how they sometimes matter.  You can also follow Meyer at OrgTheory.

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

Poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron died Friday. I thought you might enjoy this video, sent to me by my friend Pete, of clips from YouTube set to Scott-Heron’s most famous piece, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”:

NOTE: For the record, reader Azizi believes that this video, and my posting of it, trivializes Scott-Heron’s point. Azizi points us to an interview with Scott-Herson posted at Racialicious.

Cross-posted at Jezebel and AOL’s Black Voices.

In a new book called “The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia became a Black Disease,” psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl draws on a variety of sources — patient records, psychiatric studies, racialized drug advertisements, and popular metaphors for madness — to contend that schizophrenia transformed from being a mostly white, middle-class affliction in the 1950s, to one that identified with blackness, volatility, and civil strife at the height of the Civil Rights movement.

The racialized resonance between emerging definitions of schizophrenia and anxieties about black protest seem clear in pharmaceutical advertisements and essays appearing in leading American psychiatric journals during the 1960s and 70s.  For instance, the advertisement for the major tranquilizer Haldol that ran in the Archives of General Psychiatry shows an angry, hostile African American man with a clenched, inverted, Black Power fist.

The deranged black figure literally shakes his fist at the assumed physician viewer, while in the background a burning, urban landscape appears to directly reference the type of civil strive that alarmed many in the “establishment” at that time.  The ad compels psychiatrists to conflate black anger as a form of threatening psychosis and mental illness.  Indeed the ad seems to play off presumed fears of assaultive and belligerent black men.

As the urban background suggests, this fear extended beyond individual safety to social unrest.  In a 1969 essay titled “The Protest Psychosis,” after which Metzl’s book is named, psychiatrists postulated that the growing racial disharmony in the US at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, reflected a new manifestation of psychotic behaviors and delusions afflicting America’s black lower class.  Accordingly, “paranoid delusions that one is being constantly victimized” drew some men to fixate on misguided ventures to overthrow the establishment.  Luckily, pharmaceutical companies proposed that chemical interventions could directly pacify the masculinzed, black threat depicted in advertisements like the above.  “Assaultive and belligerent?” it asks.  “Cooperation often begins with Haldol.”

Moreover, ads for Thorazine and Stelazine during this period often conjured up images of the “unruly” and “primitive” precisely at a time when the demographic composition of this diagnosis was dramatically shifting from a mostly white clientele, to a group of predominately black, confined, mental patients.  It is telling that within this context, the makers of Thorazine would choose to portray the drug’s supposed specificity to schizophrenia in their advertisements by displaying a variety of war staffs, walking sticks, and other phallic artifacts from African descent.

The below ad for Thorazine, for example, exclaims western medicine’s superiority in treating mental illness with modern pharmaceuticals, by contrasting the primitive tools used by less enlightened cultures.

Notably, these claims of superiority and medical efficacy drew from a particular set of pejorative ideas of the “primitive” that were already well established within some sectors of psychiatry that equated mental illness with primitive, animalistic and regressive impulses.   As Metzl contends in his book:

…pharmaceutical advertisements shamelessly called on these long-held racist tropes to promote the message that social “problems” raised by angry black men could be treated at the clinical level, with antipsychotic medications.

These adds are in sharp contrast to previous marketing campaigns that framed schizophrenia in the 1950s as a mental condition affecting mostly middle class patients, and especially women.  Also shown below, ideas of schizophrenia were at that time an amorphous collection of psychotic and neurotic symptoms that were thought to afflict many women who struggled to accept the routines of domesticity.

While schizophrenia is certainly a real, frightening, debilitating disease, Metzl reminds us that cultural assumptions of the “other” shape how psychiatry understands and treats the condition.

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Arturo Baiocchi is a doctoral student in Minnesota interested in issues of mental health, race, and inequality.  He is writing his dissertation on how young adults leaving the foster care system understand their mental health needs.  He is also a frequent contributor to various Society Pages podcasts and wanted to post something related to a recent interview he did about the racialization of mental illness.

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

In the wake of two rounds of racially-charged anti-abortion campaigns: “Black Children are an Endangered Species” and “The Most Dangerous Place for an African-American is in the Womb.” These campaigns are built around the fact that pregnant black women are more likely to have abortions than pregnant white women.  The one getting attention at the moment, sent in by Laura E., is a set of billboards from That’s Abortion in the South Side of Chicago:

I’ve said this before, and it’s being said elsewhere, but I think it deserves to be said again, and strongly.

Many women have abortions because they cannot afford to raise a(nother) child.  They would bring the fetus to term if only they weren’t all-but-crushed under the burdens of under-served neighborhoods, shitty public education, a dearth of jobs that pay a living wage, a criminal justice system that strips inner cities of husbands and fathers, a lack of health care, and stingy, penalizing, and humiliating social services (when they can get them).  So telling black women that they are bad; telling them that they are killing their race alongside their babies, is twisting a knife that already penetrates deep in the black community.

Not to mention the fact that as soon as those poor women have children, they’re demonized for irresponsibly bringing babies into the world that they cannot support.  It’s called a double bind; damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  And no they cannot “wait until they’re in a better place financially” or “not have sex until they can afford to raise a child” because many, many women will never be in such a place in their entire lives.  And they can’t just “practice responsible contraception” because half of all pregnancies are unintended, at least a third among even the most well-educated and resource-rich women.  So pregnancies will and do happen, even to people who don’t want or can’t have a child.

If pro-life groups want to stop abortion, they need to stop accusing black women of moral bankruptcy and start putting those billboards up across from the Capital Building.  What black women need isn’t an ethics lesson, they need resources.  They need those very same people who tsk tsk them to stand up for them, to fight for a living wage, investments in their schools and communities, protection instead of criminalization, more available and better subsidized child care, and guaranteed parental leave benefits for all (it’s not a fantasy).  If black women had those things, then they might feel like that had a choice to keep their baby, just as they have a choice to abort their fetus.

It’s not the parents who fail to care-about-the-children in America, it’s a government and it’s citizens that allow 1 in 5 to languish in poverty.

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 marks what would have been César Chávez’s 84th birthday.  Chávez was born in 1927 to Mexican American farmers in Arizona.   Here he is, right, at age six with his sister:

When he was about 11, his family lost their farm in the Great Depression and they turned to migrant farm work.   In 1962 he and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers).  His success in organizing farm workers, raising awareness of the conditions of their work, and raising support for their cause is one of the most inspiring stories of collective action in American history.  Read more about Chávez here.

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 struggles in Madison have understandably focused attention on the wages and working conditions of public sector workers.  Thankfully, it appears that these struggles have helped to promote greater solidarity between public and private sector workers.  Now, we must build on this new solidarity to focus our collective energies on the bigger challenge: transforming a system that demands that workers (in both the public and private sector) accept ever worsening living and working conditions.

As many involved in the Wisconsin struggles have pointed out, there is plenty of wealth being produced—the problem is that those who are doing the producing are being increasingly denied access to it, both collectively and individually.  For example, as the Economic Policy Institute points out:

U.S. productivity grew by 62.5% from 1989 to 2010, far more than real hourly wages for both private-sector and state/local government workers, which grew 12% in the same period. Real hourly compensation grew a bit more (20.5% for state/local workers and 17.9% for private-sector workers) but still lagged far behind productivity growth.

The chart below highlights this development.  As one can see, the real issue isn’t whether public sector workers make more or less than private sector workers (and the chart covers compensation which includes pay and benefits).  Rather it is that workers together have been increasingly productive but receving an increasingly smaller share of the fruits of their labor.    Those who are well place to benefit, those at the very top of the income scale, have of course done quite well.  For example, the richest 1% received 56% of all the income growth between 1989 and 2007 (before the start of the recession).  By contrast the bottom 90% got only 16%.

If we want to change this we are going to have to build a powerful political movement, one that is prepared to take on the powerful interests that are determined to keep spending on the military; privatizing our educational, health, and retirement systems; promoting corporate mobility; weakening labor laws; and confusing us all about the causes of existing trends.

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In neither of the two videos below, collected by Nathan Palmer at Sociology Source, does Jon Stewart use the phrase “class war.” But when sociologists use this phrase, this is part of what we mean:

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.

Students of mine who are unversed in race politics frequently use the phrase “colored people.” They hear me use the phrase “people of color” and assume that the phrases are equivalent. This is a truly reasonable assumption, even as people familiar with race-based struggle know for sure that “colored” is an offensive term and “people of color” is typically not considered so.

Occasionally a student asks me what the difference is and, to be frank, I’m not quite sure. I’ve simply absorbed the rules of talking-about-race and have a good idea of how to do so in ways that reflect grass roots language claims.

Accordingly, I was really excited to see a clip of famed activist Loretta Ross at Racialicious explaining the history of the phrase “women of color,” and later “people of color.” She explains that, while “colored people” was a phrase used to delegitimate black- and brown-skinned people, “people of color” was coined by activists hoping to bring all non-white people together into a coalition against racism.

(Thanks to decius for placing a transcript in the comments. I’ve pasted it in after the jump.)

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