This five dollar bill ended up in someone’s pocket in Staten Island. It reads: “Lets (sic) keep the white house white.”
Point: Okay, so this means some guy is a real racist a-hole, no doubt.
Counterpoint: Um, yeah, but this pin was sold at the Texas Republican Convention last week:
Sigh.
Via Jezebel.
Elizabeth, over at Blog of Stench (and now a regular Soc Images blogger), brought our attention to a New York Magazine article about the Obama sock monkey doll (the company set to manufacture it has apologized and canceled production). Here is a picture of the doll:
From the article:
We were happily cruising around the Internet yesterday when we stumbled upon a link on Andrew Sullivan’s blog that gave us one of those moments Dave Chappelle joked about in Killin’ Them Softly: “Have you ever had something happen that was so racist that you didn’t even get mad? You were just like, ‘Goddamn, that was racist.’” That’s how we felt when we saw TheSockObama.com, a Website peddling an “Obama” monkey doll.
The response the author got after contacting the company:
To Those with Heartfelt Queries,
We chose twenty-two customer queries today that we believe merit a response. You touched us with either your concern, intelligence, humor, sensitivity, and/or your thoughtfulness. We thank you. There are other queries we received today as well that we chose not to respond to, because of their spewing of venom and their aimlessness.
We at TheSockObama Co. are saddened that some individuals have chosen to misinterpret our plush toy. It is not, nor has it ever been our objective to hurt, dismay or anger anyone. We guess there is an element of naviete on our part, in that we don’t think in terms of myths, fables, fairy tales and folklore. We simply made a casual and affectionate observation one night, and a charming association between a candidate and a toy we had when we were little. We wonder now if this might be a great opportunity to take this moment to really try and transcend still existing racial biases. We think that if we can do this together, maybe it will behoove us a nation and maybe we’ll even begin to truly communicate with one another more tenderly, more real even.
This is only our introductory plush toy. If we choose to move forward with a Republican candidate, we’ll begin with an elongated and slightly lumpy, fuzzy Idaho potato. Had a different Democratic candidate won the nomination, we were prepared to move forward with the cutest, fluffiest 12″ chestnut and golden-haired squirrel, with a short Farrah-like do in a brown pantsuit and call her Squirellary.
In earnest folks, we’re so sorry we offended anybody.
Best Regards,
TheSockObama Co. www.thesockobama.com
Thanks, Elizabeth!
NEW: Consider also…
Thanks to Green Ink for pointing this out in the comments!
WOW, AN UPDATE: Click here to see the TheSockObama Co. aggressively, and I mean aggressively, revoke the conciliatory words they offered in apology (thanks to Breck C. for the tip!). Some highlights:
We at TheSockObama Co. have some questions to pose. What’s really going on in America? In the good ol’ fashion spirit of entrepreneurialism ; free enterprise has been censored, and TheSockObama politically plush toy has been discriminated against in the marketplace of the United States of America…
Double standards appear to be a common thread here. It’s okay for there to be hundreds of thousands of Google sites containing references to our current president’s resemblance to a chimpanzee. However, it’s not okay to make that same association regarding our possible next president. Isn’t this the very definition of hypocrisy?
TheSockObama is no longer scheduled to go into mass production… Have the bullies won here?
…the blogging dens of resistance quickly began their fury of emails. An electronic battery of fiery darts flowed swiftly but silently through the veins of technology. Feverish fingers frantically clicking coast to coast, crashing and burning our tragically naive – yet sparkling website. A steady stream of repetitive verbal eloquence graced our Customer service inbox with tasty tidbits like, eff-ewe and every other colorul expletive you could possibly imagine. We thought we had heard it all. Hey thanks. This is America, right?
…With the number of Customers we’ve had to disappoint in our first week of business; are we saying it’s okay to take something out of the marketplace that other people want to buy? Are we now censoring one another’s liberty as Americans to freely purchase goods and services on our own terms? Is this the kind of America we want?
Lisa analyzed their “anti-apology” and what it means for U.S. race relations over at the Huffington Post. Check it out.
Also, it appears they are still selling the sock monkey, now at another website. The website has exactly the same design as the original one.
See our follow up to this post here.
Alongside an article in the New York Times today was this graph comparing the percentage of positive statements made about Obama versus Clinton by the media over the course of the primary race. The article discusses whether players in the U.S. media think their coverage was sexist. Lots of people do not think so. It has some really interesting quotes from people in front of and behind the camera.
Click here to see a montage of sexist statements about Hillary Clinton by media pundits.
In case you haven’t seen the FOX News commentary in which the host suggests that a fist bump between Obama and his wife is a secret terrorist signal, you can see it here. (And I thought this was bad.)
Here’s an image of the infamous terrorist signal:
NEW! It’s not an image, but Patrice Evans has an interesting essay on the “fist bump heard ’round the world,” arguing we should celebrate National Fist Bump Day.
For our sociologist and sociologically-inclined readers:
As Wicked Anomie asks, “Sociologist and American are mutually exclusive categories?” Who knew!
She also notes:
…did you also notice that bit about “real issues,” and how they and racial/ethnic issues are mutually exclusive? So, we have the broader category of issues, then we have subcategories of racial/ethnic and “real.”
Indeed.
Via contexts crawler.
This video, produced by Mother Jones, shows Pastor Rod Parsley arguing that America was founded to destroy Islam and has a divine mandate to do so. It is interesting on at least two levels:
First, as a response to the Reverend Wright story, it reminds us that Wright is not the only preacher who says outrageous things, and Obama is not the only politician to get “spiritual guidance” from a controversial figure. In which case, the question might be: Which outrageous preachers are most likely to be targeted as problematic? And by who?
Second, the video could be used to demonstrate how a person can be made to appear frightening or evil through editing. In this case, the move to slow motion, the use of black-and-white, the strategic stills.
In many ways, this video, produced by the left, uses many of the same tactics as the anti-Reverend Wright clips on Fox News and elsewhere. For comparison, The Daily Show put together a montage of coverage that appears in the clip below (at about 6 minutes, 51 seconds) that uses choice words (“fiery”), tone of voice, and fast motion:
Thanks to Joe DeM. for tipping us off to the Mother Jones video!
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.
