prejudice/discrimination

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011. Originally cross-posted at Ms.

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The New York Times has a fascinating 3-minute video on “roster management”, sent in by Emma M.H.  The term refers to manipulating Title IX rules in order to appear like you’re following them when you’re not.  Title IX is an amendment to the U.S. Civil Rights Act that requires that all schools allocate their resources to men and women in proportion to their interest and enrollment.  It is most famous for what it required of college athletics, and this is what this story is about.

As the article explains, schools demonstrate compliance with Title IX:

…by showing that the number of female athletes is in proportion to overall female enrollment, by demonstrating a history of expanding opportunities for women, or by proving that they are meeting the athletic interests and abilities of their female students.

Once implemented, women responded enthusiastically to the new opportunities.  But spectators and donors are less interested in women’s sports, it turns out.  And so colleges have found various ways to resist Title IX rules, including simple non-compliance.

In this case, the strategy is  to put men on women’s teams and then report them as female athletes.

Case in point: This is Cornell’s women’s fencing team:

It turns out, 15 of the 34 team members are men:

The men don’t actually compete, they are simply “practice players” (helping the women improve due to their greater speed and strength, says the coach).

The basketball team has a similar strategy.  A number of males practice with the team and then are reported to the authorities as female players.

Revealing that this is an attempt to manipulate Title IX rules and not a simple weird way of accounting for athletes, the five female coxswain’s on the men’s rowing team is reported not as male, but as female.

So there you have it.  Despite Title IX, these schools are finding ways to continue to spend a disproportionate amount of money on male athletes.  According to the Department of Education, this is well within the law.

Other sneaky moves documented in the article:

Quinnipiac University in Connecticut had violated Title IX by engaging in several questionable practices, including requiring that women cross-country runners join the indoor and outdoor track teams so they could be counted three times. The judge found earlier that Quinnipiac had been padding women’s rosters by counting players, then cutting them a few weeks later.

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At the University of South Florida, more than half of the 71 women on the cross-country roster failed to run a race in 2009. Asked about it, a few laughed and said they did not know they were on the team.

Sarah Till, who graduated from South Florida in 2009, was a more extreme case. She said that she quit and returned her track scholarship in her sophomore year, but her name was listed on the rosters of all three squads through her junior year.

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The University of California, Irvine, is among at least five California universities that sponsor women’s indoor track teams despite a mild climate and a dearth of indoor facilities. Those universities do not offer men’s indoor track.

Last year, an investigation by the Office for Civil Rights concluded that Irvine was not complying with Title IX because its indoor track team was essentially a ruse. It competed in just one meet per year and several women on the roster “vigorously stated” that they were not on the team.

Read the article and watch the video 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.

In the video below, borrowed from Geoffrey Arnold’s blog on heightism, people on the street in New York are asked to evaluate the likely occupational and class status of two men: one short, one tall.  The results are striking (if also edited and non-random, but still):

See also Arnold’s guest posts introducing the concept of heightism as a gendered prejudice and discussing heightism (and other icky stuff) at Hooters.

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.

Earlier this month I read an essay that explained to me why I am not married. These reasons included:

• I’m a bitch.
• I’m shallow.
• I’m a slut.
• I’m a liar.
• I’m selfish.
• I don’t think I’m good enough.

I’m not kidding.

Coincidentally, the Pew Research Center released 2010 data showing that just 51% of all American adults were currently married. This is an all time low, down from 72% in 1960.

Comparing this data with the essay above is a nice illustration of the difference between “normative” and “normal.”  Normal is what is typical in a statistical sense; it is what actually holds.  Normative is what is believed to be good and right in an ideological sense; it is what it is believed does or should hold.

If you go by the essay, written by the thrice married and now single Tracy McMillan, marriage is an ideal state that we all should, or do, desire.  In her reality, if you aren’t married, it’s because you’re doing something wrong.  Marriage is normative.  In actual reality, though, the state of being married is not any more normal than the state of being unmarried.

Only if marriage is normative does the non-normality of marriage become something that needs explaining.  McMillan jumps in with hateful stereotypes, but social science has much better explanations.

• Low-income women often do not take-for-granted (as many middle class people do) that they can sustain a marriage through tough times.  Accordingly, they wait much longer before marrying once they meet someone they like (as long as 10 years or more), so that they can be as sure as possible about the match.  In other words, they take marriage very seriously and are reticent to just jump right in.  They know they’re “good enough,” Tracy; in fact, they value themselves and their relationships enough to really put them to the test.  (Read Promises I Can Keep for more.)
• Other women get divorced because men don’t do their fair share.  Unresolved conflicts over childcare and housework are one of the top reasons that couples dissolve.  Women struggle to keep up when they’re working a full time job and doing 2/3rds to 3/4ths of the childcare and housework.  They may not see the data, but they may intuit that single mothers do less housework than married ones (it’s true).  So they divorce their husbands.  They’re not “selfish,” they’re just trying to survive. (Read The Second Shift for more.)
• Other people aren’t married because they’re in love with someone of the same sex.  They’re not “sluts,” they’re discriminated against.

And, just for the record:

• I’m not married because I don’t want or need the state’s approval of my relationship and  I certainly don’t want it interfering if we decide to part.
• I’m not married because the history of marriage is ugly and anti-woman; because I don’t like the common meanings of the words “wife” and “husband”; and because even today, and even among couples that call themselves feminist, gender inequality in relationships is known to increase when a couple moves from cohabitation to marriage (and I don’t think I’m so special that I’ll be the anomaly).
• I’m not married because I’m opposed to the marriage industrial complex. It’s exploitative, stereotypical, and wasteful.
• I’m not married because I value the fact that my partner and I decide to be together every day, even though we don’t have to jump through legal hoops to do otherwise.
• I’m not married because I don’t want to support a discriminatory institution that has and continues to bless some relationships, but not others, out of bigotry.
• I’m not married because I don’t believe in giving social and economic benefits to some kinds of relationships and not others.  I don’t believe that a state- or church-endorsed heterosexual union between two and only two people is superior to other kinds of relationships.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

The point is that when the normal and the normative don’t align it often leads to social conflict over the meaning of the gap.  Some people, like McMillan, may jump in to tongue-lash the deviants.  Others may revel in defending non-conformity.  In any case, it will be interesting to see how the conversation about marriage continues, especially if, as the trend suggests, married people become a minority in the near future.

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.

This commercial is good evidence that we still think nothing of being cruel towards people deemed “overweight”:

Via Copyranter.

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.

Cross-posted at The Hipster Effect.

I know, I know – you hate hipsters. Maybe somebody called you one once, but they were clearly mixing you up with the real hipsters. You know the ones.

Hipsters have beards. Or mustaches. Or neither. They wear skinny jeans. Or maybe they don’t. They’ve got thick-rimmed glasses. Or sometimes not. You may not be able to describe one offhand, but you know one when you see one. Right?

As elusive as a unicorn yet as common as an ant, the hipster seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once. The only definite thing about a hipster is that nobody wants to be called one (yet pretty much all of us are guilty of having called other people hipsters). It’s become one of the worst insults you can bestow upon somebody (yet it’s also among the most common). If you want to completely discount a person and everything that they stand for, just break out the H-word and watch their credibility to go down the drain. Once you’ve been dubbed a hipster, you yourself become meaningless in that context.  You become one of those people and we all know what those people are like.

Or do we?

The definition of a “hipster” is at best a collection of vague cultural artifacts that we associate with a certain set of personality traits, very few of which actually exist in tandem. The prototypical hipster is a trust-fund baby who spends his days talking about art projects that he never gets around to starting. He drinks the cheapest beer available even though he can afford better. He does this ironically, and he wears his clothes in the same way. He judges you, the non-hipster, based solely on your appearance, quickly dismissing you as a non-member of the hip elite. He listens to bands you’ve never heard of and thinks it’s sad that you can’t keep up with his cooler-than-cool musical tastes. In short, the prototypical hipster is an asshole – but for the most part, he doesn’t even exist.

In a way, we’ve vilified the hipster archetype as a way of dealing with our own insecurities. Being cool was something most people never worried about once they graduated high school. Our internet-fueled society has since changed that, bringing the hunt for the newest and most interesting things into our day-to-day lives. There is a burden to be cool that now follows you into your 20s and 30s and beyond, whereas before these things were safely relegated to lunchtime cafeterias and high school auditoriums. And with the internet now spitting out a different concept of cool with each and every day that goes by, it’s almost impossible to keep up. Eventually we throw up our hands in exasperation and, whenever we see somebody who looks like they’re trying harder than us, we spit out the word: hipster.

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Sophy Bot is the author of the forthcoming book, The Hipster Effect: How the Rising Tide of Individuality is Changing Everything We Know about Life, Work and the Pursuit of Happiness.  Bot also runs The Hipster Effect blog, examining how identity, society and work have metamorphosed in the age of perpetual connectivity.

According to Federal Parliament member Charlie Angus, leaders of the Attawapiskat First Nation have declared a state of emergency. Living conditions are so terrible on the reserve that members of the community are at significant risk of illness and death.  Many residents have no electricity, heat, or running water.  They are living in uninsulated tents and shacks.  Many of these residences are filled with black mold and prone to quick-spreading fires.  Some use buckets as bathrooms; with no facilities, they dump their sewage into the streets.

Angus writes:

When it comes to the misery, suffering and even the death of First Nations people, the federal and provincial governments have developed a staggering capacity for indifference.

Try to imagine this situation happening in anywhere else in this country. We all remember how the army was sent into Toronto when the mayor felt that citizens were being discomforted by a snowstorm. Compare that massive mobilization of resources with the disregard being shown for the families in Attawapiskat.

The government waited a month to respond, but has now accepted some responsibility for the health and welfare of the residents.  Attawapiskat leaders are now trying to raise awareness of the other First Nation communities in Northern Canada with similar conditions.

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.

Nickey R. sent in a commercial by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota that aims to encouraging people to stop putting off exercising, eating healthy, and quitting smoking. The problem with these ads is a simple one. It represents all unhealthy people as overweight… or smokers. It ends by flashing the phrase “for the health of all.”

But while exercise and eating healthy may correlate with being thin (and to what degree this is true is still very much up for debate), there are, in fact, lots of non-thin people who do exercise and eat right and lots of thin people who do not. Being thin is not the same thing as being healthy (as research and real people demonstrate), but these ads say that it is, justifying anti-fat prejudice and miseducating the public.

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.

Cross-posted at Love Isn’t Enough.

Jay Smooth, of Ill Doctrine, recent gave an excellent Tedx talk at Hampshire College about the difficulties of talking constructively about race and racism in the U.S. These conversations are tricky to navigate because they often devolve from discussions about structural inequalities and the consequences of certain positions or policies to individualistic arguments about whether a specific person is racist. As he points out, this backs people into corners. Because people are extremely defensive at anything they see as an accusation they are racist, there is little room to listen to someone who challenges a comment, and perhaps then acknowledge that a statement was hurtful, or based on incorrect information, or connects to larger cultural discourses and structural inequalities that we might want to examine critically.

It’s a great 11-minute video on how we might try to discuss race, and racism, constructively:

Also see Jay’s video on boundaries in mixed-race communities and Brother Ali talking about White rappers and the “n word.”