prejudice/discrimination

Cross-posted at Adios Barbie.

Today I had the pleasure of reading a 1978 essay by Susan Sontag titled The Double Standard of Aging.  I was struck by how plainly and convincingly she described the role of attractiveness in men’s and women’s lives:

[For women, o]nly one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.

The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age.

There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.  No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.

These words reminded me of an idea for a post submitted by Tom Hudson.  Tom was searching for faces to help him draw and was struck by the differences in the results for “woman face” and “man face”:

The wide variety of men’s faces, compared to the overwhelming homogeneity of the women’s faces, nicely illustrates Sontag’s point. Women’s faces are important and valorized for only one thing: girlish beauty. Men’s faces, on the other hand, are notable for being interesting, weird, wizened, humorous, and more.

On another note, the invisible but near total dominance of whiteness is worth acknowledging.

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.

We’ve discussed American Indian mascots, advertising featuring anachronistic caricatures of American Indians, the ice skater who appropriated aboriginal culture, the lie at the heart of the famous crying Indian PSA, and the stunning irony that is Avatar, but we’ve never directly addressed the use and appropriation of the idea of the Eskimo.  The term refers to the Inuit and Yupik people in Eastern Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.

Russell Potter, a professor of English at Rhode Island College, collected a few vintage advertisements featuring the idea of the Eskimo.  He argues that they fall roughly into two camps: cheerful adorable Eskimo and the Eskimo as primitive and backwards.

These first two for apples and ginger ale fall into the first category:

But this ad presents the “Esquimaux” as “dull” and Grape Nuts as civilized:

Building on Potter’s collection, Adrienne at Native Appropriations posted some more contemporary uses of the Eskimo.

Eskimo Joe’s (Stillwater, OK) uses an image of an Eskimo looking downright ridiculous and very much like his dog:

Any child of the ’80s probably remembers the Lisa Frank Eskimo girl (which Adrienne points out looks decidely anglo):

And this ad seems to suggest that even decapitated walruses speak better English than Eskimos:

Here’s another example of the childlike Eskimo, tweeted to us by @Matthew_Kneale:

All of these ads turn Eskimos into (cute but inferior) childlike figures or (deficient and inferior) backwards adults, or some combination of the two.  For a population with essentially no contact with the Inuit or the Yupik, the idea that they are real human beings can become lost.  When real members of a group are invisible, imaginary representatives can be demonized or romanticized as we see fit.

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.

On January 30th a video was uploaded to youtube featuring among the most blatantly racist banter I have ever heard on or off screen.   The conversation occurred among the hosts of a BBC program called Top Gear: Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May.  They discuss a new sports car made in Mexico and the racist “hilarity” ensues.  It is pretty damn horrible… and it goes on and on… so, trigger warning.

There’s a full transcript after the jump, but here are some high points:

They say the car is like the Mexican people: “lazy, feckless, flatulent, [indecipherable] leaning against a fence asleep”

They call Mexican food “sick with cheese on it.”

Hammond says, “Just imagine waking up and remembering that you’re Mexican.” Everyone laughs. Clarkson replies, “It’d be brilliant because you could just go back to sleep again.”

Hammond is the ring leader in this example, but Clarkson appears to make a habit of racist commentary. Here’s just a sampling from Wikipedia:

In October 1998 Hyundai complained to the BBC about what they described as “bigoted and racist” comments he made at the Birmingham Motor Show, where he was reported as saying that the people working on the Hyundai stand had “eaten a dog” and that the designer of the Hyundai XG had probably eaten a spaniel for his lunch…

In April 2007 he was criticised in the Malaysian parliament for having described one of their cars, the Perodua Kelisa, as the worst in the world, built “in jungles by people who wear leaves for shoes”…

This clip reminds us that there are still people out there who will make race-based attacks and plenty of people, note the audience, who will laugh.  Many white people truly do oppose racism and they want people of color to trust them; they want the benefit of the doubt.  But occasional exposure to people like this, even if just on television, and the ongoing daily experience of prejudice, some mild, some severe, plus the hundreds of things that happen every week that may have been racism or may have been somebody having a bad day, add up.  This makes it very scary to trust white people.  Every “benefit of the doubt” has the potential to backfire.

Given the daily experience of race that most people of color must endure, blind trust is too much to ask for.

(Transcript after the jump, borrowed from Racialicious.)

more...

In the last few hundred years, dark-skinned peoples have been likened to apes in an effort to dehumanize them and justify their oppression and exploitation.  This is familiar to most Americans as something that is done peculiarly to Black people (as examples, see  here, here, and here).  The history of U.S. discrimination against the Irish, however, offers an interesting comparative data point.  The Irish, too, have been compared to apes, suggesting that this comparison is a generalizable tactic of oppression, not one inspired by the color of the skin of Africans.

Irish woman, “Bridget McBruiser,” contrasted with Florence Nightengale:

(source)

A similar contrasting of the English woman (left) and the Irish woman (right):

(source)

Cartoon facing off “the British Lion” and “the Irish monkey”:

(source)

An Irishman, looking decidedly simian, in the left of this cartoon:

(source)

The Irish and the Black are compared as equally problematic to the North and the South respectively.  Notice how both are drawn to look less human:

(source)

A depiction of an Irish riot (1867):

(source)

An Irishman, depicted as drunk, sits atop a powderkeg threatening to destroy the U.S.:

(source)

Two similar cartoons from the same source:

About this cartoon, Michael O’Malley at George Mason University writes:

In this cartoon, captioned “A King of -Shanty,” the comparison becomes explicit. The “Ashantee” were a well known African tribe; “shanty” was the Irish word for a shack or poor man’s house. The cartoon mocks Irish poverty, caricatures irish people as ape like and primitive, and suggests they are little different from Africans, who the cartoonists seems to see the same way. This cartroon irishman has, again, the outhrust mouth, sloping forehead, and flat wide nose of the standard Irish caricature.

(source)

So, there you have it.  Being compared to apes is tactic of oppression totally unrelated to skin color — that is, it has nothing to do with Black people and everything to do with the effort to exert control and power.

For more on anti-Irish discrimination, see our post on Gingerism.  And see our earlier post on anti-Irish caricaturein which we touched on this before.

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.

A while back Kale let us know that the New York Public Library had made their images collection available online.The collection has images on a huge array of topics, from fashion to the military to slavery to insects to a whole category for stilts, and including political cartoons, illustrations from publications, photographs, and so on.

Kale found the collection particularly interesting as a way to look at historical racism and rhetoric about race relations in publications aimed at White readers. This 1875 cartoon, titled “A Privilege?”, presents segregation as actually protecting African Americans from the scourge of alcohol:

Text:

A PRIVILEGE?

Wife, “I wish you were not allowed in here.”

It’s a fascinating example of the use of institutionalized racial inequalities that hurt African Americans to, instead, garner sympathy for White women and children and present African Americans as, really, better off.

Another, published in Life in 1899, implies African American men are burdens on their families, making their wives take on the role of providing for everyone:

Text:

Parson Featherly: De Lawd hab took yo’ husban’ an’ lef’ yo’ wid six chilluns; but ‘membah, Sistah, dat dar’s some good in all de Lawd does.

“I does, Parson. I realizes dat dar’s one less for me to perwide foh.”

This 1860 cartoon from Harper’s Weekly shows an African American woman (presumably a slave) in the South using the “Bobolitionists” — that is, abolitionists, who wanted to outlaw slavery — as a threat, a type of monster that will come steal him if he’s not good:

Text:

“Now den Julius! If yer ain’t a good litte nigger, mudder’l call de big old Bobolitionist and let um run away wid yer.”

I’m sure it must have been very comforting to some readers to think of slaves viewing abolitionists as threats rather than potential allies.

Other cartoons mock African Americans’ physical attributes, marking them as laughable or even grotesque:

Text:

“Would de gemman in front oblige by removing de hat?”

“Would de same gemman oblige by puttin’ de hat on agin?”

(Details.)

Text:

“Now we’ll see ef dat sawed off Peterson man kin escape de issue dis time.”

(Details.)

There are also examples that criticized U.S. race relations, such as this 1848 cartoon from Punch [Note: a reader thinks this might be about France, which banned slavery in 1848, but the NYPL has it listed as relevant to U.S. slavery, so there may be so lost context here]:

Enjoy!

[Note: A commenter has expressed concern that I ended this post with “Enjoy!” I apologize for my insensitivity. I meant it in terms of “Enjoy browsing this fascinating archive,” of which racist imagery is only a small part, not, I hope it would be clear, “Enjoy looking at racist cartoons!” I wasn’t thinking about how it might appear immediately after those set of images, and I should have been more careful.]

Emory University has a very detailed database about the Atlantic slave trade, titled Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which I don’t believe we’ve posted before (my apologies if we have). It includes nine maps providing information on major points of departure and destination ports for the trans-Atlantic trade; here’s a general overview:

Initially the vast majority of slave voyages were organized by firms or individuals in Spain and Portugal; however, over time the slave trade was dominated by groups from northern Europe. Great Britain eventually played a major role, and over 1/3 of documented slave voyages were organized there.The description of Map 6 explains, “vessels from the largest seven ports, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Liverpool, London, Nantes, Bristol, and Pernambuco carried off almost three-quarters of all captives removed from Africa via the Atlantic Ocean.”

This map shows where voyages were organized, and the % of all documented African slaves that voyages from that country/area transported:

In the U.S., students generally learn about slavery in relation to cotton plantations and, to a lesser extent, tobacco. However, overall those two crops played a relatively minor role in the growth of the global slave trade. It was the growing taste for sugar, and the creation of sugar plantations, particularly in the Caribbean and South American coastal areas, that produced such an enormous demand for African slaves in the Americas. According to the Voyages website, less than 4% of all Africans captured were sold in North America.

The website also has a database of thousands of documented trips in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, including everything from point of origin, destination, number of slaves, % who died during voyage, length of trip, and so on. Some include many more details than others, as you’d expect. You can also create tables to display the variables you’re interested in. Here’s the table showing the slave trade, broken into 25-year intervals and by destination. We can clearly see that the slave trade made one big jump in the late 1500s (going from 4,287 in the 1551-1575 interval to 73,865 between 1576 and the end of the century) and another huge jump in the late 1600s, with the height of the slave trade occuring in the 1700s through the mid-1800s:

You can also create various graphs and charts. Here is a graph of the % of slaves who died during the trip, by year:

I presume the extremely high numbers in the 1550s must be skewed by some ships that sank or met some other disaster that led to the death of everyone aboard.

Over time, ships carried larger numbers of individuals per trip:

The individuals taken as part of the slave trade were predominantly male:

Documented types of resistance from captives or from Africans trying to free them:

You can spend quite a bit of time on this, I warn you — creating timelines, graphs, and so on. It’s taken me an hour to write this post because I keep getting distracted creating charts and tables. Overall, the site is a fantastic resource for both specific information and for helping illuminate the enormity of the Atlantic slave trade. Thanks to Shamus Khan for the tip.

Lester Andrist, at The Sociological Cinema, alerted me to a 9-minute short film revealing “Hollywood’s relentless vilification and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims.”   Created by Jaqueline Salloum and Dr. Jack Shaheen’s book, Reel Bad Arabs, it is a stunning and disturbing collection of clips.  The depictions are grossly prejudiced and relentlessly violent.  Andrist summarizes:

The Media Education Foundation also made a full length documentary based on Shaheen’s book.  The 5-and-a-half-minute trailer is a good indication of its content.  It contains many similar disturbing depiction, including a discussion of Disney’s Aladdin, but also points to how Arabs are frequently shown as buffoons (“rich and stupid,” “oversexed,” and “uncontrollably obsessed with the American woman”).

See also our posts on how Arabs are portrayed in video games and Reel Injun, a documentary about the representation of American Indians in Hollywood.

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.

E.C.S. sent along this clip from Keeping Up with the Kardashians in which the world is introduced to Kim’s wax figure, to be installed at the famous Hollywood wax museum, Madame Tussauds. E.C. asks, and suggests and answer to, the question: What has Kim Kardashian done to earn a spot beside historic presidents and renown musicians?  Kardashian, she explains, is being honored for her capitulation to patriarchy.  She explains:

Using her attractiveness, and her sexual and social capital as tools, Kim has made herself both a career and fame by winning the attention of men…

E.C. is referring, here, to Kardashian’s patriarchal bargain.   A patriarchal bargain is a decision to accept gender rules that disadvantage women in exchange for whatever power one can wrest from the system. It is an individual strategy designed to manipulate the system to one’s best advantage, but one that leaves the system itself intact.

Indeed, this is what Kardashian has done, and very successfully. So, for what is she famous? For making this bargain and getting such a good deal for herself. “Congratulations, Kim,” E.C. writes, “for being patriarchy’s perfect woman.”

Clip:

See also our post on how Tila Tequila’s patriarchal bargain ultimately backfired.

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.