prejudice/discrimination

I guess this is what sexism used to look like (before it looked like this and this and this and this and this):

These Folgers commercials are doozies:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VprIbx4QkPc[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnjjkgIO3Ck[/youtube]

Thanks David P. for sending us both the ad, found here, and the commercial!

* I stole the title of this post from HeatherShow.

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 centaur scene in Disney’s highly acclaimed cartoon Fantasia (1940) clearly communicates gendered expectations for men and women, but there are also racial politics. First, note that, in the film as released, all of the centaurs end up in color-matched heterosexual pairs.  Second, most people do not know that the original centaur scene included a pickaninny slave to the centaur females and exotic, brown-skinned zebra-girl servants.

Here’s a link to the whole thing (embedding disabled, but it works as of Feb. ’11).

A clear still in black and white:

Fuzzy color stills from the youtube clip:

Don’t miss our post showing bugs bunny in blackface, too.

Click here to watch a two-and-a-half minute video on CNN that addresses last year’s spate of race- and ethnicity-themed parties (see here). What is perhaps most amazing about it is the unbelievably impoverished analysis of what is happening and the fact that the video for some reason decides to end on an uplifting note (“their classmates had an important lesson on the danger of stereotyping”).

Thanks to Richard for this lead.

Despite all kinds of “truces” and “promises” in the media lately about “leaving race and gender out” of the democratic primaries, gender and race are obviously a part of this presidential election cycle.

But, here’s a newsflash: even when the candidates are all white men, gender and race are STILL a part of the decisions made about who should be president.

Think back to 2004 for a moment– remember all those political cartoons criticizing Kerry for being too “French” (as opposed to American Cowboy) and generally feminizing his image (feminine = bad for politics) in political cartoons.

I’m fascinated by the anti-Hillary Clinton facebook groups. There are dozens of these groups, but four groups have the most members.

• Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich– 30,000+ members
• Anti Hillary Clinton for President ’08– 65,000+ members
• Stop Hillary Clinton: One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary– 700,000+ members
• Life’s a Bitch, Why Vote for One?– 14,000+ members

So this morning I spent some time looking at the images that dominate these groups. The images these groups use to criticize Clinton as a presidential candidate make it pretty clear that sexism is alive and well (beyond the protesters asking Clinton to iron their shirts)– and that gendered ways to talk about politics are as cogent as ever! Here’s a smattering for you– there are so many I couldn’t possibly post them all!

And the intersection of race and gender…

Stereotype threat: The difference in performance measured when the belief that people like you (blacks, women, etc) are worse at a particular task than the comparison group (whites, men, etc) is made salient.

The left side of the bar graph is the performance of blacks and whites on a task (on which whites are stereotypically believed to be superior) when stereotype threat is activated (blacks and whites are reminded of the stereotype in some way). The right side of the bar graph is the performance of blacks and whites on the same task when the stereotype remains unactivated. Note the remarkable difference. This demonstrates the ways in which stereotypes, when made salient, affect our performances on “objective” tests.

From: The Effects of Stereotype Threat on the Standardized Test Performance of College Students by J Aronson, CM Steelel, MF Salinas, MJ Lustina. In Readings About the Social Animal, 8th edition, edited by E. Aronson. Stolen from Wikipedia.

Here is a link to a website called Hunting for Bambi that says it is “a highly unique, niched, and controversial comical video series that spoofs hunting.” It spoofs hunting by filming men shooting naked women with paintball guns.

You can buy this DVD. Note that the men are in a Hummer.

Hecklers shout at Clinton to “iron my shirt!” at a campaign speech in New Hampshire:See the video:[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjS8_WWhjao[/youtube] Via the Huffington Post.

James Watson won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA. He’s a pretty big deal.

The other day he said some very unfortunate things. The article from which I stole this information summarized those things as follows:

The controversy began with an article in The Times of London in October that quoted Dr. Watson, who was on a book tour, as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” According to the article, he said that “there are many people of color who are very talented,” and he hoped people were equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

Well, it turns out that a test of his DNA revealed that he has 16 times more African origin genes than the typical European person: “about the same amount of African DNA that would show up if one great-grandparent were African.”

That’s some awesome irony.

Here is a nice discussion of the scientific merit of his assertion and it’s testability by Janis Prince Inniss from the Everyday Sociology Blog supported by W. W. Norton & Co.

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.