race/ethnicity: Asians/Pacific Islanders

As far as I can figure it, Halloween costumes come in three categories: scary, funny, or fantastical.  This is why dressing up like another “race” or “culture” for Halloween is racist.  A “Mexican Man,” for example (see below), should not be presented as scary, funny, or fantastical.

Brooke, at Whebr’s Hotub’s Blog, expresses her frustration for people who dress us like an “Indian”:

Why is it socially acceptable to dress like the stereotypical Indian: “Brave”,”Chief”, “Princess”, “Squaw”, “Maiden”? Pardon Moi, but when did the Native American enter the realm of Wizards, Fairies, Super-heroes, Goblins, or Ghouls? When did it become ok to reduce the diversity, language, and culture of nearly 500 different Indigenous tribes into a tacky “costume” of cheap suede, colored feathers, plastic beads, and fringe? Who decided that the history, identity, and lineage of Native Americans could be easily put on and taken off like greasy Halloween face paint?

Brooke features a whole host of “Indian” costumes at her site, including this one:

Illustrating the way in which these costumes tend to collapse culturally distinct groups into a cheap stereotype, Costume Craze has a whole section of the website devoted to “History and World Culture Costumes.”

Here’s a sample of the “Asian costumes” (don’t miss the fantastic font):

“Indian costumes”:

“Mexican costumes”:

Fatemeh Fakhraie, at Racialicious, points out how “Middle Eastern” costumes reinforce both ignorance and negative stereotypes.  Regarding the “Sheik of Persia Arabian Costume” costume shown below, she says:

History lesson: Persia didn’t have sheikhs, they had shahs. And Persia and Arabia were two different places! AKH!

…of course he has a knife! All Middle Eastern men are dangerous, didn’t you know? You can even tell by his face: he’s pissed, and he’s going to take it out on some infidels!

For good measure, Cindy at Lotería Chicana has collected a set of racist Halloween costumes that she photographed at a store called Spirit in San Francisco.  A selection:

UPDATE!  Awesome tidbit from Rosemary in the comments thread:

The geisha one in particular makes me wince, partly because the “kimono” is tied the wrong way (the only time you ever tie it that way is when a person is dead)…

Of course, that’s actually perfect for Halloween!  But somehow I don’t think that’s what SPIRIT is going for.

More…

And my favorite, the “Dream Catcher”:

Does making fun of white people (“tighty whiteys”) make it all equal?

The thing that amazes me most about these costumes is that they’re everywhere.  You can’t escape them.  And no one seems to notice or care.  For example, this “Hey Amigo” costume can be purchased at the Linens N Things website:

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

I recently wrote a quite popular post, titled “What Do Women Want?”, based on data collected by the dating site OK Cupid (short story: women like it when men engage with their personality, not just their looks).  Mary S. sent in a link to some of their data on race and response rate, with some fascinating findings.

First, OK Cupid measured the compatibility of people of different races. They found that, by and large, race doesn’t impact compatibility scores:

Then they looked at response rates. When a man writes an inquiry email to a woman, what is the chance that that woman will write back?  Here is the data:

What this table shows is that race matters.  OK Cupid breaks it down:

Black women… are by far the most likely to reply to your first message. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and overall black women reply about a quarter more often.

…white males just get more replies from almost every group.

White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. It’s here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at the match-by-race table before this one, the “should-look-like” one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them.

And how do men respond to women?

OK Cupid again:

Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.

White guys are shitty, but fairly even-handed about it. The average reply rate of non-white males is 48.1%, while white guys’ is only 40.5%. Basically, they write back about 20% less often.

To sum, white men appear to have the most dating capital in the online dating world, while black women seem to have the least.  This means that white men can sit back and enjoy the adulation, while black women are required to do more outreach to men to get the same results.

This makes sense give the way in which race is gendered.

For more, read Restaurant Refugee’s experiment comparing  responses on OK Cupid to an identical profile with pictures of a white person and a person of color.

UPDATE: Duran2, Dave, and Assaf critiqued my comment about white men sitting back and enjoying the adulation as both inaccurate and unfair. Point taken. I apologize.

For more, see our posts on asymmetry in interracial marriage and how Asian women are marketed to white men.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Story at the Christian Science Monitor, via Asian Nation.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

In the U.S. today, men enroll in college at a lower rate and drop out at a higher rate. In 2005, there were 57 women on campus for every 43 men.

This is such a significant problem, that college admissions officers are letting in a larger percentage of male applicants, even sometimes admitting less qualified men over more qualified women.

But this isn’t just a gender story.

A USA Today story offered this data from the ACE Center for Policy and Analysis:

Looking at the very bottom line of the table (and just at 2003/2004), you can see that the gender gap is largest among lower income students.  Men make up 40% of undergraduates 18-24 when you consider low-income students only, and 49% when you look at upper income students.

The gender gap also correlates with race.  Asian students show the smallest gender gap, whites the next smallest, with Hispanics and blacks trailing.

You might notice that the correlation of the gender gap with race mirrors the class correlation.  That is, income and wealth data for racial categories follows the same pattern with Asians out earning whites (categorically speaking) and whites out earning Hispanics and blacks.  So there may be an interesting exacerbation effect here.

The gender gaps for each racial/ethnic group, however, decreases as the students’ families get richer.  And, among the upper income groups, the racial difference shrinks to only three percentage points (from 11 among low- and middle-income kids).

So, it’s not just about race, it’s not just about class, and it’s not just about gender.  Then, what is it about being poor, black or Hispanic, andmale that results in low male enrollment in college and a higher drop out rate?

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

As a fan of both sci fi and pre-WWII pop culture, I naturally have a lot of affection for Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. There’s much to be enjoyed about the original comic strip (which basically invented the style that led to the creation of super-hero comics), the 1936 serial starring Buster Crabbe, and even the 1980 movie, which I’ve mentioned before.  The 1970’s softcore porn version, Flesh Gordon, is also a lot of fun.  Although the various incarnations get pretty complicated, the basic story is of a regular guy from Earth who ends up on a bizarre alien planet, where he inadvertently becomes a hero in the struggle against Emperor Ming, the tyrant who has been keeping the whole planet under his thumb.  With the recent rebirth of big budget sci fi and comic book adaptations, the time almost seems perfect for a new Flash Gordon movie.  It’s never quite been done cinematic justice, and the basic story would hold up well to a modern interpretation.

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.

Tracy H. and a friend were shopping in some expensive kitchen/housewares stores in Kits, an upscale  neighborhood on the west side of Vancouver. In one store they came upon a display of kitchen utensils (salt and pepper shakers, timers, and so on) designed to look like Asians, complete with slanted eyes and what Tracy calls “rice-paddy hats”:

Here’s another set in the display case:

So we have a display case in an expensive store full of utensils meant to be cutesy and funny, and where items shaped like monkeys, rabbits, faceless blobs, and Asians are all presented as equivalent adorable, humorous, hip options.

UPDATE: Commenter London Mabel gave us a link to the National Palace Museum in Taiwan’s website; the Asian kitchen utensils are part of the “Chin Family Series’:

Drawing his inspiration from a picture of the young Chin seen on a visit to the NPM, one of ALESSI’s main designers Stefano Giovannoni created The Chin Family series– “Mr. Chin” and other items in the series including the salt & peppershaker set “Mr. and Mrs. Chin”, the eggcup and timer…Customers around the globe will have the opportunity to take home a piece of ancient Chinese history brought tastefully into fashion!

So what do you think? Cute? Neutral? Problematic? Does it make a difference that the majority of people who see them probably don’t know about the context and just seem them as Asian-themed utensils? Would people of Asian descent living in the U.S., Canada, and other countries possibly feel differently about seeing things like this on display or sale than the directors of the museum?

Other examples of modern racial caricatures on sale: golliwogs, mammie souvenirs in Georgia, and an Icelandic reproduction of 10 Little Negro Boys.

Dmitriy T.M. sent a link to a Cracked list of misguided products. Among them, was a discussion of a doll I remember from when I was a kid: the Cabbage Patch Kid Preemie.  Cabbage Patch Kids were all the rage.  The preemie version, a supposedly prematurely born “kid,” was a sort of spin off.

Cracked points out one of the ironies here:

So What’s the Problem?

You know what’s not all that cuddly? A one and a half-pound infant fighting for its fragile life in a coffin-shaped incubator with more tubes and machines attached to it than Weapon X. Don’t forget the bandages that keep the light out of its underdeveloped eyes, or the little heating beds it has to lay in because it can’t maintain its body heat. Toss in some weeping parents and a couple of nurses probing and prodding its frail little body and you’ve got the must-have toy of the season.

Given this deserved critique of the product, what exactly is it about the idea of a premature baby that would make Coleco think it would appeal to children and their parents?  I think this commercial gives us a clue:

The Cabbage Patch slogan, “You can give them all of your love,” is an excellent example of what this doll is really about: socializing young girls to be nurturers focused (apparently exclusively) on children.

In this case, what could possibly require more nurturing than an infant?  A premature infant!

The Cabbage Patch Kids website, where you can still buy preemies in addition to kids and babies, says that this premature version of the doll “will require extra attention and lots of Tender Loving Care. Be sure to spend lots of time with these tiny ones once you adopt.”  As Grandma reminds the girl, “Preemies need extra special care.”  And the girl responds in a way that implies that a baby that needs “extra special care” is even more rewarding than a baby that simply needs special care. The more self-sacrifice is required, the happier a girl will be.

Some deep and disturbing socialization indeed.

Oh and also, I couldn’t help but also share this doozy with you, from the description of the Preemie doll:

These small babies have no hair, but come with a choice of eye colors in blue, green, brown, and Asian.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Max shoes advertises its sturdy laces with sexualized and racialized violence in this Swiss ad:

NEW! Penny R. sent in these ads for Bisazza tiles.  They were banned in England, but she saw them in a waiting room in the U.S. in a magazine called Wallpaper:Both via Copyranter (here and here).

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.