race/ethnicity: Blacks/Africans

I know a Googler.  Never to let a fleeting inquiry go unGoogled, he recently wondered who was the voice of Hulu.  It turns out to be a man named Dave Fennoy.  Fennoy is a wildly successful voice actor, doing work for McDonalds, KFC, and Chrysler.  He’s also black.  In the 1-1/2 minute clip below, he talks about being teased as a kid for “talk[ing] like a white boy” and how this caused him “identity problems.”  Later he attended Howard University, where he re-thought what it meant to be black, rejecting the idea that he was supposed to talk in any which way. He doesn’t talk about how his success in The Industry (as we call it in Los Angeles) is related to his sound, though I wish he had:

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

People with a college degree are less likely to be unemployed than people without one (source: Andrew Sullivan):

But a college degree helps blacks less than it  helps whites, especially in this recession (source: Andrew Sullivan):

See also Devah Pager’s stunning data on race, drug convictions, and employment prospects (in text or video).  (Hint: it’s better to be a white felon than a black person with no felony record).

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.

Andrew Slater sent in an interesting example of the mocking of rap music.  The mocking occurs in a re-make of Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” about the excitement of going on out Friday night.  Black’s low-budget music video went viral, shooting her into stardom, or at least celebrity.  The song is a standard teeny-bop pop song, complete with rap interlude.

The re-make, produced by the Community Christian Church, features a so-called “Sadie Black” singing about “Sunday” instead of Friday, and extolling the pleasures of worship. Slater noticed, however, that the entire re-make is more-or-less truthful to the original, except for the rap section. In the re-make, “BP” and “Master E” appear to make fun of rappers.  It’s a very different effect when compared to the straightforward mimickry of Sadie B.

Screen shots (original and re-make respectively):

Videos (rap sections starts at 2:30 and, um, 2:30 respectively):

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.

I invite you to spend seven minutes listening to Baratunde Thurston explaining what, exactly, is wrong with the fact that Barack Obama was hounded into releasing his long form birth certificate.  He does a wonderful job of historicizing the requirement that Obama prove that he is an American (to a man such as Donald Trump), at the same time that he explains why this questioning of Obama’s citizenship is deeply hurtful to all Black Americans and their allies.

Via BoingBoing.  Transcript after the jump (via Racialicious).

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When I teach Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, one thing I have to balance is disclosure of the horrendous history of racism in the U.S. and the risk of further traumatizing students in my classroom for whom these tragedies are not pure abstractions.  One of the these tragedies is lynching.

Lynching, or the killing of individuals targeted by non-police mobs, usually by hanging, became frighteningly common after slavery was ended.  It was a form of terrorism, designed to teach black people, and their white allies, that the end of slavery would not be the end of their subordination. Because a lynching need not be based on evidence that could stand up in court, all anti-racists were at risk of death. Thousands of people — most, but not all of them black — were violently hanged, their bodies often set afire.

Despite the importance of this chapter of American history, I do not show pictures of lynchings in my classroom.  These images are surprisingly easy to come by because the events were often gleefully public and photographs of the murders were sold as postcards. Sometimes, though, I think about showing Billie Holiday singing what is, perhaps, one of the most deeply troubling songs ever written, “Strange Fruit.”  Written by Abel Meeropol and Laura Duncan, it was first performed by Holiday in 1939, almost 30 years before lynching could be called “history.”

Strange Fruit:

Via BoingBoing.

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.

Sangyoub Park, who teaches sociology at Washburn University, sent us an interesting article posted by NPR on various aspects of unemployment. The overall official unemployment rate of 8.8 percent (as of March 2011) hides a lot of variation. For instance, the unemployment rate during this recession has been consistently worse for men than for women:

Nearly half of people have been out of work for at least 6 months:

The unemployment rate for those with a college education is under 5%, while for those who didn’t graduate high school, it’s nearly 10 percentage points higher:

Check out the NPR story for more discussion and a few more graphs.

The NPR article doesn’t include data on race, but Sangyoub found some racial data at the BLS website. As of March 2011, the unemployment rate for Whites was 7.9%, while for Blacks it was 15.5%.

Racialicious and Hermes’ Journeys featured a clip of stand-up comedian Gary Owens comparing black and white churches, joking about how long and loud black services are compared to white services.  Two things are happening in the clip.  First, Owens is commenting on two different styles of worship.  This is really interesting sociologically because it shows that how one worships is a cultural phenomenon that varies.  We’ve seen this powerfully illustrated by children recently in the viral videos Baby Preacher and Baby Worshipper.

Second, though, Owens is racializing these different forms of worship.  In consultation with Gwen, she reminded me that what he’s really talking about is “the difference between more mainline churches vs. the charismatic evangelical ones.”  At the latter churches yelling out and hours-long services are common, no matter the racial makeup of the congregation.

So, the clip is a good example of both a sociological principle (socialization) and a sociological mistake (racialization):

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.

Elyse Mc.D. sent in this graphic based on data from the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality that summarizes a number of aspects of inequality.

You can get a larger version here. I took screencaps of three of the figures I found most striking:

Via.