race/ethnicity: Blacks/Africans

Enjoy Jennifer Lee, professor of sociology at UC Irvine, discussing how the American concept of race has been changing as we’re confronted with a more complex racial landscape. Are we forcing all racial groups into the pre-existing black/white binary?  A white/non-white binary?  A black/non-black binary?  Or something else?

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.

Last year Gwen posted about Medal of Honor, a World War II based video game that featured an all white cast.  In her post, she gives numbers as to the diversity of the U.S. military at that time.  Here, I offer some photographs of Black American soldiers during the war (borrowed from The History Place):

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 this 11-minute video, Dalton Conley interviews Victor Rios about the youth control complex.  He argues the that punishing arm of the state (the prison system) and the nurturing arm of the state (the education system) work together to criminalize, stigmatize, and punish young inner city boys and men.

Rios’ ideas apply very well to the treatment of Latarian Milton, the 7-year-old boy who was charged with grand theft auto for taking his grandmother’s car for a joy ride.

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 this ten-minute Black Tree Media video, sent in by Janet F., black intellectuals and artists debate sexism in hip hop. The video features over a dozen perspectives — Stanley Crouch, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Ben Chavis, Nelly, T.I., Chuck D, MC Lyte, the Reverend Al Sharpton, Mike Jones, Master P, and Kim Osorio — and covers a lot of ground.

My apologies if the video is preceded by a commercial:

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.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to an interesting breakdown of the race/ethnicity and gender of guests on a number of late-night talk shows, found at Edlundart.

Edlund explains the methodology:

The data for this graphic was gathered over 6 weeks in August and September of 2010. Numbers are based on guest lists as presented on Late Night Lineups. Determining race/ethnicity can be a rather dicey and imprecise activity, and it’s also worth noting that the relationship between census and guest numbers is not a pure one – for example, some of the guests I counted as white are British white people who are visiting the United States.

Of course, a few guests were neither White, Hispanic, Black, nor Asian. These guests were left out, as their numbers were insignificant on the whole…

Edlund also points out that since The Daily Show only has one guest per night, it has a much smaller dataset than the others, so the lack of diversity may be somewhat overstated due to such a small sample.

Here are the results for race (presented as % of all guests); the small dots show the percent in the Census, the wider bars the percent on the show:

Here is the same data but for the top-billed guests only, where the over-representation of Whites goes up even more for most of the shows:

Here’s equivalent data for women:

And, again, for just top-billed guests:

As Edlund says, these data both reflect and reinforce broader cultural patterns. Given that Whites still dominate the political system, for instance, it’s not surprising that political guests would be disproportionately White; and if more movies have male stars than female stars, guest spots will reflect that as well. But at the same time, these shows include people from a range of industries/careers, and their selection of guests helps raise the profile of some individuals more than others, potentially contributing to more opportunities and star power for them. So they don’t just reflect existing realities; they amplify them.

It would be great to get more info on how an individual is selected when there are multiple possibilities — say, you have a movie with several prominent cast members. In that case, are there patterns related to race/ethnicity and gender in which person is most likely to get booked?

According to a story on NPR, Asian Americans are less likely to be unemployed than White, Black, and Hispanic Americans.  But, when they do lose a job, they remain unemployed significantly longer.

Jobless Rates by Race:

Length of Unemployment:

Why might Asians have a more difficult time finding work?  Kent Wong of  UCLA’s Center for Labor Research and Education explains that their extended length of unemployment can be attributed to a confluence of two realities that make their situation unique.  First,about 70% of Asian Americans are foreign born and these immigrants often live in ethnic enclaves (e.g., Chinatowns) that focus on a single industry.  So long as there is work in that industry, Asians can find work.  But, if that industry goes south, their limited network outside of those enclaves becomes a hindrance.  Meanwhile, Asians (unlike Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks) tend to be segregated by language.  Wong explains that, with about a dozen languages spoken widely in the Asian American community, pan-ethnic networks can be difficult to build and maintain.  This leads to extra difficulty finding a new job:

If you have a Vietnamese employee working for a Vietnamese employer in Little Saigon in Orange County, that does not transfer to an ability to get a job in Koreatown in Los Angeles…

Both residential and linguistic segregation, then, contribute to long periods of unemployment for Asian Americans.

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 this video sociologist Devah Pager describes her experimental research on race, criminal records, and employment with Dalton Conley.  Using matched pairs of black and white students posing as job applicants, she finds, stunningly, that black men without a criminal record are as likely to get a call back for a job as white men with one (see the tables here).  Black men with criminal records receive call backs for only about one in 20 completed job applications.

See also our post in which one man explains the “hidden life sentence” he received after a crime 20 years past.

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.

Rick T. sent in a link to a post at Global Research about some new U.S. Census data about 2009 poverty rates. As is usually true, children suffer higher levels of poverty than other age groups:

Poverty is significantly higher for African Americans than for the U.S. population overall — notice the Y axis goes up to 45%, whereas above it ends at 30%:

From the post:

Being American gives you a one in seven chance of being poor. Being young raises this chance to one in four. Further, being black in America means a one in four chance of being poor. Being young and black raises your chance of being poor up to one in 2.5.

Not surprisingly, poverty is highly related to education level:

I went to the original Census report and grabbed some more images. This graph makes the over-representation of children among the poor even more obvious:

There’s tons of information in the report if you’re interested in the demographics of poverty in the current economic recession.