race/ethnicity: Blacks/Africans

This is not a major social issue, and I am not going to make it one. Rather, I think the way this story is being presented in the media effectively illustrates how race matters and is constructed in particular social contexts. Among track and field (“athletics”) aficionados, the 100 meters is frequently considered the premier event. At the elite level, the 100 meters is a power sprint, measuring fast twitch, explosive, kinetic energy manifested through meticulously honed technique.

For males, breaking the 10-second mark is still a colossal accomplishment. One might not think so since track and field doesn’t get much media attention in general (at least not in the United States), and when it does, we’re now more accustomed to watching Usain Bolt blast away his competitors, seemingly cruising to numerous sub-10-second performances (his world record currently stands at 9.58). A few weeks ago sprinter Christophe Lemaitre won France’s national competition with a time of 9.98 second, squeaking below that 10-second mark.  A typical headline of Lemaitre’s accomplishment (from Reuters.com, July 9, 2010):

Lemaitre first white man to run 100m in under 10 seconds

And from the article:

PARIS (Reuters) – France’s Christophe Lemaitre became the first white man to run the 100 meters in under 10 seconds when he clocked 9.98 on Friday, the French athletics federation said.

Lemaitre, 20, set his time during the French championships in Valence, southern France.

“He is the first white man to run the 100 meters in less than 10 seconds,” Jean-Philippe Manzelle, French athletics Federation press officer, told Reuters.

There have been other white sprinters who have excelled at the world level in recent years. Lolo Jones comes to mind in the 100m hurdles; Jeremy Wariner dominated the open 400m in recent years. And if we’re talking sprinters of “outlier” ethnicities in general, Liu Xiang of China recently held the world record in the 110m hurdles. But the early discourse around Lemaitre could be a bit more pointed in the way he is being constructed through the media as a great white hope.

When should race matter in sport, and when it does, how should it be discussed? In this case, at the very least, Lemaitre’s race is framed such that his being “white” is of greater importance than his win. As the track and field season moves on and should Lemaitre continue to run sub-10-second times, I expect to see increased media coverage about his whiteness. He is not going to beat Usain Bolt or America’s top sprinters at international competitions. But on the European circuit, I expect he will make waves. Mainstream media discussion of his success or failure should be interesting to follow.

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David Mayeda is adjunct faculty at Hawaii Pacific University in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies, where he will also come on board as Assistant Professor this coming fall semester.  His recent book publications include Celluloid Dreams: How Film Shapes America and Fighting for Acceptance: Mixed Martial Artists and Violence in American Society.  He also blogs at The Grumpy Sociologist.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

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.

Pew Research Center has released data suggesting an age gap in optimism for the future of American young adults.

When asked if their children will be better off or worse off than they are, less than half of U.S. parents say “better off” and a full 25 percent say “worse off.”  This is the most pessimistic we’ve seen parents in 16 years.

But their kids are more optimistic than anyone else, with 85% saying that they expect that their financial situation will improve next year:

Of course these data aren’t entirely compatible, but it’s an interesting comparison nonetheless.  The idealism of youth?  The pessimism that comes with bad backs and mortgage payments?  The possibility that 18-29-year-olds have nowhere to go but up?

Economix, via Karl Bakeman.

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 New York Times has a neat interactive graph based on data from the American Time Use Survey that lets you look at hour-by-hour time use broken down by sex, employment status, 3 racial/ethnic groups (White, Black, Hispanic), age, education, and number of children (though, unfortunately, you can’t search by more than one category at once). Here is the breakdown for the entire sample:

For people age 15-24:

Watching TV and movies takes up a lot of the time of those over age 65:

You can also click on a particular activity to get more information about it:

Those with advanced degrees spent the most time participating in sports or watching them in person; I suspect that the data might look a bit different if time spent watching sports on TV went in this category instead of the TV category:

Just a note, the averages for time spent at work seem pretty low, but that’s because they’re averaged over all days of the week, including any days off, rather than only days a person actually went to work.

Presumably the amount of time you’ll spend playing around with the site goes under computer use.

Deepa D. sent in an interesting post from Racebending about the race/ethnicity and gender of stars who get top billing in Paramount movies. Three volunteers at Racebending analyzed relevant data on movies produced or distributed by Paramount Pictures since 2000, as well as those currently in development. They focused on top billing — that is, which stars are most frequently highlighted in promotional materials, whose names appear highest in the credits, and so on. This both reflects power and status in Hollywood (the more prestige you have, the higher you’re likely to be credited compared to lower-status stars with similar screen time) and contributes to it (higher billing leads to more exposure and attention. Racebending explains:

Various types of Credit include Main Title Credit (before the movie starts), End Title Credit (after the movie is over), Paid Advertising Credit (mention during commercials and publicity), Above-the-Title Credit (name shows up on top of the movie name in promos and on screen), and Billing Block Credit (the block of text on posters and trailers.)

Their methodology:

For our review, we simply looked at which actor is listed first on imdb.com. Even if several actors have received top billing or above the title billing, someone is always listed first…

Our review of actors in top billing was necessarily subjective, but the cultural ethnicity and gender of most of Paramount’s top-billed actors like John Travolta, Angelina Jolie, and Samuel L. Jackson are well established in the public sphere. For animated characters like Shrek the Ogre, Spongebob Squarepants, and Eliza Thornberry we looked to the gender and ethnicity of the voice actor. We simply tallied the first actor billed, (for example: Malin Ackerman in Watchmen, Chris Pine in Star Trek, Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears, Jamie Foxx in The Soloist, Noah Ringer in The Last Airbender.)

The analysis found that the vast majority of top-billed stars in Paramount films from 2000 to 2009 are male, while movie audiences are about 45% male:

An even higher proportion — 86% — of top-billed stars are White (the green bars show each groups percent of the overall U.S. population):

The category White there specifically includes White non-Hispanics. No Latinos had top billing in Paramount movies during this time period. Also,

Out of 133 movies either produced or distributed, 17 had a black lead actor and only one had an Asian actor–Parry Shen in the film Better Luck Tomorrow (2002). However, Paramount did not produce Better Luck Tomorrow, the company distributed the film to theaters after the film made the independent film circuit.

When the data are broken down by race/ethnicity and gender, we see that the vast majority of top-billed stars who are non-White are men. Non-White women are almost entirely shut out:

The chart on the right represents films currently under development. While Whites predominate in the starring roles in these projects, notice that White women make up only 6% of top-billed stars, and non-White men make up about twice that proportion.

This is, of course, just one studio. If you have links to similar data on other studios, or on movies more generally, send them in!

Related posts: the Bechdel test, the real stars of Glee, underrepresenting women in Hollywood, the Smurfette principle, whitening Heroes, White actors in yellowface, casting cheat sheet, Hollywood’s discomfort with Asian lead characters, race in Transformers II, gender in Pixar films, racist Disney characters, and the gender hierarchy in Bee Movie.

Fox sent us this image from a Sephora email; clicking on the various skin tones would take you to a section on makeup for your complexion:

What struck Fox is how light all three skin tones are. I’m pretty pale — I often match shades with names like “ivory” — and I think I’d still be “medium” toned according to this graphic. Also, all three women have pretty similar, stereotypically Caucasian, facial features.

And while any skin tone categorization is going to throw together a wide array of shades, in this case, it seems like a lot more skin tones are going to be subsumed under the “dark” category than the others, since it starts out at a pretty light shade and contains every shade darker than that. The options here separate out lighter skin tones from one another pretty finely while throwing an enormous range of skin types together under “dark.” Presumably Sephora conducted intensive research and discovered that while lighter-skinned women required carefully customized makeup color schemes, women with even slightly darker skin can all make do with the same one.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Lisa recently discussed the trend of women having children at older ages. The Pew Research Center also just released data on women who do not have children lessfree (a commenter pointed out that “childless” implies a lack, whereas “childfree” doesn’t; others say “child-free” is also value-laden; “childless” is the word used in the report). They defined “childless” as women aged 40-44 who have no children; importantly, women who have adopted but never given birth themselves are also categorized as without children, which I find rather problematic. I can see why you might want info on both situations, but to define adoptive mothers as not having children? That’s weird. Also, they don’t report info for men.

From the report:

One in five women aged 40 to 44 reported that they’ve never had children. Meanwhile, just 41 percent of Americans say having children is necessary to a good marriage, compared to 65 percent in 1990.

The number has been increasing over time, with slightly short-term dips here and there:

Not having children is more common as education increases, though interestingly, the number of women without kids who have a Master’s or higher degrees is actually lower than in the early ’90s:

Of course, you could interpret the educational pattern a couple of ways. Perhaps achieving advanced degrees requires women who would have liked to have children to choose between career advancement and family life. Or maybe having an advanced degree makes them less attractive to potential partners, or unwilling to accept the partners available to them, so they have to decide whether to be single parents. But of course, it could also be that women who pursue advanced degrees are women who were less interested in having children to begin with. I’m sure there are other explanations and that it’s likely to be a combination of all these factors, and I’m sure somewhere there is data available. Let me know if you’ve got a good link.

But I’m stumped about the decrease in the number of highly-educated women without children between the early ’90s and now. Any thoughts on what might have caused that?

Anyway, moving on…

The increase in women without children holds for all racial/ethnic groups (and, as usual, data on Native Americans wasn’t included; sorry):

Probably not surprisingly, women aged 40-44 who never married are much more likely to be without children than are married women, though as we see, the percentage has gone down, indicating more never-married single mothers:

From that perspective, it appears that marriage and childbearing are tightly linked–only a small proportion of women who have been married at some point have no children.

But if we break down the data a bit, we see that of women aged 40-44 without children, 60% were married at least once:

So while for the U.S. population as a whole, getting married generally indicates children will appear at some point, most women who forgo childbearing do marry at least once, showing that this isn’t just a phenomenon of single women.

Where did I learn about this report? From the website Shit My Kids Ruined, which I read with morbid fascination.

These Chilean ads for menstrual pain medication, sent in by Mia A., turn women into symbols of violent aggression: fighters, literally, but also men of color.  They simultaneously affirm, then, the association of violence with both masculinity and non-white skin and the de-association of women with those characteristics.  The message is that men of color are appropriately violent, while women are not.

(source)

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 Pew Research Center report on the changing demographics of American motherhood (discovered thanks to a tip by Michael Kimmel) shows that there has been a significant rise in childbearing among women at the later end of their childbearing years.

Not quite twice as many U.S. women over 35 gave birth in 2008 compared to 1990 (while we see the opposite trend for teen births):

The share of all births that were to women over 35 also increased from 9% to 14%:

A look at the birth rates across women from 15 to 44 shows that fewer women between 15 and 29 are giving birth, but the numbers are up for all women 30 and over.

The data broken down by race also suggests that it is white and Asian women who are driving this trend:

For more from this report, see our post on race trends in motherhood.

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.