race/ethnicity: Blacks/Africans

Laura A., Brenly R., and Maurine C. all let us know about a shirt for sale at Urban Outfitters. The shirt came in two color combos: White/Charcoal and Obama/Black. Here’s an image of the Obama/Black option, via Jezebel:

There are a couple of things going on here. First, there’s the reference to Obama as a marketing ploy, which we’ve seen before, of course. But it also shows how ridiculous our racial color coding is; we continue to use colonial-era categorizations that there is a clear dividing line between groups based on color. Black and white are usually depicted as opposite colors, after all (and, of course, there’s the historic association of white with purity and black with evil). Most people don’t literally think of Black people as black or believe White people are white; people are, as far as I can tell, pretty much some shade along the off-white/tan/brown spectrum. But we continue to socially construct racial categories as though there is some meaningful, stark difference based on skin color.

So given that, if Obama’s half Black and half White, he’s gray, right? I mean, I’ve seen him on TV a lot and I’ve never noticed that, but maybe it’s the makeup.

I’m sure you will be sad to know that the Urban Outfitters website says the shirt is no longer available.

UPDATE: Reader applebrownbettywhite says,

Just wanted to let you know – I think both Jezebel and you guys interpreted UO’s color naming scheme incorrectly. “Obama” as a color refers to brown, which is the color of the buttons. You can check this assertion against the other shirt, white/charcoal, which is a lighter colored shirt with white buttons.

I’m not sure…the buttons look black to me. It doesn’t look like it has brown on it, but maybe it’s a bad photo.

We often talk about gender objectification on this blog, but we also try to talk about other types of objectification.  In this case, Literanista sent us a great example of racial/nationalist objectification.  The example comes from a tourism website for travelers to the Dominican Republic.  It offers, in one of its excursions, the chance to swim in a jungle river, enjoy a secluded beach, visit a “Rum Shack,” taste fresh sugarcane, see native animals and meet an honest-to-goodness-real-Dominican family.

Elsewhere, just to add some negative stereotyping, the website suggests that Dominican’s are drunk all the time:
In a similar vein, Karole F. sent in a photograph of some “African” carvings for sale a Stones ‘n Stuff in Exeter, New Hampshire.  Human beings are included as objectified tokens alongside animals:

For more tourism-related objectification, see our posts on tourism in Hawaii, Brazil, and Thailand, and, related, these images of international adoption and onesies for internationally adopted babies.

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.

This Clymer for Pennsylvania governor poster attacks his opponent, Geary, and the Republican exponents of black suffrage, with a familiar caricature of blackness  (Jim Crow History):

Text:

Every RADICAL in Congress VOTED for NEGRO SUFFRAGE.  Every RADICAL in the Pennsylvania Senate VOTED for NEGRO SUFFRAGE.  STEVENS, FURNEY, & CAMERON are for NEGRO SUFFRAGE; they are all Candidate for the UNITED STATES SENATE.  NO RADICAL NEWSPAPER OPPOSES NEGRO SUFFRAGE.  GEARY said in a Speech at Harrisburg, 11th of August, 1866 — “THERE CAN BE NO POSSIBLE OBJECTION TO NEGRO SUFFRAGE.”

For more caricatures of black people in U.S. history, see these posts: one, twp, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen.

And for examples of modern reproductions of these stereotypes (literally), see these: one, two, three, four, and five.

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 several posts, we have problematized past and present school mascots.  In this post, I discuss the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Ragin’ Cajuns.

Originally, UL Lafayette’s mascot was a Bulldog.  Then, according to the mascot history page,

…in the early 1960’s as an effort to “fire up” the football team, Coach Russ Faulkinberry called his team the Raging Cajuns since 95 percent of the football team was from the Acadiana area [i.e., ethnically Cajun].  It was then decided by the Sports Information Director, Bob Henderson, to honor the team and the Cajun heritage by calling them the Raging Cajuns.

The first Ragin’ Cajun mascot was Cajun Man:

This was protested by African American activists who resented the association of the multi-racial and -ethnic University with a white ethnicity.  From another perspective, the mascot was questioned on the grounds that “Cajun” had once been a nasty racial slur.

Apparently the University lost Cajun Man when he graduated, so he was replaced by Cajun Chicken:

Cajun Chicken as Elvis (what, your mascot didn’t dress up like Elvis?):

Cajun Chicken was later replaced by Cayenne, a chili pepper, the University’s current mascot:

Still, the disappearance of the Cajun Man has not led to the disappearance of the controversy over the mascot, kept alive with the term “Ragin’ Cajuns.”  In Blue Collar Bayou, Jaques Henry and Carl Bankston III report that in 1997 Louis Farrakhan protested that the state funding of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette amounted to the state using “African American and Creole tax dollars… to promote a white culture.”

Consider the Ragin’ Cajun controversy in light of the other mascots we’ve covered: the Orientals, the Gauchos, the Jews, the Fighting Irish, and the Indians.

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 Modern Language Association has all kinds of awesome language-related data available that you can customize depending on your interests. Most basically, you can get an interactive map showing the percent or number of speakers of various languages spoken at home by county (or number by zip code). Here is English:

Spanish:

Navajo:

Notice that the scale of the maps changes, so the same color doesn’t indicate the same percent of speakers for each language. For some languages the darkest red only indicates 1 or 2 percent.

There was one odd category I noticed. This is the map for “African languages”:

I can understand why you might lump some languages from an area together if they are so rare in the U.S. that they’d barely show up. But what, exactly, is an “African” language? It doesn’t appear to include Arabic, though it is spoken in much of northern Africa. Many people in Africa speak European languages (particularly French and English) due to colonialism. Presumably this category includes “native,” non-Arabic languages. It’s a strange category.

For those of you wondering about the little pockets of African language speakers in, say, Iowa and Nebraska, I could be wrong, but I would suspect in some of those counties it might have something to do with slaughterhouses. In the last decade or so some packing houses have recruited African immigrants, particularly Somalis, to move to rural areas and work in the plants. Again, that’s just a guess, but some of the locations fit.

UPDATE: Commenter mordant.espier says,

I think you’re wrong about African languages and meatpacking in the midwest. I know that Omaha has a significant Sudanese community, about 7,000, many of whom are refugees and asylum seekers.  In Minneapolis, there are a number of Somali. They are there because of the US government, and even more because religious and charitable organizations, especially the Episcopal Church and Catholic Charities, have provided support through all stages of the immigration process.  The existance of a group of refugees who are able to enlist the support of locals has created such pockets.

Anyway, moving on.You can also get side-by-side comparisons of two states. This shows the percentage of the population speaking Arabic in California and Michigan:

Number and percent of speakers of various languages:

You can compare the number of speakers in 2000 and 2005:

If you go to “Language by State” in that last link and select a language, you can then look at “ability to speak English”. Annoyingly, it only shows raw numbers, not percentages, so you have to do the calculations yourself. But here’s the breakdown for German in Michigan; clearly the vast majority of people who speak German also say they speak English “very well”:

You can also get an age breakdown (again, just raw numbers) for each language, by state. Here’s a partial list for Chinese:

I’m warning you now, the site can turn into an enormous time-suck. You think you’ll just look up the state you live in, say, and then you get started comparing things, and the next thing you know, it’s a half hour later.

UPDATE 2: Commenters have also pointed out that a) “Chinese” is as much of a thrown-together category as “African” (does it mean Cantonese? Mandarin?) and b) the site doesn’t have any information about use of American Sign Language, both great points.

Rudo M. sent us a great example of how “normal” is socially constructed. The photos below are of the box containing a Vidal Sassoon hair dryer for “normal” hair:

It’s also, “good” hair, as is said, in so many words, the blurb on the box said so:

Not too fine or coarse,  normal hair is the most manageable hair type with the largest range of possible styles.  Though it’s fun to experiment, even the easiest-to-care-for hair requires a regimen of regular maintenance.  Proper styling tools with varying heats are crucial for keeping a healthy-looking shine, maintaining balance, and adding…

Yeah, so just in case it wasn’t clear already, “normal” hair is the bestest!  It’s “not too fine or too coarse,” has the “largest range of possible styles,” is “fun,” and is totally the “easiest-to-care-for”!

Rudo is an African woman who wears her hair natural, so she knew right away that Vidal Sassoon didn’t count her hair as “normal.”  So, what were the other options?  If you’re not normal, what are you? Well, according to Vidal Sassoon, you are, of course, “fine” or “coarse.”

But a lot of good this does Rudo, since even the models on the “coarse” box are white with essentially straight hair!  So much for a range of hair types!  Well, at least we know that even white women with straight hair can be abnormal!

And, just in case you didn’t know already that being abnormal means being WRONG, coarse hair is “hard-to-style,” fine hair is limp, and both tend to “frizz.”   What a difference from Vidal Sassoon practically falling over itself praising normal hair.

Here’s another example, sent in by @adentweets.  There’s “normal” and there’s “thick” hair.

Cara McC. sent us a Covergirl commercial selling foundation for “normal,” “oily,” and “sensitive” skin. Again, they include a range of skin types (and probably include women who represent three different races) in order to point to the diversity of skin types, but nonetheless label one “normal” (the one represented by the white woman).

For more examples of whiteness as normal and people of color as deviant (or, if we measure by Vidal Sassoon, non-existent), see our posts on Michelle Obama’s “flesh-colored” gown, Johnson’s lotion for “normal to darker skin,” bandaids and other “flesh-colored” things, why Sotomayor may be “biased,” families vs. ethnic families, and people of color add “spice.”

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.

Keely W., Sophie J., and Austin C. sent in this 20-second commercial for KFC in which a white guy surrounded by black people makes the “awkward” situation all better by giving them fried chicken:

So, first of all, feeling awkward because you’re the only person with your particular racial make up in a group is called white privilege.  Most racial minorities find themselves the only or one of the only members of their group all of the time.  Calling the situation “awkward” just suggests that white people are, or should be, uncomfortable around black people.

But, second, is it racist that the guy soothes the situation by sharing fried chicken?  In the U.S., the idea that black people eat a lot of fried chicken is a stereotype (applied recently to Obama).  But this is an Australian commercial and KFC is saying that there is no such association in Australia.

I don’t know if that’s true.  But if it is, it raises interesting questions as to (1)  just how cognizant companies should have to be about various stereotypes around the world and (2) whether the biased histories of some countries must be more attended to than others.

A Guardian article quotes a professor arguing that the U.S. has “…a tendency to think that their history is more important than that of other countries.”

Ouch.  Does it hurt because it’s true?

I think these are tough questions.  What do you think?

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.

Binyavanga Wainaina does an excellent job, in this 3-minute video, describing ways that “Africa” tends to be written about in the West. See how many of the tropes you recognize:

To paraphrase Jose, at Thick Culture, it’s important to be engaged with the world, but our engagement shouldn’t be entirely on our terms. And, especially, not terms in which the Western world gets to construct itself as the savior of the less fortunate (e.g., Avatar).

Such ideas make it seem as if underdeveloped parts of the world are somehow inherently deficient (culturally or otherwise). When, in fact, insofar as underdeveloped parts of Africa or other continents need saving, it is partly (largely?) because of (1) a history of colonialism that stole their resources and disrupted their societies and (2) the current global economic system that continues to put them at a devastating disadvantage.

See also: The Single Story of “Africa”

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.