Click here to watch a two-and-a-half minute video on CNN that addresses last year’s spate of race- and ethnicity-themed parties (see here). What is perhaps most amazing about it is the unbelievably impoverished analysis of what is happening and the fact that the video for some reason decides to end on an uplifting note (“their classmates had an important lesson on the danger of stereotyping”).
Thanks to Richard for this lead.
These advertisements, the first two for a brand of jeans called Apple Bottoms, all fetishize black women’s behinds:
Underneath Beyonce’s name it says: “The body, the booty, the backstabbing.”
In this two-page spread, the body isn’t necessarily black… but it might be an interesting question as to whether the viewers assume, or might be expected to assume, it is.
Text:
MY BUTT is big
and round like the letter c
and ten thousand lunges
have made it rounder
but not smaller
and that’s just fine.
It’s a space heater
for myside of the bed
It’s my ambassador
to those who walk behind me
It’s a border collie
that herds skinny women
away from the best deals
at clothing sales.
My butt is big
and that’s just fine
and those who might scorn it
are invited to kiss it.
I think it’s interesting the way this poem pits “skinny women” against women with a big butt… so valorizing the big butt but only by taking down the skinny (white?) girl.
Divide and conquer.
You might pair these images with this post about a Pilates DVD.
EU observers agreed the vote processes were flawed and results were denounced as rigged by the main opposition party. Protesters were shot by police leading to rioting and repeated demonstrations. Hundreds of thousands of Kenyans fled their homes and hundreds lie dead as the conflict became an ethnically charged civil war.
Two years ago I had the good fortune of spending four days in Kenya. To my amazement Nairobi’ downtown felt like a Midwestern city: orderly, friendly, uncongested, clean, and mostly absent of beggars. But Nairobi has over three million people, a half million of which live in Africa’s largest slum.
Poverty in many rural villages was evident, but the Kenyan people, especially the women, work very hard. In the first photo is a typical rural scene where the women do back breaking work in the fields.
During our brief stay the papers headlined several major political events: President Kibaki, who is still the uncompromising president, fired his entire cabinet. The next day he suspended all of parliament. On the third day, major public demonstrations took place in the streets by the opposition party calling for new presidential elections.
I watched these demonstrations on the streets of Nairobi and felt the tension and anger. The demonstrations, however, ended without incident. But apparently it has not been uncommon for people to die in Nairobi demonstrations.
I took the 2nd photograph of the demonstrations in the central city. Notice that it could pass for football game day in a small US city.
What can sociology add to help us understand Kenya’s tragic, unfolding story? Here are three perspectives that may help:
Social Class Perspective: The images we are given by the American network media are suggestive of warring savages. In fact, the riots and ethnic strife are phenomena of the poverty class, not the wealthy and middle classes, although the leaders of both warring factions are wealthy politicians. Sharp inequality and festering poverty lay beneath the surface of this formerly peaceful country.
Historical Conflict Perspective: The British spent decades trying to keep the Luo and Kikuyu divided to preserve colonial order. (Now these are the two major warring ethnic groups.) During the decolonization process the British drew electoral boundaries to cut the representation of groups they thought might cause trouble. This only fanned the flames of tension among these groups. In the past few years tribal factions fighting over cattle rights in the Rift Valley have left over 100,000 refugees. These conditions helped ignite recent spontaneous rioting, looting and killing.
Race/Ethnicity Perspective: Both sides of the conflict are accusing the other of genocide, and both may be right. It will take months if not years to assess the horrendous damage. Ethnic hatreds run deep and prolonged, but the first cause of this war was political. It was the common practice of rigging elections followed by a refusal of the President to negotiate a coalition government.
These three confessions, from Post Secret this week, illustrate that “ethnic” hair carries meaning (in the first authenticity, in the second ugliness, and in the third it’s left open) and how some women feel about that:
These are Italian candies with chocolate inside. You can read a description of them here (scroll down the page quite a bit). I’m not sure what the point of the shiny dot on the forehead is.
Thanks to Denise H. for finding this image! 
NEW! Kathleen T. sent in this photo she took in Segovia, Spain, of a popsicle that had a stereotypical Asian figure on it:
Notice that the “Asian” face is in the shape of a lemon; Kathleen suggested that the idea might be “lemon = yellow = Asian.”
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Stereotype threat: The difference in performance measured when the belief that people like you (blacks, women, etc) are worse at a particular task than the comparison group (whites, men, etc) is made salient.
The left side of the bar graph is the performance of blacks and whites on a task (on which whites are stereotypically believed to be superior) when stereotype threat is activated (blacks and whites are reminded of the stereotype in some way). The right side of the bar graph is the performance of blacks and whites on the same task when the stereotype remains unactivated. Note the remarkable difference. This demonstrates the ways in which stereotypes, when made salient, affect our performances on “objective” tests.
From: The Effects of Stereotype Threat on the Standardized Test Performance of College Students by J Aronson, CM Steelel, MF Salinas, MJ Lustina. In Readings About the Social Animal, 8th edition, edited by E. Aronson. Stolen from Wikipedia.
This campaign ad from 1988 is part of the larger politicization of the black underclass. “Willie Horton” and the “welfare queen” both emerged as symbols during this period with which to demonize poor blacks for political clout. Ultimately, using the name Willie Horton became a powerful tool to criticize politicians for being weak on crime and not protecting the innocent white population from the guilty black population.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y[/youtube]
Ultimately, increasing toughness of the criminal justice system led to a situation, today, where about 1/2 of all black men are in the prison system. See an interesting entry on Willie Horton on wikipedia here.
This website created by the American Anthropological Association is a great way to explore the social construction of race. There’s an awesome timeline that traces political and scientific trends where you can click on any part of it and get more information. It’s a great resource.It also includes this great 7 minute video called “A Girl Like Me”:
I’d actually love to get some feedback on this video. I really like it, but last time I showed it (in a social psychology portion of a Race and Ethnicity course), the class had a hard time recovering. It was depressing and I wasn’t very successful in DOING something SOCIOLOGICAL with it. Any ideas?
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.
