race/ethnicity: Blacks/Africans

James Watson won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA. He’s a pretty big deal.

The other day he said some very unfortunate things. The article from which I stole this information summarized those things as follows:

The controversy began with an article in The Times of London in October that quoted Dr. Watson, who was on a book tour, as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” According to the article, he said that “there are many people of color who are very talented,” and he hoped people were equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

Well, it turns out that a test of his DNA revealed that he has 16 times more African origin genes than the typical European person: “about the same amount of African DNA that would show up if one great-grandparent were African.”

That’s some awesome irony.

Here is a nice discussion of the scientific merit of his assertion and it’s testability by Janis Prince Inniss from the Everyday Sociology Blog supported by W. W. Norton & Co.

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.

Newsweek had an article today wondering if girl’s Halloween costumes might be too risque. I wasn’t surprised (I remember being shocked when I saw young girls dressed up as Spice Girls in 1998) so I decided to look around the Internet to find other questionable costumes. Not surprisingly, Halloween costumes are markers of not only gender and heterosexuality, but of race and class as well.

And look at how race is marked with some of the children’s costume models (2 cats, and a dancer):

Anyway, happy Halloween!

“Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization” (2005) is useful for showing that non-procreational sex and sexual enjoyment are not “modern,” and that using and enjoying sexually explicit images isn’t new, either. I liked the first two episodes in the series, especially the second one, which shows how many explicit images there are in religious buildings and texts from the Middle Ages in Europe. Be warned, you need to watch these before showing them to be sure you can get away with it with your audience–for many students, even the artwork and religious drawings would probably lead to outrage today (which can be an interesting discussion in and of itself).

“Fenceline” addresses institutional racism, environmental pollution, and activism by looking at residents in a town in Louisiana and the divisions that arise between blacks and whites about the possibility of toxic waste contamination. It could be useful for discussing environmental issues or looking at why two groups in the same community could come to such different conclusions about what is going on.

These images are a 3-part ad for a Discovery channel reality show. The first page had the guy with his face being painted and says “Live like a tribesman.” The second page had him running and says “Train like a soldier.” And then, as you can see in the previous post, they show him wrestling with a black African “tribesman,” I guess. It appears this is a reality show where we see if a white guy can learn to be a primitive tribesman and show his superiority to the actual “tribesmen” (I’m not sure how I feel about that term).

NEW! Lobby Card from Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs:

These two pictures were in the same slide show released by AP and picked up all over the mass media. After instant outrage from various quarters, they were taken down… but some of us got copies before they were able to erase history. Here are the pictures with their original captions, note that the white couple “find[s]” and the black individual “loot[s].”

Caption: Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery.

Caption: A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans.

This image was passed along by a colleague’s student.