race/ethnicity: Whites/Europeans

First the marketing team for an energy drink out of Poland, called “Black,” hired a Black person, Mike Tyson, to personify its product.  Then, they surround him with White, female models and have the convicted rapist call himself a “beast” that can’t control himself.  Tag lines include “that’s the power of Black” and “Black power.”

So we have, in one ad campaign, the fetishization of Black men, the White supremacist portrayal of White women as the ultimate female, their objectification (see #3, he actually hands one out in the second ad), the trivialization of his crime (he can’t control himself, LOL right!?), the use of animalistic language to refer to Black people, and the appropriation of the Black Power movement.  Anyone see anything else?  Does it matter that this comes out of Poland and not the U.S.?

Thanks to Tom Megginson at Work That Matters for the heads up.

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.

Cross-posted at Corporate Governance.

Sociologists Richard Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff began studying ascendance to the top corporate office 20 years ago and, while the population of CEOs is far from diverse, they report that they have been surprised to see as many women and minorities as they have.  Today there are 80 white women, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans at the head of Fortune 500 companies.

In a discussion about their book, The New CEOs, at The Society Pages, they ask whether the rise of non-white/non-male CEOs is really a disruption in the distribution of power.  Despite protestations to the contrary — “all CEOs, it seems, worked their way up from the bottom,” they say with tongue in cheek — almost all come from wealthy backgrounds.  The rising diversity, in other words, doesn’t include class diversity.

With one exception: African Americans.  Most African American CEOs, they show, did not grow up in wealthy families.  “Many,” they write, “grew up with parents who were factory workers, postmen, custodians, day-care workers, or house cleaners.”  They refrain from speculating as to why they see this difference.

So, what’s next?  Zweigenhaft and Domhoff make some guesses as to the near future. The people positioned to be our next Fortune 500 CEOs will have graduated from college, got an MBA or law degree, will be currently earning more than $250,000 a year, and now hold a senior executive position.  Given these parameters, they conclude that:

…about two-thirds of those a step from the CEO office were white men, about 19% were white women, slightly fewer than 3% were African Americans, about 4% were Latinos, and about 8% were Asian Americans.

As the graph shows, compared to minority men, white women are far more likely to be rising into CEO positions in the near future.  Women of color, as they say, “almost disappear” in the data.  They explain that this likely has to do with their double minority status.  When hiring and promoting, people tend to look for ways of connecting with the potential employee.  A white man (usually doing the hiring) will see at least one thing in common with a white woman or a man of color.   As an example, they cite a study of executives with MBAs from Harvard:

…female Jewish executives all agreed that being female was more of an impediment to their careers than being a Jew, but many quickly emphasized that being Jewish, or different in any other way, was not irrelevant. As one put it, “It’s the whole package. I heard secondhand from someone as to how I would be perceived as a pushy, Jewish broad who went and got an MBA. Both elements, being Jewish and being a woman, together with having the MBA, were combined to create a stereotype I had to work against from the first day.” Another woman explained, “It’s part of the question of whether you fit the mold. Are you like me or not? If too much doesn’t fit, it impacts you negatively.”

These dynamics affect your entire career trajectory, of course, but Zweigenhaft and Domhoff believe they become even more intense as people approach the top office.  They conclude:

Culture (in the form of cultural capital), education, and class are all still in play. While gender and color remain the best predictors of who will make it into the upper echelons of the corporate world, beyond that, it’s intersectionality [of different identities together] wherever we look.

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.

Tanita S. sent along a link to an interesting observation made over at Whatever.  John Scalzi, preparing to make lunch, noticed that he had two bags of an identical food product, except one was named “tortillas” and one was named “wraps.”

John did some sleuthing and discovered that the bag of wraps cost 26¢ more than the tortillas.  Moreover, since there were only 6 wraps in the package of wraps, but 8 tortillas in the package of tortillas, each wrap cost 19¢ more than each tortilla.

So, there is an interesting marketing story here.   Mission has figured out that they can sell their product for a higher price if they name it “wraps” (or, at least, they think they can). Let’s crowd source this.  After all, Mission is counting on our collective network of ideas (and a failure to notice the count difference) to push us towards the wraps instead of the tortillas.  What does “wraps” make you think of?  What else is that word linked to that might make a person prefer it?  Would you feel different bringing home a package of wraps?  In other words, what ideas, lying just beneath the surface, are they tapping into with this marketing strategy?

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.

Often, the most socio-economically disadvantaged individuals of a group are used as a wide brush to paint a picture of an entire minority race or ethnicity.  Common examples include stereotyping all Black men as members of the inner-city underclass or as uneducated, unemployed, urban criminals, or all African-American women as “welfare queens.”  In the current cultural and political discourse, Hispanics are often prejudicially construed  as murderous drug-smugglers or as destitute immigrants who illegally cross the border to “drop babies” and exploit U.S. social programs.  As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has argued, these prejudices then disadvantage minorities of all social classes who are stereotyped and experience discrimination regardless of their individual socio-economic status or accomplishments.

However, focusing on the marginal members during the social construction of an entire racial group does not usually occur with Whites.  The existence of poor Whites is often ignored as Caucasians are stereotyped as upper-class—which usually entails assumptions that they are hardworking, highly-moral, successful exemplars of American individualism, as Kirby Moss explains in The Color of Class.  “The Whitest People,” a skit from Carlos Mencia (a controversial comedian who built his career drawing upon his Hispanic background to explore race in America), illustrates the connections between whiteness and heightened class status (sorry about the ad):

Mencia’s construction of whiteness critiques the excesses and frivolousness of the upper-middle class lifestyle often conflated with whiteness.  While Mencia pokes fun at this lifestyle, outside comedy these same stereotypes mean Caucasians are usually viewed positively as many presume the upper class can only be reached through hard work and strong morals.  Whereas minorities are often presumed poor and thus viewed with suspicion, whites are often prejudged favorably.  For instance, Mencia himself mentions that because people are viewed through prejudicial lenses, when whites drink alcohol they are thought “sophisticated” but when Blacks drink they are accused of being “drunks.”  These differential prejudgments based on race are the basis of white privilege that replicates and reinforces both class, and racial stratification.

The open expression of Latino stereotypes and slurs in this video also highlights why Mencia’s comedy is controversial.  Detractors claim he engages in a process symbolic interactionists call trading power for patronage (see Schwalbe et al. 2000).  This process occurs when an individual embodies a marginal identity in order to receive personal benefits that come at the expense of the larger group.  For example, while Mencia’s comedy career benefits from the self-deprecating humor in this video about low wage employment, family violence, and food insecurity his jokes might also reinforce negative stereotypes about Hispanics.

However, Carlos Mencia’s supporters describe the open confrontation of race and racial disadvantage in his comedy as contesting stigma (Goffman) by celebrating a minority group’s ability to persevere despite their marginalization.  To this group, Mencia’s frequent use of ethnic slurs to describe himself and other Latinos is an example of re-appropriation (Galinsky et al.), reclaiming a pejorative label in a way that redefines the meaning of racist slights and infuses the word with positive and empowering meanings.

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Jason Eastman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Coastal Carolina University who researches how culture and identity influence social inequalities.

Thanks to Leticia, Caely, Anjan G., Liz, Bradley K., and Kelsey P. for their patience.  Our SocImages email inbox is a hot mess, and sometimes things fall through the cracks.  This is certainly true for the short video below, one of the responses to the “Shit Girls Say” clip that inspired a round of copycats last December.  We decided to post about it belatedly because it remains a great example of something called a microaggression.

Microaggressions are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative… slights and insults” (source).  These are often subtle.  So the recipient feels badly, but it can be difficult to explain exactly why, especially to someone who isn’t sympathetic to issues of bias.  The Microaggressions Project has hundreds, maybe thousands, of examples.

In this video, Franchesca Leigh poses as a “White girl” and says many of the things that she and other “Black girls” hear routinely.  To Leigh, these are microaggressions.  They variously trivialize and show insensitivity towards race and racism, remind the listener that she is considered different and strange, homogenize and stereotype Black people, and more…

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.

I’m reposting this piece from 2008 in solidarity with Lisa Wade (no relation), whose (non-white) child was described by his teacher as  “the evolutionary link between orangutans and humans.”  It’s an amateur history of the association of Black people with primates. Please feel free to clarify or correct my broad description of many centuries of thought.

The predominant colonial theory of race was the great chain of being, the idea that human races could be lined up from most superior to most inferior.  That is, God, white people, and then an arrangement of non-white people, with blacks at the bottom.

Consider this drawing that appeared in Charles White’s An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables (1799). On the bottom of the image (but the top of the chain) are types of Europeans, Romans, and Greeks.  On the top (but the bottom of the chain) are “Asiatics,” “American Savages,” and “Negros.”  White wrote: “In whatever respect the African differs from the European, the particularity brings him nearer to the ape.”

Nearly 70 years later, in 1868, Ernst Haeckel’s Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte was published.  in the book, this image appeared (his perfect person, by the way, was German, not Greek):

In this image, we see a depiction of the great chain of being with Michelangelo’s sculpture of David Apollo Belvedere at the top (the most perfect human), a black person below, and an ape below him.

Notice that there seems to be some confusion over where the chain ends.  Indeed, there was a lot of discussion as to where to draw the line.  Are apes human?  Are blacks?  Carolus Linneaus, that famous guy who developed the classification system for living things, wasn’t sure.  In his book Systema Naturae (1758), he published this picture, puzzling over whether the things that separating apes from humans were significant.

In this picture (also appearing in White 1799) are depictions of apes in human-like positions (walking, using a cane).  Notice also the way in which the central figure is feminized (long hair, passive demeanor, feminized body) so as to make her seem more human.

Here we have a chimpanzee depicted drinking a cup of tea.  This is Madame Chimpanzee.  She was a travelling attraction showing how human chimps could be.

In any case, while they argued about where to draw the line, intellectuals of the day believed that apes and blacks were very similar.  In this picture, from a book by Robert Knox called The Races of Men (1851), the slant of the brow is used to draw connections between the “Negro” and the “Oran Outan” and differences between those two and the “European.”

The practice of depicting the races hierarchically occurred as late as the early 1900s as we showed in a previous post.

NEW! Nov ’09) The image below appeared in the The Evolution of Man (1874 edition) as part of an argument that blacks are evolutionarily close to apes (source):
During this same period, African people were kept in zoos alongside animals.  These pictures below are of Ota Benga, a Congolese Pygmy who spent some time as an attraction in a zoo in the early 1900s (but whose “captivity” was admittedly controversial at the time).  (There’s a book about him that I haven’t read.  So I can’t endorse it, but I will offer a link.)  Ota Benga saw most of his tribe, including his wife and child, murdered before being brought to the Bronx Zoo.  (It was customary for the people of his tribe to sharpen their teeth.)

The theorization of the great chain of being was not just for “science” or “fun.”  It was a central tool in justifying efforts to colonize, enslave, and even exterminate people.  If it could be established that certain kinds of people were indeed less than, even less than human, then it was acceptable to treat them as such.

This is a “generalizable tactic of oppression,” by the way.  During the period of intense anti-Irish sentiment in the U.S. and Britain, the Irish were routinely compared to apes as well.

So, there you have it.  Connections have been drawn between black people and primates for hundreds of years.  Whatever else you want to think about modern instances of this association — the one Wade and her child are suffering now, but also the Obama sock monkey, the Black Lil’ Monkey doll, and a political cartoon targeting Obama — objections are not just paranoia.

(I’m sorry not to provide a full set of links.  I’ve collected them over the years for my Race and Ethnicity class.  But a lot of the images and information came from here.)

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.

My post on the centrality of whiteness in fashion photos — whether magazine photos, catalogs, or ads — inspired several readers to send in other examples related to this trend.

YetAnotherGirl and Julian S. sent in a link to a Jezebel post about the new J.Crew catalog, which presents the two models in J.Crew clothing amid a group of local children, who are used to help signal the exoticism of the location:

Marianne sent in a couple of ads for Naf Naf, a French fashion brand, that show a slight variation, utilizing ethnic/cultural differences within Europe. They show a “luminous, lightning-blond caucasian woman and the dark, anonymous and yet welcoming bohemians,” seemingly meant to evoke popular imagery of the Romani.

And finally, H. pointed out Louis Vuitton’s “Journey” commercial, which she actually saw at an indie movie theater. It provides an interesting counterpoint, as groups other than Caucasians can be included as central characters in the narrative, as long as they are privileged LV consumers, with others presented in the more peripheral setting-the-tone role. As H. explains,

In this ad they include the story line of the (presumably African?) black man who is dressed in an elegant Western-style linen suit, but who is barefoot and rubbing the dust off of an old family photo. An interesting racial counterpoint — and one which suggests a metanarrative which is not only about race but also quite pointedly about class.

Take a look:

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

A version of this post originally appeared at eGrollman.

Over thirty years ago, Black feminist scholars and activists began emphasizing the importance of recognizing every identity and status of which each individual is comprised.  The crux of the perspective known as intersectionality is that we must account for the intersecting nature of our identities and statuses, as well as the intersecting and mutually-reinforcing relationships among systems of oppression, especially racism, sexism, classism, and heteronormativity.  For example, a full understanding of the lives of Black women cannot come from considering their lives as Black people only, as women only, nor as the sum of these two sets of experiences.

There is solid evidence demonstrating that one’s experiences with discrimination are consequential for one’s mental and physical health; however, these studies generally have not examined whether the relationship between discrimination and health depends upon the number of forms of discrimination individuals experience.  Could it be the case that individuals who face sexist and racist discrimination fare worse in terms of health than those who experience sexist discrimination or racist discrimination only?

In an article I published in the June 2012 issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, I find that the answer is yes, at least among youth. Using a sample of 1,052 Black, Latina/o, and White youth aged 15-25 from the Black Youth Culture Survey of the Black Youth Project, I looked at patterns in discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and class.

First, disadvantaged youth report more frequent exposure to their status-specific form of discrimination. That is, Black and Latina/o youth report more frequent race discrimination than White youth, girls and young women report more frequent gender discrimination than boys and young men, and so on:

Generally, more frequent exposure to each form of discrimination is associated with worse self-rated physical health and more depressive symptoms in the past month.

Youth who are disadvantaged due to multiple statuses (e.g., Black working-class boys, Latina lesbian and bisexual girls) report facing more forms of discrimination and more frequent discrimination overall:

Youth who face multiple forms of discrimination and more frequent discrimination report worse self-rated physical health and more depressive symptoms than youth who face fewer forms and less frequent discrimination:

These findings reiterate the importance of examining the intersections among systems of oppression.  Only examining racial or gender discrimination, for example, would miss the fact that youth who are disadvantaged in more than one way face the greatest amount of discrimination.  Unfortunately, scholarship and popular discussions of forms of disadvantage in isolation from one another continue to gloss over the experiences of individuals whose lives are constrained by multiple systems of oppression.

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Eric Anthony Grollman is a PhD candidate in sociology at Indiana University.  His research focuses on the consequences of prejudice and discrimination on the health, well-being, and worldviews of marginalized groups.  He blogs for the Kinsey Institute at Kinsey Confidential, and maintains a personal blog.