race/ethnicity

Tracy R. sent in the trailer for the movie “Good Hair,” a documentary by Chris Rock:

This movie looks awesome. It humorously addresses the social construction of “good” hair, which means, of course, straight hair. As we see in the trailer, African American women often feel pressured to wear their hair straight in order to be seen as attractive; this is similar to how lighter skin is often defined as more attractive than darker skin, even by other African Americans (and Latinos). It’s also interesting that the pursuit of “good” hair has created a global market for human hair.

On the topic of African American women and weaves, Sexual Buzz sent in this KGB “Natural Weave” commercial (KGB is a service where you can get answers to questions via text) that plays on the “angry sassy Black woman” image.

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

Mary M., of Cooking with the Junior League (go read it now! It’s awesome!) sent in photos she took of several pages from House Dressing, a cookbook published by the Windsor Square-Hancock Park Historical Society in 1978 (Hancock Park is a wealthy section of L.A.). The cookbook contains a section called “Kitchen Spanish,” which, as Mary says, “pretty much amounts to phrases you can use to boss around your help.” They are quite thorough, providing terms not just for cooking but for many other household tasks, and specific terms for wool vs. silk clothing. Here are images of a couple of the pages:

And here we have my favorites, “This is still dirty” and “Do it very thoroughly this time”:

And to think, when I first read the phrase “Kitchen Spanish” I assumed it was a geographically confused title for the Tex-Mex recipe section. Also, given that the pronunciation guides don’t include instructions on which syllable to emphasize, I can only imagine what kind of directions the employees actually received.

It made me think of the book Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence, by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. She discusses the tensions and conflicts that often arise between immigrant (largely Latina) housekeepers/nannies and their (mostly White and female) wealthy employers over how tasks should be done. Domestic workers generally expressed a wish to be told what to do, but not how to do it (and not watched while they worked), while employers felt they had to provide a lot of micromanagement if they wanted tasks done to their standards. Many instances where employees quit or employers fired them resulted from the conflict over this issue.

My guess would also be that many of the individuals contributing to and buying this cookbook would not be cooking anything from it themselves. The cookbook probably served as a form of symbolic domesticity for wealthy women to share recipes, while the women doing much of the actual cooking and cleaning in their households were present only implicitly as the recipients of the instructions on these pages. As Mary pointed out, something similar was probably true of all the “signature recipes” of First Ladies are often shown serving in photo ops–it seems likely that many of them had nothing to do with the preparation and may not have even supplied the recipe. Didn’t John McCain’s wife (I know, not a First Lady, but she was a hopeful) post a recipe on the campaign website that turned out to be taken from another cooking website?

NEW! (July ’10): Jason K. sent in another example, this one published in 1976:

Carl G. sent in this cartoon, found at Abraham Lincoln’s Classroom, that ran during the 1864 Presidential election campaign and played on voters’ fears of racial mixing:

The following text accompanied the cartoon:

The Miscegenation Ball at the Headquarters of the Lincoln Central Campaign Club, Corner of Broadway and Twenty Third Street New York Sept. 22d. 1864 being a perfect fac simile of the room &c. &c. (From the New York World Sept. 23d. 1864). No sooner were the formal proceedings and speeches hurried through with, than the room was cleared for a “negro ball,” which then and there took place! Some members of the “Central Lincoln Club” left the room before the mystical and circling rites of languishing glance and mazy dance commenced. But that Many remained is also true. This fact We Certify, “that on the floor during the progress of the ball were many of the accredited leaders of the Black Republican party, thus testifying their faith by works in the hall and headquarters of their political gathering. There were Republican Office-Holders, and prominent men of various degrees, and at least one Presidential Elector On The Republican Ticket.

I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen, so it’s good to see that outright lying in political campaigns isn’t new.

It’s interesting that all the couples feature White men and Black women. Usually opponents to abolition or desegretation depicted White women with Black men, sometimes voluntarily, other times showing Black men as sexually aggressive predators who threaten White women’s virtue.

And of course, while they weren’t generally having “Negro balls,” many White men at the time were sexually involved with Black women, often (though not always) women they owned as slaves and who had little ability to say no to, or do anything about, their sexual advances. So the real outrage here would be not so much that White men were having (often coercive) sex with Black women, but that Black women and White men would be couples, socializing openly and in a situation of “universal freedom” that would put Black women on a more equal footing relative to their White partners (or, anyway, closer to the level of equality White women had with White men, which was more than Black women had but clearly left a lot to be desired).

On another note, Carl points out that even though this is a cartoon meant to incite fears of racial mixing among Whites, the African American women are not drawn in a way that makes them look grotesque or monstrous like so many cartoons at the time did.

The Women’s Media Center has compiled a series of clips exposing the racist and sexist discourse surrounding Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court:

Via Racialicious.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Why did Bloomsbury Press choose this cover for a YA novel about a short-haired black girl? Maybe because, according to publishers, “black covers don’t sell.”

Justine Larbalestier, author of Liar, says she wanted an American cover similar to the Australian cover, which depicted the word “liar” in red letters. But Bloomsbury “has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that’s what they wanted.” So why a white girl? Larbalestier says not all the girls Bloomsbury proposed were white, but the one they went with may have to do with some upsetting prejudices in the publishing and bookselling industries. She writes:

Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA-they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section-and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all.

So basically bookstores are acting like restaurants in the Jim Crow South, segregating “black covers” in a special section, or refusing to allow them at all. This may be causing presses like Bloomsbury to whitewash their covers, resulting in confusion and anger, at least among Larbalestier’s readers. One blogger asks,

Did the publishers not want to put a black girl on the cover for fear of not selling enough books to their white customers? Or is the cover supposed to be what Micah [the main character] really looks like, and her description in the book is just another of her lies?

Larbalestier says she never intended for Micah’s race to be in doubt. Nor, obviously, did she want parents not to buy the book because “my teens would find the cover offensive.” But the whitewashing of covers has implications beyond Larbalestier’s readership. She asks, “How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white?” And she points out that the idea that “black covers don’t sell” is a self-fulfilling prophecy:

I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them. Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with “black covers” don’t sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with “white covers.”

Larbalestier says that publishers have historically underestimated the size of the African-American leadership, and that the music industry has no problem selling album with black artists on the cover. The supposed inviability of the “black cover” may have more to do with racist assumptions — that white people won’t be interested in a book with a black protagonist, or that black people won’t buy books — than they do with actual commercial realities. According to Larbalestier, these commercial realities haven’t even really been tested yet. But they could be — if Bloomsbury does what Larbalestier now wants, and puts a short-haired black girl on the cover of Liar.

Ain’t That A Shame [Justine Larbalestier]
YA Critics Feel Cheated By Liar Cover Girl [GalleyCat]
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire [The LibrariYAn]

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Anna North recently received an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and is working on a novel.  She writes about books for Jezebel, among other topics.

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

This image from the FAIL blog nicely illustrates the distinction between tanning to have darker skin and being born with darker skin– when is dark skin acceptable/desirable and when isn’t it? Presumably, this advertisement comes from somewhere near the U.S./Mexico border, and although it is probably meant to be funny, the point it makes is real. A white person (the blond pictured in the ad) can tan until they’re dark– which is acceptable and often highly desirable (which still surprises me in the day and age of skin cancer). But, getting a very dark tan, or being born with darker skin in the first place, means that near the border you might be “held by security” (although with the blond on the billboard, I doubt that mistake would be made).

And here are some images of desirable tans from tanning company websites:

We often talk about things being gendered or racialized on this blog, but we haven’t talked much about how race is gendered and gender racialized.  In a previous post, I wrote:

According to American cultural stereotypes, black people, both men and women, are more masculine than white people. Black men are seen as, somehow, more masculine than white men: they are, stereotypically, more aggressive, more violent, larger, more sexual, and more athletic. Black women, too, as seen as more masculine than white women: they are louder, bossier, more opinionated and, like men, more sexual and more athletic.

Conversely, Asian people, both men and women, are often stereotyped as more feminine than white people.  Asian men are seen as small and less muscular than white men; Asian women are seen as more passive and deferential than white women.

Interracial marriage rates bear out this asymmetry: black women are less likely to marry white men than vice versa and Asian men are less likely to  marry white women than vice versa (see here and here).

The idea, specifically, that Asian women are more passive and deferential than white women, has been used to explain white men’s fetish for Asian women, Western men’s sex tourism in Asian countries, and Western men’s use of Asian mail-order bride services.   Some of these men, it is argued, want a subordinate partner and they find it difficult to meet a white/American woman who is willing to play that role.  You can actually hear a male sex tourist make this argument in this post.

I introduce all of these ideas in order to frame a screenshot sent in by Megan S.  The screenshot is of the front page of a website (antimisandry.com) devoted to fighting misandry, or the “hatred of males as a sex.”  The website purports to “cur[e] feminist indoctrination.”  You’ll see that it is also advertising a dating site specializing in matching up white men with Chinese women:

So… I’m going to guess that, in this case, “anti-misandry” isn’t so much about encouraging women to stop hating men as it is about telling men they are entitled to a woman who will defer to them.

Either that or… unfortunate random ad placement.

Megan also thought this post on men choosing fictional female characters as lovers was related; you might also check out our post on the documentary Guys and Dolls about men who have relationships with expensive and “functional” (if you know what I mean) life-size dolls.

UPDATE: The comments thread on this post is closed.  I strongly suggest reading them, especially if you think that this post was reaching. Very interesting.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Sam Yoon is running for mayor of Boston. Yoon is Korean Korean-American. It only makes sense, then (*sarcasm*), that the Boston Phoenix illustrated a story about his race against incumbent Mayor Tom Menino with the follow picture:

Screen shot for context and posterity:

Race is made to matter. Sotomayor can’t just be a judge, Gates can’t just be a suspect, and Yoon can’t just be a candidate. If you are not white, then your race will likely be used to denigrate you, make fun of you, or question your competence and entitlements. This may not happen all the time, but it will happen often enough.

Via Resist Racism and Slant Eye for the Round Eye.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.