race/ethnicity

Pam Oliver sent in this graph that shows disparities in Blacks’ and Whites’ new prison sentences:

While blacks are more likely to be sentenced for all the offenses shown, clearly drug offenses stand out as the area with the biggest racial disparity in prison sentences. The other thing that stands out is the huge jump that occurred in the late 1980s and how much higher the disparity was by the 1990s than in the 1980s. Either African Americans suddenly started doing a whole lot more drugs, Whites stopped doing them altogether…or Blacks started getting arrested and sentenced at a much higher rate than Whites for drug offenses.

From an article by Oliver:

…the rise in imprisonment since the 1970s is not explained by crime rates, but by changes in policies related to crime…Determinate sentencing, which eliminates judicial discretion, longer sentences for drug offenses, increases in funding for police departments and large increases in prison capacity, the exacerbation of racial tensions and fears following the civil rights movement and the riots of the 1970s, and the politicization of crime as an election issue all seem to have played some role.

In Focus 21 (3) pp. 28-31 Spring 2001.

Other sociologists have pointed out that Whites tend to sell drugs inside buildings (houses, dorm rooms, workplaces) to people they know, while Blacks are more likely to engage in open-air sales to strangers. It’s much easier for police to see and arrest people engaged in open-air sales because they’re visible and, being out in public, can often be stopped and frisked without a warrant. Clearly it would be more difficult to know about drug sales taking place in private residences, and there would be more procedural hurdles to searching for them. And when you’re selling to strangers, you’re more likely to see to an undercover cop or to sell to people who don’t really have a problem saying who they bought their drugs from. So the very manner in which they sell makes it much more likely that Blacks will be caught and arrested, even though enormous amounts of drugs are bought and sold by Whites.

You can find a lot more graphs and articles on this topic (including disparities broken down by state) at Pam Oliver’s website. Also see this post about international imprisonment rates. Thanks, Pam!

Oh, and Lisa’s at the American Sociological Association meetings, which is why you’re stuck with just me this week.

The presence of lead paint on toys made in China this year brought the threat of lead poisoning to the forefront of the American mind. Parents, pundits, and politicians called on the U.S. government to DO SOMETHING. But lead poisoning was a problem for low-income families long before the China toy scandal and there was little to no outcry in the popular press.

Lead poisoning in children can increase the risk of cognitive delay, hyperactivity, and antisocial behavior. Many older homes and apartments available for rental in low-income neighborhoods still have lead paint and ingesting paint dust and paint chips is the most common way to get lead poisoning. Blood tests show that children living in poverty show much higher exposure to lead than other children.

According to William Ryan, if you are a landlord, renting out a residence with lead paint without making tenants aware of it is a crime. But, instead of enforcing compliance among landlords, the most common response to the threat of lead poisoning has been to warn mothers. Here is a representative poster:

Ryan writes that, while lead poisoning is often described as a problem involving negligent or ignorant mothers, it:

…is more accurately analyzed as the result of a systematic program of lawbreaking by one interest group in the community [landlords], with the toleration and encouragement of the public authority charged with enforcing that law.

So as long as the threat of lead poisoning was more-or-less restricted to the poor in the U.S., it was considered the problem of individuals (mothers) and the state refrained from doing much more than promoting individual responsibility. But, as soon as the lead poisoning threat affected middle class children through the toys from China, state intervention seemed appropriate.

Ryan again:

To ignore these continued and repeated law violations [by landlords who rent residences with lead paint], to ignore the fact that the supposed law enforcer actually cooperates in lawbreaking [by ignoring landlord infractions], and then to load a burden of guilt on the mother of a dead or dangerously ill child is an egregious distortion of reality. And to do so under the guise of public-spirited and humanitarian service to the community is intolerable.

CITATION: Ryan, William. 1998. Blaming the Victim. In Race, Class, and Gender in the United States. See also his book.

Did you know that the U.S. has a higher imprisonment rate than even Russia?  And the U.S. imprisonment rate is about six times that of many European countries. 

(This first figure was made by Kieran Healy.)

When and how did this happen?  It started in the 1980s with Reagan’s “war on drugs.”  The figure below shows the increase in the incarceration rate beginning in the 1980s (# of people out of 100,000).

So our imprisonment rate is the result of imprisoning people who break drug laws, NOT violent criminals or even people who commit property crimes.  The increase is largely due to more aggressive policing of drug law violations. 

And, as you can see in the figure below, the aggressive policing of drug law violations can be found disproportionately in black neighborhoods.  (White and black people take drugs at a very similar rate, but black neighborhoods are more heavily policing and drugs more common among blacks than white have carried heavier sentences — i.e., crack versus cocaine until recently).  This figure shows that the increase in the incarceration rate is mostly an increase in the black incarceration rate. 

Thanks to the amazing Pam Oliver for reminding me that this last graph comes from her work on the incarceration rate (found here).

This is why Gwen was pessimistic about the New Yorker cover.  Another product sold at the Texas Republican Convention:

Also sold at the Texas Republican Convention: If Obama is President… Will We Still Call it the Whitehouse?

Found here via Copyranter.

This is the fourth installment in a series on why and how people of color are included in advertising aimed primarily at white people.  In the first installment, I argued that people of color are included in such advertising in order to associate the product with a racial stereotype (i.e., hipness, intelligence).  In the second, I showed how people of color can be used to give a product “color” or “flavor.”  And, in the third, I argued that people of color are used to invoke ideas of “hipness,” “modernity,” “progressive” politics and other related ideas.  In this post, I suggest that people of color are used to trigger the idea of human variation itself.

In this first ad the idea that each body is different is illustrated by including women of different fitness levels, ages, and races.

In this ad, Levi’s uses a woman who appears Latina to sell their jeans, which come in various fits because there is “a style for every story.”  The idea is that people are different; not everyone wants the same cut of jeans.

In this Toyota ad, the copy says “For every expression, there’s a Toyota.”  People are unique and so, apparently, are Toyotas.  Race is used to communicate the notion of human diversity.

This is an ad for Playtex bras with half sizes.  The implication is that people’s bodies are more variable than the A, B, C etc sizes suggest, so half sizes accomodate that variety.  I think this ad is particularly interesting because the model is racially ambiguous.  Maybe she’s half Asian, Latina, or white, and she’s being used to sell a product that now comes in half sizes.

NEW:

Next up: Including people of color so as to suggest that the company is concerned with racial equality.

See the other posts in the series:
(1) Including people of color so as to associate the product with the racial stereotype. 
(2) Including people of color to invoke (literally) the idea of “color” or “flavor.”
(3) Triggering ideas like “hipness,” “modernity,” and “progress.”

In his book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (2005; New York: Touchstone), James Loewen discusses cities that had a “no Blacks after dark” policy. They were called “sundown towns” because African Americans were actively informed that they should be out of town by sundown; if not, they were subject to arrest or violence. Of course, the purpose of these regulations was to keep Blacks from settling permanently in these towns. If they couldn’t be in town limits after dark, they clearly couldn’t live there. Here is an example of a sundown town: this ad encouraging people to move to Siloam Springs, Arkansas, says, over in the lower right corner, “No Malaria, No Mosquitoes, No Negroes.”

Found here.

NOTE: As Mr. Loewen pointed out in a comment, I had originally said he discussed “cities in the South,” as though that was all his book concentrated on. That was poor wording on my part, as I had been reading the sections of the book that covered some areas in the South I was specifically interested in (particularly Oklahoma). I did not mean to imply that sundown towns existed only in the South or that Mr. Loewen only discusses the South.

Breck sent in a link to this post about the controversial New Yorker front cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Muslim extremists (I found the full-size image here):

As you may guess, there have been some quite negative reactions to this cartoon. The Obama campaign did not particularly like having him portrayed as an American flag-burning Muslim, oddly enough. And apparently this has gotten wide enough press coverage that even my mom had heard about it and was distressed, and my mom doesn’t follow politics too closely.

I’m kind of fascinated by this entire situation. When I went to Oklahoma last month to visit my family, my uncle informed me that Obama is a Muslim with some secret evil motive for wanting to be president that the rest of us can’t even imagine because we aren’t diabolical enough to think of it. When I pointed out that Obama is not a Muslim, my uncle said he used to be, which is the same thing, and that if Obama really loved America he would change his middle name from Hussein. I gave up on the conversation at that point and returned to pulling ticks off the dog, since that was a lot more pleasant.

What I’m saying is, I have first-hand knowledge of the people out there who honestly believe Obama is some type of Muslim extremist with an evil plot for when he gets into office. Fox News reported on the “fist bump” as a possible terrorist gesture. This distrust of Obama is out there. So this cartoon could spark a really interesting discussion of political humor/satire and the boundaries between “appropriate” and “inappropriate.” I assume–and I’m just assuming here–that this cover was supposed to be a commentary on the fact that some people (and Fox News) are convinced Obama has a connection to Muslims and/or terrorists and, as a result, has evil plans for the future of America. But the cover could also simply reinforce those ideas–I really hope my uncle doesn’t suddenly take up reading and pass by a magazine rack in the near future, because this cover will prove to him that he’s been right all along. So what’s the line between social commentary that points out and/or ridicules issues such as these and just reinforcing the misconceptions or stereotypes that you claim to be undermining?

It could also be used for a discussion of how we read things into images based on our own assumptions. I mean, I have no evidence this cover is supposed to be a commentary (however misguided, dumb, or inappropriate it might be) on misconceptions about Obama; I’m just presuming based on what I know about The New Yorker, its liberal slant, and my recent experience with my uncle. If you showed me the exact same image and told me it came from Fox News, I am certain my reaction would be different because of my assumptions about what Fox News would be trying to say with the image. I can check that tendency to make assumptions about the intention of the creators of an image, and I try to, but I think it’s always good to point out to students that we don’t just passively see an image; our own experiences, assumptions, and so on influence how we interpret them. This is part of the reason that, once an image is put out there, the intention of the creator doesn’t necessarily have much to do with how people interpret or use it.

Thanks, Breck!

On an unrelated note: If you’ve noticed my absence from posting the last few days, I can only say that the first 2 seasons of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” turned out to be way more compelling than I was expecting and watching them can be quite the time sucker.

I have posted previously on the exoticization of the Other through tourism (see especially this post on hula girls in Hawaii).  This is part of an exoticization of the Other that occurs within state borders as well as across.   bell hooks talks about about how some white people see having sex with a person of color as an exciting adventure, like a trip to an exotic location, in her essay “Eating the Other.”   See also Race, Ethnicity and Sexuality by Joane Nagel and Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Hill Collins.  You can see visual representations of it here and here.

Jacob G. sent us this amazing ad suggesting that dating a person of another race is like going to an exotic location. 

Text:

he wanted to show me exotic places.

Um. Wow.

NEW!  From Postsecret: