race/ethnicity

Cross-posted at PolicyMic and Racialicious.

In 1984 the U.S. began its ongoing experiment with private prisons. Between 1990 and 2009, the inmate population of private prisons grew by 1,664%  (source). Today approximately 130,000 people are incarcerated by for-profit companies.  In 2010, annual revenues for two largest companies — Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group — were nearly $3 billion.

Companies that house prisoners for profit have a perverse incentive to increase the prison population by passing more laws, policing more heavily, sentencing more harshly, and denying parole.  Likewise, there’s no motivation to rehabilitate prisoners; doing so is expensive, cuts into their profits, and decreases the likelihood that any individual will be back in the prison system.  Accordingly, state prisons are much more likely than private prisons to offer programs that help prisoners: psychological interventions, drug and alcohol counseling, coursework towards high school or college diplomas, job training, etc.

What is good for private prisons, in other words, is what is bad for individuals, their families, their communities, and our country.

This is a deeply unethical system and new research shows that, in addition to being disproportionately incarcerated, racial minorities and immigrants are disproportionately housed in private prisons.  Looking at three states with some of the largest prison populations — California, Texas, and Arizona — graduate student Christopher Petrella reports that racial minorities are over-represented in private prisons by an additional 12%; his colleague, Josh Begley, put together this infographic:

This means that, insofar as U.S. state governments are making an effort to rehabilitate the prison population, those efforts are disproportionately aimed at white inmates.  Petrella argues that this translates into a public disinvestment in the lives of minorities and their communities.

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.

Emily B. sent along this notice for a UC Davis cafeteria Martin Luther King day menu:

On the one hand, the cafeteria is making an effort to mark MLK day and, to be fair, the food choices are traditional “soul food” familiar to (especially Southern) Black populations and the South more generally.  On the other hand, preparing foods associated with Black people is about the shallowest possible way to celebrate such an important man.

The conundrum — do we or don’t we, as a cafeteria, acknowledge Martin Luther King day and, if so how? — is a familiar one.  Can one do so without reproducing stereotypes and appearing on blogs like these?  Or should we just pretend the day doesn’t exist?

The truth is, in a context of ongoing racial inequality in which stereotypes continue to harm, organizations such as these are stuck between a rock and a hard place.  That’s how racism has such staying power: it makes it such that all choices resonate with its ugliness.

See also: wrong ways to celebrate Black History Month and how not to include racial  history in school curricula.

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 The Huffington Post.

Last month Jet — a magazine marketed to African-American population — featured their first gay male couple in their wedding announcements.  The announcement may be a sign that African-American attitudes towards gay marriage may be turning around.  While the group has typically endorsed gay marriage at lower rates than White Americans, the gap between Blacks and Whites has been narrowing.

The Pew Research Center reports that the percent of Whites opposed to gay marriage dropped from 51% in 2008 to 41% in 2012.  Among Blacks, the percent in opposition dropped from 63% to 49%.  African-Americans and Whites are now separated by eight percentage points instead of twelve.

The data above was collected in April of 2012.  In May, Obama announced that he supported gay marriage.  It remains to be seen whether Obama’s modeling of a pro-gay stance will influence the opinions of the African-American community further.

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.

The year during which the U.S. will become a “majority minority” is well discussed.  It looks like it’s going to happen sometime around 2050 or earlier. This statistic, however, elides an interesting subplot: the year various age groups will be majority minority.

Over at The Society Pages Editors’ Desk, sociologist Doug Hartmann offered the following table. It shows that children under the age of 18 will be majority minority 32 years earlier, by 2018.  Young people ages 18-29 will join them by 2027.  By 2035, people aged 35-64 will be majority minority.  People 65 and older are quick to follow.

This data reminds us that demographic change is gradual.  The year 2018 is just five years away.  If young people continue to vote in numbers similar to those in the last two elections, their changing demographics could push forward a change that looks all but inevitable in the long run.

In the meantime, we need to be vigilant about how younger people are portrayed.  Today poverty is racialized so as to demonize social programs designed to help the less fortunate.  Can we imagine a future in which public education and other youth-oriented programming is similarly framed: as white people helping supposedly undeserving people of color?  This is likely something that we should be vigilant against in the coming years.

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 Racialicious.
Sociologist Jooyoung Lee is writing what sounds like a truly fascinating book. Titled Blowing Up: Rap Dreams in LA, it follows a series of young Black men who are trying to make it as rappers.  “Together,” Lee writes, “their stories show how rapping — and Hip Hop culture more generally — transform the social worlds of urban poor black youths.”

The video below gives us a taste of his findings.  In it, he’s asked why he thinks rappers are “so maligned in our culture.”  He explains that it’s because people often “take violent and misogynistic lyrics” literally.  Doing so, however, is to misunderstand “how the creative process works.”  He goes on to explain how one of the men he studied was pressured by a music label to cultivate an image that conformed to stereotypes of young, urban Black men.

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.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012. Cross-posted at Global Policy TV and Pacific Standard.

Publicizing the release of the 1940 U.S. Census data, LIFE magazine released photographs of Census enumerators collecting data from household members.  Yep, Census enumerators. For almost 200 years, the U.S. counted people and recorded information about them in person, by sending out a representative of the U.S. government to evaluate them directly (source).

By 1970, the government was collecting Census data by mail-in survey. The shift to a survey had dramatic effects on at least one Census category: race.

Before the shift, Census enumerators categorized people into racial groups based on their appearance.  They did not ask respondents how they characterized themselves.  Instead, they made a judgment call, drawing on explicit instructions given to the Census takers.

On a mail-in survey, however, the individual self-identified.  They got to tell the government what race they were instead of letting the government decide.  There were at least two striking shifts as a result of this change:

• First, it resulted in a dramatic increase in the Native American population.  Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. Native American population magically grew 110%.  People who had identified as American Indian had apparently been somewhat invisible to the government.
• Second, to the chagrin of the Census Bureau, 80% of Puerto Ricans choose white (only 40% of them had been identified as white in the previous Census).  The government wanted to categorize Puerto Ricans as predominantly black, but the Puerto Rican population saw things differently.

I like this story.  Switching from enumerators to surveys meant literally shifting our definition of what race is from a matter of appearance to a matter of identity.  And it wasn’t a strategic or philosophical decision. Instead, the very demographics of the population underwent a fundamental unsettling because of the logistical difficulties in collecting information from a large number of people.  Nevertheless, this change would have a profound impact on who we think Americans are, what research about race finds, and how we think about race today.

See also the U.S. Census and the Social Construction of Race and Race and Censuses from Around the World. To look at the questionnaires and their instructions for any decade, visit the Minnesota Population Center.  Thanks to Philip Cohen for sending the link.

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.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012.

Paul M. sent along the image below, from an NPR story, commenting on the way skin color is used in the portrayal of evolution.  There’s one obvious way to read this graphic: lighter-skinned people are more evolved (dare we say, “civilized”) than darker-skinned people. It seemed worthy to make a point of Paul’s observation, because this racialized presentation of evolution is really common.  A search for the word on Google Images quickly turns up several more.  In fact, almost every single illustration of evolution of this type, unless it’s in black and white, follows this pattern.  (See also our post on representations of modern man.) Here’s what a Google image search returns, for example:

This is important stuff.  It reinforces the idea that darker-skinned people are more animalistic than the lighter-skinned.  It also normalizes light-skinned people as people and darker-skinned peoples as Black or Brown people, in the same way that we use the word “American” to mean White-American, but various hyphenated phrases (African-American, Asian-American, etc) to refer to everyone else.  So, though this may seem like a trivial matter, the patterns add up to a consistent centering and applauding of Whiteness.

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.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012.

If you pay attention to racist portrayals of African Americans, you will notice the frequent appearance of watermelons.  The trope has its roots in American slavery.

Why watermelons?  According to David Pilgrim, the curator of the Jim Crow Museum, defenders of slavery used the watermelon as a symbol of simplicity.  African Americans, the argument went, were happy as slaves.  They didn’t need the complicated responsibilities of freedom; they just needed some shade and a cool, delicious treat. Abagond has a nice collection of images showing black people delighted to be eating watermelon. Here the copy makes explicit the idea that slaves needed little but a watermelon to make them happy:

I think this is an interesting example of the way in which supposedly random stereotypes have strategic beginnings.  The association of Black people with a love of watermelon isn’t just a neutral stereotype, nor one that emerged because there is a “kernel of truth” (as people love to say about stereotypes).  Instead, it was a deliberate tool with which to misportray African Americans and justify slavery.

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.