As evidence of how mainstream and taken-for-granted dressing up like Native Americans for Halloween (not to mention as a general fashion trend) is, Kari sent in this photo of a costume store, where Native American is a sufficiently popular costume category that it deserves prominent signage:
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
New neurological research, reported by Robert Wright at The Atlantic, suggests that racism is learned. Earlier studies had shown that the amygdala, “a brain structure associated with emotion and, specifically, with the detection of threats,” is active, on average, when White people see Black faces.
A new paper, however, led by Eva Telzer, shows that we don’t see this reaction until about age 14. Moreover, how powerfully it is after the age of 14 depends on the racial composition of your peer group. White people who grow up in more diverse environments show a much weaker reaction than those in homogeneous ones.
This figure illustrates the difference. As peer diversity increases, reaction of the amygdala retreats to zero.
This is what it means, Wright explains, to say that race is a social construct:
It’s not a category that’s inherently correlated with our patterns of fear or mistrust or hatred, though, obviously, it can become one. So it’s within our power to construct a society in which race isn’t a meaningful construct.
For lots of examples of why race is socially constructed, see our Pinterest board on the topic.
And, for other super cool stories about biology, see language, culture, and color; a story of human echolocation; human brain synchronicity; and men with higher voices have higher sperm counts.
Originally posted in 2012. Re-posted in solidarity with the African American community; regardless of the truth of the Martin/Zimmerman confrontation, it’s hard not to interpret the finding of not-guilty as anything but a continuance of the criminal justice system’s failure to ensure justice for young 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.
The Russell Sage Foundation and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality have put together Recession Trends, an interactive website that lets you create graphs about issues related to the recession. It takes a couple of steps to get to the database (you have to agree to the terms before entering), but once you’re there, you can choose data about a variety of topics — crime, housing, immigration, income, political attitudes, family life, and a lot more. It’s a great way to quickly get an overview of many aspects of life in the U.S.
I looked at the ratio of median family income between African American and White families. Between the early 1970s and 2010, we’ve seen a consistent gap in earnings, with Black median household income hovering between about 52 and 60% that of Whites:
The graph of the mean net worth of the individuals on Forbes’s list of the 400 richest people in the U.S. shows that while they certainly saw their wealth take a tumble during the recession — it fell to a mere $3.3 billion or so — they’re recovering well:
Unsurprisingly, the number of job seekers per job opening went up sharply after 2007; it’s finally starting to drop off slightly, though we still have about 5 people looking for every 1 job that’s available:
You can add more than one dataset for many topics. Here’s the growth in the prison population since 1980, by gender:
There’s lots, lots more. Whatever topic you’re particularly interested in, there’s a good chance there’s something there that’ll grab your attention for a bit.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Oops they did it again. What color do you think graces the bottle and packaging for Rihanna’s new fragrance, named “Nude”? You guessed it.
The deep and abiding centrality of whiteness is made especially clear when words like “nude” are used to describe light tan even in the context of a darker-skinned woman. It happened to Michelle Obama too. Thanks to @GenderPolitics on Twitter for sending us the tip!
We’ve many examples of this phenomenon. All can be found on our Pinterest page, titled “What Color is Flesh?“
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.
A few years back we featured a series of Playboy drawings from the 1960s and ’70s that trivialized the social movements of the time: feminism, the anti-war movement, native rights, and the civil rights movement. You should really go take a look; they’re something else.
In any case, Peter from Denmark sent in another example from the same time period. A 1970s JC Penney ad for pants; “slack power” is a reference to “Black power” and it’s no coincidence that an African American man is modeling. Notice, too, that it calls the pants “anti-establishment” in the bottom right.
While companies like Komen are getting a lot of critical attention these days for turning cancer awareness into consumption, this strategy has been around a long time.
For examples of appropriation of feminism, see these framing consumption of clothes, make-up, jewelry, cigarettes, magazines, and cosmetic procedures as expression of freedoms.
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.
***TRIGGER WARNING for racism and enslavement***
During a dark period of world history, intellectuals pondered where to draw the line between human and animal. They arrayed humans hierarchically, from the lightest to the darkest skin. Believing that Africans were ape-like, they weren’t sure whether to include apes as human, or Africans as apes.
One artifact of this thinking was the “human zoo.” Kidnapped from their homes at the end of the 19th century and into the next, hundreds of indigenous people were put on display for white Westerners to view. “Often they were displayed in villages built in zoos specifically for the show,” according to a Spiegel Online sent in by Katrin, “but they were also made to perform on stage for the amusement of a paying public.” Many died quickly, being exposed to diseases foreign to them.
This group of captives is from Sri Lanka (called Ceylon at the time):
This photograph commemorates a show called “Les Indes,” featuring captives from India:
These captives are from Oromo in Ethiopia:
A German named Carl Hagenbeck was among the more famous men involved in human zoos. He would go on expeditions in foreign countries and bring back both animals and people for European collections. In his memoirs, he spoke of his involvement with pride, writing: “it was my privilege to be the first in the civilized world to present these shows of different races.”
The zoo in Hamburg still bears his name.
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.
New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy has gotten intensified scrutiny recently. A stop and frisk refers to police officers stopping and searching individuals who are out in public. These stops don’t require a warrant; the police officer has to have reasonable cause to believe the person is engaged in criminal activity.
Critics point out that these stops are incredibly inefficient, and that relying on cops’ evaluations of who is suspicious opens the door to widespread racial profiling. The New York Civil Liberties Union analyzed the NYPD’s own data, which they are required to record about all stops. Over the past decade, literally millions of people have been the targets of stop-and-frisks, with steady growth in the use of the program. I made a chart of the data from 2002 through the first 6 months of 2012:
Yet all these stops have led to little discovery of actual crime. Overall, about 87-89% of stops lead to no evidence of wrong-doing.
These stops have also disproportionately affected minorities. Here’s a breakdown by race/ethnicity, based on the NYPD data:
You can read more about the data on stop-and-frisks at the NYCLU website.
The Nation recently posted a video that discusses the impacts of stop-and-frisk on the lives of those targeted and on perceptions of the police, as well as police officers discussing the pressure to complete stop-and-frisks. The clip includes an audio recording that a 17-year-old made when he was being targeted for a stop-and-frisk after having just been stopped a couple of blocks earlier. As the video makes clear, these stops are about more than an inconvenience in citizens’ lives; they involve real harassment and fear of violence for those who find themselves the target of police suspicions:
Tricia Mc.T. sent in a video that illustrates the tendency to associate non-White women’s bodies with curves. Fruit of the Loom’s “Flawless” commercial celebrates women’s bodies, offering the message that they’re flawless at any size. But as Tricia points out, though there is variety in the bodies of the women in the commercial, “women of color are the only ones with ‘curves’,” and the woman whose body is farthest from the thinness ideal is an African American woman:
It’s a small example of a larger pattern in which non-White women are associated with curviness and we’re comfortable depicting women of color as larger — think of all the TV shows you’ve seen where the only plump female character is the African American woman.
For more on this pattern, see our post on who has curves in a Levi’s ad, an ad for shapewear to get “Latino curves,” Vogue emphasizes Beyonce’s body, fetishizing African American women’s butts, and conflating “ethnic” with “curvy.“
