race/ethnicity

Though laws varied, American slaves generally could not legally marry.  They were the subject of contracts, legally barred from entering into contracts themselves.  And while some enslavers encouraged their slaves to form romantic relationships because such relationships discouraged running away, slave families were always at risk of being torn apart at the whims of the “master.”

On this day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order that ended slavery for all people in territories that were under Union  control.  Two years later, the Thirteenth Amendment amended the constitution to prohibit slavery.  The next year, two newly-freed now ex-slaves, Thomas and Jane Taylor, were married in Kentucky.

Text:

This day came before me Thomas Taylor and Jane, his wife, persons of color and servants of Christian County and declared that they have been and still aim to continue living together as husband and wife. Given under my hand this 27th day of July 1866.

G.W. Lawson, Clerk
Geo. C. Long, D.C.

Thomas and Jane are the great-great-great-grandparents of Tami, who blogs at What Tami Said.  They had been together for many years before they were given the opportunity to marry and had two children.  According to Dr. Tera Hunter at NPR, they were one of many newly-freed couples to marry in the years after the abolishment of slavery extended them the right.  By 1900, she explains, marriage would be “nearly universal” among American blacks.

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 Reports from the Economic Front.

Politicians always seem to be talking about the middle class.  They need some new focus groups.  According to the Pew Research Center, over the past four years the percentage of adult Americans that say they are in the lower class has risen significantly, from a quarter to almost one-third (see chart below).

Pew also found that the demographic profile of the self-defined lower class has also changed.  Young people, according to Pew, “are disproportionately swelling the ranks of the self-defined lower classes.”   More specifically some 40% of those between 18 to 29 years of age now identify as being in the lower classs compared to only 25% in 2008.

Strikingly, the percentage of whites and blacks that see themselves in the lower class is now basically equal.  The percentage of whites who consider themselves in the lower class rose from less than a quarter in 2008 to 31% in 2012.  This brought them in line with blacks, whose percentage remained at a third.  The percentage of Latinos describing themselves as lower class rose to 40%, a ten percentage point increase from 2008.

And not surprisingly, as the chart below shows, many who self-identify as being in the lower class are experiencing great hardships.   In fact, 1 in 3 faced four or all five of the problems addressed in the survey.

In short, there is a lot of hurting in our economy.

Peter N. sent in some data compiled by Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post.  It reveals the intersection of race and religion among Democrats and Republicans.   As Cillizza concludes, it’s “overblown” to say that the Republican party is made up of White Protestants and the Democratic of minorities and atheists, but there is definitely an argument to be made that each party is disproportionately so.

This first pie chart shows the racial and religious affiliation of people who identify with or lean towards the Republican party.  More than half are White Protestants, another 18% are White Catholics.  Only a small percentage of party faithfuls are religious Blacks and Hispanics (the two racial groups featured in in these data).

This second chart shows the same data for Democrats and Democratic-leaning individuals.  Almost a quarter of Democrats are White Protestants, but a slightly larger percentage of Democrats are religiously unaffiliated.  One in five Democrats identifies as either Black or Hispanic and religious.  The larger “other” category conceals smaller blocs that nonetheless add diversity to the party.

This is just one way to slice the pie, so to speak, but these are the kinds of data that both the Obama and the Romney campaigns are working with.  When they aim to bring out their “base,” this is what they’re talking about.  These numbers may give us a clue as to why they pick the strategies they do, such as the sudden spike in the inclusion of the word “God” in the Republican party platform.

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.

Race as biology has largely been discredited, yet beliefs about one race being biologically superior to another still seem to pervade one social arena: sports.  Claims that different races have genetic advantages to play particular sports persists both because individual athletic ability obviously has some basis in biology (even though that does not mean it is racial biology at play) and athletics appears to be one social arena where racial minorities succeed over whites in certain sports.

For example, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports’ 2011 Racial and Gender Report Card on The National Football League (http://www.tidesport.org), over 2/3^rds of players in the NFL are African American — far higher than the proportion of Blacks in the general population of the United States.  This report also shows that all other racial groups are under-represented in the NFL relative to their proportion in the general population, including Asians who make up only 2% of the players in the league.

These statistics compel many to assume that racial biology plays a large part in athletic success.  However, the 60 Minutes investigation Football Island debunks this assumption during a trip to the place where most of the Asian players in the NFL come from: American Samoa.   This small island is a U.S. Territory in the Pacific and has a population small enough to seat comfortably in most professional football stadiums.  Yet the average Samoan child “is 56 times more likely to get into the NFL than any other kid in America.”

60 Minutes finds Samoans succeed at football only in small part because of their size and strength.  Rather, their success grows mostly out of a “warrior culture” that instills a strong work ethic in young men.  Also, on the island the daily chores that are a necessary part of survival provide a lifetime of athletic conditioning.  In short, many of the Asian players in the NFL are successful because of their nurturing, and not their nature.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/60688464[/vimeo]

Samoans are also driven to succeed at football because they come from a place plagued by poverty and often their only chance at a better life is through athletics (that, or follow another Samoan tradition and join the Armed Forces).  In the video, the most famous Samoan player, Troy Palamalu of the Pittsburgh Steelers, explains “football is a ‘meal ticket.’  Just like any marginalized ethnic group, you know, if you don’t make it to the NFL, what do you have to go back to?”

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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.

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 Montclair SocioBlog.

About two weeks ago, Chris Hayes said, “It is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other.”

The case, it turns out, is very deniable.  Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution denied it with data from the 2002 and 2008 General Social Survey (GSS).  He looked at three questions…

• Favor laws against interracial marriage
• Would vote for a Black for president
• Blacks should not be pushy

…and concludes:

It is undeniable that some Americans are racist but racists split about evenly across the parties.

Hayes then tweeted a retraction.

End of story?

To begin with, the sample sizes Tabarrok uses are small.  In the 2002 GSS, only 87 respondents went on record against interracial marriage, and in 2008, only 80 said they wouldn’t vote for a Black for president.  (All the tables and graphs presented here and in Tabarrok’s post are based on Whites only.)

Only about 5% of the sample takes the racist response to these items.  But I would run the table differently.  Instead of asking what percent of each party is racist, I would ask where do those few racists go.

The differences are small, but the edge goes to the Republicans.

Second, there is a difference between party identification and political ideology.  If you ask not about party but about political views, the differences become sharper.

The GSS has other questions that might stand as a proxy for racism.  For example:

On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are because most (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty?

Again, the differences are small, with White Republicans slightly more likely (50% vs. 45%) to say Blacks’ economic problems are caused by lack of motivation and will power.  And again, the differences are larger when the independent variable is political ideology rather than party identification.

In that same GSS question about the cause of Black economic troubles, another choice is:

Do you think these differences are mainly due to discrimination?

The differences for both Party ID and Political views are clear.  White Democrats and liberals are much more likely to see discrimination as a major cause.

But is this racist?  Not necessarily.  It might well be part of a general view of the causes of human behavior, one that emphasizes personal factors (ability, motivation, etc.) and downplays structural forces the individual has little power over (discrimination).   Conservatives might use that same  explanation for unemployment and low income among Whites as well.  But I do not know of any GSS questions about the causes of White economic problems.  (Perhaps these exist, but I am not a GSS expert.)

We do know that racists (those who say they would not vote for a Black president) are more likely to take the conservative position on the “Willpower” explanation (76% vs. 50%) and on the Discrimination explanation (78% vs. 64%) compared with those who say yes, they would vote for a Black president.  But that does not mean that the other conservatives who agree with them and who deny that racial discrimination affects the lives of Black people are also racists. People can come to the same position from different places.  But people can also hide their racism behind seemingly non-racial issues.  In the 1960s ,70s, and 80s, many observers thought that the Republicans were using first school busing and then crime as a proxy for race, as Republican strategist Lee Atwater famously explained.  And some observers today (Tom Edsall, for example) argue that the Republicans are using welfare in the same way this time around.

Other bloggers have written about the questions Hayes raised — Tabarrok has links to three of these.  The most interesting I’ve come across is Will Wilkinson’s (here).  His original views apparently were individual-centered and much in line with Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no such thing as society.”  But that was “when I was a Rand-toting libertarian lad.”

He has now come to see that individuals, with their ideas and attitudes and “non-coercive” behavior, can add up to something greater than the sum of its parts, i.e, society.  But he got to this idea by walking down the left fork of the libertarian road – the road not to serfdom but to sociology.

Eventually I realised that actions that are individually non-coercive can add up to stable patterns of behaviour that are systematically or structurally coercive, depriving some individuals of their rightful liberty. In fact, rights-violating structures or patterns of behaviour are excellent examples of Hayekian spontaneous orders—of phenomena that are the product of human action, but not of human design.

Last year I posted about a map several geographers put together showing the distribution of last names across the U.S. Historical immigration and internal settlement patterns are reflected in the concentrations of names across the country.

Now one of the geographers involved in that project, James Cheshire, has done the same for London. Using 2001 electoral rolls, Cheshire plotted the 15 most common surnames in 983 separate London districts. Here’s a section of the map of the most common name:

The size of the font is scaled to represent the number of people with each name. They’re color-coded by place or origin (though since many immigrants have Anglicized names, origin of a name may not reflect a person’s ancestry).

As Cheshire points out, a few names fill the top slot throughout most of London. As you go a bit further down the list, London’s diversity becomes more apparent. Here’s a small slice of the map of the 10th most common surnames:

Those of you with more knowledge of London, what noteworthy patterns do you see?

Somehow the accidental mis-translation of the Princess/Barbie character is just right…

Buzzfeed and CookdandBombd, via Work that Matters.

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 September issue of Oprah’s magazine, sent in by YetAnotherGirl, features the woman herself on the cover wearing her hair in a “natural” (that is, real and non-straightened).  The O website announces that this is the first time in its 12-year history that Oprah has appeared on the cover without “blow-drying or straightening” her hair.

Black women’s hair is a touchy issue wrapped up deeply in racial power struggles.  The appearance of White people — in this case, the hair White people are more likely to have (that is, straight or slightly wavy) — is often considered the most beautiful or normal.  Black women who have tightly curled hair are faced with deciding to push back against white supremacy and wear their hair more-0r-less naturally (and face being seen as a “political” or “non-assimilating” Black person) or straighten their hair (and risk being accused of capitulating to racism).  Whatever they do, it’s sends a message.

What I think is notable here is that Oprah, of all people in the world, has never until now appeared on the cover of her own magazine with “natural” hair.   Lest we’ve forgotten who Oprah is, here’s a reminder (from wikipedia):

Winfrey was called “arguably the world’s most powerful woman” by CNN and Time.com, “arguably the most influential woman in the world” by the American Spectator, “one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th Century” and “one of the most influential people” from 2004 to 2011 by TIME. Winfrey is the only person in the world to have appeared in the latter list on all eight occasions.

What I mean to say is, when even Oprah largely avoids being seen as she really is, we know we are seeing a powerful cultural force.  In this case, a racist and sexist one demanding that women of all races conform to an unreasonable White standard of beauty.  I’m glad that Oprah decided to appear this way for the cover, but I’m saddened by why it took this long.

Via Jezebel.

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.