race/ethnicity

Originally posted at YouGov.

Race has recently taken center stage in the presidential campaign.  From Joe Biden’s suggestion that a Romney-Ryan presidency would re-enslave African-Americans, to some liberal commentators’ contentions that the Romney campaign is using racial code words like “welfare” and “anger” to mobilize anti-black sentiments against President Obama, charges and counter-charges of playing the race card now abound.

Part of this racialized turn in the campaign involves Romney’s welfare ad earlier this month—an ad that questionably accused Obama of ending welfare for work requirements.  While that charge may seem race-neutral, there is a long-standing and strong association in white Americans’ minds between welfare and “undeserving” African-Americans (see here and here).  According to Jonathan Chait, then, “the political punch of this messaging derives from the fact that white middle-class Americans understand messages about redistribution from the hard-working middle-class to the lazy underclass in highly racialized terms.”  An extensive body of social science research described as racial priming seems to support Chait’s contention.  That research shows that such code words as “welfare” and “inner-city,” especially when combined with racial imagery (e.g., the hardworking whites in Romney’s ad), can make racial attitudes a more central determinant of political evaluations (see: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).  One might therefore expect the welfare ad to activate racial attitudes in public opinion.

We can test that expectation thanks to some unique experimental data collected last week by YouGov.  The survey randomly assigned half of its 1,000 respondents to view the Romney welfare ad (see above) while the remaining half of the sample did not see the ad.  Respondents then answered a series of questions to discern whether and how the ad affected their opinions.  Unfortunately, these follow-up questions did not include vote choice or candidate favorability, which were asked earlier in the survey.  We did, however, ask respondents how well Mitt Romney and Barack Obama’s policies would benefit the following groups in society: the poor, the middle class, the wealthy, African-Americans and white Americans.  Answers were then recoded to range from 0 (“hurt them a great deal”) to 100 (“help them a great deal”).

The welfare ad did not appear to affect people’s overall answers to those questions.  However, it did make attitudes toward blacks a stronger predictor of respondents’ views about the consequences of Romney’s policies for the poor, the middle class, and African-Americans.  To measure attitudes toward blacks, we use a scale called “racial resentment” in the scholarly literature.  For respondents to this survey, we actually assessed racial resentment much earlier, when these respondents were first interviewed in a December 2011 survey.  The four questions that make up this measure are here.

The figure below shows that there was almost no relationship between racial resentment and the opinions of people who did not see the ad.  But among those who saw it, racial resentment affected whether people thought Romney will help the poor, the middle class, and African-Americans.  Moreover, seeing the ad did not activate other attitudes, such as party or ideological self-identification.  It only primed racial resentment:

(Note: Predicted values were calculated from OLS coefficients by setting partisanship, ideology, and race to their sample means.  Source: YouGov Survey, August 2012)

At the same time, the ad failed to “racialize” views of whether Romney’s policies would benefit whites and the wealthy.  This likely stems from the fact that Romney favorability ratings are strongly related to thinking his policies will help the poor, the middle class, and blacks, but only weakly related to believing he’d help whites and the wealthy.

Interestingly, the ad did not appear to further racialize the perceived consequences of Obama’s policies, either.  This is probably because racial attitudes are already linked to Obama, and a single political ad isn’t enough to significantly strengthen an already strong relationship.

Nevertheless, the results from our experiment suggest that ads like the one in this post may well contribute to the growing polarization of public opinion by racial attitudes beyond the voting booth in the age of Obama.

[I thank Brendan Nyhan for suggesting a study of this topic, and John Sides and Lynn Vavreck for help in designing the survey questions.]

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Michael Tesler is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University and co-author of Obama’s Race:The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America.

An emerging controversy in Canada is a good example of just how difficult it is to be racially-neutral when the context is racially-charged.  The country recently redesigned its money.  On the back of the $100 dollar bill celebrating medical innovation they sketched an Asian-appearing woman looking into a microscope.  In a focus group in Quebec, people complained that the bill reproduced the stereotype that Asians pursue careers in science and medicine.  The Vancouver Sun reports:

“Some have concerns that the researcher appears to be Asian,” says a 2009 report commissioned by the bank from The Strategic Counsel… “Some believe that it presents a stereotype of Asians excelling in technology and/or the sciences. Others feel that an Asian should not be the only ethnicity represented on the banknotes. Other ethnicities should also be shown.”

A few even said the yellow-brown colour of the $100 banknote reinforced the perception the woman was Asian, and “racialized” the note.

The Canadian government responded that they had never intended the woman to appear “ethnic” and ordered the image re-sketched so it would be more racially “neutral.”  

They were then accused of being prejudiced again. Mu-Qing Huang, a Chinese-Canadian interviewed for the story, objected to the deletion of the figure’s Asian features:

If Canada is truly multicultural and thinks that all cultural groups are equal, then any visible minority should be good enough to represent a country, including (someone with) Asian features.

This is a tricky problem.  By including racial or ethnic minorities on their bills, Canada risks reproducing a stereotype.  Including all “neutral” figures can be seen as exclusionary because neutral looks suspiciously like White people in a country dominated by White people.  The third option is to deliberately break stereotypes by putting, say, an Asian woman running the hurdles and a Black woman looking through a microscope, but this can seem overly contrived (as many attempts at diversity do).

The truth is that all of Canada’s options can be read in racially-charged ways.  This isn’t because people are unfairly reading into the sketches, it’s because life in Canada is, in fact, racially-charged.  When race matters, it matters, all claims to colorblindness aside.

Thanks to Craig G., Tom Megginson, Jesse, Helen, and Alex, an MLIS from McGill, for the submission!

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.

First the marketing team for an energy drink out of Poland, called “Black,” hired a Black person, Mike Tyson, to personify its product.  Then, they surround him with White, female models and have the convicted rapist call himself a “beast” that can’t control himself.  Tag lines include “that’s the power of Black” and “Black power.”

So we have, in one ad campaign, the fetishization of Black men, the White supremacist portrayal of White women as the ultimate female, their objectification (see #3, he actually hands one out in the second ad), the trivialization of his crime (he can’t control himself, LOL right!?), the use of animalistic language to refer to Black people, and the appropriation of the Black Power movement.  Anyone see anything else?  Does it matter that this comes out of Poland and not the U.S.?

Thanks to Tom Megginson at Work That Matters for the heads up.

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 Corporate Governance.

Sociologists Richard Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff began studying ascendance to the top corporate office 20 years ago and, while the population of CEOs is far from diverse, they report that they have been surprised to see as many women and minorities as they have.  Today there are 80 white women, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans at the head of Fortune 500 companies.

In a discussion about their book, The New CEOs, at The Society Pages, they ask whether the rise of non-white/non-male CEOs is really a disruption in the distribution of power.  Despite protestations to the contrary — “all CEOs, it seems, worked their way up from the bottom,” they say with tongue in cheek — almost all come from wealthy backgrounds.  The rising diversity, in other words, doesn’t include class diversity.

With one exception: African Americans.  Most African American CEOs, they show, did not grow up in wealthy families.  “Many,” they write, “grew up with parents who were factory workers, postmen, custodians, day-care workers, or house cleaners.”  They refrain from speculating as to why they see this difference.

So, what’s next?  Zweigenhaft and Domhoff make some guesses as to the near future. The people positioned to be our next Fortune 500 CEOs will have graduated from college, got an MBA or law degree, will be currently earning more than $250,000 a year, and now hold a senior executive position.  Given these parameters, they conclude that:

…about two-thirds of those a step from the CEO office were white men, about 19% were white women, slightly fewer than 3% were African Americans, about 4% were Latinos, and about 8% were Asian Americans.

As the graph shows, compared to minority men, white women are far more likely to be rising into CEO positions in the near future.  Women of color, as they say, “almost disappear” in the data.  They explain that this likely has to do with their double minority status.  When hiring and promoting, people tend to look for ways of connecting with the potential employee.  A white man (usually doing the hiring) will see at least one thing in common with a white woman or a man of color.   As an example, they cite a study of executives with MBAs from Harvard:

…female Jewish executives all agreed that being female was more of an impediment to their careers than being a Jew, but many quickly emphasized that being Jewish, or different in any other way, was not irrelevant. As one put it, “It’s the whole package. I heard secondhand from someone as to how I would be perceived as a pushy, Jewish broad who went and got an MBA. Both elements, being Jewish and being a woman, together with having the MBA, were combined to create a stereotype I had to work against from the first day.” Another woman explained, “It’s part of the question of whether you fit the mold. Are you like me or not? If too much doesn’t fit, it impacts you negatively.”

These dynamics affect your entire career trajectory, of course, but Zweigenhaft and Domhoff believe they become even more intense as people approach the top office.  They conclude:

Culture (in the form of cultural capital), education, and class are all still in play. While gender and color remain the best predictors of who will make it into the upper echelons of the corporate world, beyond that, it’s intersectionality [of different identities together] wherever we look.

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.

Tanita S. sent along a link to an interesting observation made over at Whatever.  John Scalzi, preparing to make lunch, noticed that he had two bags of an identical food product, except one was named “tortillas” and one was named “wraps.”

John did some sleuthing and discovered that the bag of wraps cost 26¢ more than the tortillas.  Moreover, since there were only 6 wraps in the package of wraps, but 8 tortillas in the package of tortillas, each wrap cost 19¢ more than each tortilla.

So, there is an interesting marketing story here.   Mission has figured out that they can sell their product for a higher price if they name it “wraps” (or, at least, they think they can). Let’s crowd source this.  After all, Mission is counting on our collective network of ideas (and a failure to notice the count difference) to push us towards the wraps instead of the tortillas.  What does “wraps” make you think of?  What else is that word linked to that might make a person prefer it?  Would you feel different bringing home a package of wraps?  In other words, what ideas, lying just beneath the surface, are they tapping into with this marketing strategy?

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.

Often, the most socio-economically disadvantaged individuals of a group are used as a wide brush to paint a picture of an entire minority race or ethnicity.  Common examples include stereotyping all Black men as members of the inner-city underclass or as uneducated, unemployed, urban criminals, or all African-American women as “welfare queens.”  In the current cultural and political discourse, Hispanics are often prejudicially construed  as murderous drug-smugglers or as destitute immigrants who illegally cross the border to “drop babies” and exploit U.S. social programs.  As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has argued, these prejudices then disadvantage minorities of all social classes who are stereotyped and experience discrimination regardless of their individual socio-economic status or accomplishments.

However, focusing on the marginal members during the social construction of an entire racial group does not usually occur with Whites.  The existence of poor Whites is often ignored as Caucasians are stereotyped as upper-class—which usually entails assumptions that they are hardworking, highly-moral, successful exemplars of American individualism, as Kirby Moss explains in The Color of Class.  “The Whitest People,” a skit from Carlos Mencia (a controversial comedian who built his career drawing upon his Hispanic background to explore race in America), illustrates the connections between whiteness and heightened class status (sorry about the ad):

Mencia’s construction of whiteness critiques the excesses and frivolousness of the upper-middle class lifestyle often conflated with whiteness.  While Mencia pokes fun at this lifestyle, outside comedy these same stereotypes mean Caucasians are usually viewed positively as many presume the upper class can only be reached through hard work and strong morals.  Whereas minorities are often presumed poor and thus viewed with suspicion, whites are often prejudged favorably.  For instance, Mencia himself mentions that because people are viewed through prejudicial lenses, when whites drink alcohol they are thought “sophisticated” but when Blacks drink they are accused of being “drunks.”  These differential prejudgments based on race are the basis of white privilege that replicates and reinforces both class, and racial stratification.

The open expression of Latino stereotypes and slurs in this video also highlights why Mencia’s comedy is controversial.  Detractors claim he engages in a process symbolic interactionists call trading power for patronage (see Schwalbe et al. 2000).  This process occurs when an individual embodies a marginal identity in order to receive personal benefits that come at the expense of the larger group.  For example, while Mencia’s comedy career benefits from the self-deprecating humor in this video about low wage employment, family violence, and food insecurity his jokes might also reinforce negative stereotypes about Hispanics.

However, Carlos Mencia’s supporters describe the open confrontation of race and racial disadvantage in his comedy as contesting stigma (Goffman) by celebrating a minority group’s ability to persevere despite their marginalization.  To this group, Mencia’s frequent use of ethnic slurs to describe himself and other Latinos is an example of re-appropriation (Galinsky et al.), reclaiming a pejorative label in a way that redefines the meaning of racist slights and infuses the word with positive and empowering meanings.

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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.

Thanks to Leticia, Caely, Anjan G., Liz, Bradley K., and Kelsey P. for their patience.  Our SocImages email inbox is a hot mess, and sometimes things fall through the cracks.  This is certainly true for the short video below, one of the responses to the “Shit Girls Say” clip that inspired a round of copycats last December.  We decided to post about it belatedly because it remains a great example of something called a microaggression.

Microaggressions are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative… slights and insults” (source).  These are often subtle.  So the recipient feels badly, but it can be difficult to explain exactly why, especially to someone who isn’t sympathetic to issues of bias.  The Microaggressions Project has hundreds, maybe thousands, of examples.

In this video, Franchesca Leigh poses as a “White girl” and says many of the things that she and other “Black girls” hear routinely.  To Leigh, these are microaggressions.  They variously trivialize and show insensitivity towards race and racism, remind the listener that she is considered different and strange, homogenize and stereotype Black people, and more…

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.

Adrienne K., who blogs at Native Appropriations, recently put together a post about food products that feature stereotypical images of Native Americans. I’m reposting some of them here, but check out her original post for more.

It started out with Calumet baking powder:

Adrienne explains,

In my head, I thought “I could make some stereotype biscuits for breakfast!” Which got me thinking. How many products with stereotypical imagery could I fit in one imaginary breakfast?

Excluding vintage products and items that weren’t easily available, she still found an awful lot. Indian Head corn meal, anyone?

Land-O-Lakes butter:

The Sue Bee Honey logo:

Umpqua ice cream:

Pemmican beef jerky:

And you can top off your meal with Cherikee Red soda:

Adrienne explains,

In isolation, each of these would seem like no big deal–these are the “good” stereotypical images. The “noble savage.” No wild eyes or big noses, just headdresses and Indian maidens. But when taken as a collective, is it any wonder that most people in the world think of Native peoples as headdress-wearing Plains chiefs or buckskin-clad Indian women? I’m not saying there isn’t stereotypical imagery of other racial/ethnic groups in branding, but the ubiquity of Native imagery is striking.

Check out her blog for her full discussion of the problems with the repetition of these limited, anachronistic images of Native Americans.