race/ethnicity

At The Color Line, sociologist C.N. Le highlighted an instance in which racist language was used in reference to pro-basketball player Jeremy Lin.  A headline at ESPN read, “Chink in the Armor.”  “Chink” is a term used to denigrate the Chinese and Asians more generally.

Le observes astutely that the word likely wasn’t meant as a slur, but instead a pun.  And, in fact, ESPN “quickly and decisively” took action, changing the headline, firing the person who wrote the headline, and suspending a sportscaster who repeated the phrase.

Instead of outright racism, Le suggests that the appearance of the word is symptomatic of a (false) belief that we’re in a colorblind post-power society.  In this society, every group is on equal footing, so making fun is just equal opportunity offensiveness; it may be off-color, but it’s all in good fun (think of South Park as an example).  The approach assumes that slurs like “chink” are no more harmful than slurs like “cracker.”

Le was disappointed to see that this kind of ongoing insensitivity to real power differences remains, but pleased to see ESPN react so swiftly and strongly to it.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

London filmmaker Michael Story sent in a short video he made about the mismatch between crime as presented in TV reports and the reality of crime in the UK. TV reports, Michael argues, misrepresent how common crime is, where it occurs, and who is most likely to be involved in violent crime; in so doing, they reinforce stereotypes about race, ethnicity, class, and criminality:

London’s 66,000 guns – by Michael Story from chichard41 on Vimeo.

My Occidental College colleague, politics professor Caroline Heldman, snapped this photograph of a billboard on an L.A. freeway.  It suggests that one may celebrate Black History Month by calling 1-800-GET-THIN.  The billboard is another stunning example of the trivialization of black history by companies using it only as an excuse to market their product or service.

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 Family Inequality.

In 1994, Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur published, Growing Up With A Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps. The growth of children living with only their mothers was — then as now — a matter of concern not only for children’s well-being, but for intergenerational mobility. One of their empirical conclusions was this:

For children living with a single parent and no stepparent, income is the single most important factor in accounting for their lower well-being as compared with children living with both parents. It accounts for as much as half of their disadvantage. Low parental involvement, supervision, and aspirations and greater residential mobility account for the rest.

The biggest problem, in other words, is economic. The other factors —  involvement, supervision, aspirations, mobility — are related to social class and the time poverty that economically-poor parents experience.

Examples

Here are some bivariate illustrations — that is, head-to-head comparisons of the difference between children of poor and non-poor versus single and married parents.

These are the “skill group” rankings by teachers of children by socioeconomic status (or SES, a composite of parents’ education, occupational prestige and income) versus race/ethnicity, gender and family structure. SES shows the widest spread in reading teachers’ group placement of first graders.

Source: Condron (2007)

Similarly, the poor/nonpoor difference is greater than the two-parent/single-parent difference in kindergarten entry scores:

Source: Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (2009)

Those are just two examples from early-childhood assessments. More importantly, here is the breakdown seen in a longitudinal study of children growing up. When women grow up to be mothers, their poverty level in childhood is more important than their family structure for predicting whether they will be in poverty themselves. The poverty difference is large, the family structure difference is not:

Source: Musik & Mare (2006)

This study included a more sophisticated set of multivariate analyses than this simple graph, but the author’s conclusion fits it:

Net of the correlation between poverty and family structure within a generation, the intergenerational transmission of poverty is significantly stronger than the intergenerational transmission of family structure, and neither childhood poverty nor family structure affects the other in adulthood.

That is, childhood poverty matters more.

Fewer single parents, or less poverty?

But if single parenthood and poverty are so closely related, some people say, we should spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting marriage to help children avoid poverty (and other problems). That’s what the government has done, with money from the welfare budget. Even if it worked, which it apparently doesn’t, it’s only one approach. What about reducing poverty? And, more specifically, reducing the relative likelihood of poverty in single-parent families versus those with married parents. That is, address the poverty gap between the two groups, rather than the size of the two groups. This has the added advantage of not singling out one group — single mothers — for social stigmatization (of the kind I mentioned here). And, because it defines the problem as economic rather than moral, may make it easier to build public support for helping the poor.

Consider a recent paper by David Brady and Rebekah Burroway, which will be published in Demography. They analyzed the relative poverty of single mothers versus the total population — that is, what percentage had incomes below half the median (per person, after accounting for taxes and government transfers). Such a relative poverty measure is really a measure of inequality, but specifically inequality at the low end. (Regardless of how rich the rich are, it’s theoretically possible to have no one below half the median income). Here is my graph showing that result, with only the countries that have reliable sample sizes in the survey:

The Nordic countries have the lowest overall poverty rates. But in absolute terms their advantage is much bigger for single mothers. (The red line shows equal poverty rates for single mothers and the total population.) The US and UK have the largest difference in poverty rates between single mothers and overall poverty. That is, we have the largest poverty penalty for single motherhood. If the relative poverty rates for single mothers were lower in the US, we might spend more time and money addressing poverty and less trying to change family structures.

In his book, Great American City, sociologist Robert Sampson argues that, while the effects of macro factors like poverty and political neglect on individual lives are well-documented, other local mechanisms matter too.  It’s important, then, to think about the constitution of neighborhoods.

Along these lines, he argues, even if a community is economically- and socially-marginalized, an existing neighborhood organizations can make a big difference.  He takes natural disasters as a case study.  A neighborhood organization can spread the news of an impending disaster, establish leadership, and organize assistance before, during, and after a crisis.  In this way, Sampson brings together micro, meso, and macro forces shaping the impact of disaster.

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.

Here’s another one for our collection of instances in which we describe light tan as “nude,” “skin-,” or “flesh-colored” (symbolically erasing the existence of people without light tan skin).  Yahoo’s OMG! describes uses the word “nude” to describe the color of Lil’ Kim shirt.

It’s always particularly amazing when they use the word to talk about something a black person is wearing.  Like, um, Michelle Obama.

For more examples, see our posts on products designed for white people, the widespread use of such language to describe light tan in the fashion world,  and lotion marketed as for “normal to darker skin.” See also our Contexts essay on race and “nude” as a color.

For contrast, see this post about how the generic human in Russian cartoons is colored black instead of white.

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.

Paula F. sent in a link to Babble.com’s list of the top 100 ‘mom blogs’ of 2011.  Mom blogs have become wildly popular in recent years as a way to document and comment on the experience of motherhood, and this particular list illustrates some interesting things about social privilege.  Paula was struck by the lack of racial diversity among the selected blogs and noted how women of color are vastly underrepresented.   For example, only 7 of the blogs are written by African-American moms, and 4 of those refer to the mother’s race in the title (although the same is not true for any of the blogs written by white women).

A quick review of the blogs reveals some other interesting issues related to social privilege and motherhood.  In addition to the lack of racial diversity, the blogs included in the list show very little variation in terms of class, sexuality, age, and marital status.   (The blogs were chosen by a panel of “experts” that took into consideration nominations from Babble readers, so it’s unclear how representative they are of mom blogs in general.)

While there is the more obvious privilege of the “digital divide,” or the disparate access that people have to technology and the internet, there is also privilege in having the spare time to devote to intensive writing/blogging and the connections necessarily to draw sponsorship and advertising.  Moreover, while some of the selected blogs do offer narratives that deviate from traditional ideas about mothering and motherhood (for example, several blogs discuss mental health issues, the struggles of parenting, and forming blended families), they nonetheless reproduce a narrow image of who mothers are, what they look like, and what they do.

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Christie Barcelos is a doctoral student, a mom, and a blogger, but not really a mom blogger.

Yesterday I posted the results of an L.A. Times study on the demographics of the Academy voters who decide who receives Oscars. What about the movies they’ll be voting on this year? The always-awesome Anita Sarkeesian, of Feminist Frequency, produced a short video applying the Bechdel test — the simple measure of even minimal representation of women in film — to the 2012 Oscar nominees, as well as a racial version of the Bechdel test that looks at how non-Whites are included. The results are not encouraging: