race/ethnicity

There are few social facts that spread themselves out evenly across social class. Most everything — how healthy we are, what we do for leisure, how we dress, etc — is correlated with income.  Twitter, I learned today, is an exception.   According to a Pew study, internet users across a wide array of income brackets are using Twitter at about the same rate.

Income and % of internet users who use Twitter:

When we look at variables that correlate with income, however, such as race and education, we see an uneven distribution.

Race and % of internet users who use Twitter:

Education and % of internet users who use Twitter:

So people with more education are more likely to use Twitter, but Whites (who, on average, get more education than Blacks and Hispanics) are less likely.  There’s something really interesting going on here.  Any idea what?

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 Jezebel.

A year ago, I posted about street harassment — specifically, that form of harassment women often experience in which random men “compliment” us and then feel entitled to our gratitude and attention in return, and often lash out with a barrage of misogynistic comments if they don’t get it.

Caitlin Boston recently posted a video at Sweet.Sour.Satire that she made to highlight the specific kinds of comments Asian American women often face from strangers and even acquaintances. These experiences, both on the street and on dates, represent the intersection of generic sexism and the stereotype of the submissive, hyper-feminized Asian woman, plus an added dash of conflating all Asians (and conflating Asians with Asian Americans) and assuming every Asian American woman’s heart will melt at hearing her date can eat with chopsticks.

Let’s analyze this one to death, shall we?  Comments are open…

It’s after the jump because you can see a woman naked from the waist up.

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The Demographics

During disasters, poor people, people of color, and the elderly die in disproportionate numbers (source), and Katrina was no exception. Many decisions were made in the days leading up to and shortly after Katrina that amplified loss of life for these groups. New Orleans is both a poor (23% poverty rate pre-Katrina – twice the national average) and segregated city, and these factors led to loss of life. First, an effective evacuation plan was not in place that accounted for the 112,000 poor, mostly black New Orleanians without cars. Additionally, the timing of the storm at the end of the month meant that those receiving public assistance were unusually cash-strapped. To make matters worse for poor people with children, school had just started so expenses for the month were higher than usual.

The immobile poor were disproportionately left behind and lost their lives. A comprehensive study of evacuees to Houston (who had stayed behind during the storm) found that 22% were physically unable to evacuate, 14% were physically disabled, 23% stayed in New Orleans to care for a physically disabled person, and 25% were suffering from a chronic disease (source). Also,

• 55% did not have a car or a way to evacuate
• 68% had neither money in the bank nor a useable credit card
• 57% had total household incomes of less than $20,000 in the prior year
• 76% had children under 18 with them in the shelter
• 77% had a high school education or less
• 93% were black
• 67% were employed full or part-time before the hurricane

Age was also a factor in fatalities. Nearly 40% of those who died in Katrina were elderly, and many more elderly individuals died from the stress of evacuation and home loss.

Government Response

Mayor Nagin received nearly $20 million to establish a workable evacuation plan in plenty of time for Katrina, but it’s questionable whether it was ever developed, and it was never disseminated. Two months before Katrina, Nagin spent money to produce and distribute DVDs in poorer neighborhoods to inform residents that they would be on their own if a storm hit because the city could not afford to evacuate them.  In the days before the storm, Nagin sent empty Amtrak trains out of the city, failed to mobilized available school and other buses, and waited an entire day to call for a mandatory evacuation so he could determine whether the City would face lawsuits from local businesses (source). All of these decisions were deadly.

The federal response was no better. The city was quiet after the storm whipped through late Sunday night/early Monday morning when President Bush announced that New Orleans had “dodged a bullet.” Within hours, three major levees breaches and over fifty minor breaches flooded the city. Despite Governor Blanco’s request for federal assistance on Saturday (two days before the storm made landfall) and concern from local media on Sunday (one day before the storm) that the levees wouldn’t hold, they breached on Monday morning with only two Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workers on the ground (see the timeline). It would take two days for 1,000 additional officials to arrive.

Once on the ground, FEMA slowed the evacuation with unworkable paperwork and certification requirements. Marc Cresswell, a medic from a private ambulance company, reported that “At one point I had 10 helicopters on the ground waiting to go, but FEMA kept stonewalling us with paperwork. Meanwhile, every 30 or 40 minutes someone was dying.” FEMA was also criticized for turning away personnel, vehicles, medical equipment, food and other supplies, and diesel fuel.

The 30,000 people who evacuated to the Superdome (per Nagin’s instructions) were stranded for a week. Those who evacuated to the Superdome experienced deplorable conditions – unbearable heat, darkness, the stench of sewage, and a lack of food and water. They were not allowed to leave, and, according to several evacuees I interviewed in Texas shortly after the storm, this led one man to take his life by jumping from a balcony. This death was one of only six deaths at the Superdome: one person overdosed and four others died of natural causes. Another 20,000 people gathered at the Convention Center for assistance, an evacuation site the federal government was unaware of until three days after the storm.

President Bush was otherwise occupied during this time. The day Katrina hit, he traveled to Arizona and California to promote his prescription drug plan, had birthday cake with John McCain, and attended a Padres game.

Panicked at the slow federal response, Governor Blanco sent an urgent request: “Mr. President, we need your help. We need everything you’ve got.” The president retired to bed that night without responding to Blanco. The next day, he sang songs with country singer Mark Willis and returned to Texas for the final night of his vacation. The President was so oblivious to the suffering in New Orleans that his staff made a video of news coverage four days after the storm to sensitize him. And, in response, President Bush’s team assembled a carefully crafted PR plan to blame local officials seven days into the ordeal while thousands of people were still stranded. Later that same day, President Bush made the infamous statement, “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.”

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s blog.

Sangyoub Park, an Assistant Professor at Washburn University, sent in a link to a story by NPR about the racial gap in homeownership rates, a gap that has worsened during the recession. For instance, while over 70% of White households owned their home in 2010, less than half of African American households did:

This graph from the Census Bureau also shows the rate for Hispanics and “all other races” — the only group whose homeownership rate is still significantly higher than it was in the early ’90s. Hispanics are only slightly more likely to own their home than are African American households:

NPR also has a page with interactive maps that show foreclosure rates, unemployment, and median income (though unfortunately it doesn’t break information down by race/ethnicity). You can roll over a county and get the specific data. Here’s the foreclosure information for Clark County, Nevada, home to Las Vegas, me, and, as far as I can tell, the highest proportion of homes in foreclosure in the nation — 1 in 99:

Also see our related posts on African American and White job loss during the recession, the growing racial wealth gap, and more on racial differences in the severity of the economic crisis.

Nicole G., Malia T.K., Zeynep A., Veronica P., Kristina K., Anthony W., Dolores R., and Velanie Williams all let us know about the Nivea for Men ad that received a lot of criticism when it appeared recently. The ad shows an African American man with close-cropped hair and shaved face ready to fling away a version of his own head, this one with beard and Afro, with the tagline “Re-civilize yourself”:

Not surprisingly, many who saw the ad saw it as playing into the old stereotype of African American men as uncivilized and savage, and presenting Afros as inherently wild and unattractive.

The ad is part of Nivea’s “Give a Damn” ad campaign. There is one that features a White man holding a head (via Ad Age):

Ad Age argues that if Nivea had simply switched the copy on the two ads, there probably wouldn’t have been an outcry. That’s quite possible. But they didn’t; they put these particular ads out into the public. We saw something similar with the Dove ad that came out back in the spring. Then I wrote,

I continue to be puzzled that multinational corporations with resources for large-scale marketing campaigns so often stumble in awkward ways when trying to include a range of racial/ethnic groups in their materials. This seems to occur by not sufficiently taking into account existing or historical cultural representations that may provide a background for the interpretation of images or phrases in the advertising.

The same can be said here: yes, Nivea (which has pulled the first ad) has a whole ad campaign about “giving a damn” about your looks. Yes, they also had an ad showing a White man, presenting long hair on Whites as unacceptable or unattractive too. But only one of the men is labeled as “uncivilized” when he has “natural” or ungroomed hair. And the cultural context for these two ads isn’t the same. Given the symbolic power of the Afro in the U.S. — because of historical prejudices against African Americans who didn’t have “good hair” or didn’t straighten it (including using the word “nappy” as an insult) and the Afro’s position as a symbol of Black pride and resistance to beauty standards that privilege Whites — presenting an African American man with long, curly hair as “uncivilized” resonates in a way that the White ad simply doesn’t, even if Nivea had used the same language in both ads.

Cross-posted, in Portuguese, at Petiscos de Sociologia.

Noam sent in a link to a website with a post featuring “beautiful” Chinese women who have been executed.  These women are apparently important not because of their sacrifice, or because of what they say about Chinese politics, but because they’re beautiful.  Non-beautiful women who have been executed apparently draw no interest.

Noam’s submission gave me a fantastic excuse to post a video of our very own Gwen Sharp giving a 4-1/2 minute lecture about a similar phenomenon, the Missing White Woman Syndrome (originally posted at the NSC School of Liberal Arts and Sciences; transcript after the jump).

She covers quite a bit of ground.  After introducing the concept, she discusses data on the disproportionate coverage of crimes against white women, and how this shapes perceptions of risk.  In fact, white women are among the least likely type of person to be victimized.  This graph, coincidentally sent in by Grace S., doesn’t break down the data by gender, but it shows a clear pattern by race.

The constant attention to white women’s vulnerability, even though it’s disproportionate, makes it seem as if they are especially likely to be a victim of violent crime.  The risk that women of color will be victimized, then, is underestimated and not taken as seriously as it should be.  Meanwhile, white women may confine themselves to safer-seeming leisure activities and occupational pursuits.

These patterns affirm the role of racism in news making — with violence against women of color apparently less newsworthy — and also shows that white women, though valorized, may self-curtail their lives out of fear that they are, accordingly, the most likely target of violence.

Follow Gwen on Twitter!

References:

Chiricos, T., S. Eschholz, & M. Gertz. (1997). Crime, news and fear of crime: toward an identification of audience effects. Social Problems 44(3), 342-357.

Lundman, R.J. (2003). The newsworthiness and selection bias in news about murder: comparative and relative effects of novelty and race and gender typifications on newspaper coverage of homicide. Sociological Forum, 18(3), 357-386.

Transcript after the jump:

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Attention upper-middle class white women: help save poor Indian women from a life of forced prostitution, all from the comfort of your hammock! Simply purchase some comfy, trendy pants.

(Image from International Princess Project, the organization behind Punjammies)

Aliyah C. wrote to us about a series of photos on a website for a product called Punjammies. The images offer a stark illustration of the racial, classed, and gendered nature of many “development” initiatives.

According to their website, Punjammies claims to offer Indian women who have escaped forced prostitution a chance to rebuild their lives by providing them with the marketable skill of manufacturing clothing.

Images in the Punjammies catalogue make it clear who the target market is: They feature exclusively white women, luxuriously lounging about in Punjammies attire.

Meanwhile, images on the “About” page depict the women purportedly empowered by this operation, conducting manual labour to produce Punjammies products.

Consumerism-driven development initiatives like Punjammies fail to challenge the inherent inequalities at play in a situation where wealthy, white women in the developed world are seen as benevolent and charitable for making a purchase, while women in developing countries manufacturing the products are portrayed as beneficiaries. Furthermore, as Barbara Heron might argue, Punjammies is a prime example of how development initiatives often play into notions of white female subjectivity as compassionate and caring, dependent upon the Othering of women of colour in the south.  In fact, since colonialism, the advantages that accrue to those of us in developed countries have been linked to the disadvantages faced by the rest of the world. Our economies are not separate entities, they are intimately linked.

Reflecting upon images like these should remind us to remain critical of the ways in which “development” is marketed to us, and how it can perpetuate rather than challenge inequalities.

Reference: Heron, B. (2007). Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender and the Helping Imperative. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press.

Hayley Price has a background in sociology, international development studies, and education. She recently completed her Masters degree in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.