race/ethnicity

Just as “I’m not a racist, but…” is a sure sign that someone is about to say something racist, an essay that begins “I don’t want to trivialize the inhumane horrors that African slaves endured on slave ships destined for the Americas. But…” is certain to do just that.  Indeed, Steven Heller at Imprint began his post this way, going on to suggest that the design of modern airplanes “resemble[s]” that of slave ships.  As evidence, he recalls his own discomfort in coach and compares drawings of slave ships and blueprints of airplanes.

Heller prefaced his observations with a disclaimer because he knew comparing modern air travel to the slave trade was sketchy.  And it is, indeed, sketchy. The descendants of slaves live life with the knowledge that their ancestors were stolen, shackled, beaten, and denied their very humanity; at least they survived the trip across the Atlantic.  Nope, not like air travel one bit.

So, yes, it’s lovely to be clever, but it’s also lovely to be thoughtful and sensitive.  In this case, Heller’s desire to be the former won out over the latter.  Or perhaps he never really thought that anyone would seriously be upset by the comparison.  It’s obviously tongue-in-cheek right?  I mean, slavery has been over for, like, ever.  Or maybe he forgot that descendants of slaves read the freakin’ internet just like everyone else.

Who knows.  In any case, it’s a great example of the trivializing of the histories and traumas of a marginalized population.

Thanks to Dolores R. for the tip.

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.

Last week we featured a guest post by Stephen Bridenstine about the invisibility of Native American reservations on Google Maps, and how this affects our awareness of geographic and social realities. The flip side of ignoring some information about our country is what we do choose to draw attention to.

Over a year ago, Charlotte C. sent in a photo of a sign she noticed in downtown Fall City, Washington, about 25 miles east of Seattle. The sign includes several milestones for the area. The first significant event worthy of note is the first time a White person laid eyes on nearby Snoqualmie Falls:

This reminded me of a photo I took of a monument near the Black Hills in South Dakota. The monument is for Anna (or Annie) Tallent, a woman who was a teacher and superintendent of schools for Pennington County. While the monument mentions she was a “teacher and author,” her major claim to fame appears to be that she was the “first White woman to enter the Black Hills”:

Text:

In Memory of Anna Donna Tallent

Teacher and Author

Born in New York State, April 12, 1827.  Died in Sturgis, S. Dakota, February 13, 1901.

The first White woman to enter the Black Hills, arriving in Custer City in December 1874.

This monument is erected by the Society of Black Hills Pioneers and many admirers.

“The world is better because she lived and served in it.”

The monument to her achievements fails to note that in 1874, when she entered the Black Hills, the region was part of the Great Sioux Reservation and were not legally available to Whites for settlement. The U.S. Cavalry removed her entire party for setting up an illegal gold mining encampment on land that was clearly owned by the Sioux, according to an 1868 treaty with the U.S. government…a treaty the government quit honoring soon after Whites found out there was gold in the Black Hills, which the the federal government confiscated in 1877. Tallent discussed the illegal land invasions (including her expedition’s efforts to avoid detection by government officials) in her 1899 book The Black Hills, Or, The Last Hunting Ground of the Dakotahs, in which she laments the “mournful” state of the Sioux nation but rhetorically asks whether it’s appropriate to honor treaties that “arrest the advance of civilization” (p. 3) and, generally, presents a racist, condescending depiction of Native Americans as pathetic, sad “savages” whose displacement in the name of progress and civilization was inevitable.

So what story about our nation do these two monuments tell? The only information contained on the two-sided Fall City monument refers to the activities of Whites; the Native residents were important only when they lost land. For all intents and purposes, the history of the area started only once a White man had set eyes on it. Similarly, Tallent’s arrival in the Black Hills is memorable largely because she was a White woman, whose presence is by definition worthy of note and celebration — imagine, a vulnerable White woman braving the wildness of the Dakota territory! The fact that she was an illegal prospector camping on land she didn’t own while in the pursuit of quick wealth is neither worth mentioning nor a cause to question whether she’s a laudable figure deserving of a monument. Thus, the effect of both of these monuments is to normalize colonization and illegal settlement, and present the arrival of Whites as the beginning of meaningful history.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Jay Smooth posted a 2-minute clip of rapper Brother Ali discussing why he, as a White rapper, decided not to use the “N-word,” and the need to be sensitive to the fact that being friends with African Americans, or being social disadvantaged in some ways (economically, due to a disability, etc.) doesn’t erase White privilege. The visual effect is sort of wonky, but it’s an interesting conversation:

Partial transcript, available at Jay Smooth’s website:

The thing with the ‘n word’: it’s very very confusing for white kids who have a lot of black friends and are accepted. And I can’t stand here and say that when I was 9 years old, and all my friends were black, and they were telling me ‘you’re basically black,’ that I didn’t believe that. Now I’m at a place where I’m just like ‘not everybody knows me and nobody should ever have to, like, why should I impose on other people to have to confront that question in their mind?’ You know what I mean?

The U.S. is not a very race-literate society.  We aren’t taught much about the history of race relations or racial inequality in school and almost nothing about how to think about race or how to talk to one another about these theoretically and emotionally challenging issues.  Many Americans, then, don’t have a very sophisticated understanding of race dynamics, even as most of them want racial equality and would be horrified to be called “racist.”

In teaching Race and Ethnicity, then, I notice that some of the more naive students will cling to color-blindness.  “Race doesn’t matter,” they say, “I don’t even see color.”   Being colorblind seems like the right thing to be when you’ve grown up being told that (1) all races are or should be equal and (2) you should never judge a book by its cover.  It is the logical outcome of the messages we give many young people about race.

But, of course, color blindness fails because race, despite being a social invention, still matters in our society.  Enter the ongoing scandal about the Cadbury candy bar ad featuring Naomi Campbell, sent in by Dolores R.,  Jack M., and Terri.  The ad compares the Dairy Milk Bliss Bar to Campbell.  It reads: “Move over Naomi, there’s a new Diva in town.”

The ad has been called racist because it compares Campbell to a chocolate bar; chocolate is a term sometimes used to describe black people’s skin color or overall sexual “deliciousness.”  The ad, then, is argued to be foregrounding skin color and even playing on stereotypes of black women’s sexuality.

So what happened here?  One the one hand, I see the critics’ point.  On the other, I can also imagine the advertising people behind this ad thinking that they want to link the candy bar with the idea of a diva (rich, indulgent, etc.), and choosing Campbell because she is a notorious diva, not because she’s a black, female supermodel.  They could argue that they were being colorblind and that race was not at all a consideration in designing this ad.

The problem is that being colorblind in a society where race still colors our perceptions simply doesn’t work.  The truth is that race may not have been a consideration in designing the Cadbury ad, but it should have been.  Not because it’s fun or functional to play with race stereotypes, but because racial meaning is something that must be managed, whether you like it or not.  This is where Cadbury failed.

In my classes, I ask my earnestly-anti-racist students to replace color-blindness with color-consciousness.  We need to be thoughtful and smart about race, racial meaning, and racial inequality.  Racism is bad, but color-blindess is a just form of denial; being conscious about color — seeing it for what it is and isn’t, both really and socially — is a much better way to bring about a just society.

Cadbury, for what it’s worth, has apologized.

See also the Oreo Barbie, the Black Lil’ Monkey Doll, the Obama Sock Monkey, Disparate Pricing for Black and White Dolls, and Accidentally Illustrating Evil with Skin Color.

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.

On the heels of our post about race, ideas of beauty, and the controversy about Satoshi Kanazawa’s blog post at Psychology Today claiming Black women are “objectively” less attractive than women from other races, Lisa C. sent in the 9-minute trailer for the documentary Dark Girls. In it, African American women discuss their own experiences of bias toward dark-skinned women, both in pop culture broadly and from people in their own lives. It’s a stunning and heart-breaking illustration of the personal costs of beauty standards that define dark skin as inherently and automatically problematic:

Dark Girls: Preview from Bradinn French on Vimeo.

Melissa H.J., Lizzy F., Dmitriy T.M., Kari B., Kalani R., Lisa C., and Anna C. all sent us links about the recent blog post at Psychology Today that many of you have probably already heard about, since it caused quite the outcry. The article, by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, apparently went through multiple title revisions, starting out as “Black Women Are Ugly,” changing to “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?”, and eventually becoming “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?”, before being removed from the Psychology Today website altogether. However, as we know, nothing on the internet is ever really gone, and images of the original post are widely available. I’m using one from BuzzFeed.

Kanazawa apparently specializes in claiming that there are clear, definite, “objective” differences in attractiveness (and also intelligence, and also everything else important) between different races. Also, you can tell who is a criminal and who isn’t just by the way they look (an article illustrated with an image of O.J. Simpson) and, as an added bonus, “virtually all ‘stereotypes’ are empirically true”. We know this is objective because there are graph-y science things, with numbers:

To summarize his point: Women are more attractive than men. And when one of his Add Health interviewers measures a study participant’s attractiveness on a 5-point scale, this is “objective.”  Because they are researchers, and therefore anything they say is objective. And according to objective measurements, Black women aren’t attractive at all. In fact, they’re “far less attractive” than other groups of women. See?

It turns out White women are most attractive. Man! Who would have thought?

There are a lot of other gems, such as the fact that Black women, though objectively less attractive, bizarrely rate themselves subjectively more attractive. It’s like they don’t know they’re ugly!

I’m sick of this article and will leave it to you to click over and read the whole thing if you feel so inclined. Let’s just summarize some of the major issues, and then all move on with our lives:

First, he treats race like a real, biological, meaningful entity. But race is socially constructed; there is no clear biological dividing line that would allow us to put every person on the planet into racial categories, since societies differ in the racial categories they recognize and “race” doesn’t map along unique sets of genes — there is more genetic variation among members of a so-called race as there are between members of different races.

Aside from that, the idea of measuring beauty objectively, completely separated from all cultural influence, is problematic, especially when you start looking at differences by race/ethnicity. In The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, Deborah Rhode discusses how perceptions of attractiveness have varied over time and across cultures and discusses the global history of slavery, colonialism, and race-based systems of domination that make it impossible to separate out our perceptions of what is beautiful and sexually appealing from historical ideologies that insisted that non-White peoples were unattractive (unless in an exotic way, when that was useful, and also, the Irish were hideous despite being European). Joane Nagel’s book Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersection, Forbidden Frontiers is another good source on this topic.

It is simply impossible to separate out even scientists’ ratings of attractiveness from the cultural context, one in which supposedly “Caucasian” features and light skin are repeatedly held up as the ideal of attractiveness (so even famous non-White people often find themselves lightened in media images) while dark skinned people are constructed as unattractive or even scary.

Given that history, it’s not shocking that White women would be rated most attractive and Black women least. What’s shocking is that a scholar at the London School of Economics would think you could uncritically accept those rankings as proof of objective reality, rather than the outcome of constant, long-standing cultural messages about attractiveness that resulted from efforts to legitimize and justify social and political inequalities.

UPDATE: Reader JA provided a link to another post at Psychology Today in which researchers looked at the data Kanazawa used and question his analysis and results.

UPDATE 2: The comments section has largely devolved into a flame war with lots of insults flying around, so I’m closing comments since I won’t be around to moderate them for the next week. I will go in and clean out the comments threads when I get a chance.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Tyrone Forman wrote a wonderful article* examining the discursive strategies white college students use to distance themselves from racism, while still blaming people of color for their own disadvantage or being, straightforwardly, racist.  Among other strategies, they noted that these students would often preface their comments with the phrase “I am not a racist but…”

We’ve documented this strategy before with a series of PostSecret confessions and we certainly saw it used by UCLA’s Alexandra Wallace in her famous anti-Asian rant.  Now Karen alerted me to a new blog collecting instances of this type of language on Facebook, titled simply I’m Not Racist But… It’s pretty stunning what often follows.  Here are some examples (trigger warning for, um, some seriously racist talk):

That was just a selection from the first two pages.  They are lots more.  In a similar vein, you might visit our post about racist tweets and updates after the tsunami hit Japan.

* Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo & Tyrone A. Forman.  2000.  ‘I am not a racist but…’: Mapping White college students’ racial ideology in the USA.  Discourse and Society 11, 1: 50-85.

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.

Note: Since I posted this, Philip Cohen has brought up concerns about the National Marriage Project’s data and analysis in another study. You might want to take a look at his post.

Patricia P. sent in an infographic illustrating trends in marriage, divorce, and cohabitation over the last several decades, based on data from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. I found several of the images to be a bit cluttered and unclear, but this one neatly summarizes the percent of women over age 15 who were currently married, 1960-2009:

I looked through the full 2010 The State of Our Unions report. This graph, showing the percent of those aged 15 or older who were married from 1960-2009, shows that marriage has become less common for both men and women, Blacks and Whites (based on U.S. Census Data):

Of course, this is in large part because people in the U.S. are getting married later; not only do we not really expect a 15-year-old to be married, we’d be rather horrified if they were. If we look only at adults aged 35-44, we do see a significant decrease in marriage between 1960 and 2009, but still, about 2/3 were married:

The report also includes a graph of the percent chance that a couple will divorce or separate within 10 years, broken down by education, for the early ’70s and the late ’90s (for first-marriage couples only). Least educated is defined as having less than a high school diploma; the moderately educated graduated high school but have less than a 4-year college degree; and the highly educated have a 4-year college degree or more:

Note that for both the least and most educated, the risk of divorce actually went down — though those with the least education are over three times as likely to separate/divorce than the highly educated.

On the other hand, rates of cohabitation have gone up:

Perceptions of marriage, not surprisingly, also vary by educational level, with the highly educated feeling significantly more positively about marriage than the less educated population. Asked if they agreed that marriage hadn’t worked out for “most people” they know, 53% of the least educated and 43% of the moderately educated said yes, while only 17% of those with at least college degrees felt similarly:

So the overall trend appears to be a growing gap between the highly educated and those with less than a 4-year college degree, with the moderately educated looking more similar to those with less than a high school diploma in terms of their marriage, divorce, and cohabitation behaviors. If you’re interested in this topic, check out the full report.