race/ethnicity

Latoya Petersen at Racialicious highlighted an interesting campaign ad. Funded by Citizens Against Government Waste, it features a future in which China has succeeded the United States as the world’s super power. It is supposed to frighten the reader by forecasting a world in which China rules America (cue ominous music and satisfied evil chuckling).

What is interesting to me is the assumption that drives the commercial: that the U.S. should be a super power, that it is naturally so (so long as it sticks to its founding principles), and that it would be wrong for China to be more powerful than the U.S.   The idea that self-satisfied Asian people would be in charge adds racist oomph to the threat.

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 at Native Appropriations reports that this year Harvard University fraternity Sigma Chi threw a Columbus Day “bros and hos” party titled “Conquistabros and Navajos.” Get it?

Perhaps it’s too much to expect student in the Ivy League to be sensitive, but Harvard students are supposed to be smart, right?  Not so much.  Adrienne points out their bizarre illogic: how exactly does it make sense to have a party that mingles Navajos (from the American Southwest) with pilgrims (who lived in the American Northeast) and Conquistadors (who arrived after, not with Columbus) and cowboys (who, as we know them, would come hundreds of years later)?

And while we’re at it, why not expect them to be sensitive.  Adrienne reminds us, again, patiently…

1. Glorifying and making light of the atrocities committed by the “explorers” of the Americas is just as bad as glorifying the Nazis and the Holocaust, and not something to be taken lightly.

2. The theme is using a generic stereotype of an Indigenous person (in this case “Navajo”) to represent thousands of tribes and communities throughout the Americas, each with their own unique culture and history. The Indigenous groups who encountered the conquistadors are not remotely the same as Navajos in the southwest, and by lumping them together, the party contributes to continued stereotyping of Native peoples as one monolithic group — consisting of hollywood stereotypes of war paint, feathers, and buckskin.

3. Encouraging party goers to “dress up” as American Indians and Indigenous Peoples puts Native people in the category of a fantasy character — something that no longer exists, or never did. Columbus, Conquistadors, and Pilgrims are all situated in the past, but Native peoples are still here, are still alive, and still Native (and yes, cowboys are still alive, but they are not systematically oppressed and facing continued colonialism). It is also condoning dressing up in racial drag, and I would bet Sigma Chi might get in a little trouble if they hosted a blackface party.

But no one would do that, would they?

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.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to an interesting breakdown of the race/ethnicity and gender of guests on a number of late-night talk shows, found at Edlundart.

Edlund explains the methodology:

The data for this graphic was gathered over 6 weeks in August and September of 2010. Numbers are based on guest lists as presented on Late Night Lineups. Determining race/ethnicity can be a rather dicey and imprecise activity, and it’s also worth noting that the relationship between census and guest numbers is not a pure one – for example, some of the guests I counted as white are British white people who are visiting the United States.

Of course, a few guests were neither White, Hispanic, Black, nor Asian. These guests were left out, as their numbers were insignificant on the whole…

Edlund also points out that since The Daily Show only has one guest per night, it has a much smaller dataset than the others, so the lack of diversity may be somewhat overstated due to such a small sample.

Here are the results for race (presented as % of all guests); the small dots show the percent in the Census, the wider bars the percent on the show:

Here is the same data but for the top-billed guests only, where the over-representation of Whites goes up even more for most of the shows:

Here’s equivalent data for women:

And, again, for just top-billed guests:

As Edlund says, these data both reflect and reinforce broader cultural patterns. Given that Whites still dominate the political system, for instance, it’s not surprising that political guests would be disproportionately White; and if more movies have male stars than female stars, guest spots will reflect that as well. But at the same time, these shows include people from a range of industries/careers, and their selection of guests helps raise the profile of some individuals more than others, potentially contributing to more opportunities and star power for them. So they don’t just reflect existing realities; they amplify them.

It would be great to get more info on how an individual is selected when there are multiple possibilities — say, you have a movie with several prominent cast members. In that case, are there patterns related to race/ethnicity and gender in which person is most likely to get booked?

According to a story on NPR, Asian Americans are less likely to be unemployed than White, Black, and Hispanic Americans.  But, when they do lose a job, they remain unemployed significantly longer.

Jobless Rates by Race:

Length of Unemployment:

Why might Asians have a more difficult time finding work?  Kent Wong of  UCLA’s Center for Labor Research and Education explains that their extended length of unemployment can be attributed to a confluence of two realities that make their situation unique.  First,about 70% of Asian Americans are foreign born and these immigrants often live in ethnic enclaves (e.g., Chinatowns) that focus on a single industry.  So long as there is work in that industry, Asians can find work.  But, if that industry goes south, their limited network outside of those enclaves becomes a hindrance.  Meanwhile, Asians (unlike Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks) tend to be segregated by language.  Wong explains that, with about a dozen languages spoken widely in the Asian American community, pan-ethnic networks can be difficult to build and maintain.  This leads to extra difficulty finding a new job:

If you have a Vietnamese employee working for a Vietnamese employer in Little Saigon in Orange County, that does not transfer to an ability to get a job in Koreatown in Los Angeles…

Both residential and linguistic segregation, then, contribute to long periods of unemployment for Asian Americans.

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.

In this Zócalo video, sociologist Jennifer Lee discusses the social construction of race and the history of the U.S. census with NALEO’s Arturo Vargas and the L.A. Times‘ Steve Padilla:

For more on the social construction of race, see our post on race and ethnicity in censuses around the world.

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.

In this video sociologist Devah Pager describes her experimental research on race, criminal records, and employment with Dalton Conley.  Using matched pairs of black and white students posing as job applicants, she finds, stunningly, that black men without a criminal record are as likely to get a call back for a job as white men with one (see the tables here).  Black men with criminal records receive call backs for only about one in 20 completed job applications.

See also our post in which one man explains the “hidden life sentence” he received after a crime 20 years past.

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.

George H.W. Bush’s 1988 “Willie Horton” campaign ad is infamous for racializing fears of crime, encouraging stereotypes of African American men as violent and threatening. The ad is widely believed to have destroyed Michael Dukakis’s chances for winning the presidency, presenting him as soft on crime. It’s a classic example of race-baiting in political campaigns — ads that present racial/ethnic minorities as threatening. Jesse Helms took a different approach with his affirmative action ad, which draws on some Whites’ fears that they are losing out on jobs because of affirmative action.

This election cycle, a number of candidates have produced ads that clearly attempt to stoke and benefit from anti-Hispanic immigrant sentiment. Talking Points Memo posted a mailer sent out by the Yuma County, Arizona, Republican Party as part of its campaign against Democratic state Representative Rae Waters. One side shows a stop sign full of bullet holes and makes a link between immigrants and neighborhood crime:

SB 1070 is the controversial Arizona law that allows law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of people they have stopped for other violations if there is a “reasonable suspicion” they might be undocumented or not carrying the appropriate papers.

To drive the message home, the other side of the mailer contains an image of a blond child, looking a little disturbed, and again links opposition to SB 1070 to “drugs and violence”:

Here in Nevada, Senate candidate Sharon Angle is currently running this commercial that calls Harry Reid the best friend of “illegals,” who are “putting Americans’ safety and jobs at risk.”

The commercial ends with this image:

She has a second commercial that plays on the same themes:

In West Virginia, this ad against Nick Rahall, a Christian Lebanese-American, prominently displays the phrase “Arab Americans” (he chaired Arab Americans for Obama) while scary music plays in the background:

If you have other examples of racialized or anti-immigrant imagery in current campaign ads, let us know.

UPDATE: S. Elle let us know about this ad by Senator David Vitter, of Louisiana, which is very similar to the Angle commercials:

And kantmakm provided a link to this billboard outside Grand Junction, Colorado:

History isn’t fact, but a narrative.  Nations narrate their own histories, telling the stories about themselves that they prefer.  Holidays are one way in which these stories are told and re-told.

At www.america.gov, the U.S. government describes Columbus Day as a”commemoration” of Columbus’ “landing in the New World” (they astutely avoid the term “discovery”) and initiating a “lasting encounter” between the mis-named “Indians” and Europeans (no mention of genocide or the stealing of land).

Contesting this particular version of history, an organization calling itself Reconsider Columbus Day is asking Americans to adopt an alternative national narrative, one that both acknowledges and emphasizes the oppressive and unjust outcomes of the ongoing “lasting encounter” between American “Indians” and Europeans-now-Americans.

The narrative and counter-narrative is an interesting example of how nation-founding memories are not set, but always potentially changing as the national ethos and distribution of power shifts underneath them.

For more on national memories, see our post comparing the German approach to the Holocaust and the America approach to slavery.

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.