discourse/language

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.

Earlier this month, The New York Times and Foreign Policy both reported on the United Nations population forecast for the next 100 years. According to the report, rather than hitting 9 billion at mid-century and then leveling off, the world’s population is likely to climb to 10 million and keep going. The cause: a fertility boom in the global south –– Africa, Asia, Latin America. Such growth, according to the report, if unchecked, will have dire consequences on a world already facing shortages of food, available water and other life-giving resources.

In reporting the story, both the Times and Foreign Policy used pictures of women and their children, but the way they used the pictures was somewhat chilling. For example, the Times ran a photo of several women of color under the heading: “Coming to a Planet Near You: 3 Billion More Mouths to Feed.”

Additionally, Foreign Policy ran a photo under the sub-headline: “Why ignoring family planning overseas was the worst foreign-policy mistake of the century.” It featured a picture of dark-skinned women with a child.

These photos, paired with the headlines and the dire predictions in the stories of what’s to come should the global south’s fertility boom remain unchecked, tap into anxieties about women’s bodies and link the coming doom and gloom directly to them. The Times headline, warning of “3 billion more mouths to feed,” is combined with seven new mothers in Manila; positioned in a long row, they crowd the frame of the photograph as they are imagined to crowd the planet.  While the Foreign Policy sub-headline inspires fear, saying that allowing the burgeoning birth rate was  the “worst… mistake of the century.”  Its photo features two women and a child in the foreground.  In both cases the focus on women makes it seem as if men have no role in reproduction at all.

Whether they meant it or not, such a juxtaposition does little more than demonize women –– particularly poor women from developing countries –– as directly responsible for the problem of overpopulation and its solution. While the commentaries herald funding for family planning and education –- both great ideas –– they contain no conversation about economic systems that create or maintain poverty in certain parts of the world; how patriarchy and systems of male-centered power prevent women from being able to control their own reproduction; and how international development money too often comes with strings attached that restrict government resources for education and health care, especially for women, who too often are the ones who bear the hardest brunt of poverty and the greatest social opprobrium.

Here’s what an alternative might look like:  GOOD Magazine discussed the U.N. report and the coming population boom. Its focus: How responsible living in the United States and other wealthy countries can help ensure food for all. The photo that ran with the commentary: a photo of the planet Earth.

Barbara Yuki Schwartz is a doctoral student in the Theology, History and Ethics program at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill.  She studies postcolonial and poststruturalist theory, political theory and theology, trauma studies, and is interested in how body, community and psychic life intersect and influence theology and liturgy. She blogs regularly at Dialogic Magazine.

I know a Googler.  Never to let a fleeting inquiry go unGoogled, he recently wondered who was the voice of Hulu.  It turns out to be a man named Dave Fennoy.  Fennoy is a wildly successful voice actor, doing work for McDonalds, KFC, and Chrysler.  He’s also black.  In the 1-1/2 minute clip below, he talks about being teased as a kid for “talk[ing] like a white boy” and how this caused him “identity problems.”  Later he attended Howard University, where he re-thought what it meant to be black, rejecting the idea that he was supposed to talk in any which way. He doesn’t talk about how his success in The Industry (as we call it in Los Angeles) is related to his sound, though I wish he had:

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

A recent Soc Images post on cultural appropriation highlighted issues of control over the production and representation of images of Indigenous peoples. On a related note, an image I captured during a recent visit to the Canadian Museum of Civilization (or as one of my professors has called it, the “Canadian Museum of Colonization”) highlights similar issues regarding the representation of Indigenous knowledges. This poster was displayed in the “First Peoples’ Hall” of the museum in a section dedicated to “Ways of Knowing”:

Two points are particularly striking. Firstly, the poster portrays the “preservation” of Indigenous knowledges as a project of colonizers and non-Indigenous anthropologists. Rather than attributing control over the production and representation of Indigenous knowledges to Indigenous peoples themselves, the poster depicts colonial “explorers” and anthropologists as the primary agents in these endeavors. Indigenous peoples themselves are merely portrayed as informants, leaving interpretation and presentation to colonizers and anthropologists. In recent years, numerous Indigenous scholars have written about the oppressive nature of this type of approach to Indigenous peoples and knowledges, pointing out how academic disciplines such as anthropology have been essential tools in the study and subjugation of Indigenous peoples as “primitive Others.”

Secondly, the poster presents Indigenous knowledges as static and unchanging, ignoring their dynamic nature and the ongoing experiences of Canada’s Indigenous communities. Canadian Indigenous scholar Andrea Smith* has argued that in settler societies such as Canada, false notions of the disappearance or threat of extinction of Indigenous peoples and their knowledges are at the foundation of cultural imaginations and serve as justifications for the appropriation of Indigenous lands and cultures. In this case, the threat of extinction is implied in the need for Indigenous knowledges to be “preserved in writing.”

This poster provides an entry point for questioning power relations inherent in the production and presentation of knowledge at the Canadian Museum of Civilization and similar institutions. This example demonstrates how the museum portrays a particular view of Canada and its relationship with Indigenous communities, one which ignores the historical and continuing reality of colonialism and its implications.

* Smith, A. (2006). Heteropatriarchy and the three pillars of white supremacy: Rethinking women of color organizing. In A. Smith (Ed.), Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology (66-73). Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

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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 with a thesis on Indigenous knowledges in development studies.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Sometimes you just have to laugh.  Sex is used to sell the most ridiculous things, like organ donation.  It’s like marketers think we’ve Pavlov’s dogs.  Show a sexy woman (’cause sexy women = sex) and, rumor has it, people will buy.

When Renée sent in this photograph of a storefront display aiming at selling ovens, I felt compelled to share its ridiculousness with you.  Begin snark:

Ovens are hot.  Get it.  They’re “hot.”  LOL.  Put her in lingerie, sit her ass on the oven door, add a fire-red wig, and surround her with thermometers.  Add the words, “HOT! HOT! HOT!”  Maybe if we really overdo it with the metaphor, no one will notice how stupid this is.

Enjoy:

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 another example, via Jezebel, of the use of hunting as a metaphor for dating/attaining sex with women.  The metaphor portrays men as predators and women as prey,  suggesting that women are inherently unwilling and men inherently deceitful, coercive, and aggressive.  This sets the stage, discursively, for sexual assault.

Throw in a couple men representing a non-specifically “primitive” culture to remind us that such a relationships is “natural,” and you’ve got this Dos Equis ad:

For more of this metaphor, see Sex and Dating as a Hunt, Beer, Sex, and the Hunt, Taxidermied Girl Parts, and Hunting for Bambi.

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.

Michel Foucault famously suggested that we stop congratulating ourselves for our willingness to talk about sex (“We are just so, like, liberated!”) and ask what it is exactly that we are saying. I thought of him as I pondered this 50-second compilation of each time a character in a single episode of the ABC Family show, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, utters the word “sex.” How many times?  70 times.  70 times in just 45 minutes of programming.

So we definitely know that we’re talking about sex.  That’s for sure.  But what is the impact of all of this talk?  You can imagine a thousand different messages contained in the space between one “sex” and the next.  Whether that’s liberating is up for debate.

Found at The Daily 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.

Chris Rock makes a downright profound observation about race discourse in this 2 1/2-minute clip, sent along by Collin College sociologist John Glass:

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.