{"id":3917,"date":"2008-11-03T01:51:59","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T06:51:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=3917"},"modified":"2010-11-24T02:37:34","modified_gmt":"2010-11-24T07:37:34","slug":"the-average-american","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2008\/11\/03\/the-average-american\/","title":{"rendered":"The “Average” American"},"content":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0her book,\u00a0The Averaged Americans<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> Sarah Igo talks about the development of statistical methods.\u00a0 Their development\u00a0allowed for the emergence of the idea of an “average American.”\u00a0 An idea that\u00a0carried moral weight; “average” was “good.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Looking at the famous\u00a0“Middletown<\/a>” study, the Kinsey Reports, and the invention of polling, she discusses how methods aimed at identifying the average Amerian often reproduced preconceived notions of who was a real\u00a0American. \u00a0In the Middletown study, Blacks were ignored because the researchers decided they didn’t count as average Americans.\u00a0 Similarly, polling methodology is aimed at getting a representative sample, but representative of who?\u00a0 Deciding who is being over- or under-represented in a sampling strategy is always a choice.<\/p>\n

The invention of the “average American” as an idea is interesting in light of the McCain\/Palin rhetoric about “main street” and “real America” and the way in which being a “typical” American is being framed as\u00a0morally good (image from\u00a0Stuff White People Do<\/a>)<\/p>\n

.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

As with Middletown, the idea of the average American used by McCain\/Palin is still racially-coded.\u00a0 We Are Respectable Negroes lists 69 terms<\/a>–including “regular folks,” “responsible Americans,”\u00a0and “good hard-working people”–used by speakers in this election to mean middle-class white person.\u00a0 Here are Palin’s words:<\/p>\n

[youtube]http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Vob9vFvojN8[\/youtube]<\/p>\n

Which brings me to Joe the Plumber.\u00a0 Joe the Plumber, of course, is supposed to represent an “average” American.\u00a0 But every in-group needs an out-group<\/a> and, like all incarnations of the average, Joe has to be differentiated from the extremes, the non-average, the tails of the distribution: the blacks, the traitors, the poor, the Muslims, etc.\u00a0 Here he is making exactly such an argument about Obama:<\/p>\n

[youtube]http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=xw2Wczp9yOc[\/youtube]<\/p>\n

Indeed, convincing us that Obama is Other has been a central part of the McCain\/Palin strategy (see here<\/a>, here<\/a>, a here<\/a>, a here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0her book,\u00a0The Averaged Americans, Sarah Igo talks about the development of statistical methods.\u00a0 Their development\u00a0allowed for the emergence of the idea of an “average American.”\u00a0 An idea that\u00a0carried moral weight; “average” was “good.”\u00a0 Looking at the famous\u00a0“Middletown” study, the Kinsey Reports, and the invention of polling, she discusses how methods aimed at identifying the average […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23384,253,274,283,285,1760,1757,42,37,302],"class_list":["post-3917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-history","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-religion","tag-social-psychology","tag-terrorism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3917"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29860,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3917\/revisions\/29860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}