{"id":9173,"date":"2014-11-21T09:00:34","date_gmt":"2014-11-21T14:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=9173"},"modified":"2014-11-11T01:05:45","modified_gmt":"2014-11-11T06:05:45","slug":"excluding-blacks-from-the-national-collective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/11\/21\/excluding-blacks-from-the-national-collective\/","title":{"rendered":"Excluding Blacks From The National Collective"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n

In a great\u00a0book, The Averaged American<\/a><\/em>, sociologist\u00a0Sarah Igo<\/a> uses case studies to tell the intellectual history of statistics, polling, and sampling. The premise is fascinating:\u00a0 Today we’re bombarded with statistics about the U.S. population, but this is a new development.\u00a0 Before the science developed,\u00a0the concept was elusive and the knowledge was impossible. In other words, before statistics, there was no “average American.”<\/p>\n

There are lots of fascinating insights in her book, but a\u00a0post<\/a> by Byron York brought one in particular to mind.\u00a0 Here’s a screenshot of his opening lines (emphasis added by Jay Livingston<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\"00_actually\"<\/p>\n

The implication here is, of course, that Black Americans aren’t “real” Americans and that including them in opinion poll data is literally skewing the results.<\/p>\n

Scientists designed the famous Middletown<\/a>\u00a0study with exactly this mentality.\u00a0 Trying to determine who the average American was, scientists excluded Black Americans out of hand.\u00a0 Of course, that was in the 1920s and ’30s.\u00a0 How wild to see the same mentality in the 2000s.<\/p>\n

Originally posted in 2009.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday. In a great\u00a0book, The Averaged American, sociologist\u00a0Sarah Igo uses case studies to tell the intellectual history of statistics, polling, and sampling. The premise is fascinating:\u00a0 Today we’re bombarded with statistics about the U.S. population, but this is a new development.\u00a0 Before the science developed,\u00a0the concept was elusive and the knowledge was impossible. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65024,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[209,253,2104,274,85,693,285,1760],"class_list":["post-9173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-history","tag-knowledgeintelligence","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-politics","tag-public-opinion","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/11\/35.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9173","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=9173"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65018,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9173\/revisions\/65018"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}