race

#pointergate, Moral Panic, and Online Protest

Jack Delehanty on November 7, 2014

On Thursday, November 6, Minneapolis-Saint Paul ABC affiliate KSTP ran a story claiming Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges had “flashed a gang sign” with a “known felon” during a get out the vote drive in North Minneapolis. The photo shows Hodges embracing and pointing at a young black man, and him pointing back. To support the headline that law enforcement officials were “outraged” by Hodges’s interactions with this man, KSTP reporter Jay Kolls quoted retired Minneapolis police officer Michael Quinn, who accused Hodges of “legitimizing gangs who are killing our children.” The story drew an immediate backlash in other press outlets and on social media. Writing in the Star Tribune, University of St. Thomas law professor Nekima Levy-Pounds criticized the media’s routine portrayal of black men as dangerous criminals and argued that such stories desensitize people to institutional racism. Twitter users deployed the hashtag #pointergate to criticize KSTP and Kolls for their inflammatory reporting, and by mid-day Friday, #pointergate was the top non-sponsored hashtag in the U.S. What might KSTP have expected to gain from running a story like this? Should it have anticipated the furious backlash? And should we be surprised that the reaction on Twitter is as big a story as the original report? Playing on fear has long been a media tactic for drawing attention to stories, but the fear of crime and gangs is a special case.

News media organizations construct their stories as secular morality plays that deploy a “discourse of fear,” which transforms news consumers into victims of the problems that the stories construct. The use of these “problem frames” has increased during the 2000s, and the media applies them much more frequently to stories about race, drugs and gangs.
Social media allows marginalized groups to share frustration much more quickly and publicly. In these symbolic conflicts, both sides escalate their positions through the same venues, like Twitter, and the side that escalates fastest usually prevails. KSTP’s silence on Twitter has given their critics full, uncontested voice, and allowed them to make their protest itself a news item.

Harassment Online and On the Street

Evan Stewart on November 5, 2014

A new survey from the Pew forum sheds light on widespread online harassment. Young adults in the study reported experiencing more bullying overall, and women were more likely to have been stalked or sexually harassed. These are serious crimes, but routine harassment also isn’t harmless. A new viral video and recent piece from The Daily Show capture women’s everyday experiences with street harassment and catcalling in public. These accounts bring bullying back to light, and social science research shows how and why harassment emerges. 

Bullying isn’t just meaningless cruelty; it is one way groups enforce social norms (especially around gender and race). Challenging harassment often means criticizing society’s deeply held beliefs.
Bullying and harassment are also advanced through social organization. Bullying can emerge when an organization is in chaos and can’t moderate unequal relationships around race and gender, and our legal protection of free speech often makes anti-harassment efforts hard to enforce.

Studying Whiteness: Not Beyond the Pale

Stephen Suh on October 30, 2014

Along with the national release of Dear White People earlier this month, PBS recently debuted a series with a unique take on US race relations called The Whiteness Project. Citing a lack of critical examination of whiteness and white identity as its motivation, the program conducts one-on-one interviews with white Americans “from all walks of life and localities.” In part one of the series, participants from Buffalo, NY are shown responding openly, sometimes jarringly, to questions about race, whiteness, and white privilege. Whitney Dow, the producer/director of The Whiteness Project, claims that through these interviews, the project hopes to examine “both the concept of whiteness itself and how those who identify as ‘white’ process their ethnic identity.”

Scholars from numerous disciplines have written thoughtfully and critically about Whiteness and how it pertains to U.S. race relations. Matthew M. Hughey and Matt Wray, both TSP contributors, have also written on the subject.

Back In Living Color? Diversity on TV

Stephen Suh on October 14, 2014

The new season of TV programing is sporting a decidedly more ‘colorful’ look, with non-white creators, producers, and/or lead characters being featured on a number of recently launched series. Among all the major networks, ABC appears to be contributing the most to this trend toward diversity. Not only are they signed on for another new series by famed African American producer/director/writer Shonda Rhimes, titled How to Get Away With Murder, they are also credited with reviving the TV presence of the non-white middle-class family, with new shows about African (Black-ish), Latino- (Cristela), and Asian- (Fresh off the Boat) American families. Most critics, though welcoming of this change, are hesitant to mark this as “progress.” What might social scientists think about this?

Though it’s been a few years, shows like Black-ish, Cristela, and Fresh off the Boat aren’t the first we’re seeing of non-white middle class families on TV. Herman Gray has written extensively, and critically, about television’s discourse on “diversity” and “blackness” and the role played by artists of color in the production process.
Looking more broadly, scholars like Catherine R. Squires write critically about the ways we as a supposedly “post-racial” society now consume those discourses about “diversity” and “multiculturalism” on TV:

Think Fast: Policing, Race, and Implicit Bias

Richie Lenne on September 26, 2014

Recent shootings in Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina keep us asking how racial bias affects the use of deadly force by the police. How and why does differential treatment by race continue to persist in law enforcement? Part of the answer has to do with the culture and history of policing (see our pervious post Reflecting on Ferguson). Another part involves what psychologists call “implicit biases.” Implicit biases are the unconscious ways in which people treat others differently. Studies of implicit bias have consistently shown that people tend to prefer white to African-American, young to old, and heterosexual to gay. Many social scientists conclude these implicit biases reflect societal biases, because continuous exposure to these assumptions in media and daily interactions leads to biased cognitive associations like “white-innocent” or “black-criminal.”

Implicit biases are most clearly exposed when people are forced to make quick decisions, like when an officer is deciding to shoot or holster their weapon.
Psychologists study the shoot/don’t shoot scenario with video game simulations that require civilians and police to make decisions about a person removing an object (either a weapon or non-weapon) from their pocket. Generally, police make better decisions than civilians, but a racial bias still persists.
Social scientists have several suggestions on how to reduce biases in law enforcement, including increasing the diversity of police forces and management, removing stereotypic images from the workplace, and requiring training to develop counter-stereotypic cognition.

If you are interested in learning about your own implicit biases you can take the Implicit Association Test (IAT) at Project Implicit.

Reflecting on Ferguson

Evan Stewart on August 26, 2014

In the wake of protests responding to the killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, sociologists began building a large body of resources to explain how these events fit into a broader pattern of racial bias in the United States’ criminal justice system. Sociologists for Justice has both a public statement on the matter and a syllabus on source material related to racialized policing. Sociology Toolbox has recent data on racial disparities and militarized police departments in Ferguson and nationwide. In addition to the conversation about racial injustice, Ferguson also calls into question our assumptions about how to maintain public safety.

Policing in communities of color presents a paradox. The state offers very little attention for social services, but also embeds itself in residents’ everyday lives through strong policing practices.
While there isn’t much research on the effectiveness of policing tactics, we do know that a militaristic approach which maximizes coercion does little to make a community feel safer. In fact, this approach may actually increase future crime and conflict as community members start to resist coercion.
In addition to racial bias in policing, there is also a gendered dimension to military tactics. Precincts develop a sense of male solidarity through military scorn of feminine traits, and even manufacturers of nonlethal police weapons appeal to these masculine sensibilities to sell their products.  

The Culture of Cosmos II: Space and Race

Stephen Suh on May 1, 2014

Earlier in the week we looked at the new television series Cosmos and the fervor it caused between pro-science and pro-­religion camps. Lost within this science vs. religion debate, however, is the obvious racial angle surrounding Cosmos. Neil deGrasse Tyson—the series’ host—is one of the few widely-recognizable black scientific figures today. He himself has stated that there is a distinct lack of representation of African Americans in STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) fields. What broader trends in race and science might this show illuminate?

Research affirms deGrasse Tyson’s opinions, showing that there are indeed significant inequalities in career attainments in STEM fields for women and minority groups:
Given the limited ways in which African Americans are typically represented in the media, deGrasse Tyson’s well established media presence as an African American scientist proves doubly important:

 

Affirmative Action and Racial Inequality

Evan Stewart on April 24, 2014

This week’s Supreme Court decision to uphold Michigan’s ban on affirmative action in college and university admissions stirred up a lot of legal controversy, and will likely lead to more court cases about these policies in other states. In the wake of conversations about constitutionality, however, it is often easy to miss the problems that affirmative action is meant to be correcting.

Racial inequality, especially in the workplace, is very real. Employers regularly make decisions based on race which clash with existing civil rights law.
Most Americans tend to think of diversity in very general, open and optimistic terms, but this “happy talk” often makes it difficult to directly address underlying racial attitudes—and the inequalities they produce—with policy changes.

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Arthur Chu, Jeopardy!, and the Asian American Stereotype

Stephen Suh on March 7, 2014

Arthur Chu, an Asian American insurance analyst from Cleveland, recently became an overnight celebrity after amassing a small fortune with consecutive victories on the popular and long-running game show, Jeopardy! Unfortunately, the publicity Chu received was not all positive. Instead, Chu’s winning ways incited many angry Jeopardy! fans to tweet negatively about his unorthodox style of play, supposedly smug demeanor, and his penchant to interrupt the show’s longtime host, Alex Trebek.

Fan backlash toward Jeopardy! contestants is not completely unheard of. In an op-ed on Slate, 74 time-winner Ken Jennings, for example, noted that he was all too familiar with the public ire that Chu was receiving for his success on the show. More provocatively (and sociologically), Jennings went on to suggest a “racial angle” to the hostility leveled at Chu stemming from the fact he was a “bespectacled man with rumpled shirts and a bowl cut” who played into “every terrible Asian-nerd stereotype.” Is there truth to Jennings’ critique?

Asian American men have long been portrayed in the US media as sinister and conniving threats. This in turn has has affected the racialization of Asian American men in contemporary times:
Even successful Asian American men such as professional basketball star, Jeremy Lin, have had to deal with unflattering stereotypes and racist caricatures from the media and general public:
All this connects back to what sociologists claim is the tendency for Asian Americans to be perceived as both racially inferior and culturally unassimilable:

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Race and Self-Defense in the Courtroom

Evan Stewart on February 18, 2014

This weekend saw a verdict in the trial of Michael Dunn, accused of killing Florida teen Jordan Davis in 2012. The jury found Dunn guilty on three counts of attempted murder, but declared a mistrial on the murder charge for Davis’ death. According to reports from Al Jazeera America, Dunn’s attorney argued that “there were no signs Dunn was planning the shooting, only firing his gun when he saw Davis wielding a weapon from inside the vehicle and felt threatened.” However, Dunn is white and Davis was black and—with echoes of the George Zimmerman trial still fresh in public memory—supporters of the prosecution argue that shooting was racially motivated and premeditated.

In cases like these, the argument often breaks down to whether violence was racially-motivated or a “colorblind” act of self-defense. However, race structures all parts of the criminal justice system.

Self-defense isn’t as colorblind as we think. Research in social psychology shows that race affects the way we perceive and react to threatening situations.
These individual reactions aggregate into big social problems, where race and social class impact how jurors and law enforcement make decisions about policing and punishment.

For a more detailed summary of racial threat experiments, see Sociological Images’ coverage of this work during last year’s Zimmerman trial.

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