race

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.

• George Lipsitz. 2006.The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Monica McDermott. 2006. Working-Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
• David Roediger. 1999. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Brooklyn: Verso Publishing.
• Matthew W. Hughey. 2012. White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race. Stanford University Press.
• Matt Wray. 2006. Not quite white: White trash and the boundaries of whiteness. Durham: Duke University Press.

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.

• Herman Gray. 2004. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness. University of Minnesota Press.
• Hermany Gray. 1989. “Television, Black Americans, and the American Dream.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6(4): 376-386.

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:

• Catherine R. Squires. 2014. The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the 21st century. New York University Press.
• Catherine R. Squires & Sarah J. Jackson. 2010. “Reducing race: News themes in the 2008 primaries.” International Journal of Press/Politics 15(4): 375-400.

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.

• Victor M Rios. 2011. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York: NYU Press

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.

• David Weisburd and John E. Eck. 2004. “What Can Police Do to Reduce Crime, Disorder, and Fear?” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 593(1): 42-65
• Peter B. Kraska and Victor E. Kappeler. 1997. “Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units.” Social Problems. 44(1): 1-18.
• Lawrence W. Sherman. 1993. “Defiance, Deterrence, and Irrelevance: A Theory of the Criminal Sanction.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. 30(4): 445-473

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.  

• Peter B. Kraska. 1996. “Enjoying Militarism: Political/personal dilemmas in studying U.S. police paramilitary units.” Justice Quarterly, 13(3): 405-429
• Jesse Wozniak and Christopher Uggen. 2009. “Real Men Use Nonlethals: Appeals to Masculinity in Marketing Police Weaponry.” Feminist Criminology, 4(3): 275-293

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.

•  John D. Skrentny. 2014. After Civil Rights: Racial Realism in the New American Workplace. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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.

•  Joyce Bell and Douglas Hartmann. 2007. “Diversity in Everyday Discourse: The Cultural Ambiguities and Consequences of ‘Happy Talk.’” American Sociological Review 72(6): 895-914

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:

• Robert G. Lee. 1999. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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:

• Stephen Suh, Kyle Green, Ben Carrington, Rosalind S. Chou, and C.N. Le. 2012. “Linsanity and the Model Minority Myth”, The Society Pages

All this connects back to what sociologists claim is the tendency for Asian Americans to be perceived as both racially inferior and culturally unassimilable:

• Jennifer Lee. 2013. “From Unassimilable to Exceptional.” The Society Pages
• Claire J. Kim. 1999. “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.” Politics & Society 27(1): 105-138

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.

• Joshua Correll, Bernadette Park, Charles M. Judd, and Bernd Wittenbrink. 2002. “The police officer’s dilemma: Using ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83(6):1314-1329.
•  Jennifer Eberhardt, Phillip Atiba Goff, Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, and Paul Davies. 2004. “Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87(6):876-893.

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.

• Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Patricia Warren. 2009. “Explaining and Eliminating Racial Profiling.” Contexts 8(2):34-39
• Scott Phillips. 2009. “Status disparities in the capital of capital punishment.” Law and Society Review 43(4): 807-837.
• Mark Bradbury and Marian Williams. 2013. “Diversity and Citizen Participation The Effect of Race on Juror Decision Making.” Administration & Society, 45(5), 563-582.

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

Love is in the air this week, but not everyone in the music world has been feeling it lately. Macklemore’s performance of “Same Love” at the Grammy’s last month—as well as his win for best hip hop album and subsequent apology to Kendrick Lamar— drew a slew of comments from pop culture bloggers. For some, his music represents everything wrong with the privileged cultural appropriation of hip hop, but others thought the performance was an important illustration of how allies can contribute to movements for social justice.

So where is the proper place for allies in the world of identity politics? Should they spread the love, or stop hogging the spotlight?

When individuals speak from a position of privilege, they don’t risk a lot by advocating for change. Their perspectives may crowd out the voices of marginalized groups, or risk appropriating identities in a way that maintains privilege instead of challenging it.

• C.J. Pascoe. 2003. “Multiple masculinities? Teenage boys talk about jocks and gender.” American Behavioral Scientist 46(10): 1423-1438.
• Whitney Anspach, Kevin Coe, and Crispin Thurlow. 2007. “The other closet?: Atheists, homosexuals and the lateral appropriation of discursive capital.” Critical Discourse Studies 4(1): 95-119.

On the other hand, allies can be an important strategic resource for marginalized groups at the social level, both by contributing material resources and changing the surrounding culture.

• Doug McAdam. 2010. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. University of Chicago Press.
• Herbert H. Haines. 1984. “Black radicalization and the funding of civil rights: 1957-1970.“ Social Problems 32(1):31-43.

Either way, we have to realize that social movements are going to build up and break down identities, and thinking about allies helps us reflect critically on what it means to belong to a movement.

• Joshua Gamson. 1995. “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma.” Social Problems 42(3):390–407.

style=”display:inline-block;width:300px;height:250px”
data-ad-client=”ca-pub-4670099812817063″
data-ad-slot=”3784613033″>

Saturday Night Live has recently been criticized for lacking racial and gender diversity in both cast and crew. This is not a new problem, but the debate was reignited when Kenan Thompson, one of only two black cast members, stated in an interview that there were currently no black women on the show because “they never find ones that are ready”. Always quick to turn controversy into a joke, a recent SNL sketch had actress Kerry Washington playing a range of black women, mocking their own lack of diversity. Then, a little over a month ago, SNL hired Sasheer Zamata, the first black female cast member in five years. While the speed at which the show is addressing their lack of diversity is commendable, SNL’s diversity problem cannot be solved by a single hire, and the controversy illustrates that what gets deemed “entertaining” or “funny” is about more than the quality of the joke. In reality, deep-seated assumptions about race and gender strongly influence who shows up on your television screen every night.

Women face ongoing inequality in film and television production jobs, and while the rates of occupational segregation for women of color have fallen since the 1940s, their decline has stagnated since 2000.

• Denise D. Bielby. 2009. “Gender Inequality in Culture Industries: Women and Men Writers in Film and Television.” Sociologie du Travail 51(2):237–52.
• Olga Alonso-Villar and Coral Del Río. 2013. “The Occupational Segregation of Black Women in the United States: A Look at Its Evolution from 1940 to 2010.” Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

However, even as minorities gain access to white-dominated mediums, they struggle to control the way their culture is portrayed and perceived, as the media often perpetuates inaccurate representations of minority groups.

• Herman Gray. 2005. Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

The SNL controversy is one example of the much larger cultural norm of marginalizing and stereotyping black women, whose misrepresentation in American society is a problem that runs much deeper than their perceived sense of humor.

• Patricia Hill Collins. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. Taylor & Francis.