race

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.

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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.

Shopping while black is not a crime, but what happens when a store assumes the customer is always white?

ColorofChange.org has created a petition urging the NYPD to conduct a full investigation into over 50 arrests of young people, predominantly of color, outside of major department stores like Barney’s and Macy’s. Why hasn’t the “shop and frisk” trend gone out of style?  Theories on race and racism, as well as the application of such ideas through social experiments, may offer some useful insights.

To study the gap between actions and rhetoric, audit studies reveal patterns of discrimination in the working world which shape employment opportunities for many low-wage workers of color.

• Pager, Devah and Lincoln Quillian. 2005.  “Walking the Talk? What Employers Say Versus What They Do.” American Sociological Review. 70: 355-80.

• Pager, Devah, Bruce Western, Bart Bonikowski.  2009.  “Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment.”  American Sociological Review.  79: 777-99.

Some theorists view racial attitudes through a conflict perspective that suggests racism and prejudice is rooted in different social positions between groups.

• Bobo, Lawrence. 1999.  “Prejudice as Group Position: Microfoundations of a Sociological Approach to Racism and Race Relations.”  Journal of Social Issues.  55(3): 445-72.

A recent report from the New York Times tells us that Washington may be loosening the leash on mortgage lenders, but a range of research from sociologists over the last five years suggests that there were actually multiple problems that led to the 2008 housing crash, and they weren’t all about financial regulation alone.

Modern mortgages arose when homeownership was politically popular.

• Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam’s A Theory of Fields

Politicians often used economic policy to “punt” unpopular political conflict.

• Greta Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, 2011.
• Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson, Too Big to Bail: The “Paulson Put,” Presidential Politics, and the Global Financial Meltdown (Part 1 and Part 2) 2009.

Subprime lending didn’t just take advantage of the poor—it was also a racial problem.

• Jacob Faber, Racial Dynamics of Subprime Mortgage Lending at the Peak, 2013.