Racial Tensions and Living In a Colorblind Society

On By econnellIn Race and Ethnicity2 Comments

author_cn By C.N. Le

In many ways, Asian Americans have achieved notable levels of socioeconomic mobility and success in American society. Nonetheless, despite (or perhaps because of) these successes, Asian Americans still confront ongoing instances of hostility, exclusion, and discrimination.

I’ve previously written about how Asian American students continue to face various obstacles in being treated fairly and justly on college campuses, whether it relates to dealing offensive "satire" or being violently attacked.

Some might be tempted to say that these were isolated incidents but as New American Media summarizes, these kinds of incidents are actually quite commonplace on college campuses around the country:

In recent months, incidents have proven this is not the tolerant and highly-evolved society we thought. Hate crimes against Asian students, racial remarks masked under the term “satire,” and institutional discrimination — are just a few causes triggering racial tension on college campuses. . . .

On Jan. 21, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Kyle Descher, a Korean American, headed out to a bar with his roommate after a Washington State University football victory over Oregon. Minutes after hearing a racial slur from one of three unknown men, Descher is “sucker-punched” in an unprovoked attack. Doctors add three titanium plates to Descher’s broken jaw and it’s wired shut. . . .

In [UPenn’s quarterly student magazine "The Punch Bowl" winter 2008 edition’s] “Where Asians Don’t Belong” section, staffers listed Math 104, in a panties drawer, on the basketball court, at a frat party, and behind the wheel. Imagine why the staff didn’t make jokes with the same glee for all the places African Americans “don’t belong.” In their defense, “Punch Bowl” editors said some of the writers of the “satirical” issue were Asian Americans themselves, even posing in photos poking fun at APIs.

The article goes on to list several other racially-charged incidents around the country involving a broad range of groups of color.color3 

It would be great if I could just focus on discussing the positive aspects of how American institutions such as higher education have made progress in alleviating racial inequality. Alas, these incidents only highlight what many scholars have been saying all along — as we move forward into the 21st century, racism and racial prejudice are still alive and well in American society.

One difference between its nature today versus that of one hundred years ago is that in many ways, racism is now expressed in "colorblind" terms. That is, racists now apparently think that racial equality has been achieved (they’ll point to Asian American socioeconomic achievements as one example), so it’s perfectly fine to make fun of Asian Americans and other groups because we’re all equal now — we’re all on a level playing field nowadays, so everybody is fair game.

In other words, this is what it means to live in a colorblind society these days– historical legacies of systematic racism are completely ignored or "whitewashed" and we all pretend that all racial groups are perfectly equal. Or alternatively, racists act on their resentment that minorities have apparently achieved "equality" and physically attack those minorities.color4 

Unfortunately, I predict that this climate of "colorblind" prejudice will get worse before it gets better, especially as globalization continues to reshape the American society, the American economy, and as a result, the assumption of American superiority around the world.

As Americans, particularly many white Americans, continue to economically struggle as we enter a recession, and as demographic and cultural shifts take place all around them, their fears, frustrations, and anger will inevitably boil over. It’s likely that verbal and physical attacks on convenient scapegoats such as Asian Americans will continue.

I want to be optimistic and hopefully I’m wrong, but as these recent incidents show, racial tensions seem to be on the rise, not on the decline.

Wombs for Sale? Gestational and Genetic Mothering

On By econnellIn Janis Prince Inniss, Relationships, Marriage and Family2 Comments

author_janis By Janis Prince Inniss

I used to think that there are several things we must do ourselves. You know, like die. Even if I wanted to, regardless of how wealthy I may become, I can’t pay someone to do that for me. And what about the basic bathroom functions? Same thing; must do those ourselves, right? 

But what about being pregnant and giving birth? I thought that those were on the “must do it yourself” list with no chance of changing. Having recently seen the film Baby Mama and a few recent news stories on surrogate mothers, I have to rethink my list ofJ0234700
 “must do yourself” things. 

A surrogate mother is a woman who becomes pregnant with a child to whom she may or may not be genetically related, with the  intention of turning the baby over at birth to others for rearing. A surrogate mother may have sperm or an embryo implanted into her uterus which means she may or may not be genetically related to the baby she carries. 

The first time that I remember hearing about surrogacy was when the Baby M case made headlines in 1986. In that instance, a couple—the Sterns—hired Mary Beth Whitehead to be clip_image003artificially inseminated with the husband’s sperm. Whitehead was to carry the child, give birth to her and then hand the baby over to the Sterns. In other words, Whitehead was acting as a substitute for Mrs. Stern who had health issues that might be complicated by bearing and birthing a child. Whitehead had a change of heart about the arrangement after she gave birth which led to a contentious legal battle. Eventually, Mr. Stern was granted custody of the baby and Whitehead was granted visitation rights. 

Flash forward to another case in which the surrogate mother, Stephanie Eckard provided the egg; Eckard changed her mind about handing over the baby but in this case the judge ruled against the couple who hired Eckard and gave custody of the baby to the surrogate. Another noteworthy case on surrogacy is the 1990 case of Mark and Crispina Calvert. The fertilized embryo of the Calverts was implanted into the womb of Anna Johnson. Johnson was paid $10,000 to hand over the baby to the Calverts at his birth, but she too had a change of heart and wanted to keep the baby boy. In deciding this case, the court essentially looked at whose idea it was to have the child and gave custody of the boy to the Calverts. 

These cases are all of surrogate mothers in the U.S. but many Americans are turning to India for their surrogacy needs. Why? The almighty dollar! It’s cheaper. 


According to this MSNBC story, hiring a woman in India to act as a surrogate is almost a third cheaper than it is in the U.S.—about $30,000 compared to about $80,000 in the U.S.. Another reason to choose a surrogate in India: Indian women have no legal right to change their minds about babies they carry because they sign documents giving up their rights to the children. The U.S. has no across the board legal stand on this issue – some states have legalized surrogacy, others have outlawed it, while others refuse to recognize surrogacy contracts.

If the “commodity” under discussion was not such an emotional one, it might be reasonable to ignore emotions. But it is not. Can carrying a child simply be a transaction? 

Apparently, Whitehead’s contract specified that she would “form no ‘parent-child relationship’ with the baby. But doesn’t carrying a child constitute some form of parenting? If I raise a baby I adopted the question of motherhood—when asked of me and the birth mother—may be clearer. But at the time of birth in the surrogacy cases, it’s hard to imagine who else could have had a greater impact on the baby than the surrogate. This conclusion, assumes that nurture trumps nature even when the surrogate is unrelated to the baby.

Is surrogacy a version of asking my girlfriend to hold my purse while I go to the bathroom? (“Hold my baby until he’s born”). Is it reasonable to expect that a clip_image006woman can carry a child—even if she is not genetically related to that child—and simply hand that child over and feel no bond? (Women who decide to give their babies up for adoption have described the difficulty some of them feel in giving up their babies, and some change their minds and keep their babies.)

Surrogate mothering is unique in that unlike other kinds of mothering, surrogate mothers exist to allow another woman to be a mother. So is that mothering at all or merely renting a womb? What else would we call this “service”?

Surrogacy forces us to think about what parenting is and about what we should be able to buy and sell. Should genetics trump gestation? Does gestation hold a superior claim to parenthood that genetics can’t touch? What principles do you think should decide these issues?

How Old is Old?

On By econnellIn Behind the Headlines, Immigration, Population, Aging, and Demography, Karen Sternheimer, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change10 Comments

author_karen By Karen Sternheimer

A student of mine had a birthday this week. “How old are you?” a classmate asked.

“Old,” he told her. He had just turned 22.

The other students who had not reached the 21 year milestone agreed. Twenty-two is old.clip_image002

I listened on, as someone with only faint memories of being that age myself. Surely someone in their late thirties like me would seem elderly to this group.

“Old” is of course relative. In my first year away at college, a friend of mine had a roommate who was 22. “She’s 22, can you believe it? She’s already had her own apartment and everything,” my friend whispered, so nobody would hear of the wizened woman she had been assigned to live with in the dorm. At eighteen, 22 seemed very worldly. And now many years later, my own perception of “old” continually gets older, and my expectations for what chronological age means shift as I pass through many previously “old” years myself.

We have been hearing the “how old is old” question a lot lately about presidential candidate John McCain. Although he is a long-time player on the national political stage, I never heard any reference to his age before this year. If you follow political news even a little, you have probably heard commentators note that if elected, he will be the oldest president to enter the White House at 72. This possibility has led to debate amongst the pundits—and jokes from late-night comics—about whether McCain is too old.

And while there have been many issues about sexism and racism that have arisen through the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, leading to discussions about both race and gender, I haven’t heard any critical discussion about ageism. 

In a Pew Research Center poll conducted in February 2008, 32 percent of respondents thought that McCain was too old to be president, and when asked what adjectives first came to mind to describe him, the leading answer was “old.” By contrast, when former Senator Bob Dole ran for president in 1996 at age 73, 34 percent thought he was too old. Not much change in a dozen years.

Representative John Murtha, 75, has publicly stated that he thinks McCain is too old for the job. The AARP (formerly known as the American Association for Retired Persons) criticized Murtha for making this statement, but ironically, older Americans like Murtha are more likely to think McCain’s age is a problem, according to a May 2008 Pew Research Center poll. In contrast to registered voters 18-34, of whom 24 percent said his age is an issue, forty percent of registered voters 65 and older thought McCain was too old to be president. Why the big difference?

Getting back to the idea that age is relative, being over seventy carries different meaning today than it did a half century ago, when McCain and his cohort were in their twenties. A white male born in 2004 has an average life expectancy of 78.3, according to the 2008 Statistical Abstract of the United States. By contrast, when McCain was born in 1936, the average life expectancy for white males was 58.0 (up from 46.6 in 1900). So what would have been an elderly age clip_image002decades ago has mutated into late middle age today. 

Other factors make age even more relative. Having long-lived family members is one indicator of longevity (McCain’s mother is 96), as is having access to quality health care, living and working in a safe and healthy environment, and having a positive outlook. Other lifestyle factors—such as not smoking and exercising regularly also extend one’s life span. 

Stress is another important issue. People who have jobs with a great deal of instability, little autonomy, and significant potential danger (such as in mining, construction, and driving a cab) also tend to have decreased life expectancy. While the president makes a decent salary—$400,000—and has arguably the best health care of any person in the world, the job is incredibly stressful. Even in the best of times, twenty to thirty percent of your constituents won’t like you. Lunatics making death threats require you to have a full-time cadre of bodyguards (four of your predecessors have been assassinated, four others have died of other causes; that means that nearly one in five haven’t made it out of this job alive). And if you are vain about your appearance, this is the wrong job for you. Check out this ABC News slide show of before and after pictures to see how the presidency has aged presidents in recent years.

Questions about McCain’s age may seem legitimate and jokes just in good fun, but age discrimination exists in many forms, and has very real consequences for people who need to work for a living. As many people struggle economically, they will need to work longer. Federal legislation, first passed in 1967 and amended in 1986, bans age limits for most jobs, but that doesn’t stop employers from refusing to hire people looking for work. These are the issues we need to seriously consider as our population ages, especially since our society increasingly worships looking young and pathologizes the aging process.

Free to Marry

On By econnellIn Behind the Headlines, Relationships, Marriage and Family, Sally Raskoff, Sex and Gender, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change6 Comments

author_sally By Sally Raskoff

The May 2008 California Supreme Court decision effectively adds a second state to the (short) list of states that do not prohibit marriage for consenting adults of the same gender. The ruling reflects the result of many years of social change that has pressured our country to live up to its ideals of freedom, equality, and justice for all. The Civil Rights Movement was the most visible event in recent history, as many radical changes occurred in a relatively short period of time. At that time, we effectively identified how race, ethnicity, and gender issues are rife with inequality and thus problematic for our country.

Social change does not move quickly or steadily. In stops and starts, forward towards new practices and backward to known traditions, society resists change at every step. Some refer to this dynamic as a dialectic process in which whatever exists creates its own contradictions, creating struggles which eventually “resolve” or morph into a new reality. Marx described the life span of capitalism as a dialectic process, for example. 

clip_image002While societies do not change quickly, they are always changing. Things today are certainly not the same as they were fifty years ago, or even five years ago. With technological changes and resource pressures, the way we live our lives has changed and will continue to change. Younger generations grow up in altogether different circumstances than previous generations thus their ways of thinking and expressing themselves sets them apart from others.

With regard to marriage laws, it is clear that we have seen some changes and we’ll continue to do so.

Marriage has long been a relationship defined by property and resources. Marriage based on love, emotional ties, and individual choice is a relatively recent social invention. That notwithstanding, marriage still is a legal contract that involves ownership and property rights. At the same time marriage effectively gives people license to have sex – although that, too, is tied to ownership and property since our societal norms of marital sex assume subsequent procreation and offspring – with appropriate naming and rights of inheritance. 

Our heterosexual norms are tied to male dominance – clearly seen when looking at marital laws. Historically, brides are women or property transferred from fathers to husbands. One look at a traditional marriage ceremony confirms this symbolism when the parents hand over the bride to the groom at the start of the ritual. 

Since men marry women – and give them their name (identifying one’s property!) – the power relations are clearly defined. Men had not been able to marry other men (and women to marry women) because that would tamper with the power structure based on gender. Homophobia helps to maintain this structure since it makes people afraid of both the idea of and the people who may be participating in same-sex couplings. 

Seen in this light, allowing same-sex marriage is progress towards gender equality.

American society’s marriage laws have always reflected its evolving attitudes toward race, ethnicity, sex/gender, and sexual orientation.

Prior to the civil rights era, anti-miscegenation laws outlawed marriage between white and non-white people thus protecting the property rights and inheritance patterns that kept the dominant group white and all other groups, well, not-white. 

While the U.S. Supreme Court deemed those laws unconstitutional in the late 1960s, it took until 1999 for all fifty states to vote those laws off their books. After being sued by inter-racial couples having trouble getting the paperwork to legally wed, Alabama finally asked their voters in 1999 to weigh in on eliminating or keeping their state anti-miscegenation laws, even as the law had been unconstitutional for over thirty years. (It passed, 60/40.)

clip_image002[5]While most marriages are still endogamous – people still tend to marry people like themselves – in contemporary American society we have the right to marry whomever we choose no matter their ethnicity or racial identity—as long as they are they opposite sex ( unless you live in California or Massachusetts).

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only two percent of marriage partnerships are inter-racial. This does vary by state and region, of course, but nationwide it is only two percent. In spite of the Supreme Court decision, most marriages are intra-racial. 

This is all part of the inevitable social changes that come about since we live in a country with an elective affinity between love-based marriages and a strong belief in individual freedoms. We socialize people to grow up and fall in love, marry their sweetheart, and settle down to create a family. Those norms have long been informed by norms of heterosexuality and cultural heterogeneity although the latter is not as strong a norm as it once was.

When states make their marriage laws based on sex or gender definitions, they often complicate things further. For example, Texas defines their marriage laws on chromosomes, thus an XX female can marry an XY female because they do have the expected chromosomal pairing. One wonders if someone with X0 and other variations can marry in Texas at all!

Add to this transgender issues and we see that our culture has some distance to travel before we really do embrace equality and justice for all. It’s not just a matter of saying that people should be able to love whomever they want. It’s more a matter of equalizing our social categories and dismantling the privileges and barriers based on sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.

From the 1960s U.S. Supreme Court to the 2008 California State Supreme Court decisions, the highest bodies in our legal system have so far demonstrated that we still do strive for these goals.

Racism as a Risk Factor for Infant Mortality

On By econnellIn Class and Stratification, Immigration, Population, Aging, and Demography, Janis Prince Inniss, Race and Ethnicity, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change9 Comments

author_janis By Janis Prince Inniss

One segment of the PBS documentary Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? examined infant mortality in the U.S. clip_image002Infant mortality is a measure of the number of babies who die in their first year of life, a figure expressed as a portion of 1,000 live births. 

What causes babies to die so early? Congenital abnormalities, being born too early and too small, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), are the leading causes of infant death. According to the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook’s 2007 estimate, the infant mortality rate in the U.S. is 6.37; according to this report 41 countries reported better rates than the U.S. 

In fact, according to the State of the World’s Mothers report, the U.S. has the second worst infant mortality rate in the developed world! Although there may be many good reasons for the rates of other countries to appear better than they really are, a few things are clear about the U.S. rate. 

First, the infant mortality rate has decreased significantly over the last four or so decades; it was 26.0 in 1960. Second, among all women in the U.S., African American women have the highest infant mortality rate. Third, infant mortality rates for African Americans are almost two and a half times that of whites (13.6 compared to 5.6). 

clip_image005If you’re familiar with the relationship between class and race, this disparity in infant mortality might not be particularly surprising. It might make sense that African Americans would experience higher infant mortality rates as result of factors related to their lower socioeconomic status (SES); for example, low-income pregnant women might not seek prenatal care due to a lack of health insurance and tight finances. However, research on the topic finds that increases in SES and education do not erase this racial gap. As you will see in the video, infant mortality rates for white college graduates is 3.7 per 1,000 while that for black college graduates is three times as high (10.2 per 1,000). Infant mortality rates for black college graduates are on par with that of whites without a high school education—who have a rate of 9.9 per 1,000. 

clip_image008Another hypothesis put forward to explain the differential infant mortality rates is a possible genetic component responsible for the disparity. Researchers reasoned that looking at the infant mortality rates of other black women should confirm such a “prematurity gene”. Yet, black women from Africa and the Caribbean do have not have the same kinds of infant mortality rates as African-American women; African women have infant mortality rates similar to that of white American women and babies born to Caribbean women are heavier at birth than those of African-American women. 

Further, after one generation of living in the U.S. these immigrant groups have infant mortality rates similar to that of African Americans, suggesting that there is something about the black American experience that leads to poor infant mortality. Hmm. J0283941

But how could race impact infant mortality? In a word, racism. Researchers have found that women who perceive racial prejudice are two times more likely to have a very low birth weight baby. Social scientists are now examining the relationship between the stress that racial prejudice produces and its adverse impact on the body; such stress may cause the release of stress hormones that trigger labor, for example. Watch Drs. Lu and Jones discuss the life course perspective and the impact of this kind of stress over a lifetime:

In a number of previous posts, I have discussed issues related to race, ethnicity, culture and related concepts. Perhaps like you, readers have questioned whether race is even relevant in today’s multiracial, multiethnic world. More than forty years have passed since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred segregation in public places in the U.S. So racial prejudice is history! But is it really? 

Most young Americans grew up before the passage of this act. Many of your parents, professors, ministers, and doctors, can tell personal stories of what life was like before the passage of that legislation. History doesn’t seem so ancient then. And what are the present day remnants of racial prejudice? Is that history too? Just as we may begin to feel comfortable that race and related concepts are simply well, historical concepts, the findings surrounding infant mortality suggest remind us that while we may argue about definitions and the utility of these ideas, people’s experiences demonstrate that none of this is simply academic flexing. Racism and its perception impacts lives, including—perhaps most especially—the smallest lives among us.

Problems with the 2010 Census

On By econnellIn Immigration, Population, Aging, and Demography6 Comments

author_cn By C.N. Le

For many sociologists and other scholars like me, the Census data that is compiled every ten years is the most reliable, comprehensive source of data on the American population. We rely on it for us to not just do our research and publish papers, but to help us understand the world around us better.

It’s with that in mind that I was rather frustrated to see this article by CNN—an accumulation of mistakes and glitches will apparently cost the Census Bureau several billions of dollars in wasted funds, not to mention the trust of scholars and the American people in general:

[T]he government will scrap plans to use handheld computers to collect information from the millions of Americans who don’t return census forms mailed out by the government. The change will add as much as $3 billion to the cost of the constitutionally mandated count, pushing the overall cost to more than $14 billion. 

This was to be the first truly high-tech count in the nation’s history. The Census Bureau has awarded a contract to purchase 500,000 of the computers, at a cost of more than $600 million. The devices, which look like high-tech cell phones, will still be used to verify every residential census4 street address in the country, using global positioning system software.

But workers going door-to-door will not be able to use them to collect information from the residents who didn’t return their census forms. About a third of U.S. residents are expected not to return the forms. . . . Interviews, congressional testimony and government reports describe an agency that was unprepared to manage the contract for the handheld computers. 

Census officials are being blamed for doing a poor job of spelling out technical requirements to the contractor, Florida-based Harris Corp. The computers proved too complex for some temporary workers who tried to use them in a test last year in North Carolina. Also, the computers were not initially programmed to transmit the large amounts of data necessary.

In my previous life, I worked as a Research Associate for the Center for Technology in Government, doing applied research on how government agencies use information technology to improve their public services.

The most common and costliest mistake we saw was caused by exactly what happened with the Census Bureau — a technological change was implemented from the top down, with little consultation with the actual workers who will use the technology on an everyday basis on what exactly they need and would like the technology to do.

census3This miscommunication and lack of consensus input from day-to-day workers led to poorly designed and inferior technology, which led to its ultimate failure, costing American taxpayers billions of dollars. Time and time and time again, this continues to happen.

I suppose this would be the textbook example of the negative connotations of bureaucracy that many of us have — inefficient, little communication, lack of coordination, and incompetence that leads to public funds being wasted and public outrage.

So it will benefit all of us if the Census Bureau gets their act together, and soon. Rather than simply another form to fill out, the Census helps us understand who we are as Americans. As the response rate declines, the Census data that we as academics rely on becomes less reliable and more prone to sampling error, and that can lead to diminished confidence in our research.

Ultimately, scholars like me end up paying a double penalty for the Census Bureau’s mistakes. The first is having our money as American taxpayers wasted. But even more important, the second penalty is that instances like this make Americans less trusting of the Census Bureau and also perhaps less likely to eventually fill out and return their Census forms. What other factors do you think prevent people from returning their Census forms?

Get Religion, Live Longer

On By econnellIn Immigration, Population, Aging, and Demography, Social Psychology7 Comments

author_bradBy Bradley Wright 

Do you want to live a longer life? Well, science says there are a few things you can do to add years to your life: eat well, exercise, watch your weight, get regular medical check-ups, to name a few. In addition, there are various social factors that are linked to longevity, and one of them is religious involvement. That’s right, people who attend religious services and are involved in religious communities live longer. 

Dozens of studies have found a link between religion and longevity. As an example of this line of work, sociologists analyzed data from a study of about 21,000 people who were first interviewed in 1987. Researchers then followed up eight years later, in 1995, and found that about 2,000 of them had died. The study was designed to study risk factors for cancer, and it contained measures of attendance at religious services. This allowed researchers to test if the people who went to religious services were less likely to die during the study than those who did not. 

clip_image006

Here’s what they found. Using various fancy statistical methods, they calculated that a twenty-year-old person who did not attend religious services at all would on average live to be 75 years old. If they attended religious services less than once a week, they would live to 80 years old; and if they went once a week, they’d live to be 82. Finally, if they attended more than once a week, they would live 83 years. Wow! Going from not attending religious services to attending multiple times a week was associated with living eight full years longer. Eight years, that’s a long time. That’s how long George W. Bush will have been president. That’s two four-year college experiences. That’s about how much extra longevity you get for not smoking.

Since women live longer than men and also tend to be more religious, we might expect a different effect by gender, but the effect of religion on longevity still holds. Men who attend services more than once a week live, on average, seven years longer than men who don’t attend services (81 versus 74 years). There’s a similar finding for women.

These findings lead to the question of why. What is it about religion that has people living longer?

One answer has to do with what sociologists call selectivity. Maybe the people who become religious are the type of people who would live longer anyway, and religion really has nothing to do with it. This seems plausible. Perhaps most people who frequently attend religious services aren’t the type to live life reckless, dangerous lives and would be this way even if they didn’t go to religious services. (This is called selectivity because people “select” themselves into religion.)

It could also be that involvement in religion changes people such that—whatever their life expectancy before they become involved in religion—they live longer. This could happen in several ways. (In case you’re wondering, this is called mediation. Mediating factors are mechanisms through which X causes Y. In this case, things that religion does to make someone live longer).

clip_image008

Many religions have explicit norms about health related behaviors-about drinking or smoking, for example. Even when they don’t have specific rules, they encourage moderation. To illustrate, in the church that I attend, it’s fine if I regularly have a drink or two, but I think my friends there would be concerned if I were routinely getting drunk (especially if I showed up drunk on Sunday mornings). Eating well, drinking in moderation, and not smoking are things that will usually increase longevity regardless of one’s supernatural beliefs.

Another factor is more social in nature. Many religious groups provide strong social ties—friendships, social activities, personal support, and, in general, lots of social interaction. Social ties, regardless of the source, lead to longer lives. My church has numerous meetings a week in which people interact with each other, often seeking to help each other.

A final factor is the effects of stress on religious versus non-religious people. Many religious groups provide various forms of formal and informal support. The theologies espoused by religions frequently include instructions on how to cope with stress. Religious organizations often provide counseling, confession, and just plain old friendship. They also can provide material goods, such as food and money, to members who experience difficulties in these areas. 

What does all this mean? That even with something as seemingly-biological as how long we live, social conditions matter greatly. Based on this, if you’re going to smoke, do try to get to services! 😉

Beauty Myths and Magazines

On By econnellIn Karen Sternheimer, Popular Culture and Consumption, Sex and Gender12 Comments

author_karen By Karen Sternheimer

I’ve recently reverted back to an old teenage habit…sort of. Last year I got a letter saying that my frequent flier miles would soon expire and that I could easily convert them to magazine subscriptions. I hadn’t subscribed to a magazine in years, so I went nuts. I ordered magazines about clip_image002politics, technology, business, travel, and fashion.

In my teen years I devoured fashion magazines like Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and the now defunct Mademoiselle, and swapped them with friends to make sure no beauty advice would pass without my knowledge. I saved old issues in my closet for years just in case I would ever want to look at them again, like the reference books that are on my shelves today. When my old house went up for sale years later, my mother told me to take them or toss them. I tossed them. 

After I graduated from high school I stopped reading the magazines cold turkey. I don’t remember exactly why, but it probably had something to do with a lack of time to read them and (more to the point) the clip_image004lack of disposable income to buy them. When the first fashion mag showed up in my mailbox last year it was like reuniting with an old friend that I hadn’t talked to in years. Yes, I had perused a magazine or two while waiting to have my hair cut, but it’s not the same if you can’t tear out the samples and dog-ear the particularly relevant advice about hair products to revisit later. Unlike the other magazines I ordered, the beauty ones required very little concentration or commitment to read since they are mostly filled with ads. They could be my secret escape.

As a sociologist, I am also deeply aware of the very narrow version of beauty these magazines typically promote. Yes, most of the women are impossibly thin, white or near-white in complexion, tall and blonde. Many of the articles are about getting/keeping/pleasing/marrying a man, and more than anything, they promote the idea that women’s worth is forever linked to how we look. If that’s not enough, in the world of most fashion magazines, beauty is something that comes from consumption, not clip_image006necessarily from character.

That said, I think we often sell readers of these magazines short when we presume that they are merely victims of the beauty industry. I have known a fashion victim or two in my years (and spot them regularly on the streets of Los Angeles), but let’s not presume that all women and girls simply read these magazines passively. In a now classic 1984 cultural studies text, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature author Janice Radway interviewed women who read romance novels and found that rather than just internalizing the messages of idealized romance they contain, readers used them to escape the drudgery of everyday life. Likewise, we cannot presume that fashion magazine readers just mindlessly adopt the perspectives of the magazines. How readers make meaning of texts—a central goal of cultural studies research—often depends on the social context that each person lives within.

Looking back on my own relationship with fashion magazines, I read them more as a fantasy about what my impending adult life might be like, and for instruction about how to best be ready for that life. The magazines I read in the 80s, like many today, provided advice about careers and living independently in cities. They told stories about having grown-up relationships with men, which my friends and I had no real frame of reference for (and let’s be honest, most seventeen-year-olds would rather not talk to mom and dad much about this topic!).

So why my excitement today? I have had enough experience with being a grown-up to know that the magazines’ advice is just a guess, as much advice often is. Fashion magazines offer the promise of self-improvement, or as historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg describes, a body project. Brumberg’s study of adolescent girls throughout the twentieth century reveals that these projects continually shift. Unlike the nineteenth century, when girls wrote in their diaries about being better morally, most of the projects today focus on the external. 

Why did this happen? We can’t blame fashion magazines for the changes, since the ones that existed then bore little resemblance to those of today. Brumberg argues that as women have gradually gained more political power and experienced less external regulation that they have been encouraged to regulate themselves internally. For instance, nineteenth-century women were often discouraged from exercise, but wore binding corsets. Starting in the 1920s women shed these physically restricting undergarments, but took up “slimming” in order to restrict their body size.clip_image008

So the magazines both reflect and reproduce images of beauty—if we took them away, girls and women wouldn’t necessarily feel better about how they look. From my personal experience, I read the magazines from the perspective that I was one of “them.” Although not tall, tan, or blonde, as many models in the magazines I bought were, I saw myself as like them in some strange way. And the advice in the magazines about make-up tips and products to try helped me feel part of this thing called beauty. Yes, Marx might say I was experiencing false consciousness—you might say I was deluded. And certainly there might be people who read the magazines and feel inadequate, but we can’t make generalizations either way. 

That said, I can’t say that I disagree with many of the critiques of the beauty industry author Naomi Wolf offers in her book The Beauty Myth or with Jean Kilbourne’s analysis of advertising in her book Killing Us Softly. But we can’t analyze magazines and presume to know how people make sense of them. Sometimes we think that criticizing things we like makes us hypocrites or killjoys. We don’t have to be either; we can both enjoy and deconstruct forms of media culture we consume creating the best of both worlds: critical consumers who can have fun reading a magazine once in a while. And learn new make-up tips.

Robert W. Fuller: An End to Inequality and Violence?

On By econnellIn Class and Stratification, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change, TheoryLeave a comment

Professor Tom Scheff and cat MishaBy Thomas Scheff 

Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, UC Santa Barbara

I didn’t understand why I found Barack Obama’s race speech so moving until I read Robert W. Fuller’s comments about it. They seemed brilliant to me, so I proceeded to read Fuller’s other writings. I think they make a powerful contribution to our understanding of the enigmas of our time, and may have the potential to help us surmount them.

Fuller has had an illustrious career; first as physicist, then President of his alma mater, Oberlin College, as a citizen diplomat during the Cold War, chair of the board of Internews, and many other distinctions. The approach he takes to the issue of inequality may be his greatest contribution, though. 

In his approach, there are two main components to the problem of inequality: rankism, on the one hand, and dignity, on the other. The term rankism doesn’t concern rank per se, but the abuse of rank. Some systems of rank are inherently abusive: white over black, male over female, hetero over homosexual, Christian over Muslim, extreme nationalism, and so on. But even legitimate systems of rank, those in most organizations, are often abusive; if not in principle, then in practice.

Fuller focuses his spotlight on dignity and the ways it can be abused. This perspective offers what seems to me to be a distinctive solution to the problem of inequality. That is, it doesn’t concern economic rank or political hierarchy directly, but dignity and its opposite, humiliation. This focus, as will be suggested below, may help with a problem that probably cannot be understood in strictly economic or political terms: gratuitous and/or interminable conflict. 

Fuller’s analysis begins with what he calls micro-inequalities, the withholding of dignity by one person from another. At work, if your boss continually interrupts conversations to take phone calls, it is a slight, a small indignity. But slights add up. If they are frequent enough, one can feel like a nobody. Maybe the boss meant no disrespect, but to be slighted consistently is humiliating. 

Much of the sociologist Erving Goffman’s work concerns this issue. He called it facework, the saving and loss of face. But it also is crucial to his most famous idea, impression management. One seeks to manage the impression one makes on others, in order to maintain one’s dignity, and often, the dignity of others. 

Goffman was concerned only with face-to-face interaction, but Fuller extends dignity/humiliation process to the traditional problem of macro-inequalities between groups. All contacts between persons and between groups have an effect on the bond: the bond is either maintained, strengthened, or disrupted by those contacts. Helping the other person or group maintain their dignity maintains the existing bond or strengthens it. Disrespect disrupts it. There are no exceptions: contact cannot occur without affecting the bond. Secure bonds lead to cooperation, disrupted ones to conflict. When the bond is entirely broken, as is often the case, others can become mere objects.

Fuller’s approach is powerful in several different ways. It is applicable to many ostensibly different issues: race, inter-ethnic and inter-nation relations, gender, sexual orientation, social class, and so on. It also implies a theory that may explain gratuitous and/or interminable conflict between individuals and between groups. 

For example, the Serbian attack on the Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s can be traced back to a defeat of the Serbs by Muslim Turks hundreds of years earlier. The Serbs took this ancient defeat as a humiliation, and harbored vengeance until it became possible. Similarly, France plotted for many years to regain their honor (read dignity) after defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, and Hitler won over the German people by promising to regain the honor they lost in the defeat in 1918. Humiliation spawns humiliation, and it can strike deep. The dignity/humiliation framework seems to reach into the very core of human conduct. 

Finally, Fuller uses terms that are understandable by everyone. Audiences all over the world have responded enthusiastically to his speeches. Indeed, his work could provide the foundation for a social movement to create dignitarian organizations and, ultimately, to build a dignitarian society. For these and other reasons not mentioned in these brief comments, Fuller’s ideas are well worth our attention.