Social inequalities hide in funny places

Posted on by

“I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one.”
― Marilyn Monroe

A family member sent this internet joke to me. The subject of the email read: “Just thought you could use a laugh. This is so true.” As I teach about social inequalities, I asked students last week if a personal happiness or in this case a a joke can function like a personal trouble. This is the basic premise of the sociological imagination forwarded by C. Wright Mills. The meme below says it all:

From a tweet by @DJAcademe

 The letter contained in the email must be linked to larger public or political issues. It’s doing some of the cultural work of online capital — tracked as funny memes or viral videos, likes or dislikes, numbers of hearts, followers, or subscribers, or just the comments below and update or a video in social media. Email started this stuff with internet jokes, legends, and myths that circulate unregulated and tap into our cognitive biases and social norms. This one is no different.
Take a moment to read it before I comment:


Purdue University: Natural Born Citizens

Those of you who worry about Democrats versus Republicans — relax, here is our real problem.

In a Purdue University classroom, they were discussing the qualifications to be President of the United States. It was pretty simple. The candidate must be a natural born citizen of at least 35 years of age.

However, one girl in the class immediately started in on how unfair it was of the requirement to be a natural born citizen. In short, her opinion was that this requirement prevented many capable individuals from becoming president. The class was taking it in and letting her rant, and not many jaws hit the floor when she wrapped up her argument by stating, “What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified to lead this country than one born by C-section?” Yep, these are the same kinds of 18-year-olds that are now voting in our elections! They breed, and they walk among US.

Lord, we need more help than we thought we did!

How my relative got an email from a midwestern, predominately-white, university, from a land grant university in Lafayette, Indiana known for its STEM programs, from a social institution that is surely male dominated except among its secretarial staff is facsinating to me. The context or social forces behind it are not even questioned. This makes internet jokes pernicious, this one because it is circulating in the framing of our current American presidential election process.

A land-grant university is a particular social structure in education that has it’s own patriarchal bias that may be overlooked. This from the Wikipedia on “land grant univerity”:

The Morrill Acts funded educational institutions by granting federally controlled land to the states for them to sell to raise funds to establish and endow “land-grant” colleges. The mission of these institutions as set forth in the 1862 Act is to focus on the teaching of practical agriculture, science, military science and engineering (though “without excluding … classical studies”), as a response to the industrial revolution and changing social class.[1][2] This mission was in contrast to the historic practice of higher education to focus on an abstract liberal arts curriculum.

The final line evoking — a religious exclamation and invocation “Lord…” — can evoke both intergenerational disdain for the joke’s readers making it dismissive of Millennials and for religious minded and purist folks it may be dismissive of the lack of or loss of values these groups see within their own in-group. Us vs. Them is subtly instituted in our minds. Our calling attention to other people’s ignorance is always a sign of our own cognitive distortions and biases. It’s easy to call someone else stupid. Hard to accept you are the arbiter of the slippery slope of hating others.

What initially lured me in was the way the email/internet joke started. It seemed non-partisan appealing to an escape from the usual polemics of social engagement on the web these days. (How do you unfriend an email?). Bi- or multiple-partisanship (i.e., intersectionality) is missing in our social discourse around politics, racial inequalities, gender disparities, and discussions of the root causes of extreme wealth inequalities in the U.S.

Critical thinking begins with a consideration of the many possible readings of an internet meme or joke that all too easily circulates our diverse society and global internet. Critical thinking should not be partisan and should not preclude considering opposing and feminist readings of texts considered “just a joke”. What makes something funny actually turns on the symbolic meanings we cannot see on the surface with our personal, biased thinking. Jokes are sociological and turn on personal readings without short cut thoughts.

I wrote back to my relative: “If the joke turned on a male rather than a female this would be really funny.” I was dodging a bit here..afraid to just come out and say I did not find it funny at all. I continued: “The sociological under belly, here, is the incompetence of girls [or I should say “women”] in the classroom and in [our national] politics at a time when a woman happens to be running for president. [This is] the political [and sociological] work of anonymous internet jokes! But, hey, I am only a professor of sociology so my view is not the norm.” {{sigh}}. Betwixt family norms and critical thinking.

As I prepare to teach a bit about labeling theory and strain theory (cf. Robert Merton and others) today, I can see how my familial reaction and behavior was “deviant” relative to expressing my dislike of the joke. It was palpable–my amygdala was like “danger, danger, Will Robinson!!” tentacles failing and lights flashing on alert. I hesitated in writing back to my relative. Family ain’t relative it’s constant, rarely malleable, it seems.

The micro norm of talking back to an elder is some serious pressure. “Don’t do it” my cognitive bias told me without thinking. “Don’t be a trouble maker. Ignore it. Play nice. Pretend.” But that would mean not being fully conscious of my whole self, of who I am, right? Maybe.  Some things, wisdom is teaching me, may be better left unsaid but I am a teacher at heart. Testing out what happened here in this blog can be useful not only to me but perhaps my students who get to see it never stops–negotiating social identities and social structures.

You must pick and choose your battles as long as you live. Meanwhile you do not pick and choose your family. You can learn to be selective and remain open to multiple readings of texts and people. THAT act may actually may impact the larger inequalities that bias access to opportunities as well as how girls and boys see themselves and how elders and teachers react in the future.

Are you training yourself and others to accept being talked about as the dumb blonde in the STEM classroom? How will you learn to STEM the tide of inequalities, inequalities that stem from internet memes we share on email or on social media without considering who might be impacted or stigmatized by it? All jokes turn on some kind of bias and all can be unpacked to consider whether we wish to keep telling such biased jokes.

If I simply flip the script to reflect the patriarchal bargains men and women make by passing such jokes if still won’t work, no matter whether you are liberal or conservative. It will simply breed animosity from the hegemonic majority, the conservatives, or other.

However, one guy in the class immediately started in on how unfair it was of the requirement to be a natural born citizen. In short, his opinion was that this requirement prevented many capable individuals from becoming president. The class was taking it in and letting him mansplain it all, and not many of his male classmates or professors jaws hit the floor but the women’s did when he wrapped up his argument by stating, “What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified to lead this country than one born by C-section?” Yep, these are the same kinds of men that we’ve voted for in our elections for centuries! They take up the seats in the House, and blame us for what sets men and women apart among US.

Lord, we need more help than we thought we did!

We do need help but all is not lost to despair and there is hope.

Sojourner Truth’s speech “Arn’t I a woman?” for some reason popped into my mind here as an nice close. It registers the power of the vulnerable groups we sociologists and anthrologists and ethnomusicologists seek to protect and bring awareness to. Not to speak for the oppressed but to show how they are quite apt at speaking for themselves–no joke!

I can’t read, but I can hear. I have heard the Bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept—and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part? [Man ain’t have nothing to do with it.]

But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.

Sources:

Elizabeth C. Stanton, S. B. Anthony, and Matilda J. Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1 (Rochester, N. Y.: Charles Mann, 1887), p. 116; Anti-Slavery Bugle (Salem, OH) June 21, 1851.

– See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/1851-sojourner-truth-arnt-i-woman#sthash.YSCQT7W0.dpuf

#StayWoke #keepitintersectional

Non-Racist or Anti-Racist? Hidden Truths

Posted on by

Learn more about implicit bias using the 2015 annual review by the Kirwin Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.  The institute offers insights into implicit bias for those who wish to understand how we socially reproduce racism or sexism as individuals and groups without thinking.

A Few Key Characteristics of Implicit Biases:

  • Implicit biases are pervasive.  Everyone possesses them, even people with avowed commitments to impartiality such as judges.
  • Implicit and explicit biases are related but distinct mental constructs.  They are not mutually exclusive and may even reinforce each other.
  • The implicit associations we hold do not necessarily align with our declared beliefs or even reflect stances we would explicitly endorse.
  • We generally tend to hold implicit biases that favor our own ingroup, though research has shown that we can still hold implicit biases against our ingroup.
  • Implicit biases are malleable.  Our brains are incredibly complex, and the implicit associations that we have formed can be gradually unlearned through a variety of debiasing techniques.

http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/researchandstrategicinitiatives/implicit-bias-review/

The Kirwin Institute has collaborated with MTV to offer young folk an implicit bias test and a 10-day fast. Check their website here: http://www.lookdifferent.org/what-can-i-do/implicit-association-test.

Defining The Culture of Despair

Posted on by

“Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

Here are a few sources that helped me rethink what “despair” in the context of a sociological study of social inequalities could more accurately mean. It’s not simply the opposite of “being” hopeful and the lack of hope. This is about a sociological mindset of despair that leads to perceptions of apathy, acquiescence in the face of the lack of a sense of autonomy to work with others to make a change. The power dissent requires one truly understand what “despair” or a culture of despair does to working and middle class people in a neoliberal climate.

  1. Despair (used in the sense of “nationalizing despair): when an excessive amount of knowledge (surfeit) clouds a subject’s eye for the future. Cf. Lamming’s “luxury of a nationalist despair.” It prevents a balanced assessment of the potential contained in the present. (daSilva, p. 16). It is a despair, I assert, that is precipitated by the nation-state, by the environmental conditions that arise from neoliberalist agendas.  The Luxury of Nationalist Despair: George Lamming’s Fiction as Decolonizing … By A. J. Simoes da Silva
  2.  Fritz Richard Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (1963):This author articulates it as a “discontent with culture and a discontent with his own place in it.” (p. 151). “Germany’s celebrated achievements in science and politics were villified, and the failures of the age magnified and maligned.” (151). This led some to find diagnosis–critical thinking–unbearable because “he lacked the detachment and ‘timelessness’ that Nietschze prescribed and possessed” (151).

    Despair he asserts leads to a maze of self-afflicted hatred and frustrations (I would add resentments). He writes, “Despair had ultimately to yield to the promise of redemption. Hence the insistence on several steps to regeneration. The healing powers of Rembrandt, on the still slumbering powers of the Niederdeutschen–all these were verbal constructions designed to combat the deeply rooted sense of despair” (152).

    Politics he writes is based on illogics that harness the cultural, spiritual and psychic dimensions of humanity not just rhetoric. Stern asserts that it is the explication of history that sheds light on the “persistent deficiences of a certain kind of unreflective, uncritical modernity and also the dangers of exuberant reform movements that in the name of idealism claim to be immune from accountability, that in their utoptianism propose collective solutions for grievances and aspirations that do not allow for collective solutions” (x; preface written at Columbia University).

    He concludes his preface with wishful thinking that perhaps it is this very culture of despair that demands a historical return: [I] “would prefer to live in a world in which the politics of cultural despair had nothing to do with historical resonance”. In other words, in a world where the past was just that, behind us, not shaping us without a need for critical reflection.  This is brilliant analysis of despair!!

Low culture’s antidote to despair…

Posted on by

….music, language and art

Niederdeutschen. Lowlands Germany. Normaal musik. The Netherlands.

Here we call it hip-hop. Conscious rap. Dirty South rap. Soul music. Funk. The Blues.
Bessie Smith. William Grant Still. Big Mama Thorton. Betty Davis. Nona Hendryx.
We gon’ be alright, RIGHT??!??

Making strange historical connections to the culture of despair after Nazi Germany and after Apartheid and the study of marginalized youth on YouTube and teaching students to grapple with the despair of learning that our American culture is NOT what it claims itself to be when it comes to poverty, the working class, the middle class, business, education and much more. It can be depressing to study and think critically. The mind wants to lighten the weight of the burden by oversimplifying even the notion of “despair”. It’s merely a distraction not a “shit hittin the fan” confrontation with what’s really happening to the people in the nation.

Skimming though a Columbia Emeritus professor’s first book, The Culture of Despair (1963) by Frtiz Stern, I am starting to discover a rich definition of “despair” that is appropriate for my social inequality class discussion today. I captured this notion in my notebook:

“Despair, historian Fritz Stern writes, leads to a maze of self-afflicted hatred and frustrations [I would add resentments quite apparent among people of color, women, and college students]. He adds, “Despair [must] ultimately to yield to the promise of redemption. Hence the insistence on several steps to regeneration. The healing powers of Rembrandt, on the still slumbering powers of the Niederdeutschen–all these were verbal constructions designed to combat the deeply rooted sense of despair” (Stern 1963, 152).

This got me thinking about the power of the arts and media to regenerate and heal the illogics and psychosis that politics imposes on citizens. Stern writes that culture, psychology and psychic manipulation are harnessed in cultures of despair. Something to draw upon as we invent the format of our final presentations.

I decided to write a letter of acknowledgement to emeritus professor Stern. I always embrace intergenerational communication and I think in this age of technological information overload where our mobile devices control us with dings and buzzes, that we actually slow down and take time to compose handwritten letters or even an email to a retired professor whose research still resonates. I shared more of my notes with Stern:

Stern concludes the preface of the book with a wistful thought. Perhaps it is the very culture of despair that demands a historical return [from the living]. [I] “would prefer to live in a world in which the politics of cultural despair had nothing to do with historical resonance”.

[KG:] In other words, wouldn’t it be great to live in a world where the past was just that–behind us–not shaping us; easy and undemanding of our critical reflection and study.  This is brilliant stuff!!

I added to Prof. Stern, “Sorry for using such lowbrow language. My 10th grade honor’s English teacher would staunchly protest the use of ‘stuff. But it seems fitting from the bit of information I examined about the cultural history of Niederdeutchen in 1970s subculture. Here’s a video of one of its proponents who reclaimed the use of Low German, which is the translation of the German term.

For more on Niederdeutschen See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German#Contemporary Normaal and low German language reclaimed through subcultural music.

I don’t know enough but to quote Wikipedia just yet. Here is a bit of biography about Normaal.

Normaal is a rock band from the Netherlands, more specifically from the Achterhoek region, who sing in Achterhooks, a local variety of the Low Saxon language group. Bennie Jolink, who was an Arts education[disambiguation needed] student stationed in Amsterdam in the 1970s, started the band in 1975 as a reaction to disco and glamrock, in addition to the overall “Dutch snobbery” towards people from the Low Saxon-speaking regions, and use of the English language by many other Dutch artists. “Normaal” meaning “normal”, suggesting the same: “act normally”. The band has since gained national fame, and have had more top 40 hits in the Dutch chart than any other Dutch band. Despite this fact, the band never reached number one.[1] The music could be typified as “heavy country rock”, and possibly as a rowdier version of ZZ Top.

CyberRacism and Social Inequality

Posted on by

“Racial Internet Literacy” from JessieNYC on Vimeo.
Daniels, J. (2012, September 4). “Racial Internet Literacy” (Vimeo). Retrieved January 13, 2016, from https://vimeo.com/48821485

Cyber Racism and Social Inequality Online

Today we are reading “Race and Racism in Internet Studies: A Review and Critique” (2012) by CUNY Grad Center professor and sociology Jessie Daniels, who is a colleague and acquaintance.  The article appeared in New Media & Society, a great journal that features many articles about new media — always on, asynchronous media online.

This video reminds me of the influence of my mentor Mike Wesch’s YouTube videos on this kind of digital storytelling. How can we implement this in a short time in my winter intercession course? That is what I’ll ask my students today.  I want them to start contributing to this blog for the next 10 days.

Notice the similarity between Daniel’s video on Racial Internet Literacy (2012) from Vimeo and The Machine is Us/ing Us (2007) from YouTube:

Wesch, M. (2007, March 8). The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version). Retrieved January 13, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

Growing Apart; Working Together Online

If the sociological study of social inequality tells us that connecting our individual problems, seeing the connections between your life and mine as well as how social structures and ideologies keep us trapped in the welter of our daily experience, as C. Wright Mills articulated, then doing collaborative storytelling online about racism might help.

The final project in the course requires students to share what they are learning with at elast 20 people. I’ve always been interested in going public with our public learning. In the age of social media, institutions of higher learning can be hubs broadcasting social justice and change. But what does it take to work together and give up the neoliberalist notion that meritocracy is succeeding alone?

Hope: How to Debate Donald Trump’s Rightwing Populism

Posted on by

“Most Americans are close to total ignorance about the world. They are ignorant. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world.”
― Zbigniew Brzeziński

 

 

Declining jobs for men at the rise of feminism

Posted on by

The video above is a brief window into some of the cultural and political history behind inequalities within the family. Students in my Social Inequality class this first week have been simply developing the discourse of inequality and sociology–defining it, grasping it, and learning to recognize the concepts in their lives and in the readings. Labor participation rate is but one of many they are grappling with through YouTube videos, podcasts, and readings.

Students are really engaged in the conversations of social inequality at the micro level (one student share how their mom had her car repossessed even though she had paid the bill but had forgetten about it) and at the macro level of how politics has shaped racial, gendered and class inequalities according to Colin Gordon’s USC site on Growing Apart, which is a political history dating back before WWII.

Earlier in the week we listened to an amazing report of coverage by Pro Publica reporter Paul Kiel on The Color of Debt where what appeared to be mostly black female homeowners including the mayor of the city of Jennings in St. Louis had all had the checks garnished for falling on bad times. Click the link in the previous sentence to see the evidence of discrimination against black communities in St. Louis, Newark, and Chicago.

An image of C. Wright Mills as a social media meme. H/T Natasha

All this has really brought home the notion of the sociological imagination being an antidote to the private matters of our individual or personal troubles that affects large groups of people but remains hidden because folk just don’t want to broadcast their shame. The podcast we listened to that revealed the story aired on This American Life on the episode titled Status Update. The segment was Act III: There Owes the Neighborhood. It’s depressing but essential to learn about. The structural oppression of black communities is clear.

I introduced the course, since it’s my first offering of SOC3156 Social Inequality, as a beta test where this new syllabus is “subjected to real world testing by the intended audience”. It helps them and me recognize we are building something and in an experimental phase. All learning should be like this in the beginning. We all loop through phrases of exploring ideas and this is essential when starting something new. Since the 10 undergrads in my course come from diverse disciplinary interests as well as ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds, having a simple prism or theme for the course has been key in our explorations, inquiry, and building of an understanding of social inequalities from a sociological perspective.

The theme and aim of our work and action, as the title of the blog suggests, is developing reasoned arguments, based on proof and evidence, for both despair and hope regarding social inequalities in education, debt, housing, jobs/careers, and more.

Students selected topics for presentations when I instituted a “card game” based on a set of rankings from the Canvas gradebook suggesting a top down hierarchy of performance. In real life such rankings not only matter they are often invisible to most. I used the ranking to give out the suit of hearts. Their performance determined who got the ace, the 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. up to 9 and then there was one joker. I shuffled the sampled desk and let the person at the top of the rank pick the first card and the order was randomly selected as to who would get the first choice of topics to present in class. I’ll explain more later but suffice it to say that i am agitating all their embodied knowledge and notions about class and stratification every way I can. We are challenging our own poverty mindsets through experiential learning, writing, study, re-study, and now we begin to justify our thinking, our reasons for despair and hope.

The first pair of students present on Monday on intersectionaliity. They came up with a great idea as we learned the impact of labor participation after WWII on men. Why not speak to intersectionality with men in mind? I don’t know how it will turn out but given the patriarchal context of our culture, I think the pair presenting might just come up with something out of the pocket and hopeful in the face of the despair that constantly agitates us as we read one article after another, one history after another, at how the decks are stacked against vulnerable and marginalized groups.

More soon.