Our intern, Lauren McGuire, found this fat-shaming ad for Mini Mentos. Text: “I love hanging out with you. All the boys keep looking at me.”
The ad uses the same strategy as a previously covered Bacardi campaign in which they encouraged women to “get an ugly girlfriend.” Both suggest that being fat (or ugly, and they’re often conflated) is undesirable. They also both treat fat people like they’re aren’t deserving of respect and dignity; that is, it’s okay to use them. In this case, the skinny girl is literally hoisting the fat girl into the air, so aggressively that her shoe is falling off. The fat girl is like a thing that the skinny girl owns and can pick up and toss about.
Notice also that it’s taken-for-granted as simply true that, if a “boy” were to see these two girls together, he would look at the skinny girl and ignore the fat one. This is a pathologization of sexual attraction to fat women, the same pathologization that leads us to call it “fat fetishism” or come up with terms like “chubby chasers” to try to explain “weird” sexual proclivities. It assumes that it’d be unnatural to find the fat woman sexier than the skinny one.
Notice also the stylization of the drawings. Both the fat and the skinny girl are drawn with wildly exaggerated proportions. This makes fat and skinny people seem like members of different species, entirely alien to one another. Skinny people are sticks; fat people are essentially circles. In reality, fat and skinny people look more alike than this. They both have human bodies with all the same parts. Some people just have more fat than others and fat is distributed differently in everyone. Fat is human, fat is natural, fat is okay. But a fear of fat is stoked when we see images like this that threaten us. This image says, “if you are/get fat, you will be a downright FREAK; you will be a circle when you should be a stick. And skinny girls will wave you around to draw attention to themselves.”
In 1989 Peggy McIntosh published an essay that is assigned in nearly every Sociology of Race and Ethnicity course in America. Titled White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, the essay included a list of things that white people, but not others in a white-dominated society, can count on. Here are a few:
I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
I thought of Peggy McIntosh when I saw this personal confession at PostSecret:
Please welcome Guest Blogger, Caroline Heldman, PhD. Heldman is an Associate Professor of Politics at Occidental College. The week after Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Helman drove to New Orleans to assist with rescue and relief efforts. She later co-founded the New Orleans Women’s Shelter and continues to work on rebuilding efforts in the Lower Ninth Ward. Below is a post, excerpted from a much longer update on the Katrina tragedy, about the Agliers massacre.
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Trigger warning: racial violence and racist language.
A disturbing picture of racial slaughter emerges in the days following Katrina, at the hands of private residents and police officers. Racially-motivated murders were carried out in Algiers Point, a predominately white enclave nestled in mostly black Algiers, not far from Gretna. This part of the city is connected to the rest of New Orleans by bridge and ferry only, and it did not experience flooding. After the storm, a band of 15 to 30 white men formed a loose militia targeting anyone whom they deemed “didn’t belong” in their predominately white neighborhood (Thompson, 2008). They blocked off streets with downed trees, stockpiled weapons, and ran patrols.
At least eleven black men were shot, although some locals expect that the actual number is much higher. On July 16, 2010, Roland Bourgeois was charged with shooting three black men in Algiers in the days following Katrina (McCarthy, 2010). He allegedly came back to the militia home base with a bloody baseball cap from Ronald Herrington, a man he shot, and told a witness that “Anything coming up this street darker than a paper bag is getting shot.”
To date, this is the only arrest of militia members, but the FBI is investigating the situation and will likely make more arrests given that two Danish filmmakers interviewed multiple residents who admitted shooting black people. In “Welcome to New Orleans,” militia member Wayne Janak smiles at the camera: “It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.” A woman nearby adds “He understands the N-word now… In this neighborhood, we take care of our own.” Many of the victims reported that militia members called them racial epithets during attacks, and a family member of militia members reports that her uncle and cousins considered it a “free-for-all—white against black,” and her cousin was happy they were “shooting niggers.”
Malik Rahim, a long-time Algiers resident and activist who co-founded Common Ground Relief after the storm, took me on a tour of bodies in his neighborhood a week or so after the storm. I only made it through one viewing – a bloated body of a man under a piece of cardboard with a gunshot wound to his back. I assumed that this death was being investigated, but should have known otherwise given that the state had essentially sanctioned these actions with a “shoot to kill” order that allowed civilians to make their own assessments of who should live or die.
One of Many New Orleans Vigilante T-Shirts Slogans:
Last week NPR reported on a scale developed by a forensic psychologist, Michael Stone, on which murderers could be placed according to how evil they are (from slightly evil to really, really really evil). To illustrate the scale, NPR developed this graphic:
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the artists designing this graphic did not purposefully associate darker skin-like colors with more evil and lighter skin-like colors with less evil. I think this is a fair assumption, though I don’t know for sure that this is true. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.
If they didn’t do this on purpose, then race never consciously entered their minds. Once you notice that the colors are skin-like colors, and if you are a member of a society that discriminates against darker-skinned people, you immediately see that this graphic reproduces those stereotypes… AND YOU CHANGE THE COLORS. Any color, going from light to dark, will illustrate intensity. How about red? In Western societies, red is associated with anger. If you insist on using black because black signifies evil in our culture, how about using a true black (that is very rarely if ever seen on people) and a gray scale? How about any colorother than brown?
I think this is likely a case in which the producers of the image did not think. And not thinking is one of the most insidious ways that racism and other bigotries get reproduced. People who don’t think about race are the most likely to endorse racial stereotypes. When people who think about race are distracted — with another task, or loud music, or some other intervening stimulus — they are more likely to think stereotypically than when they are not distracted. We can’t be colorblind. Our unconscious is steeped in racial meanings. Consciously fighting those associations is the only way to be less racist.
Not thinking about race is a cousin to thinking racist thoughts. Only thinking hard about race helps alleviate racism. And this graphic is an excellent example of why.
UPDATE: Some readers say that the colors, on their computer, look yellow, orange, and red; others see the skin colors that I see. So there may be significant variation in how these colors appear on different monitors… which is a whole other interesting problem for people who produce web content!
Gwen and I usually refrain from posting material that seems culturally marginal. There’s a lot of disturbing stuff that pops up on the fringes, but we’re mostly interested in illustrating culturally dominate tropes with particularly influential cases (for example, lessons from music videos by artists like Eminem, Rihanna, and Kanye West). My first instinct, when I received a link to a set of cartoon at The Oatmeal from Sully R., was to skip it for this reason. But when I got to the end of the page, I saw this:
Nearly 2,500 diggs, 743 tweets, over 8,000 people on facebook sharing it, and nearly 8,000 stumbleupons. What was this content that so many people had felt compelled to share?
It’s five cartoons illustrating hilarious ways to “use” a sex worker… eh em, “hooker.” The message is: once you pay for a sex worker, you get to do anything you want with her, including demean her for your own entertainment.
I guess the point of this post is: I thought this was fringe. I thought, “Oh sure, another set of sexist cartoons. They’re everywhere. Whatever.” But then I was shocked by how many people had thought they were hilarious enough to share with their friends and strangers. This is not fringe at all… it’s just everyday LOL.
Presumably many of you have heard about the controversy that has arisen about a conversation between Laura Schlessinger (aka Dr. Laura) and a female African American caller. Corina C. sent in some links to posts on the topic. Trigger warning for harsh, racist language.
Here’s a recording of the conversation (found at Media Matters) in which Schlessinger responds to the caller’s concerns about comments from her White husband’s friends and relatives by suggesting she is “hypersensitive” and isn’t in a position to be concerned about comments she considered racist because “Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger”:
Selected parts of the transcript:
CALLER: I was a little caught back by the N-word that you spewed out, I have to be honest with you. But my point is, race relations –
SCHLESSINGER: Oh, then I guess you don’t watch HBO or listen to any black comedians.
…
SCHLESSINGER: Yeah. We’ve got a black man as president, and we have more complaining about racism than ever. I mean, I think that’s hilarious.
…
SCHLESSINGER: Chip on your shoulder. I can’t do much about that.
CALLER: It’s not like that.
SCHLESSINGER: Yeah. I think you have too much sensitivity –
CALLER: So it’s OK to say “nigger”?
SCHLESSINGER: — and not enough sense of humor.
…
SCHLESSINGER: …You know what? If you’re that hypersensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry out of your race. If you’re going to marry out of your race, people are going to say, “OK, what do blacks think? What do whites think? What do Jews think? What do Catholics think?”…And what I just heard from Jade is a lot of what I hear from black-think — and it’s really distressting [sic] and disturbing. And to put it in its context, she said the N-word, and I said, on HBO, listening to black comics, you hear “nigger, nigger, nigger.” I didn’t call anybody a nigger. Nice try, Jade. Actually, sucky try. Need a sense of humor, sense of humor — and answer the question. When somebody says, “What do blacks think?” say, “This is what I think. This is what I read that if you take a poll the majority of blacks think this.” Answer the question and discuss the issue…Ah — hypersensitivity, OK, which is being bred by black activists. I really thought that once we had a black president, the attempt to demonize whites hating blacks would stop, but it seems to have grown, and I don’t get it.
There are a number of things going on here. In Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva discusses the various ways that Whites, in particular, downplay racial discrimination through a number of rhetorical and discursive strategies, several of which Schlessinger draws on in this exchange. For instance, she naturalizes the behavior the caller is concerned about: if you marry someone of another race, you just have to accept that their friends and family are going to consider you a representative of your entire race and constantly interact with you through the lens of your racial/ethnic background. That’s just to be expected, and if it starts to bother you, you’re “hypersensitive.” In fact, you ought to be sure and constantly educate yourself about all social trends as they relate to African Americans, so that if someone has any questions about what “Blacks think,” you can quickly tell them.
Think about the level of mental energy that is being expected here. Schlessinger is saying that it is the responsibility of minorities to know what members of their race/ethnicity think, in the aggregate, about whatever topic anybody else might want to know. I, as a White woman, am not expected to be able to provide, at the drop of a hat, data on Whites’ opinions about anything. (Though I do find that people who find out I’m a sociologist often think I must have insight into every aspect of social life, leading to questions such as, “My sister-in-law likes to _____. What do you think causes that?” or “So what do you think _____ will be like in 50 years?”, neither of which I am usually prepared to address in the middle of getting some potato salad at a picnic or buying a soda at the gas station.) The underlying argument here is that it is minorities’ responsibility to patiently educate Whites about things related to non-Whites, and an unwillingness to take on that role is evidence that you have a “chip on your shoulder.”
Another frame Schlessinger draws on is the minimization of racism: we have a Black president now, so racism’s totally over. What’s your problem?
Schlessinger is also holding all members of a racial group responsible for the actions of any of them. She argues that the routines of some Black comedians invalidates this individual African American woman’s right to be upset by racialized language in any context. It doesn’t matter whether this woman approves of the comedians’ comments — or has ever heard any of them; all African Americans are treated as an undifferentiated group, and the behavior of some revokes the rights of any others to bring up issues they find problematic.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Schlessinger hints at another rhetorical strategy, the “some of my best friends are _____ and thus I can’t possibly be racially prejudiced” argument:
I went out to dinner with three friends after Larry King. One of my friends who is gay is sitting there with another friend who is black, and he looks up and says, “I wonder what the media would do with this? You’re with a black guy and a gay guy.” We laughed, because we all understand what this is really about — censoring a point of view.
So there you have it: a round-up of ways to frame non-Whites as overly sensitive and unilaterally responsible for improving race relations.
UPDATE: The comments section is closed. There were still a lot of people commenting, but much of it had descended into name-calling and accusations, and I can’t keep up with all of them to catch the truly offensive ones. I may reopen comments in 48 hours after a cooling-off period.
Plans to build an Islamic community center near the site of Ground Zero, the site of the destroyed World Trade Center towers in Manhattan, have stirred up the political right who have dubbed it the Ground Zero Mosque. The proposed site (A) is about two blocks from where the twin towers once stood (B):
Objection to the project is based on a false conflation of the attacks with Islam. Bin Laden drew on Islam to mobilize support for the attack, but this in no way makes the attacks Islamic. Many Muslims died in the attacks and Muslims around the world condemn them. When Scott Roeder murdered George Tiller for performing abortions, we didn’t call that a Christian attack. It is prejudicial to paint entire groups based on the actions of a few.
Notice, however, how this ad opposing the community center identifies all Muslims (“they”) as America’s enemy (found here). The ad’s narrator explains, “They declared war against us” and “to celebrate that murder of 3,000 Americans, they want to build a monstrous, 13-story mosque at Ground Zero…” Trigger warning for those sensitive to images of the 911 attacks:
The campaign against the community center, then, is a good example of our refusal to notice that many Americans are Muslims and that not all Muslims are America’s enemy.
It also misunderstands life in that region of the city. The ad names says that the site of the World Trade Center is “sacred” and Sarah Palin says that it is “hallowed ground.” To that, Daryl Lang took it upon himself to photograph some of the Manhattan corners and storefronts that were the same distance from Ground Zero as the proposed center. “Look at the photos,” he writes, “This neighborhood is not hallowed… The blocks around Ground Zero are like every other hard-working neighborhood in New York, where Muslims are just another thread of the city fabric.”
Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for sending the link to Daryl Lang’s photos!
Kathleen P. sent in a commercial for Allstate Insurance that draws on stereotypes of teenagers:
This ad depicts a teenager girl, to be sure, but teenagers of both sexes and all races and classes tend to be portrayed negatively, albeit in different ways. Jamie Keiles, a teenager herself, is trying to draw attention to this at her blog, Teenagerie. Keiles writes:
Through the eyes of the media, teenagers are shown as narcissistic, lazy, and unintelligent. We are condemned for being tech-obsessed, shallow, and impulsive.
Keiles, however, blames media itself for promulgating this stereotype, giving teens the message that their lives should fall within its boundaries. She’s hoping her project will make a difference.
White people should worry about racism. They should worry about racism because it’s wrong. But if that’s not enough of a motivation, they should worry about it for their own damn good. Philip Cohen of Family Inequality shows us how so with a discussion of a recent paper published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
The Figure below illustrates the percentage of black (grey bar) and white (white bar) residents who went into end-stage renal disease (kidney failure; ESRD) before ever seeing a doctor specializing in kidneys (a nephrologist). As we move from left to right, the zip codes in which patients live becomes increasingly populated by black people.
What we see is that, in any given neighborhood, black people are always less likely to get access to a kidney specialist before their kidneys fail; but also that white people living in a neighborhood with a higher percentage of blacks are less likely than whites in a more white neighborhood to see a specialist. So much so that whites living in neighborhoods that are more than 50% black are less likely to see a specialist than blacks living in neighborhoods that are less than 25% black.
Cohen specifies that…
…the relationship still holds even when individual socioeconomic status, and local-area socioeconomic status, are controlled. So it’s not just a poverty effect.
Somehow places that are “blacker”, even when they are not poor, are serviced with inferior health care compared to places that are “whiter.” And everyone suffers for it (though not necessarily equally).
An Anonymous Reader in Toronto alerted us to an ad campaign for French Connection that gives “the man” a voice, while objectifying “the woman.” I wasn’t particularly compelled to post about until I saw the advertising in the windows of the French Connection in New Orleans. That part of the campaign appeared to overtly insult women, but not men.
Here is what struck our Anonymous Reader: note that these ads include descriptions of the woman, but quotations from the man (source).
These are my snap shots from N. Peters in New Orleans. The language describing the men seems pretty neutral:
The language describing the women, however, seems overtly disdainful.
“How vain of you to think we would ogle you”:
“It is nothing to do with you. It is only the dress we wish to see”:
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