Transcripts
Transcript for Figure 1.7, The Sociological Imagination and Social Structures: Understanding Personal Troubles and Public Issues
[Narrator]: We all have imagination; it lets us be creative and envision life in a new way. However, in sociology, there is a concept known as the sociological imagination, introduced by C. Wright Mills in 1959, which urges us to understand the intricate relationship between self and society. The sociological imagination allows us to grasp history and biography and the connections between the two within society. This concept helps us distinguish between personal troubles and public issues, shedding light on how individual behavior is influenced by social structures.
Exercise as a Microcosm
Take exercise, for example. While it brings individual benefits such as health improvements and social engagement, it also serves a larger purpose in the social world. The environment and community surrounding an individual significantly impact their inclination towards exercise. The sociological imagination encourages us to view personal behaviors, like exercise, from multiple perspectives, considering the interplay between the individual and society.
From Personal Troubles to Public Issues: Obesity in the United States
Applying the sociological imagination to the public issue of obesity in the United States, we confront a tough question: Is it a personal trouble or a public issue? On a personal level, what and how much we eat seems within our control. However, social structures, such as family dynamics and societal norms, influence our choices.
For instance, family gatherings often involve unhealthy food choices, and social acceptance can impact an individual’s decision to conform. Taking it a step further, broader social structures like food deserts, government subsidies, and biological drives contribute to the prevalence of obesity as a social problem. The sociological imagination prompts us to recognize the complex web of factors influencing individual behavior and how personal troubles can transform into significant public issues.
Social Structures and Their Role in Shaping Behavior
Beyond obesity, numerous issues labeled as personal troubles also have underlying social factors. Government policies, economic conditions, educational systems, and religious influences all contribute to shaping human behavior and societal problems. The sociological imagination serves as a tool to explore how these social structures influence and sometimes exacerbate personal troubles, transforming them into public issues.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the sociological imagination is a powerful lens through which we can examine the interplay between individual lives and the broader social context. By understanding the connections between personal troubles and public issues, we gain insights into how social structures shape human behavior and contribute to the emergence of societal problems. This perspective encourages a nuanced understanding that goes beyond attributing issues solely to personal choices, acknowledging the complex web of societal influences at play.
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Transcript for The Sociological Imagination by Sociology Live! is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 1.20, Profile: Dr. Peter L. Berger (Social Construction of Reality)
I think a good sociologist is the kind of person who looks through keyholes and reads other people’s mail.
I discovered sociology by mistake. What mainly drew me in was the endless curiosity about what makes people tick and that evidently goes back to my early childhood. I must have been about five years old and I got a wonderful electric train. I never turned down the electricity – I lay on my belly and talked to imaginary people in the train. Well, I’ve done that ever since.
I’ve always been interested in religion, so focusing on the sociology of religion was a natural way to go. When I started out as a sociologist, most people believed that modernity leads to secularization. It doesn’t. It creates many different options for world views, values – including religious values. Relativism and fundamentalism are seemingly opposite, but they’re very similar. They are attempts to regain certainty. The relativist who says there is no truth, everything goes, is no longer full of anxiety. The fundamentalist thinks he knows what is true. That’s not some mysterious development; it can be sociologically explained by the structures of modern society.
The book which I’ve become best known for is The Social Construction of Reality and that became our redefinition of sociology of knowledge. It’s not just theoreticians who are interesting to analyze in terms of their social context, but everybody. Some said after that they read the book they saw the world differently, and I can understand that. I saw the world differently once these ideas became clear to me.
[Music.]
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Transcript for Figure 1.21, The Need for Long-acting HIV Prevention Methods – Trailer
The audio transcript highlights the challenges faced by women in rural areas, shedding light on issues like sexual assault, power dynamics, and the complexities surrounding healthcare, particularly HIV.
[Speaker 1]: In rural areas, young girls and women often find themselves vulnerable, with men exerting power over them. Sadly, many victims may not even recognize or acknowledge that they’ve been raped.
[Speaker 2]: [Inaudible] have a young husband in second room, and I signed it see a new table…
[Narrator]: The narrative touches on the complexities of relationships, emphasizing the difficulties faced by women in rural settings.
[Speaker 3]: [Inaudible] it is tough for a young girl. Women have power over girls, but young girls in the rural areas do not realize that they have been raped.
[Narrator]: The dialogue delves into the challenges of reporting such incidents, addressing the lack of awareness and acknowledgment in rural communities.
[Speaker 4]: They will always go for family planning, but they will not use a condom…
[Narrator]: The discussion shifts towards reproductive health and the choices made by young girls in these areas, highlighting the prevalence of unprotected sex.
[Speaker 5]: [Inaudible] they will not use condom.
[Narrator]: The conversation turns towards the harsh realities of HIV in these communities, discussing the preference for family planning over protecting against sexually transmitted infections.
[Speaker 6]: I don’t trust him that much, but some of them are good…
[Narrator]: The narrative introduces skepticism towards private hospitals, expressing concerns about the motives behind certain medical practices.
[Speaker 7]: …some they want to finish their stock, so we’ll just give you anything that they can get the money.
[Narrator]: The discussion extends to the challenges faced by families dealing with HIV, including issues of medication adherence and the strain on caregivers.
[Speaker 8]: …she drinks a lot and forgets about the pills…
[Narrator]: The narrative highlights the struggles of families, emphasizing the responsibility placed on caregivers in ensuring medication adherence.
[Speaker 9]: …we have to be behind her every day, reminding her to take her pills.
[Narrator]: The conversation concludes with a poignant reflection on the impact of HIV on families and communities, urging for awareness and support.
[Music.]
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Transcript for “The Need for Long-acting HIV Prevention Methods – Trailer” by AIVI is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 2.9, What is Marxism? (Karl Marx + Super Mario Bros.) – 8-Bit Philosophy
[Narrator]: Consider, my dear viewers, a world. A world without money, without class divisions, where everyone gives according to their abilities and takes according to their needs. Sounds pretty sweet, no? To German poet and philosopher Karl Marx, such a Communist utopia was not only possible, it was inevitable – or what he called “the march of history.”
Though deeply influenced by Hegel, who proposed that history develops through the abstract concept of “World Spirit,” Marx believed that it is not conflict of ideas that propels history, but rather, conflict of our relation to material goods, that will bring history to its end- specifically, our working conditions. Marx calls this historical process “Dialectical Materialism.”
Initially, humanity was concerned only with the most basic acts of our species- producing for personal survival. But as the population multiplied, “economic systems” were established to address the needs of all. And with economics, an individual’s relationship to the products they create changes – for one is no longer producing for their immediate needs. They are producing for others.
Fast forward to the industrial revolution where mankind created mechanisms to fulfill the needs of many with unprecedented efficiency. These mechanisms, or “capital,” are owned by individuals leading to enormous concentrations of wealth. And for the tired worker who must operate these machines, there is no getting ahead. For in order for the capitalist to maximize profit, he must pay the workers little more than is necessary to survive.
To Marx, this economic system of capitalism thrives on exploitation and creates widespread unhappiness through what he calls “alienation.” For starters, I am alienated from the fruits of my own labor. If I create a turnip, it will be sold to another, and in exchange I will be paid a wage and become as much of a commodity as the thing I produce. Thus, I am removed from my work. I do not see MYSELF in my labor.
Capitalism also alienates us from each other. For the workers to produce efficiently, the capitalist tells them they are in constant competition for their job, thereby turning our fellow man into an adversary, rather than an ally. Furthermore, capitalism alienates us from our very nature. Creating is a great source of satisfaction for our species. But because we are forced to make things that have no personal investment in, our lives become a burden.
As time goes on, and industrial powers become increasingly concentrated among a select elite, the gap between the working class and the capitalists will only become wider. To Marx, this gap will eventually become so pronounced that the workers, in their profound frustration, will rise up and overthrow the oppression of the few and usher in a new society – a society in which there is no private property, there are no class divisions, where peoples’ labor is held for the common good and where all work according to their ability. And that, my friends, is Communism.
Even today, Marxism is one of the most powerful ideologies in the world. And to some, the ushering in of the Marxist utopia still lies in the not-too-distant future.
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Transcript for Figure 2.13, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
An animated video featuring the writing of W.E.B. DeBois from his article, “Strivings of the Negro People,” published in 1897.
[Narrator]: Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others, through the difficulty of rightly framing it. Instead of saying directly, “How does it feel to be a problem?” They say, “I know an excellent colored man in my town,” or, “Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?” At these, I smile, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require.
To the real question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” I answer seldom a word. And yet, being a problem is a strange experience—it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others, shut out from their world by a vast veil, for the world I longed for, and all its dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. One feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro. Two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In the days of bondage, they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment. Slavery was, indeed, the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice. Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites.
Years have passed away — ten, twenty, thirty. And yet the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Merely a stern concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this, the land of their fathers’ fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 2.13, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
Transcript for “How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?” by The Atlantic is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 2.17, On Intersectionality in Feminism and Pizza | Akilah Obviously
[Akilah]: Hi YouTube, it’s Akilah, obviously, and today I want to talk about an issue that has been neglected on YouTube and in pop culture, specifically when we talk about people like Patty Arquette and her Oscar speech and Nellie Andreeva at Deadline who thinks diversity is overtaking Hollywood and there’s no roles for white people anywhere. So today, we’re going to talk about intersectionality and feminism, and what better way to tackle an issue this big than to talk about pizza.
It’s a little cheesy. Say you’re born a cheese pizza, but the world is made for burgers, right? You can go anywhere and get a burger. Burgers are the go-to fast food; pretty much everything in the world is made to serve burgers. So you’re trying to say, “Hey, pizza’s just as good as burgers. It’s just as satisfying as burgers. Pizza deserves the same rights as burgers,” and that’s all fine and good.
Then there’s pizzas like me, deluxe pizzas, who happen to have different toppings and features than cheese pizzas and have their own problems to face because they’re pizzas and have different toppings—and we’re like, “What about us?” Cheese pizzas are by far the most celebrated pizzas in society, right? Like if you go anywhere on the menu, there’s gonna be a cheese pizza in any facet of society, whether that’s art, media, education, finance, history—cheese pizzas are the only pizzas that are ever mentioned. You know cheese pizza is so celebrated that there are snacks that celebrate that flavor, like Combos and Pringles and even bagel bites. Cheese pizza is highly visible, meanwhile, this is not the case for deluxe pizzas, alright? Our features are often seen by the untrained eye as extra weight and too much of a problem, and we’re left to crumble because the crust does not support us. It is much more difficult to be a deluxe pizza in a burger world.
So when deluxe pizzas found out that cheese pizzas wanted to join forces and fight for the right to all pizzas, they were pumped until they found out that all the discussion about pizzas would be about cheese pizzas exclusively. In fact, cheese pizzas were like, “Deluxe pizza, we’re gonna get to your rights, but only after we’ve achieved ours first.”
And so now there are tons of videos and articles that talk about how cheese pizza is tired of being told by burgers to shave their crust and how cheese pizzas getting called all these slurs because of what they choose to put in their pie hole. Deluxe pizzas would love the privilege to care about being so menial.
Historically, when a deluxe pizza rises through the pop culture ranks and uses their platform to promote pizza rights, cheese pizzas will shame them and then turn around and say, “Look at this cheese pizza, she’s got the right idea,” even when she says the exact same thing that the deluxe pizza has been saying all along. Deluxe pizzas’ unique features are often celebrated when they occur unnaturally on cheese pizzas; in fact, when they occur naturally on deluxe pizza, they’re often shamed. “Look how big your sausages are. Why are your peppers so curly???”
And so deluxe pizzas are unfortunately a little jaded. They’ve fallen to room temperature waiting for us to fight for their rights when they’ve been fighting for cheese pizza rights all along. They’ve been too strong for too long. So how do we solve this problem? You know, I think it’s called intersectionality. When we talk about pizza rights, we need to be talking about all pizzas, not just cheese pizzas that are deemed socially acceptable and worthy of saving and worthy of having a place in popular culture. We need to be talking about pizzas who are sexually attracted to other pizzas, pizzas who aren’t sexually attractive, pizzas who identify as burgers, and pizzas with different toppings because as great as it is to uplift cheese pizzas, the world could use a lot more flavor. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you soon with another video. Bye.
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Transcript for Figure 2.18, Critical race theory: Experts break down what it actually means
[Kendall Thomas, Co-Editor of “Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement”]: The whole purpose of Critical Race Theory is to provide Americans with a way to understand the legacy of racism, even though those stories sometimes hurt.
[Brian Kilmeade, Fox & Friends host]: It’s anti-American training that vilifies White people and demands they apologize.
[Meghan Dougherty, Instructional Coach in Social Studies]: The best learning for students about social studies and our democracy and our country is the learning where students can really grapple with the issues and really come to a deeper understanding of how our past informed our present.
[Marsha Blackburn, Senator (R-Tennessee)]: All of this revisionist, woke curriculum, you are not going to do this to our children.
[Narrator]: Teachers across the country are caught in the middle of the latest flashpoint in America’s culture war — Critical Race Theory. So what exactly is it and why is there a push to ban it in schools?
[Thomas]: Critical Race Theory is a body of ideas and a set of approaches to understanding the history and the present of American society that looks at the ways in which racial unfairness have been woven into the fabric of our institutions.
[Narrator]: In other words, Critical Race Theory, or CRT for short, is a legal academic framework centered on the idea that racism is systemic. It first started to coalesce in the 1970s when Black, Hispanic, and Asian legal scholars were researching the persistence of inequality, despite the landmark legal victories of the Civil Rights era.
[Thomas]: The legal scholars undertook a set of analyses and investigations that were aimed at trying to make sense of the puzzling persistence of racism in our legal system, in our political system, in our economy.
[Narrator]: CRT has been studied in fields like sociology, economics, and political science. It’s been used to examine issues such as housing and educational segregation, unconscious bias, and criminal justice reform.
[Edmund Fong, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah]: Contrary to what often critics portray as sort of judging people intrinsically as being racist or not or holding people responsible for, you know, slavery in the past, it is actually to open up a conversation of how we all inherit and live in a society sort of beyond our choosing, right? We didn’t choose where we were born or what racial group we were part of. And yet, we have this common history. How do we understand that history? What does it mean for us? Those are the sorts of questions that Critical Race Theorists were trying to grapple with.
[Crowd]: [Chanting] George Floyd!
[Narrator]: The racial reckoning spurred by the police killing of George Floyd brought the decades-old framework back into the spotlight as some schools sought to implement reforms that better address race in classrooms.
[Fong]: I think the thing that Critical Race Theory would add to that conversation is that we not sort of confine that horrific example to Derek Chauvin, but to think about how, well, there were other law-enforcement officers present, including officers of color, who stood idly by. And so that pushes us to think about, you know, this phenomenon as not simply one of, you know, racism by Whites against Blacks, right? I mean, it makes us think more critically, more engaged, more seriously around, “Well, why do these practices happen?”
[Narrator]: The push against CRT gained steam under former President Trump when he directed federal agencies to end any diversity trainings related to Critical Race Theory. Though ultimately blocked on First Amendment grounds and rescinded by President Biden, the fight over CRT at the state level is still in full effect.
[Fong]: The focus on CRT is a way to latch on to a concept that very few people sort of really understand, which sounds kind of scary perhaps to someone not, you know, trained in what it means, and latch on to that as a kind of football in this ongoing fight over, you know, the future of this country with regard to racism.
[Narrator]: As of mid-June 2021, 21 states have introduced bills attempting to restrict the teaching of Critical Race Theory and/or impose limits on how race is discussed inside the classroom. And those limits are often vague.
[Fong]: And the instructors, educators, especially at the K-12 level, will just not go there, will not run the risk of upsetting parents or, you know, being misunderstood or drawing the ire of, you know, lawmakers.
[Narrator]: In Texas, for instance, House Bill 3979 says teachers must explore current events from multiple positions without giving “deference to any one perspective.”
[Dougherty]: There’s language in this bill, like, “Teachers need to present a balanced perspective on current events,” for instance. You know, they have to do their due diligence to present multiple viewpoints. But what happens if they’re talking about an issue in the classroom and they try to present multiple viewpoints, but, you know, that student comes home and tells their parent about the lesson that day and the parent thinks, “They didn’t do a good-enough job of presenting this viewpoint.” So who decides when the teacher has done an adequate job of presenting multiple perspectives on an issue?
It saddens me and disappoints me that instead of really embracing this opportunity to confront our nation’s past and to tell authentic and more accurate narratives about experiences, you know, diverse people in this country, that we’re looking to sweep it under the rug. We’re looking to erase it even further from our memories.
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Transcript for “Critical race theory: Experts break down what it actually means” by Washington Post is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 3.1, Rosemary: A Life Disrupted
[Rosemary]: My name is Rosemary, and I was 14 when I was evicted from my home. I was in math class when a teacher comes into the classroom and tells me that my mom is here to pick me up. My mom looked really concerned, worried actually. She told me that the landlord came in and told her that she has to leave the apartment right now. I was really confused. I couldn’t imagine not having somewhere to sleep at night. And… I felt… scared.
We took whatever we could take, that was necessary. Clothing, shoes, that was pretty much it, really. The rest we just took it to a storage unit, and seeing all my stuff just packed up in there, it was kind of like saying goodbye to part of me, in a way. We were waiting to be called for, but it was so late at night, and they couldn’t attend to everyone. There were so many families. There were like babies, there were toddlers. And, I couldn’t imagine that so many families were here.
When we were on our way to the shelter, I remember actually being on the bus and thinking how much my life is gonna change. Am I gonna still be able to go to school on time? Like, how’s it gonna work? I had so many questions. And, I was just thinking, you know like, we’re gonna get through this, we’ll find an apartment soon, and we’ll work it out. But… I was homeless for two years.
I didn’t really tell anyone in my high school that I was homeless. I tried my very best to make it seem like I was normal, having a normal life. But, I just kind of slowly gave up on school. I remember just, uh, not really caring. I was just like, what’s the point? But there was a guidance counselor at my school. She wanted to know what was wrong. I told her that I’d been hiding something from her. That was the reason why I was doing so bad in my classes. And, I told her that I was evicted from my home and that I was living in a shelter for the past year.
And she looked at me like she wanted to give me a hug. And when I told her, I felt like, I felt this relief. And that’s how I slowly was able to get back on track.
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 3.1, Rosemary: A Life Disrupted
Transcript for “Rosemary: A Life Disrupted” by The Eviction Lab is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 3.4, How Ice Cream Kills! Correlation vs. Causation
[Narrator]: Like most people, I enjoy a tasty scoop of ice cream, especially Oreo blizzards. But what few people realize is how dangerous a treat ice cream has become. First, there’s the issue of obesity. Second, there are higher crime rates. Third, there’s the loss of life due to a rise in the number of drowning deaths. And finally, as more ice cream is sold, there’s an increase in forest fires. Given these indisputable facts, I need you to support my vision of an ice cream-free world.
While banning ice cream trucks from entering your neighborhood may sound far-fetched, when it comes to problem-solving, a common issue is misunderstanding the difference between correlation and causation. This misunderstanding can influence our decisions, sometimes with serious consequences that ripple throughout a community.
Correlation is when two things are related but one does not cause the other. Usually, this means the two are in some way related to a third factor, but not always. If you have a big enough pile of data, you can find plenty of relationships that are purely coincidental, like the strong relationship between the sale of margarine and divorce rates in the state of Maine.
With the sale of ice cream, the third factor is whether when it is hot outside, people buy more ice cream. They are more likely to go for a swim, and there’s a general increase in people out and about enjoying the weather, helping improve conditions for crime to take place, as well as the dry conditions associated with forest fires.
A note of caution: there is a growing trend in our digital world called data dredging. This is using analytics to sift through mountains of data, hoping to find useful relationships. Instead of a problem in search of a solution, dredging data is a solution looking to find a problem.
All of what I’ve just discussed about correlations does not mean that finding a correlation is without value. In fact, correlations are a vital part of helping us move to the next step: the discovery of causation.
Unlike correlation, causation is when you can claim that one thing causes another thing to happen. In order to make this claim, you need to be able to demonstrate an actual cause-and-effect relationship, preferably a strong relationship. An example most of us are familiar with is the pharmaceutical industry. In order to make the claim that a particular drug causes a certain effect, such as lowering your cholesterol or growing hair, the FDA requires companies to support those claims, putting the drug through a four-phase, twelve-step process that takes approximately 12 years.
This process uses control groups and clinical trials to test the drug, making sure that X causes Y and that the drug is safe. The acceptable error rate can go as high as 5% for some drugs, meaning that the clinical trials prove that there’s a 95% chance the drug does what it claims. Drugs with serious health implications, such as those used to treat a heart condition, are held to an even stricter standard, requiring proof up to 99% effectiveness.
Back to ice cream. What about ice cream and obesity? While it may seem like common sense that it does cause obesity, the fact is that we don’t yet know the true strength of the relationship. If we look at the sale of ice cream, there’s actually an inverse relationship with weight. People gain weight in the winter when sales are low and lose weight in the warm summer months when more ice cream is being consumed. This might suggest ice cream is the new diet food.
Luckily, you now know to be cautious of drawing conclusions of causation from correlation. Instead, recent research on the subject has been looking at different types of sugars used in making a wide range of sweet foods. What scientists have discovered is that the hypothalamus, which is an area of the brain that regulates the human appetite, reacts differently when we consume food with fructose instead of glucose. This has researchers speculating that eating high fructose foods, such as ice cream, may result in people not feeling full, so they continue to eat.
This theory proves difficult, however, when we start considering apples and other natural fruits also contain fructose, not just ice cream and chocolate cake. As you can see, causation is quite a bit different than correlation. Finding correlations is easy; proving causation is hard. No wonder it takes 12 years just to prove that a pill causes hair to grow.
The bottom line is, in boardrooms and coffee shops everywhere you go, you will hear claims that X causes Y—from politics to the weather, from the stock market to personal relationships. It is human nature to try and explain things, to create stories that make sense. Just keep in mind, as you hear a claim of what causes what, that correlation is not causation.
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Transcript for “How Ice Cream Kills! Correlation vs. Causation” by DecisionSkills is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 3.7, Decolonizing Methodologies: Can relational research be a basis for renewed relationships?
[Dr. Shawn Wilson, Gnibi College Indigenous Australian Peoples, Southern Cross University]: There is a need to decolonize from, say, the processes and the systems that really attacked indigenous ways of knowing and did their best to not just have a physical genocide of Aboriginal people but really attempted to kill Aboriginal ways of thinking and Aboriginal ways of doing things, Aboriginal ways of being. So, we have to recover from that, but it’s not just enough to recover from the sickness that was promoted by that; we have to go beyond so that we can flourish and become healthy and beautiful people again.
[Dr. Monica E. Mulrennan, Dept. of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University]: I think we need to understand that research is very much implicated in the colonial project, that it has been part of the marginalization, the oppression, the dispossession of indigenous people, and we need to come to terms with that. But at the same time, research is an opportunity for the renewal of relationships, and in the context of the United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Peoples and more recently the Truth and Reconciliation Commission findings, there is this opportunity to really engage research as part of the reconciliation process.
How do we make research a space for meaningful encounters and engagements?
[Mulrennan]: It really comes down to three core principles: that the research be community defined, that the research process itself be collaborative, and that the outcomes of the research be meaningful to the community.
[Wilson]: I think if you’re viewing research as a way of engaging with the community, as a way of promoting change in the community to make our lives beautiful, then we have to include everyone in that.
So, an analogy I often make is that I view myself as a feminist, even though I’m obviously not a woman. Being a feminist doesn’t mean that I know the experience of what it means to be a woman, but I can align with the philosophy, align with some of the goals. So, I try to use the word “indigenous” now to describe the philosophy, the beliefs that I’m trying to promote in recognition that non-indigenous people have the Earth and have the same beliefs, often have the same goals.
[Mulrennan]: I love a quotation I came across a few years ago from an indigenous geographer, and she indicated that if we assume we’re guests, we will be welcome, but if we assume we’ll be welcome, we’re no longer guests. And it seems to me that that captures really the core message that there is a space for non-indigenous scholars, but I think it has to be on the terms of the community and indigenous peoples more broadly.
How can we enhance the chain and distribution of research benefits?
[Wilson]: If we can take a strengths-based approach to the research that we’re doing and start to think of our Aboriginality or indigeneity, darkness as a protective factor rather than something that is another risk factor, then it changes the whole focus of how we do research. And I think if we start to engage in community research that looks for community strengths and how do I engage these community strengths, how do we use these strengths to build even stronger communities, then it shifts the whole focus away from that these are the problems with communities, to these are our potential, this is how we can do things that are going to make our communities even better, work with those strengths.
[Mulrennan]: As a geographer who has training in Earth Sciences, I think what’s really worked well for me has been the fact that my interests align with indigenous communities around a shared interest in the protection of their lands and seas. So, my training and my emphasis have not been in studying indigenous cultures and indigenous societies but in working with them to protect traditional lands and their institutions of stewardship, and knowledge, and tenure, and practice.
[Wilson]: If we want to promote real change, I think we need to recognize our own subjectivity and work with it. So, I always say that if research doesn’t change you as a person, then you’re not doing it right.
[Music.]
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 3.7, Decolonizing Methodologies: Can relational research be a basis for renewed relationships?
Transcript for “Decolonizing Methodologies: Can relational research be a basis for renewed relationships?” by Concordia University is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 3.8, Participatory Action Research
[Shirah Hassan, Just Practice]: Participatory action research is really important for organizations to consider because it allows communities to build collectively with each other to simultaneously do healing and change work while they’re also doing research and because it puts the power and control in the hands of the community so that they can identify what’s important, when it’s important, what we need to get at, how we want to get it, who we want at the table, and what we’re going to do with the data afterwards. Participatory action research is important for communities because it changes our lives as opposed to academic research which may have a long-term effect, but it will have an effect that’s far away from us. Participatory action research has an effect on us while we’re doing it; you’re holding the data and all of the results in the palm of your hands so if you have a finding you can make an immediate change – you can take an immediate step – and you don’t have to wait years for the results to come in from an outside source. You can start seeing trends and start responding to those trends in real-time.
Participatory action research allows groups to reframe language, and it also allows groups to control language, so for example one thing that academic research does really well is name phenomenon. So they’ll see data piling up in one direction and then they’ll name that a certain way. When you’re doing your own research and when a community is doing their own research, you do that so when you see a phenomenon you can begin to label something. That allows you to control the conversation and allows you to make change in your community. It allows you to change the tone of how entire conversations happen in your city or in your town or in your organization, because you can start to control how these ideas are talked about and thought about.
So one example of participatory action research that had just unbelievable impact was the research that Young Women’s Empowerment Project did in 2009 and in 2012. Their 2009 report was called “Girls Do What We Have to Do to Survive” and their 2012 report was called “Bad Encounter Line,” and they went back and did the second report as a way of deepening the first. Their findings, one of the findings of many, was that institutions were turning young people in the sex trade away and were denying them help and they wanted to understand more about why young people were being turned away and denied help and so they started a bad encounter line where young people could report experiences of being turned away and denied help. The culmination of those reports has fed so many other larger institutions’ data that has never been had before, so we got to see the report submitted to the Universal Periodic Review of the United Nations and the United Nations found that the United States was negligent in its treatment of people in the sex trade and that was a result of the data that young people ages 12 to 24 in the city of Chicago with current or former experience in the sex trade did and sent it to the United Nations so that was a huge impact. Another impact from that report was that they were able to teach other people how to do participatory action research and start their own encounter lines so we know of one encounter line that’s happening in Seattle where they’re tracking young people turned away from help in Seattle, we know of another one in Chicago that got turned into the police encounter line that’s being done by We Charge Genocide, so we were able to develop a tool that was transferable.
Another way that the study had impact was that it was presented to the Board of Amnesty International when they were in a long-term decision-making struggle about what their international policy on the sex trade was going to be, and this study really helped clarify a lot of key points for them and influenced their decision. We also saw it published in The New York Times, we saw it on national public radio and all of a sudden the voices of young people in the sex trade and street economy, who are between the ages of 12 and 24, who are all youth of color, who are queer and trans, were on National Public Radio and finding themselves in the Sunday Times, and it was this unbelievable experience that you can’t get from an academic paper.
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Transcript for “Participatory Action Research” by Vera Institute of Justice is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 3.12, Principles and Guidelines for Ethical Research and Evaluation in Development
[Narrator]: Welcome to this short film about the principles for ethical research and evaluation in international development. These principles have been developed by ACFID, the Australian Centre for International Development, and the Research for Development Impact Network.
Shortly, you will learn about the four principles. Each principle outlines important ethical questions to think about before and while doing research and evaluation in the field.
Let’s begin. Principle one is respect for human beings. In research terms, this means making sure each and every person involved in the research participates by choice and their rights and cultures are respected.
Principle two is beneficence. Beneficence means that everyone involved in the research gets something positive out of it, not just the researcher. The other important side of beneficence is that the research must not do harm or pose significant risk to anyone, including the researcher. Any risks of harm should be identified early and managed appropriately.
Principle three is research merit and integrity. Research merit and integrity mean that researchers need to be experienced and competent. Also, the research must be well designed, carefully planned, and the process outcomes and benefits of the research are clear to all involved.
Principle four is justice. In this context, justice refers to making sure that the research is fair and inclusive. It means making sure that no section of a community or population is deliberately left out. This includes children, people with disabilities, marginalized groups, and people who face language or literacy barriers.
Now you’ve learned a bit about the four principles for ethical research and evaluation in international development. These principles go hand in hand with guidelines. These guidelines offer some ideas and techniques you can use when planning research. They also help your organization to be ready, adaptable, and flexible when doing research in the field so when the unexpected happens, you can stick to ethical practice at all times. For more information, visit the website.
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Transcript for “Principles and Guidelines for Ethical Research and Evaluation in Development” by ACFID is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 4.4, Feminine Beauty: A social construct?
[Harry Shearer, Narrator]: The French existentialist writer Simone de Beauvor famously declares in her book “The Second Sex” that a woman isn’t born a woman; rather, she becomes one.
She means by this that there is no way women have to be, no given femininity, no ideal to which all women should conform. There’s biology, of course, and as a result women’s experiences tend to be very different from men’s. But what it is to be a woman is, she believes, socially constructed and largely by males at that. It is through other people’s expectations and assumptions that a woman becomes feminine.
Women, de Beauvoir argues, are expected to strive after beauty – a beauty that has been defined by men’s view of what they would like women to be. A view that often denies their capacity for action and thought. There have been different ideals of feminine beauty at different times, in different places, but the constant throughout history is that women have been encouraged to be passive objects, their bodies emphasized and displayed. Women are supposed to use artifice to make themselves ornamental, or, as de Beauvoir saw it, disguise more animal aspects of their body which men found unacceptable. Women’s clothes and shoes frequently constrain their movement. Their beauty regimes take over their lives and drain their finances. They’re controlled by other people’s visions of what they should look like and how they should live.
For young women in particular the pressure to become an object to the male gaze, to be conventionally beautiful, to diet, to worry about makeup and jewelry, is intense but it is still, according to de Beauvoir, resistible. True to her existentialism she believes that women are fundamentally free to reject male stereotypes of beauty and sexual attractiveness and to become more equal as a result.
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Transcript for Figure 5.6, Social Networks and Getting a Job: Mark Granovetter
[Mark Granovetter, Stanford University]: People think social networks are a new idea, a new thing to study. And in fact, anthropologists started talking about social networks probably in the 1930s, and mathematicians were talking about them in the 1950s, and sociologists started picking up on social networks in the 1960s. So I wanted to do a dissertation that showed how interesting and important social networks were. It seemed to me that one of the biggest sources of inequality in our society, in almost any modern industrial society, is differences in the rewards to different jobs people have. So if you could show that people found their jobs through social networks, then that would mean that social networks were a big part of where inequality is coming from.
Instead of studying, as I wanted to, men and women, and blue-collar and white-collar workers, I only studied male professional, technical, and managerial workers, because that was manageable, and it was already as many people as I could possibly handle. Professional, technical, and managerial workers are what we might call higher white-collar workers, doctors and lawyers and teachers and professors and managers and engineers and scientists and people who do technical work. So I found directories for the city of Newton, and from these directories, I chose a sample of people who had recently changed from one job to another. Almost every single person either let me into their house and was interviewed right on the spot or said, well, you know, we’re in the middle of dinner or something, but come back on Saturday.
So I ended up with a hundred people who fit the sample criteria that they’d changed jobs recently. And then once I had interviewed those people and had some sense of what was going on, then I could write a survey instrument that I mailed out to another couple of hundred people, and I got 182 of those back. A lot of times when people would tell me that they found their job through someone they knew, I would say to them, oh, so you found the job through a friend. And over and over again, people would correct me and say, no, no, no, not a friend, just an acquaintance, just an acquaintance. When you hang around with your best friends, they tend to know each other, and you form a clique with them, and their best friends are kind of the same as your best friends.
So if you want new information, if you want to be clued in on the latest styles or trends or information, then you ought to go to your weak ties, your seventh and eighth best friends. They’re in different circles from your circle, and they connect you to those other circles. In a sense, they are your windows on the world. Most of the people who changed jobs in my study were changing them voluntarily. So that almost never happens unless people think the new job is a better job. If they really wanted information about new jobs, about jobs they weren’t going to hear about any other way, they were finding it through acquaintances and not through their close friends. The majority of these workers had found their jobs through personal contact. It was 56%.
And what was really interesting to me was that more than three quarters, just a bit more than 75%, of those in the highest income categories had found their jobs through personal contact. So this effect is much stronger among people who are at the top of the stratification hierarchy. So this meant to me that social networks were particularly important in channeling people into the best jobs that the economy had to offer. It turned out that people who had been in one job for a very long time, in a place where other people had been in a job for a very long time, had a lot of trouble changing jobs when they had to, because they just didn’t know people in other companies.
People on the other hand, at the bottom end, who would change their job every few months, they weren’t in those jobs long enough to really make contacts that mattered. The people whose average job tenures was two to five years were more likely to find new jobs through weak ties than people whose average job tenure was very long or very short. Employers prefer to hire through social networks. They trust the information better about people that they’re going to hire, and that’s why they go through current employees. People use the internet for job searches. We have LinkedIn. We have all kinds of services. And so people may wonder, how can any of this still be relevant? People will still continue to trust people they know better to find out about places they might work and about employees they might hire than they will some impersonal source that is online.
But one of the consequences of that is that if there is a group that has very poor representation in an occupation or in some sector of the labor market, then it’s going to be hard for that group to break in. One way that social policy can be efficient as well as – not just effective but even efficient – is if it makes use of natural social network processes that people are going to engage in anyway. So, if white males can use social networks to bring more white males into their firms, into their industries, into their professions, then they have an unfair advantage. Because, if there are no such people who are black or Asian or some other ethnic or racial group who are already in the company then there is a disadvantage there that has nothing to do with qualifications. And that just has to do with the history of why those people aren’t in there in the first place. Affirmative action can prime the pump by putting a small number, however many people into that segment of the labor market who are in this underrepresented group. And once those people are there, they can then do what comes naturally to them, which is to bring the people they know into the company in the way that everyone else does.
[Music.]
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Transcript for “Social Networks and Getting a Job: Mark Granovetter” by Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 6.7, Cultural Capital
[Narrator]: Cultural capital is a theory developed by French theorist Pierre Bourdieu and is the cultural knowledge that serves as currency that helps us navigate culture and alters our experiences and the opportunities available to us. While cultural capital can be material objects such as clothing or what car you drive, Bourdieu also focused on the symbolic elements that embodied cultural capital, such as tastes, manners, skills, and credentials that one receives or earns. Cultural capital really isn’t about economics or how much money you have, but it can be exchanged for money, and the crazy thing is this money can help you earn more cultural capital. According to Bourdieu, cultural capital can be a source of social inequality, too. It’s hard for those who are poor or who are part of the working class to gain the types of cultural capital that are valued in society.
For example, having an education and earning a degree is a very important piece of cultural capital. Let’s say a student in poverty has difficulty finding time to study because he works evenings to help support his low-income family. This leads to poor performance due to his lack of studying, which results in lower test scores and then being placed in lower ability classes, which in turn affects his GPA and what college he is able to get into, if he goes to college at all. In the United States, if you are in a lower social class such as the student in our example, you tend to have less cultural capital. The upper middle social classes have more cultural capital. And therefore, their social class views tend to dominate in culture. Society also tends to give them more prestige.
Cultural capital takes on three forms: the embodied state, the objectified state, and the institutionalized state. The embodied state refers to capital in the form of knowledge that resides within us. While capital in the form of formal schooling is part of the embodied state, this type of capital also refers to knowledge that we seek out on our own. One of the earliest forms of capital in the embodied state is that which we acquire through language. When formal education and culture expect you to not only be able to know your ABCs, but to write or recognize words before entering kindergarten, it has become important to be exposed to such things as books at home and to be read to.
In our earlier example, the student who cannot study because he works to help support his low-income family may also not have had books in the home or was not read to early in life, and therefore lacked capital.
Next, cultural capital in the objectified state refers to material objects that we use to indicate our social class or how much capital we have. This might be the easiest state for us to recognize since we focus a great deal on acquiring things. And we often tend to assign social class based on a person possessing certain material items. For example, a person owning a Mercedes or a Lexus indicates greater capital than a person owning a Ford Focus.
In today’s technological world, we can express our capital through buying only Apple products, as they tend to carry a certain amount of prestige and are an expression of our identity. Even the type of food, such as a person buying only expensive organic food because they have the means to afford it, or boxed dinners because they are inexpensive and they must do so out of necessity, indicates an abundance or lack of cultural capital in the objectified state.
Last, the institutionalized state refers to the way that society measures cultural capital. One of the best examples we have is the type of post-secondary degree that we have and how society tends to view or value us based on that degree. A doctorate degree has more social capital than a master’s degree, and a master’s degree has more capital than an undergraduate degree. We can say that each degree gives a person more prestige than the next. This capital and prestige can then be exchanged for actual economic capital, and it is evident that that is the case. The higher the degree, the more money you can expect to make in your lifetime. Unfortunately, the institutionalized state values formal education and rewards it accordingly, but often places a lesser emphasis on capital that is not considered prestigious, such as being streetwise.
Essentially, if you were born into a family with cultural capital, it is easier for you to acquire more because you are socialized to embody the values and behaviors society rewards. For example, if a student is part of a family where they were read to every night and they were taught manners such as being polite and to listen to adults, this will benefit them when they go to school.
A student who can read and write, and who is also respectful, may earn opportunities such as being placed in advanced classes or receive higher grades. This then gives them more opportunities later on, such as being accepted into a prestigious college, and then that college then connects them with a strong network of people and companies they can work for when they graduate. This is not the same with people who are either born into or grow up with less cultural capital.
So, what is one well-known public figure that you can think of that has significant cultural capital? How can you demonstrate that they have that capital? Other than education, what ways does society reward or punish people based on their having or lacking cultural capital? And how has cultural capital changed over time? What is one example of a type of capital that is no longer valued as it was in the past? And, what is one new type of cultural capital in our society?
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Transcript for “Cultural Capital” by Sociology Live! is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 7.11, The State of Private Immigration Detention in the U.S. Revealed | NowThis
[Detention Facility Official]: Can I help you?
[Congressional Staffer for Rep. Jason Crow]: We’re here with the congressman.
[Official]: OK, you guys aren’t allowed to film in here though.
[Congressional Staffer]: At all?
[Official]: At all.
[Congressional Staffer]: OK.
[Official]: No.
[Zinhle Essamuah, Correspondent]: Private corporations operate at least 55 immigration detention facilities in the US. This facility in Colorado is accused of lacking oversight and proper medical conditions.
[Rene Lima-Marin, detainee]: ICE detention isn’t really a detention center. It’s worse than prison, worse than the county jail – it’s just worse.
[Rep. Jason Crow, Congressman (D-CO)]: What worries me right now is that I’m not getting the facts, right? And that’s why we’d made the decision to show up this morning. Many of them have told us that when officials visit that they clean everything up, they put window dressing on, and the conditions look very different from what they normally look, which is pretty concerning to me.
[Detention Facility Official]: He’s coming up.
[Rep. Crow]: Yeah I’m just here to visit the facility. I’m the congressman that represents this district and there have been concerns about some public health outbreaks and some recent disease outbreaks so they’re from a public safety standpoint we wanted to do an inspection today.
[Detention Facility Official]: Everybody has to get clearance first.
[Rep. Crow]: When there’s a private company that’s running a detention center and I’m not even able to get further than the reception area, you know, that raises concerns for me.
[Essamuah]: So what just happened?
Well, we tried to conduct a visit of the facility and we were denied access to it, which I think underscores a larger concern about transparency and accountability of these private facilities.
[Essamuah]: The company at the center of civil suits by detainees and families of those being held is GEO Group, one of the nation’s two largest private for-profit prison and attention operators. Rene is a former undocumented detainee held in one of the nearly 600 immigration detention facilities around the country.
[Lima-Marin]: The best way to explain it to you would be to give you my experience personally – what happened to me.
I slipped and I hit my face on a toilet, so you can probably tell that I have an indentation in my face right here – that’s from breaking all of these bones. They literally have me sitting in this chair for over an hour waiting to be transported to a hospital because this is that serious. She said, you need surgery, we’re going to have you back within a week.
[Essamuah]: Rene finally went in for surgery nearly two months after being injured. His bones had already healed back broken so doctors had to rebreak them in order to operate.
And is your story unique?
[Lima-Marin]: It’s not unique in the sense of, you know, them not taking care of people. They didn’t take care of a lot of people.
[Essamuah]: I spoke with immigration attorneys Danielle [Jefferis] and Bryce [Downer] about the facilities’ conditions. They represent detainees at the Aurora GEO detention centers.
[Bryce Downer, Attorney and Founder of Novo Legal Group]: There are stories of people that are detained there that are only released when their health deteriorates so badly that they would rather not be responsible for what happens after that.
[Danielle Jefferis, Civil Rights Attorney and Teaching Fellow]: What I will say is that it’s an unconstitutionized space and what I mean by that is that while these people are being housed in the custody of and under the authority of the federal government, GEO itself is not really subject to the provisions in the Constitution that we normally think that they are. These people are not in their care – they’re jailing them, and people are dying and people are sick and people are losing lives and losing family members inside.
[Essamuah]: If these allegations prove to be true, it wouldn’t be the first time GEO Group has been guilty of unconstitutional practices. In 2012, GEO Group lost its contract in Mississippi. The US Department of Justice found detainees at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility were not receiving constitutionally adequate care and the facility later closed after additional corruption findings.
I met with two detainees inside this facility. I wasn’t allowed in with any electronic devices or my recorder, so here I have pages of notes. But I was able to speak with one of them over the phone.
[Sergio]: It’s been two weeks since we’ve been in quarantine, and not one doctor has been sent to this pod to offer medical treatment for the chicken pox.
[Essamuah]: Sergio was picked up by ICE in April of 2018. He’s been held at GEO Group’s Aurora facility since then. Fed up by the influx of disease outbreaks and quarantines inside the facility, he and several other detainees held a hunger strike. They wrote letters and pleas about the conditions there.
[Sergio]: We have no visits, no deportations, our courts [dates] are all being delayed. We are being exposed to greater medical conditions living like this, including depression and anxiety. We are all in desperate need for help.
[Downer]: Individuals that have legitimate complaints as to the treatment of their family members at the detention center fear reprisals to their loved ones at the detention center if they speak up and they are too loud about it.
[Essamuah]: Despite calls for oversight, this private facility has existed mostly unmonitored. The use of private prisons is part of a larger trend in the U.S. The U.S. government awards them contracts to house detainees. The government pays a stipend based on the size of the facility or the number of detainees being housed there. In the case of GEO Group it makes nearly 2 billion dollars a year and employs more than 20,000 people. GEO Group has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to political candidates and conservative groups through its PAC, including President Trump’s campaign – even hosting its annual Leadership Conference at Trump’s golf resort. A reported 60 plus senators and representatives still receive financial support from GEO Group.
But some would call geo group’s track record dismal. The company has faced over 30 lawsuits facing penalties over five million dollars since 2000. Geo group declined our request for an interview and referred us to ICE. ICE did not reply.
Private prisons and detention facilities are under increased scrutiny as the harsh conditions within many of these facilities come to light.
[Lima-Marin]: In the immigration detention center they didn’t understand what was really taking place. They were being treated like criminals when all they had done is tried to escape being murdered or raped or whatever their situation was in their country. All they were doing was leaving their country to try to make a better life for themselves and now they’re being imprisoned. Not, not detention. Not you know, not put in the detention center – imprisoned for that.
[Essamuah]: Were there any big life moments you missed while detained?
[Lima-Marin]: Oh of course. My kids were three and seven you know, I mean so I missed everything all because they want a paycheck.
[Essamuah]: And you mean that in the sense of because they’re private facilities?
[Lima-Marin]: Yeah. I know that they get a check for me, right? They get a check for me every year. Do they use all of that money on me? Absolutely not.
[Jefferis]: There are facilities in metro areas like Denver and Aurora all over the country and I think that those facilities are not getting covered as much as the facilities along the border. What’s troubling to me is that we are not hearing the stories of the people who are detained in facilities away from the border.
[Essamuah]: What do you say to people who might watch this and wonder what do I even do? What needs to happen? What do you say to them?
Sergio, you there?
[Sergio]: Yeah, sorry. Um….
[Essamuah]: You thinking?
[Sergio]: Yeah. I’m thinking.
[Essamuah]: How are you feeling?
[Sergio]: I’ve been – I’ve been… for a year now, I’ve been working and trying to find solutions. No one’s less them anybody. Just because I’m not – I’m undocumented, there’s people in here that are undocumented, that doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve their human rights.
[Sergio does not know when his case will be heard. He has been in detention since April 2018.
Rene is out of detention as a lawful Permanent Resident. He lives with his wife and two kids in Colorado. In May 2019, Rep. Crow introduced legislation that would prevent Homeland Security from blocking members of Congress from visiting detention facilities. GEO’s shareholders are demanding the company better report human rights abuses. Companies like J.P. Morgan have begun divesting from private prisons. Facing constituent pressure, some politicians are returning GEO donations. Others maintain their stance with GEO Group PAC.]
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Transcript for Figure 9.3, Gender identity: ‘How colonialism killed my culture’s gender fluidity’ – BBC World Service
[Megha Mohan, BBC Gender and Identity Correspondent]: Gender identity might be one of the most polarizing conversations that’s happening on social media right now.
In most countries, sex is defined as what we are physically born as – male or female.
But gender identity can be much more fluid. A person can be born female and feel more comfortable or identify as male, or vice versa.
I’ve been seeing a lot of young people all over the world from gender-fluid societies talking about their traditions online.
This is Geronimo from the Native American Navajo community in New Mexico.
[Geronimo]: I’m Francis Geronimo, I am Chiricahua Apache Diné. I identify as a two-spirit individual.
This is my backyard. There’s a lot of trees. Lots of cactus. Some mountains over there.
[Mohan]: Geronimo identifies as one of four sacred and ancient gender identities from his culture.
[Geronimo]: We have masculine-masculine, masculine-feminine, feminine-feminine, feminine-masculine.
Masculine-feminine is something I gravitate towards both spiritually, mentally, physically
and emotionally. The word for masculine-feminine is Nádleehí: someone who is male-bodied,
who has a feminine nature, or who also takes on the roles of women and men.
I take it quite literally sometimes. I can dress as a female, I can dress as a male.
Traditionally you are supposed to tie up your hair in a Tsiiyééł. So men’s traditionally would be right here and women’s traditionally would be somewhere up here. We wear bandanas.
I know that I’m a male and that I can take on the gender roles of a female. I weave, I cook, I clean.
[Mohan]: Eight thousand miles away in India’s capital, Delhi, gender has been more than just male and female for centuries.
[Leher]: Hi, namaste. I am Leher. I am 23 and I was not born in a female body.
[Mohan]: In 2014, the Supreme Court recognized a “third gender.”
[Leher]: I was assigned sex ‘male’ at birth and I changed my gender medically. However, I am not what, in the Western terminologies, you would call a trans woman or transgender. In India we are considered the ‘third gender’ or the ‘sacred gender’ that has the power to bless or to curse. We are regarded as highly sacred and respectable.
Gender has never been binary in India. It has always been very, very fluid. Especially in Indian mythologies. We have scripture that describes more than 20 to 28 genders. We have the story of Shikandhi. Shikandhi was assigned female at birth, however the person transformed themselves into a man to fight the battle of Mahabharatha.
[Mohan]: Over in Australia, transgender people have had different names amongst Aboriginal communities. Kai identifies as a Brotherboy.
[Kai]: So a Brotherboy is a person that’s been born female, but has a male spirit or masculine spirit. Our understanding of being is so much more than a scientific definition of what is XX chromosome or XY chromosome. We can co-exist but it doesn’t mean that you should perpetuate hate and violence onto people that don’t necessarily believe in the way that you believe.
[Mohan]: However Kai’s journey hasn’t been easy – as he still faces discrimination in his
own community.
[Kai]: As someone that was born a women and done women’s stuff and then transitioning into a man, it’s quite difficult at times to find your place as a person within my culture.
And I think, yeah, I’m still on that journey.
[Mohan]: And, for many communities, the history of gender fluidity was lost with colonialism.
[Kai]: Sistergirls and Brotherboys history is difficult to document because of the effect
of colonization. There’s been a lot of shame and stigma.
[Geronimo]: Precolonialism time, gender roles were actually widely accepted amongst my people and our tribe. These individuals who were called two-spirit were widely respected. When colonialism started to happen, a lot of our people died and were murdered, and so a lot of the teachings and understandings of these people were lost. Forced assimilation [and] religious conversion all contributed to that idea that two-spirited individuals were bad people and they needed to go away.
I face a lot of discrimination. It hurts my feelings.
[Mohan]: Leher also believes that colonization has meant there’s less acceptance for gender diversity in India.
[Leher]: Colonization is what has corrupted the mindset of Indian folks, that today may be transphobic or homophobic.
[Mohan]: Increasingly the question of gender identity is becoming about much more than how you choose to self-identify. It can decide whether or not you can access biologically divided spaces like toilets and aid shelters – and some sports. The question of who should have access to those spaces is one of the reasons why questions over gender have become so polarized in Western society.
Yet some people question the idea of gender – and believe stereotyped ideas around masculinity and femininity are limiting. And in some other parts of the world, the idea of just male and female have been seen as an oversimplification.
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Transcript for Figure 9.15, The Urgency of Intersectionality
[Kimberlé Crenshaw]: I’d like to try something new. Those of you who are able, please stand up. Okay, so I’m going to name some names. When you hear a name that you don’t recognize, you can’t tell me anything about them, I’d like you to take a seat and stay seated. The last person standing, we’re going to see what they know. Okay? All right.
Eric Garner. Mike Brown. Tamir Rice. Freddie Gray.
So those of you who are still standing, I’d like you to turn around and take a look. I’d say half to most of the people are still standing, so let’s continue.
Michelle Cusseau. Tanisha Anderson. Ara Russer. Megan Hockaday.
So if we look around again, there are about four people still standing, and actually, I’m not going to put you on the spot, I just say that to encourage transparency, so you can be seated.
So those of you who recognize the first group of names know that these were African Americans who’ve been killed by the police over the last two and a half years. What you may not know is that the other list is also African Americans who have been killed within the last two years. Only one thing distinguishes the names that you know from the names that you don’t know. Gender. So let me first let you know that there’s nothing at all distinct about this audience that explains the pattern of recognition that we’ve just seen.
I’ve done this exercise dozens of times around the country. I’ve done it to women’s rights
organizations, I’ve done it with civil rights groups, I’ve done it with professors, I’ve done it with students, I’ve done it with psychologists, I’ve done it with sociologists, I’ve done it even with progressive members of Congress. And everywhere, the awareness of the level of police violence that black women experience is exceedingly low. Now, it is surprising, isn’t it, that this would be the case? I mean, there are two issues involved here. There’s police violence against African Americans and there’s violence against women, two issues that have been talked about a lot lately. But when we think about who is implicated by these problems, when we think about who’s victimized by these problems, the names of these black women never come to mind.
Now, communications experts tell us that when facts do not fit with the available frames, people have a difficult time incorporating them into their way of thinking about a problem. These women’s names have slipped through our consciousness because there are no frames for us to see them, no frames for us to remember them, no frames for us to hold them. As a consequence, reporters don’t lead with them, policymakers don’t think about them, and politicians aren’t encouraged or demanded that they speak to them. Now, you might ask, well, why does a frame matter? I mean, after all, an issue that affects black people and an issue that affects women, wouldn’t that necessarily include black people who are women and women who are black people?
Well, the simple answer is that this is a trickle-down approach to social justice, and many times, it just doesn’t work. Without frames that allow us to see how social problems impact all the members of a targeted group, many will fall through the cracks of our movements, left to suffer in virtual isolation. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Many years ago, I began to use the term intersectionality to deal with the fact that many of our social justice problems, like racism and sexism, are often overlapping, creating multiple levels of social injustice. Now, the experience that gave rise to intersectionality was my chance encounter with a woman named Emma de Graffenried.
Emma de Graffenried was an African-American woman, a working wife and a mother. I actually read about Emma’s story from the pages of a legal opinion written by a judge who had dismissed Emma’s claim of race and gender discrimination against a local car manufacturing plant. Emma, like so many African-American women, sought better employment for her family and for others. She wanted to create a better life for her children and for her family. But she applied for a job, and she was not hired. And she believed that she was not hired because she was a black woman. Now, the judge in question dismissed Emma’s suit. And the argument for dismissing the suit was that the employer did hire African-Americans, and the employer hired women. The real problem, though, that the judge was not willing to acknowledge was what Emma was actually trying to say, that the African-Americans that were hired usually for industrial jobs, maintenance jobs, were all men.
And the women that were hired, usually for secretarial or front office work, were all white. Only if the court was able to see how these policies came together would he be able to see the double discrimination that Emma de Graffenried was facing. But the court refused to allow Emma to put two causes of action together to tell her story, because he believed that by allowing her to do that, she would be able to have preferential treatment. She’d have an advantage by being able to have two swings at the bat when African-American men and white women only had one swing at the bat. But, of course, neither African-American men nor white women needed to combine a race and gender discrimination claim to tell the story of the discrimination they were experiencing.
Why wasn’t the real unfairness law’s refusal to protect African-American women simply because their experiences weren’t exactly the same as white women and African-American men? Rather than broadening the frame to include African-American women, the court simply tossed their case completely out of court. Now, as a student of anti-discrimination law, as a feminist, as an anti-racist, I was struck by this case. It felt to me like injustice squared. So, first of all, black women weren’t allowed to work at the plant.
Second of all, the court doubled down on this exclusion by making it legally inconsequential. And to boot, there was no name for this problem. And we all know that where there’s no name for a problem, you can’t see a problem. And when you can’t see a problem, you pretty much can’t solve it.
Many years later, I’d come to recognize that the problem that Emma was facing was a framing problem. The frame that the court was using to see gender discrimination or to see race discrimination was partial, and it was distorting. For me, the challenge that I faced was trying to figure out whether there was an alternative narrative, a prism that would allow us to see Emma’s dilemma, a prism that would allow us to rescue her from the cracks in the law that would allow judges to see her story. So it occurred to me, maybe a simple analogy to an intersection might allow judges to better see Emma’s dilemma. So if we think about this intersection, the roads to the intersection would be the way that the workforce was structured by race and by gender.
And then the traffic in those roads would be the hiring policies and the other practices that ran through those roads. Now, because Emma was both black and female, she was positioned precisely where those roads overlapped, experiencing the simultaneous impact of the company’s gender and race traffic. The law, the law was like that ambulance that shows up and is ready to treat Emma only if it can be shown that she was harmed on the race road or on the gender road, but not where those roads intersected. So what do you call being impacted by multiple forces and then abandoned to fend for yourself? Intersectionality seemed to do it
for me.
I would go on to learn that African American women, like other women of color, like other socially marginalized people all over the world, were facing all kinds of dilemmas and challenges as a consequence of intersectionality, intersections of race, and gender, of heterosexism, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism. All of these social dynamics come together and create challenges that are sometimes quite unique. But in the same way that intersectionality raised our awareness to the way that black women live their lives, it also exposes the tragic circumstances under which African American women die. Police violence against black women is very real. The level of violence that black women face is such that it’s not surprising that some of them do not survive their encounters with police. Black girls as young as seven, great grandmothers as old as 95, have been killed by the police.
They’ve been killed in their living rooms, in their bedrooms, they’ve been killed in their
cars, they’ve been killed on the street, they’ve been killed in front of their parents, and
they’ve been killed in front of their children. They have been shot to death. They have
been stomped to death. They have been suffocated to death. They have been manhandled to death. They have been tasered to death. They’ve been killed when they’ve called for help. They’ve been killed when they were alone, and they’ve been killed when they were with others. They have been killed shopping while black, driving while black, having a mental disability while black, having a domestic disturbance while black. They’ve even been killed being homeless while black.
They’ve been killed talking on the cell phone, laughing with friends, sitting in a car reported as stolen, and making a U-turn in front of the White House with an infant strapped in the back seat of the car. Why don’t we know these stories? Why is it that their lost lives don’t generate the same amount of media attention and communal outcry as the lost lives of their fallen brothers? It’s time for a change.
So what can we do? In 2014, the African-American Policy Forum began to demand that we say her name at rallies, at protests, at conferences, at meetings, anywhere and everywhere that state violence against black bodies is being discussed. But saying her name is not enough. We have to be willing to do more.
We have to be willing to bear witness, to bear witness to the often painful realities that we would just rather not confront, the everyday violence and humiliation that many black women have had to face, black women across color, age, gender expression, sexuality, and ability. So we have the opportunity, right now, bearing in mind that some of the images that I’m about to share with you may be triggering for some, to collectively bear witness to some of this violence. We’re going to hear the voice of the phenomenal Abby Dobson. And as we sit with these women, some who’ve experienced violence and some who have not survived them, we have an opportunity to reverse what happened at the beginning of this talk, when we could not stand for these women because we did not know their names. So at the end of this clip, there’s going to be a roll call. Several black women’s names will come up. I’d like those of you who are able to join us in saying these names as loud as you can, randomly, disorderedly. Let’s create a cacophony of sound to represent our intention to hold these women up, to sit with them, to bear witness to them, to bring them into the light.
[Singer]: Say, say her name. Say, say her name.
[Crowd calls out names.]
[Crenshaw]: As I said at the beginning, if we can’t see a problem, we can’t fix a problem. Together, we’ve come together to bear witness to these women’s lost lives. But the time now is to move from mourning and grief to action and transformation. This is something that we can do. It’s up to us. Thank you for joining us. Thank you.
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 9.15, The Urgency of Intersectionality
Transcript for “The urgency of intersectionality | Kimberlé Crenshaw | TED” by TED is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 9.17, Kimberlé Crenshaw Discusses ‘Intersectional Feminism’
[Sarah Hayet, Host]: I’m Sarah Hayet, and Lafayette College would like to welcome Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. She is a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University and an expert in the fields of civil rights, black feminist legal theory and race, racism and the law. On top of that she is also the director of the Center of Intersectionality and Social Policy at Columbia University which she co-founded in 2011 and also the co-founder of the African American Policy Forum. On top of that, she is the creator of intersectionality theory. We’re so glad to have you.
[Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw]: It’s a pleasure to be here, thank you.
[Hayet]: And speaking of intersectionality that actually leads us right into our first question. For the students who may not know what is intersectionality, can you define that for us.
[Crenshaw]: Well I have to practice my elevator version of it but intersectionality is basically the idea that we experience life, sometimes discriminations, sometimes benefits based on a number of different identities that we have. So the basic term came out of a case where I was looking at black women who were being discriminated against not just as black people, not just as women, but as black women. So intersectionality was basically a metaphor to say they’ve got race discrimination that they’re facing coming from one direction, they’ve got gender discrimination coming from another direction, and they’re colliding in their lives in ways that we don’t really anticipate and understand. So intersectionality is basically meant to help people think about the fact that discrimination can happen on the basis of several different factors at the same time, and we need to have a language and an ability to see it in order to address it.
[Hayet]: I know my journey to women’s and gender studies was based a lot on intersectional factors like I’m Jewish and I’m a woman and being raised in a Reform Jewish family with a female rabbi was huge. It really informed my feminism. And I was wondering what was your journey to women’s and gender studies.
[Crenshaw]: That’s a wonderful question. So I was raised by a mother and father who were deeply involved in the civil rights movement. We talked about social justice at the dinner table every day when I came home. My friends used to tease me because I had to, like, study for dinner like my parents wanted me to talk about. What did you learn today, what did you observe today, how do you defend what you think.
[Hayet]: No pressure.
[Crenshaw]: No pressure, exactly! So that’s the household that I grew up in and my mother is what, I guess, in the last century we used to call race women. They’re women who were deeply committed to the idea of racial justice and they were committed to fighting for the rights of people of color, including and especially women, so she would talk about some of the ways that racism gets experienced by black people who are women not just black people who are men and basically gave me tools to see when it was coming at me. So you know different ways that you might be spoken to as a black woman as opposed to being a white woman, having to keep your eye out for harassing behavior at work as sexual harassment actually came from black women’s employment experience. The first plaintiffs were black women because these were the kind of things that would happen to black women in the workforce. So just a general way in which you’re a woman but not quite the kind of woman that you’re supposed to be. These are the kinds of things that my mom taught me about. So I had sort of a race lens from the family as a whole and then my mother would talk more specifically about ‘now as a woman these are the things that you have to look out for’. So I was kinda naturally drawn by the time I got to college, both to Africana Studies which was one of my majors, and the other major was government and then I did a minor in Women’s Studies.
[Hayet]: To go back to what you said about your parents, that they were involved in the civil rights movement and nowadays this kind of resurgence of Black Lives Matter. But the names that stand out in the Black Lives Matter movement get the most attention are Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown but we don’t see the Eva Smiths or the Renisha McBrides and why do you think that is, that black women who are also suffering from systemic violence are getting kind of pushed under the rug, not getting that national attention.
[Crenshaw]: Yes it’s an issue that I’ve been very much concerned with and it was one of the reasons we started ‘Say Her Name’; to draw attention to the names that people don’t have. They don’t roll off the lips, you know we don’t know the names of Tanisha Anderson and Michelle Cusseaux. And, you know, I’ve thought a little bit about why this is the case and you know I can share that we have been participating in some of the marches. We were participating for example in the Eric Garner march when we came out with ‘Say Her Name’ because you know part of the march is you’re marching and you’re lifting up the names. And so then we started saying some of the women’s names and people were looking at us like, what are you talking about? That’s why we just say well just say her name, alright, just say it because saying it brings attention to the fact that there are women who are also and killed by the police.
We eventually created a big banner that had the names and the photos of 20 black women who were killed by the police and for a while we were marching in the march with it but we realized that actually the poster needed to be seen by people in the march so we came out of the marching, stood on the side of the road and and held up the banners of people walking by would see it. And we noticed that some people gave us the thumbs up, a lot of people were just – it didn’t compute, you know, the idea of women being killed by the police was just something they never imagined. And so they would come over and they took pictures and wanted to know about the stories and then there were a few people who you know were like this this is not about women killed by the police this is about black men killed by the police. And that goes somewhat to your question, I think that there is a framing of the problem of police violence that’s largely influenced by an idea that this is about competing masculinities, this is about you know the state or basically some men clothed with the power of the state trying to constrain you know individuals that are seen as hyper masculine, out of control and therefore in need of a course of punishment. And there is an element of police violence that is informed by that, but, you know, that’s not the only you know aspect of police killings that we have to worry about. So you know, in the same way that lynching, for example, was often framed as an assault on black male sexuality, which many times it was, it was also the cover for many other things that other people were subject to including black women who were also lynched.
So we’ve been trying to broaden the frame so people can see how state violence is rationalized by a lot of different stereotypes, but the most important one that black women share is that is black people more of a threat to the police, more likely to engage in conduct that puts police officer’s lives at risk, and more in need of harsh disciplinary kind of coercive physical punishment and we see this in cases that black women have experienced in their homes, in their bedrooms, around the corner from where they live, in their cars, everywhere.
[Hayet]: You kind of hinted at this but one of the biggest critiques of ‘Black Lives Matter’ is ‘all lives should matter.’ What would be your response?
[Crenshaw]: Yeah well that’s you know the ‘Black Lives Matter’ popular version of colorblindness, right? We can’t speak with any particularity about the risks that certain things will happen to people who are embodied in a particular way because to do that is to exclude all the other people. So you know one of the most tremendously troubling things that happened after the civil rights movement is the way that some of the victories of the civil rights movement had been turned on their heads. So you know Brown v. Board of Education now has been twisted into an idea that it is discriminatory to take into account race at all in school assignments even if race is being taken into account to continue the process of desegregation, right. So the idea is everybody is similarly situated with respect to race. That’s part of the idea behind all lives matters – like everybody is similarly situated with respect to the likelihood that they’ll be driving down the street one day and a police officer will, you know, interrupt their day and they might end up in handcuffs or worse. It just is not the case that everyone is similarly situated with respect to this and if it were to happen to people at the same rates that it’s happening to black people – if it were to happen to white people – the responses I think we have plenty of reason to believe will be different. So this is, this is all of the background that makes ‘Black Lives Matter’ something to say, it’s being said because the evidence suggests that they don’t. So it’s aspirational black lives should matter, the same as everybody else, so just erasing what is being said by saying they all do is just denying exactly what the circumstance is, which is their hugely different risk and circumstances of being encountered by the police and that’s what ‘Black Lives Matter’ is trying to politicize.
[Hayet]: Thank you so much and thank you for taking the time to join us today.
[Crenshaw]: Well, thank you for the wonderful questions.
[Hayet]: It was my pleasure. I was so excited to get to meet you.
[Crenshaw]: Thank you, thank you.
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Transcript for Kimberlé Crenshaw Discusses ‘Intersectional Feminism’ by Lafayette College is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 9.18, Gender Stratification: Crash Course Sociology #32
Why do some people think that drinking black coffee is manly, while ordering a pumpkin spice latte is “girly”? Don’t let them fool you. Pumpkin spice has no gender. Pumpkin spice is for everyone. The gendering of inanimate objects is a super-common practice, and it’s a good example of how societies create markers of gender that have nothing to do with anything biological. Gender, as you’ll recall, refers to the personal and social characteristics – but not the biological traits – that we associate with different sexes. That’s why sociologists say that gender is a social construct, something that we as a society create and enforce. Now, those social constructs may be totally made up, but their effects on how we interact with each other are very real. Indeed, gender influences how we organize all of society, and how we distribute power.
Trust me: the identity-politics of your morning coffee are only the beginning.
[Theme Music.]
When I say that gender affects the organization of society and the distribution of power, what I mean is that our society is largely stratified by gender. Gender stratification refers to the unequal distribution of wealth, power, and privilege across genders. Take, for example, the right to vote. Denying women the vote has been one way that many societies have kept political power in the hands of men. It was less than a century ago, in 1920, that women in the United States gained the right to vote. Saudi Arabia didn’t allow women to vote until the 2015 election. This kind of disenfranchisement is an example of patriarchy at work. Patriarchy is a form of social organization in which men have more power and dominate other genders. Matriarchal, or female dominated, societies exist, too. But most societies throughout human history have been patriarchies. And patriarchal societies are maintained through a careful cultivation of attitudes, behaviors, and systems that favor men and encourage society to believe that one gender is innately better than others. Also known as sexism.
For example, little girls may sometimes be encouraged to be tomboys. But young boys are often shamed for liking toys that are considered stereotypically feminine, or even, say, the color pink. Societies often define, and celebrate, certain sets of characteristics as being masculine. Sociologist Raewyn Connell describes this process as ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Think of the type of guy who’s the lead of every action movie – tall, broad shouldered, strong, able-bodied, heterosexual, usually wealthy… probably named Chris – that’s hegemonic masculinity. But it goes beyond mere appearance. Hegemonic masculinities are linked to power within society, too. Fitting into the archetype of masculinity pays off in the form of societal approval. But ultimately, in a patriarchal society, all men share in patriarchal dividends. This is a fancy way of saying that there are benefits that accrue to men simply because they are men. But before we get too deep into what those benefits are, let’s take a step back and look at how different gender expectations are taught in our society.
As you might remember from our episode on socialization, the first people who teach us about gender are our parents. If daughters are given dolls to play with and sons are given toy hammers, kids learn that caring behaviors are feminine and building things is masculine. This type of anticipatory socialization is reinforced by the societal assumption that men are the breadwinners in families and women will take care of the home and children. Even as more women have become equal earners outside the home, they still tend to do more work in the household as well. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild called this phenomenon the ‘second shift’, in which women come home from work to more work – cooking, laundry, childcare – whereas men are more likely to spend their time in leisure after work. According to a survey on time use from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2015, full time working moms spend about 9 more hours per week on household chores and caring for family members than full time working dads.
These gender dynamics are helped along by corporate and governmental policies that set aside parental leave only for women. And by less formal influences, too, like commercials or TV shows that depict fathers who can’t do the laundry or take care of their own kids for a weekend. The media play a big part in teaching kids about gendered ideals. Unfortunately, their depictions of what the typical woman or man looks like tend to be a bit skewed. Women in particular are exposed to messages that encourage them to value youth, beauty, and thinness. These media messages – which encourage women to be desirable to men – contribute to what Raewyn Connell has referred to as emphasized femininities. This is the flip side of the hegemonic masculinities. Emphasized femininities are forms of femininity that conform to what the ideal female is in men’s eyes.
The social reality is that femininities come in many different forms and may or may not be constructed in ways that emphasize stereotypical notions of gender. But media are only one source of gender socialization. The gender constructions that kids see outside of the home also tend to reinforce the dynamic of women in caring roles and men in leadership roles. Take school, for example. While three-quarters of K through 12 teachers are women, about half of school principals and only 14% of school superintendents are women. Female principals are more likely to work in elementary schools, which is less likely to lead to promotions to higher positions in the district. And who you see at the front of the classroom isn’t the only way that schools influence gender socialization.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble to talk about how sports ended up as part of the landmark United States law about gender discrimination in schools: Title IX. Passed in 1972, Title IX is a law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in public schools. It was originally developed in response to discrimination in higher education, such as enrollment quotas, or refusing to hire female academics with children. But the law became most well-known for its effects on sports. Prior to 1970, most schools only had official teams for boys – and if a girl wanted to join the team, she could be turned away without question. As a result, only about 4% of girls played sports. By tying schools’ funding to equal opportunities for boys and girls, Title IX required that schools offer girls just as many opportunities to play sports as boys. This increased the number of high school girls playing sports from 295,000 in 1970 to over 3 million nowadays. But more importantly, it also forced colleges to increase their funding for female sports scholarships, which was one of the factors in the increase in women pursuing higher education.
One person for whom it made a difference? Sally Ride. Thanks to Title IX, she was able to get a tennis scholarship to college – which led to her studying physics and eventually becoming America’s first female astronaut. Thanks Thought Bubble. Since the 1970s, the number of women pursuing higher education has skyrocketed, with women now making up the majority of all college graduates. But different majors attract different genders, with men being heavily represented in fields like computer science, economics, and engineering, while women are more likely to cluster in biology, psychology, or sociology.
Moving past education, the jobs that women work tend to be in service or care positions, such as food service, education, health care, and administrative roles. Sometimes known as “pink collar jobs”, these jobs with the highest concentrations of women tend to come with both lower prestige and lower pay.
You’ve probably also heard of the glass ceiling: a term used by sociologists to describe the invisible barrier that stops women’s advancement to the top levels of an organization. Women are particularly underrepresented in leadership positions across all major institutions.
Of the Fortune 500 companies, only 32 CEOs are women. In politics, only 19% of the US House of Representatives and 21% of the US Senate are female. The US has never had a female president or vice president and did not have its first female supreme court justice until 1981.
Why does the glass ceiling persist? While the US and many other countries have laws in place to prevent explicit discrimination on the basis of sex and gender, women are often held back through less explicit kinds of sexism. For example, men who are assertive in salary negotiations are more successful in getting a higher salary, but women who do the same tend to be seen negatively. Which is a Catch 22 for women – do you negotiate and get labeled as too aggressive or do you settle for lower pay?
One of the results of gender stratification is gender wage gap. According to a survey done in 2016 by the Pew Research Center, white women earn about 80 cents for every dollar that white men make. This gap is wider for non-white women, with Black women earning 65 cents and Hispanic women earning 58 cents for every dollar that white men make. Now, there’s a lot to unpack from the gender pay gap. That 20 cent gap isn’t all due to gender discrimination. Much of it can be explained by differences in education, choices of careers, differences in the hours worked, and differences in experience. But those last two factors – hours worked and career experience – are often related to the decision to leave the workforce to care for children, which is way more normative for women than for men. So, some people argue that, if we can explain the gender gap by looking at people’s choices, then it must be the people alone who are responsible for the gap being there. But the fact is, society has a tremendous influence on what choices people make, as well as what type of person is considered the right “fit” for a given job.
Yes, the gender gap is smaller if you compare female CEOs with 30 years of work experience to male CEOS with 30 years of work experience. But, there are fewer women who are offered those positions.
Gender socialization is also part of why women might choose to opt out of the workforce, to care for children. And society also informs the educational choices that women and men make that contribute to the gap. For example, until the 1980s, the number of women who majored in computer science was increasing at a pace similar to other fields, like medicine. But around 1985, that rate began to drop, roughly around the time that personal computers and video games came on the market and were marketed as gadgets for boys and men. Gendered marketing strikes again! And patriarchal norms about masculinities can affect men as well as women. For example, men have higher rates of suicide than women. Studies of suicide among men have found that it’s often linked to financial troubles or divorce, two crises of masculinity that may be related to men’s identity as a breadwinner. Men are also more likely to be incarcerated. They’re more likely to engage in criminal behavior, yes, but holding all else equal,
men are more likely to be tried for a crime and more likely to be found guilty. This stems from the stereotype that women are more moral and innocent, an example of benevolent sexism that makes women less likely to be seen as criminal types. But benevolent or not, sexism and the patriarchy have real impacts that make it harder for all genders to be on even footing in our society.
Today we learned about some of those impacts, starting with discussing patriarchy and sexism and Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinities and emphasized femininities. Then, we discussed gender socialization in the home, media, and schools. Finally, we talked about how gender stratification results in different outcomes by gender in education, occupations, earnings, and criminal activity.
Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, MT, and it’s made with the help of all of these nice people. Our animation team is Thought Cafe and Crash Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud. If you’d like to keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can support the series at Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love. Thank you to all of our patrons for making Crash Course possible with their continued support.
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Transcript for Figure 9.26, Founder of “Me Too” movement speaks out
[CBS News Reporter]: The sexual harassment allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein sparked an online movement in which women wrote ‘Me Too’ on social media platforms, highlighting just how pervasive the issue of harassment is. It was inspired by actress Alyssa Milano’s call to action. And celebrities from Reese Witherspoon to Olympian Michaela Marooney all shared their personal stories of their own experiences with sexual harassment. But what many people don’t know about the #MeToo movement is it was actually started over a decade ago by an activist, Tarana Burke. And Tarana joins us now to discuss her work.
Tarana, thank you for joining us, first of all. You started this hashtag movement in 2006, and you focused on what you called empowerment through empathy. What do you mean by that?
[Tarana Burke]: Well, the #MeToo movement started not as a hashtag, but as a campaign of an organization that I founded called “Just Be Inc.” Empowerment through empathy was the thing I felt that helped me. Other survivors who empathized with my situation helped me to feel like I wasn’t alone and gave me an entry into my healing journey.
[Reporter]: At first, your work focused on women of color, and it’s now expanded. Tell me about how it’s changed.
[Tarana Burke]: Well, my focus in all the work that I do is for the most marginalized people. And so I worked with young women of color in the South. And then when we moved our work into like we had like a MySpace page and women started coming forward and talking to us and saying, thank you for this. And we needed it. And we realized it had to expand to more than young people. And so we worked with young women, mostly black and brown women across, you know, through our MySpace page, but also throughout the South and then later in Philadelphia and New York.
[Reporter]: You know, we’re hearing critics of this campaign say that if this had been an issue that was just pervasive in the black community or for people of color, that this would not have gotten the traction that it did with the Hollywood celebrities. What do you make of that sentiment?
[Tarana Burke]: I mean, it’s true. I think we’ve seen that before. We’ve seen it in other cases. I mean, like Leslie Jones was targeted online on Twitter and there was not a groundswell of support for her and across Hollywood. And so I think that’s the case, not just in Hollywood, that people of color are usually the last to be supported around a variety of issues.
[Reporter]: Why?
[Tarana Burke]: Because of racism, because of oppression, because of the way the systems work in this country. The least of these are the least of these. And so we have to speak up ourselves and we have to create movements ourselves and we have to insert ourselves in larger movements.
[Reporter]: Lupita Nyong’o came out yesterday on Thursday with an op-ed in the New York Times. What did you make of her story?
[Tarana Burke]: You know, it’s so sad and it’s so, all of the stories are sad. But just in relation to what you were just saying, it’s like this is evidence that this happens across the board. So we’ve had all of these other actresses that have come forward that haven’t been people of color. It made it seem like it might be just white women, but it’s not. It’s these people who are predators, prey on everybody.
[Reporter]: You started this movement, Me Too. Alyssa Milano helped get this hashtag up and running. Are you in touch with her?
[Tarana Burke]: Yes, yes. She, a lot of people, once the Me Too hashtag started gaining popularity, people who are familiar with my work, I started getting like bombarded with messages and like, why don’t I see your name attached to this? And so people were saying, you know, Tarana Burke has a Me Too that she already does. And why isn’t she being talked about? And so Alyssa reached out to me early, like Tuesday, and said, ‘You know, I want to meet you. I think that your work is amazing.’ And we’ve been in contact. I was on Good Morning America the other day. It’s okay. It’s all right. And yes, and we’ve talked about collaborating to both. You know, she says that she’s very committed to making sure the goals of our, the work that I do are met. And that’s what I put forward.
[Reporter]: You know, one of the things I struggle with, we do these stories, and it takes up a huge chunk of our airtime. Then it goes away.
[Tarana Burke]: Yep.
[Reporter]: We don’t hear about the issues anymore.
[Tarana Burke]: Yep.
[Reporter]: How do you ensure that that doesn’t happen with this?
[Tarana Burke]: You know, I think that the moment we’re in, and just in the world is made like that. Hashtags are here and they’re gone tomorrow.
[Reporter]: Yeah, so true.
[Tarana Burke]: These issues are here and gone tomorrow. But I think people – I’m an organizer by training. And so I have been, these kinds of moments are like small victories, and we ride the momentum. And then we get on the ground and we do the work. And so where I come in, I think, is that like Alyssa and I are a perfect pairing because she can elevate the story and carry it forward through media, through Hollywood, and keep the conversation going. And I can organize on the ground and talk to everyday people, the people who I connect with and work with, about how we keep elevating this conversation and what work has to happen.
[Reporter]: It’s one of the things that I loved about your story, because you figured out a way to make it work and to reach out across the platform.
[Tarana Burke]: Yeah.
[Reporter]: For these people who are disadvantaged, who don’t have the Hollywood megaphone, how do you reach out to them? How do you get them the support? And how do you do that, as you mentioned, on a social media platform where it’s all about hashtags and then you move on?
[Tarana Burke]: This is not a hashtag. This is a hashtag. Hashtags and social media are important, right? They’re important for elevating the conversation, for getting the word out. But the work of it is that people, survivors like myself, who are in a position to elevate, you know, to have our voices heard. Or in a position to do work, because everybody who is a survivor can’t insert themselves and start doing work. They’re not ready.
But for those of us who are ready, and we are, there are many of us, we are the ones who carry the conversation on. We are the ones who touch other survivors, right? Me Too, the work that I was doing, is really about survivors talking to each other. And so, how we continue this after this moment is gone is that we continue those conversations and we start talking about, like, what does community healing look like? And I think survivors will be, survivors, will be at the forefront of that.
[Reporter]: You know, one of the wonderful things that has actually come out of the Trump administration has been that people, I know, hear me out here, people who care about issues, whether it’s a travel ban or something grassroots-related, if you want to see action, you’ve got to make it happen.
[Tarana Burke]: Absolutely.
[Reporter]: And we’ve seen that repeatedly, weekend after weekend, from this platform. It’s been incredible to watch. What’s your message to people who want to get involved in an organization like Me Too or a travel ban or whatever it is? How do you organize from a grassroots, grassroots level and turn that action plan into something tangible?
[Tarana Burke]: Well, there’s nothing new under the sun, right? If people are in their communities trying to figure out what do I do next, right? And people like to send donations and stuff, and that’s great. I’m not, I would never turn down donations. But I think one is looking for the people around you who are doing this work, because inevitably, there’s somebody else who has an organization or a campaign going that you can join.
And if not, connect with people in other places. The wonderful thing about social media is that we can instantly connect with people in other places and find out what they’re doing. People contact me like, how can I be active? And I say, well, we can talk and let me help you figure out some tools that you can use in your community, whether it’s people going into schools and talking about consent to children or having circles of survivors who get together and talk about what healing looks like for them or what policies have to change in their community and how they can do that. There are tons of ways to organize. And what we hope to do as a follow-up to this movement is put out that information through our website. So people have resources for how to be active in their community.
[Reporter]: And you said you’re going to be putting out some webinars and things online to help women?
[Tarana Burke]: Absolutely. So the other thing is, the hashtag has been beautiful to watch grow, but it’s also been concerning about people who have suddenly disclosed this information and then don’t have a container to process it in. So we want to do a series of webinars to help people talk about processing. Now that you have disclosed, what do you do now? We also want to talk about things like empathy and the role it plays in helping hear people’s feelings, and, you know, we want to talk about policy. So we want to do a series of webinars that’s a follow-up with concrete information for people.
[Reporter]: Tarana Burke, your story is incredible and it’s great to see a grassroots movement, how it has formed and taken off.
[Tarana Burke]: Thank you so much.
[Reporter]: Tarana, thank you for joining us.
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 9.26, Founder of “Me Too” movement speaks out
Transcript for “Founder of “Me Too” movement speaks out” by CBS News is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 10.2, Sex & Sexuality: Crash Course Sociology #31
Let’s talk about sex. It’s totally okay if that makes you want to cringe. After all, most people will tell you that sex is private, not something that people generally talk about – at least not in class. Besides, sex is usually thought of as a deep, primeval part of ourselves. It’s a matter of drives and instincts, of biology and psychology. And if sex and sexuality are both primeval and private, can a social science tell us anything about them? Of course it can! Because no matter how natural and private you think they are, sex and sexuality are still a part of every society. And like I’ve been saying since this course started, society gets in everywhere.
In order to talk about sex, we need to get a handle on some terms, starting with sex. Not sex the act, but sex the category. Sex is a biological category, and it distinguishes between females and males. And biologically speaking, the root cause of sex is a pair of chromosomes, XX for females and XY for males. These chromosomes result in two kinds of visible differences. There are primary sex characteristics, which show up as the sex organs involved with the reproductive processes and which develop in utero. And then there are secondary sex characteristics, which develop at puberty and are not directly involved in reproduction – things like pubic hair, enlarged breasts, or facial hair. Now, we tend to think of sex as a simple, fixed binary – you’re either male or female.
But that’s not the case. A significant portion of the population is intersex – that is, people who are born with sex characteristics that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. This can mean a lot of different things. Like, it can mean having different combinations of sex chromosomes, as in Klinefelter syndrome, which creates chromosomes XX and Y, or in XXX syndrome, which results in XXX. An intersex condition can also mean that the body responds differently to hormones, or that the genitals aren’t fully developed. This wide variety of intersex conditions makes population figures hard to pin down. If intersex is defined strictly in terms of having atypical genitalia at birth, then one in every 1,500 to 2,000 births fits that description.
If defined more broadly, however, to include all of the conditions I just mentioned, intersex conditions appear in as much as 2% of the population. And, of course, different societies respond to intersex people differently. In some societies, they’re accepted as just a natural variation. But Western society and medicine have long understood sex as an immutable binary, so intersex people were not seen as an acceptable variation, but rather as a deviation in need of correction. Some intersex conditions do require medical intervention for the sake of the patient’s health, but many don’t. And for years, doctors performed unnecessary operations to prevent intersex from happening. So, society plays a role in the biological category of sex.
But when it comes to gender, those distinctions are all about society. Gender is the set of social and psychological characteristics that a society considers proper for its males and females. The sets of characteristics assigned to men are masculinities, and those assigned to women are femininities. A lot of people have a hard time understanding the difference between sex and gender. But hopefully this definition makes it clear. Gender is its own thing, separate from sex. Some people don’t even want to accept that gender is anything but biological, but sociology is here to tell you that it really isn’t. Instead, it’s a matter of social construction.
To explore this idea some more, let’s go to the Thought Bubble. Let’s start with how we dress. A business suit is considered masculine, a skirt is feminine. And it should be obvious and uncontroversial that this is a purely social convention. Because, for example, you’d be pretty hard-pressed to explain the objective difference between a skirt and a kilt. Except to say that wearing one is feminine, and wearing the other is masculine. And this is also true of things that might seem to be more biologically determined. For example, physical labor, like construction, has typically been understood as masculine. And there might seem to be an underlying biological explanation for that, because, on average, men do tend to be bigger and have more muscle mass than women. But even with an average difference between the sexes, there’s a great deal of overlap, too. Plenty of women are bigger and stronger than plenty of men. And minor differences in average size and strength can’t explain why some occupations have been stratified by gender. The reality is that minor, average biological differences are used as the justification for widespread gender stratification, funneling males and females into different jobs, hobbies, and identity constructions. And society then points to this resulting stratification as proof of an underlying difference in biological reality, even though that reality doesn’t actually exist. Thanks, Thought Bubble.
So, one way of thinking about gender is that it’s a matter of self-presentation, a performance, that must be worked at constantly. What we wear, how we walk and talk, even our personal characteristics like aggression or empathy, are all ways of doing gender. They’re ways of making claims to masculinity or femininity that people will see and, hopefully, respect.
And we can be sanctioned if we don’t do gender right or well enough. This is precisely what’s happening when a man is called a sissy, or a woman is told that she really ought to smile more. The idea of gender as a performance is known as gender expression. But gender is more than that. It’s also a matter of identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s internal, deeply held sense of their gender. Nobody really perfectly fits the cultural ideal of masculinity or femininity, and lots of people construct their gender differently from these conventional ideas. In particular, transgender people are those whose gender identity doesn’t match the biological sex they were assigned at birth. By contrast, cisgender people’s gender identity matches their biological sex. Still, both trans and cis people can express their identity in a variety of ways, conventional or otherwise.
And this should make it clear that gender, like sex, is not binary. There are many ways of doing femininities, and many ways in which a person can be masculine. Now that we’ve got a basic understanding of sex and gender, we can finally get to sexuality. Sexuality is basically a shorthand for everything related to sexual behavior. Sexual acts, desire, arousal, the entire experience that is deemed sexual. One part of sexuality is sexual orientation, or who you’re sexually attracted to or not. Most people identify as heterosexual. Meaning that they’re attracted to people of the other gender. While this is the most common orientation, significant numbers of people are homosexual, attracted to people of their own gender. But these are really only poles on a continuum, with plenty of people being attracted to both their own and other genders, as in bisexual or pansexual. And some people are asexual, and don’t experience sexual attraction at all.
Now, these definitions can vary from person to person, just as they vary from society to society. This, and the fact that social norms may make people wish to keep their orientation private, makes estimates of the number of homosexual and asexual people that are attracted to people necessarily imprecise. That said, based on the surveys we do have, around 4% of the American population identifies as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. However, this increases to around 10% if we ask instead whether a person has ever experienced same-sex attraction or engaged in homosexual activity. So, what can each of the three sociological paradigms tell us about sexuality? We’ll start with symbolic interactionism, because its insight is the most fundamental.
And that is that sexuality, this intensely private and supposedly primeval thing, is socially constructed. You might think that this is a claim too far, because sexuality is a matter of inbuilt urges. Some things just are sexual. But if we actually start asking, what is sexual, then the constructed nature of sexuality gets pretty obvious pretty fast. We might think, for instance, that oral sex is just sexual. But that’s not necessarily true in all societies. For example, among the Sambia of the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea, young boys perform oral sex on and ingest the semen of older men as part of a rite of passage to adulthood. Oral sex is definitely happening, but it’s not clear that this should be thought of as sexual in the way we understand it.
And we might also be inclined to label this ritual as homosexual behavior, but it’s still not quite the same thing as homosexuality as we understand it in the US. So physically identical acts can have radically different social and subjective meanings. We can explain this, in part, with the concept of sexual scripts. These are cultural prescriptions that dictate the when, where, how, and with whom of sex, and what that sex means when it happens. The idea that sex happens at home is not necessarily true. Sex at home, between two willing partners, for example, is part of a generic sexual script in our society. Likewise, sex that happens between two people who met at a bar might come with a different script and, therefore, different shared expectations than sex between two people who’ve known each other for a long time.
This brings us to the structural functionalist perspective. Since sexual reproduction is necessary for the reproduction of society, this view says that sex has to be organized in some way in order for society to function. And society organizes sexuality by using sexual scripts. Before contraception was widespread, it was these norms that controlled how many people were born by determining when and how often people had sex. And by controlling who had sex with whom, they also, generally, made sure that those kids were born into families that could support them. This is one function of the universal incest taboo, the prohibition of sex between close relatives. Reproduction between family members would ultimately break down kinship relations. It would be impossible to maintain a clear set of familial obligations if, for instance, your brother could also be your father.
But, as seen from the perspective of the social conflict theory, regulating sexuality is also a matter of creating and reinforcing inequalities. In particular, our society is traditionally built around heteronormativity. This is the idea that there are only two genders, that gender corresponds to biological sex, and that the only natural and acceptable sexual attraction is between these two genders. Heteronormativity makes heterosexuality seem like it’s directly linked to biological sex, but heterosexuality is just as much a social construction as any other sexuality. It’s defined by dominant sexual scripts. It’s privileged by law, and normalized by social practices like religious teachings, so it comes to be understood as natural in a way that other sexualities are not.
Queer theory challenges this naturalness, and especially shows how gender and heterosexuality are tied together. Heteronormativity is based on the idea of two opposite sexes that naturally fit together, like poles of a magnet. So by this logic, men pursue, women are pursued. Men are dominant, women are submissive. But all this is socially constructed. The sexes aren’t opposites. There are just two of them at both ends of a spectrum, along with a whole array of variations between them. But the idea of opposite sexes helps make heterosexuality seem natural to us. And so you can see how sex, gender, and sexuality are all linked and all socially constructed. And you can see how society gets in everywhere, even among these apparently private and primeval things.
And in turn, these things help structure society, creating and sustaining inequalities, and giving them the veneer of the natural. But sociology can help us pick them apart. Today we learned about what sociology can tell us about sex and sexuality. We talked about the biological classification of sex and how it’s more complicated than we tend to think. And we discussed the social construct of gender, and a little bit about how it works. Finally, we talked about sexuality and sexual orientations, and what the three paradigms of sociology can tell us about them.
Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, Montana, and it’s made with the help of all of these nice people. Our animation team is Thought Cafe, and Crash Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud. If you’d like to keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can support the series at Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love. Thank you to all of our patrons for making Crash Course possible with their continued support.
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 10.2, Sex & Sexuality: Crash Course Sociology #31
Transcript for “Sex & Sexuality: Crash Course Sociology #31” by CrashCourse is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 10.4, Why Some Black LGBTQIA+ Folks Are Done ‘Coming Out’
[David Johns, Executive Director of the National Black Justice Coalition]: I would be okay with the idea of coming out if it meant that everyone was expected to come out. But that’s not how it works in practice. I’ve never seen a heterosexual person have to tell their coming out story.
My name is David Johns. I’m the Executive Director of the National Black Justice Coalition, and this is a word about inviting in. Inviting in is a way to complicate what is normally thought about as coming out. For many, coming out is the process by which people sit down with their families, have an awkward conversation about them being LGBTQIA+, and then they’re celebrated for it. Often for white people who come out, this also then involves them moving to a gayborhood, a place like Chelsea, New York, or Hollywood, California, or Boys Town, Chicago, where they then get to join communities and sports teams and show up in gay community centers where they draw power from that part of their identity.
For those of us who are Black and LGBTQIA+, the idea of coming out is sometimes simply not an option. Most Black LGBTQIA+-plus people live with other Black people. We are disproportionately concentrated in the South. We live in the states where it is legal to discriminate against us based on actual or perceived sexual identity, gender orientation, or gender expression. We use the term ‘inviting’ in to highlight the importance of people doing the work to show up as both allies and accomplices by adopting the language that we need to be able to talk about people in asset-based, stigma-free, positive ways to otherwise engage in conversations about things that are important to people. And so for us, the idea of inviting in people means that once you do the work required to demonstrate that you are competent and compassionate, I can share with you or we can share with you parts of who we are, including who we love or other things that you might need to know about our identities.
An example of inviting in is my brother Lil Nas X. Many people felt that it was important to talk about Lil Nas X having come out as if there was this singular moment in time in which he had this unique realization about his sexual identity and then decided to stand atop a mountain and declare it to the world for everyone to know. And what I appreciate most is that Lil Nas X says, actually, that’s not true. He made clear for anyone who had questions who he is and how he shows up in the world as a black man who happens to be same-gender loving. Words matter, right? Inviting in as a construct is important because it highlights the importance of a bilateral relationship and the need for two people to be engaged in this process of having conversations and making space for each other.
I don’t owe you an explanation of who I love; however, if you do the work required to learn some language, to leverage our friend Google. Um. If you think about diverse experiences, then we might be able to engage in this conversation where I will invite you in. And the hope is that if I invite you, and you will invite me in as well, and we can have conversations about things that are important to you, but might otherwise be difficult for you to think about discussing.
I have two hopes, dreams, goals with shifting from coming out to inviting in. And one is that we get to a point in time in which it’s not necessary for anyone to have to explain or announce or defend their sexual identity, gender orientation or expression.
And more than anything, I hold this dream for our babies. Right now, high school kids are identifying more often as anything other than strictly heterosexual. To be clear, there is no ‘gay agenda.’ If there is and you’ve seen it, send it to me. But it is, I think their way of saying to us that the boxes, the narrowly constructed categories that have existed for far too long, boy, girl, black, white, things that don’t allow for these intersections to exist don’t work for them. And so my hope is that we listen to the fact that our babies are screaming for us to do differently, to celebrate humanity, to otherwise find ways to strengthen cohesion so that we can be better communities and a better country. I believe that inviting in will hopefully will be a tool to help us get there.
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 10.4, Why Some Black LGBTQIA+ Folks Are Done ‘Coming Out’
Transcript for “Why Some Black LGBTQIA+ Folks Are Done ‘Coming Out’” by The Root is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 10.5, Fighting for LGBT rights in Uganda – BBC World Service, Witness History
[Victor Mukasa]: Uganda already has a law that could be used against homosexuality, but the new backbench bill goes much further. The penalty for gay sex could be death. I got death threats. My children got death threats. The story of LGBT activism was lonely sometimes. But I felt that we are not just going to be buried like this. In a country where biblical values are deeply ingrained, homosexuality is generally deplored.
My family was a very conservative family, a staunch Catholic family. Me being the first-born ‘girl’ then, I had issues with gender identity. I transgressed gender unintentionally from the time I started being aware of my existence. They bought me a very nice yellow dress, and I went and changed. I put on football shorts, I felt more comfortable that way. Then when I came out, my father was in the hallway and he gave me a slap. He said, ‘go back and dress appropriately.’ And then I put on that yellow dress, and I curled up inside. I felt different now, I wasn’t proud anymore, I wasn’t happy anymore. I fought against my sexual orientation for so many years. I was on my own because my family didn’t want anything to do with me at that point. And eventually, I was homeless. So, I felt that I needed to heal from this thing that was causing me suffering. So I took myself to churches.
Reject sodomy! Reject perversion! They were praying for me, and then as they were praying, they started stripping me, it was my clothes ‘making me a man’, so they stripped me naked. They started to lay their hands on me, and these are boys and their pastor. They laid hands in particular on my genital area because they said that was the center of it all. That is when I felt that it is torture. But I said, this is who I am. Inside me, I felt it was ok to be the way that I was and that God was not mad at me.
Seeing as homosexuality here is illegal, the gay scene is pretty much underground. I went to that bar and I just started smiling. Life had come. I didn’t want to go back home when I went there because I met lesbians, proud ones! People dressed like me. People expressing themselves like me. People in love with other women they had their partners there, and it was like I had reached heaven.
Last year under the headline ‘hang them’ a tabloid magazine published the names and addresses of 100 gay men and lesbians. The effects of that publication were major. They were horrible. A lot of people during that period lost jobs, were evicted from homes, killed. Lawyers and activists had challenged the anti-homosexuality act on the grounds that it violated human rights.
My children know me as Daddy, and they call me Daddy. They don’t say ‘hey trans Daddy, hey former lesbian trans Daddy’, they call me Daddy. It shouldn’t matter, but it matters now that I identify as a transgender man because that is the beginning of a conversation about what transgender is. Not for me because I have survived, but there are people who are still struggling to come out or to even ask for what they need. So then it matters.
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 10.5, Fighting for LGBT rights in Uganda – BBC World Service, Witness History
Transcript for “Fighting for LGBT rights in Uganda – BBC World Service, Witness History” by BBC World Service is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 10.13, Video 1: Connecting the Dots
[Music.]
Why do Advocates in the Anti-Violence Movement Need to be Doing Anti-Racism Work?
[Vanessa Timmons, Oregon Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence]: What guides my anti-violence work as anti-oppression work is this: a deep understanding that oppression is one of the root causes of violence, and the understanding that we can’t end one form of violence without ending all forms of violence. And so, as advocates, especially for me as an African-American advocate, it was not separable to me – I could not separate one thing from the other. I’ve always seen anti-oppression work, anti-racism work, as primary anti-violence work.
[Virginia Duplessis, Futures Without Violence]: Anti-racism is a vital component of anti-violence work. These videos were created by and for advocates to encourage dialogue and collective action in centering anti-racism work in the movement to end intimate violence.
[Amita Swadhin, Mirror Memoirs]: I think, for me as a queer woman of color who’s the daughter of immigrants from India, who’s non-binary in terms of my gender identity, I think about anti-violence work as anti-oppression work because that’s what my life is. I was raped as a child and and in a house in which my dad was also beating my mom. So, a commitment to anti-violence work is part of my own healing trajectory. But if I didn’t also fight homophobia and racism and xenophobia, I still wouldn’t be fighting for my own liberation.
[Vanessa Timmons]: It’s critical for advocates to be doing this anti-racism work because it’s important for us to do prevention. I mean, prevention to me is the core of what we do.
[Kelly Miller, Idaho Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence]: The anti-violence field has created a service delivery model that works for disproportionately white, heterosexual, able-bodied, temporarily poor women. And we think of anyone outside of those categories, they are not being served adequately. They’re not having access to resources.
What is Racism and What is the Context in the U.S.?
[Vanessa Timmons]: I see racism as part of this constellation of oppression. Each interacting with the other, influencing the other, compounding the other. I see racism as part of a, of an intersectional relationship with power. And so for me that is the core of racism, this intersectional relationship with power based on white supremacy. And you’ll see it in all forms of oppression.
[Amita Swadhin]: Racism looks different in terms of different countries in the world. In the United States, racism is specifically when somebody’s prejudice is backed up by the way the state is set up, by the laws and the institutions and the policies of that government actually sanctioning or supporting someone’s personal prejudice. And so in the United States, this is a country that was founded on the genocide and enslavement of indigenous people here and then later the kidnapping and enslavement of people from Africa. And when you look back at the founding laws, we see that people were not considered human beings, they were considered property. Native people in the United States were not even given the right to vote until the 1920s and so there’s a long legacy of the prejudice of the white people who founded the United States. We need to acknowledge that when people were enslaved, they were also raped systematically. This has been well documented. If you look at the Whitney Plantation Museum down in Louisiana, we now have memorials and testimonies of slaves, particularly slave girls, talking about how the slave master would come in and take them to be raped at night. Sexual violence was actually part of slavery. It was part of colonization. If we want to end intimate violence, if we want to end child sexual abuse, if we want to end sexual violence in the United States, we have to grapple with the history of racism and colonization and slavery in this country. It’s actually part of the work together.
What is the Connection Between Intimate Violence and Racism?
[Amita Swadhin]: One thing that we know for sure is the DSM now names racism as a cause of post-traumatic stress disorder. We know that people of color in the United States are experiencing PTSD at higher rates. We also know that when a parent, for example, is living with PTSD, their judgment may be impaired if they get triggered. They may not be able to act with love in a moment of being triggered and may be more likely to yell at their child, for example. There’s part of the cycle of violence there. For people of color, particularly poor people of color who are being heavily policed, who are being over-incarcerated, we know that oftentimes in interactions with police, people’s lives are on the line. People are being raped by the police, particularly for transgender and queer people of color, for black people, for indigenous people.
When you’re absorbing that level of violence, violence is a learned behavior. That lesson comes back into your homes, back into your communities. I think it’s a very difficult burden that we have as people of color who have survived violence to name the rates at which we experience it from the people that we love. And if we really want to end intimate violence, ultimately we have to end white supremacy. And that burden is also on our white allies to help us undo this very violent system that we’re all living within and in which people of color are suffering the most.
[María Limón, University of Colorado, Denver]: It’s not our fault that we ended up in the situation where racism and white supremacy are as prevalent as they are. It is not our fault. And it is totally possible for us to take this on in our lives. I know that as advocates, we all want to leave the world in a better place than when we came into the world. And by being deliberate about ending racism, by approaching the work with joy and delight in ourselves and in the humanity that we see in others, it’s a win-win situation. There’s no way we can lose.
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 10.13, Video 1: Connecting the Dots
Transcript for “Video 1: Connecting the Dots” by Futures Without Violence is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 10.16, Challenging normalization of sexual violence against women | Susana Pavlou | TEDxUniversityofNicosia
[Susana Pavlou]: Well, I hope you are sitting comfortably because I am here to make you feel uncomfortable. I am going to start with a story of a young woman, about 17 years old, who had just come out of a traumatic breakup with her boyfriend, and decided that she wanted to go out, and have a really good time with her friends. So that is what she does. They get ready, they look good. They go to a club, and they have a few drinks, and they are dancing. They are having a really good time. As the night goes on, they are joined by a couple of male friends, who they have known for quite a while; not too well. They continue to drink, they continue to dance, they are having a really good time. But at some point, she has had a little bit too much to drink. Her friends decide it is time to go home. They say, “Come on, let’s go home.” But she does not want to, and she insists that she stays behind. Her friends leave, and she stays behind with her male friends, who also wanted her to stay behind because they were having a really good time. By the end of the night, she is completely inebriated. She gets up to leave, and her male friend says to her, “Do not go home, come over to my place. I will make you coffee, you can sober up.” That is exactly what she does. He takes her home, to his place. He makes her a coffee, but she is completely wiped out. She falls asleep.
Rape
During the course of that night, he rapes her twice. I will not get into details. In the morning, she wakes up to banging on the door. It is her friend who had left her the night before who had located her, and come to pick her up. She was humiliated, shamed, and it took her 25 years to share her experience.
Now I know what some of you may be thinking; that she put herself at risk, she drank too much, she made a conscious decision to stay behind, although she could have gone home with her friends. She had also agreed to go back to her male friend’s apartment, even though she could have taken a taxi home. This rape was, in fact, the result of a series of decisions. Obviously stupid decisions on her part.
Others may be thinking, “Well, did she resist? Did she say, ‘no’?” Because if she did not explicitly do so, then obviously her actions and behavior spoke for themselves, and we cannot possibly hold him accountable for misinterpreting them. Others may be asking, “Well did she report it to the police? Did she visit the health services? Did she tell a trusted adult?”
Rape culture
Regardless of your diversity in the different understandings and interpretations of the incidents I have just described, it is almost without exception, conditioned by a social and cultural reality. By the common beliefs, behaviors, desires, and emotional reactions that society cultivates in us. Today I am going to talk to you, precisely, about how our understanding of sexual violence against women is molded. Known in feminist circles as “rape culture.” Rape culture is often dismissed as just a phrase that is made up by fanatical feminists that want to make men look bad. Or make it look as if rape happens far more often than it actually does. Perhaps we do not truly understand what ‘rape culture’ is. Besides, if you are hearing the phrase for the first time, it could be really confusing.
We understand ‘culture’ or ‘cultural practices’ from a sociological or anthropological point of view. as customs and social behavior that a society engages in together. We find it difficult to link the word “rape” in that context. We know that at its core, our society does not outwardly promote rape.
Sexual objectification
We do not outwardly promote rape, but ‘rape culture’ is something more implicit than that. It is about social practices that society do engage in as a society, that excuses, or otherwise tolerates, sexual violence against women. It is about how we collectively think about rape. The sexual objectification of women in mainstream media is one important factor that plays a role in rape culture. In a culture with widespread sexual objectification, women especially tend to view themselves as objects of desire for others. Sexually objectified women are dehumanized by others, and seen as less competent and less worthy of empathy by both women and men.
Everywhere we look, we are assailed by images of women as sexual objects, and vilified if we fail to meet the increasingly extreme beauty standard. That is not to say that men are not objectified in mainstream media, because they increasingly are, and although such objectification is always harmful, it is never harmful in the same way. Why? Because women and girls live in a world defined by the threat of sexual violence and rape, whereas men simply do not. I am not saying that such images cause sexual violence, but they do contribute to the normalization of dangerous attitudes towards women and girls.
Yes, it is true that sex is used, and probably will always be used, to sell products in advertising, but they have become more graphic and more pornographic than ever before. Such images normalize battering, sexual assault, and even murder.
Popular culture
It is not only in advertising rape culture is promoted and perpetuated. It has also infiltrated almost all aspects of popular culture. Think about songs that glorify sexual assault that are topping the billboard charts. Think Robin Thicke’s, “Blurred Lines.” Blurred lines, indeed. Or movies that feature rape and sexual assault as their main theme. They are Oscar award winners. Think “The Accused,” or more recently, “Twelve Years A Slave.” Rape and abuse are also used as a useful plot twist in some of the most highly rated shows on television. Think “Game of Thrones.” Pornography that has become more mainstream than ever before, a multi-million dollar industry where sex and violence have become one and the same.
What about language? Any linguist will tell you that language shapes the way we view our world. Let us take a moment and think about how our everyday language promotes rape culture. Think about how we refer to women when engaging in verbal warfare: “slut”, “whore”, “bitch”, “cunt.” Or how using sexually threatening language against one’s sister or mother is pretty much the norm.
Normalization
We all use this kind of language, every day; men and women. In fact, this kind of language has become so normalized, we do not even realize what we are actually saying. We even tolerate rape jokes as acceptable forms of humor. When we call people out on it, we are told to “Lighten up”; that we cannot take an innocent joke. We have to stop normalizing this kind of language in our everyday lives. We need to call ourselves and others out when we use it. The only way we can change things is if we hold ourselves and others accountable.
Not legitimate rape
Rape culture infiltrates our society with a series of myths. I do not mean that in the fantastical sense; but in the sense of promoting false beliefs, ideas, and expectations. I am going to talk about five of those myths, the ones that particularly piss me off.
Myth number one: it was not ‘legitimate rape’. Now we are treading in murky waters. Apparently, some would have us believe that there are ‘degrees of rape’. This is an updated version of a once medically supported notion that it was virtually impossible to rape a resisting woman because her pelvic and thigh muscles were considered powerful enough to fend off unwanted penetration. The updated version of this logic is that rape is mostly random and takes place in extreme conditions. According to the ‘legitimate rape’ logic, rape is committed by strangers, unknown to the victim. It takes place in conditions without substance abuse, with threat of force or use of force, and with evidence of physical or verbal resistance on the part of the victim. Well, I hate to break it to you, but it is not as simple as that. It is estimated that over 90% of sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the victim. That’s their brother, their friend, their ex-boyfriend, their neighbor, their teacher. They are not ‘other’. They are you. They are me.
Rape myth number two: it is not rape if she did not say, “No”. The absence of objection does not, in itself, constitute consent. Lack of consent may result from either the use of force or threat of force, or incapacity to consent on the part of the victim, such as when asleep or intoxicated. The responsibility is on the party who is advancing the sexual act to get that consent. And when I say, “consent”, I mean affirmative consent. That is affirmative, conscious, voluntary agreement, to engage in sexual activity every step of the way. If they do not get that consent, then they are guilty of sexual assault, and/or rape.
Myth number three: it was her fault. I challenge you to read any news article or report on an alleged incident of rape that does not reek of victim-blaming. Language, stories, and images that support or trivialize rape are so pervasive, we have become numb to them. At best, we have become completely desensitized to the victim. At worst, we actively hang them out to dry. There is no other crime in which so much effort is expended to make the victim appear responsible. When you know you will not be believed, you are far less likely to share your experience, even with the loved ones. When you will be shamed and questioned, you are far less likely to speak openly about your experience of sexual violence. When you know you will be treated as if you are the one who is at fault, you are far less likely to report to the police. Your culture, my culture, made her feel responsible.
Myth number four: she was drunk. This is obviously related to victim-blaming, but I wanted to address it separately. I am not condoning high-risk behavior. I am not promoting high-risk behavior. But let us be clear; no amount of alcohol can make one person become a rape victim in the absence of another doing the raping. Rape is not a chemical reaction. Being drunk or otherwise incapacitated is a situation in which full, informed, and free consent cannot truly be given. Despite this, it is shocking how much effort and money is put into telling girls and women to prevent their own rape, instead of addressing the root causes of sexual violence and shaking the foundations of rape culture. Here are some examples of such well-meaning, but totally misplaced campaigns. The message is that women willingly and stupidly put themselves in the path of danger. “You can prevent your rape by not being that woman at that bar, being drunk, not staying out until that time, and not accepting that lift.” Isn’t the message also that that rapist will probably rape someone else? Maybe that is OK? Because it was not you, and it was not me. Rather than asking why she became a victim of rape, we could ask, “What makes one person rape another.” But we do not ask those questions.
Which brings me to myth number five: Rapists are not monsters. Rapists are not monsters. Studies have indicated that as few as 5% of men are psychotic at the time of their crimes. Few convicted rapists are referred for psychiatric treatment. I understand that people want clear categories for the type of person that would do something so horrible, and that category to be clearly different and separate from mainstream society. From you, from me, from us. But the idea that rapists are monsters and ‘other’ is actually silencing the victim. Because that monster might be someone she loved. If we are ever going to prevent rape, we need to go beyond “the rape is wrong and done by bad people,” because that makes us feel more comfortable, it makes us feel safer.
We need to start having an honest conversation about how violence has become sex, and sex has become violence. I know that this requires cultural change, but I think that it is eminently doable. Culture, after all, is not something that is static, it is not fixed. It is fluid, it can change over time and space. There have been some really encouraging signs.
All over the world, anti-rape campaigns and organizations are naming and shaming ‘rape culture’ and debunking the myths that sustain it. Men are increasingly recognizing their role in addressing sexual violence, and doing some incredible work to raise awareness and encourage communities to take action. In the United States, colleges are rethinking how they legally define consent on their campuses. “No” means “No” is out. “Yes” means “Yes” is in. The White House has just launched a major campaign called, “It’s On Us” to prevent sexual assault on campuses across the U.S. It is possible to change the culture that sustains the situation that has such a devastating impact on our society. On women, on men, on girls, and boys. Everyone who is here gets the message, talks to a few people. Everyone of those people talks to a few people. Everyone here in this room can be the circuit-breaker. The first step is to go back to that story about a young woman raped on a drunken night out, and look deeper.
[Applause.]
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Transcript for Figure 10.18, Obergefell v. Hodges Explained
On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court, in a landmark five-to-four decision, granted the right to marry to same-sex couples, both men and women. Although this is great news for equality throughout the United States, many people still protest that the Supreme Court doesn’t have this ability or that their state can just ignore the ruling. To that, my response is: that’s not true. And thus begins our explanation of Obergefell v. Hodges, in a CGP Grey style.
So it all begins with James Obergefell and his partner John Arthur, who had been together for 21 years. They started dating when South Africa had their first presidential election. In 2011, John Arthur was diagnosed with ALS, yes, the one they made the bucket challenge out of, and was soon confined to his bed. After the Defense of Marriage Act was struck down in 2013, John Arthur and James Obergefell wanted to quickly get married before John died. So they flew from Cincinnati, Ohio, a state that doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage, to Baltimore-Washington International Airport in Maryland, a state that does recognize same-sex marriage. John and James said “I do” on the plane, signed the paperwork, and flew back, where John Arthur died three months later. Pretty sad stuff, huh?
So, under Ohio state law, Ohio didn’t recognize the marriage in Maryland and refused to put James Obergefell’s name on John’s death certificate. This pretty much means that James doesn’t have much of a say in the stuff that John and he had owned for 21 years, mind you. And thus begins the battle between James Obergefell and Ohio. Side note: John Arthur was still alive when James Obergefell started to sue the state, but he died very early on in the process.
So, James Obergefell sued the state under the claim that the state’s actions violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, and more importantly, the equal protection clause. The equal protection clause pretty much means that the government can’t pass laws with the idea to discriminate against a certain group of people and prohibit one’s ability to have life, liberty, and property. James Obergefell felt like the law banning his ability to get married to another man felt like it was specifically made to discriminate against LGBT couples. The local registry agreed and said that the ban was unconstitutional. So then it was appealed, and then the district court agreed. And so then it was appealed again. But then the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said that the ban was constitutional. So James Obergefell appealed to the Supreme Court.
Side note: during this process, this case was often mixed with a lot of other cases, but these all had the same goal of having Ohio and other states recognize same-sex marriage. Anyways, when James Obergefell sent his appeal to the Supreme Court, it was really shocking that the Supreme Court accepted his case because the Supreme Court’s acceptance rate is only around 2.8 percent, which is half than Harvard’s acceptance rate for applicants. After I listened to the entire two-and-a-half-hour oral defense, it really came down to these three things:
1. Should a marriage be defined between a man and a woman because it’s the only bonding that can produce a child?
2. Should a marriage be defined between a man and a woman because that has always been the tradition?
3. Is it in the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to define marriage, or should it be determined by the states through a popular vote or legislation?
This point was the hardest to defend without being rude to the judges, but it mostly came off as, “You don’t want to have another Roe versus Wade,” which gave women the right to have an abortion. And although Roe vs. Wade is viewed by many as a right step for women’s rights, many people view it as the Supreme Court overstepping their boundaries to make a decision on something that wasn’t theirs to make in the first place.
In the end, it was a five-to-four decision to allow same-sex marriages in all states, with Justice Ginsburg, Justice Kagan, Justice Sotomayor, Justice Breyer, and Justice Kennedy in the majority opinion. Justice Kennedy was a huge swing vote for this case, as he often is for many controversial cases. The minority or dissenting opinions for this case were from Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, and Justice Roberts.
So, to answer the questions previously stated:
1. Should a marriage be defined between a man and a woman because it’s the only bonding that can produce a child? No, many justices laughed this off during the oral defense, saying that old and infertile people can still get married. And many of the majority opinion said that it should be more about love and commitment than anything else.
2. Should a marriage be defined between a man and a woman because that has always been the tradition? No, this was Justice Scalia’s main point as an originalist, interpreting the Constitution as the founding fathers intended it to be read. Although I tend to think that we live in a more advanced society than in 1787.
3. Is it in the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to define marriage, or should it be determined by the states through a popular vote or legislation? Guess not. This is why all the dissenting opinions voted no, not because they hated the LGBTQ community, but because they would rather have the states hold a popular vote to decide on the matter.
In his dissenting opinion statement, Justice Scalia holds that he has no personal opinion on the matter, but an unelected committee of nine should not be making this decision. So why did the Supreme Court rule in favor of James Obergefell? Well, it really comes down to the Fourteenth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause, because he really isn’t viewed as an equal in the eyes of the law, saying that homosexual couples should not have the benefits of heterosexual couples. Justice Kennedy, in his majority opinion statement, notes, “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than they once were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them this right.”
Whew, that took about 20 hours to make, but thank you so much for watching. And I’d like to thank CGP Grey and his wonderful community for giving me the idea to make this video. And I might make a part 2 about the misconceptions about this case if this gets enough traction. But thank you so much for watching, bye.
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Transcript for Figure 11.1, Multiracial American Voices: Identity – Pew Research Center
[Mycal]: My name is Mycal, and my father is full black, and my mother is half black and half white.
[Amy]: My name is Amy, and my mother is American Indian, and my father is first generation American-German-Jewish.
[Roo]: My name is Roo, my father is white, and my mother is Catawba Indian.
So conversations about race with people can get uncomfortable when we’re talking about my own identity because I feel like I always have to prove it to people. Because I don’t look like what they’ve seen in Hollywood movies or what they’ve seen on television shows or in comic books or whatever. Most of the time I give this prepared speech that kind of proves my Indian-ness to people, and I say yes my grandfather was the assistant chief for twenty years and my mom was on the Executive Council, my aunt runs the cultural center and I grew up going there every day after school and during summers. Just to prove to people that I do have this connection even though their preconceived notions about what that looks like on a person aren’t met when they see me.
[Mycal]: There was, in fact, a time when I didn’t just identify as black, in fact, growing up I really hung onto this idea that I was biracial, I hung into his idea that I had some sort white identity. I remember wanting to dress a certain way because I wanted to embrace what I thought was, sort of what could be sort of tied to being white identity and it wasn’t until college really that I had made that switch from identifying as biracial to being black.
[Amy]: Sometimes I identify as white because it’s easy. It’s easier to identify as white to just explain myself because I just sometimes I just get tired of explaining like who I am, and like you know sometimes I just don’t care to.
[Mycal]: Being able to stand confidently in your identity, as a single race person I think it’s much easier, and it’s much more difficult for a mixed-race person to be confident in their identity because you’re consistently either being pushed away or pulled in and your questioning yourself and do I really fit in here, don’t I if I don’t what does that mean are there people like me?
[Roo]: So I don’t think it’s possible to separate one part of your identity from anything else. You know I’m a man, but I’m not just a man, I’m a Native American man, but I’m also a white man. I’m also gay, so I’m Native American and gay, but also white and gay, it’s not like a Lego set where you can just put pieces of identity on top of each other, but it’s much more fluid and complicated like if you put some dye into a river or something it becomes something entirely different than just a, you know, kind of building block pieces.
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Transcript for Figure 11.10, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi: Creating A More Equitable Society Is In White Americans’ Self Interest
[Stephen Colbert]: Welcome back. My first guest is an historian and the bestselling author of “How to Be an Antiracist” and “Stamped from the Beginning.” Please welcome Ibram X. Kendi! Professor Kendi, thanks for being here.
[Dr. Ibram X. Kendi]: Oh, it’s a pleasure to be on the show.
[Colbert]: You’re America’s leading scholar on antiracism, and in your 2019 book “How to Be an Antiracist” is currently a number one nonfiction best seller. What’s the difference between being not racist and being antiracist?
[Kendi]: Well, historically, whenever people are challenged for saying and doing something that’s racist, typically, their response is I’m not racist, no matter what they just said, no matter what they just did. By contrast, someone who is striving to be antiracist is actually willing to admit the times in which they express racist ideas. They’re willing to admit the times in which they sort of support racist policies because they’re in a process of changing. They’re changing themselves, they’re seeking to change society. They’re not necessarily in denial, like many Americans who claim they’re not racist.
[Colbert]: Well, I like that framing of the conversation because I, like I’m sure many Americans, have examined their conscience especially over the last four weeks and said I am a white American, I’ve benefited from our systemic racism in our society and I can’t say honestly that I don’t have any racism, but the refrain that you put it allows a hope for change.
[Kendi]: Well, I mean, and humans have the capacity to change, and I think we have to allow for that. And the question is always, and I think with anything, when someone diagnoses us, when somebody explains that we have some sort of problem, the question, I think, for all of us is are we going to deny that problem? Are we going to deny that addiction even, or are we going to admit it and then begin the process of changing ourselves, healing ourselves so that we can change and heal this country?
[Colbert]: Another thing I like the way you’ve done this is while not a racist and antiracist both might be described as an identity, antiracist implies action.
[Kendi]: Oh, it does. And, really, I’m not racist is an identity because, typically, a person believes that’s who they are. For somebody who’s being antiracist, it’s more so what they’re being based on what they’re saying and doing. Antiracist know if they’re expressing racial groups are equal, they’re being antiracist, if they’re challenging racist policies they’re being antiracist. So you have to do and be something in order to be antiracist.
[Colbert]: Can you be both racist and antiracist at the same time? I’ll give you an example — We hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal. That is baldly an antiracist statement written by a racist man.
[Kendi]: And even in that statement you had some people at the time believed we were all created equal, which was an antiracist idea, but then they also believed, let’s say, black and even Native people became inferior on Earth, in other words, their cultures are inferior, they’re inferior because of their environment. So we were all equal to begin with, but as a result of the cultures of black or even Native people, they’re inferior right now.
[Colbert]: I have a question about the history of racism. Is what we think of as racism a modern — and I mean 500 years old — a modern European colonial idea that is merely a subset of inequality, or has there always been some form of racial discrimination?
[Kendi]: So, for a very long time, you can look into antiquity and see sexism and ethnocentrism and see obvious religious persecution, but racism is a modern phenomenon. The concept of race — black, African, Native American, even white European — is a phenomenon that largely comes out of colonialism and slavery.
[Colbert]: So if there have been always been, like, man’s inhumanity to man, did the sort of economic desire to exploit Africans — to exploit Africans lead to the justification of racism?
[Kendi]: Exactly. The core to have racism is self-interest. In other words, I want to slave trade or enslave African people or even Native people and, therefore, I’m going to create policies that make all these different ethnic groups one people, worthy of enslavement, and then I’m going to argue these people are inferior, they’re savage, and should be driven from their land that I’m supposedly civilizing. So the self-interest led to the racist policies, and the racist policies have led to the racist ideas, and people believe these people’s were barbaric and savages which made them ignorant and hateful.
[Colbert]: Well, we may not have always had racism as we perceive it, but humans have always had self-interest. How can you — how can we make it so that being antiracist is in your self-interest?
[Kendi]: One thing for the vast majority of Americans, being antiracist or creating a more equitable society is actually in their self-interests, and I think that, for instance, white Americans are constantly thinking about what they would lose with a radical sort of renovation of this country, of this country’s policies, as opposed to what they’d gain. So they’re too quick to compare themselves to people of color as opposed to comparing themselves to what people in other Western democracies have. And then the question is why don’t we have paid family leave in the United States? Why don’t everyone have access to free healthcare? Why is there so much income inequality? And one of the reasons you can point to is racism and people being constantly manipulated to supporting policies and policy-makers against their own self-interests by racist ideas.
[Colbert]: And the cudgel of the welfare queen being used to destroy the idea of any sort of safety net that I saw growing up in the 180s.
[Kendi]: Exactly, and it was a social safety net that wasn’t just helping black women or black people, it was helping all Americans, all Americans who, of course, at times, are going to fall and need a safety net to catch them, to lift them back up. There’s nothing wrong with that.
[Colbert]: Now, you say that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. You’ve got an amazing example of someone who’s clearly steeped in racism, who has become an active antiracist. Tell the story of the David Duke’s godson.
[Kendi]: Oh, yeah, three years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Derek Black. Derek Black is the son of Don Black. Don Black created the website Storm Front, one of the major progenitors of the white nationalist movement and groomed his son Derek to become one of the leaders of the white nationalist movement, to really become like a Richard Spencer. But when Derek Black went to college, he started — some of his friends took him to the side and started challenging some of his ideas and, ultimately, he began changing. I understand he read one of my books along the way and many other books on racism and now he’s someone who’s striving to be antiracist. So someone who was raised to lead the white nationalist movement Stonewall Jackson School is now striving to be antiracist.
[Colbert]: One of the changes going on now, one to have the cultural changes like monuments being pulled down, perhaps changing names of army bails named after Confederate generals, I have found out your high school, you went to Stonewall Jackson High School? Virginia, and there is a petition, over 30,000 signatures, to rename it the Ibram X. Kendi High School. I know this doesn’t come from you, but this is happening. How did this come about and how do you feel about that?
[Kendi]: Well, I think, obviously, I’m happy they’re finally changing the name of my high school, since it was named after a Confederate general, but I understand people are pushing for this, and one of the people who are pushing for it, I understand, is the great, great-grandson of Stonewall Jackson who I think is a class act, Warren Christian, and he’s showing that we are likely not bound by our ancestors, just like we’re not bound by the past history of this country’s racism. We can create a different kind of country that will respect and value black lives and the lives of people of color.
[Colbert]: You’ve released another book called “Antiracist Baby.” Why did you decide to write a book about antiracism for babies?
[Kendi]: I first and foremost have a very young daughter, and I wanted to have a tool for her. I mean, I know that, at six months, babies are already seeing race. I know at two years old, some children are already consuming or believing in racist ideas and discerning who to play with based on a kid’s skin color, and I also know that many parents believe their kids are color blind, but their kids are anything but, according to the studies. And we should be teaching our kids about racism and being antiracist even before they can fully understand what that means. Just like we teach them what it means to be kind, what it means to love, these are sophisticated concepts. Kindness and love are what we teach our kids early because we value being kind and loving, and we should value being antiracist, and the earlier we teach our kids to be antiracist, the better.
[Colbert]: As I said, your leading voice against racism in the United States. Your wife is an E.R. doctor at a chirps hospital in D.C. She’s fighting COVID on the front lines. What gives the two of you hope? Because you’re both part of a present vital struggle.
[Kendi]: Well, I think, for us, I think what gives us hope is that you have to believe change is possible in order to bring it about. So when she diagnoses a young child who has a serious illness, she believes that that kid, that that child can be healed. She has to believe that. Doctors have to believe that. Just like when I diagnose America as racist, when I say that even America is stage four metastatic racism, I still believe that America can fight against the odds and still heal itself.
[Colbert]: Well, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for the message and thanks for the hope and thanks for the example.
[Kendi]: Of course, yes. Thank you so much.
[Colbert]: “Antiracist Baby” and “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You” are both available now. Ibram X. Kendi, everybody. We’ll be right back with comedian Patton Oswalt. Thanks again, sir.
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Transcript for Figure 11.13, Racial/Ethnic Prejudice & Discrimination: Crash Course Sociology #35
I think you’ll all agree with me that racism is a loaded topic. What is or isn’t racist, or who is or isn’t racist, is one of the most hotly debated issues in American society. Is racism about what you believe, or is it about how you behave toward other races? What is prejudice, and why does it exist? Sociology can’t make racism go away, and it can’t make it any less disturbing. It probably can’t even make the issue of race and racism less loaded than it already is. But it can help us understand racism, and understanding is an important start.
As always, let’s start by defining our terms. For one thing, what’s the difference between racism, discrimination, and prejudice? Prejudice is a rigid and unfair generalization about an entire category of people. So what exactly do I mean by unfair? Well, a prejudice assumes that something you think to be true for a whole group applies to every individual member of a group too, with little or no evidence. Prejudice often takes the form of stereotypes, or exaggerated and simplified descriptions that are applied to every person in a category. Negative stereotypes are often directed at people who are different from yourself, which means that people who are a minority in a population are more likely to be negatively stereotyped. For example, two common stereotypes of people who use government assistance are that they’re a) African American, and b) gaming the system.
But both of these ideas are demonstrably false. The majority of people on welfare are white. And people who use social services like welfare are also likely to need the extra help. But these stereotypes lead people to claim that black Americans, particularly single mothers, are lazy or untrustworthy. This example is a specific type of prejudice – racial prejudice.
Racism includes beliefs, thoughts, and actions based on the idea that one race is innately superior to another race. Some take this definition further and argue that racism is inherently tied up in structures of power, meaning that racism specifically refers to the belief that a race with less societal power is inferior to other races. And of course, racism can be explicit or implicit.
Explicit bias refers to the attitudes or beliefs that we have about a group that we’re consciously aware of. But implicit biases are a little bit more insidious. These are the unconscious biases that we have about other groups. While we might easily recognize an explicit act of racism, like calling someone a racial slur, we often don’t consciously recognize how implicit biases affect how we interact with each other. For example, a 2007 study by University of Colorado social psychologist Joshua Correa and colleagues found that people’s implicit bias comes into play when making judgments about how likely it is that a person is holding a gun. Participants in the study played a video game, in which the goal was to shoot people who had a gun, but not shoot unarmed people. Participants were more likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black man than an unarmed white man.
This was true whether the participants in the study were white or black, and it didn’t change regardless of what explicit biases the subjects said they had. What did seem to matter was if the subject said he or she was aware of stigmatizing about black men and gun violence – even if the subjects adamantly disagreed with those stereotypes. That said, it does seem like training can make a difference. The sample for this study contained both a sample of adult community members from Denver and a sample of police officers. The study found that police officers, who are trained to recognize when someone has a gun or not, were less susceptible to racial bias in who they shot than a community member was. Also, we should note that like many studies in psychology, this is a small sample design. About 130 members of the community and 230 police officers participated in the study.
So, prejudice is about what people believe, but discrimination is a matter of action. Discrimination is simply described as any unequal treatment of different groups of people. Most of us think about discrimination in terms of specific actions, like calling someone a racial slur or refusing to do business with a certain type of person. But racism can be bigger than one individual.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble to talk about institutional racism. Institutional prejudice and discrimination are the biases that are built into the operation of society’s institutions. Like schools. Banking systems. And the labor force. The concept of institutional racism was highlighted by civil rights activists Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in the 1960s, who argued that institutional racism is harder to identify and therefore less often condemned by society. Carmichael and Hamilton compared society’s response to the suffering caused by white terrorists bombing black churches to the lack of attention given to thousands of black children who suffered for different reasons, like from the lack of access to quality housing, food, health care, or schooling. Bombing black churches is an overt act of racism, motivated by racial hatred, so it’s easy to understand as racism. By contrast, elevated rates of sickness and death, which stem from structural disadvantages, aren’t the fault of any one individual’s racial animus, but it still results in discrimination on the basis of race. And it’s much more likely to go unnoticed, because there’s no single person to blame.
Together, prejudice and discrimination form a vicious cycle that entrenches social disadvantages. The cycle starts with prejudice taking hold in a society, often as a strategy for consumption, or consolidating economic or social power for a certain group. This prejudice then motivates discrimination against the minority group, both at an individual and institutional level, which forces the group into a lower position in society. Then this social disadvantage means that the minority group is seen as less successful and therefore inferior to the majority group, seemingly justifying the original prejudice, and the cycle continues. Thanks, Thought Bubble.
So that’s what racism is. Now, why does it exist? One theory of prejudice is known as racism. The scapegoat theory, also known as frustration-aggression theory.
Scapegoat theory frames prejudice as a defense mechanism on the part of frustrated people who blame another, more disadvantaged group for the troubles that they face, even when those troubles stem from structural changes. Economic anxiety is seen as a common trigger for scapegoating. Fear of losing jobs leads to blaming immigrants for taking jobs, rather than looking at how globalization and automation have changed the economy.
A second theory was proposed in the 1950s by German sociologist Theodor Adorno and his colleagues. They were trying to understand how fascism and antisemitism took hold in Germany before and during World War II. The authoritarian personality theory sees prejudice as the outgrowth of a certain personality profile, one that’s associated with authoritarianism, or the desire for order, tradition, and strong leaders who will maintain the status quo.
People with authoritarian personalities tend to see society as hierarchical, with people who are naturally superior having the right to power over others. So, according to this theory, racial prejudice is heightened when an authoritarian personality feels there’s some moral or physical threat to their way of life. Both this theory and the scapegoat theory see prejudice as a reaction that certain types of people have – people who are frustrated, or people who have a certain personality type. A third theory of prejudice takes a different tack. Culture theory claims some prejudice can be found in everyone, because people are products of the culture they live in, and we live in a prejudiced culture. This is what some people mean when they say everyone’s a little bit racist – that, or they just like quoting Avenue Q.
We learn racial prejudice and stereotypes through a kind of cultural osmosis. For example, American history textbooks tend to be written from a Euro-Caucasian perspective and focus mainly on the contributions of white people rather than other cultures. And this relates to yet another approach, which measures prejudice in terms of social distance. In the 1920s, American sociologist Emery Bogartas developed the social distance scale, which measures how closely people are willing to interact with people from different races and ethnicities. Social distance is a kind of proxy for how much of an other you see members of another race. Just like how geographic distance makes you more likely to generalize about a group of people who are different from yourself, social distance increases the likelihood that you might hold stereotypical or prejudiced views about another racial group.
And the final theory of prejudice is one we’ve talked about before – conflict theory. Race conflict theory focuses on how social inequality develops as the result of power conflicts between different racial and ethnic groups. Under this theory, prejudice is a tool for maintaining the power of the majority. For example, the argument that whites are a superior race was used as a justification for slavery, and the racial discrimination that continued long after. So, people may think about and treat each other differently based on their race or ethnicity in many different ways. But the ways in which racial groups interact within a society are often described by sociologists in terms of four broad patterns – pluralism, assimilation, segregation, and genocide. Pluralism is a state in which all races and ethnicities are distinct, but have equal social standing.
This isn’t a society that’s colorblind, per se, because people still have different racial heritages that are recognized in society, but in terms of how social and economic resources are distributed, the color of one’s skin plays no role. So, is the US pluralistic? Nah, not exactly. The United States is pluralistic by the letter of the law, but in a practical sense, there’s still a lot of racial and ethnic stratification, and despite having equal legal standing, all races do not have equal social standing. Now, in contrast to pluralism, in which different races remain distinct, assimilation describes the process by which minorities gradually adopt patterns of the dominant culture. By adopting the modes of dress, values, religion, language, and llifestyles of the majority culture, minorities are sometimes able to avoid prejudice or discrimination. But assimilation is much easier for some groups than others, and it’s easier if you look and sound like the group that you’re trying to assimilate to.
A third pattern of racial interaction is to just not interact. Segregation is the physical and social separation of categories of people. Racial segregation has a long history in the United States, with racial minorities historically being segregated into lower-quality neighborhoods, occupations, and schools. In the United States, racial segregation is considered to be one of the most important; Segregation under the law, also known as de jure segregation, has since been prohibited through court cases and laws, such as Brown v. Board of Education. But de facto segregation, or segregation due to traditions and norms, still remains. People live in neighborhoods, attend schools, and work mostly with people like themselves.
This self-segregation has led to high levels of racial stratification. About one quarter of black students attend public schools that have more than 90% students of color, and those schools tend to have less resources available to them. De jure school segregation may be over. But de facto segregation has all but ensured that the public school system remains separate and unequal for many Americans. Sometimes, however, racial prejudice has consequences beyond segregation and inequality. Racism can lead to genocide, or the systematic killing of one group of people by another. Whether we’re talking about the attacks on indigenous populations by colonizers starting in the 16th century, the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the Holocaust during World War II, or modern examples in Rwanda and Darfur, genocide represents some of the worst of humanity.
And it is usually motivated by racism. We can’t talk about race without talking about how people have used racist attitudes as an excuse for violence and subjugation. But hopefully, what we’ve talked about today will give you some context for thinking about how race plays out on a societal scale. Today we discussed prejudice, stereotypes, racism, and five theories for why prejudice exists. We talked about discrimination and the legacies of institutional racism, and we ended with an overview of four types of racial interaction: Pluralism, Assimilation, Segregation, and Genocide.
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Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 11.13, Racial/Ethnic Prejudice & Discrimination: Crash Course Sociology #35
Transcript for “Racial/Ethnic Prejudice & Discrimination: Crash Course Sociology #35” by Crash Course is included under fair use.
