You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Gender’ category.
So Michele Bachmann has signed a pledge to support families that’s got some very creepy stuff in it. In particular, there’s this:
“Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”
Others have noted just how brain-curdlingly offensive this is, and I agree 100% with what they’ve written. But I want to pause for a second and look at the numbers behind the claim.
The pledge cites an invalid source — the 1880 census doesn’t have great data on slave family structures, it turns out — but the standard estimate for the number of slave families broken up by the sale of children away from one or both parents is about one in three. With life expectancy so much lower in the 19th century than it is today, I’d guess that about half of all slave families in the antebellum US were ones in which children were living with both of their parents.
And yes, the percentage of two-parent households in the black community today is a little lower than that.
But again, let’s pause for a second. Contrary to stereotypes, most African American fathers who don’t live with their kids are involved with them on a regular basis. Almost half see their kids or speak to them by phone at least once a week, and fully two-thirds spend face-to-face time with them at least once a month. (This percentage, by the way, is significantly higher than the analogous stat for white fathers who don’t live with their kids: 67% vs 59%.)
So when you compare slave families to black families today and wring your hands about the decline in the two-parent household, you’re not just ignoring the fact that slave children lived in “households” where their white master, not their own parents, had final authority over them. You’re not just ignoring the fact that many of them saw their parents savagely beaten and their mothers repeatedly raped. You’re not just ignoring the fact that their parents were in many cases prohibited by law from reading them a bedtime story. You’re not just ignoring all that.
You’re also saying that a family destroyed by the sale of its children is functionally identical to one in which the kids sleep at their mom’s most nights but have a bedroom in their father’s place, cereal in his cupboard, and drawings taped to his walls.
You’re saying, not to put too fine a point on it, that my ex-wife and I, by amicably separating and choosing to raise our children together while living apart, behaved comparably to the slaveowner who tore a toddler screaming from her mother’s arms and sold her away forever, permanently severing the bond between parent and child.
That’s what you’re saying. And it’s an repulsive insult to every parent in America.
Update: Santorum signed the pledge too. And Pawlenty is apparently considering it.
When the brouhaha over the Psychology Today “Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women” article broke, I wrote a quick blogpost pointing out some of author Satoshi Kanazawa’s most ludicrous, obvious mistakes. But now someone with a bit more competency has gone back to look at the actual data Kanazawa used, and discovered that the problems with his “study” go much deeper.
Much, much deeper.
Basically, Kanazawa completely misrepresented the data. His source material just flatly doesn’t say what he says it says.
Here’s the deal. Kanazawa drew his conclusions on the relative attractiveness of black women from the “Add Health” study, a long-term survey of American adolescents. He claimed that the study showed — proved — that black women were less attractive than women of other races. But that’s not the case.
The attractiveness “data” is itself suspect, for one thing. It consists of the subjective judgments of interviewers who were asked to rate their interviewees’ appearance. There’s no effort in the numbers to control for the interviewers’ (unstated) ethnicity, no protocol for their judgments, no reason to believe that their conclusions are in any way representative. It’s just their opinion, and different interviewers reached dramatically different conclusions about the same interviewees’ attractiveness.
Let me underscore that last bit. According to a review of the original data, most of the difference in attractiveness between individuals in the study can be explained by different interviewers “grading” the same interviewee differently.
But it gets worse.
This study is, as I noted above, a study of American adolescents, tracked through early adulthood. And though Kanazawa portrayed his article as a study of the attractiveness of adults, the samples he used included children as young as twelve. He based the majority of his conclusions on data on the youngest two groups, who had an average age of just sixteen.
Still with me? It gets even worse.
Kanazawa admitted that the supposed difference in attractiveness was less in “Wave III” than in “Wave I” and “Wave II,” though he actively concealed the fact that Waves I and II weren’t adults at all. (He labeled the relevant charts “Wave I: Men,” “Wave II: Men,” “Wave I: Women,” and “Wave II: Women,” even though the vast majority of those subjects were teenagers and pre-teens.)
What he didn’t admit was that there’s a Wave IV.
Wave IV, it turns out, is the only wave composed entirely of adults. And an analysis of the Wave IV data shows that it doesn’t support Kanazawa’s thesis.
At all.
In Wave IV there is no difference between the perceived attractiveness of the black women and that of the other ethnic groups examined.
None.
At all.
And again, I want to underscore something. Wave IV is composed of the same interviewees as the previous waves. So what the data really shows is that some (presumptively white) interviewers thought that the black adolescent girls in the study were a little less cute than the white, Asian, or Native American girls.
But when interviewers went back and spoke to the same women as adults, that “attractiveness gap” disappeared. Completely.
This isn’t just shoddy statistics. This isn’t just crap reporting. This isn’t just incompetence. It’s scholarly malfeasance.
It’s fraud.
“The job of an actor is to play a role. The job of a cheerleader is to cheer.”
— Eugene Volokh on Doe v. Silsbee Independent School District
• • •
The Doe case, as most of my readers probably know, involves a high school cheerleader in Texas, identified in court papers as “HS,” who was kicked off her squad for refusing to cheer for her alleged rapist. She had accused the player a few months earlier, but he had remained on the school basketball team. It was school tradition for the cheerleading squad to cheer from the sidelines when players attempted foul shots, but HS refused in the case of this player — standing silently with her arms crossed. After a warning, she was removed from the squad. (The player in question pled guilty to an assault charge some time afterward.)
HS sued the school for taking her off the squad, and lost. She appealed, and lost again. Last week her final appeal was rejected.
Eugene Volokh, a constitutional lawyer I respect, thinks the courts got this one right. If this lawsuit had prevailed, he says, “cheerleaders would be free to refuse to cheer for any reason that they think sufficient.” They could refuse to cheer for teams with gay or undocumented immigrant players, or those who “belong to a reprehensible religion, or refuse to properly support our military.”
I think HS was right to refuse to cheer her attacker, and I think the school was deeply wrong in how it handled the case. (For one blogger’s assessment of just how wrong they were, read this.) Whether by dropping her assailant from the team or suspending the practice of sideline cheers or just letting her sit those particular cheers out, the school should have found a way to accommodate HS’s reasonable desire not to cheer the name of a person who had recently sexually assaulted her.
But they didn’t. And given that they didn’t, I think the courts did the only thing they could. I just don’t see a way to craft a rule that would allow HS to refuse to cheer that wouldn’t also protect a cheerleader who shouted “slut” at a single mother on an opposing team, or an actor who changed the lines of a school play to give it a particular religious message, or a football player who wrote “I HATE FAGS” on his jersey, big enough to be seen from the stands.
It’s possible, as some commenters at Volokh’s blog suggest, that HS might have had other legal remedies. It’s been suggested that she might have had — and might still have — grounds for a lawsuit on equal protection claim, or for infliction of emotional distress. I’m not in a position to evaluate those suggestions. But as a matter of First Amendment law, I think the courts got this one right.
By the way, one other element of this case is worth mentioning — that the appeals court ruled HS’s lawsuit “frivolous,” and ordered her family to pay $45,000 in legal fees to the school district. It’s my understanding that the district has the option of waiving the collection of that judgment, and I hope they do so.
Update | The ACS Blog reaches a different First Amendment conclusion than I did, and it does so by addressing a question Volokh took as a given — whether cheerleaders are “agents” of the school, and speaking on the school’s behalf when they perform as cheerleaders. Their position is that so long as a cheerleader’s symbolic protest doesn’t substantially disrupt the school’s functioning, it’s protected speech.
I’m going to have to chew on this one. It’s not obvious to me that students have a blanket First Amendment right to Sharpie messages onto their uniforms while cheering or playing sports, or to shout obnoxious comments at opposing teams while on the field. I’m attracted to the pro-speech side of the argument — as always — but I’m not sure where I come down on this particular issue.
What do y’all think?
Adapted from a comment I just left at Feministe.
You probably can’t make yourself non-racist, but you can make yourself anti-racist. And in the end, being anti-racist is actually more important.
And no, you can’t ever rid yourself of privilege completely. But you can go a long way to rid yourself of ignorance of that privilege.
More to the point, you can make yourself into an opponent of privilege as it exists in the world, rather than just as it exists in you.
Jill hit the nail on the head when she said that the struggle to be — and to be seen as — “one of the good ones” can be a distraction from the real work of the activist. When you find stuff that needs doing, figure out how to help, and get to work on helping, that’s activism. Checking your privilege isn’t activism. It’s a part (and an ongoing part) of the process, but it’s not an end in itself.
And one last thing: As a person with privilege, if you spend time in progressive spaces, you’re going to get yelled at every once in a while. Sometimes people will be right to yell at you. Sometimes they’ll be out of line. Staying open to both possibilities is important, but it’s even more important to learn how to distinguish between them — and to figure out how to respond to each in a productive and self-caring way.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments