Tuesday, February 25, 2014

What ESPN And The NFL Don't Talk About When They Talk About "Nigger"

Hi all,

I know my piece is late. I am busy, but I wanted to give us some other things to think about in the meantime.

This article relates to use of the word "nigger." Some people in the NFL have proposed that racial slurs be banned on-field and given a substantial penalty for their usage. This has quickly caught fire, largely because of the power differential between black players and white owners/league officials. (See, anything can be sociological!) Even if you do not watch sports, this can be a useful article for discussing what the evolution of words means. For a similar argument in satire form, please turn to this episode of South Park called "The F Word," which explores the evolution of the usage of the word "fag" in the U.S (http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s13e12-the-f-word).

GREG HOWARD – Deadspin

http://deadspin.com/what-espn-and-the-nfl-dont-talk-about-when-they-talk-a-1529286618?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+deadspin%2Ffull+%28Deadspin%29

What ESPN And The NFL Don't Talk About When They Talk About "Nigger"

Last week, we got word that the Fritz Pollard Alliance, chaired by ex-NFL player John Wooten, was pushing a rule change in the league that would penalize players for the use of the word "nigger" on the football field. The proposal involves a 15-yard penalty for a player's first offense, with an ejection if he says it again. This idea is bullshit, but it's gained so much traction that it's already been kicked to the NFL Competition Committee, comprising a racially diverse eight-man group of league coaches and general managers. They'll most likely present the rule change to the NFL's mostly old, mostly white owners next month.
The word "nigger" has gotten a lot of play in football over the last while, first with Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper proclaiming at a Kenny Chesney concert over the summer that he would "fight every nigger here," and then with the ongoing Richie Incognito-Jonathan Martin affair, during which it emerged that Incognito called Martin many racial epithets, including "half-nigger piece of shit.

"So between this proposed rule change, white guys calling black guys "niggers," and Black History Month, ESPN thought it would be a good idea to run an Outside the Lines special on Sunday titled "The N-Word." This was essentially an hourlong Around the Horn debate in drag, featuring ESPN personalities like Michael Wilbon, Jason Whitlock, Jemele Hill, and Tom Jackson, as well as others like Pittsburgh Steelers safety Ryan Clark, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and TourĂ©. Weirdly, Common turned up, too, presumably because he seems soulful, didn't really have shit else going on, and agreed to do an awkward little beat-poetry number to start the show. Dr. Richard Lapchick was also on hand, and while he's done a lot of great work over the years, it wasn't entirely clear why ESPN had invited him on to talk about the word "nigger," and given the amount of time he spent establishing his right-thinking bona fides, perhaps it wasn't clear to him, either.
In any case, the show sucked, for the same reason the proposed rule change sucks: Even after 400 years of slavery and de jure and de facto racism in this country, we still don't know how to talk about "nigger." We treat the word as a matter of etiquette, as a thing one shouldn't say in civilized society, and rarely reckon with what it actually means for someone to say it.

The problem of the word is that its etymology is entwined with an atrocity: the systematic purchase, relocation, enslavement, torture, rape, and murder of a race upon these shores. Not every black person has ancestors who were slaves, but nearly every black person in the Western Hemisphere can trace his or her roots to this bloody past, and no word or phrase has ever been devised that better or more efficiently encapsulates both that history and the way that history is woven into the present. It's a heavy word, having lost none of its violence or menace over the years. As Whitlock said during Outside the Lines, it was the last word many, many blacks heard before being shot or hanged or dragged or pummeled or hacked to death.
But "nigger" is also just a word. If it had never issued from a man's mouth, you can be damn sure the boats and the whips and the chains would've kept on coming. There would've been just as many shootings and hangings and draggings and pummelings and hackings in a "nigger"-less America, and we'd be having an earnest and altogether useless debate today about the propriety of using some other word, and we'd still be mistaking the symptoms for the disease.

That's part of the history, too, though—the non-reckoning. Reconstruction was less a nationwide effort to repair a broken country than a synchronized effort to dismiss the past, and among its legacies was a century and change of trying to sidestep the issue. We don't want to talk about any of that. It's uncomfortable; it's painful; it brings up incredibly complex questions about how we right wrongs that, however much they affect us today, were committed before our grandparents were born and that are in some ways baked into the system. Strange as it was, Common's introduction—written by ESPN's professional Southerner, Wright Thompson—got at the issue better than anything that transpired in the actual discussion. To reckon with "nigger," the piece understood, you have to reckon with history.

What is that history? It's slavery, and a campaign of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and six million African-Americans fleeing the racially segregated South to Northern and Western cities in search of freedom and opportunity and many of them ending up in isolated ghettos. This is a map from 1934, showing the concentration and location of Chicago's blacks in the middle of a period that saw their proportion swell from less than two percent of the city's population to around a third. It hasn't changed much nearly a century later, and the story isn't much different in our other major cities. This is what Ta-Nehisi Coates means when he invokes the "half-assed social contract" handed down to black people, the way we ignore that America turned its own citizens into a refugee population.

We don't like to talk about this, and so we talk around it instead. We get conversations about rap lyrics, referenda on saggy pants. We get rules and hourlong specials devoted to the forms of racism rather than any exploration of the thing itself. We don't talk about where it comes from, or how it expresses itself. We don't even talk about what it actually meant for Richie Incognito to call Jonathan Martin a "half-nigger piece of shit," or the power dynamic in play there—a dynamic that doesn't change if you take one freighted word out of Richie Incognito's vocabulary. The word "nigger" didn't give Incognito license to terrorize the guy he perceived as his lesser; it gave him a tool.

Another part of history, though, is change. In ESPN's strongest segment, a camera crew went to Teaneck High School in New Jersey to tape kids' reactions to the word. Many of them used it and heard it all the time. Most of the time, they were unfazed, because of its context. The sight of their young faces, mixed in among those of older dudes like Mean Joe Greene, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Jason Whitlock, did more than anything else to show how much this debate was about a generation gap. Older folks hear the word, and it immediately summons all sorts of specters—the violence Whitlock described, maybe, or the memory of indignities endured. Younger folks hear the word now and—depending on the context—shrug. (I'm 25. I say "nigga" all day, every day, and can't remember once directing the word at someone in unironic derision or hatred.)

The evolution of the word is pretty unfathomable and even tragic to many old people, but it's no less real for being resisted by the sort of people who furrow their brows on news specials. There's something healthy about it, in any case. It acknowledges the situational nature of language, that context matters.
In this respect, the NFL's proposed rule is hilariously wrongheaded. It plucks the word out of context, out of history, fixing a precise value on the use of a racial slur. Players are penalized 15 yards for saying "nigger"—not five or 10, or 20 yards, or a down, but 15 yards. Worse than holding, not as bad as intentional grounding. The rule is meant to stop a mountain troll like Incognito from looking across the line of scrimmage at a black player and calling him "nigger." But if such a rule were ever implemented and interpreted with the NFL's usual literal-mindedness, it would only end up policing and punishing more young black men who grew up with the word as a term of endearment than white men who would wield it with malice. Does anyone really think that a black player congratulating a teammate with "My nigga!" is using the same word that Richie Incognito was using?

Ultimately, the problem with the NFL's rule is the problem with Sunday's Around the Horn-as-Outside the Lines show. They both approach "nigger" as a question of manners, a do-and-don't, a first-order concern rather a second-order one that may (Incognito) or may not (Cooper) illuminate more serious blind spots within the league. The problem isn't the word "nigger." The problem is racism. Nothing is accomplished by conflating the two.


Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Princeton Mom vs. the Facts

Susan Patton's argument that college women should be looking for husbands doesn't square with the reality of today's marriages.
Susan Patton is attracting a great deal of attention with her polemic on the virtues of attracting a husband in college. Her underlying theme, that the university setting is the ideal feeding ground for husbands, leaves many women up in arms over the suggestion that the goal of getting a guy should be right up there with getting a degree. In what can only be described as scare tactics, she offers her version of motherly advice, which is that women need to find the smartest guys in college and pursue them as marriage prospects. It may be in her upcoming book she will fill in the facts that back up her many assertions, but her argument does not hold up, not because the message is offensive, although it is. Rather, because the argument does not square with the facts.

Patton begins her argument on sure footing. Marriage, or some other form of relationship, is a big factor in women’s happiness. But the fact that she neglects to mention is that marriage is even more important for men. It is men who should be far more desperate to find a partner, as their health, happiness, and longevity depend on it. Multiple studies show that married men have a lower risk of disease, less loneliness and depression and that men with more educated wives enjoy a lower death rate. One cannot help but wonder if it is not men who should be seeking out college educated women as life partners, rather than the reverse.
Patton argues that spending the decade of one’s 20’s focused on career will leave a woman with few marriage prospects as they approach 30 because men reaching this milestone will look for younger women as partners. She exhorts future thirtysomethings not to put themselves in the precarious position of having to compete with girls much younger. But again, the problem with this argument lies in the facts. On average, men marry women two years younger. Two years, not ten years.

Next, Patton resorts to the lowest of all arguments, the one that kept girls from higher education for generations and to this day keeps women from asserting themselves in the classroom and the workplace in the same way that men do: Men don’t like women who are too smart, or too educated. Without resorting to facts, Patton asserts, “Those men who are as well-educated as you are often interested in younger, less challenging women.” Can we just pause for a moment and recognize this as the monumental insult to men that it is? And then we can move on to the facts. Among college-educated married women, Pew found that 64 percent were married to men with the same level of educational attainment and 36 percent were married to less-educated men.

Times have changed, and college-educated women are just as like to marry as women without degrees. As Pew found, “Young women with college degrees are now just as likely as less-educated women to marry, and the timing of their marriages are increasingly similar. This was not the case in 1990. Back then, less-educated women were more likely to marry than were better-educated women, and they tended to do so at a younger age.”

College, Patton argues, is the best place to find a husband because of the plentiful supply of well- educated like-minded men. The well-educated part is obvious, but like-minded might be harder to prove. College is a diverse place with people, luckily, of widely divergent views. But, nonetheless, the average age of marriagefor college educated men is 28. The notion that they would be thinking about marriage, looking for a mate, or even a girlfriend for the very long haul, seems unlikely when, on average, their wedding date is still six to eight years away.

Finally, in perhaps the most offensive passage, Patton exhorts women to keep in touch with the smart men, particularly the super smart ones as they will be in demand. She presumes that marriage is an economic arrangement where women need to seek out the highest earner. First, college-educated women earn on their own, as Patton pointed out about herself, and do not necessarily need men in this role. Second, income prospects are not the criteria used in selecting a spouse. Research shows that among the reasons to get married, financial stability ranked fifth after more important reasons like love, lifelong commitment, companionship, and having children. Men and women are equally likely to rank love as their most important reason.

Patton stakes out a controversial viewpoint, and it is receiving widespread attention. While there are those who agree with her and others who disagree, her arguments should be held up to the light of fact. Young women should not be scared into action based on a world view from another era, that does not square with today’s facts. The New York Times pointed out that college-educated women have the lowest divorce rate and therefore, “by age 30, and especially at ages 35 and 40, college-educated women are significantly more likely to be married than any other group.” In reality it is the college-educated woman who is the prize. Her husband can expect a higher level of income, a healthier life, and longer marriage.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/princeton-mom-vs-the-facts/283880/

Monday, February 17, 2014

Is marriage better now than before?

Hi all. I'm a little behind schedule on my Robocop analysis. Keep the faith alive, though, I just need a couple of days to sort it because I am a bit tied up right now. It will come soon enough.

To hold you over, I found an interesting article from the New York Times about the quality of marriages today. The argument, based on the literature, is that the average marriage has declined in quality, while the best marriages have improved. Take a look and let us know what you all think. You'll see some familiar names if you study families. (I did not go looking for Penn State names to appear, but it happened anyway.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/opinion/sunday/the-all-or-nothing-marriage.html?_r=1

Leave your thoughts, and eventually I will leave mine as well!

Dylan
Gratuitous Simpsons quote: "Now what is a wedding? Well, Webster's dictionary describes a wedding as: the process of removing weeds from one's garden."

First Post!

Welcome to the unofficial blog of Penn State Sociology's 1st year graduate cohort.

Coming soon will be my first contribution, a sociological examination of the seminal science-fiction/action film Robocop, in which a greedy corporation that runs the police department of Detroit uses a dead police officer's corpse to create a robot cop that they refer to as a "product" while they conspire with the biggest drug dealer in the seedy section of town. Can you see why I love this movie so much?

Once I get the ball rolling with this post, I look forward to seeing some more interesting pieces, links, videos, or anything else that might be worth our time.

Dylan
Gratuitous Simpsons quote: "See all that stuff in there, Homer? That’s why your robot never worked."