Randolph Hohle, Ph.D.
Sociology at Fredonia, SUNY 

Election time always provides a snapshot of how race shapes just about everything in American politics. The Democratic Party spent this past election season rallying black voters to vote Democrat in a desperate attempt to hold onto the Senate. It worked, but they still lost control of Senate. The president nominated Loretta Lynch to replace Eric Holder as US attorney general. If confirmed, Lynch will be the first black woman to hold the post.  Holder was first black US attorney general. The GOP also wooed black voters this past election season. A GOP Super PAC paid black leaders to support Thad Cochran in the Republican Primary run-off in Mississippi. Cochran beat his Tea Party challenger, and was reelected to represent Mississippi in the Senate.  Mia Love became the first black Mormon elected to the House of Representatives on the Republican ticket. She will join two other black Republicans in Washington: Tim Scott, the first black Senator to represent South Carolina since Reconstruction, and Will Hurd, the first black Republican from Texas to win a seat in the House of Representatives. I think it’s safe to say that the Republicans benefited from the current state of race in America more than the Democrats.

The contrasting images of black bodies in this past election tells us more about race in America than simply voter demographics and a series of new firsts. I wrote a book about bodies and race, Black Citizenship and Authenticity in the Civil Rights Movement. Instead of rehashing academic debates on how social movements start or end, I wanted to understand the civil rights movement’s impact on black political representation. I found two contrasting representations of black citizenship. The first was good black citizenship, the racially non-threatening form black political representation that reflects the idealized US citizen. Good black citizenship allowed for a narrow slice of black life to gain access to the political and economic world. The second was black authenticity, a racially threatening representation of black citizenship.  Although the politics of black authenticity was originally intended to secure black political power at the local level, it became the basis for the criminalization of urban black life.

Did I mention that Eric Garner had a heart attack and died when the police dragged him to the ground for selling single cigarettes? It was captured on digital film here. To be fair, the police kill whites too. The difference is the degree, consistency, and levels of police harassment urban blacks endure on daily basis. The commonality between the protests surrounding the murders of Travon Martin, Mike Brown, and Eric Garner is the representation of black bodies targeted by the police. Is it any wonder that young black males walk with their heads down, eyes averted from the police?  The danger of looking up is death. This was the story of Emmitt Till.

Now here’s the catch. The protester’s embodied performances to address the problems of police brutality and extreme poverty inadvertently reinforce the same racial stereotypes the protesters are trying to debunk. If the police attack the protesters, the protesters are blamed for the violence. If the protesters express any emotion or appear outraged at the police, the style of protest silences the message. The protests do not sway the general public to their side. The change in symbolic gesture is very telling about the current politics of black authenticity. In the late 1960s, it was the fist in the air.  It meant securing black political power so that the black community had a say in shaping their future. Today, it’s hands in the air. There is even a hash tag, #handsup. Black authenticity’s signature protest is a gesture of surrender. It captures the dire sentiment of no hope or promise of a future in America’s marginalized black community.

Good black citizens do not address the plight of blacks on the margins. The national representation of good black citizenship cuts through party lines. For example, take the Democratic Senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker. Booker has been an enthusiastic supporter for charter schools, and has had no problem raising money from political donors. His response to the events in Ferguson skipped the issue of police brutality and extreme poverty, “I appreciate the challenges and complexities of the situation in Ferguson.” He called on Eric Holder to look into how the police handled the journalists covering the Ferguson protests. He called for an end to the violence. He remained calm during the interview.  He did not address the continued criminalization of blacks on the margins.

The Republican’s used representations of good black citizens and black authenticity bit differently than the Democrats. They used good black citizens to distance themselves from the overt racists in the Tea Party and mask pro-business neoliberal policy.  Rand Paul reached out to the black community, specifically the NAACP. In an opt-ed for Time Magazine, he called for an end to the militarization of the police.  He blamed the militarization of the police on big government. He did not blame teachers unions. He did not address the conduct of the police officers. Tea Party candidate Joe Miller challenged Dan Sullivan in the 2014 Republican primary in Alaska. Miller ran an overtly racist ad campaign, even for Tea Party standards. 

The racially threatening bodies of gang members with facial tattoos serve as a proxy to establish Miller as the most conservative candidate in a field of conservative candidates.  Miller folded negative portrayals of Latinos with the notion of black authenticity.  He drew on the national fears of black authenticity, even though Alaska’s black population is less than 4%, and its Hispanic population is less than 6%.  He lost to Dan Sullivan, who went on to defeat the incumbent Democratic Senator.  Thad Cochran rallied good black citizens to his cause against the Tea Party candidate in Mississippi.  Rand Paul reached out to good black citizens.  There is room in the GOP for good black politicians.  The bodies of good black republicans will likely be on full display at the 2016 Republican Primary.  It will create a visual image of an integrated party.  Hopefully Michael Steele and Herman Cain get an invitation.

The failure of the Democratic Party in 2014 is not because of billionaire funded Super PACS, Ebola, ISIS, or racism towards Barack Obama.  Whites have continued to ignore the plight of blacks on the margins since the 1960s, while embracing good black citizens.  Whether or not the police officer was within his legal rights to shoot Michael Brown is not the real issue in Ferguson.  The real issue is that the political establishment can so willfully ignore the struggles of blacks on the margins of society, where police brutality is commonplace, and sometimes justified.  However, the significance of black political representations is no longer confined to blacks like it was during the civil rights era.  It is a national problem.  Whites have to embrace the problems of the black community as if they were their problems.  Whites cannot afford to identify with the neoliberal project.  Poverty, crumbling infrastructure, ecological damage, and a dwindling safety net affect all of us.  Our contemporary social problems cannot be solved by privatization, tax cuts, fiscal austerity, and more police officers.  In the end, you have to wonder if the Democrats will adopt the Ferguson protesters’ embodied performance of raising their arms in the air for the 2106 elections. 

Daniel R. Morrison, Ph.D.
Seaver College, Pepperdine University

I teach at a private, religiously affiliated liberal arts college in the Los Angeles area. Our students come from across the country and around the world, and thus are diverse in terms of race and gender. The stereotypical Seaver College student at Pepperdine University is upper-middle class, white, and active on campus and in the community. My goal for this post is to reflect on the representation of bodies and body-speech in an anonymous forum and interactionist ideas about social control.

As a student of symbolic interaction and a professor who often teaches a class in social psychology, I am interested in the social construction of the self. I often teach my students classic interactionist texts, including Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In this class, we focus on how people perform within roles—using their bodies, clothing, gestures, and speech to construct a “face” for use in interaction. We often discuss the inherent risk of losing face in interaction, as others may judge our performances and our “selves” as unworthy of consideration and respect. Because face-to-face interaction is risky, people often alter their appearance, speech, and manner in order to receive the praise, or avoid the approbation, of others. For Goffman and many others, this means an important part of social control is self-control.

An important part of self-control, then, is recognizing that others may react negatively to the “face” and therefore the self that one presents. A recent smartphone app, YikYak, changes this dynamic. The app allows users to write, read, respond to, and up or down vote anonymous posts within a 1.5 mile radius of their current location. Posts with a balance of five down-votes are deleted, and all posts disappear from the app eventually. Users can also read posts from other colleges and universities, theme parks (e.g. Disneyland), sporting events, on certain topics, even Hogwarts. The app is probably in use on your campus.

YikYak promises that users can post their “true” thoughts without the same level of risk that comes with face-to-face and online-but-attributed speech. In some ways, the app is a hyper-local version of the anonymous trolling that was so prominently featured recently in gamergate. Users still risk esteem, derision, or perhaps worse, being ignored, through the up or down voting system. Yet I think that this level of risk is minimal. After all, unless a user decides to share their posts or attributions are made on the app (truthful or not), reputations, and thus, “face” may be saved.

Over the past few weeks, I have been collecting screenshots of YikYak posts from people on our campus in Malibu. I decided to do a quick and dirty content analysis on the posts relating to bodies, gender, and sexuality. It became clear quite quickly that removing a measure of social control inherent in attributed speech resulted in what might politely be called politically incorrect posts. Many of these had to do with women’s bodies, heterosexual sex, sex acts, attributions of homosexuality directed towards fraternities and men’s residence halls, and more. Euphemistic references to female anatomy in a sexual context were common.

These messages, seemingly swiftly composed, with little concern for grammar, spelling, or punctuation, may speak to the immediacy of the sentiments expressed. In an environment where nearly all students know about the hook up culture but practices and definitions vary widely, hegemonically masculine expressions of sexual desire abound. Lisa Wade’s research suggests that most students will have somewhere between 4 and 7 hook ups throughout their undergraduate years.

For example, a presumably male, heterosexual user posts about “easy pussy” abroad, drawing upon local knowledge of Pepperdine’s international programs.

Post:

The only reason I’m sad I can’t apply for abroad is all the easy pussy I’ll be missing out on

Reply:

Wrong priorities dude.

About half of our undergraduate students study abroad at some point. Utilizing the notion that one’s year abroad should be filled with fun, travel, and (sexual) adventure, this user laments the loss of that experience. Another message in the thread suggests that heterosexual men strive to compete with each other and achieve during college so that they may attract a suitable woman.

Post:

Pussy runs everything. That’s a fact

These messages share in the sexual objectification of women, reducing this group with a misogynistic euphemism.

Anonymous posts also feature commentary on fraternities and sororities. Not surprisingly, some fraternities receive negative posts regarding their sexuality, specifically attributing gay male sex acts to one or another group:

Post:

You can’t spell alotofbuttsex without ATO

Post:

Sigma Chi is still just a bunch of pussy ass douchebags

Post (attributed to a fraternity member):

Fuck my facial appointment interferes with my workout

Post:

Guy working out in his red frat shorts and vans: eat a dick

It is important to note how these put-downs often distance the writer from the presumably feminine activities of men who have sex with men and women, who are presumed to enjoy facials and fellatio. Sororities are mentioned primarily for their looks and financial status:

Post:

Kappa: “I can’t decide if I want daddy to get me a bmw or another boob job for graduation, maybe I’ll just get both.”

Most posts about fraternities and sororities illustrate what sociologists of gender, sexuality, and the body have long known about college life. An intense focus on women’s bodies, the stigmatization of the feminine in men and femininity in general, and heterosexism are common. For heterosexual men and women, there is an intense focus on being “hot,” in other words having the type of body that gets noticed and attracts (even anonymous YikYak) attention.

I close with some of the posts regarding women’s bodies.

Post:

“Ya that’s her. Our relationship is based on her ass...I have a relationship with her ass. I know who she is when I see it”

Post:

If titties could talk, what would they say?

Responses:

Stop staring

Let’s bounce niggah

Ta ta for now!

Post:

Yeah so a boyfriend would be clutch right now

Response:

Tryna get fucked right in the pussy huh

Post:

Where my fat ass bitches in the club? My anaconda wants some.

The posts reflect patterns discussed above. The final user’s reference to “my anaconda” (i.e. my penis) comes from a Nicki Minaj song that samples and updates Sir Mix A Lot’s anthem “Baby Got Back.” Here the presumably heterosexual male poster suggests that “fat ass bitches” are his target for intercourse. These dehumanizing and sexist posts may give faculty and on-campus advocates for feminism, sexual health, and violence prevention some avenues for exploration with students. As always, there is much work to do in order to ensure that all people and all bodies are safe on campus.