Using comprehensive lynching data from the Beck-Tolnay Inventory, I analyzed Southern episodes of lynching from 1877-1950 using Tableau software.
In the storyboard, you can play around with a few important variables (state, race, sex) to see differences in where lynchings took place, and the demographics of the victims. With the maps, you can identify the number of lynchings in an area down to the county level.
If clicking on the map below doesn’t take you to the story, just click here.
I’m very proud to be a part of the University of Mississippi’s Critical Race Studies Group. Below is the link to our open letter to the University concerning Confederate iconography on our campus. Please share widely!
An Open Letter to the University of Mississippi Community On Wednesday, September 30th, 2015, student leaders from the University of Mississippi’s College Democrats and the UM Chapter of the NAACP called, separately, for the disavowal of Confederate iconography across our campus, including, but not limited to, the Mississippi state flag. Evoking the University of Mississippi’s own declaration that the flag and what it represents no longer aligns with our community’s core values, these student leaders showed the courage and conviction required to make this campus safe and inclusive for all students, faculty, and staff.
Since September 30th, many other student organizations have also publicly condemned the display of the Mississippi state flag and other Confederate iconography on campus, including: the Black Student Union, the National Pan-Hellenic Council, the University of Mississippi Pride Network, the University of Mississippi Black Law Students Association, and the International Student Organization. The Critical Race Studies Group, an interdisciplinary body of faculty and staff committed to racial justice and equity, is proud to declare our public support for these and any other student organizations for whom these symbols represent a threat, whether overt or subtle. We are here for you, and we want to work with you.
The near-daily presence of Confederate flags on cars and pick-up trucks parked on campus property, the continued display of Confederate merchandise in faculty and staff offices, the proud display of large Confederate flags in the historic Grove at every home football weekend, the continued playing of “Dixie” by the University band at home sporting events, and the referencing of our University as ‘Ole Miss’ (a term used by slaves to refer to white slaveholding women) over the University of Mississippi (the name of the institution) is not aligned with our institution’s stated commitment to inclusivity. Furthermore, these symbols serve as concrete barriers in our quest to truly transcend our institution’s legacy of racism.
As our state’s flagship public institution of higher education, the University of Mississippi has a unique responsibility to lead proactively on all matters of racial justice. As a leading institution of higher education committed to intellectual debate and discussion, we call on our University administration to show the same courage and conviction as these brave students.
In addition to an immediate disavowal of all Confederate iconography, we ask that our University leadership follow through on the recommendations provided by two outside consultants last year, and the ‘action plan’ from former Chancellor Dan Jones. Taken together, the Critical Race Studies Group asks the University to:
• Discontinue displaying the current state flag on campus.
• Give faculty, staff and students the option to use um.edu instead of olemiss.edu
• Take an active and public role in supporting the efforts of Mississippi legislators, including House Speaker Phillip Gunn, U.S. Senator Thad Cochran, and U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, who are demanding the removal of the battle flag emblem from the state flag.
• Reinterpret and modify our physical landscape to accurately reflect our institution’s historic involvement with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the University’s challenges and achievements in the post-Civil Rights era.
• Make a tangible investment on the part of University leadership into ongoing research by faculty on matters related to race and racism.
• Catalogue and promote all past and present race- and racism-related research conducted at the University
• Condemn publicly and officially the use of all Confederate symbols on university property, including their display in faculty and staff offices, in the Grove, and on vehicles parked on campus property
• Organize a public forum to allow for a debate on the merits of these symbols on our own campus. Such a conversation should be the hallmark of a leading liberal arts institution.By confronting openly the presence of emblems of the Confederacy and white supremacy on our campus, we would be acting in concert with other leading public institutions such as Clemson University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Texas at Austin. The above changes, when combined, help tangibly demonstrate an ongoing, public recommitment to end the legacy of white supremacy on our campus.
After the Civil War, prominent Mississippi segregationists such as L.C.Q. Lamar and James K. Vardaman, both of whom have campus buildings named in their honor, continued to reinforce white supremacy. A critical rethinking of who and what we want to represent may help the campus community address how our racist past continues to affect campus life today. We recognize that these small changes alone will not disestablish the legacy of white supremacy on our campus. However, they are necessary first steps in moving towards a more inclusive, respectful, and enriching university community.
Sincerely,
The Critical Race Studies Group
University of MississippiThe Critical Race Studies Group is an interdisciplinary group of scholars and staff dedicated to the identifying and dismantling of racial and other inequalities at the University of Mississippi and elsewhere. For more information, see http://socanth.olemiss.edu/critical-race-studies-group/
Posted by University of Mississippi Critical Race Studies Group on Thursday, October 15, 2015
I’ve been going back and forth about writing this post for several weeks. Last month, I came across the following tweet from Syed Ali, co-editor of the sociological magazine, Contexts:
What words in academic writing do you abhor? Will collect and put in @contextsmag. I’ll start. Lived experience, interrogate. #writeclearly
— syed ali (@skyedali) January 21, 2015
Before going further, let me be clear: I don’t know Syed well, having only met him once. I do sit on the editorial board of Contexts, but since we only meet once a year at the American Sociological Association meetings, I don’t have much personal interaction with the magazine’s leadership. The one time I met him, he was polite and collegial. In addition, Syed has posted a nice essay on the Contexts website explaining what kinds of writing the magazine is interested in, so that more sociologists can adapt their work to the magazine’s conventions.
Syed’s essay, and tweet, are part of a more general movement taking place within sociology, and many other social sciences. I call this movement the “Write Clearly Campaign.” The campaign’s goals are admirable: in the spirit of wanting a stronger and more direct impact on public discourse, certain circles within sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics have encouraged a form of academic writing that is less “jargon-y”, and more accessible to a general, nonacademic readership. The magazine, Contexts, for example, is explicit in its aim is to make “cutting-edge social research accessible to general readers.” In general, this is a great goal for the social sciences, especially given recent debate in The Chronicle of Higher Education on our role (or lack thereof) in public debate and policy discussion. Making our scholarship more widely available, and understandable, to a nonexpert audience has the potential to influence public opinions on a number of important social issues.
Nevertheless, I found Syed’s tweet incredibly naive, especially concerning the line he, and others, draw between “jargon” and “clear writing.” As someone embedded within the larger intellectual tradition from which “lived experience” is located, I feel it’s necessary to explain why this term is far from “jargon”, and how reducing it to just jargon illustrates a serious problem within the Write Clearly Campaign–an underlying assumption that all social science derives from the same epistemological position.
Epistemology, of course, refers to the study of knowledge–how we know what we know, including how that knowledge is produced and distributed and what conditions constrain and enable its production and distribution. The term “lived experience” derives from a specific epistemological position–that there is a complex relationship between our bodies and our awareness of our bodies and our surroundings. Some of this tradition date back to Spinoza’s counterclaim to Descartes classic Mind/Body dualism, but I find aspects of Spinoza’s monist position (i.e. the mind and body are of the same substance) equally troubling. A more contemporary understanding of “lived experience”, I believe, is found in the phenomenological tradition–a tradition extremely influential in the development of sociology, particularly the interpretivist vein which focuses on how social actors make meaning from their experiences. Phenomenological thinkers like Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz, for example, have greatly influenced interpretive sociology for several decades. Though they and others have used the term “lived experience” in different ways, my own understanding and use of the term reflects that of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty understood our bodies as the sites from which our social experiences unfold. He described that our bodies are used for all sorts of things, from the mundane (e.g. sit, stand, walk) to the complex (e.g. create, destroy, and govern). In doing these things, we bring our bodies into relationships with our worlds, and through this encounter, our experiences become meaningful–literally, full of meaning. Our bodies, then, are not merely ‘objects’, in the Cartesian sense. Our bodies, rather, are our point of view in the world–the vessels through which we interpret what it means to sit, stand, walk, create, destroy, and govern.
It’s important to note that, while these discussions were originally matters of philosophical debate and discussion, they are now grounded across several disciplines, including sociology of course, but also anthropology, political science, and cognitive neuroscience. So when one uses a term like “lived experience”, it’s not a “jargon-y” way of saying “experience”, as if all experience is lived therefore it’s unnecessary to specify. It’s demonstrating–clearly, I might add, for those embedded within the phenomenological canon–that (1) our discipline, along with many others, has not always recognized the inherent problems in Cartesian duality and (2) those of us who use the term write from an epistemology that examines embodiment as subjectivity-in-action/practice.
Is phenomenology complex? Absolutely. Within the canon, there is much debate about the specific relationship between embodied habits and practices and how we make sense of those things. Nevertheless, it’s a significant branch of sociology, and one in which concepts like “lived experience” have great currency. Dismissing it as something to “abhor” fails to recognize this concept, and others, on their own terms. Importantly, it draws poorly thought-out lines between sociology worth bringing to a wider audience, and sociology worth keeping insulated. Look, I’m all for making the knowledge we produce as sociologists more accessible to a non-specialized audience. However, if the Write Clearly Campaign is saying there is no room in their movement for complex discussions on how knowledge is produced and/or situated, then we’re doing a disservice to our potentially broader audience.
Yesterday I was interviewed by the student-run campus broadcast channel, NewsWatch 99. The focus of their story was the one-year anniversary of the symbolic lynching of the James Meredith statue that took place last spring on the University of Mississippi campus.
The clip is short, so I feel the need to elaborate a bit on my comments. I was asked whether I thought the campus reacted at all to the incident when it happened. Though the video doesn’t show this, I responded by saying there was a very strong reaction to the incident by most of the members of this campus community. Many students, faculty, and staff were outraged, and expressed this in private conversations, and in some public forums. However, what I also stated was that the response was far from collective or sustained. Furthermore, what I tried to articulate in the interview is that the “loud” reaction to extreme acts of racism, like the symbolic lynching of the Meredith statue, are rarely situated within the context of an environment where more mundane forms of racism are commonplace. Instead, we treat those incidents as anomalies, as the products of a few “bad apples” in an otherwise “good bunch.” This seems to be fairly common in many other social settings. We, as a society, tend to distance ourselves from the most extreme bigots, racists, and acts of intolerance because they don’t fit with our general ideals about civility and community. However, in doing so, we also perpetuate a culture that does tolerate everyday, microassaults and microaggressions toward people of color. When I stated that our campus policies are ‘missing the boat’, I was referring to policies (like the formation of a Bias Incident Response Team) that, in an attempt to respond strongly against such extreme acts of intolerance, ignore that these extreme acts are the least common instances of racism on our campus.
Watch on YouTube: Changes Since the Meredith Incident
I’ve spent the past few weeks playing around with Tableau, a data visualization software program. Though initially a bit outside of my wheelhouse, I am starting to understand the software a bit better, and it’s intuitiveness is becoming a bit more clear to me.
I downloaded some data from the American Community Survey’s 2009-2013 five-year estimates the other day, and decided to play around with it in Tableau. Below is something I came up with rather quickly–family income distribution for each county in the state of Mississippi, first by the total number of families reported in each county, and then by their percentage distribution within each county. Feel free to use the drop down menus to change which counties are displayed:
As I get more familiar with the software program, I hope to create more complex visuals, and stories. Ultimately, I think Tableau can be a really cool tool to integrate into the classroom with students to help better understand data, and the stories sociologists can tell with data. If you’re unable to access the workbook above, just click here
I remember from my time as a graduate student instructor the horror stories concerning teaching evaluations. Many of these stories, often second-hand, suggested that just one negative student evaluation could be the difference between getting a job and not getting a job in what is an extremely constricted and competitive academic job market. Even now as junior faculty, I occasionally come across an article reporting that a faculty member was denied tenure, or had a difficult time getting tenure, because of negative student evaluations. Student evaluations certainly matter, but the degree to which they matter varies from institution to institution. Even at institutions where student evaluations may be weighted equally for promotion and tenure, how we are evaluated as faculty varies considerably.
I say all of this to suggest we, as faculty members, consider other determinants of our impact on students, and how best to demonstrate this impact when it’s time to go up for promotion. I recently received a very kind note from a former student who sought my help in preparing for her Americorps interview. Having worked for one United Way chapter, and now a board member at another, I had a pretty good idea of what kinds of questions she might be asked, and how she could best demonstrate her fit with a nonprofit, service-oriented organization like Americorps. We scheduled a mock interview, and I prepared around a dozen different questions I thought might be asked of her. After our mock interview, we reviewed her responses, and I made some suggestions on how she could rephrase some of them in order to illuminate her skill set, and the contributions she could make as an Americorps member.
A few days later, after her interview, I received the following email:
Dr. Thomas,
Thank you so much for your help before my interview. Your practice questions were almost identical to what they asked me during the Skype interview and I felt much more confident having already prepared answers and questions of my own. I referenced your class a lot, which they were very impressed with as its so relevant to their cause. Mentioning books we were assigned to read that piqued my interest in youth education and outreach was one of the strongest points of the interview and they even wrote down the names of the books to suggest them to their team. Thank you again for all your help, I couldn’t have done it without you!
Later that same day, I received a handwritten thank-you note from this same student, which I took a picture of and placed end of this post. My point here is not to toot my own horn (though I have no qualms about owning my achievements). Rather, it’s to suggest, as my dissertation adviser wrote:
When you care enough to put in special extra effort and attention to a students success that won’t help a vita line but is morally important and of significant importance to the student, it often is a more important thing in their lives than we sometimes realize. Turning points matter and the multiple seemingly little things you do to go an extra mile to help students, such as a mock interview, are not actually in the end little at all.
How my former student was impacted by our mock interview is something that may not make it into a P&T file, but it should. The current model of likert scales and brief, qualitative summations of our courses as ‘really hard’ or ‘really cool’ simply don’t convey how much we can, and do, impact our students’ lives both in and outside of the classroom. We, as faculty members, then, need to take it upon ourselves to catalog these experiences and interactions. Maybe in the process we can take back some degree of ownership in how we are evaluated, and help determine what should count.
On March 5th, 2014 I participated in a panel discussion entitled, ‘Diversity in Sports.’
Many of my comments in this discussion drew inspiration from Taylor Branch’s phenomenal essay for The Atlantic, ‘The Shame of College Sports‘. One of the points I tried to make in this discussion (26min mark) is that we can’t expect to have a transformative discussion about diversity if we don’t begin that conversation by interrogating inequality and inequity within the contexts of sports (and this would apply to institutions of higher education, more generally). The hiring of more men and women of color as head coaches, as faculty, and as administrators does not solve the problem of a system that is fundamentally coercive and exploitative. College athletes have no labor rights, yet produce enormous amounts of wealth and value (symbolic, cultural, political) for their universities. While many receive a college scholarship for their efforts, this scholarship is year-to-year, on average it does not cover 100% of tuition and fees, and it can be revoked at any time by the coaching staff for undisclosed reasons. Meanwhile, many other college athletes play competitive sports in exchange for even less than the aforementioned “full-ride”.
I sympathize with some of the comments made by other panelists for the need to have greater representation and retention among men and women of color in the higher ranks of college athletics, and institutions of higher education more generally. Yet, I’m not convinced that a NCAA version of the ‘Rooney Rule’ would do much, and I certainly disagree with the comment made by one of the panelists that commerce and capitalist logic has led to positive changes regarding diversity in pro sports (17min mark). Too often, diversity is employed as a marketing strategy, as a way to re-brand the University as a place of inclusivity because they now have an initiative to become diverse. And, like the federal Affirmative Action initiative, too few of these diversity initiatives have clear goals and timestables to hold parties accountable when they fall short. What we end up with is a diversity initiative that is efficient in changing the perception of the University as a diverse place, rather than an initiative that actually facilitates transformative changes to the University’s structure (see Ahmed’s On Being Included for a great analysis of this phenomenon).
What does a diverse institution look like beyond just representation? Or, how does an institution that truly commits to diversity and inclusivity operate differently from one that does not? How do they restructure their day-to-day operations in order to promote diversity? How do they use diversity and inclusivity to frame new initiatives? These are the questions I would like to see more colleges and universities wrestle with in a transparent way, where students, faculty, staff, and administrators can collaboratively develop the University they want to become.
On Tuesday, October 1st, members of an audience of University of Mississippi students, including an estimated twenty members of the University football team, disrupted the Theater Department’s production of “The Laramie Project.” The audience used derogatory slurs, like ‘fag’, and heckled both cast members and the characters they were portraying.
On Thursday, The Critical Race Studies Group, an interdisciplinary group of scholars committed to fostering an inclusive campus environment at the University of Mississippi, issued the following statement:
“We are members of the University community who are committed to promoting an environment of acceptance and support for difference at the University of Mississippi. As such, we reject expressions of intolerance and bigotry of all types, such as the recent display of homophobia during a performance of The Laramie Project on our campus. We pledge our ongoing, active support for students and other members of our community who are hurt by such incidents. As educators and scholars, we vow to contest all forms of hatred that manifest in expressions like those Tuesday night. We reject the notion that Tuesday’s event was an isolated one. Instead, we encourage an open dialogue among members of our community, including the administration, faculty, and staff, to interrogate our complicity in maintaining an environment where such forms of hatred are even possible, and how they may be tied to other forms of prejudice, discrimination, and inequality.”
As a member of The Critical Race Studies Group, I am so proud of our efforts, and our stated commitment during such a time. That we were able to coordinate this statement among almost two dozen members and allies, all through an email exchange, and in less than three hours, is a demonstration of our undying willingness to fight injustice on our own turf.
Please check out our Facebook page, and stay tuned for more updates.
The past two weeks in my Social Stratification course, we’ve covered several classic readings on stratification and social order: Adam Smith’s Of the Division of Labor, Marx’s Alienated Labor and Wage-Labor and Capital, Weber’s Class, Status, and Party, and DuBois’s Of the Dawn of Freedom, to name a few.
One of my objectives in this section is to get students to see how these classic (and, in some cases, dated) texts relate to contemporary issues of stratification. In moving from Marx’s theory of social order flowing from the political economy (relations of production) to Weber’s theory of social order flowing from a combination of the political economy and status, it struck me that a useful question to ask my class was why are so many Americans resistant to demands for fair-wage practices coming from the Fast Food Industry?
In scanning online mass media coverage of fast-food worker strikes, and in particular the comments sections, I found that workers were frequently described by posters as ‘lazy’, ‘incompetent’, ‘unskilled’, ‘unmotivated’, and ‘undeserving’. Statements like “It seems that America is becoming more lazy and the masses that are demanding more are contributing less and less,“ were common. Furthermore, I noticed several instances where commentators and posters justified low wages among fast-food workers by referencing less-than-ideal wages for high-status occupations, like school-teachers and public service workers (police officers, firefighters, etc.).
I asked my class what Marx might say about this matter: many of them felt that Marx would question a system so resistant to providing basic necessities to its members based on a drive for profit. Others correctly pointed out that Marx, in “Alienated Labor”, clearly states, “an enforced raising of wages would be nothing but a better slave-salary and would not achieve for the worker or for labor significance or dignity.” For these students, raising the minimum wage would be a form of appeasement, but ultimately would not disrupt capitalism.
I redirected their attention to Weber, asking them how Weber might explain the resistance of so many Americans to fast-food workers’ demands. In a previous class period, we watched “Wealth Inequality in America“, which highlights the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth among the U.S. population. I asked them to think back to that video. The information in the video demonstrates that Americans in the middle quintile of wealth distribution (40-60%) have more in common with those in the bottom quintile than they do with those in the top. Even those in the fourth highest quintile of wealth distribution have more in common with those in the bottom quintile than they do with the top five-percent of Americans.
I asked my students to think of occupations that have relatively high social value, or prestige, but relatively low median earnings. Many of them identified school teachers, police officers, firefighters, and even university faculty (hell yeah!). I informed them that one of the fastest growing occupations in the U.S. is the hospice worker. Most agreed that this is an important job, with high social value. Many were surprised, however, at how low their median wages are (less than $11/hr). Here is a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that projects the fastest growing occupations from 2010-2020, and their median wages:
Personal aides and home health aides (think hospice workers) clearly dominate this projection. Other than biomedical engineers, many of the fastest growing occupations pay well below the U.S. median household income ($51,324 in 2011). We don’t often think of hospice workers, pipelayers, iron workers, carpenters, or aides to physical and occupational therapists as ‘lazy’, ‘incompetent’, ‘unskilled’, ‘unmotivated’, and ‘undeserving’. These jobs do require skills, they do require some training, and yet they pay only marginally better than the fast-food industry.
I show this data to my students to help them understand Weber’s position that status is still very important for maintaining our existing system of stratification. The role of status is evident in other low-wage workers’ responses to fast-food workers’ demands for better pay in their own industry. Rather than recognize common class interests among fast-food workers and Americans working in other, low-wage earning occupations, many Americans align themselves with the class interests of the elite through their perceived status relative to fast food workers. I anticipate this will spark a discussion centered on the power of the media, and its role in producing and maintaining hegemony over the public. It’s important to inform students that while they’re correct in identifying the media’s contributions to maintenance of contemporary stratification, we also need to think deeply about the role of other institutions, and social actors within them (How, for instance, do colleges and universities contribute to class and status stratification? What about departments, faculty, and students?).
Our next step in examining classic theories of stratification is to ask how would DuBois respond to Weber and Marx if he were to enter this conversation?
This semester, I asked my Social Problems students to work together on a class project to map the landscape of need in Oxford/Lafayette County, MS. Splitting my students into three groups (Research, Marketing, Policy), they were to work together to collect and analyze information on poverty, develop a plan for raising community awareness around the issue, and present potential policy recommendations based on their findings.
Two of my students play for the University of Mississippi’s baseball team. Together, they convinced the media relations team of the Athletic Department to construct some short PSAs that were shown at this past weekend’s home baseball series against Alabama. Over 10,000 fans were in attendance at each game, and saw the following videos:
I am so very proud of my students. They really rose to the challenge here.
Politics and Pedagogy 