Class Stereotypes Research Articles

The political economy of "marriage for all"

Marriage is an institution that promotes solidarity between two families, gives access to social benefits, and organizes inheritance. Although central, this economic dimension was never at stake during debates on "marriage for all" in France. This article shows that the French government and opponents of "marriage for all" shared the same depoliticized register of discourse, based on class stereotypes and sexual inequalities. It argues that homosexual cultures know in fact various forms of kinship, which both celebrate and question marriage, genealogy, and economic sharing. This complex relation to the norm can possibly tackle the question of marriage beyond tradition, patriotism, and governance for future generations.Le mariage est une institution à caractère économique puisqu'il rend solidaires deux familles, donne accès à diverses prestations sociales et organise l'héritage. Bien que centrale, cette dimension économique n'a jamais été objet de débats lors de la réforme du « mariage pour tous » en France. Le présent article montre que le gouvernement français et les opposants à la réforme partagent une même rhétorique fondée sur des stéréotypes de classe et le maintien d'inégalités en matière de sexualité. Cet article soutient au contraire que les cultures homosexuelles connaissent de nombreuses formes d'alliance et de solidarité qui célèbrent mais aussi questionnent mariage, généalogie et partage. De cette relation complexe à la norme peut émerger une réflexion sur le mariage par-delà les assignations à la tradition, au patriotisme et à la gouvernance pour les générations futures.

The Class Stereotype-Driven False Memories in a Source Monitoring Framework

Class stereotypes are simplistic generalizations about attributes, differences of the social class, and about roles of individuals and/or groups. Stereotypes provide perceives a basis to generate inferences about unseen orunobserved aspects of a stereotypic schema, enabling them to make conjectures beyond the information given. Multinomial Processing Tree Models(MPT) are theories about the decision processes that were involved in source monitoring and can provide separate parameters for source discrimination, item detection, and response biases. It has been suggested by stereotype studies in a framework of source monitoring that stereotypes provided after encoding and before test, might produce a response bias in favor of the stereotype. This bias can distort memory representations of earlier events, resulting in false memories. Previous studies suggested that participants may resort to guess based on their stereotypes knowledge in situations when they cannot remember the source in a source-monitoring task(Bayen, Nakamura, Dupuis, Yang, 2000). According to this guessing hypothesis, if stereotypes are activated during retrieval in an explicit way, participants are prone to consciously make use of stereotypes knowledge and to guess the source in a stereotype consistent manner, particularly when they fail to remember the actual source. However, recent research has provided mixed evidence. By controlling the guessing, other researchers still found that participants create illusory recollections when stereotypes are activated during retrieval in an explicit way(Dodson, Darragh, Williams, 2008). So an intriguing question is: If guessing plays a critical role in creating false memories, what other factors should be responsible for false memories after controlling guessing? In this study, MPT were used for the measurement of cognitive processes in two source monitoring experiments. Sixty-six college students of normal vision, twenty-six in Experiment 1 and forty in Experiment 2, were enrolled to participate. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to determine how stereotypes influence source-monitoring decision processes when the class stereotypes are subliminally primed during retrieval. The results showed that when the subliminally primed class stereotype is provided during retrieval, participants' memory performance was distorted in a stereotype consistent manner, presumably through guessing responses. Particularly, the automatically activated class stereotypes affect source guessing process, thus producing false memories. In Experiment 2, explicit warning was provided to reduce false memory. We aimed to investigate how stereotypes influence decision processes of source monitoring, when the class stereotypes are explicitly primed during retrieval. Our results demonstrated that participants showed similar stereotype-induced false memories even after the stereotypes guessing at conscious level was controlled. Although it was difficult to fully control the stereotypes guessing at unconscious level, the explicit warning could lower the rate of false recall. Thus, the unconscious stereotypes guessing and illusory recollections might be the basis for false memories in a stereotype consistent manner. To sum up, the present study indicated that class stereotypes can affect source memory under different conditions in a flexible way. The activation of class stereotypes, in a source monitoring framework, affects not only guessing processes but also illusory recollections, both of which provide a potential basis for erroneous source attributions.

Bleeding, Wailing, and Hypnosis: The Words and Images of Caroline “booops” Sardine

In a context of educational, social, and financial marginalization of artistic practice in the anglophone Caribbean, the high degree of self-motivation and resilience required of artists is often manifest in their work. This essay profiles one such artist, the young Vincentian Caroline “booops” Sardine, for whom social violence, in the form of racial, class, and gender stereotyping, as well as a personal experience of physical violence and its attendant trauma, provide the substance of her work.

Even More Racially Isolated than Before: Problematizing the Vision for “Diversity” in a Racially Mixed High School

Background/ContextThe term racial diversity is interchangeably used in the literature with other terms such as racially mixed, integration, and desegregation in reference to policies to design and practices to implement racially heterogeneous communities, districts, and schools. Scholarship that promotes the democratic potential of racially diverse schools argues that the policies for doing so, if implemented systematically, can extend equitable resources to all students and dismantle negative racial and social class stereotypes through cross-cultural interactions. However, the social-justice-oriented goals of a racially diverse school will never fully materialize if institutional and structural barriers as well as racial attitudes and perceptions allow only a privileged few to connect to opportunities and result in a school that is merely diverse in terms of student enrollment.PurposeAttaining racial heterogeneity is just one goal of racially diverse schooling. Students’ academic and social opportunities, engagement, and connectedness to school should also be considered. Thus, this article expands upon research that critically examines definitions of “true” diversity and calls for a policy vision for diversity that goes beyond achieving heterogeneity in student enrollment and considers what structures and relationships are necessary to provide equitable opportunities for all students. In order to further problematize the concept of “diversity,” the author used Brown High School (BHS), a racially and socioeconomically diverse comprehensive high school located in a predominately White, affluent southern part of a major metropolitan area, as a critical case. The school community as a whole appreciated its racially diverse student body, but as the case study demonstrates, “appreciation” for diversity did not resolve the institutional, structural inequities and racial attitudes that resegregated students of color who transferred to BHS in search of better opportunities to structures within the school that were nearly or equally isolating as their previous racially segregated, low-performing schools.ParticipantsSeventeen students of color were interviewed and among this sample seven identified as Latina/o, six as African American, one of Asian descent (Vietnamese), and three self-identified as multi-ethnic (Latina/Chinese, Latino/White, and Latina/White). Nine faculty (the principal, two assistant principals, four teachers, one tutoring center director, and one college and career counselor) were nominated by students to also be interviewed.Research DesignThis study employed qualitative case study methods to illuminate the complex relationships that unfold within the high school of study.Data Collection and AnalysisSchool-level demographic and achievement data, observations, school documents, and field notes of student-led focus groups also helped frame the high school context. All data was collected during the 2009–2010 school year. An initial round of open coding and then several iterations of focused coding were used to uncover consistent themes, issues, and story lines.FindingsThe school administration unveiled a school improvement plan that would enable the school to capitalize on its growing student diversity by ensuring all students have meaningful academic and social connections to school. Despite the school improvement team's efforts to hold school community wide discussions about what changes should be made to support the increasingly diverse student body, most students of color who transferred to BHS were consigned to the lowest course and programmatic tracks, creating very disparate structures of opportunity within the high school. A complex set of factors contributed to inequities within the high school. There were vast inequities between schools across the district; thus, students of color from lower performing schools transferred to BHS already at a disadvantage in academic preparation. Also, some faculty were reluctant to change their practices to accommodate the increasingly diverse student body and harbored negative racial attitudes and stereotypes. Finally, any strategies put in place to address the inequities were very unsystematic and, instead, were piecemeal and programmatic.Conclusion/RecommendationsIn order to fully capitalize on the democratic benefits of diversity, leaders must be willing to re-organize and alter school structures so that every student is equally connected to opportunities. Also, while it is important for school leaders to engage in discussions with faculty and the community about the importance of racial diversity, dialogue is only one step, as leaders must also then take action towards implementing systematic supports to address inequities. Furthermore, faculty should consider how their own racial identities and social constructions about diversity impact student experiences and make faculty dialogue about race and cultural difference an integral part of the school improvement plan. Ultimately, when racially diverse schools are not strategic about ensuring all students are connected, students of color within these settings can become even more racially isolated.

Diabetes and "Defective" Genes in the Twentieth-Century United States

In the decades following the discovery of insulin, eugenicists grew concerned that more diabetics would survive into their reproductive years and contribute "defective" genes to the gene pool. Insulin thus came to be seen as both a blessing for the individual and a problem for the future of humankind. Nevertheless, diabetics in the United States were neither prevented nor discouraged from reproducing. I argue that this stemmed from the widespread belief that diabetes was a disease primarily of middle-class whites, who possessed positive traits that outweighed their particular genetic defect. Historians of eugenics have demonstrated convincingly that race and class stereotypes made some populations more vulnerable to coercive eugenic practices. The case of diabetes demonstrates that race and class stereotypes could also confer protection. In the end, possession of a defective gene mattered less than the perception of one's contribution to society.

Performing the grade: urban Latino youth, gender performance, and academic success

This article examines the intersection of race, gender, class, and academic success through an ethnographic case study in a Texas charter high school. The 98% working-class, Latino student population was exposed to an array of stigmas ascribed to their persons based on negative social stereotypes of race, ethnicity, gender, and class due to the cultural and professional climate on campus. Gender expression was the primary mode of differentiation, given the relatively homogenous population, and used to stratify students learning potential. Racism, stigma, materiality, and teacher indifference work in conjunction with one another to disenfranchise Latino youth on this campus, and arguably US public education.

Westward Bound: Sex, violence, the law, and the making of settler society (review)

Reviewed by: Westward Bound: Sex, violence, the law, and the making of settler society Laurie K. Bertram Westward Bound: Sex, violence, the law, and the making of settler society Lesley Erickson . Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. Lesley Erickson's fascinating new survey uses prairie regional court records to explore the creation, perpetuation and subversion of race- and gender-based mythologies of crime and victimhood between 1886 and 1940 in western Canada. The book draws from court cases during five decades within in five judicial districts in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Questions related to women's entanglement in racist and sexist systems of violence loom large in Erickson's timely book. As discussed further in her introduction, her work responds in part to the legacy of missing and murdered Aboriginal women in the Canadian West, including Pamela George, an Aboriginal woman killed in 1995 by two young White Saskatchewan men, in a field where Erickson used to play as a child. Proceeding from more recent instances of gendered and racist violence that permeate western Canadian communities, courts and everyday space, Erickson examines a longer history of gendered and racialized discourses of victimhood and criminality on the Canadian prairies. Published as part of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History series, Erickson's book joins a broader body of scholarship on sexual regulation and the consolidation and contestation of gendered and racialized identities in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Canada. As in other critical histories of both the sex trade and heterosexual marriage and companionship in the Canadian West, Erickson balances her coverage of state regulation with defendants' myriad of responses. The lived experiences and voices of western Canadian women resisting domestic and sexual violence as well as those of madams and other women involved in the sex trade ground her discussion of larger developments in the region. Her presentation of both the success and limits of women's agency in court records and criminalized activities is particularly strong. Employing an intriguing array of cases, she traces the challenges that these and other court cases and defense strategies posed to "mythic images of Canada's prairie West as a land of opportunity, a place of fruitful land and happy homes" (12). So doing, Erickson unveils a fascinating series of other criminal specters that haunted regional court systems, social order and popular imagination in western Canada. Westward Bound is organized thematically, according to actual cases shaped by popular caricatures of prairie offenders. The main argument is that the courts "served as a stage upon which larger developments and conflicts—between Native and newcomer, men and women, capital and labour and adults and youth—played out" (12). Each chapter focuses on a series of narratives and cases that hinged on racial, gender and class stereotypes, including those that evoked images of sexually aggressive Aboriginal men, prairie prostitutes, immigrant wife-murderers, and predatory farmhands. The prosecution of such figures, writes Erickson, did not simply bolster dominant cultural values, but transformed courtrooms into venues in which defendants could resist or manipulate stereotypes about their race, class and gender to benefit their cases. Erickson's survey framework makes several important contributions to scholarship on colonialism in the Canadian West. The project traverses numerous English-speaking, French-speaking, ethnic and Indigenous communities in the region during this period and offers a broader overview that scholars will find beneficial for an array of future investigations. The scope of the study extends to 1940 in a field where analyses of settler society often end on the eve of World War One. This scope reflects the distinct shape of the colonial project in the Canadian West, particularly its more recent and arguably ongoing features. Erickson's substantive incorporation of elements beyond the text, including courthouse architecture, prairie visual culture and police photography, also enliven her discussion of legal and sociocultural developments. The book's survey of five districts is compelling, though additional information regarding the extents to which these areas differed would have further strengthened Erickson's study. For example, references to the frequency with which Aboriginal women became involved in the sex trade appear to vary between cities and rural centres in Manitoba and Alberta in the...

The Harms of crime media: essays on the perpetuation of racism, sexism and class stereotypes

The Harms of crime media: essays on the perpetuation of racism, sexism and class stereotypes

Social Classes vs Professional Stereotypes in Greece. A View to a Fogy Social Construction

In the context of the largest crisis that capitalism has ever faced the discussion on social class and class consciousness seems more relevant than ever. The Greek crisis strikes as an ideal opportunity to start this debate. The phenomenal rise of the middle class in Greece over the last four decades has shaped a very problematic framework for a deep and rational analysis of social classes in contemporary Greek society. The policy that had enabled public servants and small businessmen to have access to social goods - that until a few years ago was exclusive privilege of the upper class - has changed the dominant model of interpretation of social stratification and hierarchy in modern Greek society. This study by using a mixed questionnaire (Likert scale and Content Analysis of the written texts) investigates the class stereotypes and the class consciousness of the Greek youth, while trying to clarify the facts of class stratification in the country in the midst of an unprecedented economic, social and political crisis.

Perceiving the Problem of Poverty and Schooling: Deconstructing the Class Stereotypes that Mis-Shape Education Practice and Policy

A rich history of scholarship has demonstrated the ways in which popular stereotypes of disenfranchised communities, including people living in poverty, affect individual biases and preconceptions. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which such stereotypes help frame policy and practice responses regarding social problems, such as the economic “achievement gap.” The purpose of this essay is to examine the nature of poverty-based stereotyping in the context of popular discourses regarding the education of poor and low-income students. In doing so, I analyze stereotypes commonly used to locate the problem of the economic “achievement gap” as existing within, rather than as pressing upon, poor and low-income families. I then discuss how these stereotypes have fed deficit ideology and, as a result, misdirected policy and practice responses to gross class inequities in U.S. schools.

‘And what comes out may be a kind of screeching’: The stylisation of chavspeak in contemporary Britain

This paper discusses stylisations of chavspeak, the supposed language of the chav, a recently emergent and explicitly stereotyped figure that has been implicated in ‘the demonization of the working class’ (Jones 2011). It argues that stylisations of chavspeak draw on a number of well‐established stereotypes of non‐standard Englishes in the British Isles, such that, rather than working as a representation of actual sociolinguistic innovation, chavspeak stylisations can primarily be seen as combinations of well‐recognised stereotypes. The suggestion is made that, in terms of providing a representation of variation at the first order of indexicality, the enregisterment of chavspeak is highly fragmented – a form from here and a form from there – but in terms of ideological force – intensifying sociolinguistic class stereotypes in accordance with the more general stereotype of the chav– there is a coherence. The intended humour of the stylisations is discussed as a feature that reinforces this ideological force, and the inclusion of stereotyped features of black Englishes is discussed as a possible emergent tendency in language ideologies in the British Isles.

I Should Get Married Early: Culturally Appropriate Comprehensive Sex Education and the Racialization of Somali Masculinity

From 2003 to 2006, Project Brotherhood, Responsibility, and Outreach (Project B.R.O.) offered comprehensive sex education to young East African men in San Diego, California. Project B.R.O. emerged from anecdotal reports made by police and service-sector officials that gang activity, teen prostitution, and teen pregnancy were fast-rising threats among Somali youth, and sought to test whether a “culturally appropriate” intervention could stem those trends. This essay examines the racial ideologies at work in the construction, funding, and operation of Project B.R.O., specifically the stereotypes of African American class, gender, and sex pathology at work in shaping the acculturation process for refugee youth. Rather than slipping into the underworld of vice, however, young Somali men are shown struggling over legitimacy and empowerment in cultural, religious, and gender-based terms.

How “Commonsense” Notions of Race, Class and Gender Infiltrate Families Formed across the Color Line

This research presents data from in-depth interviews of sixty adults in Southern California who have formed families across the black/white color line. In a societal context where normative family formation remains mono-racial, many adults in multiracial families manage their social performances to mitigate the stigma associated with their unusual family pattern or to challenge social expectations associated with race, class, and gender. Their stories reveal how they deploy strategic exaggerations of gender and stereotypes of social class in their day to day lives. These deployments operate to manage social interactions when confronting commonsense expectations about what it means to be a man or woman who trespasses the color line in family formation.

Providing fun in the ‘world of tourism’: servicing backpackers in Indonesia

Service sector work is a special arena for the formation of gendered subjects because its workers are both service providers and part of the consumed product in the sense that they have to deliver a ‘quality’ product and have the ‘right attitude’ toward customers. Based on repeated qualitative fieldwork, including in-depth interviews with tourism workers in a backpacker tourism enclave in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, this article explores the ways in which tourism work and tourism workers are constructed as gendered subjects. Although women and men might have the same work tasks within tourism, they are positioned differently, and it is not unusual for women to be seen as having a hidden agenda that is assumed to involve sex work. Men are constructed as the norm to which women are compared and consequently perceived as deviating from. Between men and women working in tourism and the western backpackers on which tourism workers depend in order to sustain their livelihoods, relations of class, gender and colonial stereotypes come into play. Tourism workers consider themselves to be seen as providers of fun, which means that they are able to meet the needs of the tourists, whatever those needs might be.

Race, class, and emerging sexuality: teacher perceptions and sexual harassment in schools

Sexual harassment is a highly troubling gendered phenomenon that plagues young women on a daily basis. The way in which sexual harassment is perceived and treated is varied and is largely based on racial and class stereotypes. This paper highlights the findings from a study in which a group of middle and high school teachers were interviewed and their perceptions of sexual harassment on their campuses were discussed. What was revealed throughout this study was the way in which many teachers’ notions of sexuality are conceptualised through their notions of class and race. This paper addresses how such racial and class stereotypes veil the sexual victimisation of many young women.

On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America. By Brian P. Luskey. (New York: New York University Press, 2010. Pp. 228. Cloth, $48.00.)Reviewed by Donna J. RillingOn the Make is a cleverly conceived and tightly argued study of clerks in New York City between 1830 and 1870 that draws together social, business, and history approaches. It is well grounded in a wide range of sources, among them censuses, diaries, credit records, periodicals, and popular humor. The book contributes to recent approaches to capitalist transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that connect production to consumption, economic change to and political ideologies, and the home to the marketplace. Clerks are excellent subjects because they were the faces of capitalist transformation (2), Brian Luskey suggests. They were ubiquitous in the nation's commercial center, striving to rise up the social and economic ladder, and eagerly and visibly engaging in the city's consumer abundance. Their experiences in the workplace and in the streets capture debates over citizenship, class, race, and gender in antebellum America.Migrants from the countryside, immigrants from Europe, and urban sons flocked to antebellum cities, convinced that clerking in the commercial world would assure their rise to independence and respectability. Young men bought into the advice literature that held out eighteenthcentury successes (Ben Franklin, for example), even though these models were ill suited to the perils of the volatile antebellum economy. Still, they believed the narratives and internalized the ideology of selfmaking (2). If they failed, diarists reflected, their own lack of perseverance and character would be to blame; how could capitalism itself be rigged against them? Self-consciously and self-critically, they set about assembling the cultural capital - respectability, character, aloofness from the laboring masses - to complement their projected economic status.Clerks did not seek economic gain alone, but also social and political affirmation of their autonomous status as men. At each step, however, clerking plagued them with its ambiguities. Meager salaries, slow advancement, and menial tasks did not reconcile with the ideas youths held about their future prospects as proprietors. Were perseverance and the development of good character their own rewards if commercial success was elusive? Contemporary advice manuals seemed to hedge. Daily work toyed with the self-image of clerks and their ability to capture respectability. Headwork - keeping books, copying letters, taking inventory, serving customers - underscored their claim to the white collar. But the manual tasks they actually performed meant that those collars were soiled with sweat. Clerks chafed at doing the dirty work of the store (62), which was regularly though not exclusively assigned to African American or Irish porters. In practice, the line between headwork and hard work was porous. Discomforted by the slippage, clerks (who were overwhelmingly white) wore their collars as markers of refinement, and used popular culture to endorse racial and class stereotypes, limit access to their ranks, and bolster their sense of white superiority.Denying the physical labor of their station also cast doubt on clerks' rights to political capital. When the Early Closing Movement sought to free them from late evening hours, supporters championed their rights as workers - a status clerks rejected. Clerks stood aloof from labor associations and democratic politics, eschewing ruder participants and corrupt practices in lieu of a more respectable mode of politics centered in the lyceum and library (121). Critics nonetheless mocked the notion that young men would use evenings for self-improvement and study, pointing to urban leisurely pursuits - frequenting gambling houses and brothels - associated with unsupervised youth. …

‘City of sand’: Stately Re‐Imagination of Marina Beach in Chennai

AbstractThe launch of economic neoliberalization in India in the 1990s unfolded a new urban habitat in Indian metropolitan cities with public spaces becoming an important part of a parvenu visual display. A vigorous state‐led bourgeois imaginary based on an aestheticized model of order and cleanliness ensued, but its realization is often ‘cracked and refracted’, illustrating the problematic conceptualization of public spaces in postcolonial India. This article examines the imagination of the Marina beach in Chennai, from its creation in the colonial era to the different cycles of re‐imagination pursued in the postcolonial years. In doing so, it highlights a fundamental difference between the Western and indigenous understandings of open spaces, which is characterized by conflict at two levels — first of all, between the public and the common, and secondly, between the public and the crowd. This persists to date, as a result of which state‐produced plans for the Marina have come across weakly and attempts to implement grand visions on the beach have frequently been thwarted. Reduced to a narrower set of fragmented pursuits, the state (and those who subscribe to its bourgeois imaginary), instead of looking for a reconciliation between the two conceptualizations of open spaces, increasingly employs class stereotypes to legitimize one (the public) and discredit the other (the common/crowd).Résumé Dans les années 1990 en Inde, le début de la néolibéralisation économique a révélé un nouvel habitat urbain dans les villes métropolitaines, les espaces publics revêtant peu à peu un aspect important dans l'exposition des nouveaux parvenus. Il en a résulté un fort imaginaire ‘bourgeois’ porté par l'État et fondé sur un modèle esthétique d'ordre et de propreté qui, une fois concrétisé, apparaît souvent ‘fendillé et déformé’, illustrant les problèmes de conceptualisation des espaces publics dans l'Inde postcoloniale. Cet article s'intéresse à Marina Beach (Chennai) et à la manière dont le site a été imaginé depuis sa création à l'époque coloniale, jusqu'aux différents cycles de ré‐imagination dans les années postcoloniales. Ce faisant, il met en évidence une différence fondamentale entre les notions occidentale et nationale d'espace ouvert. Celle‐ci se traduit par un conflit à deux niveaux qui persiste encore à ce jour: d'une part, entre le public et la communauté; d'autre part, entre le public et la masse. De ce fait, les plans que l'État a élaborés pour la Marina ont manqué de vigueur et les tentatives d'aménagements grandioses sur la plage ont souvent été contrecarrées. Réduit à une panoplie rétrécie d'actions fragmentées, l'État (et les adeptes de son imaginaire bourgeois) n'a pas cherchéà concilier les deux conceptualisations de l'espace ouvert, accentuant progressivement sa préférence pour des stéréotypes de classe afin de légitimer l'un (le public) et de discréditer l'autre (la communauté ou la masse).

The Master's Narrative: Resisting the Essentializing Gaze in Ian McEwan's Saturday

ABSTRACT Racist, sexist, and cultural essentialisms deny people subjectivity, and some post-9/11 literature suggest methods for resistance. In Ian McEwan's best-selling novel Saturday, white protagonist Henry Perowne may initially seem more likely to uphold rather than resist class, gender, and racial stereotypes. However, Perowne's objectification of three of the novel's nonwhite characters demonstrates how essentialisms reinforce the “master narratives” of financial wealth, professional success, and family bliss, and, in an unexpected twist, indicates how such pervasive stereotypes might be undermined.

'Black Shame' — the campaign against 'racial degeneration' and female degradation in interwar Europe

The 'Black Shame' campaign used stereotypical images of 'racially primitive' , sexually depraved black colonial soldiers threatening 'white women' in 1920s Germany to manufacture widespread concern and generate panic about the presence of tens of thousands of occupying French troops from colonial Africa on German soil. The campaign, which originated with the German government, quickly developed a momentum of its own and became an international phenomenon, spanning the political divide and incorporating figures from the Left and Right, trades unionists, Christian groups, women s organisations and key public figures including Edmund D. Morel and Bertrand Russell. It had followers throughout Europe, the US and Australia and was promoted through the modern media. The author here explores the ways in which the racial, sexual, class and national stereotypes that fuelled the campaign interrelated and reinforced one another, creating 'interlinked discriminations'.

False News Reports, Folk Devils, and the Role of Public Officials: Notes on the Social Construction of Law and Order in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, rescue and evacuation efforts were slowed by rumors of extreme violence in the flooded city of New Orleans, including reports of rampant murder, systematic rape, and gangs of armed thugs taking control. Moreover, public officials solidified these rumors by presenting them as fact to reporters. In this article, we examine the contribution of public officials to false news reports. Drawing on the sociology of rumor, we argue that, in part, their descriptions of extreme violence served as rationalizations for organizational and institutional paralysis. We illustrate this “interest group” interpretation with official statements and show how it can shed additional light on the role of class and racial stereotypes, the stigma experienced by Katrina evacuees, and the evolution of the New Orleans chaos narrative. Implications for rumor control and disaster management are discussed.