Category Archives: Sociology

Nearly half of American whites feel that discrimination against whites is similar to discrimination against minorities

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Survey data from last year suggest that nearly 50% of whites feel that whites are discriminated against at similar rates to minorities:

Nearly half (46 percent) of Americans agree that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. A slim majority (51 percent) disagree.

  • A slim majority of whites agree that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups, compared to only about 3-in-10 blacks and Hispanics who agree.
  • Approximately 6-in-10 Republicans and those identifying with the Tea Party agree that discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups.
  • Nearly 7-in-10 Americans who say they most trust Fox News say that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. In stark contrast, less than 1-in-4 Americans who most trust public television for their news agree.

So what media you watch the most or political groups you identify with colors your perceptions of what racial groups suffer discrimination? Considering this, I wonder if most American whites could describe a situation where they have personally suffered racial discrimination or whether these data reflect larger perceptions about American society (“people out there are against us/taking our jobs/working the system”). I wish there were some follow-up questions here…

There is also some interesting data here on opinions of Muslims: Americans generally support religious freedom but aren’t as willing to extend this to Muslims.

 

Keeping your lawn nice under pressure from your neighbors

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A Canadian journalist explores why he recently started pulling dandelions out of his lawn:

Well, according to University of Toronto sociologist Brent Berry, I’ve likely knuckled under to the social pressures that come with people living in proximity on modern North American urban landscapes.

“It’s all part of human nature,” says Berry, an American-born associate professor whose research focuses on urban sociology, among other things. “People strive to live in homogeneous communities where they and their neighbours conform to certain standards. Toeing the line is a social control thing (and) it’s fascinating how that manifests itself in regards to confronting nature.”

In other words, I’ve become weed-whipped.

Not that that’s a bad thing, according to Berry.

Lawns, he says, are in some ways public expressions or extensions of who we are as individuals. Messy people are more likely to have a messy yard, while fastidious individuals – especially those who are retired and have both the time and money needed to create and maintain a weed-free lawn – are likely to have, well, you know.

“Every human being likes to have control over their environment,” says Berry. “Lawns are like personal grooming.”

I’ve heard arguments about the status lawns can convey but I’ve never heard it compared to personal grooming…

Another note: it isn’t just the social pressure of neighbors. This social pressure has been enshrined in local ordinances where people can’t have grass above a certain height (say 6 inches) or can’t have certain plants or weeds. Your neighbors may not like your lawn and impose negative sanctions on you (you don’t want to be the one with the lawn full of dandelions) but an increasing number of municipalities will simply come mow your lawn and bill you for it.

Sociologist Duncan Watts helped come up with the idea for the Huffington Post

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Here an interesting sidelight to sociologist Duncan Watts career: he helped create the Huffington Post.

The origins of the now famous Huffington Post began at a lunch in 2003 between AOL’s Kenneth Lerer and author and sociologist Duncan Watts. The two met to discuss Watts’ book, and left with the beginnings of the Huff Post.  The Columbia  Journalism Review recently gave its own take on Watts’ book, Six Degrees, that inspired Lerer from the get-go and on the history of The Huffington Post as we now know it. According to CJR, before AOL’s purchase of HuffPost in 2011, the company was not known for revenues or breaking news stories. However, the website had managed to master social media integration and search-engine optimization.

Here are more details from the story in the Columbia Journalism Review cited above:

He brought the book with him and Watts would recall that the copy was dog-eared, the flatteringly telltale sign of a purposeful read. Lerer had a plan and he wanted Watts to help him. He had set himself an ambitious target. He wanted to take on the National Rifle Association.

He told Watts: “I know the answer to this is somewhere in these pages.”…

Ken Lerer listened, and he was not deterred. Networks did, in fact, occur—vast networks through which previously disconnected people suddenly found themselves joined together, perhaps to share an idea, a song, a sentiment, a cause. Why not then try to create a network that could challenge the vast and powerful and sustaining network of the NRA?

“I know the answers,” Watts told him. “I am confident they are not there.” Then, having deflated Lerer, Watts threw him a lifeline: “Maybe my friend Jonah can help you.”

An interesting read: in order to fight the NRA and counter the DrudgeReport, people wanted to make the Huffington Post both viral and sticky.

However, from his Twitter account, here is Watt’s Apr 18 take on the CJR piece:

Six degrees of aggregation: A fascinating (in my biased opinion) take on the origins of the Huffington Post.

Conservationists/residents, Will County fight over prairie plantings in the backyard

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Here is an intriguing case that pits conservationists versus suburban government: should homeowners be able to have native prairie plantings in their backyard?

Since then, a two-year legal battle has spread like unruly crab grass across state and federal courts with no end in sight. Will County authorities have spent more than $50,000 on an outside lawyer to respond to civil rights claims while prosecuting the Frankfort-area family [includes two U.S. EPA employees] over the plants…

In March, the county offered to dismiss its ordinance violation case if the couple would drop their claims and allow inspectors to take another look at their property. The couple sought, among other things, a written apology, annual payments to care for the plot and for the county to highlight the wetland as a model of suburban native landscaping…

One neighbor says her family now uses more weed-killing chemicals to keep their lawn looking good, and another has stopped speaking with the offending couple, though one neighbor said she’s reluctant to oppose plants that are native to the area…

Will County says the problem isn’t with native landscaping, but with the Frankfort Square couple’s refusal to follow the rules. Mary Tatroe, head of the state’s attorney’s civil division, said the couple failed to live up to two separate agreements and was taken to court over the “noxious weeds” on their property.

In December, the county passed a new ordinance that allows native plantings under certain conditions along with fines and penalties of up to $525 per day for violations. Tatroe said the Frankfort Square couple still would be in violation of the new code, both because of the weeds and the lack of a 5-foot buffer from their neighbor’s property.

Does this sort of thing only happen in America?

If the article has all of the facts correct, this seems like a fairly straightforward case: local governments, whether they are municipalities or counties (which has jurisdiction here because this couple lives in an unincorporated area), can have rules about gardens and plants. If the couple want to change these rules (such as how far native plantings can be from an adjacent property), it may be more productive to do these outside of court. On the other hand, if the couple is trying to make a public statement about native plants and what is allowed, a lawsuit may just get people’s attention. Then again, a lawsuit sounds combative and this whole matter has also apparently set off unpleasantries in the neighborhood (don’t mess up my lawn with those “native weeds”!).

It would be interesting to know in how many places in the United States it is illegal to have native plants. The topography and vegetation in many places (including Illinois) has changed quite a bit…and I assume most people like it that way? (Let’s be honest: most people probably never think about it.)

No agreed-upon standard on how to measure a house’s square footage

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You might think this would have been settled some time ago but apparently not: builders, real estate agents, and assessors do not have a common standard by which to determine the square footage of a house.

Many shoppers blindly trust that the size of a new home featured in an ad or brochure is accurate. But the reality is that no official industry standard exists for calculating residential square footage, nor is there widespread consensus on the correct measuring methodology.

Some builders and agents, for example, tally a home’s total footprint, including uninhabitable space (such as areas between walls), while others round off calculations to the next highest number…

Steve Carr, president of Naperville-based Carr Building and Development LLC, said in new construction the builder or architect usually determines square footage calculations.

For resale homes, square footage is typically determined by the seller’s real estate agent (who will measure the dimensions or obtain predetermined measurements from the county assessor’s office) or by an appraiser, who is enlisted by the seller or, if an appraisal is ordered, the buyer’s lender, Wittman said.

So it sounds like the square footage is determined by whoever has a financial interest in the number. It would be interesting to do a study and look at a sample of homes and see whether the square footage fluctuates depending who is doing the measuring (a buyer, seller, or assessor).

There is some interesting discussion later in the article about how homes cannot strictly be compared on the price per square foot as there are other factors involved. This is true but I think this is misleading: there are few figures that people start with when looking for a home and square footage is one of them (perhaps alongside how many bedrooms the home has). I have thought in the past that people who buy homes for their square footage are different kinds of people (social class, taste) compared to those who buy for the architecture of the home or perhaps the neighborhood.

All together, square footage matters for everyone involved in the building, buying and selling, and taxing of homes and I’m surprised that there is no single standard. Who would lose the most by doing this?

The need to study language AND culture

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A literature professor argues that in order to truly learn and use a language, you must also learn about the culture in which the language is used:

I have been asked several times at my university in Oman to do a brief “cultural introduction” to native speakers of English from North America and Europe who have come to improve their Arabic. I start by mentioning that there is a large difference between learning how to speak a language and learning how to navigate a culture. Then I segue into a discussion of how to dress appropriately. My watchwords are: no knees or elbows on display in public. Usually, at this point, several of the listeners look angry, disbelieving and/or bored, especially the men wearing tight, casual T-shirts and women in spaghetti-strap underwear shirts…

My attempts to make Westerners understand that they will need to make adjustments to fit into Omani society have not gone well. The most common response is, “But I am me. They will just have to accept me as I am.” The problem with the “I need to be me” response is that most Westerners do not realize that the consequences of “being me” are not the same as in the West. Omanis rarely use direct confrontation and will simply avoid a person who they feel is violating cultural norms.

The trick is to find a balance between integration and self-integrity while learning not just the language but also how to use it in a culturally appropriate manner. For example, most Gulf Arabs use an indirect communication style. They will rarely make a negative comment in public and never convey negative information that they do not want to share. For example, if there is a specific need to convey a warning or bad news, Omanis will often recruit an intermediary to deliver it. That is why I, a non-Omani, have been asked to give the “dress and act politely” lecture to Western students…

The other answer I get when Westerners refuse to, say, comb their hair, smile when greeting an Omani, or stand up to shake hands, is that “I don’t need to talk to people—I just need the language.” As a literature professor, I find this bewildering. Imagine a person who visited Britain having read all major political-theory textbooks but never having seen Monty Python, read Wordsworth, tasted tea, or been to a soccer game. Could that person cope with references to the “Beeb,” “Oxbridge,” “Beckham,” “twee,” or “pillock”? Words such as “slamming,” “in the dumps,” “bummed,” or “shambolic” don’t show up in vocabulary lists. So much of daily language is slang and metaphors that if a person is not speaking often with native speakers, she or he will never be able to carry on a normal conversation in that country. The last response I often get from Arabic language learners, is “I don’t plan to live in this country, so I don’t need to fit in here.” While it is true that the people who say this may never live in Oman, if they have careers that involve familiarity with the Arabic language, literature, politics, or business, they will probably meet some Omanis down the line. Imagine the icebreaker or dealmaker comments that a person will have at hand if she or he can greet an Omani with a local expression or a local joke.

There is much more to language than just the words, grammar, and inflections: language is a window into much larger cultural frameworks that are full of complicated symbols, values, and meanings.

It sounds like the language learners described above want to learn the language but don’t want the language to affect them too much. In other words, they want the skill of being able to speak another language (and can be perceived as being really marketable) but they want to keep the language at arm’s length. To some degree, this sounds like modern day ethnocentrism: “I want to learn your language to be able to talk to you but I don’t want to have to learn about what makes you tick because that wouldn’t be worth my time.” Of course, it could very well be worth one’s time for business or political or social purposes as the examples at the end of the last quoted paragraph above illustrate.

But, it sounds like a larger issue here is explaining to students why one should learn a new language: is it about checking off a box on a list of high school or college requirements? Is it about being able to put this on a resume? Is it about becoming “smarter” or more “cosmopolitan”? Is it about learning how to authentically interact with cultures different from your own? This last reason fits with calls for students to learn cross-cultural skills as they will go on to navigate a world where more frequently cultures interact and sometimes clash.

The increasing sadness in pop music songs

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A psychologist and sociologist looked at Billboard pop music hits since 1965 and found that the songs have become more sad:

“As the lyrics of popular music became more self-focused and negative over time, the music itself became sadder-sounding and more emotionally ambiguous,” according to psychologist E. Glenn Schellenberg and sociologist Christian von Scheve.

Analyzing Top 40 hits from the mid-1960s through the first decade of the 2000s, they find an increasing percentage of pop songs are written using minor modes, which most listeners—including children—associate with gloom and despair. In what may or may not be a coincidence, they also found the percentage of female artists at the top of the charts rose steadily through the 1990s before retreating a bit in the 2000s…

Strikingly, they found “the proportion of minor songs doubled over five decades.” In the second half of the 1960s, 85 percent of songs that made it to the top of the pop charts were written in a major mode. By the second half of the 2000s, that figure was down to 43.5 percent…

“The present findings have striking parallels to the evolution of classical music from 1600 to 1900,” Schellenberg and von Scheve write. “Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries …. Pieces tended to sound unambiguously happy or sad. By the 1800s, and the middle of the Romantic era, tempo and mode cues were more likely to conflict,” which allowed composers to express a wide range of emotions within a single piece.

I would be interested to hear how they relate these changes to larger social forces: does this line up with a greater sadness in society or perhaps the ability or proclivity to express negative emotions? I also wonder if the data is skewed at all by only looking at Top 40 songs – does all music reflect this or only the most popular songs (which then reflect the influence of musical gatekeepers such as radio stations, journalists, critics, and music labels)?

Also: could we have a period where we return to more major mode music? Can a musical genre, whether classical or pop music, recover from an extended period of “sadness”?

Study: American “multiethnic neighborhoods are populated mainly by Latino and Asian families,” not by Whites and Blacks

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A new study in American Sociological Review shows that residential segregation still endures as “multiethnic neighborhoods are populated mainly by Latino and Asian families”:

Researchers who analyzed the mobility trends of more than 100,000 families in metropolitan areas over nearly three decades found that the majority of blacks and whites continue to live in neighborhoods with high concentrations of residents of their own race…

Sixty percent of families leaving black neighborhoods moved to a similar community and nearly 75 percent of whites transitioned from a mostly white neighborhood to another white area.

Only about 19 percent of blacks and 2.4 percent of whites moved to a multiethnic neighborhood.

Both whites and blacks were more likely to move to diverse areas with new housing, while there was more of the churning effect in older neighborhoods.

While recent figures might suggest that residential segregation has decreased in recent years, there are still some stark differences. The three most interesting findings to me:

1. The long-standing black-white differences continue to matter but the positions of Latinos and Asians within American society are more fluid (partially due to more immigration in the last half-century).

2. The summary also suggested the study found that there is more diversity in neighborhoods with newer housing as compared to neighborhoods with older housing stock. A couple of things could be happening here: this could be referring to more suburban neighborhoods and it could also be the result of class differences (newer housing often being more expensive to purchase).

3. I like the emphasis in this study on tracking where people move from and move to. In other words, do people move to similar kinds of neighborhoods over time or do they move up some sort of socioeconomic ladder? It sounds like there isn’t as much movement as people might think.

Diamond grinding to reduce highway noise

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One Lake County community is paying out of its own pocket to reduce noise on I-294 by diamond grinding the road:

The village [of Green Oak] will pay nearly $338,000 for a process called diamond grinding to hopefully reduce the racket along that stretch of road.

“The idea here was to grind it and produce a quieter pavement and pavement noise in the lower frequency range so it wasn’t so obnoxious,” Village Engineer Bill Rickert said.

That sound also described as “singing” by Rickert spurred several complaints after the tollway widening was completed about three years ago, and sent village leaders on a quest for a solution…

In the simplest terms, the concrete road surface had been tined or grooved perpendicular to the road surface, he said. The diamond grinding changed the grooves to run parallel, evoking “more of a corduroy-type feel,” and theoretically producing lower noise levels in frequencies less noticeable to the human ear.

While diamond grinding emerged as the village’s proposed solution, it isn’t used by the tollway as a noise reducing technique.

It would be interesting to see how this solution compares with building sound barriers – is diamond grinding cheaper or more effective? If this is an effective technique and people agree about this, why doesn’t the Tollway use it?

I have had some more interest in this lately because our neighborhood borders a busy arterial road that is being expanded from 2 to 4 lanes. Because of this, sound barriers have been installed. I don’t think they look too bad with a sort of faux beige brick look. Granted, I don’t live in a house that backs up to these walls and I assume there is a price (in housing value) to pay for backing up to these walls. Going further, at night we can faintly hear the nearby highway that is 1.5 miles away – it is a sort of background noise. But having grown up close to a railroad track which produced more sporadic but louder noise, can’t you simply get used to these things? Perhaps the difference here is that people in these neighborhoods near the Tri-State haven’t had this level of noise until the highway was expanded.

Upcoming film about a unconstructed 90,000 square foot mansion

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I’ve seen several references to the film The Queen of Versailles which comes out later this summer. Here is what the movie is about:

A Florida real-estate tycoon and his appealing, immensely flawed wife try to build the country’s biggest McMansion in photographer-turned-filmmaker Lauren Greenfield’s documentary, which is stranger than any work of fiction. Surrounded by controversy since well before its Sundance premiere (when subject David Siegel tried to sue the festival), “Queen of Versailles” veers from profound human compassion to domestic horror as Siegel’s wife Jackie wanders through her enormous but trashed home scraping dog crap off the carpets. It’s like a Theodore Dreiser novel for our time, infused with the vivid, vulgar spirit of reality TV. (Opens in theaters July 20; VOD release is likely but has not been announced.)

There is one problem with this: the home at the center of this film is not just a regular American McMansion.

At 90,000 square feet, it will be America’s largest single residence, boasting ten kitchens, a private ice-skating rink, and enough tacky antiques to make Michael Jackson blush. It’s telling that while the couple’s dream house was inspired by the famed palace, it was most directly modeled on a Las Vegas theme-park imitation of French grandeur.

A home that is 90,000 square feet is far beyond a McMansion. There are not many homes in the United States that are 90,000 square feet so it is difficult to argue that this home is mass produced. The home is named “Versailles,” referring not to some builder’s model but rather the well-known French palace. The home may be tacky and not have a lot of architectural merit but this is home is way beyond the size of anything that can be reasonably called a McMansion.

In reading several early reviews of this film, it seems like critics think this film is about more than just the vanity of a few wealthy people: the uncompleted mansion serves as a metaphor for the excesses of the early 2000s.