Abstract
Having “The Talk”
In a Social Problems article titled, “Black Girls and the Talk? Policing, Parenting, and the Politics of Protection,” Shannon Malone Gonzalez examines distinctions between how middle-class and working-class Black mothers discuss the risk of police sexual violence with their Black daughters. Gonzalez introduces two types of socialization practices: the respectability talk and the predatory talk. She draws on 30 in-depth interviews with Black mothers where respondents answered questions on their own “talks” as children and the conservations they have with their children (both sons and daughters). Framed in [working class] intersectionality theory and previous literature on the socialization of Black children, Gonzalez explores how Black girls of different social classes are given specific “talks” which both differ from the “talks” their brothers have and their peers of different social classes hear.
Gonzalez examines the types of socialization practices Black parents engage in with their daughters and their class-based distinctions.
R, Flickr cc
Before describing the class-based socialization differences, Gonzalez establishes that all respondents, regardless of social class, had experiences with the police in the past year. The mothers described experiences of gender-based harassment from police officers, including sexual assault, physical assault, and racial profiling. Moving to socialization practices, middle-class mothers relied on the respectability talk, which relies on Black girl stereotypes and the individualization of encounters with the police. The respectability talk encourages Black girls to act like a “lady,” make sure they aren’t yelling or cursing and generally acting in a very presentable way. Middle-class mothers explain to their daughters how officers might be intimidated by an independent Black woman, thereby pushing them to constrain their agency and modify their behavior to conform to socially-accepted gender, race, and class norms as a means of protecting themselves. In contrast, working-class mothers (and sometimes middle-class mothers, in conjunction with the respectability talk) rely on the predatory talk when talking to their daughters about police sexual violence. The predatory talk teaches girls strategies to be aware and limit the possibility of sexual violence from police. Mothers tell their daughters to call a family member, write down the officer’s badge number, and other ways to navigate an encounter where police sexual violence is a risk.
Gonzalez writes that the respectability talk gives Black girls middle-class attributes and the predatory talk gives Black girls strategies for dealing with police sexual violence. The respectability talk focuses on individual responsibility, while the predatory talk emphasizes that the officers are the ones to blame if sexual violence occurs. As a result of the intersection between class and race, Black mothers provide different strategies to their daughters from ensuring their safety and wellbeing from the threat of police sexual violence.
Corrections
Spring 2022 article
Also in the Spring 2022 issue of Contexts, the article titled
The Whiteness of NPR
In Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Laura Garbes explores the beginnings of National Public Radio (NPR), and how its founders created a racialized organization, even if not their intention. In “When the ‘Blank Slate’ Is a White One: White Institutional Isomorphism in the Birth of National Public Radio,” Garbes draws on theories of racialized organizations and institutional isomorphism to make the concept of white institutional isomorphism, which is a process that explains how actors adopt racialized practices in developing their new organization. By analyzing the first ten years of NPR’s meeting minutes, external reports, and other historical documents, Garbes aims to understand how the deeply embedded racialized norms of NPR’s founders created an organization that was ultimately racially discriminatory. NPR founders believed that they were creating a diverse, inclusive organization reflective of the American public, yet, even as they sought to be racially inclusive, founders’ white habitus and reliance on white institutional norms resulted in an organization-building process embedded within racialized practices.
Garbes frames her analysis with a brief history of educational radio and how Black and minority voices have been historically excluded from this discussion. Her results draw on Paul DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell’s three types of institutional isomorphism: coercive, normative, and mimetic, as she applies each of these pressures to the founding of NPR. Coercive isomorphic pressures created an elite station membership criteria for NPR, which largely excluded minority non-commercial stations; normative isomorphic pressures resulted in NPR executives being found through weak ties and networks of the existing white, male Board and President; mimetic pressures meant that NPR executives saw the “broad” audience they were reaching as white, male America as they imitated the style of the already white, existing field. These presented results illustrate how NPR, due to the established whiteness of the non-commercial radio field and the white habitus of its early executives, created a racialized organization where minority voices were kept out.
Garbes aims to understand how the deeply embedded racialized norms of NPR’s founders created an organization that was ultimately racially discriminatory.
Dmitri Demidov, Pexels
Garbes’ concept of white institutional isomorphism, and her research more generally, adds another dimension to institutional isomorphism and interrogates how white habitus and internal racial bias result in racialized organizations, even where intentions are anti-racist. Institutional isomorphism, as Garbes argues, occurs on the micro-social level, where organizational actors, who hold these racial biases, have the power to shape organizations, often in a racialized direction as in the case of NPR.
Limits of Police Reform
Since the murder of George Floyd catapulted the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement onto the global stage, Minneapolis has been a site of continued scrutiny and concern over state violence and biased policing practices. In their article for the American Journal of Sociology, Michelle S. Phelps, Christopher E. Robinson, and Amber Joy Powell reflect on the limits of police reform. By situating their research in 2017-2019 and in heavily policed neighborhoods of Minneapolis, this research has temporal and locational significance as it captures the moment where white awareness of racial injustice and biased policing was growing, but prior to the inflection point of 2020.
The article titled, “‘We’re Still Dying Quicker Than We Can Effect Change’: #BlackLivesMatter and the Limits of 21st-Century Policing Reform,” addresses the questions of how those in heavily policed communities make sense not only of police violence but also recent efforts to reckon with said violence. It also investigates how dimensions of race, such as racialization and racial privilege, shape residents’ perspectives on police and police reform. Over the course of the two-year study, researchers conducted 112 interviews with those who reside or are active in the North Minneapolis community. While Minneapolis was put into a global spotlight in 2020, the authors point out that this area was also a hotspot of early BLM activism and activity.
The authors of this study found that, by and large, residents of this area across demographic groups identified racialized police violence as a serious social problem. For many white residents, this awareness or recognition of racialized police violence was new and an extreme minority of residents in the sample resisted the idea that police violence was racialized and instead identified crime and neighborhood exposure to crime as greater threats to their neighborhood. Researchers found a relationship between the respondents’ race and their understanding of the scope and potential for alleviating the problems associated with systematic police violence. This research ultimately reveals that there are limitations to the effect of protests, media campaigns, and even white proximity to Black experiences with racialized state violence in terms of effecting structural change in the policing and criminal legal system in the United States. Indeed, these efforts of structural change are more likely to be successful if broader structural, cultural, and political transformations take place to redress racialized state failure.