feature article joshua gamson and pearl latteier
do media monsters devour diversity?
Photo by A. Pierce Bounds, Dickinson College
Politicians and critics have long lamented that the rise of huge media conglomerates means the death of diversity in newspapers and on the airwaves. But research suggests that media conglomeration, however distasteful, does not necessarily
reduce diversity.
At the Philadelphia airport, local and network media reporters await the return of Song Yongyi, a librarian
from Dickinson College who had been imprisoned in China while doing research on the Chinese Cultural
Revolution. Their reports will be shaped in part by the kinds of news organizations they work for.
Something odd is going on when Ted Turner, Trent Lott, Al
Franken, the National Rifle Association, Jesse Jackson and
Walter Cronkite agree. Opposition to media consolidation has
turned these adversaries on most issues into bedfellows. When
the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) prepared to
further loosen restrictions on media ownership—a move
approved by the FCC in June 2003 and then blocked by a circuit
court three months later—the decision was met with a motley
chorus of criticism. FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein called
the problem “the McDonaldization of American media.”
Former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun stated that “we have to
ensure that there is a diversity of ownership, a diversity of voice.”
And Cronkite, the veteran and widely-respected news anchor,
declared concentration “an impediment to a free and independent press.” The new rules would “stifle debate, inhibit new
ideas, and shut out smaller businesses trying to compete,” said
Turner, whose vast holdings include CNN, TBS, and HannaBarbera cartoons, and who is a major shareholder in parent
company Time Warner AOL. “There are really five companies
that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It’s not
healthy,” Turner added.
Critics and policymakers have long been troubled by consolidation among America’s mainstream media. Opponents of
the Communications Act of 1934—which established the FCC
and allocated the majority of the airwaves to commercial
broadcasters—warned that commercial, network-dominated
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contexts summer 2004
needs and interests of America’s diverse population, and not
just those of its elite. When a small group of “gatekeepers”
controls how information circulates, the spectrum of available
ideas, images and opinions narrows. Big media companies
prefer programming and voices that conform to their own
financial interests, and they make it nearly impossible for
smaller, independent companies to offer alternatives.
This frightening vision is intuitively reasonable. But a close
look at decades of scholarship on the relationship between
media ownership and content diversity uncovers a surprising
story—one much more complicated than the vision of media
monsters gobbling up diversity. Scholars have zeroed in on
three broadly defined types of diversity in media: format diversity, demographic diversity and idea diversity. The research suggests that when it comes to “diversity,” media-consolidation
critics are, if not barking up the wrong tree, at least in need of
a more nuanced, sharper, more carefully directed bark. Indeed,
effective opposition to media ownership consolidation may
require, ironically, acknowledging the ways media giants
sometimes promote diverse content.
format diversity
Offices in Berkeley, California for KPFA, the flagship radio station
of the independent Pacifica Broadcasting Network. Consolidated
ownership of many local radio stations, most notably by Clear
Channel Communications, has dramatically decreased local programming while increasing the number of syndicated shows that
air simultaneously in multiple markets.
radio would squelch, as the ACLU director then put it, the few
small stations that “voice critical or radical views.” And in
1978, the Supreme Court ruled “it is unrealistic to expect true
diversity from a commonly owned station-newspaper combination.” Nonetheless, during the past two decades—and with
a big boost from the Telecommunications Act of 1996—media
ownership has become increasingly concentrated in fewer and
fewer hands. Time and Warner Brothers merged into the
world’s biggest media company in 1989. A decade later,
Viacom and CBS set a new record for the largest corporate
merger ever. And the 2000 AOL-TimeWarner merger was several times bigger than that.
The critics’ logic is this: Citizens need access to diverse
sources of news and opinions to make well-informed decisions
about how to vote and live. Also, media should address the
Suppose you turn on your TV after dinner, and every single channel is broadcasting either an American Idol spin-off or
a makeover show. That would mean the after-dinner time slot
in your area lacks “format diversity”—or variety in programming—turning everything into, as FCC commissioner
Adelstein describes it, “Big Mac, fries and a Coke.” In particular, observers worry that consolidation undercuts local content. Most experts agree that this has happened to radio since
the late 1990s, as Clear Channel Communications has gobbled up stations throughout the country. Programming that
was once determined locally is now overseen by Clear Channel
programmers headquartered elsewhere, and local disc jockeys have been replaced by a single show that plays simultaneously in multiple markets. Consolidation of radio ownership
encourages this centralized, cost-cutting format. The same
logic would be expected in newspapers and television; running wire service copy is cheaper than employing staff
reporters, and standardized production is less expensive than
hiring a team of local broadcasters.
Of course, because different audiences are attracted to different content and format types, it also makes business sense
for a conglomerate to maintain different sorts of programming—including locally produced content—just as General
Motors produces lines of cars for different types of customers.
This can actually promote format diversity. In a market with
three competing stations, argues communications law expert
summer 2004 contexts
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A bank of television sets that are all tuned to the same station in an electronics store in Emeryville, California. Consolidation among
media companies does not simply increase or decrease the diversity of media content and formats. Some large companies homogenize
their offerings, but others diversify to attract different audiences.
Edwin Baker, each station will try to attract the largest possible audience by providing fare that the majority prefers. The
stations will wind up sounding pretty similar. In contrast, if all
three stations are owned by the same company, ownership
has no incentive to compete against itself, and will try to make
the stations dissimilar in order to attract different audiences.
Similarly, it makes sense for entertainment conglomerates to
make their various holdings more rather than less distinct in
format, and to build a “diverse portfolio” of media properties.
Viacom does not want its UPN (“America’s Top Model,” “The
Parkers,” “WWE Smackdown”) to be like its CBS (“CSI,”
“Judging Amy,” “Late Show with David Letterman”), its
Sundance Channel (documentaries on HIV/AIDS, the films of
Patrice Chereau) to air the same kind of material as its Spike
TV (“Sports Illustrated’s 40th Anniversary Swimsuit Special”),
or its Downtown Press (“chick-lit” like Alexandra Potter’s
Calling Romeo) to publish what its Atria Press does (“academic” titles like bell hooks’ The Will to Change). This multiple-brand logic promotes rather than reduces format diversity.
Research suggests that media consolidation does not simply increase or decrease format diversity. Some studies compare the fate of local or public-affairs programming in
independent versus conglomerated companies. Others look
for shifts in content after a publication is bought by a bigger
company. The results are tellingly mixed. Some find big differences between the offerings of independent and corporate-
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owned outlets, but ambiguous effects on format diversity.
Others find little or no difference at all. For example, a 1995
study found that two years after Gannett—owner of USA
Today, among many other papers—bought the Louisville
Courier-Journal, the paper devoted almost 30 percent more
space to news than it had before, and 7 percent less space to
advertising. On the other hand, the average story became
shorter, the percentage of hard-news stories smaller, and wire
stories came to outnumber staff-written ones. Within the
expanded news reporting, the proportions of local, national,
and international news changed little. The paper became
more like USA Today, but simultaneously the “news hole”—
the amount of content consisting of news reporting—
increased from when it was independently owned. Other
studies of Gannett-bought papers—in Arkansas and Florida—
found that international and national news decreased after
the company took over. Local news, often in the form of crime
or disaster stories, actually increased after consolidation.
A recent large-scale, five-year study by the Project for
Excellence in Journalism also found mixed results. The
researchers asked who produces “higher quality” local television news, which they defined as news that “covers the whole
community,” is “significant and informative,” demonstrates
“enterprise and courage,” and is “fair, balanced, and accurate,” “authoritative” and “highly local.” Although they did
not isolate “format diversity” in their study, they nonetheless
offer some clues about the relationship between ownership
and formats. On the one hand, just as anti-consolidation critics would predict, of 172 newscasts and 23,000 stories,
researchers found the “best” programs overall tended to
come from smaller station groups or from stations affiliated
with but not owned by networks. On the other hand, they also
found that “local ownership offered little protection against
newscasts being very poor.” As an evening’s cursory viewing
might confirm, local news is weak regardless of whether or
not it is part of a conglomerate. Even more to the point, the
researchers found that stations whose parent companies
owned a newspaper in the same market—exactly the kind of
“cross-ownership” that consolidation critics worry about—
produced “higher-quality” newscasts, including more locally
relevant content. They ran more stories on “important community issues” and fewer celebrity and human-interest stories.
Cross-ownership shifted the types of programming provided,
but in the direction most critics of cross-ownership seem to
favor. Moreover, being owned by a small company, while an
advantage when it came to “quality,” was certainly no guar-
antee of a diverse mix of local and non-local content.
For a glimpse of how big media corporations—aided by
government deregulation—sometimes do reduce format diversity, look at the current state of commercial radio. In a series of
scathing articles for Salon, Eric Boehlert exposed Clear Channel
as “radio’s big bully,” known for “allowing animals to be killed
live on the air, severing long-standing ties with community and
charity events, laying off thousands of workers, homogenizing
playlists, and a corporate culture in which dirty tricks are a way
of life.” Concentrated, conglomerate ownership is certainly a
prerequisite for being a big bully, and Clear Channel has used
its power to undercut local programming and standardize
rather than diversify both music and talk on radio. But radio’s
striking homogeneity is not just the result of concentrated
ownership. As Boehlert wrote in 2001, radio “sucks” (similarsounding songs, cookie-cutter stars) because record companies, through independent promoters, pay radio stations huge
amounts to get their songs on playlists. With or without Clear
Channel, material without money behind it—alternative styles
of music, music by artists who do not fit the standard celebrity
Mergers and acquisitions in the media industry changed ownership of the cables attached to this television set four
times in the past 12 years. Each change involved the purchase of a smaller company by a larger one. Each change
also increased the number of channels available to subscribers and the cost of monthly service.
summer 2004 contexts
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Photo by Mr. Kenn
Even though critics worry about cross-ownership of news outlets, television stations whose parent companies own a newspaper in the same market may produce higher quality broadcasts.
model, innovative and therefore risky formats—does not get
airplay. It is not that ownership has no effect on format diversity, only that the impact is neither uniform nor inevitable. It is
instead influenced by particular corporate strategies and the
inner-workings of particular media industries.
demographic diversity
In everyday conversations, diversity usually refers to demographics: whether a workplace employs or a school enrolls
people of various racial, ethnic, gender and economic categories. How the media represents and addresses the interests
of America’s diverse populations—who gets seen and heard—
is, appropriately, often in question. Studies routinely find that
the individuals appearing in mass media are disproportionately
white, middle-class men between the ages of 20 and 60. But
they have not figured out how, if at all, concentrated corporate ownership affects representation. This should not be surprising. A gap between the diversity of the population and
media images of that population existed long before the rise
of the media giants. And it clearly cuts across commercial and
non-commercial media: studies of public broadcasting’s guests
show little demographic diversity, while daytime talk shows
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contexts summer 2004
produced by for-profit conglomerates—however tawdry—
offer some of the greatest demographic diversity on television.
Both government agencies and scholars have assumed
that the key to ensuring demographically diverse content is
demographically diverse ownership. Until recently, the FCC
and the courts attempted to promote this kind of diversity by
giving licensing preferences to minority-owned (and sometimes female-owned) broadcast stations. The FCC halted the
licensing preferences in 1995, and the rapid consolidation of
deregulated media companies makes it even less likely that
companies and stations will be minority-owned today.
Although it might seem reasonable to think that fewer minority-owned companies will mean less demographically diverse
content—in surveys, minority owners do report being more
likely to produce “minority” programming—studies of content do not back up such claims. Two studies comparing
minority-owned (African American and Latino) radio stations
to white-owned stations in the 1980s found that owners’ ethnic backgrounds did not significantly affect demographic representation in their programming. There are many good
reasons to pursue affirmative action in media ownership and
employment, but ensuring diversity in media content is not
one of them.
If anything has promoted demographic diversity in media
content, it is the rise of niche-marketing and narrow-casting,
which target previously excluded demographic groups with
images of themselves. Although minority owners often typically
start that process—gay marketers tapping the gay niche, Latino
publishers targeting Latino readers—it proceeds regardless of
whether they remain owners. Indeed, niche marketing has
become a media-giant staple: Time Warner AOL started the
highly successful People en Español in 1996, NBC-owned Bravo
produced the summer 2003 hit “Queer Eye for the Straight
Guy,” Robert Johnson became the first AfricanAmerican billionaire when he sold Black Entertainment
Television to Viacom in 2002, and the largest shareholder of radio’s Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation is
Clear Channel. Multicultural content and oligopoly
media ownership are clearly not incompatible.
harder to discern. Generally speaking, one might observe that
the American media environment has been an inhospitable place
for radical, dissenting voices before, during and after the rise of
media giants. More specifically, scholars have found that viewpoint diversity does not line up neatly with particular ownership
structures. For example, the recent Project for Excellence in
Journalism study of local television measured how many sources
were cited in a story and how many points of view were represented in stories involving a dispute or controversy. Locally owned
stations presented no more viewpoint diversity than non-locally
idea diversity
Almost everyone pays lip service to the notion
that citizenship thrives when people are exposed to a
variety of contending viewpoints. As the number of
owners decreases, critics of media conglomeration
argue, so does the number of voices contributing to
the “marketplace of ideas.” Media conglomerates
with holdings in all kinds of other media and nonmedia industries have the power to censor the news
in accordance with their interests. There is plenty of
anecdotal evidence that consolidation tips content
against ideas critical of the corporate owners. The Los
Angeles Times, for example, failed in 1980 to cover a
taxpayer-funded $2 billion water project that stood
to benefit the Times-Mirror Company. Likewise, NBC A newspaper stand offering both mainstream and alternative publications.
remained silent on the 1990 boycott of their owner Studies of newspaper content suggest that independently owned papers are
no more likely to include diverse ideas and perspectives than are papers
GE. And CBS’s America Tonight show had a proowned by conglomerates.
tobacco bias in the mid-1990s, when the Loews
Corporation, owner of Lorillard Tobacco, held a conowned ones, and small companies no more than big ones.
trolling interest in CBS. Disney-owned ABC News even canNetwork-owned-and-operated stations did better than smaller,
celled an investigative report about sloppy background checks
less well-funded affiliates. The weak connection between viewat Disneyworld. A recent study also found a “synergy bias”
point diversity and monopoly ownership is actually old news. In
among media giants, in which media companies slip unana classic 1985 study, Robert Entman examined the first page and
nounced promotions of their other products and services into
editorial section of 91 newspapers in three types of markets:
newscasts—as when ABC devoted two hours of Good
competitive local markets with multiple, separately owned
Morning America to Disneyworld’s 25th Anniversary. In short,
papers; monopolistic markets with only one local newspaper;
media corporations act in their own special interests, promote
and “quasi-monopolies,” where joint-owned or joint-operated
ideas that suit those interests, and sometimes “spike” stories
papers share a market. He measured diversity as the number of
through self-censorship.
people or organizations mentioned in each story, and the numBeyond these forms of direct self-interest, though, the conber of stories that presented conflicting opinions. The study
nection between ownership concentration and idea diversity is
summer 2004 contexts
31
found that on no measure did independent papers present more
diversity than papers in monopoly or quasi-monopoly situations.
In all of the papers, more than half the stories involved fewer than
two actors, and less than one-tenth presented conflicting opinions. In other words, regardless of who owned them or how
competitive their markets were, the papers were not exactly
brimming with lively debate and diverse ideas.
centrated, conglomerated media ownership facilitates diverse
media formats, opinions and demographic representations.
A genuine commitment to diverse media content may require
an unsettling task: encouraging those conditions even while
opposing the corporate domination of media, feeding the
giants while trying to topple them. ■
recommended resources
the challenge for media reformers
The radical concentration of global media ownership has
spawned at least one excellent, rebellious child: a vibrant,
smart, broad-based media reform movement. Groups like
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, the Media Alliance, the
Center for Digital Democracy, Independent Media Centers,
the People’s Communication Charter, and many others, are
growing in strength, alliance and effectiveness. There are
many reasons to object to media oligopolies that research on
diversity does not speak to: the concentration of private power
over a public resource in a democracy is wrong in principle;
standardized media are part of a distasteful, branded, chainstore life of Barnes and Noble, Starbucks, and Disney; corporate, multinational media are increasingly unaccountable to
the public; and a corporate press is probably a less adversarial
press. But the research on media concentration should challenge this reform movement to relinquish at least one sacrosanct belief. If our goal is vibrant, diverse media content—what
the People’s Communication Charter, an international activist
group, refers to as the “plurality of opinions and the diversity of
cultural expressions and languages necessary for democracy”—
then research suggests that concentrated ownership is not
equivalent to reduced diversity. Sometimes corporate media
giants homogenize, and sometimes they do not. Sometimes
they shut people up and stifle dissent, and sometimes they
open up extra space for new people to be visible and vocal.
That they do so not because they are committed to the public
good but because diversity sometimes serves their interests
does not negate the outcome. And, romantic notions notwithstanding, independently owned and noncommercial media
hardly guarantee diverse content.
Just as there are different kinds of diversity, there are also
different kinds of ownership concentration. A single corporation might own all the major outlets in a single market, or
a chain of newspapers, or a film production company and a
theater chain, or music, television and book companies.
These different kinds of concentration promote and inhibit
different kinds of content diversity. Researchers, activists, and
policymakers must identify the conditions under which con-
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contexts summer 2004
Bagdikian, Ben H. The Media Monopoly (6th ed.). Boston: Beacon
Press, 2000. In this new edition of a now classic book, Bagdikian presents an impassioned argument against media concentration.
Baker, C. Edwin. Media, Markets, and Democracy. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press, 2002. Baker demonstrates that media
products are not like other commodities, and he argues that market
competition alone fails to give media audiences what they want.
Columbia Journalism Review. “Who Owns What?” Online.
http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners. This informative website lists the
holdings of approximately 50 major media companies.
Croteau, David, and William Hoynes. The Business of Media: Corporate
Media and the Public Interest. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press,
2001. This book contrasts two different views of media conglomeration: the market model, which regards people as consumers, and the
public-interest model, which regards people as citizens.
Compaine, Benjamin M., and Douglas Gomery. Who Owns the
Media? Competition and Concentration in the Mass Media Industry.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. This book provides
a detailed look at the current media industry and challenges common
assumptions about the dangers of ownership concentration.
Entman, Robert M. “Newspaper Competition and First Amendment
Ideals: Does Monopoly Matter?” Journal of Communication 35, 2
(1985): 147-65. This study of newspapers in competitive and noncompetitive markets concludes that market competition does not
guarantee content diversity.
Horwitz, Robert. “On Media Concentration and the Diversity
Question,” Department of Communication, University of California,
San Diego, 2003. Online. http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/
ConcentrationpaperICA.htm. This is a careful discussion of the media
ownership debate, empirical research and the virtues of a “mixed
media system.”
Napoli, Philip M. “Deconstructing the Diversity Principle.” Journal of
Communication 49, 4 (1999): 7-34. Napoli argues that the FCC policies on media ownership have long been based on unproven assumptions about the relationship between ownership diversity and content
diversity.
©2012 The Weinstein Company
mediations
Tarantino’s depiction of the Ku Klux Klan as a group of ill-equipped buffoons challenged dominant notions of white supremacy and masculinity.
functions as the evil sidekick to his master’s nefariousness; both characters have
access to capital and exercise obscene
forms of power. But unlike DiCaprio’s
Candie, Jackson’s character is comic: he
is the passive, stupid, older black male
figure who functions seamlessly within
his own subordination. Black passivity,
in the film, is funny and repellant. Or as
Frantz Fanon, in his polemic Black Skin,
White Masks, tells us, “For not only must
the black man be black; he must black in
relation to the white man.” At the very
least, Tarantino’s depiction of a passive
black population slanders the enslaved
and misunderstands history. At the Sesquicentennial of Emancipation, we might
productively remember that the enslaved
walked away and became “contraband.”
Their status as soldiers (that is, men with
guns) came far, far later.
On the contrary, white masculinity is the identity most associated with
mastery, wisdom, and grand narrative.
It is anything but passive. We see this in
Tarantino’s cinematic attempt to spoof
the KKK: in Django, this group of white
men are buffoons, complaining that the
eyeholes in their hoods are not sewn in the
right place and it’s blocking their view of
the black people they are trying to kill. The
comedic scene displaying white masculinity as stupid, racist, and violent is, perhaps,
meant to undercut or justify all of the
violence yet to come. Or, maybe it is meant
to lighten the mood, nothing more than
a moment of irony? As we know, KKK
costumes are symbolic of white power,
and yet this scene turns them into clothes
sown by women (who is the Betsy Ross
behind the KKK?). In any case, the scene
domesticates the violence of white men,
rendering it dumb and ineffective, less
repellant than its racialized counterpart.
In the end, both colonial slavery and
the contemporary context of the global
war have economic roots, so maybe a
high-budget, high grossing film is just
the way to take them on. The former
used dehumanized bodies as capital, the
latter engages systematic brutality for
politico-economic ends. The global war
and the global prison complex rely on
celling black and brown bodies, a process that emerges from the ideological
sustenance of both black passivity and
racialized violence. Can we even imagine
a film that depicts Muslims successfully
killing (white) Americans in a passionate,
rageful way as a redemptive-glorified
operation that reveals the white imperial
state and nationalized racism? I suspect
such a film will never be made. Historical
and contemporary patterns of racialized
punishment reveal Django’s absurdity
rather easily. This film is not only a transparent attempt at moral elevation, but an
act of bad conscience: a way to lick the
wounds of the past by disarming contemporary black and brown rage through
fictional vindication.
Moon Charania is in the gender and sexuality studies department at Tulane University. She studies visual
culture, transnational feminism, and the politics of
postcolonialism.
queasy questions about media effects
by cynthia chris
In February 2013, an online petition
asking NBC to withdraw or recast an
episode of Law & Order: Special Victims
Unit (SVU) garnered thousands of electronic signatures. The episode, “Monster’s Legacy,” was slated to guest-star
former boxer Mike Tyson and scheduled
to air on the eve of One Billion Rising, a
global event tied to Valentine’s Day and
designed to raise awareness of sexual
violence. NBC responded as though it
had simply stumbled into bad timing,
rescheduling the episode and capitalizing
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contexts.org
on the protest by advertising “Monster’s
Legacy” as “The controversial episode
you must see.”
But the complaints went beyond
the episode’s timing. Marcie Kaveney,
a rape crisis counselor, launched a
Change.org petition when she learned
that Tyson would appear. She says SVU is
a show that is seen by survivors as “their
show because it is their stories.” Most
of these stories involve sexual assault,
incest, or the sexual abuse of children.
Interviewed on CBC Radio’s show Q,
Kaveney said that survivors find “comfort and solace” in SVU, since it assures
them that someone will “stand up for
them and see justice for them.” In this
light, casting Tyson seemed unconscionably callous to many viewers, given
that in 1992, when Tyson was already
a deposed heavyweight champion, he
was convicted of rape. He served half
of a six-year sentence.
On the show, Tyson played Reggie Rhodes, a character sentenced to
death for murder. In the plot, prosecutors
imitating art?
The petition and the dedicated
viewership it revealed reminds us that
media consumers relate to the texts that
they encounter in all kinds of ways. Pure
imitation is perhaps the least of these
responses, and there is a range of opinions about how much media influences
its consumers.
Among critical media studies scholars, there is near-consensus that proof
of the old theories of “hypodermic” or
“magic bullet” media effect is rare. Audiences, these scholars believe, are active
and discerning, basing their choices and
actions on multiple factors; the media
plays an auxiliary role that is difficult to
pin down. In landmark studies such as
1955’s Personal Influence, “Encoding
and Decoding” by Stuart Hall, Janice
©2013 NBC Universal, Inc.
represented the victim as a random victim, but, as Detective Olivia Benson
(played by Mariska Hargitay) uncovers,
he was once the leader of a childhood
gang rape of Rhodes. Haunted by shame,
Rhodes had never revealed his past as a
victim of several predatory men, until
Detective Benson was able to bring it out,
leading to Rhodes’s exoneration and the
imprisonment of another of his childhood
abusers (played here by a cast-againsttype Ed Asner).
The kind of fandom Marcie Kaveney
describes, where victims watch to see
other victims vindicated, suggests a twist
on Seymour Feshbach’s “catharsis theory.” In his 1971 article on “Television
and Aggression,” Feshbach observed
decreased aggression among boys
watching violent TV, suggesting that the
media could provide a safe outlet for
dangerous urges. Focusing on the victim rather than potential perpetrators of
violence, Kaveney’s comments suggest
a scenario in which disturbing content
can be redemptive when it provides an
alternative ending. Heroic rescue, punishment for the perpetrator, healing for the
survivor—any of these more “happy endings” may have eluded real-life survivors
but give them some solace now.
The public’s reaction to Tyson’s role on Law & Order SVU reminds us that we interact
with media in complex ways.
Radway’s Reading the Romance, Henry
Jenkins’s Textual Poachers and Nationwide Television Studies, Ellen Seiter’s The
Internet Playground, and Mary Gray’s Out
in the Country, media sociologists and
audience researchers have discovered
an array of surprising uses of popular
culture. Virtually none involve “direct”
effects. This is to say, critical media studies
assert that a violent movie will not, on its
own, make you violent. (From this perspective, it should follow that no cathartic
television episode can heal all wounds.)
interpretations of, say, heavy metal music
or first-person shooter videogames, the
story is that these media are causal factors in real-world violence. In 1990,
the parents of two young Nevada men
sued members of the band Judas Priest,
claiming that subliminal messages in their
songs had driven their sons to suicide.
While the case was dismissed, media
producers have since been regularly
taken to court or excoriated by the press
when crimes or accidents “copycatted”
from their entertainment have taken
Disturbing content might be redemptive if it
provides an alternative ending.
Psychologists studying media violence have come to some different
conclusions. Many of their studies have
suggested that exposure to violent media
increases aggression on at least a shortterm basis, reaffirming Albert Bandura’s
findings in the famous “Bobo doll” experiments at Stanford in the early 1960s. In
the psychology literature, a clear picture
of long-term effects still remains elusive.
Neither Leonard Eron and Rowell Huesmann’s longitudinal studies, which began
in the 1960s, nor subsequent work in the
same vein, have unpacked the degree
to which media influences behavior, or
individuals prone to aggression self-select
violent media.
And when it comes to mainstream
Contexts, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 60-62. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2013 American
Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI:10.1177/1536504213499881
place. (Yes, we are talking about one
form of media taking another to task.)
For example, too much may have been
made of the fact that the shooters in the
Columbine High School massacre, which
killed 13 in 1999, were fans of the games
Wolfenstein 3D and Doom and loved the
movie Natural Born Killers. Natural Born
Killers made over $50 million at the box
office, and thousands of people play the
same video games without taking the
action outside their living rooms.
Interest in the effects of media violence on heavy consumers, especially children, abounds. On February 18, 2013,
the Christian Science Monitor reported
on a study from the journal Pediatrics,
which, instead of assessing aggression
SUMMER 2013
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mediations
following exposure to violent media,
monitored apparent increases in empathy after exposure to media showing
cooperation. The next day, the New York
Times covered University of Illinois professor Carol L. Tilley’s examination of the
interviews that had informed the influential 1954 takedown of comic books,
Seduction of the Innocent by Frederic
Wertham. Tilley found that Seduction’s
author had manipulated data to serve his
anti-comic agenda, blaming the medium
for turning juveniles into delinquents and
encouraging homosexuality. (Batman and
Robin in tights? Kids might get ideas!)
The same week these stories appeared
and more than two months after Adam
Lanza killed 8 adults (including himself
and his mother) and 20 schoolchildren in
Connecticut, CBS This Morning and PBS
Newshour were apparently having déjà
vu, reporting breathlessly about Lanza’s
obsession with Call of Duty and other
violent video games.
To be fair, the man who took the
lives of 77 and wounded over 300 in
a violent 2011 spree in Norway, openly
horse-backed, pistol-packing vengeance?
All we can agree on is that Django raked
in over $150 million at the box office and
was rewarded with five Oscar nominations. The rest is an open debate fueled
more by passion than science.
what the watchdogs watch
Serious conversation about the material effects of America’s gun-loving culture
has long been shunted from politics. For
example, since 1995 Congress, pressured
by the National Rifle Association, had
prevented the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention from funding research on
gun violence as a public health issue. In
January 2013, President Barack Obama
embraced increased gun control efforts
and rescinded the ban with an executive
order “directing the Centers for Disease
Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.” Better late than
never, thought many. A gruesome string
of mass shootings had left 6 dead and
13 wounded in Tucson, Arizona; 12 dead
and 58 injured in Aurora, Colorado; and
the Sandy Hook murders. Tragically, these
Critical media studies assert that a violent
movie will not, on its own, make you violent.
claims to have “trained” by playing Modern Warfare 2 and World of Warcraft
(the same game famously played by outspoken marriage equality proponent and
professional football player Chris Kluwe).
The point is, we really don’t know why
so many are drawn to these entertainments, nor to what effect. We don’t
even have a firm grasp on the scope and
received meanings of violence contained
within popular entertainment products.
Film critics scurried to parse distinctions
between realistic and cartoonish scenes
of mayhem in Django Unchained, many
rendering it as both an educational look
at the brutality of slavery and a cathartic
revenge fantasy. Others (myself included)
found it a nauseating, narcissistic bore
(see the related essay elsewhere in this
issue). But has it led anyone to exact
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were just the most spectacular of the over
30,000 gun-related deaths in the United
States in 2012.
If research on gun violence withered
during the federal funding moratorium,
rigorous studies on the relationships
among media and other kinds of violence
have been even less supported, and their
industries are just as vocal about keeping
scrutiny off their products. For instance,
videogame industry representatives have
talked a good game about keeping sexual violence out of their releases, while
criticism has still dogged the eroticized
violence and implied threats of sexual
assault in Hitman, Tomb Raider, and
Grand Theft Auto. At the same time,
consumers like Marcie Kaveney have
proclaimed they’d stop watching SVU—
or the whole of NBC—because of its
offensive episode, but audiences were
down for all programming the night
“Monster’s Legacy” aired. Even powerhouses like Modern Family and American Idol (neither a hotbed of non-verbal
violence) went unwatched, too. Maybe
everyone was catching up on Downton
Abbey, preparing tax returns, or finally
slogging through Fifty Shades of Grey?
In another, more important question, for survivors who were fans of
SVU, at least until this “slap in the face”
(Kaveney’s characterization of the casting
stunt), isn’t it retraumatizing to watch
scenarios similar to their own victimization, again and again? Wouldn’t they
have spurned SVU long before this
episode? For my own part, I had long
included the Law & Order franchise in my
TV diet, until a harrowing 2008 episode
in which Hargitay-as-Benson, undercover
in a women’s prison, was cornered by a
gun-wielding male guard. No amount
of stolid narrative closure—one pleasure
of SVU has always been that bad guys
get caught—could temper the graphic
fear contained in those scenes, and
I never went back. I wouldn’t call the
effect precisely hypodermic, but there
was something sticky and toxic at work
in the show, and I could not overlook it
ever again.
So what makes one person’s nightmare trigger another person’s electronic
therapy session and a third person’s
harmless entertainment? Are some
provoked to aggression by exposure to
violent media? Are individuals prone to
violence for other reasons drawn to—and
perhaps even provided a harmless outlet
in—violent media? Are the rest of us
unscathed, or even benefitted in surprising ways? We have little to go on but gut
feelings, and for now, mine is telling me
to reach for the remote control.
Cynthia Chris is in the media culture department
at the College of Staten Island. She is the author
of Watching Wildlife and co-editor of Cable Visions:
Television Beyond Broadcasting and Media Authorship.
pedagogies
teaching
and learning
beyond bullying
Early one Monday morning in December of last year, we arrived tired and
excited at West High School (all names
are pseudonyms) wearing T-shirts and
carrying a banner—all with The Beyond
Bullying Project logo. The storytelling
booth, a wooden box measuring 7 by
3 feet, had been installed the previous
week, complete with recording equipment, lighting, foam to dampen the
sound and ensure privacy, and a folding chair. Student advisors to the project
had decorated the booth with construction paper rainbows, feather boas, and
posters. “Tell Your Story” flyers hung
throughout the hallways.
For the next two weeks, our team of
researchers and students was stationed
at a table next to the booth, handing out
chocolate, granola bars, raffle tickets, and
business cards that encouraged people to
“Follow Us” on Facebook, Instagram, and
Twitter. As students, teachers, and staff
walked by, we invited them to enter the
booth and tell a story about lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)
sexuality: they were invited to talk about
themselves, someone else, a rumor, a joke,
a question, or a political opinion; it could
feel big and important or silly, ordinary,
or even boring; it could be true, we said,
but it did not have to be. Any story about
LGBTQ sexuality was welcome, and no
one from the school would hear their story
or know what story they told. We were
intentionally non-directive. “Any story,”
we cajoled. The invitations left space for
students and adults to think, reflect, enter
the booth individually or in groups, and,
often, return over and over again.
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The first morning, Evan, our main
school contact, was chatting with us
when Randee, a queer girl in her first
year at West High, approached the
booth—one of only a few students who
had spoken to us. Evan had been working closely with us from the start of our
project. He often described himself as gay
and worked closely with queer students.
Randee described herself as queer. She
was of mixed race, round-bodied, with
acne, long brown hair, braces, and an
easy smile. On this day, she wore long,
slouched shorts and sneakers. The school
campus was quiet as most students were
in class, so we asked where Randee
was supposed to be. The two laughed
as Evan pointed to Randee. “This,” he
said, “is what truancy looks like.” Randee
smiled and explained that her teacher
had kicked her out of class, so she had
nowhere to be.
Randee wanted to tell a story about
losing friends after she came out in eighth
grade. Initially, Randee asked one of the
team members to go into the booth with
her—she was unsure she could tell a
story without prompting—but after a few
minutes chatting, Randee decided to tell
the story on her own. When she exited a
few minutes later, Randee seemed quite
pleased with herself. Later that morning, Randee returned. She did not have
a story to tell this time, but she preferred
hanging out at the booth to attending
geometry class. Randee spent a lot of
time around the storytelling booth during
our two weeks at West High. She encouraged friends to tell their stories, ate her
lunch with us, and played basketball
© Beyond Bullying Project
by jessica fields, laura mamo, jen gilbert, and nancy lesko
The booth where high school students
shared their stories of LGBTQ sexuality.
one afternoon with one of the research
assistants.
But not everyone was happy to see
us. We encountered students, teachers, and administrators who kept their
distance from the booth, their eyes
down as they walked by, and ignored
the team’s coaxing to get involved. The
booth changed the patterned uses of
school spaces. Inside the booth, students,
teachers, and staff told their stories about
LGBTQ crushes, families, friendships,
break-ups, coming out, ambivalence,
bravery, and aspirations that go well
beyond the framework of bullying. Outside the booth, students, teachers, and
staff figured out where they stood—literally and figuratively—in relation to a
booth devoted to LGBTQ sexuality.
re-framing bullying
Evan, Randee, and The Beyond Bullying Project team live in a surprising and
© Beyond Bullying Project
The storytelling booth affords participants the chance to think, reflect, and speak out
about bullying.
welcome moment—one in which people
generally agree that anti-gay bullying
constitutes a social problem to which
policies, communities, and schools must
respond. Increasingly, pedagogy, policymaking, and public conversations about
LGBTQ youth in the United States focus—
almost exclusively—on preventing antiLGBTQ bullying. Schools aim to minimize
the risk of depression and suicide among
LGBTQ youth and punish those who fail
to practice sexual tolerance.
While The Beyond Bullying Project
advocates for the right of LGBTQ students, teachers, and families to live free
from harassment in schools, we also
worry that framing conversations about
LGBTQ sexuality as a problem of bullying
narrowly links LGBTQ sexuality to risk and
danger. Within the terms of this logic,
stories of LGBTQ sexuality can reliably
enter schools only under the cover of risk
prevention and health campaigns—to be
gay in school, this story goes, is to be, at
best, in need of tolerance and, at worst,
at risk of anti-gay violence, mental illness,
and suicide. But for Randee, LGBTQ sexuality means more than that in her school
day: it is a source of pleasure in a boring
day, a way to connect with adults, and
something she speaks freely about—even
if it has meant losing some friends.
LGBTQ sexuality and gender exist in
all parts of the school day, intersecting
with other social identities, and leading
to many ends. LGBTQ sexuality moves
through the school, is subject to routine
policing, calls out for recognition, offers
students a way to interrupt their teachers’
lessons, and bumps up against not only
concerns about bullying and harassment
but also ideas about race, class, gender,
and religion. Too often, the dominance
of discourses of bullying threatened to
obscure these scenes of sexuality.
present our findings during the school’s
anti-bullying week. In a similar vein, one
teacher favored the project because it
supported LGBTQ students and discouraged self-harm and suicide. Students acting as project advisors were excited to
tell their stories, but worried their peers
might avoid the booth for fear of being
labeled and harassed as gay.
These interactions point not only
to how difficult it is to get beyond bullying to stories of discomfort, hope, and
ambivalence surrounding LGBTQ sexuality and gender, but also to how particular
ways of knowing about LGBTQ sexuality
have become institutionalized in schools.
studying schools, uncovering
stories
When we designed The Beyond Bullying Project, we anticipated neither all
the obstacles we would face nor the ways
those obstacles would come to re-shape
the project. The obstacles were varied—
from getting approval from three universities and three public school systems to
conduct the research to finding ways to
construct booths in three high schools,
from designing efficient consent processes
The Beyond Bullying Project aims to solicit and
share stories beyond victimization and bullying
and to provoke new ways of understanding
LGBTQ sexualities in schools.
For example, while principals, teachers, administrators, and students have
been enthusiastic about The Beyond
Bullying Project, they have also had difficulty getting “beyond bullying.” Early
on, a school administrator who spent
hours helping us bring the Beyond Bullying Project to his high school referred
to the storytelling booth as a “kiss and
tell” booth and said he hoped we would
Contexts, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 80-83. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2014 American
Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504214558226
to helping nervous teachers talk about
LGBTQ sexuality with their students and
colleagues. These obstacles demanded
methodological shifts, but they also
opened us up to pedagogical questions.
Ultimately, a research project became
an occasion for teachers and students to
rethink experiences of teaching and learning. The project, as a storytelling installation and a series of events, provided
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© Beyond Bullying Project
pedagogies
The Beyond Bullying Project helps high schools imagine a broader range of sexual and
gender possibilities.
opportunities for students and teachers to
question and challenge popular or commonsense ideas about schools. In creating
a two-week long storytelling event, we
disrupted business as usual. In soliciting
and sharing stories beyond victimization
and bullying, we offered times and spaces
for something “other” to occur.
The Beyond Bullying Project aims to
capture these times, spaces, scenes, and
stories—from participants who identify
as straight and as LGBTQ—suggests they
offer ordinary and extraordinary narratives of LGBTQ sexuality. Young people
talk about how they want to support
their gay friends even though those once
familiar friendships now feel strange.
Others talk about feeling bullied and
wonder if it was because of their perceived race, gender, or sexuality. Some
Schools are full of stories about LGBTQ sexuality
that go beyond bullying, but these stories
circulate outside of the official discourses of
school curriculum, programs, and policies.
movements and to provoke new ways
of understanding LGBTQ sexualities in
schools. In 2013-14, across three racially
diverse high schools (one each in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and New York City),
we collected over 400 stories ranging in
length from one to thirty minutes about
friendship, family, love, culture and the
ordinary trials of living your life in school.
As researchers, we now listen to the stories and the ways they push against the
equation of LGBTQ sexuality and bullying.
Our initial listening to the collected
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discuss how their own experiences of
victimization have helped them understand how it might feel to be different in
high school; some talk about their own
or another’s homophobia and how they
make sense of the intolerance.
Other young people describe navigating relationships with their parents
and their cultural and religious communities, charting the intersections of
sexuality, race, and religion. Students talk
about reading a gay novel, admiring a
gay athlete, or watching TV shows with
LGBTQ characters. Many people describe
having lesbian and gay parents, uncles,
aunts, neighbors, cousins, and grandmothers. Some youth tentatively question
their own sexual or gender identities,
risking the use of a term—“bisexual,”
for instance—perhaps for the first time.
Others buoyantly claim their right to be
genderqueer or gay or trans.
Teachers and principals discuss
their relationships with LGBTQ students,
remember their own experiences in high
school, or admit confusion about how
to introduce LGBTQ issues into the curriculum. What surprises us across these
400 narratives is how multiple and varied these stories are; every storyteller has
a relationship to LGBTQ sexualities and
communities that stretches far beyond
the limited rhetoric of bullying. The space
of the booth allows students, teachers,
and staff to tell stories of experiences or
opinions they may not have voiced before.
The stories we have heard tell us not
only that schools are full of stories about
LGBTQ sexuality that go beyond bullying, but also that these stories circulate
outside of the official discourses of school
curriculum, programs, and policies. When
you make room for conversations about
LGBTQ sexuality beyond bullying, you
also create other pedagogical spaces that
expand the intimate possibilities available
in schools.
storytelling and belonging in
school communities
Beyond anti-bullying interventions
and the language of risk, vulnerability,
and tolerance lay struggles for belonging
and recognition. Drawing on the work
of sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn,
our team understands young people’s
membership and participation in school
communities—indeed, in all communities—as “a matter of belonging, which
requires recognition by other members
of the community.” Recognition occurs
through local, national, and life histories,
in policy debates and school cultures, and
in the negotiation of student statuses
and hierarchies. In Beyond Bullying, we
move away from LGBTQ sexualities and
youth as problems for education and
health and toward recognizing LGBTQ
youth like Randee—and LGBTQ sexuality
more broadly—as vital to the cultures and
practices of school communities.
To achieve meaningful recognition,
educators and administrators must notice
the many ways LGBTQ sexuality circulates
through schools—as a set of identities,
desires, and behaviors; as a site of curiosity and connection as well as harassment; as a future left unconsidered and
unimagined; and as a concern taken up,
neglected, celebrated, and demonized by
adults, peers, families, and communities
in students’ and teachers’ lives. Teachers
and students will have to tell and hear the
ordinary narratives of LGBTQ lives—of,
for example, families, friendships, breakups, and aspirations—as part of what can
count and be valued as human. They will
also have to recognize that these narratives vary and shift as they travel across
regional, racial, gender, socioeconomic,
and other boundaries.
Our time at West High suggests that
telling and listening to these stories will
be challenging and generative. This is a
pedagogical challenge—what innovations are necessary for schools to welcome stories that move beyond bullying
and imagine other possibilities of LGBTQ
sexuality and gender and LGBTQ people
to belong in schools? How will teachers
need to rethink Randee’s truancy, recognize her complicated friendships, and
welcome her multi-faceted queerness?
preliminary lessons
The Beyond Bullying Project aims
to provoke new ways of understanding,
allowing, and imagining sexualities to
flourish in our schools. We do not yet
know if the stories collected will offer
radical imaginaries of LGBTQ sexualities
in schools. But so far, our experience
in the schools tells us that strange and
unexpected things can happen when a
school devotes two weeks and a hallway,
auditorium, or courtyard to an LGBTQ
storytelling installation.
Teachers can confront the limits
of their own imaginations, students can
dream of dancing on stage, pizza par-
stories about LGBTQ sexualities and lives,
we have crafted research methodologies
that push boundaries of teaching, learning, questioning, participation, and that
expand our sense of what it means to
“intervene.”
These methodologies reflect our
belief that stories, both told and heard,
have the potential to create new and
expanded possibilities for LGBTQ and
straight youth alike. Social science
Teachers and students need to tell and hear
the ordinary narratives of LGBTQ lives—of, for
example, families, friendships, break-ups, and
aspirations—as part of what can count and be
valued as human.
ties can shift into conversations about
the meanings of “bisexual” for young
women, and a school’s outsiders, students like Randee, can find a new, if temporary, place to hang out during lunch.
With this research project, we have collected data on how diverse school communities receive conversations about
LGBTQ sexualities, but we have also witnessed how schools can be transformed,
however fleetingly, by the arrival of a
giant wooden box and a commitment
to talking and thinking about LGBTQ
sexualities and lives.
The preliminary lessons we are taking from this project are that sometimes
LGBTQ sexualities and lives link with formal school curriculum, but not always;
sometimes school climates continue to
obfuscate the language and existence of
queerness in their halls; and, sometimes,
making a space for conversations about
LGBTQ sexuality opens up ancillary space
for all sorts of other things to occur.
In our attempts to ask schools to
hear and recognize a wider range of
research tells us that stories can do
things that straightforward instruction
and lessons cannot accomplish. Stories
can help extend our sense of LGBTQ lives
across generations, place, race, religion
and gender categories, to recognize and
include diverse experiences and communities. And, perhaps most significant for
our study of schools, and as sociologist
Ken Plummer informs us, “Stories can
be heard when a community has been
fattened up, rendered ripe and willing to
hear such stories…. they gain momentum from an interpretive community of
support.” Schools can aspire to be such
communities.
Jessica Fields and Laura Mamo are at San Francisco
State University in sociology and sexuality studies, and
health education, respectively. Nancy Lesko is in education at Columbia University; and Jen Gilbert is in
education at York University. The team and the Beyond
Bullying Project can be followed at beyondbullyingproject.com; on Facebook, www.facebook.com/BeyondBullyingProject; and on Twitter @bbproject2014.
Their study was funded by the Ford Foundation Supporting Sexuality Research, 2012-2014.
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cultivating S-P-E-L-L-E-R-S
by pawan dhingra
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“Shrewdness,” says the announcer to a young boy whose turn it is at
the microphone to spell correctly. The boy stares at the pronouncer.
Wearing a red t-shirt and blue shorts, with dark hair that covers most
of his forehead, the boy rocks back and forth on his feet. Does he
know the word? Is this going to be the one that sends him home?
Will he make it to the next round? He tentatively asks a set of questions: “Can I have the definition of the word?” “Can you repeat the
word?” “Can I please have the part of speech?” His arms are down
and hands clasped over his waist, with his fingers rolling over one
another. His eyes are open wide with a sense of fear. He tentatively
Mark Taylor, Flickr CC
starts, “Shrewdness. S-H-R-E-W-D-N-E-S-S. Shrewdness.”
A speller pauses at the 2012 Rockville South Asian Spelling Bee.
Contexts, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 26-31. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-60521. © 2015 American
Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504215614000
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Scripps National Spelling Bee, Flickr CC
A spellers’ photobooth at the 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee.
It is a long two seconds. “That is correct,” the judge says
dispassionately, in effect adding to the tension that had been
building up for the past minute. The boy’s eyes roll, equal parts
relief and disbelief. As he takes his seat, another competitor steps
up to the microphone, and the suspense starts again.
This is not the Scripps National Spelling Bee. It is a spelling
bee organized by and mostly for Asian Indian Americans. Despite
the heavily ethnic presence, a passerby could be excused for
bees aren’t even the only competition that Indian Americans
dominate: they have won the past three National Geography
Bees, with seven of the 10 finalists in 2015 being of Indian origin.
Most Indian American youth do not engage in competitive
spelling, and about a quarter of Indian Americans have limited
proficiency in English. Still, it is safe to say that spelling bees
have a special resonance for many in this ethnic group. In fact,
there are two major competitions designed by and for Indian
Americans, each of which hosts regional competitions in about
twelve cities and a finals competition for the top competitors
in each city. Families drive for hours to reach these matches.
Indian Americans’ excellence in spelling bees has caught
the attention of mainstream media and the general public, and
not always favorably. News articles covering the trend often
compare the parents of winners to “Tiger Moms and Dads,”
meaning that the families push the children into the competitions and over-emphasize academics at the expense of children’s
other interests—even happiness. Attention is placed on the long
hours of study involved. As Sameer Pandya wrote in The Atlantic,
Indian Americans at the Scripps Bee have become “America’s
great racial freaks-and-geeks show,” a spectacle that is as much
gawked at as applauded by the general audience. On top of
this, racist social media responses to Indian Americans’ spate of
victories are now commonplace, even expected.
Rather than ask why Indian Americans keep winning the
bee, I have a different, more fundamental question: Why are
so many committed to spelling bees in the first place? What
motivates these families to spend so much time on bees? To
understand this group dynamic, I have interviewed over 100
persons, including parents and children, from across the country,
with a concentration in the Boston area. Families are mostly
Indian Americans, but include many non-Indians, engaged in
some version of extracurricular education like the spelling bee.
I have conducted ethnographic observations at eleven spelling bee competitions, in
people’s homes, and other related settings.
This article draws from my interviews and
observations with Indian American participants and their families.
As Sameer Pandya wrote in The Atlantic, Indian
Americans at the Scripps Bee have become
“America’s great racial freaks-and-geeks show,”
a spectacle that is as much gawked at as
applauded by the general audience.
mistaking this for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, broadcast
annually on ESPN. As of 2015, Indian Americans make up 15 of
the past 19 champions (including co-champions) of the Scripps
Bee, and, at the 2014 Bee, half of the 12 finalists were of Indian
origin. At the 2015 Bee, out of the top 49 spellers to make to
the finals, 25 were Indian American. The Scripps winner receives
$30,000, does the television talk show and news program circuit,
and becomes a hero to tens of thousands of children. Spelling
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the push beyond educational
excellence
For parents, spelling is a form of
hyper-education—a voluntary educational
pursuit for their children outside of school. Extra education is a
response, in part, to an anxiety over children’s college admission
prospects. Contemporary parents of many backgrounds sense
angst around college placement. Middle-class parents practice
“concerted cultivation”, including organized extracurricular
activities meant to foster life skills, with their young children
with college admissions in mind. As Hilary Friedman argues, this
cultivation can take the form of competitive activities. Families
Scripps National Spelling Bee, Flickr CC
feel that the sooner a child specializes in an activity, the more
likely the child will excel in it, thereby earning credentials to put
on their eventual college applications. Amit, an Indian immigrant
father, told me and a group of parents over lunch at a bee about
the need to specialize when young: “You cannot be jack of all
things, and that way gain nothing. So when you are focusing on
something, focus. Then they will love that, okay. ‘If I focus, I will
excel in this one thing, or if I focus on that [other] one, I will excel
in that, too.’” Children must specialize or “gain nothing” in life.
For these Indian American parents, the notion of competition is not a hypothetical problem awaiting their children in
late high school. Competition pervaded their own upbringings
in India. Raju, a father of a speller in a bee finals competition,
explained the “scarcity mentality” and its
impact on his parenting: “Every resource
in India is scarce. You have to be cream
of the crop to get anything into it. Ok, so
museum trips [for example]. I come from
a very suburban school [in India]. Twenty
kids from school are chosen to go on the
museum trip, so you’ve got to be good
at something [to be chosen]. … We have
this scarcity mentality built in, that we need to be there first
to get some resource. Otherwise it’ll be gone. So we have the
competitive thing built into us, so we are pushing our kids to it.”
While sports present a common avenue for gaining competitive credentials for youth, these Indian immigrant families put
more attention into education. The model minority stereotype
contends that Asian immigrants “overachieve” in school because
they are culturally drawn to education, but the reality is more
complicated. These families prioritize education as a way to stand
out within a competitive field, for one thing, because they did
not think that their child could excel in sports. As one Indian
American father explained while a group of fellow immigrant
parents nodded in agreement, “Some
of my [Indian] friends with whom
I spoke said, ‘Well, our kids cannot compete with the other kids in
swimming, they get tired out very
easily.’ … So those physical aspects
and also other issues come into play.
That’s why you scale down at sports
and look at other activities which
bring you to the top.” I should note
that many of these Indian American
kids still participated in sports—
though they weren’t expected to be
champions. According to parents,
sports were a way to make children
“well-rounded.”
Academics resonated with the
parents as an alternative competitive
venue in part due to their own upbringing and immigration patterns. They had immigrated to the United States mostly through
work visas, achieving upward mobility through education. As
Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou argue, Asians who immigrated as
professionals to the U.S. are a highly selected bunch, with higher
levels of education not only compared to other Americans but
especially so compared to those in their homeland. Well over
two-thirds of Indian Americans (age 25 and above) have a college degree or higher—more than double the national average.
While about one in ten Indian Americans has less than a high
school degree, these tend not to be the parents of children
involved in the bees. The parents of spellers are predominantly
college-educated and often work in STEM fields.
Families feel that the sooner a child specializes
in an activity, the more likely the child will
excel in it, thereby earning credentials to put on
their eventual college applications.
why spelling?
Given its commitment to education, why has the Indian
American community chosen spelling bees? Parents find the
preparation for the bee reminiscent of their study patterns in
India, with an emphasis on logic and memorization. These parents are fluent or at least proficient in English, which gives them
a significant advantage in not only training their children but
also, more generally, in being comfortable with exploring English
in greater depth. Similarly, parents and children appreciate that
spelling and academic pursuits make them more knowledgeable
about American culture. Families bond while studying.
But, a crucial part of the answer to “why spelling” involves
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Scripps National Spelling Bee, Flickr CC
2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee champ Sukanya Roy prepares for her CNN interview. She placed in the top 20 at the Bee in the
prior two years.
co-ethnic role models. Spelling caught on as Indian Americans
saw their co-ethnics achieve in this arena. It became a selfperpetuating cycle. When Nupur Lala won in the Scripps National
Spelling Bee in 1999 and was profiled in in the Oscar-nominated
film, Spellbound, she became a household name. Champions
serve as role models and provide a crucial spark to get the trend
going, for a community to identify with an activity. When I asked
a mother why more families did not pursue chess, for example,
as an extracurricular academic option, she told me to wait until
the first Indian American chess champion prevails—then we’d
see a flood of young Indian American players.
Even before Lala won Scripps, spelling bees had been a
nascent interest among Indian Americans. The North South
“When you’re in a community—if everybody in your family is
a doctor, you want to become one, right? If everybody is an
engineer in your community you want to become one, right?
… Other kids are doing, you’ll do it.”
the youth
Like with many other extracurricular pursuits, these kids
first became interested in bees often through a friend. Hema, a
former speller, explained her progression: “I initially started spelling bees because my oldest friends are Indian, and they would
do spelling bees and stuff, and I hung out with them. So, um,
then they, either aged out or stopped doing them, and I just
continued to do them because I was winning, at least like little
bees here and there.” Having competitions
designed for your own ethnic group made
it more likely that you would have friends
participating in it, and that made you more
likely to participate.
Friendships also serve as a continuing
motivation at the highest levels of competition. Youth form friendships at the bees. At the Scripps bees,
for instance, I have seen kids literally run around together in
the hotel. They go up to each other’s hotel rooms to chat. They
enjoy organized field trips together. Spellers want to repeat the
bees in part to reconnect with past spellers. They keep in touch
through social media.
While friendships provide an incentive to start and continue
participating in bees, these children also embraced the competitive element. Naresh started spelling at age five and said, “I saw
Champions serve as role models and provide
a crucial spark to get the trend going, for a
co-ethnic community to identify with an activity.
Foundation, one of the Indian American bee competitions,
started its competition in the mid-1990s as a way to boost Indian
Americans’ verbal SAT scores and support its charity efforts
toward education in India. Since then, another South Asian
American national spelling bee started, and local bees targeted
Indian Americans. The rise of these spaces created not just
opportunities to spell competitively but also the expectation to
do so. A father, Mihir sat up in his chair, as the two of us spoke,
to explain the impact of his peers on his parenting decisions,
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Scripps National Spelling Bee, Flickr CC
Speller Rohat Goyal poses with his family at the 2011 Scripps
National Spelling Bee.
somebody in the paper holding up a trophy, and it was that
year’s champion who, you know, seemed like was having a lot
of fun. So I told my mom that I wanted to win the spelling bee
and get that trophy.”
Many of the young people I interviewed compared the
competitive dimension to traditional sports. One youth aptly
called spelling “a brain sport.” Sonu told me, as we sat in his
family’s home in Dallas, TX, “It’s like golf in a way, in that you’re
really only competing against yourself. You have no control over
the success or failure of others, so at the end of the day, if you
don’t win, it’s something you could have
done better. I took that to heart and used it
as a measuring stick for myself, improving
each year I did it.”
On top of these motivations to
engage in bees, youth refer to what’s at
the heart of spelling: a love of words. This
is particularly the case for kids who show a penchant for spelling
and stick with the bee for years. A common trait among competitive spellers is they were voracious readers when young. As Hari
and I spoke during a lunch break at a bee, he reflected upon his
pre-elementary and lower-elementary years, saying, “I probably
read so many science fiction and fantasy books… I would get
20 books from the library, and I remember the librarians would
always raise their eyebrow, ‘Can this kid really read all these
books in three weeks?’ And I would be able to, because that’s
what I wanted to do.”
This is a child whose commitment to reading surprised
even librarians. Spellers quickly develop favorite words. They
appreciate words that derive from certain languages. They
develop rituals to study. And they are prepared for the pressure
on stage when spelling.
that promotes their children’s mobility. It makes sense to them,
given their own histories with education and immigration and
their sense of disadvantage in other competitive venues. Indian
Americans participate not as individuals nor even just as families,
but as community members inspired by co-ethnics.
I do not foresee asking my elementary-aged children to join
a spelling bee, primarily because they do not show an interest
in it, nor does my family feel any social pressure to get them
involved. That said, I understand what families in the bees are
trying to accomplish, much like I see worth in Little League baseball and gymnastic competitions. To each group (and subgroup),
their own. And I await the day when the spelling bee champion
is also the starting pitcher for her or his Little League softball or
baseball team. Given the number of hours required to excel in
both kinds of activities, I might be waiting a long time.
recommended readings
Hilary Levey Friedman. 2013. Playing to Win: Raising Children in a
Competitive Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
This book covers middle class families’ growing use of extracurricular activities, namely sports, dance, and chess, as a means to
instill a competitive spirit in children.
Annette Lareau. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and
Family Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Explores
the philosophies and practices of “how to raise children” among
middle- and working-class families, both Black and White, including their views on after-school activities.
Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou. 2014. “The Success Frame and
I await the day when the spelling bee
champion is also the starting pitcher for her or
his Little League softball or baseball team.
Achievement Paradox: The Costs and Consequences for Asian
Americans,” Race and Social Problems 6(1):38-55. This article
speaks to the drive for education by Asian Americans, including
references to their use of extracurricular education.
Kathryn M. Neckerman, Prudence Carter, and Jennifer Lee. 1999.
“Segmented Assimilation and Minority Cultures of Mobility,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(6): 945-965. How minority groups
might achieve mobility through strategies either unavailable to or
uninteresting to White, middle-class Americans, demonstrating
that assimilation is not always the best means for success.
Tony Wagner. 2010. The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our
Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children
Need—And What We Can Do About It. New York: Basic Books.
Interviews with parents and scholars’ reveal concerns about the
state of U.S. education in the world.
Pawan Dhingra is in the department of sociology at Tufts University. He was a
curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s “Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans
Shape the Nation.”
Indian Americans’ commitment to bees is not that different
from other communities’ commitments to specific extracurricular practices. The Indian immigrants see bees as an activity
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the
challenge
of
diverse
public
Dean Hochman, Flickr CC
schools
by toby l. parcel, joshua a. hendrix, and andrew j. taylor
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Wake County, N.C. citizens are divided. Some believe that school
integration—by race and social class—is important for the wellbeing
of all children. One citizen told us of the dangers of the opposite: “It
is not OK to segregate our schools. It is not OK to deliberately create
high-poverty schools and claim that you are going to have all these
fixes, whether it is funding or innovative programs, etc. It is just wrong,
and that is why I am in this debate.”
the district’s diversity policy in favor of one that placed more
emphasis on neighborhood schools.
These events garnered attention because they threatened
to roll back decades of successful school integration, a policy
vehicle for promoting positive race relations and facilitating
upward mobility. Integration had also been associated with
county growth and prosperity. Would these trends now be
reversed and mean the end of Wake County’s economic and
social progress? Would Wake become more like other large
school districts characterized by strong school re-segregation,
with negative educational and social consequences?
Ed Uthman, Flickr CC
Another parent’s concerns reflected the costs of implementing a “diversity” policy: “I see young children standing out there
in the cold and dark at 6:30 in the morning, and it is totally
obnoxious that any polite society would do this to the children.
It is not safe, it is not fair, and it certainly is not fostering any
good educational system; people generally want good schools
close to home.”
Heated debates around these issues culminated in a watershed Wake County school board election in October 2009
that switched the board from majority Democratic and liberal
to majority Republican and conservative, which resulted in
consequences. By early 2010, this new board voted to discard
School classrooms are often homogeneous by race and class.
Contexts, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 42-47. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-60521. © 2016 American
Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504216628843.
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consensus and its dissolution
Wake’s history shows that a large southern county comprised of urban, suburban, and rural populations could sustain
successful school desegregation over many years. In 1976, after
federal pressure, Wake County and the city of Raleigh merged
their school districts to create one countywide system of 55,000
students. Innovative superintendents used magnet schools
located in central Raleigh to entice White and middle-class
families to enroll their children, thus promoting voluntary school
integration through school choice. This worked: there were rising
test scores, decreased racial gaps in student achievement, and
strong satisfaction with schools among parents. Wake County’s
population rose, but the county was able to educate this growing
numbers of students, many of them from families migrating to
Raleigh from other parts of the country.
To promote desegregation in the early 1990s, up to 1,000
African-American and White children were bused across the
county each year, with minority children more likely to be bused
than Whites. This strategy meant that some children were
Younger children could not be assured they would attend the
same schools as older siblings. Parents could not be guaranteed
that relationships they formed with teachers, administrators and
other parents would pay off in the future. Population growth was
also increasing commute times for both parents and children,
who might be traveling many miles from home. Complaints
about annual reassignments increased.
A second school board strategy proved even more controversial. To make good use of fixed resources, the board
created year-round schools, which had some elementary and
middle-school children on three out of four nine-week tracks,
but rotated one group of students out at all times. Although
year-round schools required more personnel, this strategy cut
costs by slowing down the need for school construction. Some
parents liked year-round schools and sought them out. Board
policy eventually mandated large groups of families to enter the
year-round system or face unattractive alternatives. For example,
opting out of a year-round school could saddle some kids with a
longer bus ride and earlier pickup times. Families with a child in
a year-round magnet school who also had
a child in a public high school automatically
had kids on two different school calendars,
because all county high schools remained
on traditional calendars. By 2009, these
conditions were politically unsustainable.
We wondered, what is the price of diverse
schools? Had adherence to the diversity
policy come at too high a cost?
We began our study by reviewing
media reports, and continued by interviewing 24 locals who
were either pro-diversity or favored neighborhood schools. We
conducted two focus groups, and used those discussions to
help us develop a telephone survey for more than 1,700 Wake
County adults. We asked questions about learning benefits for
children when they experience economic and racial diversity in
schools and in classrooms; learning benefits from neighborhood
schools; opinions on the length of bus rides; implementation of
student assignment policy, general thoughts about the school
board, and a variety of social and background characteristics.
Heated debates around integration in Wake
County’s October 2009 school board election
threatened to roll back decades of successful
policy promoting positive race relations and
facilitating upward mobility.
transferred to new schools for reasons beyond graduating
to middle or high school. Children were often re-assigned in
groups, which preserved social ties but parental relationships
with schools and teachers were inevitably disrupted. Still, at
this time, complaints were few, especially compared to other
communities in the South.
The county prospered both socially and economically, but
prosperity had its price. By 2000, suburban communities such
as Cary and Apex had acquired the reputation of some of the
“best places” to live. Population growth in these areas exceeded
school capacity, while parts of central Raleigh were decreasing
in population. The county was now responsible for educating
close to 100,000 children. By 2000, court rulings had largely
disallowed race as a basis for school assignments, so Wake
began using social class and achievement data instead. Estimates
varied regarding how many children were bused for purposes of
achieving diversity along economic and achievement lines, with
the board arguing it was always less than 5% of children each
year. But county growth appeared to increase this proportion and
board reliance on reassignment increased over time. By 2008, the
board proposed that more than 25,000 children be reassigned
over the next three years. Some children from kindergarten
through high school had already been moved multiple times.
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diversity vs. neighborhood schools
Wake’s debate seemed to originate with two different
views of how children should be assigned to public schools. One
promoted a county-wide perspective in which the school board
would assign children so that no schools were disproportionately poor or low-achieving. This would disrupt any connection
between residential segregation and school segregation. Proponents of this policy feared the county’s economic future would
be threatened if public schools were viewed unfavorably by firms
and middle-class employees considering re-locating to Raleigh.
Since the county’s assignment policy was associated with rising
test scores and decreased achievement gaps, they viewed diverse
USDA
Year-round schools, similar to this one in West Virginia, offer Wake County a good cost-cutting option that would slow new school
construction.
schools as an investment in county well-being.
The other side championed proximity of home and school,
so that children’s school attendance reinforced neighborhood
social ties and vice versa. Under these conditions, however,
schools would replicate residential segregation, a familiar condition in many American communities. Such realities would
intensify inequality across generations, a situation that diversity
advocates disliked.
Media reports, interviews and focus groups reflect either
pro-diversity sentiments or worries about the disadvantages of
diversity policy implementation. However, our findings showed
other sentiments as well. First, disrupting
the proximity of home and school was
clearly a challenge for families. As a former
superintendent noted in an interview, “I
was having a forum over at Moore Square
Middle School and it was about 200…
predominantly African-American parents…
and I will not forget the parent who stood
up and said, ‘Well, we do not understand why we have to put
our five-year-old on that bus and ride for an hour and twenty
minutes to a school that is a [significant] distance from the
house’.”
Others suggested that having children attend school far from
home affected their capacity to meet parental responsibilities.
It meant challenges for parents who were often juggling the
demands of multiple jobs and commuting to work, as well as
managing children’s school assignments and their changes. One
African-American interviewee recalled a storm when half an
inch of snow accumulated, causing icy roads, early dismissals,
and long traffic delays. Some students ended up spending the
night at their schools. She said, “But that assignment [plan],
how far is [too far]? For the parent, how quickly can I get to
my child? That was exhibited when we had that freak storm.
How quickly can I get to my child in an emergency, from [my]
workplace or home?”
By 2000, court rulings had largely disallowed
race as a basis for school assignments, so
Wake began using social class and
achievement data instead.
Second, citizens worried that children’s academic well-being
would be harmed by reassignments to distant schools. As one
interviewee stated: “Really, if you think about elementary school,
you know a lot of it is creating a love for school and so if you
are putting a heavy burden on a child and… they are having
to get up extra early… you would think (this situation) would
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Donald Lee Pardue, Flickr CC
children ran high.
One involved parent stated, “The
discontent that I was hearing was the
unbelievable inconsistency in feeder patterns. People would not know from one
year to the next where their kid was going
to school, and not only would they not
know where they were going to go this year,
they did not even have a sense of, OK, well,
you will go to this elementary school, this
middle school, and then this high school.
It switched with no rhyme or reason.” This
uncertainty meant parents felt unsure about
how to protect child wellbeing, clearly at the
heart of the conflict, but seemingly beyond
A school bus makes its daily trek on North Salem Street in Wake County.
the debate between preferences for diversity and neighborhood schools.
From our survey we also learned that preferences for diverpotentially, in some students, create more of a negative taste for
sity and neighborhood schools were not even diametrically
education and send them down the wrong road.”
opposed. Citizens who favored diversity were less likely to favor
Similarly, one African-American community leader sugneighborhood schools and vice versa, but the relationship was
gested: “I just don’t think diversity, shipping kids around, really
far from perfect. We found that nearly everyone favors neighmatters as much as them getting a good education, and at the
borhood schools. They are well ingrained in American life and
end of the day, there is a job.” Nor was this concern confined
likely reflect the type of school arrangement many of today’s
to those skeptical of diversity’s benefits. An African-American,
adults experienced when they were young. However, a signifipro-diversity parent at a focus group said: “I will use the word
cant subset of Wake County citizens who favor neighborhood
‘repulsive,’ and the reason I say it is repulsive is because I am
schools also strongly support diversity as a basis for children’s
tired of all of this sitting on the backs of the children. …It is
school assignments.
the children that you are busing; it is the children that you are
Finally, our survey also showed that attitudes among
manipulating. …It is not on their back to take the long bus ride
African Americans in Raleigh were complex. They were more
or be pulled out of your class.”
supportive of diversity-based school assignments than Whites, and less supportive
of neighborhood schools. But social class
also mattered. Affluent African Americans
favored diversity more than their lower
income counterparts, who were managing
both work and family with fewer resources.
For them, having children assigned to
schools far from their homes, even in the
name of diversity, was less attractive. More
highly educated African Americans worried
less about the challenges, dangers, and uncertainties inherThird, the process of changing student assignments created
ent in assignment policy implementation than those with less
uncertainty for families and for children. Each winter the school
education.
board identified groups of children they were proposing to move
to keep up with uneven population growth and to avoid schools
becoming disproportionately low income. Hearings with the board
is wake typical?
followed. Sometimes parents were granted exemptions from
We wondered how unique Raleigh was. Wake’s history
proposed moves. Others applied for magnet schools, preferring
lacked examples of “massive resistance” to desegregation charthose placements, and their certainty, to the possibility of future
acteristic of other southern communities during the 1960s and
reassignments. Board decisions came out in May, which meant
1970s. The district was never under a court order to desegregate;
that some families were unsure about school placement for
it had done so voluntarily (although within the context of federal
several months during each year. Emotions of both parents and
pressure). Wake’s public education system had improved for
Wake’s debate had two camps: one that viewed
diverse schools as an investment in county
wellbeing and favored school “balancing,” the
other that championed proximity of home and
school.
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O Palsson, Flickr CC. “Gyre,” Thomas Sayre, NC Museum of Art.
challenges, dangers and uncertainties previously associated with
mandatory reassignments and year-round school attendance. This
also meant that school re-segregation based on socioeconomic
status increased. Magnet schools remain popular, while parents
now also have an increased number of charter school options.
The impact of greater school choice on the traditionally strong
middle-class character of Wake public schools is still unclear.
Demographics remain important. Currently the district
enrolls more than 155,000 students, making it the 16th largest
school district in the country, and managing district growth continues to be challenging. Wake’s public school-aged population
has now become majority-minority, largely because of Latino
immigration. Given the association between race and family
income, in the future Wake will find creating schools mixed
by family income to be more complicated. More than ever, it
will need to rely on its strong traditions of maintaining diverse
schools to promote both equal opportunity and encourage
county prosperity.
recommended resources
The debate over school diversity in Wake County means
balancing competing, if both laudable, goals and perspectives.
more than thirty years after its creation in 1976. These factors,
we reasoned, made it at least somewhat unique, and had created a social and political climate supportive of diverse schools.
In addition, the county began creating diverse schools before
significant amounts of White flight and “bright flight” occurred.
While the diversity policy was in effect, middle-class residents
had less incentive to locate in just a few neighborhoods because
street address did not strictly dictate which schools children
would attend, thus discouraging residential segregation.
We concluded that compared to other large school districts,
Wake is relatively unique in the longevity of its school diversity
policy, which we see as based both on the demographic capacity to create diverse schools as well as the collective political will
to make that happen. For example, it sustained diverse school
assignments longer than Charlotte, and it avoided the substantial segregation of schools experienced in places like Richmond.
Despite the challenges involved in implementing economically
diverse schools, Wake persevered longer than many other school
districts. This means Wake was an exemplar for other large
school districts that had the demographic capacity and political
will to create diverse schools.
what does the future hold?
The 2011 and 2013 elections returned the school board
to firm Democratic majorities, likely because of citizen concerns
with a lack of transparency by the Republican board. However,
this new board chose to maintain past reassignments, not initiate
new ones. This approach responded to concerns regarding the
Annette Lareau and Kimberly A. Goyette, eds. 2014. Choosing
Homes, Choosing Schools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Russell Sage
Foundation. Explores the reality that for many families, choosing
homes and choosing schools happens simultaneously.
Toby L. Parcel, Joshua A. Hendrix, and Andrew J. Taylor. 2015.
“Race, Politics, and School Assignment Policies in CharlotteMecklenburg and Wake County, North Carolina.” In R. A. Mickelson, S. S. Smith, and A. Hawn Nelson, eds., Yesterday, Today,
and Tomorrow: School Desegregation and Resegregation in
Charlotte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. A comparison of Charlotte and Raleigh history, demographics, and school
characteristics suggests why Raleigh sustained school desegregation longer than Charlotte.
Toby L. Parcel and Andrew J. Taylor. 2015. The End of Consensus: Diversity, Neighborhoods, and the Politics of Public Schools
Assignments. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
A mixed-methods study of the creation of the Wake County Public School System, the evolution of consensus surrounding diverse
schools, and why this consensus dissolved, with comparisons to
other school districts.
James E. Ryan. 2010. Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City,
Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press. The story of two
racially segregated high schools, one in urban Richmond and the
other in Henrico County, Virginia.
Toby L. Parcel is in the sociology and anthropology department at North Carolina
State University. Her current work focuses on families, schools and children. She is
replicating the Wake survey in other cities. Joshua A. Hendrix is a research criminologist at RTI International. He studies policing and adolescent development, including
why some adolescents abstain from delinquency. Andrew J. Taylor is in the political
science department in the school of public and international affairs at North Carolina
State University. His current work focuses on Congress, elections and political attitudes.
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“I feel so sad about it,” she remembers. In her dreams, “I’m begging
the doctor, ‘Don’t do it.’” In 2011, doctors performed a cesarean
section on Rinat Dray, a 32-year-old, religious mother of two without her consent. Dray adamantly refused a cesarean throughout
her labor, she told us in an interview, but “The [hospital] manager
said, ‘Take her... to C-section. We got permission. ...Take her to the
room for the C-section.’” Doctors wheeled her into the operating
room, told her to be quiet, and performed a cesarean. The baby was
healthy, but during the surgery the physician lacerated Dray’s bladder, requiring extensive surgical repair. Dray’s malpractice lawsuit is
ongoing.
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contexts.org
To study forced and coerced cesareans, we searched for
cases like Dray’s in LexisNexis and the National Advocates for
Pregnant Women’s (NAPW) online case file. We found ten
between 1990 and 2014 and were able to interview Dray and
Jennifer Goodall, as well as two of the attorneys, Michael Bast
(Dray’s attorney) and Colleen Connell (Tabita Bricci’s attorney),
involved in forced C-section cases. We also interviewed three
attorneys with Birth Rights Bar Association (BRBA), Deborah
Fisch, Susan Jenkins, and Indra Lusero; NAPW senior staff attorney Farah Diaz-Tello; and President of Improving Birth Dawn
Thompson.
The low number of published cases is partly a result of an
exceptionally small fraction of court cases being published and
thus accessible on LexisNexis, but it also reflects the high bar to
entry into the legal system for these types of cases. Even so, we
were surprised at how few cases we found:
advocates and attorneys we’d interviewed
had told us that instances of coerced and
forced cesareans were common. For example, when we asked Dawn Thompson how
often she receives calls from women in
such situations, she answered, “Oh, every
day.” Similarly, Michael Bast told us, “We’ve heard many times
where women have said, ‘I was forced to have a C-section.’”
Although statistics are unavailable and neither Bast nor Thompson can indicate the exact frequency with which they receive
requests for help with lawsuits, we believe we’re just exposing
the tip of the iceberg.
Forced and coerced cesareans are situated within a larger
trend: an overuse of cesareans in the U.S., a trend coauthor
Theresa Morris wrote about in her book Cut It Out. The procedures accounted for 32% of U.S. births in 2015. The technique
is associated with higher rates of maternal and fetal morbidity
(injury) and mortality (death) than vaginal deliveries—that is, it
doesn’t lead to better maternal or fetal outcomes. Instead, the
rise of the C-section is tied to organizational and legal imperatives. Specifically, physicians cannot know for certain whether a
cesarean will lead to better outcomes than a vaginal birth, but
they have learned through medical-legal conferences and court
proceedings that they are less likely to be sued for malpractice
if the baby is born by cesarean. This lowers doctors’ thresholds
in choosing a cesarean.
Although typically a woman’s “right to choose” is associated with abortion, not childbirth, it is instructive to think of
both situations in a broader context of women’s bodily integrity.
Choice is hard won in childbirth because the cultural context
dictates that pregnant women should sacrifice everything for
The rise of the C-section is tied to organizational
and legal imperatives, not maternal and fetal
outcomes.
Courtesy Michael Bast
Courtesy Rinat Dray
Rinat Dray, forced into having a cesarean.
Courtesy Colleen Connell
the fetus. Thus, a pregnant woman who makes a decision that
authorities deem is not in the fetus’s best interest—for example
refusing a cesarean section—may be deemed incapable of
making decisions about the birth. Her “choice” never really
existed. Our research reveals that a woman’s right to bodily
integrity and decision-making, seemingly sacrosanct in the letter
of the law, is frequently challenged by medical providers when it
comes to childbirth. Women’s right to refuse unwanted surgery
buckles under the weight of cultural pressures and legal and
organizational processes.
Michael Bast, Attorney, Silverstein & Bast,
represents Rinat Dray.
Contexts, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 24-29. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-60521. © 2017 American
Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504217714259.
Colleen Connell, Executive Director,
American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois,
re...
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