Transcript Lesson 10 – Social Class and Popular Culture

SOC 86 – Social Class,
Race and Popular
Culture
Robert Wonser
SOC 86 – Fall 2013
Popular Culture
1
Highbrow and Lowbrow
• “highbrow” and ”lowbrow”
• Phrenological throwback when it was presumed brow
size (height of forehead) was thought to be a marker
of intelligence
• Pejorative label—low culture—activites and
amusements lacking in virtue and associated
with sexuality and the lower half of the body as
opposed to highbrow (being more intellectual of
course!).
• Does this distinction still hold today?
2
Taste and Consumption
• Taste – one’s preference for particular styles
of fashion, music, cinema or other kinds of
culture
• Consumption – the reception, interpretation
and experience of culture
• Does social class play a role in determining
these?
• Ex: food deserts
3
The Invention of class cultures
• 150 years ago Americans enjoyed the same national
popular culture consumed and experienced
collectively by the masses, by people from all social
classes.
• What happened? Industrial Revolution
• Created a new upper-classes American elite of
successful entrepreneurs, bankers and
businesspeople.
• The nouveau riche descended from common
backgrounds, not aristocracy like in Europe.
• So initially they drew on trappings of European
nobility (family crests, French cuisine, classical art and
music)
4
Mountain Dew
• Mountain Dew, for instance, originally
based its entire brand around making fun
of poor Appalachians, also known as
hillbillies.
• In the late 40s and early 50s, its label
featured the official Mountain Dew mascot
"Willy the Hillbilly" and the slogan: "YaHoo! Mountain Dew. It'll tickle yore
innards."
• The name of the soft drink, of course,
refers to the Southern slang for
moonshine.
Coke is for White People
• Through the 1920s
and ’30s, it
studiously ignored
the AfricanAmerican market.
Promotional
material appeared
in segregated
locations that
served both races,
but rarely in those
that catered to
African-Americans
alone.
Pepsi is for Black People
• Whereas Pepsi and its "negro markets"
department went an entirely different
direction:
• By the late 1940s, black sales representatives
worked the Southern Black Belt and
Northern black urban areas, black fashion
models appeared in Pepsi ads in black
publications, and special point-of-purchase
displays appeared in stores patronized by
African-Americans. The company hired Duke
Ellington as a spokesman. Some employees
even circulated racist public statements by
Robert W. Woodruff, Coke's president.
And there’s this…
• Probably a coincidental
oversight….
The Invention of Class Cultures
• They sought to create distinctions between
themselves and everyone else
• Conscious efforts at boundary maintenance
and social exclusion.
• Including “serious” culture for upper classes
(classical music, opera etc.)
9
Class Status and Conspicuous
Consumption
• Conspicuous consumption status
displays that show off one’s
wealth through the flagrant
consumption of goods and
services, particularly those
considered wasteful or otherwise
lacking in obvious utility
• Upper classes distinctly avoid
associations with working class;
this reverse is not true.
10
Examples of Conspicuous
Consumption
11
Cultural Capital and Class
Reproduction
• Cultural tastes have value and can be transferred to
others, converted into financial wealth, and
ultimately help to reproduce the class structure of
our society. This is called,
• Cultural capital one’s store of knowledge and
proficiency with artistic and cultural styles that are
valued by society, and confer prestige and honor
upon those associated with them.
Do you
know what
each fork
is used
for?
• Unevenly distributed and usually inherited
• Economic capital can be converted into cultural
capital as an investment.
• For example: ballet and music lessons, foreign travel and
private school
• Since it is inherited and passed down it helps
maintain the class structure
Are these the
droids you’re
looking for?
12
Cultural Omnivores and Code
Switching
• Typically affluent consumers, cultural
omnivores consumer many kinds of cultural
artifacts and have far-ranging tastes
• Code-switching the ability to negotiate
among multiple and varied cultural worlds
simultaneously
• How many of you do this?
13
High vs Popular Cultures
• High culture’s audience is much smaller and
homogenous
• Although they pride themselves on
individuality of tastes it is much more
homogenous than popular culture’s.
• Less high culture be definition is produced
than pop
• Innovation is rare in both high and pop
culture although it is celebrated in high and
expected in pop
14
Tastes and Politics
• Although most taste cultures are not explicitly political, all
cultural content expresses values that can become political
or have political consequences
• Sitcoms reveal much about gender relations in society
• High culture: may include more extremes in political
opinions
• Upper-middle culture products are liberal, conservative or
centrist
• Remaining taste cultures are mainly centrist or conservative
 in part because of the business ideology of the mass
media owners
• Media conservatism is more cultural than political; most
media self-censorship is directed at sexual or sacrilegious
references
• Whether or not taste cultures are political may be
irrelevant because most are unlikely to notice or care
15
Some Ways this plays out
• Tv and most other media, cater to the largest
income generator; the lower-middle class
taste culture.
• Most others are ignored
• High culture garners the bulk of distinction
and praise
• Low culture and quasi-folk culture receive
none
• As people move up the economic ladder they
also tend to move up the taste hierarchy
16
How these power dimensions work
• These distinctions manifest in all facets of life.
• We’ve discussed tv and film in this context
but the effects are further reaching than that.
• We see housing segregation as well
• Where do the well-to-do live?
17
• The Lower Classes? Where do they live?
• Where do we in the middle classes live?
• This no accident
18
White Flight and Popular Culture
• Disneyland
• LAs freeways
• Dodger Stadium
19
White Flight and the Suburban Ideal
• Pre WWII LA was very white; LA was once
known as “seaport of Iowa”
• Encapsulated the utopian aspirations of the
suburban society; reinforcing the formation of
a suburban white consciousness
• White flight describes a structural process by
which post war suburbanization helped the
racial resegregation of the U.S., dividing
presumably white suburbs from concentrations
of racialized poverty.
• The corollary that is often overlooked is that
this allowed for the creation of a suburban
white identity (based in part on privatized
values)
20
The FHA
• White flight was fueled by the FHAs anti-urban
bias; anathema to a secure investment were
“the presence of inharmonious racial or
nationality groups”
• Policies prevented blacks and other nonwhite
groups from attaining suburban home
ownership
• Deed restrictions
• “If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is
necessary that properties shall continue to be
occupied by the same social and racial classes.”
changes in this lead to declining property
values. – the FHA’s Underwriting Manual
21
Favorable Effect on Property Values
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)
English, Germans, Scots, Irish, Scandinavians
North Italians
Bohemians or Czechoslovakians
Poles
Lithuanians
Greeks
Russian Jews of lower class
South Italians
Negroes
Mexicans


We see the formation of a suburban white identity beginning …
For whites, conforming to “American standards of living” helped remove
themselves from the FHA’s least wanted list
Simultaneously we begin to see the market approach trumping the public vision;
the defeat of public housing in Cold War Los Angeles illustrates the transition to a
new political culture that encouraged the spatial and racial fragmentation of the
postwar urban region

22
The Birth of a New Political Identity
• Based on suburban home ownership and
segregation in opposition to the noir slums
• An “anxious, tightfisted conservatvism” that
revolved around racialized social issues.
• Racial homogeneity, dependence on Cold
War economy, high rates of home ownership,
flurry of intense real estate development
fostered distinct political culture that
foreshadowed national politics in the 70s and
80s
• Its epicenter? Orange County
23
Disneyland
• Extols the virtues of consumerism, patriarchy,
patriotism and small-town midwestern
whiteness
• Disneyland emphasized cultural motifs of retreat
from the public culture of New Deal liberalism
and instead asserted a privatized suburban
alternative to that culture.
• Explicitly in contrast to Coney Island where
women could escape the supervision of parents
and discover a newfound sexual freedom
sanctioned by the modern city and its
anonymous venues for heterosocial interaction
24
• Main Street, USA upheld Disney’s faith in the
virtues of small town America and symbolized
a nostalgic retreat from the decadence of the
noir city
Homogeneity and
dissonance that
defined urban culture
inspired Walt to create
a counterculture of
order, regimentation
and homogeneity
25
A “Rage for Order”
• To eliminate distractions from the contrived vistas,
Disney buried all water, power and sewer lines
beneath street level
• Each land is completely self contained and cannot be
seen from other lands
• Forced perspective (trick to make objects appear
larger, larger at the bottom and smaller on top) used
in Sleeping Beauty’s castle and the Matterhorn
Bobsleds to guarantee the perfect view from any
angle unlike real cities
• Employees: “clean and natural without extremes”
and “blond, blue-eyed…outdoorsy [and] vacuously
pleasant”
• Animatronics to replicate the perfect show every
time
26
Race at Disneyland
• The Other
• Frontierland (in contrast to the marvels of civilization and
white modern culture of Tomorrowland) clearly upheld
long standing distinctions between white progress and
nonwhite “savagery”
• Aunt Jemima’s pancake house where Aunt Jemima herself
“will serve her famed pancakes and also will sing to
entertain her visitors”
• The Jungle Cruise – “wild animals and native ‘savages’
attack your craft as it cruises through their jungle privacy”
• Americans could use these images to reify their own
sense of whiteness, particular in Main Street USA where
the Others were conspicuously absent, further reifying
Disney’s racialized and deeply nostalgic vision of
American “folks”
27
28
Suburbanizing the City Center
• Dodger fans had to dodge streetcars and trolleys on
their way to Ebbets Field in New York
• Urban sprawl in LA scared elites
• Canceled plans for public housing after residents of
Chavez Ravine were removed conveniently left the
space vacant for Dodger Stadium, after all, public
housing = communism, private use of land = laissez
faire
• Baseball was a more American alternative to public
housing
• Dodger stadium would serve as a popular
counterpart to the temples of high culture erected
upon remnants of Bunker Hill (revitalizing urban
blight)
29
By the 1950s “blight" became invoked as a strategy for
privatized, downtown redevelopment, not as it used to
be, for improving the living conditions of the urban poor.
30
• The city’s deed to the land explicitly stated
that the land was to be used “for public
purposes only”
• “strings had to be pulled” by the City Housing
Authority (CHA, same ones who evicted the
ravine residents) by changing the wording of
the deed to eliminate that provision
31

To make way for a
private
construction

32
Irony
• Disneyland: idealized suburban community and politics
of white home ownership
• Dodger Stadium: facilitated “whitening” of the city
center by fueling a racialized political culture predicated
upon a privatized corporate version of downtown
redevelopment
• Built upon a site originally designated for public housing,
Dodger Stadium was both the product of and producer of
a shifting political culture that negated social programs
(like public housing), favored political subsidies for
private development (note the irony…), and heightened
simmering racial tensions.
• Team name made little sense in Southern California’s
freeway metropolis where there are no speeding trolley
cars to “dodge” on the way to play ball…
33
The Red Cars
• LA had a light rail system.
• Between 1880-1930 most Angelinos
depended on the Red Cars: the
interurban system of streetcars that
radiated outward from downtown Los
Angeles, west to Santa Monica, east to
Riverside and south to Long Beach.
• The automobile, freeway system, GM
and Standard Oil ended this
34
The PE Cars’ Demise
• Harry Chandler, publisher and owner of the Los
Angeles Times, held major investments in
Goodyear Tire, Western Construction Company,
Southern California rock and Gravel Company, and
Consolidated Rock Products Company and Union
Oil.
• “The Pink Sheet” was a newspaper section
devoted exclusively to the automobile
• Editorials against the streetcar were ran
• Denunciations declaring the motorists rights over
the streetcar’s right of way  declining streetcar
patronage  less incentive to maintain the
streetcars  they get worse
• LA’s first freeway, Arroyo Seco Parkway
35
These Routes became Freeways
And this
is what
became
of our
streetcars
…
36
Sutured City: Freeway Metropolis
• Unlike the streetcar which promoted
interconnectedness among urban dwellers and
provided a window onto the city’s distinct
neighborhoods, the freeway severed the
commute from his urban context and furthered
the distance, literally and figuratively between
racialized cities and white suburbs.
• Whose neighborhoods were bisected?
• The freeways go to directly to Disneyland and
Dodger Stadium as well as OC and other housing
subdivisions; this was no coincidence
37
Because no one wants their
commute bummed out by the sight
of poor people…
38
The Division of the Barrios
39