Author Archives: Sarah Shugars

Horse Races and Political Journalism

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The advancement of the calendar year has brought a whole new energy to political campaign coverage. The Iowa Caucus is just over two weeks away, with the New Hampshire primary a week and a half after that.

Political journalism is aflutter with polling data and predictions – Cruz is expected to win the Iowa primary, and the second spot seems locked down as well. But other republicans vying for the nomination have the chance to make waves with a surprise third place finish.

“‘Exceeds expectations’ is the best headline a candidate can hope for coming out of Iowa,” a reporter shared in a recent NPR Political podcast while discussing what he referred to as the “Iowa Tango.”

The dance is not dissimilar on the democratic side – Clinton is expected to win Iowa, but Sanders has been slowly chipping away at her lead. An “exceeds expectations” in Iowa – and certainly a win – could lead to a big bump for the Sanders campaign.

This is all very exciting.

For those of us who are political junkies, presidential horse race coverage can be exhilarating. It’s like a (nerdy) action movie where you never know what’s going to happen next, where you’re on the edge of your seat because there’s no guarantee of a (subjectively) happy ending.

This sort of coverage is engaging for a certain segment of the electorate, but is it good journalism?

In We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, my former colleague Peter Levine illustrates an alternative model:

An important example was the decision of the Charlotte Observer to dispense with horse race campaign coverage, that is, stories about how the campaigns were trying to win the election. Instead, the Observer convened representative citizens to choose issues for reporters to investigate and to draw questions that the candidates were asked to answer on the pages of the newspaper.

Rather than asking “who will win the election?” this type of political coverage seeks to answer “who should win the election?”

One could argue that this isn’t an appropriate question for a news outlet to ask. If an ostensibly fair and balanced news outlet was actually biased in a particular candidate’s favor, for example, that would indeed go against the democratic process.

Yet we already know that horse race coverage can be prone to bias – resulting in early or inaccurate calls of elections while voting is still taking place.

Similarly, while certainly prone to bias, the question of who should win is not inherently biased. In the example above the Charlotte Observer answered the question not with their own editorial views, but through a combination of citizen voice and candidate response.

This is hardly the only model for political coverage addressing who should win. For example, outlets could put more emphasis on political investigative journalism – scrutinizing candidate policies for likely impact and outcome. There is certainly some of this already, but it is absent from some outlets while others treat such long-form critiques as secondary to the quick news of poll numbers.

Arguably here we have a market issue – perhaps journalists want to provide this sort of thoughtful analysis, but lack the reader interest to pursue it.

Walter Lippmann – a journalist and WWI propagandist – would certainly agree with that assessment. “The Public” as a faceless, unidentified herd, will always be too busy with other things to invest real time and thought into a deep understanding of political issues.

As Lippmann describes in his 1925, The Phantom Public:

For when private man has lived through the romantic age in politics and is no longer moved by the stale echoes of its hot cries, when he is sober and unimpressed…You cannot move him then with good straight talk about service and civic duty, nor by waving a flag in his face, nor by sending a boy scout after him to make him vote.

To the extent that it is popular, horse race coverage succeeds because it is sexy and exciting. There are some people who have the interest and energy to read more provocative thought pieces on politics, but their numbers are not significant enough to affect so-called “public opinion.”

Lippmann does not fault the generic masses for putting their attention towards other things – it is only natural to have more interest and awareness in those topics which effect you more profoundly.

There is an important and subtle distinction here – just because the unnamed masses have no interest in politics does not mean that all people do not have an interest in politics. In one of my favorite Lippmann quotes, he writes that “The public must be put in its place…so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd.”

Lippmann does not mean to argue for a technocratic society in which the voices of the common people are excluded. Rather, he highlights an aggregation problem – individual voices are important, while the collective voice of “the Public” – while easiest to hear – is nonsense.

This is, perhaps, what is most attractive about a model such as that used by the Charlotte Observer. Individual voices shaped the process, but on a scale that didn’t aggregate to meaninglessness.

A similar strategy can be seen in work such as that by the Oregon Citizen’s Initiative Review. A the review regularly gathers “a panel of randomly-selected and demographically-balanced voters…from across the state to fairly evaluate a ballot measure.” Each panel hears professional testimony about the measure and participates in several days of dialogue before produce a statement “highlighting the most important findings about the measure” which is then included in the official voter pamphlet.

This type of approach provides a balance between engaging diverse citizen voices and the infeasiblity of having every single person participate in such a process.

The Charlotte Observer provides one example of how this balance might be found in political journalism, but there have been so few attempts it’s impossible to know what’s best. It’s an area that’s desperate for greater innovation, for finding new ways to cover politics and new ways to think about journalist’s and citizen roles in politics.

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Does Anger Lead to the Dark Side?

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Anger is generally considered to be an “negative” emotion.

It is often intense, powerful, and unpleasant for everyone around it. The emotion may have several negative health effects, and may be especially bad for your heart. Anger management resources are widespread. Because of the problematic nature of anger, that it is “such a forceful negative emotion and makes people uncomfortable,” as one Psychology Today article puts it, “taboos about expressing it are widespread.”

To further complicate matters, many psychologists “believe that holding anger in is bad for you, that it only builds pressure to be expressed.” On the other hand, the American Psychological Association (APA) now says that freely expressing anger may be “a dangerous myth” used “as a license to hurt others.” Furthermore,  “research has found that ‘letting it rip’ with anger actually escalates anger and aggression and does nothing to help you (or the person you’re angry with) resolve the situation.”

Feeding into the taboo nature of anger, it seems as though our best solution is to simply not have any anger in the first place – thus avoiding the conundrum of holding it in or letting it out.

Recognizing the seeming impossibility of simply deleting anger from our lives, the APA puts this a little more constructively, recommending: “It’s best to find out what it is that triggers your anger, and then to develop strategies to keep those triggers from tipping you over the edge.”

This strikes me as the advice you give when you don’t know what to say.

Most notably, this advice seems to imply that most anger is unjustified. Figure out what makes you angry and avoid it, the way a person with Celiac ought to avoid gluten.

But what if what makes you angry is…injustice? What if you are angry because of historical legacies of power and oppression, because of deep disparities which are so entrenched as to seem normal?

A coping mechanism hardly seems appropriate for the task.

In one of the few memorable lines from The Phantom Menace, Yoda uses a line of thought similar to the APA when he proclaims, “Fear is the path to the dark side…fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering.”

Yet, this is the the logic of someone in power – it subtly assumes that anger is little more than the selfish reaction of someone who doesn’t get their way.

There is, of course, a certain truth to Yoda’s claim – there are plenty of instances throughout history where fear mongering has proven to be an effective, though unfortunate, tool for power, hate, and suffering.

But the idea that all anger intrinsically leads to hate goes too far.

This is a danger, no doubt, but the power of justified anger is a force to be reckoned with. A power which can critically be harnessed for positive social change.

As Hitendra Wadhwa writes in a 2012 piece on Martin Luther King:

Great leaders do not ignore their anger, nor do they allow themselves to get consumed by it. Instead, they channel the emotion into energy, commitment, sacrifice, and purpose. They use it to step up their game.  And they infuse people around them with this form of constructive anger so they, too, can be infused with energy commitment, sacrifice and purpose. In the words of King in Freedomways magazine in 1968, “The supreme task [of a leader] is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.” 

 

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Radical Acts of Kindness

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The phrase “random acts of kindness” is most commonly attributed to author Anne Herbert. In 1982, in Sausalito, California, Herbert wrote on a placemat:

Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty

The phrase was then popularly refined to “practice random acts of kindness.” Growing up in California in the 1980s, this phrase was everywhere.

I never really liked it.

I appreciate the sentiment – kindness towards others is generally a good thing – but random acts of kindness? Here’s what I imagine:

I am out in the world. I see a person in distress. I have the ability, with little cost or effort, to provide help or support. I flip a coin.

Randomly, I decide whether or not to be kind.

Surely, this is not what Herbert intended, but nevertheless, the phrase seems inappropriate. Random kindness removes intentionality, agency, context. Random kindness is predictable, perhaps, on average but generally no better than fumbling around in the dark. A random choice between kindness and inaction.

I propose a different phrase: radical acts of kindness.

Perhaps kindness seems so passé as to be the opposite of radical. As a social norm, kindness is generally accepted to be good.

Sort of.

Consider the work of philosopher Peter Singer. In his 2002 book One World, he shares a example he conducts with his class. He starts by quoting Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick:

We should all agree that each of us in bound to show kindness to his parents and spouse and children, and to other kinsmen in a less degree: and to those who have rendered services to him, and any others whom he may have admitted to his intimacy and called friends: and to neighbors and to fellow-countrymen more than others…

Singer writes, “When I read this list to my students, they nod their heads in agreement at the various circles of moral concern Sidgwick mentions.” And this all does seem more or less reasonable: you care most for your closest family, and then for your closest friends, and then more generally for your acquaintances and connections. Every person in the world can be mapped to your various circles of concern, indicating, approximately, how much kindness you ought to show to them.

But Sidgwick is not through. He did, after all, write more than a century ago. His quote continues:

…and perhaps we may say [we are bound to show kindness] to those of our own race more than to black or yellow men, and generally to human beings in proportion to their affinity to ourselves.

Well, that got awkward. Singer shares that at this point, his students “sit up in shock.”

And it is shocking. To go from caring more for your immediate family to being an racist seems like quite a leap. It hardly seems immoral if I prefer to donate a kidney to a loved one rather than a stranger, yet, as Singer points out, there is something troubling to these circles of concern.

This element is particularly troubling in conjunction with the numerous studies which show that people tend to self-segregate into “like” groups. Again, it doesn’t seem intrinsically immoral to want to spend time with people you can easily relate to – yet if we grow closest to those most like us, and we care most for those we are close to…the ultimate result is a self-fulfilling loop of power and supremacy.

Singer argues that we need to reset our sense of “like”, seeing all humanity as part of our global community. Our neighbors are suffering, and it makes no different whether they are 10 blocks away or 10 thousand miles away. He proposes a specific policy solution – donating a minimum of 1% of your income to those most in need. But even with this practical implementation, he provides little guidance on how to shift one’s thinking and feeling.

This is where we get to radical acts of kindness.

Perhaps there are circles of concern – even Singer concedes that it’s reasonable to care for your family more than strangers. I’m inclined to agree with Singer that, especially among strangers, we need to shift who we see as “like” ourselves, but this shift doesn’t address the fact that there’s a basic inequity to the circle of concern model.

Singer’s plan would address global poverty while doing little to confront the deep racial and social injustice experienced in our own country.

A radical act of kindness is being kinder than social norm would generally dictate. Showing true care for someone you hardly know, regardless of their distance from you, regardless of their likeness to you.

Radical kindness is pushing the boundaries of those circles, changing the norms of how much kindness is proper to show. Radical kindness seeks to go beyond social obligations.

Such radical acts of kindness are not easy, and those circles of concern will never – and perhaps should not – go away. But we can each push the boundary of what it means to care for our fellow man, each seek to make the word a little better – not randomly, but radically.

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Words as Actions

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A common critique of dialogue is that it is “just talk.” That is: it’s useless to talk about injustice if we don’t act to confront injustice.

This is a reasonable complaint, yet it minimizes the value of dialogue – relegating words to a hollow role of little to no meaning.

I’ve been reading J. L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, a compilation of notes from his 1962 William James Lectures. Far from deriding words as “just talk,” Austin starts by examining words as actions.

These performative statements, as he calls them, are verbal actions. Words that accomplish an act.

When getting married, a person says, “I do.” That statement is the act of marrying. When naming a ship, a person might declare “I name this ship…”. To make an accusation, one would rightly say: “I accuse…”

These words are actions.

Austin spends much of his time examining how performative statements such as these may be “unhappy” or infelicitous – a person may not have the authority to name a ship, one person may say “I do” while the other has a change of heart. And, of course, there are those particularly devious forms of infelicity – a person may be insincere in their statements, they may lie or have other intentions.

Such infelicity may abort or debase an action, but Austin has no doubt that there is a class of felicitous speech-acts, which are, indeed, acts.

Consider the sentence, “I promise that…” This, Austin argues, is an action in itself: “It is not a description, because (I) it could not be false, nor, therefore, true; (2) saying ‘I promise that’ (if happy, of course) makes it a promise, and makes it unambiguously a promise.”

Not all talk is performative, of course, though Austin concedes that in a certain sense, all speaking is an act.

When we issue any utterance whatsoever, are we not ‘doing something’? Certainly the ways in which we talk about ‘action’ are liable here, as elsewhere, to be confusing. For example, we may contrast men of words with men of action, we may say they did nothing, only talked or said things: yet again, we may contrast only thinking something with actually saying it (out loud), in which context saying it is doing something.

Yet, Austin’s true interest in performative statements is deeper than simply the act of speaking as an act itself. To clarify this point, Austin sorts the act of “issuing an utterance” into three categories: you can make a sound, you can say a word, or you can – essentially – make a performative statement. Austin here calls this a “rhetic” act.

To be clear, not all sounds are this type of action, but Austin is voracious in his argument that rhetic acts are important and should not be dismissed as “just words.”

Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them…

And here we have the crux of the matter: words not only have meaning, they have consequences. Words that are true acts, which are more than “just talk,” have impacts on everyone around us.

Those who decry “just talk” are right to deride hollow or infelicitous comments when action is what’s needed. But Austin, too, is right to highlight the value of words: the value of words as actions, words which can make change.

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Madness and Biotypes

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There’s an interesting article in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. The study, Identification of Distinct Psychosis Biotypes Using Brain-Based Biomarkers, uses bio-markers to identify “three neurobiologically distinct psychosis biotypes.”

As the researchers explain, clinical diagnoses remain “the primary means for classifying psychoses despite considerable evidence that this method incompletely captures biologically meaningful differentiations.” The study aims to classify psychoses more rigorously and accurately by examining the underlying biological factors.

Researchers recruited individuals who had been diagnosed with some form of psychosis, as well as a comparative “healthy” population. They “collected a large panel of biomarkers of known relevance to psychosis and functional brain activity” and “refined a subset of the biomarker panel that differentiated people with psychosis from healthy persons.” Clustering the relevant biomarkers, researchers found three distinct biotypes (“biologically distinctive phenotypes”).

Interestingly, the three biotypes identified “did not respect clinical diagnosis boundaries.” That is: the biological expression of psychoses differed from their clinical diagnosis, highlighting the need to refine current diagnosis techniques.

However, the clusters did reveal a meaningful lens through which to view psychosis. For example, “the biotypes significantly differed in ratings on the Birchwood Social Functioning Scale, which assesses social engagement, psychosocial independence and competence, and occupational success; biotype 1 showed the most psychosocial impairment, and biotype 3 had the least impairment.”

Particularly interesting are the implications of this work:

The biotype outcome provides proof of concept that structural and functional brain biomarker measures can sort individuals with psychosis into groups that are neurobiologically
distinctive and appear biologically meaningful. These outcomes inspire specific theories that could be fruitfully investigated. First, biotypes 1 and 2 should be of greater interest in familial genetic investigations, while perhaps biotype 3 would bemore informative for explorations of environmental correlates of psychosis risk, spontaneous mutations, and/or epigenetic modifications.

This is fascinating research and certainly worthy of further study, but it also raises the haunting specter of modernity. As Gordon Finlayson describes in Habermas: A Very Short Introduction:

There is a sinister aspect to the assumption that science and rationality serve man’s underlying need to manipulate and control external nature: that domination and mastery are very close cousins of rationality. Not only science and technology, but rationality itself is implicated in domination.

James C. Scott emphasizes the difference between the dangerous ideology of “high modernism” and genuine scientific practice in his excellent book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

Unlike true scientific scholarship, high modernism was “a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimist about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.”

In short, high modernism is the authoritarian imposition of a planned social order, designed by bureaucrats foolish enough fancy themselves as benevolent conquerors of nature.

To be clear, the study itself is not inherently high modernist. Better understanding and diagnosis of psychosis is a worthy scientific goal. But you’ll forgive me if I’m somewhat weary of the profession which considered homosexuality a mental ailment until the 1970s. Social understandings of “mental health” have long been propped up by the scientific understanding of the day – with the currently scientific research miraculously changing to validate social norms.

Michel Foucault perhaps best documents this phenomenon in Madness and Civilization, a brilliant historical account of “madness” as a social construct which shifts to fit the norms of the day.

Perhaps this seems unlikely in our modern world – surely our modern scientific understanding of biology far out shines the dark, half-science of the middle ages. Finding biological underpinnings of madness, biotypes that reveal psychosis, seems, on its face, reassuring: madness can be rationally explained.

Yet it is exactly that reassurance which ought to give us pause. Perhaps we have only found what we wanted to find – irrefutable proof that the mad are somehow different than the healthy, that there is something fundamentally, biologically, different about “them.” And, of course, it’s the implied outcome which should surely give us pause – if we can define the root of their madness, we can at last fix these poor, broken souls.

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The Hollow Men

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In 1925, T.S. Eliot, already an established and respected poet, published The Hollow Men.

It was a transitional time the author. Two years later, Eliot – who had been born to a prominent Missouri family and raised in the Unitarian church – would convert to Anglicanism and take British citizenship. A conversion which is reflected in his 1930 poem, Ash Wednesday.

He was in an unhappy marriage. In his sixties, Eliot confessed in a private letter, “To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.”

Eliot had composed the epic poem largely while on three months enforced bedrest following a nervous breakdown.

It was in that state of mind – post-Waste, as Eliot later described it, yet without the peace he found later in life – that Eliot wrote The Hollow Men.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

The poem is full of allusions to hollow men – Guy Fawkes of the infamous Gunpowder treason and plot; Colonel Kurtz, the self-professed demigod of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Brutus, Cassius, and other men who conspire to take down Julius Caesar; and the many cursed shades who call to Dante as he travels through the afterlife in The Divine Comedy.

Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Ultimately, these hollow men, full of veracity and determination in life; worshipped, perhaps, as gods among men, are nothing. They are only the hollow men, the stuffed men.

In Purgatory, Dante finds such hollow men. “These shades never made a choice regarding their spiritual state during life (neither following nor rebelling against God) instead living solely for themselves.  Neither heaven nor hell will let them past its gates.”

They are remembered – if at all – not as lost,

Violent souls, but only 
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

There is an in-betweenness to their existence, a nothingness far worse than the tortuous circles of hell. They are shape without form; gesture without motion. They are paused, eternally, in that inhalation of oblivion.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

Perhaps we are all hollow men. Perhaps we are all doomed to that empty pause. Perhaps, we, like Fawkes, will be found – seemingly on the eve of our victory – standing guard over our greatest work not yet accomplished.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Or, perhaps not. Perhaps, as Eliot did himself, we can find new beginnings out of our quiet darkness. As Eliot writes in Ash Wednesday:

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

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Reclaiming “Citizens”

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Like many who work in the civic realm, I use the word “citizens” a lot. Usually with the clarification that I don’t mean the term as a legal status, but rather as a way of describing people who are part of the same community or who live in the same area.

This difference in meaning is significant. To talk about the work of improving communities as relying on the engagement of citizens (of legal status) has wholly different moral and political connotations than seeking the engagement of all citizens (who are connected to a community, regardless of legal status). .

For that reason, many civically-minded organizations have elected to drop or minimize use of the word “citizens.” In my days as a marketer I would have advised them to do so. It’s a bad enough sign if you have to explain a term to your audience, but you definitely don’t want people  to interpret something as exclusive when it is intended to be inclusive. That is not a miscommunication you want to have.

So why persist in using a term that is so widely understood to mean something different than what I mean by it?

First, there’s the poetry of it. “Citizens” is a simple word, and there is no other term that so concisely indicates “people who are part of a community.”

But more importantly, citizens have rights.

Again, this could be interpreted in the legal sense – legal citizens have legal rights – but the word has a broader civic meaning as well.

All people who are part of a community or who are affected by a decision have the right to participate in shaping that community or making that decision. Regardless of legal status, citizens have the right to participate as full members of the community.

I think of this non-legal use of the word “citizens” as a reclamation of sorts, though truth be told the word “citizens” has always been problematic.

It is a word whose function is to divide the haves from the have nots; to indicate who has power, who has the right of full participation. The precise legal and social understanding has changed – “citizens” were once only wealthy white men; our current understanding is only slightly more benevolent.

That’s why it’s so important to reclaim – or perhaps simply claim – this term. All people have rights; all people have the right and responsibility to participate in their communities as citizens.  This right is not bestowed by some legal definition; it is an intrinsic human right.

Until we recognize all our neighbors as true citizens and as equal partners in shaping our communities, we not only impinge upon this important right, we shut out important voices and energy, harming our communities through a narrowed perspective.

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Civic Voice and Civic Duty

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Earlier this month, the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) and the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) released research showing that Americans’ volunteering rate remains strong. Over a quarter of U.S. adults volunteered through an organization last year, while nearly two thirds volunteered informally.

This is welcome news, but also disconcerting: recent trends point to steady volunteering rates but drops in other civic activities. A December 2014 report found that “16 of the 20 civic health indicators dropped,” with volunteering as one of the few positive outliers. Collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, civic health indicators cover topics including voting, volunteering, political expression and group membership.

Personally, I am quite concerned about indicators related to civic voice. A 2010 NCOC report found that, among Americans who are not engaged with a community group, less than 15% express their political voice in one or more ways. This number rises significantly for those who are involved in a group (about 40%) and especially for those with a leadership role within a community group (nearly 70%).

But the disparity indicated by these gaps is alarming. Under 10% of the population falls into the category of “leaders,” raising important questions about the socioeconomic and gender disparities represented in that gap.

For example, a 2012 study by my former colleagues at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) looked specifically at the civic lives of young people with no college experience – some of the most underrepresented people in our society.

When one focus group was asked whether they had a voice in their school, they all simply laughed. One young man in Little Rock argued that student voice in school was a myth: “Even when you are class president and school president you still don’t have a say, so … it’s only a show.”

Another student is quoted as saying, “even if you do voice your opinion it won’t do any good—the suits are the ones who are gonna make all the decisions.”

That is deeply problematic for civil society.

Too many people feel as though their voice does not matter, as though their perspectives don’t add to the world.

This is a fallacy. A myth perpetuated by false social standards laying claim to what types of people have value and what types of views have value.

All people have value; all voices matter.

Unfortunately, too many people have been taught that their voices don’t have value – that they would only add to the noise if they ever dared to speak up. Once this message is internalized, the civic silence is hard to break.

But that’s why it’s important to remember – speaking out is not a luxury, its not an activity you do to show off how important you are. It is a civic duty. Sharing your own voice and perspective – particularly for those whose voice and perspective is often overlooked – is critical to transforming the state of civic dialogue. Everyone’s voice needs to be heard.

There’s this great and terrible irony in the world – it’s the people who worry about being rude or incompetent or otherwise being a terrible person who are the least likely to be rude, incompetent or an otherwise terrible person.

The same can be said about civic voice – if you never speak up because you are so convinced that your own voice can’t possibly add value, then you are depriving the rest of us of your wisdom. I know it is awkward, and I know it feels self-aggrandizing, but forget about all that: we need your words and your perspective. It’s a civic duty to share your voice. Really. We can’t tackle the hard problems without you.

 

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Gender Representation in Comic Books

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For one of my classes, I have spent this semester cleaning and analyzing data from the Grand Comics Database (GCD) with an eye towards assessing gender representation in English-language superhero comics.

Starting with GCD’s records of over 1.5 million comics from around the world, I identified the 66,000 individual comic book titles that fit my criteria. For each character appearing in those comics, I hand coded the gender for those with a self-identified male or female gender.

From this, I built a bipartite network – comic books on one side and comic book characters on the other. A comic and a character are linked if a character appeared in a comic. The resulting network has around 66,000 comic titles, 10,000 characters, and a total of nearly 300,000 links between the two sides.

From the bipartite network, I examined the projections on to each type of node. For example, the below visualization contains only characters, linking two characters if they appeared in the same issue. Nodes here are colored by publisher:

Screen Shot 2015-12-11 at 4.05.50 PM

The character network is heavily biased towards men; nearly 75% of the characters are male. Since the dataset includes comics from the 1930s to the present, this imbalance can be better assessed over time. Using the publication year of each comic, we can look at what percentage of all characters in a given year were male or female:

Screen Shot 2015-12-11 at 4.16.49 PM

While comics were very gender-skewed through the 1970s, in recent years, the balance has gotten a little better, though male character still dominate. If anyone knows what spiked the number of female characters in the early 2000s, please let know. I looked at a couple of things, but couldn’t identify the driving force behind that shift. It’s possible it just represents some inaccuracies in the original data set.

If you prefer, we can also look at the various eras of comics books to see how gender representation changed over time:

Screen Shot 2015-12-11 at 4.32.29 PM

I was particularly interested in applying a rudimentary version of the Bechdel test to this dataset. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the data to apply the full test, which asks whether two women (i) appear in the same scene, and (ii) talk to each other about (iii) something other than a man. But I could look at raw character counts for the titles in my dataset:

Screen Shot 2015-12-11 at 4.07.23 PM

I then looked at additional attributes of of those titles which pass the Bechdel test. For example, when were they published? Below are two different ways of bucketing the publication years: first by accepted comic book eras and the second by uniform time blocks. Both approaches show that having two female characters in comic books started out rare but has become more common, coinciding roughly with the overall growth of female representation in comic books.

Screen Shot 2015-12-11 at 4.38.07 PM

Finally, I could also look at the publishers of these comic books. My own biases gave me a suspicion of what I might find, but rationally I wasn’t at all sure what to expect. But now you can see, Marvel published an overwhelming number of the “Bechdel passed” comics in my dataset.

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To be fair, this graphic doesn’t account for anything more general about Marvel’s publishing habits. Marvel is known for it’s ensemble casts, for example, so perhaps they have more comics with two women simply because they have more characters in their comics.

This turns out to be partly true, but not quite enough to account for Marvel’s dominance in this area. About half of all comics with more than two characters of any gender are published by Marvel, while DC contributes about a third.

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The More Things Change…

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When I was in 8th grade, a newly hired teacher came into our classroom after lunch one day and announced that a parent had seen a student throwing rocks at passing cars. The parent wasn’t sure who the student was, so had simply given a description when reporting the matter to the principal.

Someone was in trouble. It just wasn’t clear who.

To deal with the matter, the teacher pulled all the kids fitting the description out of class and sent them to the principal’s office. The students were to remain there until further notice.

To all of us kids, it was clear that this plan was foolish. How would detaining an essentially random group of students really help anything? How did it make any sense to hold a whole group responsible for the actions of one unknown assailant? And furthermore, it was grossly unfair – why punish innocent students for simply looking like someone who misbehaved?

As it turns out, the whole thing was an elaborate set up introducing Japanese internment in the United States.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, fear of people of Japanese ancestry mounted. Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Command, testified as much to Congress in 1943, saying:

I don’t want any of them (persons of Japanese ancestry) here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty. The west coast contains too many vital installations essential to the defense of the country to allow any Japanese on this coast. … The danger of the Japanese was, and is now – if they are permitted to come back – espionage and sabotage. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty. … But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.’

Ultimately, between 1942 and 1946, 120,000 people were forced to relocate to U.S. internment camps “as a result of the military evacuation of the West Coast.” Some 62 percent of those detained were American citizens.

It was a dark chapter in our nation’s history. A moment whose only saving grace was the indelible stain left by these camps, pockmarked across the west. Haunting testaments to the nation we should never let ourselves become again.

I’d like to think that we have all learned something from those darker days. Learned to love our neighbors and to not let fear drive us towards hate. I’d like to think that’d we’ve learned that all people truly are created equal, and are all equally endowed with our most sacred inalienable rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

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