Someone (Ahem) Did a Statistical Analysis of Vox.com Photos, And It's Actually Pretty Depressing

    The other day, Vox.com ran a piece entitled "Someone did a statistical analysis of New Yorker cartoons, and it's actually pretty depressing." The semi-serious article presented the findings in the "semi-satirical journal Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science" regarding the race and gender of characters in the semi-iconic New Yorker cartoons. The study found that "[o]ut of 1,810 total characters, 1,277 (about 70.6 percent) were male, and 1,714 (94.7 percent) were white." Vox writer Joseph Stromberg argues that there is a "need for accurate representation of nonwhite guys", and not just in movies and on TV. Stromberg quotes Amy Rothschild of the FiveThirtyEight blog asserting that it's a problem "[w]hen whole groups of people appear as stereotypes or not at all[.]" Rothschild was referring to children's books, but Stromberg says "adults are impressionable, too."
     After reading the article, I became curious about what impressionable adults might find to skew their something-other-than-the-content-of-a-persons-character worldview on the site where the article appeared, Vox.com. Since Vox does not regularly produce cartoons, I decided to use as a proxy a Google search of the Vox.com site of the first 100 facial images since the beginning of 2015. (Small sample size, but I have staff limitations.) You won't, as they say, believe what happened next:

    Read 'em and weep:

• 81% "white dudes", as Vox likes to say
• 9% women, all white
• 10% non-whites (and four of them are President Obama)

     Others may come up with slightly different figures. I am particularly bad at guessing a person's race (maybe that's a good thing?)
     Anyway, to try to eliminate the possibility that Google itself is the culprit in white-male-skewing the results, I also conducted a general (the whole web) image search for "faces" since the beginning of the year.

     At a glance, the results seem more eclectic (certainly more women than men), but I did not conduct a full statistical analysis (again, staffing issues...).
     I decided to do a few more for comparison. Here's the New York Times:

     Looks like quite a variety.

     How about MSNBC?

     Whoa. Elizabeth Warren is looking pretty lonely there, eh, MSNBC?
   
     And finally, just for fun, The New Yorker's website:

     It appears the "white dude" dominance at The New Yorker is largely confined to the cartoons.

     So what conclusions can we draw from these analyses? Got me. I think I got a C in Statistics in college. I told you we have staffing issues.

Diversity for Me, But Not For Thee

    Andrea Mitchell recently reported about internal Obama adminstration reaction to Susan Rice's withdrawal from consideration for Secretary of State:

ANDREA MITCHELL: A lot of Democrats are saying that the president did not show enough loyalty. A lot of women in the administration are very angry tonight, and I'm saying this at a very high level. Angry because they feel that she was not treated with respect, she was not given the support she needed and she was left to twist in the wind.

    Are the men in the administration angry too?  Just the women?  Why?  Because this president, who doesn’t need binders to pick qualified women, decided to accept the decision of a women to withdraw her name?  Should he have refused and nominated her against her wishes?  Or do these “angry women” think she was told to remove herself from consideration?  Are these women saying that if Rice was a man, Obama would have stood behind her?  After all this time of telling us Republicans are the ones waging a war on women, are they accusing their own president of waging a war on Susan Rice?

    Instead, why aren’t these women saying, “This President has shown great leadership in putting both men and women of all races in places in his administration on the basis of their qualifications for the job.  It’s ridiculous to say that Barack Obama treated Susan Rice differently because she’s a woman. Susan Rice made her decision to withdraw, and the president treated her like an adult and accepted it.”  Can these “angry women” not say that because they don’t believe it? Because they are so used to reacting to everything in terms of sex and/or race?  They’ve spent weeks accusing Republicans of sexism and racism for opposing Rice and criticizing her for her now infamous Benghazi comments on those Sunday talk shows. Is it possible – is it just remotely possible – that neither the Republicans criticism nor the president’s decision to accept Rice’s choice to withdraw have NOTHING TO DO with her sex or race?

    The Republicans have a long history of criticizing Democrats of both sexes and all races, and those Barack Obama has thrown under the bus are also the picture of diversity (Obama’s own grandmother, Van Jones, Tony Rezko, Rod Blagojevich, and Ludacris, to name a few – someone has compiled a helpful if somewhat outdated list here.)  Have we lost the ability to look at political issues without resorting to a demographic analysis of all the individuals involved?  

    Or can we blame the media - like Andrea Mitchell - for introducing this element.  Here's another example.  At the White House Press Briefing Friday, the following exchange took place between Jay Carney and an unidentified reporter:

Q    Now that Susan Rice is out of the running, the President's -- 

MR. CARNEY:  Do you want to know who is in the running? 

Q    Well, yes, if you care to respond to that.  But the President is losing someone who would have brought diversity to his Cabinet.  So how important is it to the President now that his Cabinet with her out of the running reflects the sort of diversity that we see throughout the rest of the country?  

    “[T]he President is losing someone who would have brought diversity to his Cabinet”? Is someone’s race and sex the most important factor in determining diversity?  Would not John Kerry, now the presumptive nominee, bring diversity to the Cabinet?  John Kerry’s background is certainly quite diverse: married to an extremely wealthy woman; Vietnam veteran and harsh, vocal critic of the same war; long-time Senator; former presidential candidate.  How many other people in America can match that demographic?

    For all the left's talk about Republicans and conservatives being sexist and racist, more often than not it is they who focus on the external.  But on the other hand, maybe this incident shows progress of a sort.  In addition to the "good ole boys" network of old white men we hear so much about, this may be evidence of the emergence of a "good ole girls" network who look out for each other.  As the saying goes, you've come a long way...

Does Obama Deserve a Second Term? Ask the White House

    Wow.  Read this from the White House website's autobiography of Bill Clinton [emphasis mine]:

During the administration of William Jefferson Clinton, the U.S. enjoyed more peace and economic well being than at any time in its history. He was the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second term. He could point to the lowest unemployment rate in modern times, the lowest inflation in 30 years, the highest home ownership in the country's history, dropping crime rates in many places, and reduced welfare rolls. He proposed the first balanced budget in decades and achieved a budget surplus.

    Bill Clinton managed to do what no Democratic president had done in half a century.  Using the same criteria, what do Barack Obama's reelection chances look like?

• Unemployment - The unemployment rate has been above 8% for 42 consecutive months, the longest period of sustained high unemployment since the Great Depression. (Forbes)  The median length of unemployment is now 19.4 weeks — also nearly double from what it was in January 2009. (IBD)
• Inflation - Real inflation rate above 8%; gas prices up 83%. (NY Post)
• Home Ownership - Census reports the national home ownership rate at 65.4% is the lowest in 15 years.  African American home-ownership under Obama has fallen 30 percentage points below white home ownership, the biggest difference in 20 years, and one of the biggest on record. (Forbes)
• Crime – Bright spot!  Despite hard economic times, crime continues to decline. (WSJ)
• Welfare Rolls - An all time record of 47% of Americans are now government dependents receiving some form of government benefits. (Forbes)    Food Stamp rolls increased 46% from January 2009 to June 2012.  Total individuals receiving food stamps as of June 2012 is 46,670,373, largest number ever. (USDA)
• Budget - "For the fourth year in a row, Washington faces a $1 trillion-plus deficit[.]" (Politico)

    I've been arguing since January that President Obama's chances of reelection are virtually nil.  But now I've got the White House backing me up!

The Author of The Color Purple Sees Red

    The Israel-Palestinian conflict has a long history of provoking irrationality among those who side with the Palestinians.  Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, a novel popularized in part by the Oprah Winfrey movie of the same name in the 1980s, has continued the tradition.  MyFoxNY.com reports:

Author Alice Walker has denied a request from an Israeli publisher to release a Hebrew edition of her novel, "The Color Purple."
The book details the struggle of black women in the South in the 1930s.
In a letter to Yediot Books she said it was because Israel is "guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people."
She says she grew up under "American apartheid" and says Israeli's treatment of Palestinians is worse than blacks in South Africa.

    Given that the “book details the struggle of black women in the South in the 1930s” and Walker "grew up under 'American apartheid'," it’s a wonder that she ever consented to have her book published in English.

Judging a Man By the Color of His Politics

    In a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post, Fredrick Harris, professor of political science and the director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, wrote that we in America are "still waiting for our first black president."  This may come as a surprise to anyone who was an inhabitant of earth in November 2008 or has arrived since.  But according to Mr. Harris, Barack Obama has not properly fulfilled the role that his black father apparently bequeathed to the future president merely by virtue of his race.  Mr. Harris fills his essay with phrases such as "issues of specific interest to African Americans," "issues of particular interest to us [blacks]," and "it appears that the nation is instead becoming non-racial," but the following passage just boggles the mind:

Politicians such as former governor Doug Wilder of Virginia, former Seattle mayor Norman Rice and former New York mayor David Dinkins ran campaigns that largely deemphasized race, stressing the need for racial unity and advocating policies that they said would benefit everyone, rather than any particular groups. It was probably necessary to shatter the glass ceiling and win office in majority-white jurisdictions, but these victories came at an unintended cost: They undermined the ability of black voters and activists to place race-specific policy issues on the electoral agenda.
After winning office, such race-neutral politicians don’t normally embrace issues and positions that black voters might prefer. Instead, the imperatives of reelection take over. To maintain their winning coalitions, these politicians usually need to govern in a racially neutral manner as well. (Black Americans understand this: In the 2008 ABC News-USA Today-Columbia University Black Politics Survey, nearly half of all black respondents believed that African Americans must play down their racial identity to get ahead in the United States.) [emphasis added]

    Mr. Harris is making the case that US politics is in danger of losing race as an issue, and these "race-neutral politicians" (one gets the sense Mr. Harris is using this label as a pejorative) are responsible.  The advances made by millions of individual blacks and their families are interfering with the ability of Mr. Harris and his allies to segregate the black race into a homogenous voice to advance Harris's political and social goals.

    President Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod expressed similar sentiments in reaction to talk of the conservative Marco Rubio being on the short-list of possible Romney running mates.  The Washington Times reports:

"I think it would be an insult to the Hispanic community to choose Senator Rubio ... if Governor Romney thinks that's sort of a get-out-of-jail-free card for all of the things and the positions that he's taken," Mr. Axelrod said.

    Why an insult?  Because Rubio does not fit the stereotype that Axelrod believes Hispanics/Latinos should box themselves into.  Rubio is a hypocrite for allowing his ideology to trump his racial makeup.
 
    The Democratic Party has comfortably settled into its strategy of division and group politics, even reflecting it in their campaign websites and outreach.  In an ostensible attempt to achieve equality of outcomes, the decision was made to abandon color-blindness for (as Harris puts it) "communities of color." What we are left with now is the spectacle of Fredrick Harris lamenting that Obama's "early discussions of injustice gave way to calls for policies to benefit all Americans and tough-love speeches for African Americans."   [emphasis added]  When "policies to benefit all Americans" is seen as a step down, the towel has been throw in.

    In the midst of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, Martin Luther King famously said:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Traditional racists say they can tell you what kind of person someone is by the color of his skin.  Frederick Harris and David Axelrod look at the color of someone's skin and tell you what kind of person he should be.  Not much of a dream, is it?