The Racialization of Leisure: Comments on Stodolska’s Discrimination Model
Leisure Studies, Special Issue (forthcoming)
Ray Hutchison
Urban and Regional Studies
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
Four years ago I was invited to travel with the Allman Brothers Band for part of their summer tour through the Midwest. After just a couple of days of all-night bus rides, groggy mornings, and long afternoons waiting for the call to board the bus once again to travel to that evening’s venue (if it’s Tuesday, this must be Cincinnati), I was glad to have an opportunity to step out of the hotel one morning and spend several hours walking through the downtown streets. As I entered a large food court in a renovated office building, I noticed that half or more of lunchtime crowd consisted of young men and women, white and black, sharing their lunch tables, engaged in conversations about work, family, what they had done over the weekend, and the like. And as I looked around at these lunch groups, a very clear thought came to mind: it was nice to be in a southern city once again. This form of casual racial mixing is strangely absent from many northern cities.
This image came to mind as I revised my comments on Stodolska’s discrimination model and I wondered how we might explain this example of social interaction in downtown Cincinnati. Were these individuals conscious of the potential costs and benefits of interacting with other-race coworkers when they set out on their lunch hour? Were the costs of discrimination greater or lesser in this informal leisure environment than in the more formal work setting? Would these same individuals discriminate against their coworkers if they were in their home communities rather than in the downtown work environment? Did they consciously weigh these costs? Or were they having lunch with one another simply because they were friends?
Stodolska presents us with a formidable agenda, one that would systematize our understanding of discrimination in leisure and recreation and develop a theoretical model to explain discrimination in various leisure settings. As one who in the past has argued for greater theoretical discussion of race and ethnic relations in leisure and recreation studies (Hutchison, 1989; 2001), my comments on the work presented here may appear incongruous. But the issues are very important, because race is/was not simply the problem of the United States for the 20th Century; it is the problem of the 21st Century as well. Stodolska’s discrimination model is derived from previous work on the psychology of prejudice and from her own research on discrimination against the Polish community in Edmonton (Stodolska and Jackson, 1998). In that research, Stodolska found that discrimination against Poles was less likely to occur in leisure settings, due in part to “ethnic enclosure.” These research findings and concepts are carried over into the discrimination model and figure prominently in several of the propositions presented in “Implications of a Discrimination Model…” (Stodolska 2003b).
For some time I have thought that the literature in leisure studies can be divided into two types. First, there is disciplinary work that could be published in the mainstream journals of traditional disciplines. A good example might be the economic modeling of leisure demand, which one might expect to find in one or another disciplinary journals economics. A second area of work includes interdisciplinary (or perhaps multi-disciplinary) studies, where the main focus is more directly on leisure and recreation sui generis. It is difficult to imagine this work being published in the major disciplinary journals. The problem with the first type of research is that while it offers us insights into (for example) demand curves to explain changes in leisure activity, it does little to advance the more general field of leisure and recreation studies. The problem with the second is that it often is unconnected to work in the founding disciplines and in other interdisciplinary fields. This presents some important problems--particularly in the case of race and ethnicity, where there has been a virtual explosion of theoretical work over the last two decades.
Stodolska’s discrimination model suffers from this second problem. In presenting this series of inter-related propositions, the model looks past important work on the social construction of race and ethnicity. While I am sympathetic to the task that the author has laid out, in a very curious way the discrimination model would seem to reinforce the very structures that create and perpetuate discrimination in leisure and recreation. Most of my comments address the general theoretical formulations and assumptions upon which the propositions are constructed. These include classic studies in the field of race and ethnic relations as well as more recent work in the social construction of race, or racialization, as it has become known in the field.
Prejudice and Discrimination. The first group of propositions deal with discrimination across work and leisure settings in contemporary society. They suggest that structural reinforcements against discrimination play a more important role in the workplace than in the leisure setting; discrimination is more likely in leisure settings because conformity rules are greatly relaxed. This presentation follows Robert Merton’s (1949) well-known typology of prejudice and discrimination (in one recent textbook on race and ethnic relations, this is referred to as Merton’s Paradigm; see Marger: 95-98). Merton recognizes that while individuals may be prejudiced against a particular group (a belief that one may hold), whether they discriminate against members of this group (a behavior that one may or may not chose to exercise) depends upon the social situation and groups present. This leads to his well-known typology: active bigots (prejudiced discriminators, those who will practice discrimination in any social setting); timid bigots (prejudiced non-disriminators, those who feel constrained by social norms not to practice discrimination); all-weather liberals (unprejudiced non-discriminators, those who will refuse to discriminate in any social setting); and fair-weather liberals (unprejudiced discriminators, those who will go along with the majority and discriminate when they are in a crowd of all-weather bigots).
The first two categories represent prejudiced or tolerant individuals whose behavior is consistent with their belief; the last two categories represent prejudiced or tolerant individuals whose actual behavior is dependent upon the social situation. Taken as a whole, the categories represent the behaviors “predicted” by Stodolska’s discrimination model: in the work setting, individuals are constrained from discriminating against co-workers because of institutional rules, while in the leisure setting these rules are replaced by social norms that may pose fewer constraints on individual behavior.
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