Tag: Racial Stereotypes

Global Challenges in Drinking Studies: Alcohol and Racial Stereotypes

It was a great pleasure to have welcomed 15 scholars from around the world to a virtual workshop on 22 May 2020, to start the process of designing a collaborative research agenda on the global relationship between alcohol and race. Originally, we had planned a full-day event to take place at the University of Leicester, but in the context of coronavirus lockdown we convened a much shorter online meeting via Zoom. As such virtual research events seem likely to become more common in the future, for environmental as well as safety reasons, we wanted to provide a (hopefully helpful) outline here of how we organised the meeting, how it worked and the collaborative approach we’re taking.

Firstly, we circulated a call for expressions of interest via the Drinking Studies Network (DSN) and beyond, and invited a few people directly. We asked them to describe how their research interests intersected with, or could develop in new directions in response to, some broad questions, which we would then use the workshop to refine.

From the call for Expressions of Interest:

Stereotypes about “national” or “ethnic” drinking styles can be harmful, both by shaping drinking behaviours and by fostering racial prejudice. Racial stereotypes have shaped alcohol regulation, marketing practices and harm-reduction policies in many parts of the world, since at least the nineteenth century. Some continue to do so to this day, with serious consequences for public health and race relations. The aim of this collaborative research is to explore, from both historical and contemporary perspectives:

– how such stereotypes develop, change or solidify over time in different places

– the extent and effects of transnational exchanges and debates about alcohol and race

– how stereotypes about different ethnic or racial groups have shaped one another

– the role(s) of alcohol in the expression of ethnic identities

– the most pressing gaps and challenges in our knowledge about the relationship between alcohol and race

To maximise the time available for discussion, we circulated the collated responses from participants in advance, encouraging everyone to think about potential connections we could explore together. Jamie and I prepared several ideas for grouping participants around emergent themes, which we pitched and debated during the first main discussion session. Based on this, we then allocated everyone to one of three breakout groups on

– The “Black Diaspora”

– Imperial Contexts (Regulatory Regimes & Imperial Identity)

– Circulation of ideas about Alcoholism

After the breakout sessions, we returned to whole group discussion to feed back the ideas that had been generated. Here’s the schedule we used:

2.00pm: Welcome, Introduction, Ground Rules for Zoom Meeting [inset]
2.10pm: Updates on Research Interests
2.30pm: Discussion to Identify Group Topics/Themes
3.00pm: Break and Breakout Groups Set-up
3.15pm: Breakout Group Discussions
3.45pm: Whole Group Discussion of Breakout Sessions
4.15pm: Conclusions and Next Steps
4.30pm: End

The fifteen-minute break in the middle was critical, I think, for both participants and us as organisers. We stretched across time zones from California to Poland, via Mexico, Brazil, Ireland, the UK and Germany. This meant that some people had  a very early start to their working day, while others were right at the end of theirs. I found that chairing the meeting online demanded a level of multi-tasking, combined with technological challenges, that left me feeling as tired as I would normally be at the end of organising a two-day conference. Despite prior practice on Zoom, a superfast broadband connection, and a two-screen set up in my home office, the fifteen-minute break allowed me to uncover a subtle settings change, and one frozen screen, which made it impossible for me to set up the breakout rooms. A computer restart and some slightly breathless clicking later, the problem was solved, although not without me realising that I hadn’t switched off my video during the panicky period of troubleshooting. Everybody was kind enough not to mention having to look at nothing but my confused face for seven or eight minutes.

The confused face of Deborah Toner trying to solve a technical problem on Zoom
The confused face of Deborah Toner trying to solve a technical problem on Zoom

That aside, the workshop as a whole went well. In some ways, doing the event in a virtual setting was an improvement. In particular, I doubt that a physical one-day workshop in Leicester would have had such a range of international guests. The whole group discussion sessions were a little more directed than likely would have been the case in a physical setting, but the smaller-group breakout sessions were very lively and generated some excellent ideas for future collaborative work. The shorter duration of the workshop as a whole, and the panels within it, were perhaps also a blessing, ensuring that energy levels remained high through-out.

The ultimate goal of this workshop was to take the first steps towards producing a co-authored book on the global relationship on alcohol and race. By forming groups of two or three (or more) authors, examining an aspect of this relationship from different geographical, chronological and/or disciplinary perspectives, we aim to make the most out of working together, achieving a scope that would not be possible as individuals. As an intermediary step, we plan to present one or two panels at the Global Challenges in Drinking Studies: The Drinking Studies Network at Ten conference. This was originally scheduled for November 2020, marking ten years of the formation of the DSN (then, known as the Warwick Drinking Studies Network), but will be postponed to some point in 2021. We’re hoping the collaboration will be an iterative process: generating preliminary ideas and findings in the conference presentations; identifying potential gaps and limits in our coverage of the core issues; recruiting additional authors for the book project; and meeting again, perhaps several times in the online format, to achieve a holistic vision for that book.

In the meantime, if you weren’t able to attend the workshop and you’re interested in being involved in our future work together, please get in touch with me (dt151@le.ac.uk) or Jamie (jh811@le.ac.uk).  

Why is it important to understand the development of racial stereotypes about alcohol?

I have been thinking about racial stereotypes connected with drinking behaviour in one way or another since the first year of my undergraduate degree in History – way back in 2002! The issue was raised by a session within a module on the Social History of Food in Latin America and, from there, questions about racial stereotypes remained in the background of my MA and PhD research on the history of alcohol in Mexico. Through my own teaching at the University of Leicester, particularly a course I designed called “From Beer to Fraternity: Alcohol, Society and Culture in North America“, discussions at various Drinking Studies Network events, and research for an edited book, A Cultural History of Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War, 1850 to 1950, I increasingly considered the question of racial stereotypes about alcohol use to be of transnational and global significance.

Through these different avenues of exploration, I found that research from a range of disciplines on alcohol-related harm showed there is a real need to deconstruct racial stereotypes about drinking. Stereotypes have perpetuated prejudice against Native Americans and Hispanic Americans, encouraged aggressive marketing of distilled drinks to African Americans, and reduced opportunities for Asian Americans to seek help for drinking problems.[1] Racially differentiated alcohol regulations in Australia, based on long-standing racial stereotypes about Indigenous drinking, have compounded rather than reduced alcohol-related harm.[2] The so-called “drunken Indian” stereotype still shapes the attitudes of US government officials involved in harm reduction programmes for Native Americans, and the internalisation of racial stereotypes about drinking helps to cause alcohol-related harm amongst Native Americans.[3] Explaining how and why racial stereotypes about drinking have developed historically through cultural processes of othering in the United States, Mexico and the wider world, as I aim to do in this project, is a critical step in reducing the harm that they still do.

Historians have clearly established the role of anti-immigrant prejudice in garnering support for the United States policy of national prohibition (1920-33), and the century-long temperance movement from which it grew. Enforcement of the national prohibition law was disproportionately targeted against ethnic minorities, especially Mexican Americans, African Americans and poor European immigrants.[4] Widespread perceptions about the tendency of Native Americans towards excessive drinking meant that prohibition laws had already been applied to them in the nineteenth century and persisted long after national prohibition was repealed.[5]

In Mexico, cultural misunderstandings about Indigenous alcohol use and the commercialisation of alcohol contributed to the development of a stereotype about Indigenous drunkenness during the colonial period (1521-1810).[6] By the late nineteenth century, degeneration theory – the idea that physical, mental and moral defects were passed down from generation to generation – transformed alcohol abuse into a major threat to racial and national health.[7]

Book cover of Alcohol and Nationhood by Deborah Toner
Shameless plug alert: you can read more about this point on degeneration theory in my first book, Alcohol and Nationhood in 19th Century Mexico

Mexico’s more limited policies of prohibition in the early twentieth century have been less thoroughly researched than the US experience of prohibition, but anti-alcohol campaigns foregrounded concerns about Indigenous drinking practices more than those of other ethnic groups.[8]

In the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project, I aim to draw together these distinct historiographies to provide a systematic analysis of what different racial stereotypes about alcohol had in common, how they interacted and how they changed over time in the US and Mexico. The goal is to analyse the relationship between these stereotypes in the context of changing power dynamics across borders. In turn, this should help to reveal the importance of debates about alcohol to the construction of modern ideas about race and racial difference.

This approach responds to and advances recent calls to analyse the increasingly transnational and global nature of debates about alcohol in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Mills and Barton acknowledged the role of racial stereotypes about alcohol and other drugs in the legitimisation of European imperialism but called for more research on how such ideas were “transferred and circulated, and with what effects.”[9] Pliley et al examine some transnational aspects of anti-alcohol activism but highlight the need for more comprehensive studies of transnational actors, ideas and processes. They also encourage research to go beyond the geographical limits of Euro-American imperialism and to go beyond traditional organisational studies of temperance groups.[10]

Several small-scale studies of the relationship between alcohol and racial stereotypes indicate how transformative a larger, transnational and comparative study could be. Historians of colonial North and Spanish America have shown how “drunken Indian” stereotypes became embedded in discourses of Indigenous weakness, impurity and barbarism.[11] Gaytán compared the racialised meanings of particular drinks in Mexico and the United States in the early twentieth century, revealing how the American press associated tequila with a stereotype of Mexicans as volatile, savage and inferior.[12] Guatemalan alcohol policies in the early twentieth century were driven by racial assumptions that Indigenous people were more susceptible to alcohol problems, despite evidence that non-Indigenous Guatemalans drank in socially disruptive ways more frequently.[13] Debates about alcohol prohibition in Southern Nigeria in the early twentieth century were central to the formation and challenging of ideas about racial difference between Africans and Europeans.[14]

In focusing on the US and Mexico from 1845 to 1940, in the first part of this fellowship project, I want to examine how multiple racial stereotypes about the drinking behaviours of different ethnic groups were formulated in dialogue with each other. I’ll also be combining analysis of official and popular perspectives about alcohol during points of transnational exchange. These include cultures of consumption of soldiers in the Mexican American War; early marketing practices of alcoholic products in international exhibitions; debates about alcohol regulation and harm in international conferences; and anti-alcohol activism that crossed borders through temperance tours.

I’ll close here with some of the key research questions I’ll be exploring as part of this fellowship project:

1. What racial language, imagery and concepts were used in describing the drinking behaviours of different ethnic groups in the United States and Mexico between 1845 and 1940?

2. How and why did racial stereotypes about drinking solidify around some ethnic groups but not others?

3. To what extent did American and Mexican ideas about alcohol and race interact with one another?

4. Was the racialisation of drinking behaviours a global phenomenon?

[1] R. Caetano, C.L. Clark and T. Tam, ‘Alcohol Consumption among Racial/Ethnic Minorities: Theory and Research,’ Alcohol Health and Research World, 22:4 (1998).

[2] P. D’Abbs, ‘Alcohol Policy and Aboriginal Drinking in the Northern Territory, Australia,’ Contemporary Drug Problems, 39 (2012).

[3] M.D. Holmes and J.A. Antell, ‘The Social Construction of American Indian Drinking: Perceptions of American Indian and White Officials,’ The Sociological Quarterly, 42:2 (2001); J. Fish, T.M. Osberg and M. Syed, ‘Alcohol Beliefs and Acculturation in Relation to Alcohol Consumption among Native Americans,’ Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse, 16:2 (2017).

[4] L. McGirr, The War on Alcohol (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016).

[5] I. Ishii, ‘Alcohol and Politics in the Cherokee Nation Before Removal,’ Ethnohistory, 50:4 (2003); R. Phillips, Alcohol: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

[6] J.M. Córdova, ‘Notes on the Drunken Indian Image in Colonial Mexico,’ Word & Image, 31:1 (2015).

[7] D. Toner, Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

[8] G. Pierce, ‘Mexico’s National Anti-Alcohol Campaign and the Process of State-Building, 1934-1940,’ Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 23:2 (2009).

[9] J.H. Mills and P. Barton (eds), Drugs and Empire: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication, c. 1500-c.1930 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),pp. 14-15.

[10] J.R. Pliley, R. Kramm and H. Fischer-Tiné (eds), Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

[11] R. Earle, ‘Indians and Drunkenness in Spanish America,’ Past and Present, Supplement 9 (2014); P. Mancall, Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); J.A. Fernandes, ‘Alcohol, Identity and Social Hierarchy in Colonial Brazil,’ in G. Pierce and Á. Toxqui (eds), Alcohol in Latin America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014).

[12] M. S. Gaytán, ‘Drinking Difference: Race, Consumption, and Alcohol Prohibition in Mexico and the United States,’ Ethnicities, 14:3 (2014).

[13] D. Carey Jr., ‘Drunks and Dictators: Inebriation’s Gendered, Ethnic, and Class Components in Guatemala, 1898-1944,’ in Pierce and Toxqui, Alcohol in Latin America.

[14] C. Ambler, “The Specter of Degeneration: Alcohol and Race in West Africa in the Early Twentieth Century” in Pliley et al, Global Anti-Vice Activism.