Answer Questions About Drawings of People

June 19, 2023 Answer Questions About Drawings of People

That’s the intentionally unrevealing title of the research survey I’m designing to study how viewers perceive race and ethnicity in comics. It was originally “Representing Race in the Comics Medium” (which not coincidentally is also the subtitle of my book-in-progress, “The Color of Paper”), but a much more experienced colleague suggested I go with something generic to avoid self-selecting participants (either opting in or opting out due to a focus on race might be a problem).

Here’s the project description:

“There are multiple previous studies that require participants to differentiate the races and ethnicities of photographed and computer-generated faces. But no previous studies use drawings of faces. Since drawings generally involve a reduction in detail and a corresponding emphasis on selected details, drawings are distinct from photographs and realistic computer graphics. Drawings are also the primary artistic approach for works in the comics medium, where characters of multiple races and ethnicities are routinely represented. How does a viewer know that a character is meant to represent a certain race or ethnicity? Without quantifiable data, scholars can only report their personal perceptions, speculating without evidence that they align with other viewers. My goal is to quantify comics viewers’ perceptions, with a particular interest in the role of skin color and facial features. Study participants will look at a set of drawn faces taken from a range of comics and identify the characters’ race, ethnicity, and gender (using U.S. Census categories).”

Though I’ve co-authored two survey-based cognitive-science studies, this is my first solo outing — which means I needed to get Institutional Review Board certification. I learned a variety of facts from the online course, including certain psychological tendencies of researchers:

“Regardless of the true probability of harm, research indicates that when potential harms are severe, people tend to overestimate probability. When potential harms are less severe, such as embarrassment, people tend to underestimate the probability.”

I summed up my survey’s potential risks:

“It is possible that identifying the race and ethnicity of people in drawings could produce discomfort for a participant whose race and/or ethnicity is complex, a source of anxiety, and/or has been a cause for their suffering discrimination. A mixed-race person, for example, could experience discomfort selecting racial categories. More broadly, any participant who is aware that appearances (skin color, facial features, and hair) may not accurately reflect racial and ethnic categories could feel forced to make unfair judgements. Finally, two of the images participate in the drawing tradition of racist Black caricature, which anyone, but most especially a Black person, should be expected to find offensive. Finally, some of the study images are excerpted from a series about zombies and so include mild gore.”

I also learned that, as a literary critic, my research is officially “Not Research”:

Still need my university’s IRB approval though, which came recently in an email:

“Your proposal, Representing Race in the Comics Medium (as submitted 05/24/2023), meets the following thresholds: 1) poses no foreseeable risk to the research population; 2) meets ALL of the criteria listed on the Washington & Lee University IRB website, Exempt, Part A; 3) meets one or more of the criteria listed on the Washington and Lee University IRB website, Exempt, Part B; and 4) meets one or more of the federal exempt categories criteria (Exempt 45CFR46.104). As a result, the study has been classified as EXEMPT on 06/07/2023, and the research may proceed per your protocol and the stipulations below.”

Creating the survey also required a crash course in Qualtrics, and I’m still in the process of learning the research platform Prolific to distribute it. The idea for the survey (and some of the images) began with an earlier post about a black and white reprint of The Avengers #73-74 (February-March 1970) where I mistook a Black character for White.

The larger topic began as a panel paper in Venice last May, where I discussed the paradoxical representational properties of paper color.

I explored the effects in my own art too (What Race Are My Cartoons?).

I first felt the need for some kind of objective counterpoint to my own perceptions while I was analyzing racist imagery in The Defenders #16 (October 1974), which I described last July.

And the very first image is from Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #216 (April 1976).

I’ve since amassed a digital file folder of comics images I’ve snapped on my phone, with particular interest in comics that have been published both in color and in black and white. The survey is actually two surveys for that reason, and each participant responds to one or the other set of 36 images, always answering the same three questions:

What race best matches the person in this drawing?

1. White
2. Black or African American
3. American Indian or Alaska Native
4. Asian
5. Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
6. Some Other Race

What ethnicity best matches the person in this drawing?

1. Hispanic or Latino
2. Not Hispanic or Latino

What gender best matches the person in this drawing?

1. Male
2. Female

Those categories are from the U.S. Census Bureau. I like the gender binary least and originally wasn’t including it, but then I started wondering how perceptions of gender might interact with perceptions of race and ethnicity. Could, for example, racially ambiguous drawings of men be categorized as Black more often than racially ambiguous drawings of women? The final survey section asks participants to answer the same three questions about themselves. Do Black and White participants categorize the ambiguous drawing the same way or differently? Either result would be interesting.

My image folder grew way too big (the survey is meant to take no more than fifteen minutes), but I got it down to 36, including new examples from Yes, Roya:

The Walking Dead:

and Love & Rockets:

I’m also presenting a panel paper on the Love & Rockets images at the Comics Studies Society conference in July, so more on that soon. Meanwhile, I’m troubleshooting the survey to launch at the end of the month.

Tags: Institutional research board, representing race in comics, the color of paper

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