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TENTH EDITION

A N I N T E G R A T E D S T U D Y

RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER IN THE UNITED STATES

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RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER IN THE UNITED STATES, Tenth Edition Paula S. Rothenberg This best-selling anthology expertly explores concepts of identity, diversity, and inequality as it introduces students to race, class, gender, and sexuality in the United States. The thoroughly updated Tenth Edition features 38 new readings. New mate- rial explores citizenship and immigration, mass incarceration, sex crimes on campus, transgender identity, the school-to-prison pipeline, food insecurity, the Black Lives Matter movement, the pathology of poverty, socioeconomic privilege versus racial privilege, pollution on tribal lands, stereotype threat, gentrification, and more. The combination of thoughtfully selected readings, deftly written introductions, and careful organization makes Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, Tenth Edition, the most engaging and balanced presentation of these issues available today.

Readings new to the Tenth Edition include:

• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander • How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America by

Moustafa Bayoumi • Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates • Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage

• Immigration Enforcement as a Race-Making Institution by Douglas S. Massey • Domestic Workers Bill of Rights by Ai-jen Poo • The New Face of Hunger by Tracie McMillan • My Class Didn’t Trump My Race by Robin DiAngelo • Intersectionality: An Everyday Metaphor Anyone Can Use, Kimberlé Crenshaw

interviewed by Bim Adewunmi • Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream by

Christina Greer • Transgender Feminism: Queering the Woman Question by Susan Stryker • Debunking the Pathology of Poverty by Susan Greenbaum • The Transgender Crucible, reporting on the life and imprisonment of

transgender activist CeCe McDonald, by Sabrina Rubin Erdely • Neither Black nor White, on the racialization of Asian Americans, by

Angelo Ancheta

• “You are in the dark, in the car…” from Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

• When You Forget to Whistle Vivaldi by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Instructor’s resources to accompany Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, Tenth Edition, are available for download. Instructor’s resources include Reading for Comprehension Questions, Writing Assignments, Article Summaries, Research Proj- ects, Recommended Media, and Data Activities.

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www.macmillanlearning.com Cover photo: Silberkorn/Shutterstock

RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER IN THE UNITED STATES

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New York

RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER IN THE UNITED STATES AN INTEGRATED STUDY

Tenth Edition

Paula S. Rothenberg

with Soniya Munshi Borough of Manhattan

Community College

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Publisher, Psychology and Sociology: Rachel Losh Associate Publisher: Jessica Bayne Senior Associate Editor: Sarah Berger Development Editor: Thomas Finn Assistant Editor: Kimberly Morgan Smith Executive Marketing Manager: Katherine Nurre Media Producer: Hanna Squire Director, Content Management Enhancement: Tracey Kuehn Managing Editor, Sciences and Social Sciences: Lisa Kinne Senior Project Editor: Kerry O’Shaughnessy Photo Editor: Robin Fadool Permissions Associate: Chelsea Roden Director of Design, Content Management: Diana Blume Senior Design Manager: Vicki Tomaselli Cover and Interior Design: Kevin Kall Senior Production Supervisor: Stacey B. Alexander Composition: Jouve North America Printing and Binding: RR Donnelley Cover Photo: Silberkorn/Shutterstock

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016932674

ISBN- 13: 978-1-4641-7866-5 ISBN- 10: 1-4641-7866-6

© 2016, 2014, 2010, 2007 by Worth Publishers

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First printing

Worth Publishers One New York Plaza Suite 4500 New York, NY 10004-1562 www.worthpublishers.com

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http://www.worthpublishers.com
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Preface xiii

About the Author xix

Introduction 1

PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality 5

1 Racial Formations Michael Omi and Howard Winant 11

2 Constructing Race, Creating White Privilege Pem Davidson Buck 21

3 How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America Karen Brodkin 27

4 “Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender Judith Lorber 38

5 The Invention of Heterosexuality Jonathan Ned Katz 47

6 Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity Michael S. Kimmel 59

7 Transgender Feminism: Queering the Woman Question Susan Stryker 71

8 Debunking the Pathology of Poverty Susan Greenbaum 78

9 Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History Douglas C. Baynton 81

10 Domination and Subordination Jean Baker Miller 91

Suggestions for Further Reading 97

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CONTENTS

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PART I I Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege 99

1 Defining Racism: “Can We Talk?” Beverly Daniel Tatum 105

2 Color- Blind Racism Eduardo Bonilla- Silva 113

3 Neither Black nor White Angelo N. Ancheta 120

4 Oppression Marilyn Frye 130

5 Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism Suzanne Pharr 134

6 Class in America Gregory Mantsios 144

7 Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life Annette Lareau 163

8 Intersectionality: An Everyday Metaphor Anyone Can Use Kimberlé Crenshaw, interviewed by Bim Adewunmi 171

9 White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack Peggy McIntosh 176

10 My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege Robin J. DiAngelo 181

Suggestions for Further Reading 188

PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration 191

1 Immigration in the United States: New Economic, Social, Political Landscapes with Legislative Reform on the Horizon Faye Hipsman and Doris Meissner 195

2 Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of America Mae Ngai 207

3 Los Intersticios: Recasting Moving Selves Evelyn Alsultany 218

4 For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color Mireya Navarro 220

5 Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream Christina M. Greer 224

6 The Myth of the Model Minority Noy Thrupkaew 230

7 How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Moustafa Bayoumi 237

Suggestions for Further Reading 242

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PART IV Discrimination in Everyday Life 243

1 The Problem: Discrimination U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 247

2 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander 258

3 Deportations Are Down, But Fear Persists Among Undocumented Immigrants Tim Henderson 266

4 The Ghosts of Stonewall: Policing Gender, Policing Sex Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlak 270

5 The Transgender Crucible Sabrina Rubin Erdely 276

6 Where “English Only” Falls Short Stacy A. Teicher 285

7 My Black Skin Makes My White Coat Vanish Mana Lumumba- Kasongo 288

8 Women in the State Police: Trouble in the Ranks Jonathan Schuppe 290

9 Muslim- American Running Back Off the Team at New Mexico State Matthew Rothschild 294

10 Race, Disability, and the School- to- Prison Pipeline Julianne Hing 296

11 The Segregated Classrooms of a Proudly Diverse School Jeffrey Gettleman 304

12 Race and Family Income of Students Influence Guidance Counselor’s Advice, Study Finds Eric Hoover 307

13 By the Numbers: Sex Crimes on Campus Dave Gustafson 308

14 More Blacks Live with Pollution The Associated Press 313

15 Pollution, Poverty and People of Color: A Michigan Tribe Battles a Global Corporation Brian Bienkowski 316

16 Testimony Sonny Singh 322

Suggestions for Further Reading 325

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PART V The Economics of Race, Class, and Gender 327

1 Imagine a Country Holly Sklar 329

2 Wealth Inequality Has Widened Along Racial, Ethnic Lines Since End of Great Recession Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry 340

3 The Making of the American 99% and the Collapse of the Middle Class Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich 344

4 Immigration Enforcement as a Race- Making Institution Douglas S. Massey 348

5 For Asian Americans, Wealth Stereotypes Don’t Fit Reality Seth Freed Wessler 361

6 Gender and the Black Jobs Crisis Linda Burnham 364

7 Domestic Workers Bill of Rights: A Feminist Approach for a New Economy Ai- jen Poo 373

8 “Savage Inequalities” Revisited Bob Feldman 378

9 The New Face of Hunger Tracie McMillan 382

10 “I am Alena”: Life as a Trans Woman Where Survival Means Living as Christopher Ed Pilkington 387

11 Cause of Death: Inequality Alejandro Reuss 393

12 Inequality Undermines Democracy Eduardo Porter 398

Suggestions for Further Reading 401

PART VI Many Voices, Many Lives: Issues of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Everyday Life 403

1 Civilize Them with a Stick Mary Brave Bird (Crow Dog) with Richard Erdoes 407

2 Then Came the War Yuri Kochiyama 411

3 Crossing the Border Without Losing Your Past Oscar Casares 419

4 Between the World and Me Ta- Nehisi Coates 421

5 “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known.” E. Tammy Kim 425

6 This Person Doesn’t Sound White Ziba Kashef 428

7 “You are in the dark, in the car . . .” Claudia Rankine 432

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8 He Defies You Still: The Memoirs of a Sissy Tommi Avicolli 434

9 Against “Bullying” or On Loving Queer Kids Richard Kim 440

10 The Case of Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson: Ableism, Heterosexism, and Sexism Joan L. Griscom 443

11 Gentrification Will Drive My Uncle Out of His Neighborhood, and I Will Have Helped Eric Rodriguez 451

12 My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK Kiese Laymon 453

13 The Unbearable (In)visibility of Being Trans Chase Strangio 460

14 Black Bodies in Motion and in Pain Edwidge Danticat 463

Suggestions for Further Reading 466

PART VII How It Happened: Race and Gender Issues in U.S. Law 469

1 Indian Tribes: A Continuing Quest for Survival U.S. Commission on Human Rights 477

2 An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Slaves, South Carolina, 1712 482

3 The “ Three- Fifths Compromise” The U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 2 487

4 An Act Prohibiting the Teaching of Slaves to Read 488

5 Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls Convention, 1848 489

6 People v. Hall, 1854 493

7 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857 495

8 The Emancipation Proclamation Abraham Lincoln 499

9 United States Constitution: Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments 501

10 The Black Codes W. E. B. Du Bois 503

11 The Chinese Exclusion Act 511

12 Elk v. Wilkins, 1884 514

13 Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896 516

14 United States Constitution: Nineteenth Amendment (1920) 519

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15 U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 1923 520

16 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954 523

17 Roe v. Wade, 1973 528

18 The Equal Rights Amendment (Defeated) 529

19 Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015 530

Suggestions for Further Reading 534

PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality” 537

1 Self- Fulfilling Stereotypes Mark Snyder 541

2 Am I Thin Enough Yet? Sharlene Hesse- Biber 547

3 Institutions and Ideologies Michael Parenti 555

4 Media Magic: Making Class Invisible Gregory Mantsios 562

5 Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid Jonathan Kozol 570

6 Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex Angela Davis 584

7 You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4 Jon Ronson 589

8 The Florida State Seminoles: The Champions of Racist Mascots Dave Zirin 596

9 Michael Brown’s Unremarkable Humanity Ta- Nehisi Coates 599

10 When You Forget to Whistle Vivaldi Tressie McMillan Cottom 601

Suggestions for Further Reading 603

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PART IX Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference 605

1 Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference Audre Lorde 609

2 Feminism: A Transformational Politic bell hooks 616

3 A New Vision of Masculinity Cooper Thompson 623

4 Interrupting the Cycle of Oppression: The Role of Allies as Agents of Change Andrea Ayvazian 629

5 Demand the Impossible Matthew Rothschild 636

6 The Motivating Forces Behind Black Lives Matter Tasbeeh Herwees 639

7 On Solidarity, “Centering Anti- Blackness,” and Asian Americans Scot Nakagawa 642

Suggestions for Further Reading 644

Index 645

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Reflections from the First to the Tenth Edition of Race, Class, and Gender When the first edition of Race, Class, and Gender in the United States was published in 1988 under the title Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study, there was no World Wide Web. There were no smart phones. Smoking was still allowed on airplanes. China was one of the poorest nations in the world, the Soviet Union still existed, and apartheid was alive— if not well— in South Africa. In fact, the next president of South Africa and famed civil rights leader Nelson Mandela was still in prison in 1988, serving the 25th year of his sentence.

In the United States, the Reagan Administration was defending the secret sale of U.S. arms to Iran, while the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether one of the largest associations of “businessmen”—the Rotary Club— had a constitutional right to refuse to admit women as members. Scholars were arguing over the relationship between race and intelligence— a debate that was about to get even more heated in the decade that followed. Three quarters of the American population thought homo- sexual relations between two consenting adults was always wrong and the state had the right to outlaw such conduct.* As for the issue of economic inequality, it was nowhere to be found in the public discourse.

Much has happened in the intervening years. With a surge in voter turnout in 2008, a black man was elected president, and as of this writing, a woman is leading the polls for— and, by the time you are reading this, may even have won— the presidency of the United States. Given the setbacks for the feminist, black, and Latino/a move- ments of the 1960s and 1970s, most Americans in the 1980s did not expect to witness this type of cultural and political change in their lifetime. Even more inconceivable, given the cultural landscape, was that a growing LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) movement would help make gay marriage legal, and gender reassignment would enter the popular culture. An Occupy Wall Street movement helped put the issue of economic inequality squarely on the national and international agenda, seem- ingly overnight. And while many had hoped for a growing environmental movement, few anticipated the emergence of a global approach to climate change.

On the other hand, nearly three decades after the first edition of this book was published, so much has stayed the same or worsened. In 1988, the richest 20% of Americans held 83% of total household wealth: today, that 20% holds 93% of the nation’s wealth. Women have made significant strides politically, socially, and eco- nomically, yet they still make only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes— and the

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PREFACE

* Smith, Tom W. “Public Attitudes toward Homosexuality.” NORC/University of Chicago: Septem- ber, 2011.

The right of states to outlaw acts of homosexuality by consenting adults was based on the 1986 Supreme Court decision Bowers v. Hardwick.

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gap is even greater for women of color (64 cents for African American women). While racial profiling has finally caught the attention of the media, its persistence—and its expansion to Muslim and Sikh communities—continues to destroy lives and families. Policies, like affirmative action, that were designed to remedy inequities have been deeply weakened. So too, have organizations, like unions, that had for so long been such an important check on inequality and injustice. Twenty- two percent of the chil- dren in the United States live in poverty, a proportion nearly identical to what it was 30 years ago. How ironic that so much change can co- exist with so much stagnation.

How do we make sense of all of this? In the introduction to the first edition of the book, I put it simply: “An integrated approach to the study of racism and sexism within the context of class provides us with a more comprehensive, more accurate, more useful analysis of the world in which we live out our lives.” This is as true now as it was nearly three decades ago.

New to Race, Class, and Gender, Tenth Edition The tenth edition of Race, Class, and Gender, like previous editions, views the prob- lems facing our country and our communities as structural, and seeks to contribute to the conversation about fairness and justice. Like its predecessors, this edition un- dertakes the study of race, gender, and sexuality within the context of class. We look at racism, sexism, heterosexism, class privilege, and the concepts of patriarchy and white privilege, and explore the interlocking nature of these systems of oppression as they work in combination and impact virtually every aspect of life in U.S. society today. New to Part II of this edition, we revisit Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on inter- sectionality, a term she coined in 1989. In an interview, Crenshaw reflects on the continued need for an accessible metaphor that captures the complexity of multiple and simultaneous forms of oppression. This intersectional framework is one that we rely on throughout the book to illustrate the complex dimensions of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Part I introduces these different categories by examining the ways each of them has been socially and hierarchically constructed to the benefit of some and to the disadvantage of others. Susan Stryker’s work, new to this edition, explores the rela- tionship between sex, gender, and gender identity. This excerpt lays a foundation for later pieces that address trans lives, identities, and experiences, all showing us how gender identity is shaped by race, class, sexuality, and other factors. For example, ad- ditional writings include a piece on violence against trans women (“The Transgender Crucible” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely in Part IV), the role of economic access in living as a trans person (“‘I am Alena’: Life as a Trans Woman Where Survival Means Living as Christopher” by Ed Pilkington in Part V), and a reflection on how recent public attention on trans communities is mediated by privilege so that many stories and experiences continue to be omitted (“The Unbearable (In)visibility of Being Trans” by Chase Strangio in Part VI).

This edition includes an intentional, focused, and intersectional engagement with current public conversations about mass incarceration, police violence, and racial and

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other forms of profiling. We have included an excerpt from Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (Part IV), which addresses mass incarceration and racial targeting of Black and Latino communities. “The Ghosts of Stonewall: Policing Sex, Policing Gender” by Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock and the above- mentioned “Trans- gender Crucible” both discuss how the actions and identities of LGBT people, especially people of color, come under greater scrutiny by the law and are more vulnerable to pun- ishment. Julianne Hing’s article, “Race, Disability and the School- to- Prison Pipeline,” illustrates the relationship between educational institutions, systems of punishment, and the risks involved for marginalized students.

In Part VI, “Many Voices, Many Lives,” Claudia Rankine, Ta- Nehisi Coates, and Kiese Laymon each offer a poetic reflection on how structural racism, specifically anti- black racism, operate on a deeply personal, everyday level of experience. Also in this part, Edwidge Dandicat shares a beautiful and difficult meditation on the concurrences of anti- black racism by linking the white supremacist killings of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, to the state policies of the removal of Hai- tians in the Dominican Republic. Finally, in Part VIII’s exploration of the role of the media and stereotypes in maintaining race, class, and gender hierarchies, Ta- Nehisi Coates and Tressie McMillan Cottom each reflect on the police killings of two un- armed black men, Michael Brown and Jonathan Ferrell. Coates and Cottom challenge “respectability politics,” or the idea that it is the responsibility of those individuals and groups that are being racially targeted to change their behavior to prevent such targeting. Coates and Cottom are concerned with how safety and protection from violence are distributed in our society and argue that one’s basic humanity is not something that must be earned. In our final part, Part IX, we include a selection by Tasbeeh Herwees about the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. Herwees explores how gender and sexuality are integral to social justice organizing, even when it is explicitly centered on race.

As in previous editions, we pay substantive attention to the complex and evolv- ing dynamics of identity. For example, we feature Christina Greer’s research on the relationship between native- born black Americans and black ethnic immigrants, il- luminating the heterogeneity within black communities. We also include Angelo N. Ancheta’s seminal essay “Neither Black nor White” in Part II, which illustrates how Asians have been racially positioned in the United States. Scot Nakagawa’s “On Soli- darity, ‘Centering Anti- Blackness’ and Asian Americans” in Part IX brings Ancheta’s analysis into the present, reflects on how Asian Americans are racially positioned today, and offers suggestions for how Asian Americans should participate in contem- porary racial justice struggles.

This edition includes several pieces about the experiences of communities that are, or are perceived to be, Arab and/or Muslim. Moustafa Bayoumi’s work with Arab- and Muslim-American youth in the post- 9/11 period illustrates how contemporary examples of the racialization and exclusion of Arab and Muslim Americans reflects a history of these processes in the United States. Jon Ronson’s work (Part VIII) looks at stereotypical representations of terrorists in the media and how typecasting limits the opportunities available for Muslim- American actors.

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Additionally, this edition includes two new pieces that address the racial- ized experience of indigenous populations in the United States. In Part IV, Brian Bienkowski documents how environmental racism affects Native American popu- lations in Michigan, and in Part VIII, David Zirin examines how cultural racism is enacted against indigenous communities through professional sports team mascots.

Several essays in this new edition take a look at immigration policies. Faye Hipsman and Doris Meissner (Part III) provide a helpful overview of how the U.S. immigra- tion system works, its historical context, and contemporary trends in immigration. Tim Henderson’s piece (Part IV) looks at the fear of deportation in undocumented communities. In his article, Henderson notes that even when the rate of deportation went down, the level of fear in undocumented immigrant communities remained. He shows our feelings of fear and insecurity operate beyond the concrete risks we face. At the time of this writing, in early 2016, the Obama administration has prioritized a new wave of removal operations, conducting raids of mostly Central American individuals and families, making Henderson’s work even more poignant. Douglas Massey’s work (“Immigration Enforcement as a Race- Making Institution” in Part V) shows how immigration policy shapes the demographics of communities in the United States— in this case, Latino immigrants. Moving from the structural to the individual, E. Tammy Kim’s writing (Part VI) tells the story of an undocumented im- migrant and the everyday struggles she faces.

This edition includes many new pieces that approach issues of class and the econ- omy from an intersectional perspective. In Part I, we include a short essay by Susan Greenbaum that challenges the persistent myth that poor people are to blame for their economic conditions, by looking at government, corporate, and other struc- tural factors that shape poverty. In the next part, Robin DiAngelo provides a personal reflection on how her experience of poverty and class oppression did not negate her white privilege. In Part V, Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry offer an updated overview of inequality and wealth distribution by racial category. Seth Freed Wessler challenges stereotypes about Asian “model minority” success, painting a more com- plete picture of class distribution in Asian immigrant communities. Linda Burnham’s research shows how black women, facing both racism and sexism in the workplace, were more affected than others by the last recession and continue to struggle during the economic recovery. Ai-jen Poo writes about how domestic workers, organizing as a workforce of mostly immigrant women of color, challenge unfair and unjust workplace conditions. Organizing on the basis of “women’s work” makes visible the often- erased caring labor that is essential to our economy. Finally, Tracie McMillan writes about hunger in the United States, challenging assumptions about what the everyday experience of being without sufficient food looks like.

We close this edition with essays that encourage readers to redefine difference and to think in broad terms about the kind of society we wish to live in and the kinds of relationships we wish to have with others. These essays in Part IX, “Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference,” by Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Cooper Thompson, as well as the new pieces by Tasbeeh Herwees and Scot Nakagawa about the current movement for Black Lives, demonstrate how people who care about

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the issues of inequality, privilege, and injustice can, and are, making a difference in the world. Faculty using this book will find that this section allows them to end their courses in a very positive way. This is important because students who study social problems often end up feeling overwhelmed by the extent and severity of these issues. The articles in the last section leave students with an understanding that ordinary people acting on their principles really can make a difference!

Acknowledgments Many people contributed to Race, Class, and Gender— and its evolution over the course of nearly three decades. First, I owe a profound debt to the old 12th Street study group, with whom I first studied black history and first came to understand the centrality of the issue of race. I am also indebted to the group’s members, who pro- vided me with a lasting example of what it means to commit one’s life to the struggle for equality and justice for all people.

Next, I owe an equally profound debt to my friends and colleagues in the New Jersey Project on Inclusive Scholarship, Curriculum, and Teaching, and to friends, colleagues, and students at William Paterson University who have been involved in the various race and gender projects we have carried out over the years. I have learned a great deal from all of them. I would also like to thank the faculty and stu- dents, too many to name, at the many colleges and universities where I have lectured over the years.

In addition I am grateful to the reviewers of this and previous editions for their insightful feedback. They include: Mildred Anterior, New Jersey City University; Maral N. Attallah, Humboldt State University; Adriana Leela Bohm, Delaware Community College; Nancy F. Browning, Lincoln University of Missouri; Debra Butterfield, Boston College; Natalie Smith Carslon, North Dakota State Univer- sity; Margaret Crowdes, California State University– San Marcos; Helen Dedes, William Paterson University; Margie Kitter Edwards, Temple University; Miriam Rheingold Fuller, University of Central Missouri; Lawrence Andrew Gill, William Paterson University; Tonya Huber- Warring, St. Cloud State University; Denise Isom, California Polytechnic State University–San Luis Obispo; Kelly F. Jackson, Arizona State University; Navita Cummings James, University of South Florida; Michelle L. Johnson, Ramapo College of New Jersey; Mary Kelley, University of Central Missouri; Deborah L. Little, Adelphi University; Enid Logan, University of Minnesota; David Lucander, Rockland Community College; Michele Murphy, William Patterson University; Julie Norflus- Good, Ramapo College of New Jersey; Archana Pathak, Virginia Commonwealth University; Viji Sargis, William Paterson University; Rashad Shabazz, University of Vermont; Roger Simpson, California State University, Fresno; and Rebeckah Zincavage, Boston College.

This edition would not have been possible without the work of three collabora- tors to whom I am deeply indebted: Soniya Munshi for her research, writing, and revisions to this edition; Sarah Berger, my hands- on editor, for her insights, sensitivity,

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perseverance, and deep commitment to the project; and Greg Mantsios for his inval- uable assistance and good judgment about all things related to this and all previous editions.

Finally, I want to thank Greg for being such a remarkable partner as well as col- laborator; our children, Alexi Mantsios and Andrea Mantsios; and their partners, Caroline Donohue and Luis Armando Ocaranza Ordaz, for their insights, observa- tions, and most of all, their extraordinary support through thick and thin.

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Paula Rothenberg has been writing, teaching, and consulting on a variety of topics for over five decades. Her areas of expertise include multicultural curriculum transformation, issues of inequality, equity, and privilege, global- izing the curriculum, and white privilege. From 1989 to 2006, she served as Director of the New Jersey Project on Inclusive Scholarship, Curriculum, and Teaching, and Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at The William Paterson University of New Jersey. She is the author of Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender (University Press of Kansas). Her anthology, White Privilege: Readings on the Other Side of Racism, is now in its fifth edition. Beyond Borders: Thinking Critically About Global Issues was published by Worth in 2005, and her anthology, What’s the Problem? A Brief Guide to Critical Thinking, was published in 2009. Paula Rothenberg is also co- editor of a number of other anthologies, including Creating an Inclusive College Curriculum: A Teaching Sourcebook from the New Jersey Project; Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations be- tween Women and Men; and Philosophy Now. Her articles and essays ap- pear in journals and anthologies across the disciplines, and many have been widely reprinted.

About the Contributor Soniya Munshi is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Borough of Man- hattan Community College of the City University of New York, where she also teaches Asian American Studies in the Center for Ethnic Studies. Her research examines the racial politics of antiviolence work, the role of legal and medical institutions in constructing and responding to social problems, and social movements that build strategies of accountability outside punishment. Soniya Munshi is a member of the National Collective of INCITE! Women, Gender Non- Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association Working Group.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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1

It is impossible to make sense out of either the past or the present without using

race, class, gender, and sexuality as central categories of description and analy-

sis. Yet many of us are the products of an educational system that has taught

us to ignore these categories and thus not to see the differences in power and

privilege that surround us. As a result, events that some people identify as clear

examples of sexism or racism appear to others to be simply “the way things are.”

Understandably, this difference in outlook often makes conversation difficult and

frustrating. A basic premise of this book is that much of what passes for a neu-

tral perspective across the disciplines and in cultural life smuggles in elements of

class, race, and gender bias and distortion. Because the so- called neutral point of

view is so pervasive, it is often difficult to identify. One of the goals of this text is to

help the reader learn to recognize some of the ways in which issues of race, class,

and gender are embedded in ordinary discourse and daily life. Learning to identify

and employ race, class, and gender as fundamental categories of description and

analysis is essential if we wish to understand our own lives and the lives of others.

The Challenges of Studying Race, Class, and Gender As we begin our study together, some differences from other academic enter-

prises are immediately apparent. Whereas students and faculty in an introductory

literature or chemistry class rarely begin the semester with deeply felt and firmly

entrenched attitudes toward the subject, almost every student in a course that

deals with issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality enters the room on the first

day with strong feelings, and almost every faculty member does so as well. The

consequences can be either very good or very bad. Under the best conditions, if

we acknowledge our feelings head on, those feelings can provide the basis for a

passionate and personal study of the topics and can make this course something

out of the ordinary, a class that has real long- term meaning both for students

and for teachers.

This material presents many challenges. Racism, sexism, heterosexism, and

class privilege are all systems of oppression with their own particular history and

their own intrinsic logic (or illogic). Therefore it is important to explore each of

these systems on its own terms; at the same time, these systems operate in con-

junction with one another to form an enormously complex set of interlocking

INTRODUCTION

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2 Introduction

and self- perpetuating relations of domination and subordination. It is essential

that we understand the ways in which these systems overlap, intersect, and play

off one another. For purposes of analysis, it may be necessary to talk as if it were

possible to abstract race or sexuality from, say, gender and class, and for a time

subject a dimension to exclusive scrutiny, even though such distinctions are never

possible in reality. When we engage in this kind of abstraction, we should never

lose sight of the fact that any particular individual has an ethnic background,

a class location, an age, a sexual orientation, a religious orientation, a gender,

and that all these characteristics are inseparable from the person and from one

another. Always, the particular combination of these identities shapes the individ-

ual and locates him or her in society.

It is also true that in talking about racism, sexism, and heterosexism in the con-

text of class, we may have to make generalizations about the experience of different

groups of people, even as we affirm that each individual is unique. For example,

in order to highlight similarities in the experiences of some individuals, this book

often talks about “people of color” or “women of color,” even though these terms

are somewhat problematic. When I refer to “women” in this book instead of “white

women” or “women of color,” it is usually in order to focus on the particular expe-

riences or the legal status of women as women. Yet for the purposes of discussion

and analysis, it is often necessary to make artificial distinctions in order to focus

on particular aspects of experience that may not be separable in reality. Language

both mirrors reality and helps to structure it. No wonder, then, that it is so difficult

to use our language in ways that adequately address our topics.

Structure of the Book This book begins with an examination of the ways in which race, class, gender, and

sexuality have been socially constructed in the United States as “differences” in

the form of hierarchies. What exactly does it mean to claim that someone or some

group of people is “different”? What kind of evidence might be offered to support

this claim? What does it mean to construct differences? And how does society

treat people who are categorized in this way? The readings in Parts I, II, III, and IV

are intended to initiate a dialogue about the ways in which U.S. society constructs

difference, and the social, political, and personal consequences that flow from that

construction. These readings encourage us to think about the meaning of racism,

sexism, heterosexism, and class privilege, and how these systems intersect.

Part I treats the idea of difference itself as a social construct, one that under-

lies and grounds racism, sexism, class privilege, and homophobia. Each of the

authors included would agree that while some of these differences may appear to

be “natural” or given in nature, they are in fact socially constructed, and the mean-

ings and values associated with these differences create a hierarchy of power

and privilege which, precisely because it does appear to be “natural,” is used to

rationalize inequality.

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Introduction 3

Part II introduces the concept of “oppression” in order to examine racism,

sexism, heterosexism, and class privilege as intersecting systems of oppression

that ensure advantages for some and diminished opportunities for others. Part III

moves us beyond a black/white paradigm for thinking about issues of race and

examines some of the complexities of the experiences and the challenges that

arise from living in a genuinely diverse, multicultural society in which white privi-

lege continues to play a major role in shaping economic, political, and social life.

Part IV provides us with concrete examples of how the systems of oppression

operate in contemporary society. Through news articles and other materials, we

get a first- hand look at the kinds of discrimination that are faced by members of

groups subject to unequal and discriminatory treatment.

Defining racism and sexism is always a volatile undertaking. Most of us have

strong feelings about race and gender relations and have a stake in the way those

relations are portrayed and analyzed. Definitions are powerful. They can focus

attention on certain aspects of reality and make others disappear. Parts I through

IV are intended to examine the process of definition. The readings allow us to dis-

cuss the ways in which we have been taught to think about race, class, and gender

difference and to examine how these differences manifest themselves in daily life.

Part V provides statistics and analyses that demonstrate the impact of economic

structures on race, class, and gender differences in people’s lives. Whereas previ-

ous selections depend primarily on narrative to define and illustrate discrimination

and oppression, the material in Part V presents current data, much of it drawn

from U.S. government sources, that document the ways in which socially con-

structed differences mean real differences in opportunity, expectations, and treat-

ment. These differences are brought to life in the articles, poems, and stories in

Part VI, offering glimpses into the lives of women and men of different ethnic and

class backgrounds, who express their sexuality and cultures in a variety of ways.

Although many selections are highly personal, each points beyond the individual’s

experience to social policy or practice or to culturally conditioned attitudes.

When people first begin to recognize the enormous toll that racism, sexism,

heterosexism, and class privilege takes, they often are overwhelmed. How can

we reconcile our belief that the United States extends liberty and justice and

equal opportunity for all with the reality presented in these pages? How has the

disconnect between our beliefs and our actual experiences happened? At this

point we must turn to history.

Part VII highlights important aspects of the history of subordinated groups in

the United States by focusing on historical documents that address race and gen-

der issues in U.S. law since the beginning of the Republic. When these documents

are read in the context of the earlier material describing race, gender, and class

differences in contemporary society, they give us a way of using the past to make

sense of the present. Focusing on the legal status of women of all colors and men

of color allows us to distill hundreds of years of history down to a manageable

size, while still providing the historical information needed to make sense of con-

temporary society.

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4 Introduction

Our survey of racism and sexism in the United States, past and present, has shown

that these phenomena can assume different forms in different contexts. For some,

these experiences are still all too real today; for others they reflect a crude, blatant

racism that seems incompatible with contemporary life. But racism, sexism, homo-

phobia, and class privilege are in fact perpetuated in contemporary society— why do

these divisions and the accompanying differences in opportunity and achievement

continue? How are they reproduced? Part VIII offers some suggestions.

The selections in Part VIII focus on how our conceptions of others— and,

equally important, our conceptions of ourselves— help perpetuate racism, sexism,

heterosexism, and class privilege. The discussion moves beyond the specificity

of stereotypes; it analyzes how modes of conceptualizing reality itself are condi-

tioned by forces that are not always obvious. Racism, sexism, heterosexism, and

classism are not only systems of oppression that provide advantages and privi-

leges to some, they are not simply identifiable attitudes, policies, and practices

that affect individuals’ lives; racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism operate

on a basic level to structure what we come to think of as “reality.” As such, they

limit our possibilities and personhood. They cause us to internalize beliefs that dis-

tort our perspectives and expectations and make it more difficult to identify the

origins of unequal and unjust distribution of resources. This hierarchy of privilege

and opportunity has been institutionalized throughout our society, and in this way

it has been rationalized and normalized. We grow up being taught that the pre-

vailing hierarchy in society is natural and inevitable, perhaps even desirable, and

so we fail to identity that unequal and unjust distribution as a problem.

Finally, Part IX offers some suggestions for moving beyond racism, sexism,

heterosexism, and classism. These selections are intended to stimulate discussion

about the kinds of change we might wish to explore in order to transform society.

Some of the articles offer ideas about the causes of and cures for the pervasive

social and economic inequality and injustice that are documented in this vol-

ume and suggest ways to revise our society and our social relationships. Others

move from theory to practice by offering very specific suggestions about, and

concrete examples of, interrupting the cycle of oppression and bringing about

social change. Some of these articles suggest things that individuals can do in the

course of everyday life in order to make a difference; others provide examples of

people working together to bring about social change. The task is enormous, time

is short, and our collective future is at stake.

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Selection Title 5

The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality

5

Every society grapples with the question of how to distribute its wealth, power,

resources, and opportunities. In some cases, the distribution is relatively egalitar-

ian; in others, it is dramatically unequal. Those societies that tend toward a less

egalitarian distribution have adopted various ways to apportion privilege; some

have used age, others have used ancestry. U.S. society, like many others, places

a priority on sex, race, and class. To this end, race and gender differences have

often been portrayed as unbridgeable and immutable.

Men and women have historically been portrayed as polar opposites with

innately different abilities and capacities. The very traits that are considered

positive in a man are seen as signs of dysfunction in a woman, and the qualities

that are praised in women are often ridiculed in men. We need only look at the

representation of women in U.S. politics where, despite making up a majority of

the population, women hold less than 20 percent of congressional seats, or at

the small percentage (9 percent2) of male nurses in the profession to see that

ideas about gender differences shape our view of what men and women can and

cannot do.

Race difference has been portrayed in a similarly binary fashion. White- skinned

people of European origin have viewed themselves as innately superior in intelli-

gence and ability to people with darker skin or different physical characteristics.

As both the South Carolina Slave Code of 1712 and the Dred Scott Decision, in

Part VII of this text, make clear, “Negroes” were believed to be members of a

PART I

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6 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality

different and lesser race. Their enslavement, like the genocide carried out against

Native Americans, was justified on the basis of these assumed differences. In the

Southwest, Anglo landowners claimed that “Orientals” and Mexicans were natu-

rally suited to perform certain kinds of brutal, sometimes crippling, farm labor to

which whites were “physically unable to adapt.”3

Class status, too, has been correlated with supposed differences in innate abil-

ity and moral worth. Property qualifications for voting have been used not only to

prevent African Americans from exercising the right to vote, but also to exclude

poor whites. From the beginnings of U.S. society, owning property was considered

an indication of superior intelligence and character.

We begin this book with an entirely different premise. All the readings in this

first part argue that far from reflecting natural and innate differences among

people, the categories of gender, race, and class are socially constructed. Rather

than being “given” in nature, they reflect culturally constructed differences that

maintain the prevailing distribution of power and privilege in a society, and they

change in relation to changes in social, political, and economic life.

At first this may seem to be a strange claim. On the face of it, whether a person

is male or female or a member of a particular race seems to be a straightforward

question of biology. But like most differences that are alleged to be “natural” and

“immutable,” or unchangeable, the categories of race and gender are far more

complex than they might seem.

Social scientists often distinguish between “sex” as a category that is assigned

at birth and “gender” as the particular set of socially constructed meanings that

are associated with each sex. Although “sex” is often assumed to be natural or

biological, even sex is socially constructed. As Susan Stryker shows in this part,

sex collapses complex and diverse physiology, biology, and genetics into only two

available options: male or female.

The meaning of classification as a man or as a woman differs from culture to

culture and within each society as well as over different periods of time. It is this

difference in connotation or meaning that theorists point to when they claim that

gender is socially constructed. What is understood as “naturally” masculine or

feminine behavior in one society may be the exact opposite of what is considered

“natural” for women or men in another culture. Furthermore, while it is true that

most societies have sex- role stereotypes that identify certain jobs or activities as

appropriate for women and others for men, and claim that these divisions reflect

“natural” differences in ability and/or interest, there is little consistency in the

kinds of task that have been so categorized. In some societies it is women who

are responsible for agricultural labor, and in others it is men. Even within cultures

that claim that women are unsuited for heavy manual labor, some women (usually

women of color and poor white working women) have always been expected and

required to perform backbreaking physical work— on plantations, in factories, on

farms, in commercial laundries, and in their homes. Anthropologist Gayle Rubin

explains it this way:

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PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality 7

Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes. . . . Men and women are, of course, different. But they are not as different as day and night, earth and sky, yin and yang, life and death. In fact, from the standpoint of nature, men and women are closer to each other than either is to anything else— for instance, mountains, kangaroos, or coconut palms. The idea that men and women are more different from one another than either is from anything else must come from somewhere other than nature.4

In fact, we might go on to argue, along with Rubin, that “far from being an

expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of

natural similarities.”5 Boys and girls, women and men, are under enormous pres-

sure from the earliest ages to conform to sex- role stereotypes that divide basic

human attributes between the two sexes. In Selection 4, Judith Lorber argues

that differences between women and men are never merely differences but are

constructed hierarchically so that women are always portrayed as different in the

sense of being deviant and deficient. Central to this construction of difference

is the social construction of sexuality, a process Jonathan Ned Katz and Michael

Kimmel analyze in Selections 5 and 6. In Selection 7, Susan Stryker asks us to

evaluate our assumptions about the relationship among sex, gender, and sexuality,

and posits that transgender feminism reveals the limits of theorizing about gender

on the basis of sexed bodies.

The idea of race has been socially constructed in similar ways. The claim that

race is a social construction challenges the once- popular belief that people are

born into different races that have innate, biologically based differences in intel-

lect, temperament, and character. The idea of ethnicity, in contrast to race, focuses

on the shared social/cultural experiences and heritages of various groups and

divides or categorizes them according to these shared experiences and traits. The

important difference here is that those who talk of race and racial identity believe

that they are dividing people according to biological or genetic similarities and

differences, whereas those who talk of ethnicity simply point to commonalities

that are understood as social, not biological, in origin.

Contemporary historian Ronald Takaki suggests that in the United States,

“[r]ace . . . has been a social construction that has historically set apart racial

minorities from European immigrant groups.”6 Michael Omi and Howard Winant,

authors of Selection 1, would agree. They maintain that race is more a political

categorization than a biological or scientific category. They point to the rela-

tively arbitrary way in which the category has been constructed and suggest

that changes in the meaning and use of racial distinctions can be correlated with

economic and political changes in U.S. society. Dark- skinned men and women

from Spain were once classified as “white” along with fair- skinned immigrants

from England and Ireland, whereas early Greek immigrants were often classified as

“Orientals” and subjected to the same discrimination that Chinese and Japanese

immigrants experienced under the laws of California and other Western states.

In South Africa, Japanese immigrants were categorized as “white,” not “black” or

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8 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality

“colored,” presumably because the South African economy depended on trade

with Japan. In contemporary U.S. society, dark- skinned Latin people are often

categorized as “black” by those who continue to equate something called “race”

with skin color. In Selection 2, Pem Davidson Buck argues that whiteness and

white privilege were constructed historically along with race difference in order

to divide working people from each other and in this way protect the wealth and

power of a small, privileged elite. In Selection 3, “How Jews Became White Folks,”

Karen Brodkin provides a detailed account of the specific ways in which the status

and classifications of one group, Jewish immigrants to the United States, changed

over time as a result of and in relation to economic, political, and social changes

in our society.

The claim that race is a social construction is not meant to deny the obvious

differences in skin color and physical characteristics that people manifest. It sim-

ply sees these differences on a continuum of diversity rather than as reflecting

innate genetic differences among peoples. Scientists have long argued that all

human beings are descended from a common stock.

Writing about racism, Algerian- born French philosopher Albert Memmi once

explained that racism consists of stressing a difference between individuals or pop-

ulations. The difference can be real or imagined and in itself doesn’t entail racism

(or, by analogy, sexism). It is not difference itself that leads to subordination, but the

interpretation of difference. It is the assigning of a value to a particular difference

in a way that discredits an individual or group to the advantage of another that

transforms mere difference into deficiency.7 In this country, both race and gender

differences have been carefully constructed as hierarchy. This means that in the

United States, it is not merely that women are described as different from men, but

also that the difference is understood to leave women deficient. Similarly with race:

People of color are described as different from white people, and that difference

too is understood as deviance from an acceptable norm— even as pathology— and

in both cases, difference is used to rationalize racism and sexism.

In Selection 6, Michael Kimmel argues that homophobia is “intimately interwo-

ven with both sexism and racism.” According to Kimmel, the ideal of masculinity

that prevails in U.S. society today is one that reflects the needs and interests

of capitalism. It effectively defines “women, nonwhite men, nonnative- born men,

homosexual men” as “other” and deficient, and in this way renders members of

all these groups as well as large numbers of white working class and middle class

men powerless in contemporary society.

Our understanding of the ways in which race and gender differences have

been constructed is further enriched by Douglas Baynton’s analysis in Selec-

tion 9. Baynton argues that the idea of disability has functioned historically to

justify unequal treatment for women and minority groups as well as to justify

inequality for disabled people themselves. In his essay, he explores the ways in

which the concept of disability has been used at different moments in history

to disenfranchise various groups in U.S. society and to legitimize discrimination

against them.

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PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality 9

The social construction of class is analogous, but not identical, to that of race

and gender. Differences between rich and poor, which result from particular ways

of structuring the economy, are socially constructed as innate differences among

people. These differences are then used to rationalize or justify the unequal dis-

tribution of wealth and power that results from economic decisions made to per-

petuate privilege. In addition, straightforward numerical differences in earnings

are rarely the basis for conferring class status. For example, school teachers and

college professors are usually considered to have a higher status than plumb-

ers and electricians, even though the earnings of plumbers and electricians are

often significantly higher. Where people are presumed to fit into the class hier-

archy has less to do with clear- cut numerical categories than it does with the

socially constructed superiority of those who perform mental labor (i.e., work with

their heads) over those who perform manual labor (i.e., work with their hands).

In addition, the status of various occupations and the class position the occupa-

tions imply often change depending on whether the occupation is predominantly

female or male and on its racial composition.

Equally significant, differences in wealth and family income have been over-

laden with value judgments and stereotypes to the extent that identifying some-

one as a member of the middle class, working class, or underclass carries implicit

implications about his or her moral character and ability. In the nineteenth cen-

tury, proponents of Calvinism and social Darwinism maintained that being poor

in itself indicated that an individual was morally flawed and thus deserved his or

her poverty— relieving society of any responsibility for social ills. More recently, as

Susan Greenbaum discusses in Selection 8, the idea that poverty can be blamed

on family structure and cultural values was brought to the fore again in the 1965

government- issued Moynihan Report, which claimed that African American family

values were producing a “tangle of pathology.” This approach to blaming the poor

for being poor refuses to see poverty as a social and economic problem that we

can collectively address.

Finally, class difference can be said to be socially constructed in a way that

parallels the construction of race and gender as difference. In this respect, the

organization of U.S. society makes hierarchy or class itself appear natural and

inevitable. We grade and rank children from their earliest ages and claim to

be sorting them according to something called “natural ability.” The tracking

that permeates our system of education both reflects and creates the expec-

tation that there are A people, B people, C people, and so forth. Well before

high school, children come to define themselves and others in just this way

and accept this kind of classification as natural. Consequently, quite apart from

accepting the particular mythology or ideology of class difference prevalent at

any given moment (i.e., “the poor are lazy and worthless” versus “the poor are

meek and humble and will inherit the earth”), we come to think it natural and

inevitable that there should be class differences in the first place. In the final

essay in Part I, Jean Baker Miller asks and answers the question “What do people

do to people who are different from them and why?”

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10 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality

NOTES 1. Steve Hill, “Why Does the US Still Have So Few Women in Office?” The Nation.

March 7, 2014. 2. American Nurses Association. The Practice of Professional Nursing Work Force.

“Fast Fact 2014” Retrieved November 25th, 2015 (http://www.nursingworld.org /MainMenuCategories/ThePracticeofProfessionalNursing/workforce/Fast-Facts-2014 -Nursing-Workforce.pdf)

3. Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: Multicultural American History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 321.

4. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, Rayna R. Reiter, ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), p. 179.

5. Ibid., p. 180. 6. Takaki, Different Mirror. 7. Albert Memmi, Dominated Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).

03_ROT_7866_P1_05_098.indd 10 2/22/16 11:34 AM

http://www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ThePracticeofProfessionalNursing/workforce/Fast-Facts-2014-Nursing-Workforce.pdf
http://www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ThePracticeofProfessionalNursing/workforce/Fast-Facts-2014-Nursing-Workforce.pdf
http://www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ThePracticeofProfessionalNursing/workforce/Fast-Facts-2014-Nursing-Workforce.pdf
11

1 Racial Formations Michael Omi and Howard Winant

In 1982–83, Susie Guillory Phipps unsuccessfully sued the Louisiana Bureau of Vital Records to change her racial classification from black to white. The descendant of an eighteenth- century white planter and a black slave, Phipps was designated “black” in her birth certificate in accordance with a 1970 state law which declared anyone with at least one- thirty- second “Negro blood” to be black. The legal battle raised intriguing questions about the concept of race, its meaning in contemporary society, and its use (and abuse) in public policy. Assistant Attorney General Ron Davis defended the law by pointing out that some type of racial classification was necessary to comply with federal record- keeping requirements and to facilitate programs for the prevention of genetic diseases. Phipps’s attorney, Brian Begue, argued that the assignment of racial categories on birth certificates was unconstitutional and that the one- thirty- second designation was inaccurate. He called on a retired Tulane University professor who cited research indicating that most whites have one- twentieth “Negro” ancestry. In the end, Phipps lost. The court upheld a state law which quantified racial identity, and in so doing affirmed the legality of assigning individuals to specific racial groupings.1

The Phipps case illustrates the continuing dilemma of defining race and estab- lishing its meaning in institutional life. Today, to assert that variations in human physiognomy are racially based is to enter a constant and intense debate. Scientific interpretations of race have not been alone in sparking heated controversy; religious perspectives have done so as well.2 Most centrally, of course, race has been a matter of political contention. This has been particularly true in the United States, where the concept of race has varied enormously over time without ever leaving the center stage of US history.

What Is Race? Race consciousness, and its articulation in theories of race, is largely a modern phe- nomenon. When European explorers in the New World “discovered” people who looked different than themselves, these “natives” challenged then existing concep- tions of the origins of the human species, and raised disturbing questions as to whether all could be considered in the same “family of man.”3 Religious debates flared over the attempt to reconcile the Bible with the existence of “racially dis- tinct” people. Arguments took place over creation itself, as theories of polygenesis questioned whether God had made only one species of humanity (“monogenesis”). Europeans wondered if the natives of the New World were indeed human beings

From Michael Omi and Howard Winant, “The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality” in Racial Formations in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. Copyright © 1986. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

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12 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality

with redeemable souls. At stake were not only the prospects for conversion, but the types of treatment to be accorded them. The expropriation of property, the denial of political rights, the introduction of slavery and other forms of coercive labor, as well as outright extermination, all presupposed a worldview which distinguished Europeans— children of God, human beings, etc.—from “others.” Such a world- view was needed to explain why some should be “free” and others enslaved, why some had rights to land and property while others did not. Race, and the interpreta- tion of racial differences, was a central factor in that worldview.

In the colonial epoch science was no less a field of controversy than religion in attempts to comprehend the concept of race and its meaning. Spurred on by the classificatory scheme of living organisms devised by Linnaeus in Systema Naturae, many scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dedicated themselves to the identification and ranking of variations in humankind. Race was thought of as a biological concept, yet its precise definition was the subject of debates which, as we have noted, continue to rage today. Despite efforts ranging from Dr. Samuel Morton’s studies of cranial capacity4 to contemporary attempts to base racial classification on shared gene pools,5 the concept of race has defied biological definition. . . .

Attempts to discern the scientific meaning of race continue to the present day. Although most physical anthropologists and biologists have abandoned the quest for a scientific basis to determine racial categories, controversies have recently flared in the area of genetics and educational psychology. For instance, an essay by Arthur Jensen which argued that hereditary factors shape intelligence not only revived the “nature or nurture” controversy, but raised highly volatile questions about racial equality itself.6 Clearly the attempt to establish a biological basis of race has not been swept into the dustbin of history, but is being resurrected in various scientific are- nas. All such attempts seek to remove the concept of race from fundamental social, political, or economic determination. They suggest instead that the truth of race lies in the terrain of innate characteristics, of which skin color and other physical attributes provide only the most obvious, and in some respects most superficial, indicators.

Race as a Social Concept The social sciences have come to reject biologistic notions of race in favor of an approach which regards race as a social concept. Beginning in the eighteenth cen- tury, this trend has been slow and uneven, but its direction clear. In the nineteenth century Max Weber discounted biological explanations for racial conflict and instead highlighted the social and political factors which engendered such conflict.7 The work of pioneering cultural anthropologist Franz Boas was crucial in refuting the scientific racism of the early twentieth century by rejecting the connection between race and culture, and the assumption of a continuum of “higher” and “lower” cultural groups. Within the contemporary social science literature, race is assumed to be a variable which is shaped by broader societal forces.

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1 Omi and Winant / Racial Formations 13

Race is indeed a pre- eminently sociohistorical concept. Racial categories and the meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and historical context in which they are embedded. Racial meanings have varied tremen- dously over time and between different societies.

In the United States, the black/white color line has historically been rigidly defined and enforced. White is seen as a “pure” category. Any racial intermixture makes one “nonwhite.” In the movie Raintree County, Elizabeth Taylor describes the worst of fates to befall whites as “havin’ a little Negra blood in ya’—just one little teeny drop and a person’s all Negra.”8 This thinking flows from what Marvin Harris has characterized as the principle of hypo- descent:

By what ingenious computation is the genetic tracery of a million years of evolution unraveled and each man [sic] assigned his proper social box? In the United States, the mechanism employed is the rule of hypo- descent. This descent rule requires Ameri- cans to believe that anyone who is known to have had a Negro ancestor is a Negro. We admit nothing in between. . . . “ Hypo- descent” means affiliation with the subordinate rather than the superordinate group in order to avoid the ambiguity of intermediate identity. . . . The rule of hypo- descent is, therefore, an invention, which we in the United States have made in order to keep biological facts from intruding into our col- lective racist fantasies.9

The Susie Guillory Phipps case merely represents the contemporary expression of this racial logic.

By contrast, a striking feature of race relations in the lowland areas of Latin Amer- ica since the abolition of slavery has been the relative absence of sharply defined racial groupings. No such rigid descent rule characterizes racial identity in many Latin American societies. Brazil, for example, has historically had less rigid concep- tions of race, and thus a variety of “intermediate” racial categories exists. Indeed, as Harris notes, “One of the most striking consequences of the Brazilian system of racial identification is that parents and children and even brothers and sisters are frequently accepted as representatives of quite opposite racial types.”10 Such a possibility is in- comprehensible within the logic of racial categories in the US.

To suggest another example: the notion of “passing” takes on new meaning if we compare various American cultures’ means of assigning racial identity. In the United States, individuals who are actually “black” by the logic of hypo- descent have at- tempted to skirt the discriminatory barriers imposed by law and custom by attempt- ing to “pass” for white.11 Ironically, these same individuals would not be able to pass for “black” in many Latin American societies.

Consideration of the term “black” illustrates the diversity of racial meanings which can be found among different societies and historically within a given society. In contemporary British politics the term “black” is used to refer to all nonwhites. Inter- estingly this designation has not arisen through the racist discourse of groups such as the National Front. Rather, in political and cultural movements, Asian as well as Afro- Caribbean youth are adopting the term as an expression of self- identity.12 The wide- ranging meanings of “black” illustrate the manner in which racial categories are shaped politically.13

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14 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality

The meaning of race is defined and contested throughout society, in both collective action and personal practice. In the process, racial categories themselves are formed, transformed, destroyed and re- formed. We use the term racial formation to refer to the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings. Crucial to this formulation is the treatment of race as a central axis of social relations which cannot be subsumed under or reduced to some broader category or conception.

Racial Ideology and Racial Identity The seemingly obvious, “natural” and “common sense” qualities which the existing racial order exhibits themselves testify to the effectiveness of the racial formation process in constructing racial meanings and racial identities.

One of the first things we notice about people when we meet them (along with their sex) is their race. We utilize race to provide clues about who a person is. This fact is made painfully obvious when we encounter someone whom we cannot con- veniently racially categorize— someone who is, for example, racially “mixed” or of an ethnic/racial group with which we are not familiar. Such an encounter becomes a source of discomfort and momentarily a crisis of racial meaning. Without a racial identity, one is in danger of having no identity.

Our compass for navigating race relations depends on preconceived notions of what each specific racial group looks like. Comments such as, “Funny, you don’t look black,” betray an underlying image of what black should be. We also become disoriented when people do not act “black,” “Latino,” or indeed “white.” The content of such stereotypes reveals a series of unsubstantiated beliefs about who these groups are and what “they” are like.14

In US society, then, a kind of “racial etiquette” exists, a set of interpretative codes and racial meanings which operate in the interactions of daily life. Rules shaped by our perception of race in a comprehensively racial society determine the “presentation of self,”15 distinctions of status, and appropriate modes of conduct. “Etiquette” is not mere universal adherence to the dominant group’s rules, but a more dynamic com- bination of these rules with the values and beliefs of subordinated groupings. This racial “subjection” is quintessentially ideological. Everybody learns some combina- tion, some version, of the rules of racial classification, and of their own racial identity, often without obvious teaching or conscious inculcation. Race becomes “common sense”—a way of comprehending, explaining and acting in the world.

Racial beliefs operate as an “amateur biology,” a way of explaining the variations in “human nature.”16 Differences in skin color and other obvious physical characteristics supposedly provide visible clues to differences lurking underneath. Temperament, sexuality, intelligence, athletic ability, aesthetic preferences and so on are presumed to be fixed and discernible from the palpable mark of race. Such diverse questions as our confidence and trust in others (for example, clerks or salespeople, media figures, neighbors), our sexual preferences and romantic images, our tastes in music, films,

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dance, or sports, and our very ways of talking, walking, eating and dreaming are ineluctably shaped by notions of race. Skin color “differences” are thought to explain perceived differences in intellectual, physical and artistic temperaments, and to justify distinct treatment of racially identified individuals and groups.

The continuing persistence of racial ideology suggests that these racial myths and stereotypes cannot be exposed as such in the popular imagination. They are, we think, too essential, too integral, to the maintenance of the US social order. Of course, particular meanings, stereotypes and myths can change, but the presence of a system of racial mean- ings and stereotypes, of racial ideology, seems to be a permanent feature of US culture.

Film and television, for example, have been notorious in disseminating images of racial minorities which establish for audiences what people from these groups look like, how they behave, and “who they are.”17 The power of the media lies not only in their ability to reflect the dominant racial ideology, but in their capacity to shape that ideology in the first place. D. W. Griffith’s epic Birth of a Nation, a sympathetic treatment of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction, helped to generate, consolidate and “nationalize” images of blacks which had been more disparate (more regionally specific, for example) prior to the film’s appearance.18 In US television, the necessity to define characters in the briefest and most condensed manner has led to the perpetuation of racial caricatures, as racial stereotypes serve as shorthand for scriptwriters, directors and actors, in commercials, etc. Television’s tendency to address the “lowest common denominator” in order to render programs “familiar” to an enormous and diverse audience leads it regularly to assign and reassign racial characteristics to particular groups, both minority and majority.

These and innumerable other examples show that we tend to view race as some- thing fixed and immutable— something rooted in “nature.” Thus we mask the histori- cal construction of racial categories, the shifting meaning of race, and the crucial role of politics and ideology in shaping race relations. Races do not emerge full- blown. They are the results of diverse historical practices and are continually subject to chal- lenge over their definition and meaning.

Racialization: The Historical Development of Race In the United States, the racial category of “black” evolved with the consolidation of racial slavery. By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans whose specific identity was Ibo, Yoruba, Fulani, etc. were rendered “black” by an ideology of exploitation based on racial logic— the establishment and maintenance of a “color line.” This of course did not occur overnight. A period of indentured servitude which was not rooted in racial logic preceded the consolidation of racial slavery. With slavery, however, a racially based understanding of society was set in motion which resulted in the shaping of a specific racial identity not only for the slaves but for the European settlers as well. Winthrop Jordan has observed: “From the initially common term Christian, at mid- century there was a marked shift toward the terms English and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term of self- identification appeared— white.”19

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16 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality

We employ the term racialization to signify the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group. Racialization is an ideological process, an historically specific one. Racial ideology is constructed from pre- existing conceptual (or, if one prefers, “discursive”) elements and emerges from the struggles of competing political projects and ideas seeking to articulate similar elements differently. An account of racialization processes that avoids the pitfalls of US ethnic history20 remains to be written.

Particularly during the nineteenth century, the category of “white” was subject to challenges brought about by the influx of diverse groups who were not of the same Anglo- Saxon stock as the founding immigrants. In the nineteenth century, political and ideological struggles emerged over the classification of Southern Europeans, the Irish and Jews, among other “ non- white” categories.21 Nativism was only effectively curbed by the institutionalization of a racial order that drew the color line around, rather than within, Europe.

By stopping short of racializing immigrants from Europe after the Civil War, and by subsequently allowing their assimilation, the American racial order was recon- solidated in the wake of the tremendous challenge placed before it by the abolition of racial slavery.22 With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, an effective program for limiting the emergent class struggles of the later nineteenth century was forged: the definition of the working class in racial terms— as “white.” This was not accomplished by any legislative decree or capitalist maneuvering to divide the working class, but rather by white workers themselves. Many of them were recent immigrants, who organized on racial lines as much as on traditionally defined class lines.23 The Irish on the West Coast, for example, engaged in vicious anti- Chinese race- baiting and committed many pogrom- type assaults on Chinese in the course of consolidating the trade union movement in California.

Thus the very political organization of the working class was in important ways a racial project. The legacy of racial conflicts and arrangements shaped the definition of interests and in turn led to the consolidation of institutional patterns (e.g., segregated unions, dual labor markets, exclusionary legislation) which perpetuated the color line within the working class. Selig Perlman, whose study of the development of the labor movement is fairly sympathetic to this process, notes that:

The political issue after 1877 was racial, not financial, and the weapon was not merely the ballot, but also “direct action”—violence. The anti- Chinese agitation in California, culminating as it did in the Exclusion Law passed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most important single factor in the history of American labor, for without it the entire country might have been overrun by Mongolian [sic] labor and the labor move- ment might have become a conflict of races instead of one of classes.24

More recent economic transformations in the US have also altered interpretations of racial identities and meanings. The automation of southern agriculture and the augmented labor demand of the postwar boom transformed blacks from a largely rural, impoverished labor force to a largely urban, working- class group by 1970.25

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When boom became bust and liberal welfare statism moved rightwards, the majority of blacks came to be seen, increasingly, as part of the “underclass,” as state “de- pendents.” Thus the particularly deleterious effects on blacks of global and national economic shifts (generally rising unemployment rates, changes in the employment structure away from reliance on labor intensive work, etc.) were explained once again in the late 1970s and 1980s (as they had been in the 1940s and mid- 1960s) as the result of defective black cultural norms, of familial disorganization, etc.26 In this way new racial attributions, new racial myths, are affixed to “blacks.”27 Similar changes in racial identity are presently affecting Asians and Latinos, as such economic forces as increasing Third World impoverishment and indebtedness fuel immigration and high interest rates, Japanese competition spurs resentments, and US jobs seem to fly away to Korea and Singapore.28. . .

Once we understand that race overflows the boundaries of skin color, super- exploitation, social stratification, discrimination and prejudice, cultural domination and cultural resistance, state policy (or of any other particular social relationship we list), once we recognize the racial dimension present to some degree in every iden- tity, institution and social practice in the United States— once we have done this, it becomes possible to speak of racial formation. This recognition is hard- won; there is a continuous temptation to think of race as an essence, as something fixed, concrete and objective, as (for example) one of the categories just enumerated. And there is also an opposite temptation: to see it as a mere illusion, which an ideal social order would eliminate.

In our view it is crucial to break with these habits of thought. The effort must be made to understand race as an unstable and “decentered” complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle. . . .

NOTES 1. San Francisco Chronicle, 14 September 1982, 19 May 1983. Ironically, the 1970 Louisiana law was enacted to supersede an old Jim Crow statute which relied on the idea of “common report” in determining an infant’s race. Following Phipps’s unsuccessful attempt to change her classification and have the law declared unconstitutional, a legislative effort arose which culminated in the repeal of the law. See San Francisco Chronicle, 23 June 1983. 2. The Mormon church, for example, has been heavily criticized for its doctrine of black inferiority. 3. Thomas F. Gossett notes:

Race theory . . . had up until fairly modern times no firm hold on European thought. On the other hand, race theory and race prejudice were by no means unknown at the time when the English colonists came to North America. Undoubtedly, the age of exploration led many to speculate on race differences at a period when neither Europeans nor Englishmen were prepared to make allowances for vast cultural di versities. Even though race theories had not then secured wide acceptance or even sophisticated formulation, the first contacts of the Spanish with the Indians in the Americas can now be recognized as the beginning of a struggle between

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18 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality

conceptions of the nature of primitive peoples which has not yet been wholly settled. (Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America [New York: Schocken Books, 1965], p. 16).

Winthrop Jordan provides a detailed account of early European colonialists’ attitudes about color and race in White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York: Norton, 1977 [1968]), pp. 3–43. 4. Pro- slavery physician Samuel George Morton (1799–1851) compiled a collection of 800 crania from all parts of the world which formed the sample for his studies of race. Assuming that the larger the size of the cranium translated into greater intelligence, Morton established a relationship between race and skull capacity. Gossett reports that:

In 1849, one of his studies included the following results: The English skulls in his collection proved to be the largest, with an average cranial capacity of 96 cubic inches. The Americans and Germans were rather poor seconds, both with cranial capacities of 90 cubic inches. At the bottom of the list were the Negroes with 83 cubic inches, the Chinese with 82, and the Indians with 79. (Ibid., p. 74).

On Morton’s methods, see Stephen J. Gould, “The Finagle Factor,” Human Nature (July 1978). 5. Definitions of race founded upon a common pool of genes have not held up when confronted by scientific research which suggests that the differences within a given human population are greater than those between populations. See L. L. Cavalli- Sforza, “The Genet- ics of Human Populations,” Scientific American (September 1974), pp. 81–9. 6. Arthur Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 39 (1969), pp. 1–123. 7. Ernst Moritz Manasse, “Max Weber on Race,” Social Research, vol. 14 (1947), pp. 191–221. 8. Quoted in Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr., The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), pp. 168–70. 9. Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York: Norton, 1964), p. 56. 10. Ibid., p. 57. 11. After James Meredith had been admitted as the first black student at the University of Mississippi, Harry S. Murphy announced that he, and not Meredith, was the first black student to attend “Ole Miss.” Murphy described himself as black but was able to pass for white and spent nine months at the institution without attracting any notice (ibid., p. 56). 12. A. Sivanandan, “From Resistance to Rebellion: Asian and Afro- Caribbean Struggles in Britain,” Race and Class, vol. 23, nos. 2–3 ( Autumn– Winter 1981). 13. Consider the contradictions in racial status which abound in the country with the most rigidly defined racial categories— South Africa. There a race classification agency is em- ployed to adjudicate claims for upgrading of official racial identity. This is particularly neces- sary for the “coloured” category. The apartheid system considers Chinese as “Asians” while the Japanese are accorded the status of “honorary whites.” This logic nearly detaches race from any grounding in skin color and other physical attributes and nakedly exposes race as a juridical category subject to economic, social and political influences. (We are indebted to Steve Talbot for clarification of some of these points.) 14. Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958), pp. 184–200. 15. We wish to use this phrase loosely, without committing ourselves to a particular po- sition on such social psychological approaches as symbolic interactionism, which are outside

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the scope of this study. An interesting study on this subject is S. M. Lyman and W. A. Douglass, “Ethnicity: Strategies of Individual and Collective Impression Management,” Social Research, vol. 40, no. 2 (1973). 16. Michael Billig, “Patterns of Racism: Interviews with National Front Members,” Race and Class, vol. 20, no. 2 (Autumn 1978), pp. 161–79. 17. “Miss San Antonio USA Lisa Fernandez and other Hispanics auditioning for a role in a television soap opera did not fit the Hollywood image of real Mexicans and had to darken their faces before filming.” Model Aurora Garza said that their faces were bronzed with pow- der because they looked too white. “‘I’m a real Mexican [Garza said] and very dark anyway. I’m even darker right now because I have a tan. But they kept wanting me to make my face darker and darker’” (San Francisco Chronicle, 21 September 1984). A similar dilemma faces Asian American actors who feel that Asian character lead roles inevitably go to white actors who make themselves up to be Asian. Scores of Charlie Chan films, for example, have been made with white leads (the last one was the 1981 Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen). Roland Winters, who played in six Chan features, was asked by playwright Frank Chin to explain the logic of casting a white man in the role of Charlie Chan: “‘The only thing I can think of is, if you want to cast a homosexual in a show, and you get a homosexual, it’ll be awful. It won’t be funny . . . and maybe there’s something there . . .’” (Frank Chin, “Con- fessions of the Chinatown Cowboy,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 4, no. 3 [Fall 1972]). 18. Melanie Martindale- Sikes, “Nationalizing ‘Nigger’ Imagery Through ‘Birth of a Na- tion’,” paper prepared for the 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, 4–8 September 1978, in San Francisco. 19. Winthrop D. Jordan, op. cit., p. 95; emphasis added. 20. Historical focus has been placed either on particular racially defined groups or on immigration and the “incorporation” of ethnic groups. In the former case the characteristic ethnicity theory pitfalls and apologetics such as functionalism and cultural pluralism may be avoided, but only by sacrificing much of the focus on race. In the latter case, race is consid- ered a manifestation of ethnicity. 21. The degree of antipathy for these groups should not be minimized. A northern commentator observed in the 1850s: “An Irish Catholic seldom attempts to rise to a higher condition than that in which he is placed, while the Negro often makes the attempt with suc- cess.” Quoted in Gossett, op. cit., p. 288. 22. This analysis, as will perhaps be obvious, is essentially DuBoisian. Its main source will be found in the monumental (and still largely unappreciated) Black Reconstruction in the United States, 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1977 [1935]). 23. Alexander Saxton argues that:

North Americans of European background have experienced three great racial confrontations: with the Indian, with the African, and with the Oriental. Central to each transaction has been a totally one- sided preponderance of power, exerted for the exploitation of nonwhites by the dominant white society. In each case (but es- pecially in the two that began with systems of enforced labor), white workingmen have played a crucial, yet ambivalent, role. They have been both exploited and exploiters. On the one hand, thrown into competition with nonwhites as enslaved or “cheap” labor, they suffered economically; on the other hand, being white, they benefited by that very exploitation which was compelling the nonwhites to work for low wages or for nothing. Ideologically they were drawn in opposite directions. Racial identification cut at right angles to class consciousness. (Alexander Saxton, The

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20 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality

Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti- Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p. 1; emphasis added.)

24. Selig Perlman, The History of Trade Unionism in the United States (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1950), p. 52; emphasis added. 25. Whether southern blacks were “peasants” or rural workers is unimportant in this context. Sometime during the 1960s blacks attained a higher degree of urbanization than whites. Before World War II most blacks had been rural dwellers and nearly 80 percent lived in the South. 26. See George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Charles Mur- ray, Losing Ground (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 27. A brilliant study of the racialization process in Britain, focused on the rise of “mug- ging” as a popular fear in the 1970s, in Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis (London: Macmil- lan, 1978). 28. The case of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man beaten to death in 1982 by a laid- off Detroit auto worker and his stepson who mistook him for Japanese and blamed him for the loss of their jobs, has been widely publicized in Asian American communities. On immigration conflicts and pressures, see Michael Omi, “New Wave Dread: Immigration and Intra– Third World Conflict,” Socialist Review, no. 60 ( November– December 1981).

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21

2 Constructing Race, Creating White Privilege

Pem Davidson Buck

Constructing Race Improbable as it now seems, since Americans live in a society where racial character- ization and self- definition appear to be parts of nature, in the early days of colo nization before slavery was solidified and clearly distinguished from other forms of forced labor, Europeans and Africans seem not to have seen their physical differences in that way.1 It took until the end of the 1700s for ideas about race to develop until they resembled those we live with today. Before Bacon’s Rebellion, African and European indentured servants made love with each other, married each other, ran away with each other, lived as neighbors, liked or disliked each other according to individual personality. Sometimes they died or were punished together for resisting or revolting. And masters had to free both Europeans and Africans if they survived to the end of their indentures. Likewise, Europeans initially did not place all Native Americans in a single racial category. They saw cultural, not biological, differences among Native Americans as distinguishing one tribe from another and from themselves.

Given the tendency of slaves, servants, and landless free Europeans and Africans to cooperate in rebellion, the elite had to “teach Whites the value of whiteness” in order to divide and rule their labor force.2 After Bacon’s Rebellion they utilized their domi- nation of colonial legislatures that made laws and of courts that administered them, gradually building a racial strategy based on the earlier tightening and lengthening of African indenture. Part of this process was tighter control of voting. Free property- owning blacks, mulattos, and Native Americans, all identified as not of European ancestry, were denied the vote in 1723.3

To keep the racial categories separate, a 1691 law increased the punishment of European women who married African or Indian men; toward the end of the 1600s a white woman could be whipped or enslaved for marrying a Black. Eventually en- slavement for white women was abolished because it transgressed the definition of slavery as black. The problem of what to do with white women’s “black” children was eventually partially solved by the control of white women’s reproduction to prevent the existence of such children. The potentially “white” children of black women were defined out of existence; they were “black” and shifted from serving a thirty- year indenture to being slaves. To facilitate these reproductive distinctions and to discour- age the intimacy that can lead to solidarity and revolts, laws were passed requiring separate quarters for black and white laborers. Kathleen Brown points out that the control of women’s bodies thus became critical to the maintenance of whiteness and

From Worked to the Bone. Copyright © Monthly Review Press, 2001. Reprinted by permission.

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22 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality

to the production of slaves.4 At the same time black men were denied the rights of colonial masculinity as property ownership, guns, and access to white women were forbidden. Children were made to inherit their mother’s status, freeing European fathers from any vestiges of responsibility for their offspring born to indentured or enslaved African mothers. This legal shift has had a profound effect on the distribu- tion of wealth in the United States ever since; slaveholding fathers were some of the richest men in the country, and their wealth, distributed among all their children, would have created a significant wealthy black segment of the population.

At the same time a changing panoply of specific laws molded European behavior into patterns that made slave revolt and cross- race unity more and more difficult.5 These laws limited, for instance, the European right to teach slaves to read. Europeans couldn’t use slaves in skilled jobs, which were reserved for Europeans. Europeans had to administer prescribed punishment for slave “misbehavior” and were expected to participate in patrolling at night. They did not have the legal right to befriend Blacks. A white servant who ran away with a Black was subject to additional punishment beyond that for simply running away. European rights to free their slaves were also curtailed.

Built into all this, rarely mentioned but nevertheless basic to the elite’s ability to create and maintain whiteness, slavery, and exploitation, was the use of force against both Blacks and Whites. Fear kept many Whites from challenging, or even question- ing, the system. It is worth quoting Lerone Bennett’s analysis of how the differentia- tion between black and white was accomplished:

The whole system of separation and subordination rested on official state terror. The exigencies of the situation required men to kill some white people to keep them white and to kill many blacks to keep them black. In the North and South, men and women were maimed, tortured, and murdered in a comprehensive campaign of mass condition- ing. The severed heads of black and white rebels were impaled on poles along the road as warnings to black people and white people, and opponents of the status quo were starved to death in chains and roasted slowly over open fires. Some rebels were branded; others were castrated. This exemplary cruelty, which was carried out as a deliberate process of mass education, was an inherent part of the new system.6

Creating White Privilege White privileges were established. The “daily exercise of white personal power over black individuals had become a cherished aspect of Southern culture,” a critically important part of getting Whites to “settle for being white.”7 Privilege encouraged Whites to identify with the big slaveholding planters as members of the same “race.” They were led to act on the belief that all Whites had an equal interest in the main- tenance of whiteness and white privilege, and that it was the elite— those controlling the economic system, the political system, and the judicial system— who ultimately protected the benefits of being white.8