1) Race as ideology 1) Race as ideology
Race and notions of racial difference constitute some of the most culturally powerful ideologies in our society today. As the cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall notes, ideologies are most powerful when they are unconscious and taken for granted as common sense, and the notion that people can be classified according to preexisting racial categories is a widespread common sense idea that continues to persist today. Ideologies involve “representations of the social world, images, descriptions, explanations and frames for understanding how the world is and why it works as it is said and shown to work.” Race is a culturally dominant ideological framework in the US for how we understand our world.
As Hall and other scholars have noted, race is a social construct and not a biological or natural category. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant even posit that race has no biological or genetic basis; rather, they argue that it is “a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.” In my experience teaching, this last concept—that race has no biological basis and is a social classification of bodies—has been one of the most difficult for students to comprehend, perhaps due to the deep extent to which biologically-based ideologies concerning race are entrenched in our societies. But I believe it helps our understanding if we are aware of the ways in which race began as a social category that arose alongside the world political economy, the slave trades, intercontinental travel, and imperialism. In societies with powerful interests in building and maintaining empire, race was a means of justifying the oppression of certain people based on their physical characteristics.
2) “From Nothing, a Consciousness” by Helen Zia 2) “From Nothing, a Consciousness” by Helen Zia
Helen Zia talks in her article about her difficulties growing up in a Chinese American immigrant family in the 1950s and ‘60s. She had been raised to respect the patriarchal Asian ideal of “The Three Obediences” (the daughter obeys the father, the wife obeys the husband, and, eventually, the widow obeys the son), but disobeys her father by attending Princeton University. Her experiences in the Asian American student movement at Princeton further transformed her consciousness as an obedient daughter to one that actively protested racial and gender oppression.
At a time when various oppressed social groups on campus could have been forging coalitions across racial and gender differences, Zia tells us that the reality was more complex. Walking with her Asian American friend Alan one day, they argued over the relative importance of race and gender, wherein Alan said, “Race is primary. Only after we eliminate racism can we fight sexism. Women will have to wait.” Her experience with the campus women’s center alienated her from the primarily white members whose lives and concerns seemed far removed from her own struggles as a Chinese American.
3) “The Past is Ever Present” by Patricia Hill Collins 3) “The Past is Ever Present” by Patricia Hill Collins
Patricia Hill Collins notes that contemporary mass media in the US tend to represent hegemonic ideologies of a color-blind present in which racism no longer exists. Today, the dominant attitude is to celebrate a multicultural America, one characterized by the emergence of a new black middle-class, increased numbers of black people in positions of power and influence, and increased rates of interracial marriage. While the notion of a race-blind multicultural society may seem appealing, Collins nonetheless notes that racism is still very much alive today, just in different ways; these differences constitute what she
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calls the “new racism” which juxtaposes old and new, and “reflects sedimented or past-in-present racial formations from prior historical periods” (52).
The legal rights that were won for people of color from the struggles of the Civil Rights era were intended to create the conditions for reducing social inequality and encouraging socioeconomic mobility, but this brighter future has yet to come. Collins points out that the gains won in the legal context were not met with positive developments in the social arenas of housing, education, health-care, and employment that would lead to social mobility. Rather, the post-Civil Rights decades saw a rise in residential racial segregation (inner-city ghettos and suburbs populated primarily by white people), and several Republican administrations that cut enforcement efforts for equal opportunity, reduced funding for urban programs, incarcerating increased numbers of African Americans, and shrinking welfare. As Collins writes: “Poor and working-class Black youth who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, often within racially segregated, inner-city neighborhoods, encountered markedly different economic, political, and social conditions than those that faced their parents or those provided to middle-class youth of all races. Despite coming of age during a time of unprecedented social change, regardless of gender, opportunities for poor Black youth eroded (56).
The increased incarceration of Black men, rise in families headed by single Black mothers, proliferation of gang culture in inner cities, and the valorization of the “thug life” and sexism in Black youth culture—were all factors in the “contemporary closing door of opportunity” Today’s new racism is built upon histories of Black slavery, segregation, and discrimination—it is a kind of racism in which the past has contributed to the social obstacles and struggles that Black people are still faced with. As the social critic Randall Robinson argues, African Americans are influenced by the legacy of slavery and segregation: “No nation can enslave a race of people for hundreds of years, set them free bedraggled and penniless, pit them, without assistance in a hostile environment, against privileged victimizers, and then reasonably expect the gap between the heirs of the two groups to narrow. Lines, begun parallel and left alone, can never touch” (qted. in 60). “Legal changes,” as Collins asserts, “are necessary, but they are far from sufficient in responding to a new seemingly color-blind racism where the past is ever present” (60).
“White Privilege” by Peggy McIntosh “White Privilege” by Peggy McIntosh
Peggy McIntosh uses the metaphor of an “invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks” to describe white privilege. Being white herself, she finds it difficult to identify some of the effects of white privilege, so she listed some conditions of white privilege in her daily life (pp. 79-80). By creating this list, she is making visible “the silences and denials surrounding privilege” which she believes are crucial to maintaining the “myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is available to all” (82).
QUESTIONS
1- “The Past Is Ever Present” – Patricia Hill Collins Patricia Hill Collins notes that the legal rights won for Blacks and other people of color from the struggles of the Civil Rights era were intended to create the conditions for reducing social inequality and encouraging socioeconomic mobility, but this brighter future has yet to come for many people. Collins points out that the gains won in the legal context were not met with positive developments in the social arenas of housing, education, health-care, and employment that would lead to social mobility. Rather, the post-Civil Rights decades saw a rise in residential racial segregation (inner-city ghettos and suburbs populated primarily by white people), and several Republican administrations that cut enforcement efforts
https://umb.umassonline.net/webapps/blackboard/content/listContent.jsp?course_id=_46663_1&content_id=_1884888_1#
for equal opportunity, reduced funding for urban and public programs, incarcerating increased numbers of African Americans, and shrinking welfare. As Collins writes: “Poor and working-class Black youth who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, often within racially segregated, inner-city neighborhoods, encountered markedly different economic, political, and social conditions than those that faced their parents or those provided to middle-class youth of all races. Despite coming of age during a time of unprecedented social change, regardless of gender, opportunities for poor Black youth eroded (56). According to Collins, the increased incarceration of Black men, rise in families headed by single Black mothers, and the proliferation of gang culture in inner cities—were all factors in the “contemporary closing door of opportunity.” Today’s new racism is built upon histories of Black slavery, segregation, and discrimination—it is a kind of racism in which the past has contributed to the social obstacles and struggles that Black people are still faced with. As the social critic Randall Robinson argues, African Americans are influenced by the legacy of slavery and segregation: “No nation can enslave a race of people for hundreds of years, set them free bedraggled and penniless, pit them, without assistance in a hostile environment, against privileged victimizers, and then reasonably expect the gap between the heirs of the two groups to narrow. Lines, begun parallel and left alone, can never touch” (qted. in 60). “Legal changes,” as Collins asserts, “are necessary, but they are far from sufficient in responding to a new seemingly color-blind racism where the past is ever present” (60).
It is important to remember that racism cannot just be reduced to explicit racial prejudice–i.e., the beliefs, thoughts, and feelings held and expressed about about racialized social groups. Racism also, and more invisibly, operates at a broader, systemic level and is the result of entrenched institutional and social practices. Simply not talking about race and acknowledging racial inequities does not mean that racism has diminished. And while the US has enacted racial anti-discrimination laws since the Civil Rights movement, that does not mean that these laws have been successful or are enforced consistently.
What are your thoughts regarding Collins’s description of the “new racism” that oppresses African Americans today? Can you think of any examples of this new racism either from your own experience or in recent events in the US?
2- Race as ideology
[Note: this post is not associated with an assigned reading. However, please read the entire body of this prompt prior to responding.] Race and notions of racial difference constitute some of the most culturally powerful ideologies in our society today. As the cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall notes, ideologies are most powerful when they are unconscious and taken for granted as common sense, and the notion that people can be classified according to preexisting racial categories is a widespread common sense idea that continues to persist today. Ideologies involve “representations of the social world, images, descriptions, explanations and frames for understanding how the world is and why it works as it is said and shown to work.” Race is a culturally dominant ideological framework in the US for how we understand our world.
As Hall and other scholars have noted, race is a social construct and not a biological or natural category. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant even posit that race has no biological or genetic basis; rather, they argue that it is “a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.” In my experience teaching, this last concept—that race has no biological basis and is a social classification of bodies—has been one of the most difficult for students to comprehend, perhaps due to the deep extent to which biologically-based ideologies concerning race are entrenched in our societies.
This is not to say that people’s physical traits do not have a basis in their genes, because they do–genes do indeed code for skin color, eye color, hair color and texture, shape of facial features, etc. Race is a category that has no code in human genes (e.g. there’s no gene that codes for black or white), but it is a category used to classify people based on their skin color and physical traits. But I believe it helps our understanding if we are aware of the ways in which race began as a social category that arose alongside the world political economy, the slave trades, intercontinental travel, and imperialism. In societies with powerful interests in building and maintaining empire, race was a means of justifying the oppression of certain people based on their physical characteristics. In the US, racial minorities have historically been oppressed in multiple ways, and the racial categories, for instance, of African Americans, Asians, Latinx, and Native Americans are not entities that correspond to genes, but rather socially constructed and motivated categories for classifying people. In the course of US history, these classifications have produced a host of often negative attributions and the bases for discriminations.
How do you understand the concept that race is a socially constructed ideology? Do the theories of Hall and Omi & Winant change how you perceive the category of race? What do you make of Omi and Winant’s theory that race has no biological basis and is instead a way for socially unequal societies to classify human bodies?
3- “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” – Peggy McIntosh Peggy McIntosh uses the metaphor of an “invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks” to describe white privilege. Being white herself, she finds it difficult to identify some of the effects of white privilege, so she listed some situations where she views white privilege is at work in her daily life (pp. 79-80). By creating this list, she is making visible “the silences and denials surrounding privilege” which she believes are crucial to maintaining the “myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is available to all” (82). One of the items on her list that was especially eye-opening to me was #26: “I can choose blemish cover or bandages in ‘flesh’ color and have them more or less match my skin” (80). I’d never thought twice before about the color of flesh-colored bandages, but now the absence of flesh-colored options for darker skin is all the more apparent to me every time I’m in the bandage aisle of a store (thankfully blemish cover now come in a range of shades). This is of course but one small example of how McIntosh could think of herself as “belonging in major ways, and of making social systems work for [her]” (81).
McIntosh is also careful to point out that having white privilege does not mean that white people are not privileged in other ways. Racism is always embedded in a system of interlocking oppressions having to do with social and economic class, religion, sex, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, etc. We are all subject to interlocking oppressions which may confer privilege on us in some respects and not others (for instance, McIntosh is white, but she is also female, so she does not have male privilege). Racism is of course not the same as sexism, she notes, but what is similar about all of the interlocking oppressions is “they take both active forms which we can see and embedded forms which as a member of a dominant group one is taught not to see” (82). White privilege refers not to individual acts of racism, as McIntosh asserts, but rather in “invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.”
What are your thoughts about McIntosh’s list of the advantages of white privilege? Can you find any items on this list that you identify with or that rings true? If so, name at least one (of course, read the essay first before you respond). Do you find her metaphor of white privilege as an “invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions” to be useful for illustrating how racial privilege works in our society?
