Maintaining Race, Class and Gender Hierarchies

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

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Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes
 Stereotypes and deep prejudices come out of everyday interactions that are “reinforced by
the behavior of both prejudiced people and the targets of their prejudice.”
 Stereotypes push people into the roles of those very stereotypes.
 That is, regarding sex and gender roles, men and women often conform to and even adopt the
dominant expectations of those roles.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTYMSulvnyw
 The student subjects reading the biography consistently “allowed their preconceptions about
lesbians and heterosexuals to dictate the way in which they interpreted and reinterpreted the
facts of Betty’s life.”

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Am I Thin Enough Yet?
 Hesse-Biber states that a woman’s worth in our culture is “still greatly determined by her
ability to attract a man.
 Social status is largely a function of income and occupation.
 Women’s access to these resources is generally indirect, through marriage.
 “An addiction model of behavior,” the author notes, “assumes that the cause and the cure
of the problem lies within the individual.”
 Delia’s Story
 Nearly every phase of Delia’s story seems to be shaped her desire to be thin.

4. +
Institutions and Ideologies
 Parenti is referring to the ways in which nearly all institutions in the United States—
universities, publishing houses, newspapers, televisions, etc.—have organized themselves
“as corporations, ruled by boards of directors (or ‘trustees’ or ‘regents’ as they might be
called) composed overwhelmingly of affluent business people.”
 Parenti argues that we are taught to think that American capitalism creates prosperity and
spreads democracy.
 But actually capitalist interests in the United States have “supported and flourished under
some of the most repressive regimes and impoverished Third World nations.”
 Parenti states that mass advertising sells not only products but a “way of life” that is a
“glorification of consumer acquisitiveness.”

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Understanding Antisemitism
 Antisemitism is ideological oppression that targets those who follow Judaism.
 Often this type of oppression involves dehumanization and degradation through lies and stereotypes as
well as mythology
 Antisemitism is cyclical; historically Jews have been able to progress and even succeed
economically and otherwise, to then suffer through periods of anti-Jewish sentiment and violence
 In contrast, anti-Black sentiment require a system in place and a fixed hierarchy of White power with a
binary values system
 Antisemitism and Islamophobia (anti-Muslim sentiment) are both deeply rooted in the same
systems of white supremacy and Christian hegemony
 This article distinguishes between white supremacists and the system of white supremacy – the
former being neo-Nazis and white nationalists, the latter being is the establish hierarchy of power
that favors Whites, including Capitalism
 Jewish are seen to benefit from the system of white supremacy in that they enjoy privilege over Native
Americans and Blacks

6. +
Cowboys and Indians: Toys of Genocide,
Icons of American Colonialism
 In this article, the Author, Yellow Bird, uses the analogy of Cowboys and Indians to
demonstrate the continuing theme of White domination over Native Americans of all tribes
 He describes colonialism as a “sickness, an addiction to greed, supremacy, power and
exploitation” and it serves to keep Indigenous Peoples perpetually in the role of the “Indian”, a
position of weakness and that they will never be free from colonialism
 Author states that Native Americans have internalized and adapted to the colonizer’s
dominant ideology, which perpetuates subjugation and repression
 As long as Whites continue to idolized ideas of the Old West domination and continue to
accept their privilege in society without amending the historical narrative oppression will
continue

7. +
Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s
Educational Apartheid
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7X3JI-aais
 Kozol makes direct connections between the long history of state-sanctioned racism and
current racial segregation in public education.
 “Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less
segregated now, while thousands of other schools around the country that had been
integrated either voluntarily or by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating…. ”
 Kozol finds that because Skinnerian methods are commonly used in penal institutions and
drug-rehabilitation programs, they often put teachers in the position of teaching and
interacting with students of color in low-income schools as though they are in need of criminal
reform and reeducation.
 Kozol says: “There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education. There ought to
be; we measure almost everything else that happens to them in their schools.”
 The lack of such an index reveals how little the students are taken into consideration in the creation of
educational policy.

8. +
Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison
Industrial Complex
 Davis argues that prison perform magic by making “vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant,
and racially marginalized communities” disappear.
 Once primarily the responsibility of the government, prisons have become private ventures.
 Davis notes that, in order to “deliver up bodies destined for profitable punishment, the political
economy of prisons relies on racialized assumptions of criminality—such as
 Images of black welfare mothers reproducing criminal children—and on racist practices in
arrest, conviction, and sentencing patterns.”

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Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison
Industrial Complex
 Davis states: “Many corporations whose products we consume on a daily basis have
learned that prison labor power can be as profitable as third world labor power
exploited by U.S.-based global corporations.”
 Davis’ examples of prisoners’ work:
 Data entry for Chevron
 make telephone reservations for TWA
 raise hogs,
 shovel manure,
 make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and
 Lingerie for Victoria Secret
 All at a fraction of the cost of ‘free labor.’

10. +
Media Magic: Making Class Invisible
 Mantsios shows that the news media’s coverage of poor people and poverty is meager and
misleading.
 When the media does turn its attention to the poor, it offers a series of contradictory
messages and portrayals, ultimately eliding the realities of poverty and poor people.
 Mantsios notes that the annual release of census data on poverty receives marginal
attention from the media.
 When the media does cover the poor, it uses a kind of sensational journalism, with stories of
“welfare cheats, drug addicts, and greedy panhandlers (almost always urban and Black).
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P19-FhzKWl8

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Media Magic: Making Class Invisible
 Mantsios argues that, in an effort to develop solidarity with the middle and upper classes,
the media “speak[s] to and for an audience that is both affluent and like-minded” and
effectively produces a “faceless, amoral, undeserving, and inferior ‘underclass,’” or the
social, cultural, and economic “other” of the imagined targeted viewer.
 Mantsios concludes that the ideologies that dominate our society—ideologies that preserve
the status quo—serve to justify the “order…that perpetuates unprecedented elite privilege
and power on the one hand and widespread deprivation on the other.”
 Mass media serves its own interests—that is, the interests of the affluent and the wealthy—
and is not likely to present how those interests “undermine democracy…[and] ravage a
people and their communities.”

12. +
You May Know Me from Such Roles as
Terrorist #4
 Instead of having them play characters that are nuanced, filmmakers wanted
to use religion and culture to reduce actors of Middle Eastern backgrounds to
a “bunch of villainous, cartoonish psychopaths.”
 The Muslim Public Affairs council educated Howard on the power of the
images on his show and asked him to consider how it would feel to have
people fear his faith.
 He came to realize that we “have our own personal biases and fears” and that
he did not want to be “a midwife to xenophobia.”

13. +
You May Know Me from Such Roles as
Terrorist #4
 Ronson looks at the way later generations have realized that racist stereotypes
of their time (“bloodthirsty Red Indians” and “black savages”) were outrageous
in order to make the point that these stereotypes about Middle Easterners being
terrorists will one day be seen the same way.

14. + Against “Bullying” or On Loving Queer Kids
 In this article, the author is appalled at the lack of protection for those who bully queer
kids
 The author discusses several cases in which the bullied minor goes on to commit suicide in
order to be spared the shame of being revealed as gay
 The author believes that the narrative of these stories seem to put the blame/shame
on the victim by mentioning the victim’s sexual orientation

15. +
When You Forget to Whistle Vivaldi
 This phrase comes from the title of a book by Claude Steele and refers to the
practice his friend started “to counter the negative effects of white fear.”
 Whistling music by Vivaldi was a way for him to “signal to the victimless victims of
his blackness that he was safe,” an action that makes use of the racist
assumption that “[d]angerous black men do not listen to classical music.”
 “Exerting any measure of control over signaling” that, as a black person, one is
not dangerous is not prevention but “mostly assuaging the cognitive stress that
constant management of social situations causes.”

16. +
When You Forget to Whistle Vivaldi
 “When the object of a stereotype is aware of the negative perception of her,
that awareness constrains all manner of ability and performance.”
 Cottom uses Steele’s framework to talk about the kind of stress that being
stereotyped causes, that being subject to stereotyping requires “constant
background processing.”
 Cottom discusses the sociopsychological privilege enjoyed by those who are
not stereotyped.
 Cottom notes that even after Johnathan’s death, his family talks about his GPA
to signal that he was a “student and, by extension, a human being whose
death should matter.”