US police brutality

Introduction Elite White Men:

The 21st Century Problem

centra' Pr°blem of the 21st century is elite white men. They long ago created what we term the elite-white-male dominance system, a complex and oppressive system central to most western societies that now affects much of the planet. This small elite rules actively, undemocratically, and globally, yet remains largely invisible to the billions of people it routinely dominates, n the U.S. case, which we focus on here, few people outside the top rank of

this powerful elite or its immediate subordinates can name more than a tiny number ot the mosdy white men at the pinnacle of major U.S. institutions.

While we include these immediate powerful subordinates in the term elite, we seek to accent the top rank of that elite—the mostly white men who occupy the loftiest apex of societal power and control. This small rul­ ing class holds exceptional social rank and privileges, and they have much more power than non-elite members of society. Those in the top rank of the elite form a dominant oligarchy in which they, a very small minority of U.S. residents, rule over all others in society.1

The director of one media research project, Soraya Chemaly, has summed up the extensive white male dominance across major U.S. economic, politi­ cal, educational, and media institutions:

[Currently] white men make up more than 80% of Congress, 78% of state political executives, 75% of state legislators, 84% of mayors of the top 100 cities, 85% of corporate executive officers, 100% of CEOs of Wall Street firms, 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 73% of tenured pro­ fessors, 64% of newsroom staffers, 97% of heads of venture capital hrms, 90% of tech jobs in Silicon Valley, 97% of owners of television and radio licenses, 87% of police departments and 68% of U.S. Circuit Court Judges.2

A very unusual New York Times article recently presented photographs of top elite and other powerful decision-makers. Unsurprisingly, it showed a huge sea of white, and especially white male, faces of societal decision-making power.3 As Chemaly adds to her analysis, if a novelist presented a fictional

2 • Introduction

story in which the gender of these powerful decision-makers were reversed, the"reviewers would describe this world as a violent and emasculating fem­ inist tyranny or a frightening male dystopia."1

One goal of this book is to move away from the typical passive tenses and vague nouns in discussing those who have ruled this country for centuries. In our experience, almost no social analysts have made regular and system­ atic use of a specific term and concept like "elite white men," for those who constitute the overwhelming majority of the most powerful decision-makers whose everyday choices and actions have regularly shaped both the United States and other societies across the globe.

One only has to skim a typical U.S. history textbook to see that almost all of the top economic and political decisions made by Americans since the 1600s have been made by elite white men. Some actions taken by these elite white individuals, or by elite subgroups, have been relatively progressive or potentially beneficial to ordinary people—for example, the elite's asserting equality and justice themes in the Declaration of Independence, creating 1930s New Deal social welfare programs, joining the European war against Nazism in World War II, helping to create a United Nations, and passing significant civil rights, health, and social welfare laws since the 1960s.

However, a great many other choices and decisions made by this elite have been oppressive for centuries, for very large numbers of people in North America and overseas. These have included, to name a few, creating North American colonies by killing off and stealing land from indigenous Americans, creating and maintaining African American slavery for more than half of U.S. history, fighting a bloody Civil War over slavery, maintain­ ing Jim Crow segregation for many decades, establishing a sexist and het- erosexist legal system, creating an auto-centered and petroleum-dependent transportation system, creating exploitative capitalistic corporations, mili­ tarily invading countries to build a U.S. empire, becoming the largest seller of weapons abroad, using the first nuclear weapons, and starting wars in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Today's white male elite, and the organizations they head and are thus empowered by, still engage in many similar actions, including the large-scale parasitic exploitation of people of color globally. Note too that this elite has historically generated much of the racial, gender, and class framing rationalizing their actions.

For centuries, since Europeans began imperialistic and colonial expan­ sion, a powerful white male capitalistic elite has emerged and thereby replaced earlier aristocratic elites by generating great wealth from extensive theft of the labor, land, and other resources of peoples across the globe. They have engaged in new nation-building and positioned themselves at the top of the overarching elite-white-male dominance system and, thus, of three of its major subsystems—systemic sexism (heterosexism), sys­ temic dassism (capitalism), and systemic racism—that we examine in this

Introduction • 3

book.5 These highly oppressive and globally determining subsystems usu­ ally appear together in societal operations and are regularly interlocking, codetermining, and coreproducing in a helix-like fashion. This is true for several reasons, but one primary one is that the same or similar elite white men have long ruled at the top of each subsystem, and thereby over the entire elite-white-male dominance system.

A typical definition of "modernity" emphasizes features of western coun­ tries, such as advanced industrialization, extensive urbanization, substantial secularism, and developed technologies. This modernity, which supposedly includes a superior rationality, has long been accented by western schol­ ars and other analysts, from German sociologist Max Weber's time to the present. What is missing from such conventionally positive portrayals of modernity is what is central to this book—the elite-white-male dominance system and its many negative impacts for much of humanity. In many ways the elite-controlled, colonized world created by European expansion, impe­ rialism, and colonization from the 16th to the 19th centuries gave birth to many oppressive structures and other oppressive aspects of western societ­ ies that persist to the present day.

Social Science Analyses of the Elite

Since early in the history of western social science, most mainstream social scientists have tiptoed around the major issues of elite power and coer­ cion, especially in regard to systemic racial, gender, and/or class oppres­ sion. Unsurprisingly, these social sciences have long been molded by their national contexts, and thus relatively elite white men have generally shaped the dominant theoretical and methodological perspectives on stratifica­ tion issues.6 As sociologist William Carroll has argued, this powerful white group has greatest access to information about how major institutions operate, while those in subordinated positions have much less information. As a result, most people have to put some "trust in the managers, officials, and professionals who occupy the higher echelons of the system." Drawing on sociologist Howard Beckers earlier argument, Carroll explains that if social scientists do research and teaching from some version of the domi­ nant racial, class, or gender framing, "there is no charge of bias.... It is when sociologists give credence to subordinate perspectives and experiences, thereby challenging the hierarchy of credibility, that they may be charged with bias."7

Nonetheless, a significant number of social scientists have examined, with varying degrees of critical insight, aspects of western political and eco­ nomic elites. Numerous mainstream political and organizational theorists, such as the conservative James Burnham, have provided insightful anal­ yses ot the role of managers, professionals, and think-tanks in important

4 • Introduction

societal decisions.8 In this book we have drawn most often on the social sci­ ence tradition of investigating the U.S. elite from a more critical class (e.g., neo-Marxist) perspective. For instance, in the 1950s the critical sociologist Floyd Hunter demonstrated the absence of real democracy in decision­ making in a major U.S. city, while sociologist C.Wright Mills probed beneath everyday events to major societal power inequalities and the actors shaping them. Mills documented, at the helm of U.S. society, a small tripartite elite those few people in big corporations, major government agencies, and large military institutions who typically make many of society s most important decisions.9 A little later, in 1960, political scientist Elmer Schattschneider argued that the array of powerful pressure groups did not add up to the "democratic" U.S. political system claimed by many pluralist analysts.1'

More recent class-critical social scientists, such as Philip Burch and Bill Domhoff, have shown in empirical detail that the U.S. is governed at the top by an upper-class elite that is empowered by the organizations they operate from and the networks they have emerged from. Their work has influenced our understanding of the role of corporations and other important orga­ nizations in the power and development of the country s elite. Domhoff, for example, has demonstrated well that major capitalists and their close subordinates rule in the United States, in part, by serving in top positions in government and in private policy-planning organizations.1 This criti­ cal social science theorizing and empirical research has mostly accented aspects of the social class dimension of the dominant elite, and we will draw on research on class and capitalism in our analysis.

However, there is much more to the dominant elite's social dominance that must be fully delineated and assessed. Throughout this book, we demonstrate that whiteness and maleness are extraordinarily important social dimensions shaping this elites personal and collective reality, includ­ ing their dominant social framing and their decisions flowing from that framing. As we demonstrate, these elite white men have for centuries con­ stituted the group at the top of three major social hierarchies the capital­ istic, sexist, and racial hierarchies. They have long created, maintained, and extended these inegalitarian hierarchies that are imbedded in and shaping all societal institutions. Generally speaking, contemporary social scientists and other social analysts have substantially bypassed an in-depth analysis ot the reality and significance of the white and male aspects of this controlling elite's motivations to act and, thus, the important decisions that result.

The partial exceptions to this generalization are mainly a few research studies and theories of scholars of color and white women scholars. For instance, one social scientist who pioneered in bringing issues ot racism into a neo-Marxist class analysis was Oliver Cox, an African American sociologist. Between the 1940s and the 1970s he did penetrating analyses ot the intertwining of white racism and class-exploitative capitalism. Breaking with white social scientists in that era, he contributed significantly to our

Introduction • 5

understanding of this intertwining of racial and class oppression, seen as a single phenomenon with white capitalists generally at the top. From his empirically honed perspective, that ruling elite had aggressively exploited black labor and thus succeeded in proletarianizing "a whole people—that is to say, the whole people is looked upon as a class—whereas white prole­ tarianization involves only a section of the white people."12 The concepts of capitalists and white people seem "to mean the same thing for, with respect to the colored peoples of the world, it is almost always through a white bourgeoisie that capitalism has been introduced. The early [white] capitalist settlers ... were disposed to look upon the latter and their natural resources as factors of production to be manipulated impersonally with 'white capi­ tal' in the interest of profits."" Early on, Cox had assessed how the western ruling elite not only is made up of controlling capitalists but also has histor­ ically been almost entirely white and male.

Moreover, in the midst of the 1960s civil rights movement, black activ­ ists and activist-scholars increasingly accented the problem of an oppres­ sive U.S. power structure. In their influential book Black Power, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Kwame Ture and historian Charles Hamilton analyzed the racial and class aspects of what they called out as the "white power structure," especially how that power elite had cre­ ated racially oppressive institutions that did much more harm than did isolated white bigots. Although they did not accent the gendered aspect ot this oppression or call out and assess elite white men more specifically, they took a major step in naming and critiquing the collective white power structure and demonstrating that its power flowed from institutional positioning.14

In recent years a few other scholars have done some research on another juncture of the racial and class hierarchies—ordinary white men in the working class. Sociologist Michael Kimmel has analyzed the views of angry white men in the working class who have faced declining deindustrializa- tion and loss of jobs in recent times; he briefly calls out elite actors for suc­ cessfully hiding their role in this crisis: "This has been the cultural mission of the ruling elites—to deny their own existence ... and pretend that they are on the side of the very people they are disenfranchising The anger of middle-class white Americans is... misdirected not toward those who are the cause of their misery but against those who are just below them on the economic ladder."11 Still, Kimmels discussion is brief and he does not probe more deeply into the who and what of these "ruling elites."

The Triple Helix of Class, Racial, and Gender Domination

The influential sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, whose pioneering work on intersectionality theory is discussed in the next chapter, has suggested that the racial-gender intersectionality she probes deeply is part of an overarching

6 • Introduction

system of oppression she terms the "matrix of domination —the intercon­ necting matrix of the gender, class, and racial oppressions. Drawing on the tradition of black feminist thought in assessing the oppressive situations of black women, Collins argues that an accent on a single matrix structure should replace older models that just add up oppressions: "Race, class, and gender represent the three systems of oppression that most heavily affect Af rican- American women."16 A few other scholars of color have briefly underscored this tripartite system of oppressions. For instance, bell hooks too has pio­ neered in assessing the intersectionality of women of color. She labeled the system at the root of white violence against women and men of color as the "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy."17 These scholars of color have laid one major part of the conceptual basis on which we build in this book.

Here we add to existing intersectionality theory and critical elite the­ ory by accenting additional theoretical dimensions and empirical realities. In particular, we provide a specific and detailed focus on those white men who are the key decision-makers at or near the apex of society's elite-white- male dominance system. We primarily assess their centrality in three of this larger systems complex subsystems of racial, class, and gender oppression.

The Triple Helix

Introduction • 7

These oppression subsystems, which elite decision-makers play a central role in controlling and perpetuating, are much more than separate societal vectors that are "pointing in different directions and crossing at one point."18

They do much more than intersect. Generally, they are intimately intertwined and interlocking at several levels, like a triple social helix, and they have code- termined and coreproduced each other at these levels for centuries. Thus, in their everyday actions elite white men constantly have a great impact on the shape and trajectory of society. Regularly, over short and long periods of time, they seek to protect and expand capitalistic profit and property, their position in the national and global racial hierarchy, and their hegemonic masculinity in the global gender order. As we will demonstrate, they are so powerful substantially because of the major networks and major organiza­ tions in which they are groomed, situated, and/or operative.

Among the specific questions we raise about these elite white men and their determinative actions are these: How has a rather small number of people, these very powerful white men, come to control most of the west­ ern world, and increasingly much of the globe? How does their racial and gender position and framing shape their actions in sync with their capi­ talistic position and class framing? What has motivated these elite men to create and perpetuate a geographical empire of centuries-long exploitation and dominance? Given that mostly elite white men still control this empire ot hundreds of millions of people, where and how do they maintain that extensive national and global dominance? And how have they viewed and framed themselves, especially in comparison to those they have exploited and subordinated in class, racial, and/or gender terms?

So let us, indeed, position and assess these exceptionally powerful white men and their huge number of concrete societal-shaping actions as the global problem of the 21st century when it comes to many matters of human rights and human survival, to real "liberty and justice for all" of humanity.

10 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

subsystems of social oppression? The oldest of these is the patriarchal- sexist subsystem. In the 16th and 17th centuries this old European sys­ tem of oppression was redeveloped in North America and was joined and shaped by two other subsystems of oppression—capitalistic class oppres­ sion and systemic racial oppression. In their early and later developments these three structures of oppression have been intertwined and extended across whole societies, including the North American colonies and later United States.

The European colonizers brought to North America a social subordi­ nation and categorization system that was adapted to the new society they created, thereby shaping it in fundamental ways. Central to their Christian worldview had long been a mental framing of the world that emphasized a grand hierarchical structure called the "great chain of being," a view dating back to the ancient Greeks. In the early Christian era, the Christian God and angels were placed at the top of this ladder of beings. Below them was a well-developed hierarchy of superior and inferior human beings and then other animal groups. The higher up that ladder, the more socially val­ ued a group was; the lower down, the less socially valued. In the view ot the formidable men who headed up the Christian groups that dominated Europe, and soon North America, virtuous Christians were above unvirtu- ous non-Christians, the highly ranked aristocrats were above lower-status ordinary people, and the more privileged men were above subordinated women.1 Accepting the chain-of-being hierarchy and its rationalizing framing was a Christian duty. Disrupting it would mean social chaos—or so decreed the powerful European men who aggressively perpetuated it. Standing up to the views of this elite was against established religion and threatened societal stability.

The great-chain-of-being perspective was an integral part of English and other European mens sexist, elitist-class, and Eurocentric framing of the world as they invaded the lands of indigenous peoples in North America and Africa. Seeking to rationalize their violent dominance of non-European peoples, European leaders and their implementing assistants framed them as being near the bottom of this great chain of being, with Europeans and their colonial descendants at the top of terrestrial beings. English and other European colonialism in the Americas generated a social system with a hierarchical and racialized division of status and labor where European American (soon self-named "white") men were at the top, with European American women well below, and indigenous and African American men and women even lower at the bottom of this imposed hierarchy. Unsurpris­ ingly, given who enforced this social hierarchy, European men were regu­ larly viewed as "superior" and "manly," while an ever-expanding group ot colonized and subordinated non-European peoples (male and female) were framed as "inferior" and "weak."2

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 11

Over the centuries since this early imperialistic colonization, the most powerful European and European American men, with aid from enabling acolytes, have regularly imposed or substantially shaped sexist, classist, and racist hierarchical structures in countries across the globe. Today, as in the past, this elite-white-male power is rooted in and buttressed by major socie­ tal organizations and institutions—and thus is systemic, firmly established, and undergirded by threats of force.

Intersectionality, Interactionality, and Coreproduction

Given this overarching elite-white-male dominance system, let us explore a bit more the relationships of its gender, class, and racial oppression subsys­ tems. How are these component subsystems related and interrelated? Espe­ cially since the 1960s civil rights movements, numerous social science and humanities scholars have focused on certain aspects of the intersectionality ot these important subsystems. These intersections seem to have been ana­ lyzed in detail for those most oppressed, especially the intersectionality that situates African American women and other women of color. Indeed, some groundwork for analyzing the intersectional situation of African American women appeared well before the 1960s movements in the work of activists and analysts from Sojourner Truth and Frances E. W. Harper in the mid- 19th century to Anna Julia Cooper and Maria Stewart later in that century. For example, in her 19th century speeches and novels Harper provided pen­ etrating assessments of the dominance of patriarchal norms as they nega­ tively aifected all women, and especially black women.3

Most recently, several African American scholars such as Kimberle Cren­ shaw, Angela Davis, and Patricia Hill Collins have been in the forefront of those accenting a much more developed intersectionality theory and empir­ ical analyses. Coining the term "intersectionality" for critical race studies, Crenshaw was a pioneer in critiquing mainstream feminist studies for not considering the intersectional position of black women, who jointly face both systemic sexism and systemic racism. In her work Davis has exam­ ined, among other intersectionality issues, how enslaved black women were long racialized and gendered—exploited for their labor and "breeders" of enslaved children. In her pioneering intersectionality research, Philomena Essed has examined what she terms the "gendered racism" faced by black women in the United States and Europe.4 As suggested previously, Collins has provided a major and detailed social science analysis of intersectional­ ity issues in regard to how racial oppression intersects with gender oppres­ sion, and how understanding these intersections forms a distinctive black feminist epistemological perspective.5

In addition, over the last century white Marxist-Feminist scholars have examined the intersectional relationship of gender oppression and class

12 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

oppression, with a particular emphasis on the materialistic basis of this oppression. They have been critical of mainstream Marxists for paying lit­ tle attention to the conditions of women and of the radical feminist tra­ dition for being too psychological in analyses of such issues as marriage and women workers. Marxist-Feminist researcher Zillah Eisenstein has analyzed how the contemporary United States still has a well-developed patriarchal system in which women must struggle for their liberation and a positive sense of self.6 A Marxist-Feminist perspective, as Heidi Hartmann argues, regularly defines "patriarchy as a set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women."7 Well-established societal institutions, such as monog­ amous heterosexual marriage, thus provide male control over womens access to essential productive resources (e.g., their relationship to the job economy) and control over women's family and sexual labor. In this way, the early European patriarchal system and its male exploitation of womens labor provided a major template for the later exploitation of colonized peo­ ples overseas.8

In this book we add to social science analysis of these systems of oppres­ sion by examining in specific detail the most powerful group, the elite white men, at the intersectional top of the hierarchical gender, class, and racial subsystems. This society-creating and society-shaping group is rarely called out as such and has almost never been systematically analyzed by social scientists. This group of societal overlords makes many of the most import­ ant everyday decisions that create, shape, and sustain the sexist, classist, and racist subsystems. They interlink and interconnect these subsystems— physically, materially, and socially.

In addition, these subsystems do much more than accommodate each other, for they regularly codetermine and coreproduce one another. One sub­ system rarely operates in isolation of the others. For example, within the modern capitalistic system important economic positions are often signifi­ cantly determined and defined by the intersecting impacts of the sexist and racist subsystems. The hierarchical arrangement of jobs often has a major gendered component (e.g., women disproportionately in clerical positions, men disproportionately in senior management) or a racial component (e.g., blacks disproportionately in lower-paying jobs, whites disproportionately in better-paying jobs) that is not understandable just from an economic- class viewpoint. Theoretically, a profit-oriented capitalistic system does not require such gendered and racialized placements of workers. In turn, the long-term patterns of gendered and racialized job positions within the cap­ italistic economy help to reproduce other aspects of the larger sexist and racist subsystems of oppression. Additionally, the latter subsystems work to reinforce and coreproduce the class subsystem in numerous ways, including

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 13

the gender and racial splitting up of the working class to the general ben­ efit of the dominant capitalist class. For example, these subsystems create within capitalism a distinctive "reserve army of labor"—for instance, work­ ers of color who are paid less by discriminating employers, and thereby also undermine the wages of many white workers. Unmistakably, over centuries critical aspects of these subsystems of subjugation have become interlock­ ing and resistant to change, so that one subsystem significantly and regu­ larly helps to coreproduce the others.9

Throughout this book we see how powerful this coreproduction process is in maintaining the elite-white-male dominance system. Some decades back, a group of critical social theorists briefly developed this useful con­ cept, which they defined as a major "causal force at work in historical development. Spheres co-reproduce when the dynamics of one reproduce the defining relations of others."10 We adopt here a holistic social science perspective that accents this reality of the major subsystems of sexist, clas- sist, and racist oppression being coreproducing, interconnected, and inter­ twined. For the sake of a clearer explanation, we mainly consider in this book these three coreproducing subsystems of the elite-white-male domi­ nance system, but we must keep in mind the interconnections of these par­ ticular systems of oppression with other systems of oppression in western societies like the United States. Thus, our approach will be to look beyond surface appearances and prevailing mythologies to critical societal realities that have long been regularly hidden and thoroughly disguised.

Unity and Divisions in the Ruling Elite

Many analysts who research or theorize systemic sexism, classism, and rac­ ism are periodically accused of "essentialism." This often involves the claim that there is such diverse experience within these categories that generaliz­ ing is unwarranted. However, other analysts counter that this "postmodern" attention to human differences has become so exacting that it leaves little room for the necessary unifying claims against major societal oppressions. That people in categories such as "women" or "African Americans" do not always experience subordination in the same manner does not mean that most do not share many similarly oppressive experiences as part of a socially oppressed group. As legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw has put it, a major project for all oppressed people is reflecting deeply on the "way in which power has clustered around certain categories and is exercised against oth­ ers. This project attempts to unveil the processes of subordination and the various ways in which those processes are experienced by people who are subordinated and people who are privileged by them."11

As we will see throughout this book, much research demonstrates that substantial majorities of large subordinated groups such as women or

14 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

African Americans face broadly many similar gender and/or racial experi­ ences with the dominant white male group. In that sense they do constitute oppressed groups because that oppressor group has routinely and power­ fully made that so in material, legal, and other social terms.

Much empirical evidence demonstrates that the major institutions of U.S. society have long been shaped and operated by a small white and male elite, one that has taken on a more or less oligarchical form since the earliest century. Consider the foundational example of the 55 delegates at the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention. They were all white men, and almost all were members of a privileged elite within the colonial society. All agreed that the new U.S. government must be powerful enough to protect private property, and thus undergird and sustain current and future class and racial inequality. Well-off white Americans had to protect themselves against rebellious enslaved workers, indigenous Americans, and landless whites—a principal reason for the second amendment protecting armed state mili­ tias. James Madison, the influential shaper of the Constitution, wrote of the "class with" property and the "class without" property and thereby noted increasing national inequality, which he wished to be constitutionally pro­ tected. A leading northern delegate, Gouverneur Morris, likewise agreed that property is die "main object of Society."12

These Constitution-makers did protect propertied interests, again mainly those of white men with substantial property such as early capital­ ists. For instance, Article I o f the Constitution prevents state governments from interfering with contract obligations, and the Constitutions Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit federal and state governments from tak­ ing private property without "due process of law" and "just compensation. Ever since, the mosdy elite or elite-vetted federal and state judges have gen­ erally made certain that propertied wealth is well-protected.1.

The U.S. Constitution, together with other early political documents, did not create a true democracy (literally, rule by "the people"). The "founders actually created a nation-state with a federal government that has drawn higher-level officials typically from the white upper class or upper middle class. From the beginning, this increasingly bureaucratized government has provided a major power base for the dominant elite; its operation has gen­ erally been elitist in regard to most significant foreign and domestic policy­ making. Moreover, the U.S. political system has sharply limited the degree of democratic input into its major political institutions by most adult cit­ izens. Indeed, the new U.S. Constitution was never ratified by the mass of the country's adult citizens in a free election. The white male founders intentionally created an inegalitarian and undemocratic political system where most adults then—especially white women and women and men ot color—had very little or no input into the shape and operation ot the polit­ ical institutions. The few who sought a much more democratic political

K 1

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 15

system had lost out.14 Thus, the U.S. Constitution and political actions taken after its ratification essentially established a "white man's republic" built to a substantial degree on African American slavery and the genocidal theft of indigenous peoples' lands.

Still, within this dominant oppressor group there were, and still are today, significant social divisions. There is indeed no one societal place called the White Male Dominance Headquarters, "with flags and limousines, where all the strategies are worked out."15 There are conflicts within the top rank of the ruling elite that are revealed in major institutions, and especially in such realms as politics and corporate competitions. One important politi­ cal or corporate faction periodically comes into conflict with another. For instance, when it came to some constitutional and other political issues, the founding elite had a conservative wing and a moderate wing, both rooted in empowering social networks and organizations. Those in the moderate wing of this elite were the most supportive of some greater class equal­ ity and of more political and legal rights for ordinary Americans (that is, ordinary white men). The more conservative wing included delegates who sought some form of monarchy, and many were anti-democratic and feared, as they said, the masses." Indeed, the moderate wing was unable to get a specific list of individual civil rights into the initial Constitution, and these had to be added later in a more democratic Bill of Rights, substantially because of pressures from ordinary whites (i.e., white men with influence in various states).16

Since the founding period, the factions in the ruling elite have also been differentially represented in various U.S. regions, with the majority of the southern elite often being more conservative on certain issues than those in other regions. In some situations the factions within this powerful elite have found themselves in temporary or permanent political and economic conflicts. Even so, there is nearly unanimous commitment to maintaining the top status of elite white men in the country's gender, racial, and class hierarchies and thus in the overarching elite-white-male dominance sys­ tem. Note too that over the last century or so the dominant U.S. elite has shifted from one that was in early centuries virtually all northern European in origins—mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants—to a more ethnically diverse group including growing numbers of Irish Catholics and southern and eastern Europeans (mostly Catholics and Jews). Today the power elite is characterized by a multiethnic whiteness. More recendy and slowly, token or modest numbers of other men and women, including from groups that are not white, have been added to the margins of this still very dispropor­ tionately white and male elite.

Frequendy, as we provide details on this elite, we will observe that just below its top social rank is a larger class of acolytes and assistants who provide everyday enforcers and coordinators of this integrated system of

16 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

gender, class, and racial oppression. These powerful implementing decision­ makers tend to be disproportionately white and male, but in recent decades modest numbers of white women and people of color have also moved up into these important societal positions.

Moreover, as we will document throughout this book, the tripartite sub­ systems of the elite-white-male dominance system are operative within most U.S. major institutions and at various social levels within them, includ­ ing groupings such as families, schools, workplaces, and civic organizations. Indeed, these latter social arenas are where much critical socialization into the dominant societal frames take place—the dominant frames that ratio­ nalize and legitimate the subsystems of gender, class, and racial oppression.

The Patriarchal-Sexist System and European Colonialism

In terms of historical time, patriarchal-sexist domination both predated and greatly shaped the historical emergence of the subsystems of capitalis­ tic class dominance and white racial dominance in western countries, and in the global spheres they have since controlled.

We previously noted the ancient Greeks' great-chain-of-being framing of reality, which was later adopted and adapted by Europeans in the Christian era. Men were viewed as socially superior and women socially inferior, and thus necessarily subordinated. This patriarchal-sexist system has long had a strong misogynistic aspect; women are not only legally subordinated by superior men but often feared, disliked, or hated as dangerous. Researcher Jack Holland has traced the roots of this misogynistic perspective to the 8th century BCE, in both Greece and fudaea. There religious creation myths arose describing "the Fall of Man"—that is, myths about "how woman's weakness is responsible for all subsequent human suffering, misery and death." These "man's fall" myths (e.g., Eve tempting Adam) became central in western civilization through the Greek and Jewish traditions; they were used by powerful men to rationalize the oppression of women in patriarchal- sexist societies. Later on, male oppression and misogyny were intensified in the Christian tradition, which accepted the old Adam and Eve "Original Sin" myth. Woman is therein considered responsible for the "falling away of man from the perfect state of grace with God into the horror of the reality of being."1 The male leaders of the western religions, together with other male leaders, were key figures in this misogynistic subordinating and dehu­ manizing of women. A central concern was full social control of women, their bodies, and their lives.

Conditions for women got even worse in many areas toward the end of the European Middle Ages, the era in which modern capitalism emerges in the context of a patriarchal-sexist and feudal system faced with increasing peasant protests. Public witch trials and burnings, usually of women, were

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 17

part of the state violence that put down peasant rebellions against feudal elites. These trials also ensured, as Silvia Federici has demonstrated, that women had to submit to an amplified patriarchal system "where wom­ en's bodies, their labor, their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources."18

From the 16th century onward, this extensive suppression of women was part of the great societal changes brought about by Europe's religious, political, and economic elites. The landed feudal elite oriented to agricul­ ture was often struggling against the emerging urban capitalistic elite, yet both groups were almost always male and patriarchal-sexist in orientation. The capitalistic elite in various countries expanded its business enterprises by means of often violent "colonization and extermination of the popu­ lations of the New World, the English enclosures, [and] the beginning of the slave trade. 19 Organized state (especially military) violence has been central to capitalistic expansion and imperialism ever since.

Thus, the expansion of European countries overseas, the creation of empires, was simultaneously gendered, racialized, and classed. In this col­ onizing process, European male conquerors assumed male character to be virtuous and western Christian civilization to be a superior gift to a sup­ posedly uncivilized world. This imperialistic expansion was often led by European men from the male-dominated occupations of entrepreneurs, state officials, ministers or priests, traders, and soldiers. Unsurprisingly, an individualistic and assertive masculinity developed in connection with the greedy and violent conquests of indigenous peoples on several continents. The European sense of masculinity was reinforced by ever stronger and imperialistic European states and large professional armies, whose opera­ tions in overseas colonies and European wars further institutionalized and uni\ ersalized the patriarchal-sexist power and often violent orientation of European men.20

Unsurprisingly, when they imposed colonial rule on indigenous and African peoples in North America, European colonizers operated from a patriarchal- sexist framing. Virtuous European (soon "white") men were superior physi­ cally and morally, while women were weak and unvirtuous: "Marital, familial, and communal order all hinged on God's sanction of male superiority."21 The English colonists, both the ruling male elite and ordinary people, adjusted the patriarchal-sexist patterns in the law, church, and community customs to new social and demographic conditions, implementing a brand of patriar-

chalism that reflected not only Old World practices but also a commitment to... creating godly communities on the American coast."22

For instance, in his 1711 sermonizing pamphlet, Manly Christianity, the powerful Puritan minister and leader Cotton Mather made clear the nec­ essary connection between white manliness and good Christian virtue. In this view male colonists' patriarchalism sustained a godly society; it was

18 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

linked to "Christian manhood and the system by which men enjoyed pri­ mary authority in both family and society."23 Their patriarchal-sexist model was authoritarian. To be a Christian patriarch, a man was supposed to be virtuous and a "strict father" figure. Early colonial laws "dealing with adul­ tery, rebellious children, recalcitrant servants, single people, and the poor all served to reinforce the importance, power, and interests of independent married men and underscored the centrality of patriarchalism to colonial life."2'1 Clearly, this European manhood framework not only set the norma­ tive patterns for men and women, but also shaped relationships between men of different social classes, ages, and family positions. Unsurprisingly, too, the elite European men extended patriarchal-family imagery to white male leadership in colonial communities, imagery that signaled their asserted control there and over the larger society.25

This European American patriarchal framework combined racial and masculinist views that shaped the approach these European American Christians took to Native American men. In the early colonization period major attempts were made to convert Native Americans to Christian­ ity, including converting indigenous men to the English patriarchal ideal. Soon, however, this Christian missionary approach was pushed to the side as greedy colonists developed an even more substantial warfare approach to gain a firm hold on more land belonging to others. Early on, "manly" warmaking was central to the English Americans' view of Christian man­ hood. Their warmaking was contrasted in their minds with the supposedly unmanly and dishonorable warmaking conducted by Native American men who were, in fact, defending their invaded communities.26

Early male European leaders strongly shaped and maintained an ine- galitarian, gendered society substantially through economic, legal, political, religious, and other institutional means. Ever since that era, in these insti­ tutional spheres, white men have generally averaged much more privileged and powerful positions and have received an array of better socioeconomic benefits and resources than women of all backgrounds. The European imperialistic and colonizing efforts were heavily gendered, masculinist, and patriarchal in what we term their male sexist framing. This aggressively male sexist framing is seen everywhere in the accounts of European explorers, entrepreneurs, and colonizers operating across the globe.27

Conceptualizing Systemic Sexism

Let us pause to underscore our systemic sexism perspective. Over the last century feminist scholars of diverse backgrounds have analyzed sexism (patriarchy) as deeply structured into U.S. society. Contemporary femi­ nist scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins and Judith Lorber have strongly accented the reality of gendered institutions and the role of a gender

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 19

ideology in perpetuating them. Some decades back in the 1970s, author Joe Feagin helped to accent the concept of institutional sexism, thereby taking analysis of gender discrimination beyond individualistic prejudice-centered theorizing.-8 Too often sexism, like racism, is viewed by the public and mainstream scholars as mainly a matter of relationships between individ­ uals, between one or a few who are prejudiced perpetrators and one or a few who are the targets. In our view, however, sexism, like racism, cannot be adequately understood just in this individualistic framework.

Such asymmetrical interpersonal relationships are part of much larger systems within which more powerful people repeatedly and profitably impose their interests and goals on much less powerful people. At the heart of an analysis of this well-institutionalized sexism is this material reality of highly gendered exploitation and discrimination. It is centrally about who has the dominant power and who has much less or no power in recurring situations involving the societal groups concerned. We noted this materi­ alistic accent above in the work of early African American feminists and ot Marxist-Feminists. Gendered oppression has long been institutional­ ized and has thereby allocated, to quote the early feminist Gerda Lerner, resources, property, and privileges to persons according to culturally

defined gender roles." Furthermore, this has involved "male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in society in general."29

Generally speaking, we use systemic sexism to refer to well-institutionalized societal patterns of subordinate and dominant social positions and roles, respectively, for women and men in a male-dominated hierarchical society. To catalog key dimensions of systemic sexism specifically, we should under­ score the following: (1) the many discriminatory practices of men directed against women; (2) the social privileges and power unjustly provided to men and enshrined in the dominant gender hierarchy; (3) the maintenance of these major gender inequalities by institutionalized social reproduction mechanisms; and (4) the many sexist prejudices, stereotypes, images, ide­ ologies, emotions, interpretations, and narratives that constitute the dom­ inant male sexist frame (male worldview) that rationalizes and implements the everyday oppression of women.

The dominant male sexist frame is a male-imposed worldview from which virtually all men routinely operate. As with all dominant frames, there are some significant variations associated with particular groups, such as certain racial and ethnic groups. (Yet, white masculinity dominates.) And numerous individuals in all groups may have some distinctive "bits" in their particular male sexist framing, but their individual bits are usually imbed­ ded in, and elaborations of, collective group knowledge. As the sociolo­ gist Karl Mannheim argued, "Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he [or she]

20 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

participates in thinking [to] further" what the relevant others have thought before.30 Individuals always find themselves in societal settings where they learn and participate in inherited patterns of thought.

For centuries this male sexist frame has come to include both a deep- seated pro-male subframe (a positive placement of men and male superior­ ity) and an anti-female frame (a negative placement of women and female inferiority). This male superiority subframe is the center of the dominant male sexist frame and aggressively accentuates male superiority, virtue, and associated elements. It thus emphasizes male supremacy (patriarchy) and hegemonic masculinity (superior manhood), the latter being typically viewed in U.S. society as white-racialized and heteronormative.31 Signifi­ cantly, the English word virtue is derived from the Latin word vir, which literally means man. Early in the development of North American colonies, white men were supposed to exhibit the manly virtues of courage, physical strength, and patriarchal dominance.

Consider a major contemporary example. This male sexist frame was obvious in the way the mainstream media recently covered the extramarital relationship between well-placed whites—Paula Broadwell, a counterter- rorism expert and Army reservist, and David Petraeus, a former top U.S. general. In media discussions Broadwell was often negatively viewed out of the male sexist frame as very unvirtuous—with sexist language like his mistress," "shameless," "self-promoter," and "femme fatale" who "got her claws" into Petraeus. He, in contrast, was portrayed from the virtuous-male center of that sexist frame as a "leading" and "honorable general, gentle­ man," and "family man" who "let his guard down."32 He had made a "grave error," but his career achievements were celebrated; she was "his mistress without significant career achievements.

This negative framing of Broadwell lines up with centuries of negative framing of women who step outside the male-imposed normative expec­ tations of women being married, child-bearing homemakers. As Lisa \Nade notes, for many centuries and to the present day, many women living out­ side these strong domesticity norms have been conceptualized as in a vir­ gin" or "whore" category. In all these cases, however, women are viewed as subordinate to men, and their bodies are under male control.33

Women who conform to the virgin status or move into a conventional domes­ tic setting are "good" according to the male-crafted norms of the patriarchal- sexist system. Even today, women are expected to be more sexually pure and religiously "pious" than men. Sexual activity by women outside the con­ ventional norms often brings implicit or explicit criticism, in part because they are not supposed to have male-type sexual desires. In contrast, men are usually not judged so negatively for their sexual behavior, but are excused or expected to be sexually active outside of marriage ("men will be men ). Women who break strongly with these conventional male-crafted norms

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 21

about domesticity and sexuality—such as those seeking careers outside the home, especially in male-dominated fields, or feminist activists-have long been considered to be "unfeminine, immoral, or even feminazis.

The "Founding Fathers": More Patriarchism and Intense Misogyny

In the early centuries of European colonization, the European American elite was substantially composed of large hereditary landowners and their business allies in the towns and small cities. By the 1660s the explicit term "patriarchism" was consciously developed for the sexist system by white men who headed up slave plantations, other large farms, and other impor­ tant economic institutions. Slaveholders and other slavery-related elite men (e g, merchants, bankers, lawyers) constituted the dominant wing ot this country's white elite until the Civil War. And slaveholding communities, especially in southern and border states, were often organized around white male patriarchs who were extremely powerful and generally capitalistic in their business perspectives.34 Note that their hierarchical class framing of society was constandy intertwined with their racial and gender framing ot society. Thus, the white patriarchal worldview of this European American gentry motivated their aggressive control over women and children on their agricultural plantations and farms and over workforces in the fields and town enterprises, including over enslaved indigenous and black workers and low-status white workers who generated significant profits for them.

Still, these men viewed themselves as highly virtuous men of principle, as powerful and strict "fathers" controlling not only families but often com­ munities and the larger society. For instance, in the 18th century the pow­ erful Virginia slaveholder William Byrd II described himselt: "Like one ot the [biblical] patriarchs, 1 have my flocks and my herds, my bond-men and bond-women, and every soart of trade amongst my own servants, so I li ve in a kind of independence.... I must take care to keep all my people to their duty, to set all the springs in motion, and to make every one draw his equal share to carry the machine forward."35 He makes clear in various writings that his wife and family are included in his broad patriarchal sphere. Now that they had driven or killed off most indigenous Americans in the area, Byrd and others at the top of the white gentry even "appropriated the newly invented reputation of Indian men for virility.36

One can use the term patriarchy to refer to this coercive, often vio­ lent dominance of these "fathers" over their lands and animals and over all aspects of the lives of their workers and family members. Moreover, for leading whites the immediate patriarchal family was a source of broad male-dominant metaphors used to interpret and conceptualize other important areas of socio-political life-including their patriarchal-like dominance over their communities and the larger society. Constantly, we

22 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

see how intimately interwoven and coreproducing were (and still are) the sexist, classist, and white-racist hierarchies and their rationalizing frames.

We notice too how important the religious legitimation of the elite-white- male position in society was, as in their accent on being like biblical patri­ archs. Influential religious leaders, especially but not exclusively in the South, such as minister James Henley Thornwell (1812-1862), defended slavery as a positive system under which white men had a moral and legal right to enslave others. In Thornwell's view this racialized and gendered sys­ tem perpetuated the Bibles patriarchal admonitions—with a white father as ruling head of a household that included not only his wife and children but also men, women, and children he enslaved. Leading white slaveholders, ministers, and publishers of pro-slavery publications regularly cited Isra­ el's patriarchs in the Bible as examples of their God-ordained legitimacy as patriarchal enslavers of African Americans.37

Unsurprisingly, too, the white slaveholders made clear their fear that enslaved African Americans, especially men, would revolt against their enslavement. They secured many laws, including the U.S. Constitution, that supported armed militias and other policing organizations to protect slavery from revolts. Black men were viewed as threatening their dominant white masculinity, to the point that many slaveholders made black men and boys wear dress-like shirts (female clothing) and barred or restricted their wearing pants'™ Such actions again demonstrate the close connections between this country's systemic racism and sexism.

In addition, significant fear of white women was regularly expressed by members of the white male establishment. The powerful slaveholder Wil­ liam Byrd II and the leading slaveholding intellectual Thomas Jefferson kept diaries that presented themselves as virtuous patriarchs and provided very negative commentaries on white women (e.g., as "female monsters"). They sprinkled diaries with misogynistic commentaries on women's suppos­ edly abhorrent and corruptible bodies. The young Jefferson even penned a misogynistic fantasy of a better world without women.39

Like other white men, they drew on these misogynistic images as met­ aphors for broad discussions of political or societal corruption, accenting that a good society must avoid these serious woman-like faults. Unsurpris- ingly, too, this white manhood perspective encompassed a heavy accent on heterosexism and hostility to gay and lesbian relationships. While gay relationships were occasionally tolerated if kept strictly private, lead­ ing founders such as Jefferson supported severe laws, including one that made castration punishment for gay men and facial mutilation for lesbian women. Numerous "sodomy" laws prescribed death for violations of hetero- sexist laws.40 Being at the top of the societal hierarchies, these men played the central role in constructing who is the "normal" human being to judge others against—a male being bearing white heterosexist masculinity.

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 23

Archly patriarchal views extended well beyond the elite southern lead­ ers. For example, the white "liberal" Benjamin Franklin insisted that "Every man that is really a man is master of his own family."41 In his emphatically masculine view a real man must be dominant; he accented that his wife too was "obedient." Pervasive masculinist framing among leading white found­ ers was shared by ordinary white men. It emphasized that girls and women were naturally unequal, suited for family life, should be dependent on men, were too emotional, and were unfit for full citizenship.42 In the early cen­ turies of this country's history, we observe key dimensions of what is still the dominant U.S. masculinity: male authority, dominance over women and children, toughness and aggressiveness, and heteronormativity.

The leading white men extended their patriarchal view to include their domination of the entire society. Like many others, Jefferson not only spoke of female relatives and those he enslaved as his subordinated family—in his words, he was "blessed as the most fortunate of patriarchs"—but also viewed the United States as a larger extension of the elite white families.43

These men viewed themselves as deserving patriarchal rulers of their fam­ ilies, plantations, communities, and society. Indeed, they, and those who have celebrated them since, have regularly used clear patriarchal language for them—e.g., "forefathers," "founding fathers," "fathers of their coun­ try," and "fathers and guardians of their people." A myriad times since the founding era, George Washington has been labeled the "father of his coun­ try" or the leading "founding father." Such repeated fatherly language for and by the leading white founders further encouraged all white men, then and now, to obey elite male leaders "without feeling they had to sacrifice their own manly independence."44

Metaphorical and Other Language Control

Significantly, such patriarchal-sexist metaphors have been commonplace in much elite and ordinary white framing of political and racial matters since the days of slavery and the American revolution. As a result, white Americans have long spoken of their "forefathers" or "founding fathers," with an under­ standing that the white-dominated United States was the "family" of concern.

Reflect for a moment on the power of certain metaphors and of other language in shaping some ways that many people think about society. For centuries, powerful elite-generated metaphors have helped to legitimate this country's systems of oppression. Authoritative metaphors channel what ordinary people are encouraged to believe about our society's origin, development, and stratification systems. Cognitive linguists have under­ scored the importance of the creation and imposition of social, political, and moral metaphors that operate to protect existing structures of inequal­ ity. Much of how we know, and what we know of, the society is shaped by

24 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

important concepts and metaphorical understandings that we are taught. In this way, key metaphorical themes and the frames that embody them function to serve the powerful elite and, more extensively, the country's dominant groups.45 In subsequent analyses we will assess the importance of these elite-generated metaphors and linguistic expressions in a myriad of societal contexts.

We will see, for instance, how the dominant (white) manhood ideol­ ogy has drawn for centuries on an array of metaphors and other linguistic expressions to spread the concept of "manly men." As linguist Eliane Luthi Poirier has emphasized,

Sexist idioms and expressions, such as "be a real man," "take it like a man," "separate the men from the boys," and "boys don't cry" are all used to pressure boys and men into conforming to traditional ide­ als about masculinity and masculine behavior. It also serves to create deep fear in the hearts of boys of exhibiting any kind of behavior that could be remotely considered feminine."

Members of the male elite, including presidents, and ordinary men have reg­ ularly used such harshly differentiating and gendered expressions to legit­ imate and buttress this society's oppressive patriarchal-sexist institutions.

Beyond this linguistic buttressing of the patriarchal-sexist system, throughout this book we will also show how much of the language of soci­ ety's dominant racial and class framing is likewise developed and circu­ lated by the ruling elite to undergird their societal control. New metaphors, expressions, and concepts arise in all corners of society. Once these appear, the mostly white male elite and its implementing subordinates have histor­ ically had great power to select and firmly institutionalize their preferred metaphors, expressions, and concepts.

When key metaphors and other language expressions become central to the dominant societal framing, they regularly influence what many people can or do think about, and especially what they do not think about. For example, in discussing the impact of the elite's historical framing of Native Americans as inferior and "uncivilized savages" on recent decisions of Supreme Court justices, the scholar Robert Williams captures the thought-shaping power of that negative framing on elite and ordinary Americans today: "It's that unthinking, unconscious, and unreflective state of mind and belief embed­ ded in the American racial imagination ... that determines and defines what most Americans care to think about Indians and Indian rights."4

National White Manhood Framing

Early national manhood framing, as historian Dana Nelson has shown, con­ stantly accented its virtuous whiteness. The Declaration of Independence

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 25

and the U.S. Constitution, crafted by powerful white men, implicitly or explicitly excluded white women and people of color from full U.S. citizen­ ship. As it spread thereafter, this white manhood identity was very much a national identity spread by the ruling elite as an "ideal for guaranteeing national unity," especially among non-elite classes of white men.48 Soon after the Constitution was implemented, the Naturalization Act (1790), passed by an all white-male Congress, made explicit these leaders' central concern for making only white immigrants into naturalized citizens of the new United States, as did later legislation at various government levels. (That act also used the pronoun "he" for these desirable immigrants.) Interestingly, too, during this era the image of "Uncle Sam" as a powerful and bearded white man came to personify the new United States.49

The privileged reality of national white manhood early articulated by influential propertied white men spread over the early 19th century to ordi­ nary white men. Because of organized pressures by the latter men, import­ ant voting and other political rights were expanded across the class line to working class white men. However, they paid a heavy price for buying into an elite-generated, national white manhood. As Nelson notes, their identi­ fication with this white manhood blocked them "from being able efficiently to identify socioeconomic inequality," which greatly hurt them and their families, "as structural rather than individual failure." They were thus fur­ ther socialized into the individualism of elite-run capitalistic markets and competition.50

By subscribing to this national white manhood the ordinary white men foregrounded the sexist and racist interests they shared with that white male elite, often instead of pursuing their class interests. They thus paid a personal price by collaborating in the oppression of other Americans (e.g., black Americans) and thereby helping to shut themselves and the country out of real democracy. As the social scientist W. E. B. Du Bois explained, these ordinary men got a "public and psychological wage of whiteness" in return for giving up important socioeconomic advancements, such as they would likely have had if they had organized in unions with workers of color to counter powerful capitalists' economic domination. We might add to Du Boiss concept that these ordinary men also got a public and psychological wage of white maleness. Ever since, this constantly proclaimed white broth­ erhood has regularly reinforced the exclusion of other Americans—white women, Native and African Americans, foreign immigrants—from voting and other citizenship rights.51

This national manhood framing included an emphasis on toughness and aggressive manly action to uphold white male interests, a militant perspec­ tive extended to white-controlled government action. For example, serving as the seventh U.S. president in the 1830s, Andrew Jackson was a former general with a strong white manhood identity, gained as a violent slave­ holder and Indian-killing "pioneer" who helped expand the U.S. "frontier."

26 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

A patriarchal authoritarian in his general social framing, he endured and inflicted much pain—the enduring model of hegemonic white masculin­ ity. He insisted that Native Americans relinquish ancestral lands to whites, in accordance with ideals of republican white manhood. In condescending communications with them, Jackson portrayed himself as "your father the President."'2 Jackson was a leading example of an elite figure who sought to spread the reality of privileged white manhood to white men of all classes. Indeed, the hyper-masculine Jackson's mythologized story has inspired subsequent politicians to use similar images of arrogant and heroic white masculinity in their political strategies. Since the early U.S. decades, this dominant manhood framing has constantly been linked, implicitly or explicitly, to assessments of who has the "true American" civic identity.53

Over the course of the 19th century after Jackson, according to an anal­ ysis of Google's huge book and article collection by the scholar Anthony Weems, the use of the concept of "manliness" increased dramatically in popular literature. These included numerous popular books by white Prot­ estant authors like these: E. H. Chapin's Christianity: The Perfection of True Manliness (1856); T. Hughes's True Manliness (1880); and J. B. Figgiss Man­ liness, Womanliness, Godliness (1885).54 They accented a hard-working, cou­ rageous, and Christian white male ideal, while stereotyping (white) women as necessarily docile and subordinate. The aggressive styles of these books and pamphlets can be seen in this passage from Figgis:

Most young [white] men know that the Latin word for "man"—at least, for a right manly man—is the word from which our English word virtue comes. .. . And it has risen in the English word virtue, to the act and habit of duty. We may feel a modest national pride in this, and may gratefully conclude that in the thought of Englishmen virtue is the highest quality of a man; and so that manliness is most fully developed—the virtues, shall we say, of bravery, honesty, activity, and piety.55

The linkage of white men to high virtue is conspicuous in this literature. Notice the accent on white Englishmen as leading exponents of manly vir­ tues of courage, duty, physical strength, and Christian piety. These import­ ant publications were designed to vigorously communicate this virtuous image to ordinary white men.

The great power of this manhood ideology over many decades, to the present, can be seen conspicuously in the history of major sports. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as amateur sports spread in the U.S. (and British) middle and upper classes, it became clear, as the scholar Tony Col­ lins puts it, that "sporting ideals were underpinned by concerns about mas­ culinity and its importance to capitalist society." The amateur sports sense

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 27

ot masculinity "was squarely based on Muscular Christian ideals. A gentle­ man amateur... was physically courageous, strong-willed, prepared to give and take orders, and, above all, not feminine. True sport could only be a mas­ culine kingdom."56 This dominant white masculinity was contrasted with an inferior and necessarily subordinate womanliness. In one 1912 Ladies Home Journal essay, 'Are Athletics Making Girls Masculine?" a white male doctor highlighted his and others concern with girls and women participating in mens athletics such as baseball, boxing, and basketball. Such participation

makes them too masculine. In"man-splaining"to mostly women readers, he asserted that sports as played by boys and men are bad for girls and women; he suggested how to make them less vigorous for the latter.57 Like many male authors who have written on such topics, he asserted a white male framing of superior (white) manliness over inferior (white) womanliness. This perspective persists in many sectors of society to the present day and remains important in the perpetuation of this country's systemic sexism.

Enshrining Male Dominance: The U.S. Legal System

From the beginning, most of this society's legal system, including the Consti­ tution, has historically been crafted and controlled by white men. The pow­ erful white men who crafted that Constitution assumed women's gendered subordination, then in place in numerous court decisions and state laws. This included the principle of "coverture"—that married women were not legal persons, the term used in the Constitution, but are legally subordinate to

husbands. Coverture laws and other laws imposing discriminatory restric­ tions on single women were instituted by (white) male-only state legislatures, and the Constitution-makers clearly did not wish to contradict those laws.

In 1848, a few decades after the ratification of the Constitution, a confer­ ence of 68 women and 32 men was held in Seneca Falls, New York, to press tor full rights for women. The conference's Declaration of Sentiments forth- rightly referenced the male-made Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.... The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

They then penned a long list of the ways in which women were oppressed by men, including these:

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. ... He has monopolized nearly all the profitable

28 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

employments— He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. ... He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a differ­ ent code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquen­ cies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man. . . . He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.58

The document then concludes that "because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privi­ leges which belong to them as citizens of the United States." As we will see throughout this book, women have not yet secured these full equal rights and privileges as U.S. citizens.

Systemic Classism and Systemic Racism: Theft of Land and Labor

Let us now consider the historical development of western capitalism in more detail. The Marxist theoretical tradition has provided a powerful the­ ory of class oppression centered on key concepts like worker exploitation and Uass struggles. Marxist analyses typically identify the basic social forces undergirding capitalistic class oppression, show how human beings are alienated from each other by class relations and struggle, and point toward activist remedies for class oppression.

As we document throughout this book, there is much going on in this capitalistic system or, as we also term it, systemic classism. Briefly summa­ rized, this systemic classism involves (1) well-institutionalized social pat­ terns of subordinate and dominant class positions and roles, respectively, for ordinary working people and capitalists (owners and top executives) in a hierarchical capitalistic society; (2) the many exploitive practices of capi­ talists directed against workers of all backgrounds; (3) the social privileges and power unjustly provided to capitalists and enshrined in the class hier­ archy; (4) the maintenance of major class inequalities by institutionalized social inheritance mechanisms; and (5) the many class prejudices, stereo­ types, images, ideologies, interpretations, and narratives that constitute the capitalistic class frame that prizes the capitalist class and rationalizes the everyday exploitation of working people. We should note, too, that particu­ larly important in most critical analyses of this systemic classism are those corporate capitalists who head up the larger enterprises with considerable employees, as distinguished from small business owners with relatively few employees.

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 29

There is a commonplace myth that these capitalists are no longer domi­ nant in this society because about 47 percent of Americans are said to also be "owners" of corporations—that is, they directly, or in retirement accounts and the like, own some corporate stocks. What this notion elides is that the majority do not own stocks, and that those who do mostly own a modest number of shares. Moreover, because one major corporations stock is usu­ ally held together with other stocks by institutional investors (e.g., mutual funds) that do not run companies, often one individual or small group needs only 5 percent or so of a corporations stock to control it.59

Situated in important economic networks and organizations, todays cor­ porate capitalists have decisive control over the economic means of produc­ tion, distribution, and exchange; over land and buildings; and over the labor power of others, including many working class and middle class Americans in all racial and gender groups. Their power generally comes from their important networks and their location in powerful organizations such as the larger corporations. They and their acolytes often gain additional social power and critical coordination as they move into upper reaches of major government, civic agencies, and private policymaking organizations (e.g., the Business Roundtable)—and then often back again to capitalistic enter­ prises. This process is essential to the coordination and integration of the ruling elite.

Societal power is not some vague or magical reality, but comes from these specific organizational positions, operations, and resources. As sociol­ ogist Bill Domhoff has emphasized, these networked organizations are power bases due to the information and material resources their leaders

control, along with the ability leaders have to hire and fire underlings, form alliances with other organizational leaders, and many other prerogatives the specialists in managing, coordinating, and obtaining outside resources have the power advantage from the start."60 For several centuries, clearly, executives at the top ot large corporations and other major economic orga­ nizations have had a very disproportionate ability to substantially shape the economic and political development of societies like the United States.61

Historical Stages of Capitalism

Western capitalism and its developed class system have gone through his­ torical stages in North America. Early on there was agricultural capitalism, essentially mercantile and slave-plantation capitalism, from about the 17th century to the mid-19th century. Wealth generated overseas from theft of indigenous lands and African American labor played a major role in creating urban-industrial societies in the colonizing countries in Europe. By the mid- 19th century U.S. agricultural capitalism was accompanied by expanding urban-industrial capitalism. Over time smaller-scale industrial capitalism

30 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

morphed into a modern form often termed "oligopolistic capitalism"—that is, a capitalistic economic system were major economic sectors are increas­ ingly dominated by a few large national or multinational corporations.

Over the last century, this era of oligopoly capitalism has seen much cor­ porate centralization and many mergers, emphasis on consumerism, and more government support for corporate profitmaking. Today in the United States, the capitalistic market remains central; direct or indirect control of major corporations and other economic institutions still lies in the hands of a small group of powerful capitalists (owners or top executives). Roo­ sevelt Institute researchers emphasize that today U.S. capitalism is "more concentrated and less competitive than at any point since the Gilded Age —the 1870s-1890s peak of early monopoly capitalism.62 Additionally, to prosper, these dominant capitalists have long required a society in which both economic and noneconomic structures are substantially supportive ot capitalistic norms, especially profitmaking. Throughout these eras the more powerful capitalists, usually white men, and the capitalistic system they crafted have made certain types of economic activity the central goal ol numerous societies. They have operated according to the "mystique of gain." And "what they gained, others lost."63

A critical feature of contemporary oligopolistic capitalism is the dra­ matic increase in large U.S. multinational corporations operating around the globe. For many decades much of the globe has been available for U.S. capitalists investments, and they have exported billions in capital and millions of jobs overseas in the process of creating profitmaking facilities that employ many workers, heavily workers of color, in less industrialized countries at significantly lower wages than U.S. workers. Disproportion­ ately white and male, top corporate executives have become the major decision-making force in expanding the capitalist world economy and its international economic institutions and problem-creating social forces. Operating out of a strong capitalistic framing of society, these executives have regularly fought strong worker organizations globally, organizations that engage in a class struggle with capitalists to secure better wages and workplace conditions.61 In later chapters, we will assess the impact of these multinational executives' operations globally.

Stealing Land and Labor: Original Capital Accumulation

Modern capitalism began with the great overseas expansion of European colonizers in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese were the first to colonize the Americas for economic reasons, but were followed by colonizing English, Dutch, and French nation-states and private companies seeking economic wealth. In North America, English firms often made huge profits from agricultural farms and plantations, commonly using enslaved

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 31

indigenous and African labor on stolen indigenous peoples' lands. Stock­ holders in these exploitative firms included scientists, authors, bankers, and members of the English legislature—most leading white men.65 The North American colonies began as state enterprises created under the auspices of the king or as state-fostered companies developed by entrepreneurs and plantation owners. Early capitalistic companies, such as the Southern Com­ pany, were formed by merchants under the auspices of James I of England. This company's employees settled Jamestown, Virginia, the first colony to enslave African laborers. Land worked by those enslaved was often taken by genocidal force or crafted treachery from indigenous societies, and Europe­ ans developed a brutal Atlantic slave trade to exploit these land resources.

The political-economist Karl Marx was perhaps the first to analyze critically the reality of early modern capitalism being grounded in great wealth stemming from European imperialism in the lands of non-western indigenous peoples. In his book Capital he captured the significance of this exploitative foundation:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning ot the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceed­ ings are the chief moments of primitive [original] accumulation [Cjapital comes dripping from head to foot from every pore with blood and dirt.66

The early and dramatic growth of modern western capitalism was solidly built on the wealth generated by this extensive, regularly violent seizing by Europeans of the resources and labor of non-European peoples across the globe. The leading oppressors in this original capital accumulation and human destruction were aggressively masculinist European men— especially capitalistic entrepreneurs, top religious leaders, and top mili­ tary and other nation-state officials—who headed up extremely profitable, world-changing societal developments. Over centuries, in this capitalistic and imperialistic process, these men came to dominate a world social order.

Consider too the centrality of this so-called primitive accumulation to capitalism, to the present day. Profit from exploiting urban workers in the West is not enough. Scholars such as Silvia Federici have underscored the point that extraordinary levels of exploitative accumulation beyond western borders have always been essential. For centuries a universalizing capitalism "has been able to reproduce itself. .. only because of the web of inequalities that it has built into the body of the world proletariat, and because of its capacity to globalize exploitation."67

32 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

Throughout this book we observe how central organized white male violence, including state violence, has been in the origin and continuing operation of capitalism. As the scholar Maria Mies has concluded from her research, "direct violence was the means by which women, colonies and nature were compelled to serve the 'white man.'"68 In her view the suppos­ edly enlightened modern world was created in this violent western process of subordinating most of humanity and of nature as well.

Genocidal Seizing of Native American Lands

The scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has likewise described European and European American capitalism and colonialism as being "modern" from the beginning: "the expansion of European corporations, backed by gov­ ernment armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources."69 Central to the expansionist oppression of Native Amer­ icans was the increasing power of private companies and government agencies, especially military organizations. Such bureaucratized organiza­ tions accented organizational discipline and written rules to facilitate their "efficient" operation. Large-scale attacks on Native Americans, and soon large-scale enslavement of African Americans, would not have been possi­ ble without them. Ever since, such extensive oppression has required these bureaucratized organizations and their empowered decision-makers.

To take a signally consequential example of United States expansion, in 1846 the slaveholding President James Polk invaded Mexico with a large U.S. army, thereby creating a trumped-up war that led to the United States seizing more than half of Mexico. This U.S. and European colonialism was modem in its use ot well-organized government violence to overcome indigenous resistance to the new European-created societies in the Americas. Certainly, too, from the first century of European invasions, indigenous peoples liv­ ing in strong communities had the cultural and other strength to fight back against oppression. They did so with "defensive and offensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance.... In every instance they have fought for survival as peoples." 0 The intent of the European colonizers was not just to secure indigenous lands and other resources by treachery and violence, but often to destroy their very existence as peoples. European imperialism frequently involved intentional genocide in the name of an asserted European "right" to expand across indigenous peoples' lands.

One of the myths in the U.S.-origins narrative emphasizes that Europe­ ans invaded North American lands that were unoccupied or underutilized. As Francis Jennings has underscored, the reality was the opposite:

Had it been pristine wilderness then, it would possibly be so still today, for neither the technology nor the social organization of Europe in

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 33

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had the capacity to maintain, of its own resources, outpost colonies thousands of miles from home. Incapable of conquering true wilderness, the Europeans were highly competent in the skill of conquering other people, and that is what they did. They did not settle a virgin land. They invaded and displaced a resident population.71

Lntil they were well-established, European invaders depended heavily on the skills, food, and hunting technologies, and developed infrastructures of indigenous societies already present in the Americas.

Whites' often genocidal wars targeting indigenous peoples lasted for cen­ turies, before and after the official creation of the United States in the late 18th century. This savage warfare was led by white men and was central to what white Americans saw as necessary land grabs for their own prosperity: "Owners of large, slave-worked plantations sought to expand their land- holdings while small farm owners who were unable to compete with the planters and were pushed off their land now desperately sought cheap land to support their families."2 Ever since these early conquests, many white analysts have assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that modern American "civi­ lization was created by early Europeans "in a struggle against the savagery or barbarism of the nonwhite races. . . . civilization was able to triumph because the people who bore it were unique from the beginning—a Chosen People or a super race."73 Empirically speaking, however, the most extensive savagery was generated by white European invaders and their descendants.

Ever since the founding century, this much-heralded sense of U.S. exceptionalism—of being a "chosen people" with the God-given right to expand—has insisted that the U.S. government, its military, and private corporations bring "progress" and "civilization" to "uncivilized" peoples across the globe. As early as 1630, on a ship that brought Puritans to the Massachusetts colony, their leader John Winthrop gave a sermon setting forth the view that their colony was destined to be a world model: "The Lord will... make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, 'the Lord make it like that of New England.' For we must con­ sider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us."74 These colonists saw themselves as religiously and culturally distinctive from the "savages" they encountered, and as setting a spiritual example. Ever since, this exceptionalist perspective has played a key role as part of a distinctive nationalistic "American" identity.75

Seizing Labor and Land: The Material Basis of Systemic Racism

The massive amounts of land stolen from indigenous societies created the possibility and reality of much white wealth. Europeans, self-defined as

34 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

white by the late-1600s, racialized the large-scale exploitation and enslave­ ment they aggressively spread across the Americas and other parts of the globe. Long ago, the astute African American social scientist Oliver Cox was perhaps the first U.S. scholar to develop a systematic analysis of the role of white-seized labor in North America and elsewhere in creating the modem world, with its interlocking and codetermining systems of capitalism and racism:

Seizing the labor of non-Europeans in North America and elsewhere is actually the beginning of modern racial relations. It was not an abstract, natural, immemorial feeling of mutual antipathy between groups, but rather a practical exploitative relationship with its socio- attitudinal facilitation As it developed, and took definite capitalist form, we could follow the white man around the world and see him repeat the process among practically every people of color.76

Without a doubt, systemic racism in the modern world began not with an ingrained white racial prejudice but with the extensive exploitation for profit of the world's peoples of color.

During centuries of subordination of Native Americans and associated land theft, together with centuries of enslavement of Africans and their descendants—and later oppression of other people of color such as Chinese and Mexican Americans—whites created and maintained not only mod­ ern capitalism but also the extensively racialized oppression that was also foundational and systemic. Generally speaking, we use the term systemic racism to refer to these well-institutionalized patterns of subordinate and dominant social positions and roles, respectively, for people of color and whites in a white-dominated hierarchical society. Specifically, this systemic racism has included: (1) the many exploitative and discriminatory practices of whites targeting various people of color; (2) the significant resources, privileges, and power unjustly gained by whites and enshrined in a d om­ inant racial hierarchy; (3) the maintenance of major racial inequalities by long-standing social reproduction mechanisms; and (4) the many racial prejudices, stereotypes, images, ideologies, emotions, interpretations, and narratives that constitute the dominant white racial frame (white world- view) that rationalizes and implements everyday racial oppression."

In addition, it is useful in thinking about what "systemic" means in the cases of systemic racism, sexism, and classism to consider the difference between single-factor and systemic causes.78 For example, systemic racism has generated unjust enrichment for early and later generations of white Americans and unjust impoverishment for the early and later generations of black Americans through a web of different and interacting systemic causes. Immediate single-factor causality for a racist action is usually easier

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 35

to see, such as in the beating by a white slaveholder of an enslaved black worker or a white employer discriminating against a black person today. However, the causal impact of such immediate individual subordination on racial inequality is only one part of the systemic causation that has shaped centuries of well-institutionalized racism. This systemic causation is harder to see if one operates mainly out of the standard U.S. framing that accents more individual and limited causality. That is, in the case of black Ameri­ cans systemic causation has operated by means of multiple specific causes accumulating, interacting, and creating joint impacts to shape their lives across many generations. Indeed, once a group such as black Americans was thoroughly exploited and subordinated by whites in early generations, this over time created major feedback loops—that is, most blacks secured little or no socioeconomic resources to buttress their resisting oppression or to pass along to assist the social mobility of their descendants. Additionally, extensive white discrimination targeting those later generations created yet more systemic racial inequality.

Rationalizing Capitalistic Oppression: White Racial Framing

Over the centuries, the peoples invaded and exploited by early European and European American colonizers have been mostly non-European. From the very beginning of this European colonization an aggressive ethnocen­ tric and predatory ethic was central to the thinking and motivation for the actions of the early male European entrepreneurs and other leaders of overseas imperialism. Their central value system was much more than the ascetic Protestant Ethic accented by theorists like Max Weber, for it entailed the view that people (men) of European descent had a God-ordained right to conquer new worlds, kill or "civilize" the "savage" (un-Christian) inhab­ itants, and seize lands and laborers in the interest and name of superior European religion and culture. Thus, not only economic greed but also extreme Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism (soon to be white racism) appear as major motivations behind the European land and labor expropriation and exploitation—actions often euphemized by many white analysts, then and now, as "overseas exploration" or "settlement of unoccupied lands."

This greedy and bloody theft of lands and labor was soon rationalized beyond ethnocentrism in an expanding white racial framing of the supe­ riority of "whites" and the inferiority of the exploited others—early on, labeled "blacks" and "reds." For example, in 1836 a powerful U.S. senator from Virginia, Benjamin Leigh, boasted of supposed racial white superior­ ity: "It is peculiar to the character of this Anglo-Saxon race of men to which we belong, that it has never been contented to live in the same country with any other distinct race, upon terms of equality; it has, invariably ... proceeded to exterminate or enslave the other race in some form or other,

36 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

or, failing that, to abandon the country."79 Such dominant and predatory destructiveness by whites was in his mind a positive feature of the white "race" and of white manhood, a reality illustrating the constantly interlock­ ing and coreproducing character of systemic classism, racism, and sexism.

Each of these "other races" faced a rationalizing white-racist framing from Europeans and European Americans. The European colonizers had brought earlier hierarchical notions privileging European peoples and cul­ tures over other peoples and cultures. They extended the understandings from this hierarchical great-chain model to prescribe the racial hierarchy in which they were dominant over indigenous peoples and African Amer­ icans. In North America much white racial framing, of elite and ordinary- whites, has for centuries been shaped by key framing elements that emerged in early imperialist wars against indigenous peoples and in the development of the extensive European enslavement system, the latter lasting for about 246 years. Thus, the conceptions of who is virtuous and "white," who is not virtuous, what the characteristics of whites and nonwhites are, and what "race" means, are all rooted in centuries of Native American and African American oppression. Those exploited, enslaved, and killed were viewed as biologically and culturally inferior. In contrast, the invading people of Euro­ pean ancestry were viewed as racially virtuous and superior—and regularly viewed as "white" by the late 1600s. As W. E. B. Du Bois noted, this "discovery of personal whiteness among the worlds people is a very modern thing The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. ... We have changed all that, and the [white] world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful."80

Indeed, since the 17th century, elite self-defined "whites" and their aco­ lytes have adopted and helped to institutionalize certain color labels (e.g., "white," "black," "red," "yellow," "brown") for the racial identities they have imposed on these human beings. Obviously, people are usually not these colors; "race" colors are not empirical observations but part of an imposed metaphorical system.81 The historical metaphor themes attaching good and light/white versus bad and black/dark in European minds made it easier to associate "black" people with negative notions and "white" people with positive notions. Such metaphors intentionally direct the mind away from the empirical realities. As the scholar Andrew Goatly puts it, "Those who defend the existing classifications of society, for example race/colour, in which they are the most powerful group use the language of nature to justify this classification. This is an exceedingly important motive for the adoption ot power-aggression theories of nature since the celebration of the winners in a competitive struggle is useful to those in power."82

The white male founders of the United States were very aware of the oppressiveness of the slavery system that their coterie controlled. Indeed, as they rebelled against the British, they insisted that they as white men would

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 37

not give up their freedom and be, as they said, "enslaved" by the British. For instance, in 1774 George Washington, one of the largest slaveholders and chair of the later U.S. constitutional convention, described the crisis over white colonists rights thus: "The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway."8' Another major constitutional convention delegate and Pennsylvania slaveholder, John Dickinson, argued too that: "Ihose who are taxed without their own consent... are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves or our representatives. We are therefore—slaves"** Many white men made similar comments, includ­ ing references to British authorities tying to strip them of "their manhood."

Additionally, a strong and distinctive white sense of individualism—one still significantly different from that in most European countries—has deep roots in the centuries of slavery during which whites could, or must, posi­ tion themselves as individuals who were not enslaved and thus were dis­ tinctively "free." This long slavery era, as Greg Grandin has noted, included the emphasizing in the United States of a long-lasting "illusion of individual autonomy among ordinary whites. The prosperity directly and indirectly generated by the huge slavery system "generalized these ideals of self-creation, allowing more and more [white] people, mostly men, to imagine them­ selves as autonomous and integral beings, with inherent rights and self-in­ terests not subject to the jurisdiction of others." This individualistic process involved a white racial framing because of a white mans "emotional need to measure [his] absolute freedom in inverse relation to another's absolute slavishness"iS

"Manifest Destiny": More Racist and Masculinity Framing

The racialized predatory ethic was given a boost in an enhanced white- rationalizing frame called "manifest destiny" in the late 19th and early 20th century, a framing that reasserted the white right to expand across others' lands to increase their prosperity. This capitalistic expansion again included the destruction or reduction of Native American societies and exten­ sive theft of their lands in what became the western United States. It also included greatly increased overseas expansion of U.S. corporations.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the famous President Theo­ dore Roosevelt operated from an aggressive manifest destiny view of the United States. The often violent subordination of indigenous Americans was, he bluntly argued, "as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable. Such conquests are sure to come when a masterful people [whites] . . . finds itself face to face with the weaker and wholly alien race which holds a cov­ eted prize in its feeble grasp."86 Like most whites for centuries, he framed

38 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

indigenous peoples as alien and racially inferior to superior and deserv­ edly dominant whites. Soon, given the strong sense of territorial destiny and the needs of U.S. capitalism, this imperialism was globalized in the seizure of overseas territories of yet more people of color in such places as Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines—areas taken into the U.S. empire after the 1898 Spanish-American War. Ever since, the elite-dominated U.S. government (see Chapters 3 and 4) has engaged in much international imperialism, usually at least in part on behalf of U.S. capitalists' interests. These actions have also been regularly intertwined with this country's dominant white-racist framing of its manifest destiny to expand and dominate across the globe. As one historian has underscored, today the "sun never sets on American territory, properties owned by the U.S. gov­ ernment and its citizens, American armed forces abroad, or countries that conduct their affairs within limits largely defined by American power."87

Clearly, too, this global imperialistic enterprise was not only capitalis­ tic and systemically racist, but heavily gendered. The accent on virile white manhood was again conspicuous. Hyper-masculine white men, principally from upper-income strata, were asserted to be necessary leaders in these imperialistic efforts. As scholar Mrinalini Sinha has underscored, those men opposed to this U.S. imperialism were described as effeminate. This sense of national white manhood was shaped by, and shaping of, members of the power elite. Theodore Roosevelt illustrated this process: "His rein­ vention of himself from a somewhat 'effete' and 'weakling' New Yorker into a symbol of US imperial masculinity was capped by his exploits as a 'Rough Rider during the Spanish-American and Philippines-American wars."88

Roosevelt s ideology of "strenuous life" hyper-masculinity was tightly linked to his view of superior Anglo-Saxon Protestant virtue, which had long been part of dominant racial framing. Indeed, Roosevelt was fond of the sport ot U.S. lootball, at the time a very violent sport with no helmets or padding and numerous men being killed in play. Roosevelt called football leaders to the White House to help improve its rules and used football metaphors, without critical reflection, to accent the importance of assertive white mas­ culinity: "In short, in life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard: don't foul and don't shirk, but hit the line hard."89 The great expansion ot college fans of this violent sport around the turn of the 20th century demonstrated and reinforced aggressive white masculinity, much of which has persisted in many areas to the present day.

Moreover, as with most other white men, Roosevelt's manhood framing accented a global militaristic stance, one lasting to the present day. As pres­ ident, he was given to aggressive masculinist gestures such as sending the United States "Great White Fleet" to overseas ports to show U.S. prowess and international influence. He and other top elite men, viewing themselves as necessary global leaders, made great use of technically advanced and

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 39

bureaucratically organized violence not only in colonial wars, but eventu­ ally in major European wars.90

Aggressive white masculinity has been connected to U.S. militarism and imperialistic wars for centuries. We saw it in connection with early military attacks on Native Americans by white leaders such as Andrew Jackson. To take another example, the white southern writer W. J. Cash underscored the hyper-masculinity of millions of ordinary white men who fought as Con­ federate soldiers during the Civil War. He describes the strong masculinist ethic they shared with leading slaveholders: "the individualism of the plan­ tation world ... like that of the backcountry before it, would be far too much concerned with bald, immediate, unsupported assertion of the ego ... one, in brief, of which the essence was the [male] boast, voiced or not.. . that he would knock the hell out of whoever dared to cross him." A few pages later, he notes that the reason millions of ordinary white southerners would charge up hill after hill into heavy gunfire during the Civil War was their hyper-masculinist conviction "that nothing living could cross [them] and get away with it."91

Over the last two centuries, the heavy accent on a national white man­ hood has helped to generate among most ordinary white men strong sup­ port for white leaders' capitalistic expansionism at home and abroad. They could buttress their own sense of white manliness by reveling in the domina­ tion of people of color overseas in imperialistic government and corporate interventions, as well as over women in their social class at home. Addition­ ally, economic and political trends within the United States in the first half of the 20th century buttressed this linkage of elite interests to the interests and perspectives of ordinary white men. Central to this was the country's continuing and advanced industrialization, which continued to link dom­ inant manliness to dominant whiteness. Working-class and middle-class white men, as Thomas Winter has underscored, framed white women and men and women of color as mostly not having the essential and virtuous white masculine characteristics, including true rationality and intelligence, necessary for significant success in an advanced economy. Clearly, the cap­ italistic system has been constantly intertwined with both systemic sexism and systemic racism.92

Moreover, as we discuss later, these close connections between systemic classism, systemic sexism, and systemic racism have persisted over ensuing decades. For example, from the 1930s Depression era, through the World War II period, and in the postwar era up to the 1960s, top government officials developed many support (public welfare) programs, such as those creating jobs, providing business and housing loans, and setting up veter­ ans' educational programs. Repeatedly, it was whites, especially white male "heads" of households, who were the principal, sometimes only, beneficia­ ries of these extensive and substantial government assistance programs.

40 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

These social welfare programs helped greatly to put a majority of white male breadwinners" (and their families) into the middle class. Those citi­ zens who were not white and male were often excluded or marginalized in terms of direct assistance from these extraordinarily important government programs.

Other Lasting Impacts of Racial Slavery

In many ways, the white-controlled, slavery-centered world of Europe and North America gave birth to, or shaped substantially, much of what most people think of as the "modern world." It is hard to exaggerate the deep, last­ ing, and long-term impacts of this extensive racialized slavery system, which lasted several centuries during and after the founding eras of European colonial societies in the Americas and Caribbean. Let us consider briefly a few more examples of the ways in which centuries of slavery-centered capitalism not only had an enduring U.S. impact but created a lasting tem­ plate tor later economic development, including much labor exploitation, by the capitalistic elite and its minions.

Consider, for instance, the early and central consumerism template. In North America, enslaved African workers generated many commodities, such as sugar and cotton, that became essential in the 18th and 19th centuries to Europes and North Americas growing economic prosperity, especially the expanding consumption of the newer middle and older upper classes. These mostly white consumers, notes Guy Mount, "were at once purchasing an abstract commodity removed from the brutal system that produced it" and thereby "enmeshing themselves in a transatlantic trade network that tied the daily nourishment that they put into their bodies directly to the institution of slavery and the slaves that suffered to produce it." That is, the slavery system 'consumed slaves" to "produce consumer goods."93

In effect, without millions of those black workers and other workers of color, there probably would be no modern western world. In the massive slavery system not only white wealth, but also significant consumption opportunities and expanded leisure time, were systematically created—first for the white upper class and then, over time, for a growing and mostly white middle class. Indeed, contemporary western consumerism is still grounded in the very disproportionate exploitation of workers of color, this time in a globalized economy. One cannot understand consumer capitalism well without understanding these critical and systemic realities of U.S. and other western history.

A Distinctive Accent on Private Property

Another major example of the great long-term impact of slavery-centered capitalism is the U.S. legal system, with its very distinctive conception of

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 41

private property. The systemic oppression of slavery, and its successor Jim Crow, included the creation and perpetuation of a dominant white perspec­ tive on who was legally a person and full citizen, on who or what could be considered personal and collective property, on who did what sort of labor, and on how the country should expand territorially. Thus, viewed by wealthy and better-off whites as their "property," enslaved workers were valuable as embodied capital. They were profit-generating on slave plantations and in other workplaces not only as enslaved workers and by producing more enslaved workers, but also as 'commodities" in regional and national cap­ ital markets used as human "collateral" that a slaveowner could regularly borrow against."' This human labor and commodity system, developed by white male slaveholders, permanently shaped many aspects of the U.S. legal system, including its still distinctive property laws, to the present day. The Supreme Courts white supremacist Dred Scott decision (1857)—decreed by an all-white-male slaveholding majority-insisted that African Americans had "no rights which the white man is bound to respect." Additionally, in a less often discussed provision, that ruling decreed that no act of Congress depriving a white citizen of his enslaved human property "could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law."95 Quite clearly, these elite white men framed the world not only in class terms but also in white rac­ ist terms. In addition, this racialized ruling on enslaved human "property" (the black man Dred Scott) set in place, to the present day, a highly priv­ ileged legal status for private property that does not exist in many other countries. Over time, this extreme property-rights template has greatly affected workers of all racial backgrounds, by assisting in making capitalist property-holders and their corporations much more powerful, and workers and their organizations weaker, than in other western countries.96

To the present day, the extreme legal protection of corporate and other "private" property has blocked important changes in the U.S. system of racial oppression. For example, many whites have argued that desegregation and other redress for brutal Jim Crow segregation sought by black Americans in the 1960s and afterward has conflicted with the private "property rights" of white employers, landlords, and other discriminators. Given this accent on the sacredness of private property (often, no matter how gained), it is unsurprising that in our contemporary era the white conservative political- economic resurgence has brought much "renewed popular white support for private property rights over human rights."97 This intensified accent on personal property rights is often just a diversion from the actual white con­ cern over control of people of color in U.S. society.

Persisting Labor Management Techniques

In addition, U.S. slaveholders and other allied management experts greatly shaped what became capitalistic management practices for labor control

42 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

after slavery's demise. Again systemic racism and capitalistic classism are closely intertwined. The scholar Karen Brodkin has underscored how the enslavement of African American workers became a centuries-long "tem­ plate for an enduring organization of capitalism in which race was the basis for the organization of work."98 The slavery-centered system of intensive worker exploitation over two-plus centuries was followed by nearly a c en­ tury of the near-slavery of intensive Jim Crow labor exploitation, with much of that modeled on elements of the slavery system. In fact, in the early 20th century the white "father" of scientific management, Frederick Taylor, per­ ceived well the business profitability of encouraging racialized competition between workers in the supposedly scientific management practices he sug­ gested for top corporate executives and their managers. This management perspective was heavily influenced by the inherited racial framing of blacks, whites, and others as bad or good workers that was generated during the slav­ ery and Jim Crow eras. White company managers and owners intentionally communicated this racist framing to millions of new European immigrant workers coming into the United States in the first half of the 20th century, so that these white immigrants would view black workers as racially inferior— again dividing workers racially for easier capitalistic control."

The long era ot extreme labor exploitation under slavery and Jim Crow generated a lasting management template from which contemporary white (and some other) employers and their managers have continued to inter­ pret, manage, and exploit the labor of many workers of color, and thereby often to pit them against usually more privileged white workers. This is yet another example of the historical and contemporary interconnectedness of systemic racism and class-riven capitalism.

7he Capitalistic Class Frame

These last sections on the extraordinary accent on private property and on aggressive worker management signal how strong the capitalistic class fram­ ing ot U.S. society has been. Much of what has been written by analysts on the capitalists frame of mind has discussed their view of the rational pur­ suit of profit and reinvestment, and other "Protestant Ethic" orientations.1

In our view new social science analysis needs to focus on the broader class framing of the capitalist class. From the beginning, western capitalists have had a hierarchical view of society in line with the old great-chain-of-being framing. And some good historical research has examined key aspects ot the capitalist class frames negative view of workers. In the late 19th cen­ tury leading capitalists developed a Social Darwinist perspective, one view­ ing most workers, especially those poor and nonwhite, as morally weak, lazy, and inferior. From this Social Darwinist perspective, there must not be union or government efforts—e.g., regulating work conditions or public

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System • 43

education—to improve the lives of these socially inferior workers and their families. At that time, and often today, leading white male free-marketeers have "placed their faith in economic salvation." For them it is "as unnatural to fetter the rich as it was hopeless to uplift the poor."101

Clearly, since at least the late 19th century, this capitalistic class frame has encompassed a central pro-capitalist subframe (positive view of cap­ italists as virtuous and superior) and an anti-worker frame (critical view of workers as lower status and justifiably managed). Today, the capitalist superiority subframe is the center of the still-dominant class frame, which does vary somewhat across the society. Both subframes contain an array ot class stereotypes, images, interpretations, and narratives. Unsurprisingly, too, workers ot all backgrounds, and their families, are aggressively social­ ized to accept much ot this class framing and their subordinate class posi­ tion under contemporary capitalism, the latter being said to allow them the treedom to choose the work they do and to be consumers in a "free market" system superior to other economic systems. Note too that racial, gender, and occupational divisions within the U.S. workforce also help to reinforce the capitalist class system and its dominant framing by making workers' organized resistance less likely.

Conclusion

In this introductory chapter we have laid out, with important examples, much of our theoretical perspective on the centrality of elite white men in building and maintaining what is for a great many people a very oppressive contemporary world. During the early centuries of European imperialistic expansion and usually violent colonization these powerful social actors cre­ ated an overarching system of elite-white-male dominance with its major interlocking and coreproducing subsystems of oppression—systemic sex­ ism, systemic classism, and systemic racism.

Over subsequent centuries, to the present day, more generations of these elite men have further developed and mostly maintained their dominance in these and other subsystems of the overarching elite-white-male dominance system. We have examined here some of their actions and orientations, mostly prior to the 1970s in the United States. In the chapters to come we will examine many more examples of the power and impact of elite-white- male actions and orientations, as they have continued to maintain this elite-white-male dominance system in the United States and globally.

We have only touched briefly in this chapter on certain large-scale national and international impacts of this elite-white-male dominance system. We will enumerate these more fully in subsequent chapters. Ear­ lier historical developments do greatly impact the present. For exam­ ple, one central and lasting impact is that, over the black-enslavement

44 • The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

centuries, thousands of small and large capitalistic enterprises—including slave plantations and associated merchant, banking, and law firms—generated much of this country's white economic prosperity and wealth. That par­ ticular oppression era was followed by a huge and unjust generation of more white prosperity and wealth over nearly a century of legal segrega­ tion. Over many generations, including the few since the end of Jim Crow in 1969, these socioeconomic resources have often been passed along in families, thereby generating unjust enrichment and prosperity for many tens of millions of white Americans, to the present. This massive exploita­ tion over three and a half centuries of slavery and Jim Crow simultane­ ously created large-scale unjust impoverishment that has greatly impacted many generations of African Americans, as well as some other Amer­ icans of color. Though usually hidden from view, this white-generated process of unjust impoverishment for generations of Americans of color is directly linked to the unjust enrichment of generations of white Americans, now well into the 21st century.

One central aspect of the triple helix of interrelated and codetermining racial, class, and gender oppressions is that they operate routinely and often in the background. Reflecting on systemic sexism and its heterosexist mas­ culinity, anthropologist R. W. Connell underscores how such normalized oppression works over time:

Given that heterosexual men socially selected for hegemonic mascu­ linity run the corporations and the state, the routine maintenance of these institutions will normally do the job. . . . What is brought to attention is national security, or corporate profit, or family values, or true religion, or individual freedom, or international competitiveness, or economic efficiency, or the advance of science. Through the every­ day working of institutions defended in such terms, the dominance of a particular kind of masculinity is achieved.102

This normalized and often concealed operation is also characteristic of systemic racism and classism. An aggressively overt and direct defense of systemic racism, classism, and sexism is often not required because mostly elite white men and their immediate acolytes control the majority of major private and government institutions. As we see throughout this book, these societal realities of national security, corporate profit, family values, reli­ gion, individual freedom, competitiveness and efficiency, and advance of science affect all Americans, but they are still mostly elite-white-male gen­ erated, shaped, and/or controlled through the normal and routine opera­ tions of major U.S. institutions.

2 Elite White Male Dominance

A Contemporary Overview

Contemporary Misremembering: "The Father of Our Country"

Together with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, George Washing­ ton is today consistently ranked as one of the greatest U.S. presidents. His huge monument is the most recognizable in Washington, D.C. He peers down at visitors from the massive stone wall of Mount Rushmore. Cur­ rently, many more educational institutions, streets, and municipalities bear his name than that of any other American.1

^et, it is revealing of how the elite-white-male dominance system works that few contemporary Americans actually know much about this extraor­ dinarily important elite white male American. Encouraging ignorance and misrepresentation is usually essential to the maintenance of oppressive sys­ tems. Nearly half of the students at 55 renowned universities failed to rec­ ognize Washington as being the founder called "first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen."2 James Rees, who raised millions for campaigns to bring Washington back into national consciousness, has expressed astonishment over how many people view him as old or boring. To offer the million-plus annual visitors a heightened appreciation of the conventionally portrayed Washington, his Virginia slave plantation (Mount Vernon) was recently reconstructed at huge expense.3

What is more disturbing is that most Americans are less aware of the actual Washington, perhaps the most powerful white man of his day sub­ stantially because of the hundreds of enslaved black workers and extensive Native American lands that he "owned." Few whites today appear willing to fully acknowledge that many men like Washington who are referred to as "founding fathers" lived far from honorable and ethical lives by the best standards of their own day. Today, especially among white Americans, there is a lack of a critical sense of the savage attacks on indigenous towns and savage slaveholding engaged in by famous white founders, their associates, and their descendants. Thus, at one juncture in the 1780s George and his wife Martha held more than 200 African Americans in enslaved bondage. The annals of his Mount Vernon plantation complex reveal that he generally