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CHAPTER FOUR

Ways of Seeing Power and Privilege

When Halley was in divinity school, she took a class from a scholar of Native American religions, who was herself Native American. Halley’s professor started her lecture on the first day by noting that while there are many Native American Indian groups in the United States, the “Wannabe Indians” are the biggest tribe.1 Jokingly, Halley’s professor was referring to the many ways white Americans have adopted and appropriated pieces of Native American culture. The “Want-to-be Indians” often take the pieces out of context with little understanding of the history and society from which they came. For example, one can visit most New Age religious businesses and find that, while the business caters largely to a white clientele, the products being sold include numerous artifacts understood by the business to be Native American. Some of the white customers go so far as to identify with being Native American, or at least their understanding of what it means to be Native American, taking new names and practicing what they believe to be a Native American religion. Often a piece of the identification romanticizes the “noble savage” as a person who is both in sync with nature and at odds with the modern world. Not only is the decontextualized appropriation of colonized Native American cultures

problematic, this romanticizing dehumanizes indigenous people in that it replicates a dualistic framework common in western thought (as discussed in chapter 3). In this thinking Native Americans are less human, more animalistic, and earthier than other human beings. Further, this romanticization of Native Americans is problematic because of the slippery nature of race in this thinking. Can white Americans simply be Native American when it suits them? Can someone from outside of a culture and a race simply make a choice to switch into that racial group? The Irish immigrants discussed in chapter 3 became white. Like them, can white people become another race, too? In chapter 3 we established that race is socially constructed. Where do we go from there?

How do we understand race, given social construction? In this chapter, we explore different ways of identifying with and understanding one’s own and other people’s races. We explore three ways social movements have understood and framed race: identity politics, intersectionality, and cultural materialism. We conclude with cultural materialism (introduced in chapter 1) because we believe it to be the most valuable given its potential for empowering people and bringing about a more just society. Race is socially, not biologically, constructed, and thus fluid. In other words, we are not

genetically raced but socially raced. This fluidity does not mean that anyone can switch races, like changing jobs or getting a new hairstyle. Race is not a matter of pure individual choice and whim. That race is socially constructed means that racial groups are themselves embedded in a particular (albeit changing) culture and history. It is the shared culture and history that makes one a member (or not) of a racial group.

Halley, Jean, et al. Seeing White : An Introduction to White Privilege and Race, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucr/detail.action?docID=718698. Created from ucr on 2021-04-23 17:56:29.

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One piece of this shared history involves the material resources available to a particular group. Over the past five centuries, as white people colonized more and more of the North American continent, Native American groups were pushed off the land where they lived onto smaller and smaller areas called reservations. Reservations were made up of less desirable land, land on which it was harder for Native people (or anyone) to survive. Due to this history, Native American communities remain among the poorest in the United States and have some of the highest rates of unemployment. Native American unemployment springs largely from the reality that reservations are often in remote places where there are very few job opportunities. About Native American poverty, journalist Tom Rodgers notes, “According to the U.S.

Census Bureau, these Americans earn a median annual income of $33,627. One in every four (25.3 percent) lives in poverty and nearly a third (29.9 percent) are without health insurance coverage.” Rodgers writes, “Native American communities have fewer full-time employed individuals than any other high-poverty community. Only 36 percent of males in high-poverty Native American communities have full-time, year-round employment. . . . On the Blackfoot Reservation in Montana, for example, the annual unemployment rate is 69 percent.”2 The Blackfoot today continue to suffer an unemployment rate almost three times that of national unemployment during the Great Depression. The Blackfoot are a Native American people with a shared history of facing profound racism

and oppression, including being forced to survive with extremely limited work, land, money, and other material resources. Without the culture, the history, the community, the religion, and the experiences that the Blackfoot share, as middle-class white people, it would be ridiculous, for example, for Halley or Eshleman to assume that they could simply decide to be Blackfoot. Race is not simply biological, psychological, or merely a matter of individual choice. As

discussed in chapter 3, race is socially constructed. However, social construction does not mean that individuals can simply choose a racial identity. Instead, racial and other identities are shaped—in large part outside of the choices or even consciousness of individuals—in the context of societies, cultures, and history. Nonetheless, even using the framework of social construction, the lines around any group are usually not exact, or perfectly clear. Even the U.S. Census Bureau has struggled to answer the question of what makes someone

one race or another. (Please do see box 4.1 at the end of the chapter for further discussion about the Census.) A newspaper journalist, Gregory Rodriguez, notes that defining race, what it means to “be” or “have” a race, to be (or not to be) Black, Latina/o, Asian, or white has always presented a problem for the U.S. Census Bureau. Throughout its history, starting in 1790, the Census has categorized people in racial groups. This of course leads to the question: Why did the Census focus on racial groups rather than simply counting human beings? In large part, the Census categorized people by race because some races counted more than

others. Free people, who were also white, counted as full people. Enslaved African Americans each counted as three-fifths. This was a compromise for white elites in the southern and northern United States. The South wanted a greater population in order to gain greater representation in government. The North suggested not counting enslaved people at all. In the U.S. Constitution, one finds the following:

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Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.3

An enslaved Black American counted as only three-fifths of a person, while indentured as well as free white people counted as full people. (People who were indentured owed a certain number of years of work to someone in exchange for something, such as the fare to come to the United States from another country. This was one way that the Irish managed to immigrate to the United States from Ireland.) The only people who counted as less than full people were people of color, such as enslaved African Americans and Native Americans. In other words, the Census “reflected and upheld the racial hierarchy that existed in society.”4 Over time, when new groups immigrated to the United States, Rodriguez notes that they were

“obliged to fit themselves into this black/white racial scheme. Not surprisingly, most chose to identify themselves with the group that had full rights.” Many immigrant groups went from being a more distinct ethnic group—French or Italian or German—to being white because whiteness was normative. Being white meant having more power in the new society. As discussed in chapter 3, the Irish were among many other immigrant groups that became white after immigrating to the United States. One common way white people define whiteness is that it is “normal.” White people often

think of themselves as “just human” and raceless. Michael Kimmel describes his own recognition of this at a seminar he attended in the early 1980s. At the seminar, a Black woman asked a white woman, “When you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, what do you see?” The white woman responded, “I see a woman.” “‘That’s precisely the problem,’ responded the black woman. ‘I see a black woman. To me, race is visible every day, because race is how I am not privileged in our culture. Race is invisible to you, because it’s how you are privileged. It’s why there will always be differences in our experience.’” At this point, Kimmel explained about himself prior to this seminar, “When I look in the mirror, I see a human being. I’m universally generalizable. As a middle-class white man, I have no class, no race, no gender. I’m the generic person!” Regarding this seminal moment, Kimmel continued, Since then, I’ve begun to understand that race, class, and gender didn’t refer only to other people, who were marginalized by race, class, or gender privilege. Those terms also described me. I enjoyed the privilege of invisibility. . . . What makes us marginal or powerless are the processes we see. Invisibility is a privilege in another sense—as a luxury. Only white people in our society have the luxury not to think about race every minute of their lives.5

Identity Politics During the U.S. 2008 presidential campaign, feminist and founder of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem, wrote an article for the New York Times called “Women Are Never Front-Runners.” In this controversial piece, Steinem argued that women experience more oppression than any other group. She wrote, Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House. This country is way down the list of countries electing women and, according to one study, it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy. . . . Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).6

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Steinem sparked extensive debate. Is it harder to be a woman than a person of color, or vice versa? Is it worse to be a white woman like then-Senator Hillary Clinton, or a Black man like then-Senator Barack Obama? And what about women of color, do they experience the most oppression of all? Steinem was engaged in identity politics—focusing on one’s identity and validating one’s

sense of belonging to a particular group with a particular history. One of the problems with identity politics is that they can have this kind of fracturing effect. In a time, when all women and all people of color experience profoundly harmful forms of prejudice like sexism and racism, should we focus on worrying about who has it worse? Identity politics can also lose track of the complicated nature of human identity, as in the above example where Steinem writes about “women” without race and Black people as men. We are left to wonder, what happened to women of color in her analysis? Identity politics are problematic, but not only problematic. Recognizing one’s identity and

validating one’s sense of belonging to a particular group with a particular history are deeply important for those who come from marginalized communities. Through the recognition of one’s racial identity, one might understand oneself as part of a larger social system. Thus we appreciate the ways one’s group’s experiences have been shaped by social systems of power. Depending on who one is, we begin to understand how an individual might benefit from a group status or be harmed by it. (Note that focusing on one’s identity is very different from choosing an identity, as in the case of white people deciding to be Native American.) Here it is significant to note that identity politics focus on the ways one’s ingroup has been

disadvantaged and on revaluing the group as surviving, and as a group with a rich and valuable culture to offer, in spite of oppression. Yet, while not identity politics, challenging and dismantling racism also requires that white people, like Kimmel above, recognize their whiteness and the privilege they gain through it. Indeed, this is the focus of our book. In terms of gender, for example, one might argue that identity politics help women identify

with other women as a group with particular shared concerns. One such shared concern involves the high rates of gendered violence women face in the United States. A housewife in the 1950s whose husband verbally abused her through accusations of unfaithfulness and worthlessness, who found herself nervously looking over her shoulder when shopping because he might have taken off another afternoon from work to follow her, would have been likely to consider her struggle to be personal and to find herself averting her eyes when a neighbor’s black eye was visible from beneath the sunglasses she wore inside the grocery store. With the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, women have increasingly recognized that gendered violence is part of our social system and not simply a problem faced by some private individuals. Kimberle Crenshaw writes, “Battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and

aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class.”7 Crenshaw argues, “This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of African Americans, other people of color, and gays

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and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development.”8 Identity politics can be an important way to bring people in a marginalized group together.

Yet identity politics alone are not enough. After coming together around an identity, we argue for the importance of the marginalized group challenging our society and the ways it advantages, in the case of women, men in general over women. When women organize around their identity and come together as a group, they gain the shared power of their numbers. This second step involves recognition of imbalanced social power and the group in question working together to challenge that imbalance. It also involves a critical analysis of social power. Without an analysis of social power, identity politics alone offer a limited, and at times, even

problematic response. If a group, like early Irish immigrants to the United States, is impoverished, it is crucial that we understand that poverty as born from a larger social context and history. Understanding these immigrants as poor simply because of who they are (understanding the Irish as poor because of something about being Irish) means blaming the victim for their own victimization. Nineteenth-century Irish immigrants were poor because of the social context—including the English colonization of Ireland—from which they came.

A Note about Multiculturalism and the Celebration of Diversity As in chapters 3 and 6, when we discuss multiculturalism, we mean a way of thinking about race that examines differences between groups with the aim to understand and celebrate these differences—to celebrate diversity. Multiculturalism shares much with the identity politics perspective. Like identity politics, multiculturalism tends to focus on the differences between diverse identities. Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins call this a difference framework. They write, “The language of difference encourages comparative thinking. People think comparatively when they learn about experiences other than their own and begin comparing and contrasting the experiences of different groups.”9 The identity politics/multiculturalism/difference framework can be a good place to start when one begins learning about social phenomena like race, class, and gender. This framework can bring about greater tolerance. Yet, ultimately tolerance is a weak goal. The difference (or diversity or multiculturalism)

framework is deeply limited. As Leslie McCall writes, “The multicultural and identity-politics perspective tends to maintain group boundaries uncritically in order to revalue them.”10 There is nothing inherently wrong with celebrating diverse identities through learning about the cultural traditions of different groups. The problem with the difference or multiculturalism framework is that it often neglects to analyze social power through thinking about the social and historical context of each group’s experiences and relationships between and among groups. Multiculturalism tends to focus on decontextualized issues of diversity while material realities such as poverty, access to work and decent education, and freedom from violence remain invisible. In other words, multiculturalism suggests that if only we come to appreciate diversity, race and racism will no longer be a problem, even though the material conditions of peoples’ lives remain unchanged.

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Intersectionality The perspective of intersectionality offers to solve some of the problems with multiculturalism and identity politics. Intersectionality, or what Andersen and Collins call a matrix of domination, focuses on how different aspects of one’s identity interact (or intersect) with each other. While some individuals will have one stigmatized aspect of their identity, others will have multiple stigmatized aspects that intersect with each other, forming a matrix that may be used to dominate, to oppress. Andersen and Collins argue that a focus on multiculturalism simply encourages us to compare different identities by noting differences between individuals’ experiences.11 Comparing differences between one identity and another tends to be unproductive in terms of understanding the roles of social systems in oppression. For example, comparing the experience of being Asian American to the experience of being impoverished will likely fail to recognize how systems of power interact and affect identity across various dimensions of individuals’ identities. Alternatively, a focus on intersectionality —on the matrix of domination—encourages us to think relationally in terms of power and domination. Thinking relationally encourages one to consider how social systems influence interlocking aspects of identity.12 In an exploration of intersecting identities, Black, feminist, lesbian essayist Audre Lorde

offers an example of intersectionality in noting that she faces stigma in ways beyond the struggle against sexism and homophobia that she shares with white feminist scholar, Mary Daly. In “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” Lorde writes, “Within the community of women, racism is a reality force within my life as it is not within yours.”13 Because of her race, the oppression Lorde experiences is more profound in relation to white, lesbian women like Daly who face sexism and homophobia, but not racism. Further, compared to Black men who face racism, Lorde faces racism plus sexism plus homophobia. Even many other Black women, those who are heterosexual and middle or upper class, do not have to face oppression on as many dimensions as does Lorde as a lesbian who grew up in poverty.14 Along with oppression, intersectionality addresses the complexity—and the reality of

diversity—in individuals’ life experiences and in their relationships with others.15 Much like the white woman and the Black woman that Kimmel describes (in the earlier example of what one sees when looking in the mirror), people who experience multiple oppressions are more likely to perceive their identities in complex ways. Those two women overlap in terms of gender, but not in terms of race. Whereas both women face sexism, the Black woman also faces racism. In this recognition of multiplicity in human experience, intersectionality tends to frame

people’s experiences in terms of their social and historical context. In other words, each of us has multiple—diverse—identities in our own particular being. Each of these multiple identities overlaps with some people and is simultaneously different from aspects of others’ identities. Some of our identities carry privilege; others, the weight of oppression. And some of our particular personal identities change over our lifetimes. This might happen, for example, as we grow up from childhood to adulthood to old age, or as we slip from working-class status to poverty in a time of recession. Intersectionality recognizes the complexity of human

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identities. In terms of race, sometimes it is hard to know what racial group someone belongs to; indeed,

often people belong to more than one racial group. Further, as discussed above, along with race, people have multiple other social identities. These include ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, age, and ability. To complicate matters even more, people may decide to live in a racial group other than the one they were assigned at birth, as when Gregory Howard Williams’s father passed as a white man when Williams was a young boy. Sometimes the group people are assigned in childhood is questioned later in life. The story of Halley’s close friend, sociologist Ron Nerio, exemplifies the complicated nature

of race and of identity and of the meanings involved in belonging to a racial group. Nerio’s multiple identities offer a rich example of human intersectionality. Yet Nerio’s story is somewhat unusual, for instead of passing as white, Nerio struggles with the issue of whether he can legitimately claim to be Latino. Nerio grew up a working-class, closeted gay boy in Saginaw, Michigan. He did not know his

biological father who abandoned him and his mother before Nerio was born. At the age of four, Nerio’s mother married the man who would adopt Nerio and raise him as his own son. Nerio writes, “He gave me his surname, and I was not to learn about my former name or the adoption until the entire story came tumbling out in an argument years later.”16 This man, Nerio’s father, was a working-class veteran who believed in traditional, normative

manhood. He believed men should be tough, athletic, unemotional, and ready for anything. When Nerio was still very small, his new father focused on making a “real” man out of Nerio, usually by beating manhood into the little boy with his belt. Nerio’s father worked as a General Motors (GM) assembly line worker at a local factory. He

had little power over anyone, except his growing family, as Nerio’s mother had two more children with him, two girls. His identity was as a working-class man in the United States where nearly everyone, even the poor, identify as middle class.17 Nerio himself, like most of us, grew up with layered identities, some recognized, others not. He was a boy, although he did not feel like the boys around him seemed to feel. Other children noticed this difference, too, and Nerio was often bullied and teased at school for his way of carrying himself and his lack of interest in sports; in other words, his failure to achieve normative manhood. Nerio was also working class. His family did not have much money, but in those days of unionized factory labor, his father made a decent living working at a factory job. And, Nerio was Mexican American. Or so he thought. Nerio knew he was the son of a Mexican American man and a white woman. Nerio’s skin

was like his mother’s, white-white with freckles, and he had red hair. His sisters had brown skin like his father. Yet, as a young boy it did not strike him that these differences were anything but happenstance. He was as Mexican as his sisters, a member of a large, extended Mexican American family. “It never occurred to me that I was not his natural son, despite the fact that my skin was nearly translucent white and his was a deep, reddish brown.”18 Nerio regularly spent time with his father’s extended family, many of whom lived nearby—aunts, uncles, cousins, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother. “My father’s mother’s house, [was]

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just two blocks away from us. . . . Grandma Nerio’s little three-bedroom bungalow was the center of Nerio life. Every holiday involved homemade tamales, hand-rolled tortillas, and chicken mole. There would be copious drinking and ribald laughter.”19 None of the children in Nerio’s family learned to speak Spanish because the parents of that

generation chose not to pass their first language on to their children. This meant that Nerio and his sisters could not speak with his great-grandmother, who lived right next door and spoke only Spanish. Yet, like his sisters, he took full part in other aspects of his family’s cultural heritage on both sides. Although Nerio and his mother were the only white people at his father’s family functions, as he understood it, he belonged fully. Indeed, even the Saginaw school system classified Nerio as Latino. For a period of his schooling, he was bussed out of his neighborhood to a white school as a Mexican American child, the only white face on a bus full of African American and Latina/o children as part of a program aimed at integrating white schools. However, when he was about nine years old, an aunt informed him that he was not Mexican

by birth; he was the biological white child of two white parents before being adopted by his Mexican American father. Nerio writes, “When the story was out, the relatives had good fun pointing out our paleness.” Nerio notes that he was teased and then accepted: “You are a Mexican,” my Aunt Yolanda announced one Christmas, for all to hear, “just like us.” I appreciated the magnanimity in this proclamation. She, the eldest sister in the clan, was letting everyone know that the adopted white child was to be welcomed and treated as one of them. She was also instructing me to be proud of this heritage, to understand who I was. If I had any doubts, if I did not know where I belonged, she was giving me permission to claim the label “Mexican” as my own.20

Now, however, Nerio struggles to define his own racial and ethnic identity. When people ask Nerio about his racial and ethnic background, he usually identifies as white.

This is not because he is ashamed of his Mexican background. Rather, Nerio worries that perhaps, given that both his biological parents are white and he has white skin, he has no right to identify as Latino. He recognizes that because his skin is white, he often benefits from white privilege; he passes, in a sense, as white even though he does not wish to do so. Nerio has a choice, of sorts, to pass by omission as white. His adoptive father does not have this choice. In thinking about relationships among groups, about social context and social power, it is

important to always bear in mind the many dimensions of individuals’ experiences. Humans have multiple dimensions to their identities. Once again, these dimensions include race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and age, and they also have multiple social relationships based on or grounded in those identities. All of these aspects—the intersectionality of human social life and individual experience—matter. Intersectionality refers to the social relationships among and between diverse people and between diverse aspects of our own experiences. In this way, intersectionality addresses the many dimensions of a person and the diverse ways we are formed as individuals.21 About intersectionality, Andersen and Collins write, “Race, class, and gender are intersecting categories of experience that affect all aspects of human life; thus, they simultaneously structure the experiences of all people in this society.”22 Further, Andersen and

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Collins make clear, “At any given moment, race, class, or gender may feel more salient or meaningful in a given person’s life, but they are overlapping and cumulative in their effects.”23 In the case of Ron Nerio, his identity includes being white and Latino, male, gay and working

class. All of these pieces of his identity matter. All of them play a role in his day-to-day experiences and in his life opportunities and options. And all of these pieces of identity link Nerio to his social context and history in diverse ways. Seeing Nerio’s identity and experience in terms of intersectionality makes more sense than merely thinking about him in terms of one aspect—Latino or white or working class or gay. Because intersectionality helps us to understand people as located and shaped by diverse

experiences, relationships, and connections, it helps us to think beyond individual identity and moves us toward seeing everyone as linked to a social and historical context. However, one more step must be taken to better understand race—and social experience. Ultimately, understanding the intersectionality of a person’s identity within the framework of cultural materialism offers the optimal way to understand the phenomenon of race.

Cultural Materialism Cultural materialism (introduced in chapter 1 and discussed in chapter 2) presents a framework for understanding diverse and intersecting identities as born from social structures embedded in social power.24 As with the above example from Kimmel of looking in the mirror, cultural materialists claim that social ideas (including the lack of ideas that white people have about whiteness) always come from the ways a particular group lives and survives in a particular time and place. Kimmel understands himself as simply a person, because he comes from the most privileged group. He is powerfully positioned in society, and his ideas and the ideas of others in his group, white men, spring from this position of power. He sees himself as a “normal” person instead of a white man because his social position allows him to see himself this way. It is a privilege that comes with being white to not see race when one looks in the mirror. As discussed in chapter 1, those in a society with the most power have the most access to the

production of knowledge or ways of thinking. In the early 1800s, white elites in the southern United States reproduced their elite status via an agricultural society built on slavery. From this political and economic system—slavery (and, as discussed in chapter 3, the colonialism that accompanied it)—came ideas about people of African descent. Racism did not bring about an economic system of exploitation based on race; rather, the economic system was the motor behind a way of thinking that we now recognize as racist. Cultural materialism argues that a society’s ways of thinking about a socially constructed

phenomenon like race springs from the society’s economic structures. Thus, when cultural materialists challenge, for example, a racist way of thinking (such as the idea that Black people are less human and more animalistic than white people), they also always work to challenge the economic inequity (an economy built on slave labor), which accompanies that way of thinking. The problem of race, the problem of whiteness, most fundamentally has to do with social

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power. Simply, being white means always having a kind of power; indeed, what critical race theorists call a kind of property in one’s whiteness. Because Halley and Eshleman are white, they gain all kinds of benefits and privileges in our society. These benefits might range from access to greater material resources,25 higher and better educations,26 and healthier environments (with less pollution),27 to being able to shop without worrying that they will be followed around with suspicion in the store, and having others deal with them as individuals rather than representatives of their group.28 These benefits are like owning a piece of property; whites own these benefits. As long ago as 1935, labor historian W. E. B. Du Bois (discussed briefly in chapter 3) identified this.29 These benefits are rarely questioned—they are taken for granted—advantages that simply come like a birthright to those who are white. To clarify what this means, civil rights activist and law professor Derrick Bell explains that

at one point, he believed along with most other civil rights advocates that everyone, people of color and white people in the United States, wanted to end racism. He has slowly realized this is not so. Bell argues that white people gain power and want to protect the power they gain through whiteness. And the law supports and reproduces this power.30 In contrast to basic liberal thought that all are equal in the eyes of the law, Bell explores

critical race theory, arguing that the law is not neutral. (Critical race theory is a form of cultural materialism that focuses on race and the law. As we explore in chapter 6, critical race theory has also been applied to critical reflections on race in education.) Indeed the manifestation of the law in day-to-day life is racial. For example, drug laws bring harsher penalties for drugs more commonly used in African American communities and conversely lighter penalties for drugs commonly used in white communities, even when the drugs themselves are similar. So, the laws for crack cocaine (more common in Black communities than white) have carried mandatory penalties one hundred times harsher than the laws for powder cocaine (more common in white communities than Black). Only since March 17, 2010, have these laws finally been challenged. And even so, a vast disparity remains. The disparity between sentences for powder cocaine versus crack cocaine has been a hundred to one. In other words, “the current decades-old sentencing law sets a 100-to-1 ratio, requiring the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence for the possession of five grams of crack cocaine as it does for the possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine.”31 As of the writing of this book, both houses of Congress have approved the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 that will decrease the sentencing disparity to eighteen to one.32 Reflecting Roediger, Bell writes, “In the United States, where property is a measure of

worth, many whites with relatively little or no property of a traditional kind—money, securities, land—cling to their whiteness as a kind of property. They are reinforced in this by the law, which recognizes and protects this property right based on color the same way it recognizes and protects any other property.”33 In chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 we explore examples of cultural materialism (including critical race

theory perspectives), exposing the ways in which socioeconomic class, education, work, and public policy predict and may shape our society’s thinking about race and whiteness.

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Box 4.1 The Census The defining of racial categories for the purpose of collecting data on race has historically been a controversial and difficult issue. As we describe in this chapter, the introduction of a racial category in the U.S. Census served a racist purpose. Periodically in the United States, particularly during a Census year such as 2010, one hears arguments against the collection of any kind of data on race. Given its extremely problematic history regarding the definition of racial categories, should the census abandon the collecting of racial data altogether and simply count human beings? We strongly argue no. Indeed, this would be counterproductive. Not counting race does not undo the structure of racial privilege and discrimination that has become entrenched in our society. Racial differences do not go away simply because we do not count them. In fact, if we don’t count the differences we have no way of knowing or understanding the extent of the discrimination that exists. Without that understanding, we would lose the ability to address the discrimination. Today, enforcing race neutrality on data would only make the privilege of whiteness even more invisible than it already is. Other countries have also had controversies around racial data. For example, French law prohibits the French government

from collecting any official race-related data.1 The law is meant to promote the ideal of a color-blind state where each person is only identified as French and therefore completely equal before law. France collects no census or other data on the race or ethnicity of its citizens. However, in recent years, the tremendous material differences between the lives of the richer French citizens of European ancestry and the poorer French citizens of African ancestry has generated a debate about the need for racial statistics to combat racism in France. Without data on race and ethnicity, it has been argued that the government has no way of enforcing antidiscrimination laws and measuring the progress of its citizens of color. Due to this debate, the French government has constituted a commission to examine the issue of collecting race-related statistics.2

Notes 1. David B. Oppenheimer, “Why France Needs to Collect Data on Racial Identity—In a French Way,” Hastings International and Comparative Law Review 31, no. 2 (2008). 2. Chrisafis, Angelique, “French Plan to Break Taboo on Ethnic Data Causes Uproar,” Guardian, March 23, 2009.

Discussion Questions 1. As you read more, what ways, do you imagine, we can address the problems described in this book? 2. To explore how different countries, including the United States, have asked census questions about race, visit the American Anthropological Association’s online project entitled “Race: Are We So Different?” at http://www.understandingrace.org/home.html. Within the activities available under the menu Lived Experience, you can choose the Global Census option to see how race is classified in Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, South Africa, and other countries (www.understandingrace.org/lived/global_census.html). Which of these ways of classifying race surprised you the most? Which seemed most foreign to how you have understood race? Did you approve of any of these ways of classifying race or ethnicity? Please do explain why or why not. 3. Irish and Italian Americans historically have been blamed for their poverty and other social problems because of their ethnic/racial identity, as though that ethnic/racial identity was the cause of these problems. Please identify another racial/ethnic group that has been blamed for the group’s own poverty, crime rates, or other social problems. Evaluate systemic injustice as an explanation for the social problems faced by this group. 4. Based on the description within this chapter, do you perceive Ron Nerio as Mexican American or as white? Explain why you do or do not perceive Nerio’s race as Mexican American. 5. Explore the case of a person whose biological parents are identified as different races,

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such as Nerio’s sisters from a white mother and a Mexican American father. Are Nerio’s sisters Mexican American or white? Can they be both? Why or why not? Can Nerio be both? Why or why not? 6. Within chapter 3, we asked, “What does it mean to ‘have’ a race?” Across chapters 3 and 4, we argue that race is social but that it cannot be chosen the way some other social identities may be chosen (such as being an environmentalist). Please do respond to our arguments about what it means to have a race. Address the extent to which you agree with social constructionist arguments about race. Do you agree or disagree that race cannot be chosen? Explain why. 7. If Nerio allows others to assume his racial background is white, is he passing? Please refer to arguments and evidence from chapters 3 and 4 in your response. 8. Critical race theorist Derrick Bell has argued that whites actually do not want to end racism because white people want to protect the power they gain through white privilege. If given the opportunity to have a conversation with Bell, how would you respond to his argument? 9. Do you believe white people might gain power and privilege simply from being white? If so, why might white people want to protect this power? Please explain by responding to arguments and evidence from this chapter. 10. Please discuss whether you see sentencing discrepancies as at least partially racial in basis. Explore the relative dangers of the drug crack compared to powder cocaine, the violence predicted by each, and the racial group most associated with each. Do you believe that penalizing crack cocaine to powder cocaine on a ratio of 100 to 1 is fair? Might this sentencing difference be racial? What about the Fair Sentencing Act proposal of a ratio of 18 to 1?

Notes 1. According to Tom Rodgers, Native Americans today number approximately 4.5 million in the United States (“Native

American Poverty: A Challenge Too Often Ignored,” Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, www.spotlightonpoverty.org/ExclusiveCommentary.aspx?id=0fe5c04e-fdbf-4718-980c-0373ba823da7 (June 11, 2010). 2. Rodgers, “Native American Poverty.” 3. U.S. Constitution, Article One, Section Two, modified by the Fourteenth Amendment, Section Two, www.usconstitution.net

(June 11, 2010); for more information on the Three-fifths Compromise, please do see the following online article at www.usconstitution.net/consttop ccon.html (June 11, 2010). 4. Gregory Rodriguez, “The Dark Side of White,” Los Angeles Times, December 28, 2009. 5. Michael S. Kimmel, The Gendered Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7. 6. Gloria Steinem, “Women Are Never Front-Runners,” New York Times, January 8, 2008. 7. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” in Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education, eds. Edward Taylor, David Gillborn, and Gloria Ladson-Billings (New York: Routledge, 2009), 213. 8. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 213. 9. Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins, Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, 7th ed. (Belmont, Calif.:

Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), 8. 10. Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2005), 1772–

1800. 11. Andersen and Collins, Race, Class and Gender, 7–8. 12. See Deborah M. LaFond, “What Is the Race, Class, Gender Lens?,” Global Citizenship through a Race, Class,

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Gender Lens 2010, www.albany.edu/~dlafonde/Global/whatisrgc.htm (July 13, 2010). 13. Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color,

ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Latham, N.Y.: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981/1983), 94–97. 14. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Latham, N.Y.: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981/1983), 99. 15. McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” 1771. 16. Ron Nerio, unpublished memoir, 2009: 2. 17. A related piece of the process described by David R. Roediger (1991) involved growing numbers of the working class,

particularly over the mid- to late-twentieth century, identifying not only as white but also as middle class. With this, working people increasingly defined their work as “professional.” So, all kinds of work, formerly understood as working class, began to be understood and described as a “profession.” One could be a professional hairstylist, professional carpenter, or professional butcher. We argue that this ideology of professionalization, like the thinking that one was always middle class no matter what the work or the pay involved, paid a psychic wage not unlike—nor unrelated to—that paid by whiteness. 18. Nerio, unpublished memoir. 19. Nerio, unpublished memoir, 28. 20. Nerio, unpublished memoir, 28. 21. McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” 1771. 22. Andersen and Collins, Race, Class and Gender (italics in original), 6. 23. Andersen and Collins, Race, Class and Gender, 6. 24. For further information on cultural materialism, please see Maxine L. Margolis, True to Her Nature: Changing Advice to American Women (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, Inc., 2000). 25. Thomas M. Shapiro, “The Hidden Cost of Being African American,” in Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, 7th ed.,

ed. by Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), 129–36. 26. Roslyn Arlin Mickelson and Stephen Samuel Smith, “Can Education Eliminate Race, Class, and Gender Inequality?,” in Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, 7th ed., ed. by Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), 407–15. 27. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., PhD, Executive Director of the Commission for Racial Justice, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York: The United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 1987). 28. Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons (Durham, N.C.: Duke

University Press, 1996). 29. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in the United States (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935). 30. Derrick Bell’s books include Race, Racism, and American Law, 6th ed. (New York: Aspen Publishers, 2008), and Confronting Authority: Reflections on an Ardent Protester (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), among many others. 31. Main Justice: Politics, Policy and the Law, www.mainjustice.com/2010/03/17/senate-passes-crack-cocaine-sentencing-bill

(June 30, 2010). 32. The Sentencing Project: Research and Advocacy for Reform, www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=128

(May 30, 2010). 33. Derrick Bell, “Epilogue,” in When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories,

ed. by Bernestine Singley (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002), 327–28.

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