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Defining Contested Concepts

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Race, Gender, Sexualit}l, ( ..0 Socia I Class

, D1MENS10NS OF lNEQYAL1T:Y

Susan J. Ferguson ED1TOR Grlrinell College

($)SAGE Los Angeles I London I New Delhi

Singapore IWashington DC

DEFINING CONTESTED CONCEPTS

LYNN WEBER

This first reading is by Lynn Webel; a professor of psychology and women :sstudies at the University of South Carolina. Webel; a well-f..71ownscholar of the American social class system and of gender studies and intersectionality, argues that race, social class, gender, and sexuality are all social systems that, while they change over time and across cultures, persist to preserve the privilege of some groups over that of others. This excerpt is taken from Weber s 2009 book, Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: A Conceptual Framework; it introduces readers to these concepts and how they are used by some societal groups to sustain their power and social control.

To analyze race, class, gender, and sexual-ity, it is necessary to characterize whatwe mean by the terms. But because their meanings are in fact contested and often obscured, defming these social systems is not a simple task. This reading offers working defini- tions of key terms, discusses some of the pro- cesses that operate to obscure these systems, and describes social arenas in which they are

manifested differently-in political, economic, and ideological institutions.

RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY

AS COMPLEX SOCIAL SYSTEMS

Race, class, gender, and sexuality are social systems, patterns of social relationships among people that are

• Complex

• Pervasive

Intricate and interconnected

Widespread throughout all societal domains-for example, in

families and communities, religion, education, the economy

government, the law and criminal justice, the media

(Continued)

Source: Understanding Race, Class, Gende/: and Sexuality: A Conceptual Framework, 2nd Edition by Weber (2009)

pp. 23-36, 38-39. By permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. 7

8 • INTRODUCTION TO RACE, GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND SOCIAL CLASS

(Continued)

• Variable

• Persistent

• Severe

• Power Based

changing, always transforming

prevailing over time and across places

serious in their consequences for social life

hierarchical, stratified (ranked), centered in power-

benefiting and providing options and resources for some by

harming and restricting options and resources for others

Stated otherwise, race, class, gender, and sexual- ity are systems of oppression. Oppression exists when one group has historically gained power and control over valued assets of a society (e.g., wealth, information, and political power) by exploiting the labor and lives of other groups and then by using those assets to secure its position of power into the future. In exploitative relation- ships, the welfare of one group of people-the exploiters, the dominant group-depends on the poverty and efforts of another-the exploited, the subordinate group. Exploitation is thus a power relationship resulting from and reinforc- ing the unequal distribution of productive assets in society (Wlight 2008). The unequal distribu- tion of society's valued opportunities and resources is repeatedly reinforced in daily life, and its fundamental unfairness is masked in a pervasive belief system-an ideology, a set of stereotypes-that interprets the inequalities as a "natural" outcome of each group's presumed superior or inferior traits.

When we first meet people, we often try to get an idea of who they are by asking ques- tions that situate them in time and place, as well as in meaningful social categories. We ask "Where are you from?" often meaning geographic location, and "What do you do?" often meaning work or occupation. But we actually use these questions as indicators of more important social and cultural experiences and background that we associate with time, place, and work. When we meet people, we also situate them in other critical social

locations-race, class, gender, and sexuality- that are powerfully embedded in all our insti- tutions, that touch every aspect of life, and that suggest other commonalities of experience and background. Social location refers to an individual's or a group's social "place" in the race, class, gender, and sexuality hierarchies, as well as in other critical social hierarchies such as age, ethnicity, and nation.

Although the meaning and experience of race, class, gender, and sexuality change over time and place, they also have a persistence and resilience that leads people to believe that they will always be with us. Perhaps the central principle under- girding these hierarchies and the primary reason they persist over time is that they are intersecting systems of power relationships. One way of defming power is the capacity to achieve one's aims despite resistance. Groups remain dominant in a system over time because their position enables them to continue no matter what the will or aims of others might be: They have power. Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres (2002) describe the ways these systems operate, much like a zero-sum game. Games have winners and losers, and the powerful are those who have the advan- tage on three fronts, the three faces of power:

• The power to design or manipulate the rules • The power to win the game through force or

competition • The power that winners have to name the game,

to tell the story about the game, its significance, and why they won-in modern slang, to spin the story

Who makes the rules that give some groups privilege? Those with power in our political, economic, and ideological systems. Who wins the game? Those whom the rules have advan- taged. Who gets to put the spin on the game- who names the game and interprets its outcome? The winners.

Heterosexism: An Example

Heterosexism, like racism, classism, and sex- ism, is a system of power relations. Heterosexuals set the laws and acceptable practices governing adult intimate life ("the rules"), the advantages that go to those who follow the rules ("the win- ners"), and the rationale for the hierarchy that justifies the unequal treatment ("the spin"). In our culture, heterosexual marriage was long ago established as the standard and legally privileged status against which all other ways of conducting adult intimate life are measured ("the rules"). Advantages accrue to those who conform ("the winners"): the right to marry, to adopt children, to receive survivor benefits from Social Security, to file taxes as married couples, to receive health insurance from a spouse's employer, to inherit from one's partner, and to claim a legal family connection in medical emergencies. To be sure, significant changes have taken place in the legal status of gay people (e.g., twenty states, the District of Columbia, and many municipalities now prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation) and in public atti- tudes about alternative sexualities, especially among the young (Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center 2006; Badgett et al. 2008). Still, most people who depart from the sexual standards set by those in power are denied full citizenship rights, making it difficult for them to create and to maintain families at all.

These restrictions, however, do not affect all gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans gender people in the same way. Some middle- and upper-class White men and women, for example, have more political, economic, and social resources to construct families in spite oflegal obstacles and social disapproval. Class and race privilege

DEFINING CONTESTED CONCEPTS • 9

give White upper-middle-class, educated gay men and women the options of suing if employ- ers discriminate; of living without spousal insurance; of establishing estates with the help of estate attorneys who can find other tax shields for their monies; of traveling to other cities, states, or countries that may allow adop- tion or marriage and paying the costs incurred; of living well without a partner's Social Security.

The rationale for the unequal treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans gender people is provided in the interpretation that the powerful place on them by defining them variously as "other," "deviant," "sexual predators," "sinners," as less than fully human-not deserving of full citizenship status ("the spin"). And because they are defined as not "normal," gay, lesbian, bisex- ual, and transgender people have only recently begun to appear in popular culture texts-books, videos, films, television shows, advertise- ments-in ways that are less stereotypical, as was the case in such popular TV shows as Will and Grace or Ugly Betty (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation [GLAAD] 2009). The advertising industry has even coined a term, gay vague, for ads constructed to appeal to gay consumers-a market estimated to have had

$690 billion in buying power in 2007-without overtly challenging heterosexual dominance (HarrisInteractive 2009; Wilke and Applebaum 2001).

This third arena of power, "the spin," is car- ried out in the world of ideas through the media, the knowledge experts, and the image makers. These sources provide us with explanations and interpretations intended to help us make sense of our everyday lives, including hierarchies of power and privilege, and thereby either help to create and reinforce or to challenge and trans- form the systems of race, class, gender, and sexu- ality. They can encourage us to feel comfortable with harsh treatment of some people by present- ing a pervasive belief system-an ideology, a set of stereotypes-that interprets the treatment as a "natural" outcome of a group's presumed infe- rior traits.

, 10 • INTRODUCTION TO RACE, GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND SOCIAL CLASS

WHY RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND

SEXUALITY?

When we examine these four systems of social inequality-race, class, gender, and sexuality- and recognize their interrelationships as the pre- vious example ofheterosexism's interaction with race, class, and gender suggests, you might ask which of the four is most important. And what of other forms of oppression? By focusing on these four dimensions, I do not intend to suggest that these are the only hierarchical dimensions of inequality that matter in social life. People face oppression along many other dimensions- disability, region, nation, ethnicity-and those patterns of relationships are also hierarchical and intersect with race, class, gender, and sexuality. In different times and places, and with regard to particular issues, they may carry more signifi- cance than the four dimensions examined here.

But race, class, gender, and sexuality are given priority for several reasons:

• ... In the United States, race, class, gender, and sexuality each have such a significant history as powerful organizers of social hierarchy that they are deeply embedded in our most impor- tant institutions: law and justice, education, religion, family, economy.

• Subordinate groups have struggled in large-scale social movements of resistance against these oppressions in legal, educational, religious, fam- ily, economic, and other institutions for many years. As a consequence, each of these inequali- ties is quite visible in the public consciousness now in the United States. In recent years, for example, the persistent and rapidly growing social movements of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenderpeople for socialpower and self- determination have precipitated significant social change and enhanced attention from the political, religious, and other realms....

• Given the visibility and the fundamental impor- tance of these dimensions at this time in the United States, this analysis of race, class, gen- der, and sexuality and its extended application to education in the United States should give you the tools-the conceptual framework and the questions to ask-to analyze other dimen- sions of inequality, as well.

The primary purpose of my research is to deepen our understanding of the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality and to demon- strate how to analyze those intersections in spe- cific times and places. But the framework should encourage you to look beyond the most clearly visible dimensions of inequality in any arena, to look for more subtle expressions of power dynamics, and to seek out the structures and mechanisms that undergird oppression in all areas of society.

PROCESSES THAT OBSCURE RACE, CLASS,

GENDER, AND SEXUALITY

Race, class, gender, and sexuality shape every- one's life every day. Yet these systems are often hard to see, to understand, even to define. In U. S. society, these constructs are typically defined by referring to social groups selected for unequal treatment and ranked according to

• Race: Ancestry and selected physical charac- teristics, such as skin color, hair texture, and eye shapel

• Class: Position in the economy; in the distri- bution of wealth, income, and poverty; in the distribution of power and authority in the workforce

• Sex/Gender: Biological and anatomical char- acteristics attributed to males and females (sex); culturally and socially structured rela- tionships between women and men (gender)

• Sexual Orientation: Sex of partners in emo- tional-sexual relationships

Yet these definitions tend to rerry the categories, to make them seem universal, seem tied to a pre- sumably stable biology, rigid and unchanging- characteristics quite the opposite of the way the framework in this reading presents them. One of the challenges of my research is to present a more complex picture of these systems and their intersections so that we can see their persistence and significance in shaping social life and their shifting nature over time and space.

In fact, the reasons that these intersecting sys- tems of oppression are so difficult to understand

and to define are contained in the very nature of the systems themselves:

Every social situation is affected by societywide historical patterns of race, class, gender, and sexuality that are not necessarily apparent to the participants and that are experienced differ- ently depending on the race, class, gender, and sexuality of the people involved.

Typically, the beneficiaries of long-standing patently unfair practices that routinely rein- force social injustice, such as giving special preference in college and law school admis- sions to the sons and daughters of wealthy alumni, do not come away viewing the prac- tices as unfair, do not associate them with affirmative action, and may in fact view them as fair and even desirable practices (Crosby and Stockdale 2007; Karabel 2005; Sturm and Guinier 1996). To those who occupy positions of privilege, that is, who benefit from the exist- ing social arrangements, the fact that their privilege is dependent on the unfair exclusion of or direct harm to others is obscured, unim- portant, practically invisible.

Although I remember, for example, when my all-White girls' high school desegregated in the 1960s, the event meant very little to me at the time. I had never even seen the segregated African American schools whose inferior conditions had

made school desegregation such an important goal in the African American community. But for my new African American schoolmates, the unfairness of racial segregation was painfully apparent, and being the first African Americans to attend my school was most certainly a critical life event for them.

Systemic patterns of inequality can also be obscure to those disadvantaged by them because they lack access to information and resources that dominant groups control. So, at the same time that I experienced my high school's integra- tion as a nonevent because of my racial privilege, I became aware of the significant restrictions on my life imposed by my gender.

I rode to school on a bus with other students

from my end of town who had gone to elementary

DEFINING CONTESTED CONCEPTS • 11

school with me. The bus stopped at the three small Catholic girls' high schools and the single large Catholic boys' high school. Every day on the bus, my good friend Mickey O'Hara and I, who had competed with each other academically in ele- mentary school, compared notes about what we were learning in high school. As the days, weeks, and years went on, it became clear that Mickey was being taught much more than 1. The boys in college prep courses went further in math, read more in English, had more science. They scored better on standardized tests. They had better facilities, books, and teachers. Why? In large part because each parish was required to contribute money to the boys' high school for each boy in the parish who attended the school. And for the girls? Nothing. So the girls' schools ran on tuition alone; the boys' ran on subsidies from the parishes-a fact I didn't learn until years later. My brother's education cost my parents far less and provided him much more, a discrepancy that few saw as troublesome because the school system was orga- nized to prepare boys to provide materially for their families and to prepare girls to have children and to raise them in two-parent, heterosexual nuclear families.

These assumptions about the fundamental aims of our education-to learn to enact gender- specific roles in heterosexual marriages and in the labor market-were profound. They shaped every aspect of our lives-from proms to course content, from sports to labs. The girls' schools provided the homecoming queens and the cheer- leaders; the boys' school, the athletes. The girls' schools provided the home economics and typ- ing labs; the boys' school, the physics course.

So in my position as a girl in a gender-stratified school system, I had been aware of many of the differences in education between the boys' and the girls' schools but was unaware of the funding practices that supported them and would have been unable to do much about the practices even if I had known. Likewise, law school applicants who lack class and family privilege may never know or may be unable to change the fact that their chances for admission were reduced by the preferences given to the children of alumni. People often come away from a discriminatory

12 • INTRODUCTION TO RACE, GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND SOCIAL CLASS

practice not knowing whether or how the dis- crimination took place--even when they are the victims of the injustice. Even though those who suffer the unfairness are more likely to see it, we all participate in discriminatory systems with and without knowing that or how we have done so.

The dominant ideologiesof a "color-blind," "gen- der-blind," and "sexually restrained" society obscure oppression and its history.

The dominant ideology (belief system), par- ticularly about race and gender but also about social class and sexuality, that pervades the media and dominates public policy is that the United States is or should be a "gender-blind," "race- blind," "classless," and "sexually restrained" soci- ety. These ideologies are presented as "neutral" perspectives suggesting that a "gender-blind" or "postgender" or "race-blind" or "postracial" soci- ety is the preferred outcome of any social policy that seeks to address pervasive inequalities-the goal to strive for-as well as the way that poli- cies designed to achieve equity should operate. Although on their surface these ideologies sound much like the arguments made by antiracists in the civil lights movement of the 1960s, they are currently aimed at obscuring the privilege that accompanies Whiteness and maleness rather than at seeking to transform them from an iden- tity of social superiority to one of social respon- sibility (Bonilla-Silva 2003; McDermott and

:.Samson 2005). We do not hear the term class-blind used in

public discourse because the dominant ideology of class differs from race and gender ideology. The classless ideology does not assert that even though classes are biologically determined, we should strive not to attend to them-as it does

with race and gender. Although it recognizes great differences in income, wealth, and other valuable resources, it asserts that classes--either as biological groups or as social groups in a rela- tion of oppression and conflict with one another- simply do not exist. Instead, economic positions in the United States are presumed to be earned in a free and open "meritocratic" society in which

hard work and talent payoff-the land of the American Dream. And it is those differences in

hard work and talent-not oppression-that are offered as the core causes ofthe obvious, extreme economic differences present in the population.

The dominant ideology of sexuality is one of restraint, with the alleged sexual practices of the heterosexual majority taken as the moral noml against which the sexual orientation and prac- tices of people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgende~ are seen as deviant and danger- ous. The dominant ideology of sexuality is not that we should be blind to differences, that they should not matter or do not exist, but rather that they should be denied, contained, or ignored- neither discussed in public nor condoned. The military's former policy toward homosexuals of "don't ask, don't tell," implemented in 1994, captures the dominant ideology of sexual restraint well: "We won't ask and you shouldn't tell, because if you tell you will be punished."

Think about these ideologies. Why would we use denial and blindness as bases for social pol- icy and the assessment of moral righmess? To do so implies that we seek not to see and therefore not to know. It suggests that ignorance is a pre- ferred foundation for social policy-an anti- intellectual stance that has no valid place in the modem academy, where we seek knowledge, truth, and wisdom.

Yet these stances on race, class, gender, and sexuality prevail for at least two basic reasons:

• Because members of privileged groups are not disadvantaged and, in fact, benefit from these systems, people in these groups find dismissing the claims of oppressed groups as unreal relatively easy.

• In our education and in mass media, we do not systematically learn about the totality of the experiences of subordinate groups.

The experiences of oppressed groups are either excluded or distorted in our society by being pre- sented in limited and stereotyped ways: gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans gender people solely as people who engage in particular sexual acts or wear sex-inappropriate clothes; African Americans

as slaves or protesters in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, as sports heroes and music stars, and as welfare moms and criminals; Latino/as as ille- gal aliens swelling the schools and welfare rolls; Native Americans as wlassimilable, alcoholic reservation dwellers benefiting from gambling- driven windfalls; hard-working Asian Americans as clannisWy living in Chinatowns and overcom- ing all obstacles to rise to educational and employ- ment heights, especially in math and science. In short, we typically leam of these groups only as they can be seen to present "problems" or threats to the dominant group or as exceptions to the "normal" way oflife.

We rarely leam of the common ground in our experiences or of the ways that the lives and struggles of oppressed groups can and have ben- efited the entire society. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, although fought for and won primarily by African Americans, expanded protections against discrimination to women, religious minorities, and all racial groups. In a similar vein, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres (2002) compare the experiences of women and people of color to the miner's canary. Miners used to take a canary into the mines with them to signal whether or not the air was safe to breathe. If the canary thrived, the atmosphere was safe. If the canary became sick or died, the atmosphere was toxic.

Members of oppressed groups-people of color, poor and working classes, women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people-are like the canary: They signal when the atmo- sphere is not healthy. When oppressed groups experience high death rates from lack of access to medical care; high infant mOltality rates; increasing high school dropout rates; declining college, graduate, and professional school atten- dance rates; high unemployment and poverty rates; and declining standardized test scores, something is wrong with the atmosphere-not with the canary. Trying to "fix" the canary or blaming the toxic atmosphere on the canary makes the atmosphere no less toxic to everyone in it. Learning about the atmosphere through the experience of the canary, we can develop a

DEFINING CONTESTED CONCEPTS • 13

broader and healthier assessment of societal pro- cesses that affect us all-intemational relations, family life, and the workings of the economy, of education, of religion.

These systems are never perfectly patterned; some people have experiences that defy the overall patterns.

In my high school, some students in the col- lege preparatory track never went to college; some home economics shldents did. But rags-to- riches stories, popular in America, are always more complex than we are often led to believe. For example, in "A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano," Ruben Navarrette, Jr., a twenty-four-year-old Mexican American man, tells of how he went from vale- dictorian afhis class in a school system with a 50 percent dropout rate for Hispanics to Harvard University and then to the University of California Los Angeles graduate school in edu- cation. He describes the guilt, pain, and isolation he felt in graduate school:

White student colleagues smile at me as they tell me, implicitly, that people like my parents, like my old friends, like the new girlfriend back home whose immeasurable love is sustaining me, are incompetent and unintelligent and unmotivated and hopeless. They wink and nod at me, perhaps takiilg comfort that I am different from the cultural caricature that they envision when they hear the word "Chicano." (Navarrette 1997:278)

So even though a pervasive pattern of oppres- sion exists, individual exceptions also exist. And these exceptions tend to reinforce the views of dominant groups that the system is not oppres- sive but is indeed open and fair, because those who have benefited from the current arrange- ments have difficulty seeing the ways in which the exclusion of others has made their inclusion

in the successful mainstream possible.

These systems are not immutable; they change over time and vary across different regional locations and different cultural milieus.

14 • INTRODUCTION TO RACE, GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND SOCIAL CLASS

Race, class, gender, and sexuality are not fixed systems or traits of individuals. Because they are negotiated and contested every day in social relationships, they change over time and in different places. Many of the working-class White girls who were my high school class- mates, for example, did not attend college imme- diately after high school but attended college later, in the 1970s and 1980s, after marrying and having children. Changing economic conditions no longer allowed their husbands to be the sole support of the family; changing family condi- tions meant that many of their marriages ended in divorce; and changing education and labor market conditions meant that there were signifi- cantly increased opportunities for women. Thus what race, class, gender, and sexuality meant for the lives of White, heterosexual, working-class women had changed considerably from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Because of the pervasive, persistent, and severe nature of oppressive systems, people resist subordination and in their resistance can develop positive skills, talents, and abili- ties. These skills fortify them to survive and to challenge more effectively the very system designed to limit their opportunities to use their skills, talents, and abilities.

The fact that no parish resources were sent to the al+l-girls schools in my community meant,

~.for example, that the parishes could funnel all their resources into the education of their boys- to fortify their ability to succeed and to bolster the economic base of the patriarchal nuclear family. Yet because we were segregated, I was able to play leadership roles and participate in activities that girls in coeducational schools mostly could not play. In much the same way, segregated African American schools, Native American res- ervation schools, and barrio schools-typically inferior in resources, per-pupil expenditures, physical facilities, and teacher preparation-have become fertile ground for the development of future leaders and activists who effectively chal- lenge the systems themselves.

Because members of oppressed groups can withstand oppression and may even succeed while facing it, dominant group members often take that success to mean that the oppression either does not exist or is not severe. But it is not

the oppression itself that creates the success that some people experience: It is the human will to resist oppression and overcome obstacles that makes this success possible. Resistance in indi- vidual and collective forms pressures the domi- nant system to change and transform over time. If anything, because so many people are willing to resist, President Obama was able to connect powerfully to a wide cross-section of America. He asked people to believe that their resistance could bring about fundamental change, and his many new strategies of reaching people (employ- ing the Internet, text messaging, organizer training, etc.) engaged a decisive segment of the United States in resistance to the status quo.

DOMAINS, INSTITUTIONS, AND LEVELS OF OPPRESSION

Domains and Associated Institutions

Relationships of dominance and subordination along race, class, gender, and sexuality lines are produced, reinforced, challenged, and changed in many arenas or social domains. Although histori- cally employed to characterize the domains of class oppression (cf. Vanneman and Weber Cannon 1987), three broad domains-the ideo- logical, the political, and the economic-also represent useful ways of seeing the societal con- text for other forms of oppression. Each domain has associated with it certain social institutions- patterns of social relationships that are intended to accomplish the goals of the particular domain. And relations of dominance and subordination are structured within the institutions associated

with each of the three major domains of society:

• Ideological Domain. The media, arts, reli- gion, and education represent institutions whose

primary purpose is ideological-producing and distributing ideas and knowledge about society and its people, why society is organized the way it is, what people need to know in order to func- ion in society. Control over ideological institu- ions enables dominant groups to shape public

images and cultural beliefs about both dominant and subordinate groups. Some refer to negative group images, for example, of ''welfare queens," as controlling images to highlight their intended purpose of restricting the lives and options of subordinate groups, in this case poor African American women (Collins 2000; Hancock 2004).

• Political Domain. The government, law, civil and criminal justice, the police, and the military represent institutions whose primary purpose is political--<:reating and enforcing the laws and government structures that defIne citi- zens' and non-citizens' rights, responsibilities, and privileges. Through control over these insti- tutions, dominant groups exert direct control over the behavior of others.

• Economic Domain. The major industries (e.g., fInance, health care, manufacturing, hous- ing, transportation,and communication)and work represent institutions whose primary emphasis is economic-producing and distributing society's valued goods and services. Control over material goods and resources such as wealth, jobs, wages and benefIts, health care, day care, and education makes dominant groups more competitive in the workplace and in community life.

Each of these domains and the institutions associated with them are organized to reinforce and reproduce the prevailing social hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality-by produc- ing and disseminating ideas that justify these inequalities, by concentrating government power and social control mechanisms among dominant groups, and by unequally distributing society's valued material and social resources to Whites, the middle and upper classes, men, heterosexu- als, and U.S. citizens.

Although most institutions have a primary purpose, none of the major social institutions

DEFINING CONTESTED CONCEPTS • 15

relates solely to a single domain of oppression- ideological, political, or economic. Just as race, class, gender, and sexuality are interconnected dimensions of oppression, so are social institu- tions intertwined with one another. If we think again about the realm of sports, for example, sports are:

• Ideological: Ideas about "winners and los- ers," fair play, and a "level playing fIeld" often serve as a basis for defIning how groups should be treated, punished, and rewarded.

• Political: Many connections between the powerful in society-especially among men- are fIrst forged in sports teams in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) and in college (Messner 1992). Sports also become overtly political arenas, as when, for example, the International Olympic Committee tied its deci- sion to allow Beijing to host the Olympics in 2008 to demands for greater human rights in China (Human Rights Watch 2008).

• Economic: Over the past forty years, as manufacturing has declined, many municipali- ties around the country have turned to tourism and recreation, including professional sports teams, to improve the economies of urban areas. Large colleges and universities commit millions of dollars to sports promotion to increase reve- nues, to satisfy alumni, and to increase dona- tions. And some of the richest people in America are sports professionals (e.g., Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, LeBron James) and team owners.

Education, too, although primarily an ideo- logical institution, is deeply implicated in the economic and political domains because it certi- fIes people for different social locations within them.

Society's expenditures on schooling are justi- fIed on economic grounds as preparing and sort- ing people for different positions in the capitalist economic system as owners, managers, profes- sionals, laborers, and-for those who drop out or otherwise fail-as society's underclass. As

16 • INTRODUCTION TO RACE, GENDER, SEXUALITY, A.ND SOCIAL CLASS

the costs of higher education have risen dra- matically in recent years, students are increas- ingly viewed as consumers who must be "sold" on the "product" that any given institution offers and who must be "satisfied" in order to keep their "business." Some have even sued schools for failure to educate them. Advocates for rural and inner-city K-12 schools are challenging school funding formulas that most often rely on local property taxes and heavily advantage affluent suburban areas. For example, when its supreme court ruled that the state's constitution merely obligated it to provide students a "mini- mally adequate" education, a South Carolina citizens' coalition proposed a constitutional amendment to require the state to level out the gross inequities in funding across its districts in order to provide all students with a high-quality education (see www.Good byeMinimallyAde- quate.com).

And because of the ideological and economic importance of education, the state is deeply involved in legislating the structure of educa- tion. Social movements seeking to challenge the fundamental basis ofthe social order often begin with and emanate from schools. Take, for example, the historical equity movements sur- rounding school desegregation, students with disabilities, gender equity (Title IX), and affir- mative action.

Cross-Cutting Institutions

Some institutions have no single focus and uniformly cross cut all dimensions-for exam- ple, the family. The family is a social institution whose purpose is to meet people's basic psycho- logical, emotional, and physical needs. And even though emotional support, love, and nurturance take place in families, families also serve as sites where inequality is reproduced in the ideologi- cal, political, and economic realms:

• Ideological: Families are places where the ideas that bolster and justify the dominant power

structure are reinforced daily in an intimate set- ting. Conservative politicians and political inter- est groups, for example, have used the term

family values to refer to the political values that serve the interests of nuclear, heterosexual, White, middle- and upper-class Christian fami- lies: values that serve to reinforce the dominant power structure.

• Political: Families are places where the public authority and power of middle- and upper-class White male heterosexuals is rein- forced daily in a variety of ways. When a man rapes or otherwise sexually assaults the child of a neighbor, for example, the violation is typically seen as a crime and is often pursued in the criminal justice system. When, however, the same man, particularly if he is middle or upper class, rapes or otherwise sexually assaults his own daughter, the rape is more often not chal- lenged at all, is treated as an issue for social services, or is dealt with in therapy. The public power of men (including their greater economic power) gives them power in the family, making it especially difficult for women and children to successfully challenge the abuse of that power either in the family or in the criminal justice system.

• Economic: Families are places where goods and services are distributed to reinforce the economic power of dominant groups. The family wage, a wage large enough to enable a man to provide for his entire family,was extended at the beginning of industrialization to White men to lure them away from family farms and into factory work but was never extended to men of color. It also served as a mechanism for exert- ing control over women both by denying them access to wage work and by justifying lower wages to women (Hartmann 1997). Current tax laws determining what part of income earned by individual workers will be retained by the state is set by their family status-married, heterosexual couples pay one rate, unmarried individuals pay another rate, and deductions and tax credits accrue to parents with dependent children....

SOCIAL RELATIONS OF CONTROL

Maintaining their position of control over subor- dinate groups is a primary task for dominant groups. To do so, they must structure:

• Ideology so that exploitation is explained, jus- tified, and rationalized and comes to be seen as a natural, normal, and acceptable part of social life

• The polity so that the state supports and enforces the exploitative relations

• The economy so that the exploitative relations continue, so that the poverty and labor of the exploited enhances the welfare of the exploiters

Internalized Oppression

The very fact that society continues without major disruption every day serves as a testimony not only to the power of dominant groups to effectively control the ideological, political, and material resources that subordinate groups need :0 shift the balance of power but also to the per- ::uasive power of dominant ideologies to con- -ince subordinate group members that the current "ocial hierarchies are acceptable and cannot be hanged (cf. Mullings 1994). Two processes of

:'1ternalized oppression are at work:

• Self-Negation: Subordinate group mem- .::erssometimes restrict their own lives because ~ey believe the negative views and limits "-rlposedon their group by the dominant ideol- ~gy.When subordinate group members internal- .:e oppression, they do not challenge the social :::-derand may even exhibit self-destructive pat- :;:ms such as drug abuse, family violence, or :epression. In more subtle ways, for example, a . man who fails to put herself up for consider-

_=on for a promotion at work because she :-=uevesthat she is less capable or less suited for - - agement than her male counterparts has - ernalized the socially constructed, controlling .,., ges of women.

• Negation of Others: Subordinate group - embers sometimes restrict the lives of other

DEFINING CONTESTED CONCEPTS • 17

members of oppressed groups or of their own group because they believe the negative views of and limits imposed on another subordinate group or their own group. When working-class Latinos, for example, accept negative images of Latinas as sexually promiscuous and treat them as sexual objects, the Latinos reinforce the larger structural patterns of race, class, gender, and sexuality dominance. When women managers fail to pro- mote other women because they believe that women are less capable than men, they also reinforce structures of race, class, gender, and sexuality dominance, the same structures that have restricted their own lives.

Resistance

But people also resist oppression.Even though each of these social institutions is organized to reproduce the current social hierarchy and is thus a structure of oppression, strong forces of resis- tance occur within each. The resistance occurs at both the macro social level of community and society and at the micro level of the individual and the family. Ever since the beginning of our public education system, for example, various groups have established alternative schools- religious schools, other private schools, single- sex schools, African American schools, bilingual schools, and home schools, to name a few-to resist the dominant culture's organization of edu- cation and to produce students who have differ- ent ideas about the social order. And because education is a primary institution charged with the socialization of the young, it holds a key to the future stability of the social order. Education is thus a critical site for resistance to all forms of oppression: racism, sexism, classism, and het- erosexism, as well as oppression resulting from religious, ethnic, national, political, age, and dis- ability status.

A major focus of the civil rights, women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, and poor people's movements has been educational system reform-for example, through school desegrega- tion; through battles over fue gender, race, and

18 • INTRODUCTION TO RACE, GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND SOCIAL CLASS

sexuality content of school texts and curricula; through struggles for access for students with disabilities; through bilingual education; and through poor (mostly rural and inner city) school districts' challenges to school funding formulas based on property values.

Resistance also occurs at the micro level of

the individual and the family when individuals develop an alternative consciousness, insist on self-defInition and self-valuation, and refuse to incorporate negative images of their groups. An alternative consciousness is often nurtured in a

community of resistance, such as a racial ethnic community, a community of workers, a gay and lesbian community, a religious community, or a women's community. And increasingly today, those communities of resistance are created and

sustained through the use of advanced technolo- gies such as the Internet and cell phones, which facilitate communication across vast reaches of

time and space. When groups publicly resist oppression, indi-

viduals within them can participate in the devel- opment of a positive defInition of self in the face of dominant culture oppression. When, for exam- ple, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans gender people acknowledge their sexual orientation at work, they often face ostracism, hostility, lost opportuni- ties for promotions, and even loss of their jobs. At the same time, however, by living their lives openly-something heterosexuals take for granted-they also contradict the denial and

, silence that enables dominant culture distortions

- about their lives to persist and to operate against them. In valuing themselves in this way, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans gender people con- tribute to an environment in which others are bet-

ter able to do the same. This process is one of empowennent, "a process aimed to consolidating, maintaining, or changing the nature and distribu- tion of power in a particular social context" (Morgen and Bookman 1988:4). Processes of oppression and resistance and empowerment exist in dynamic relation to one another: Each is in a continuous process of changing to adapt to the shifts in the other.

NOTES

1. Ethnicity, a concept closely related to race, is conceived as shared culture based on nationality/ national origin, language, religion, and, by some defi- nitions, also race. I address ethnicity in the context of race because the Black-White divide in the United States has most powerfully shaped the terrain on which ethnic groups-people of color (Asians, Latinos, Arabs, Natives) and Whites (Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles)--have historically been viewed and treated (cf., Brodkin 2004; Ignatiev 1995; Perlman 2005).

2. Transgender is a term increasingly used by people whose gender expression (e.g., masculine, feminine) is deemed inappropriate for their biological sex (e.g., male, female). As Leslie Feinberg (1996, xi) states, "Because it is our entire spirit-the essence of who we are-that doesn't conform to narrow gender stereotypes many people who in the past have been referred to as cross-dressers, transvestites, drag queens, and drag kings today defme themselves as transgender. "

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Discuss how domination and subordina-

tion along race, social class, gender, and sexual- ity lines become structured by institutions within the· three domains: the ideological, the economic, and the political.

2. Using examples from Weber's life or your own, explain how the "intersecting systems" of race, social class, gender, and sexuality support the domination of one group over another group by obscuring or denying this power relationship and its resulting inequities.

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