80 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
For example, the decision of many employers to short workers’ wages by not pay-
ing for overtime or by altering records of time and tips is a costly cultural choice. The
Economic Policy Institute determined2 that wage theft in 2008 amounted to almost
$200 million, nearly four times the haul from all types of robberies in 2009 (about
$57 million). The Wall S treet–c aused collapse of 2008 saw 3.6 million jobs lost and
up to 4 million home foreclosures, including a great many black and Latino victims of
fraudulent, predatory mortgages. The wealthy perpetrators of this bad behavior have
been perversely rewarded. Meanwhile, the racial wealth gap has grown enormously
since 2008. Wealth inequality in the U.S. is greater now than at any time since 1928,
and the share funneled to the top 1 percent continues to grow. . . .
It is time to put an end to this canard once and for all. Until we stop blaming
the wrong people and accept the fact that government can help, we will perpetuate
the current dystopic state as the new normal. We need to lift the fog induced by the
s o-c alled culture of poverty and recognize that we really could wage an effective war
against poverty.
NOTES
1. House Budget Committee Majority Staff (2014, March 3). The War on Poverty: 50
Years Later. U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Budget.
2. Lafter, G. (2013, October 13). The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor
Standards, 2011–2012. Economic Policy Institute.
9 D isability and the Justification of
Inequality in American History
Douglas C. Baynton
Since the social and political revolutions of the eighteenth century, the trend
in western political thought has been to refuse to take for granted inequalities
between persons or groups. Differential and unequal treatment has continued, of
course, but it has been considered incumbent on modern societies to produce a
rational explanation for such treatment. In recent decades, historians and other schol-
ars in the humanities have studied intensely and often challenged the ostensibly
rational explanations for inequalities based on identity—in particular, gender, race,
and ethnicity. Disability, however, one of the most prevalent justifications for inequal-
ity, has rarely been the subject of historical inquiry.
Disability has functioned historically to justify inequality for disabled people
themselves, but it has also done so for women and minority groups. That is, not only
has it been considered justifiable to treat disabled people unequally, but the concept
of disability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by attribut-
ing disability to them. Disability was a significant factor in the three great citizenship
debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: women’s suffrage, African
American freedom and civil rights, and the restriction of immigration. When catego-
ries of citizenship were questioned, challenged, and disrupted, disability was called
on to clarify and define who deserved, and who was deservedly excluded from, citi-
zenship. Opponents of political and social equality for women cited their supposed
physical, intellectual, and psychological flaws, deficits, and deviations from the male
norm. These flaws—irrationality, excessive emotionality, physical w eakness—a re in
essence mental, emotional, and physical disabilities, although they are rarely dis-
cussed or examined as such. Arguments for racial inequality and immigration restric-
tions invoked supposed tendencies to feeble-m indedness, mental illness, deafness,
blindness, and other disabilities in particular races and ethnic groups. Furthermore,
disability figured prominently not just in arguments for the inequality of women and
minorities but also in arguments against those inequalities. Such arguments took the
form of vigorous denials that the groups in question actually had these disabilities;
they were not disabled, the argument went, and therefore were not proper subjects
for discrimination. Rarely have oppressed groups denied that disability is an adequate
justification for social and political inequality. Thus, while disabled people can be
considered one of the minority groups historically assigned inferior status and sub-
jected to discrimination, disability has functioned for all such groups as a sign of and
justification for inferiority. . . .
From The New Disability History, Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds. Copyright © 2000
NewYork University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
81
82 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
The metaphor of the natural versus the monstrous was a fundamental way of
constructing social reality in Edmund Burke’s time. By the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, however, the concept of the natural was to a great extent dis-
placed or subsumed by the concept of normality.1 Since then, normality has been
deployed in all aspects of modern life as a means of measuring, categorizing, and
managing populations (and resisting such management). Normality is a complex
concept, with an etiology that includes the rise of the social sciences, the science
of statistics, and industrialization with its need for interchangeable parts and inter-
changeable workers. It has been used in a remarkable range of contexts and with a
bewildering variety of connotations. The natural and the normal both are ways of
establishing the universal, unquestionable good and right. Both are also ways of es-
tablishing social hierarchies that justify the denial of legitimacy and certain rights to
individuals or groups. Both are constituted in large part by being set in opposition to
culturally variable notions of disability—just as the natural was meaningful in rela-
tion to the monstrous and the deformed, so are the cultural meanings of the normal
produced in tandem with disability2. . . .
As an evolutionary concept, normality was intimately connected to the western
notion of progress. By the mid-n ineteenth century, nonwhite races were routinely
connected to people with disabilities, both of whom were depicted as evolutionary
laggards or throwbacks. As a consequence, the concept of disability, intertwined with
the concept of race, was also caught up in ideas of evolutionary progress. Physical
or mental abnormalities were commonly depicted as instances of atavism, reversions
to earlier stages of evolutionary development. Down’s syndrome, for example, was
called Mongolism by the doctor who first identified it in 1866 because he believed the
syndrome to be the result of a biological reversion by Caucasians to the Mongol racial
type. Teachers of the deaf at the end of the century spoke of making deaf children
more like “normal” people and less like savages by forbidding them the use of sign
language, and they opposed deaf marriages with a rhetoric of evolutionary progress
and decline. . . .
Disability arguments were prominent in justifications of slavery in the early to
m id-n ineteenth century and of other forms of unequal relations between white and
black Americans after slavery’s demise. The most common disability argument for
slavery was simply that African Americans lacked sufficient intelligence to participate
or compete on an equal basis in society with white Americans. This alleged deficit
was sometimes attributed to physical causes, as when an article on the “diseases
and physical peculiarities of the negro race” in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical
Journal helpfully explained, “It is the defective hematosis, or atmospherization of the
blood, conjoined with a deficiency of cerebral matter in the cranium, and an excess of
nervous matter distributed to the organs of sensation and assimilation, that is the true
cause of that debasement of mind, which has rendered the people of Africa unable
to take care of themselves.” Diseases of blacks were commonly attributed to “inferior
organisms and constitutional weaknesses,” which were claimed to be among “the
most pronounced race characteristics of the American negro.” While the supposedly
higher intelligence of “mulattos” compared to “pure” blacks was offered as evidence
9 Baynton / Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History 83
for the superiority of whites, those who argued against “miscegenation” claimed to
the contrary that the products of “race-m ixing” were themselves less intelligent and
less healthy than members of either race in “pure” form.3 A medical doctor, John Van
Evrie of New York, avowed that the “disease and disorganization” in the “abnormal,”
“blotched, deformed” offspring of this “monstrous” act “could no more exist beyond a
given period than any other physical degeneration, no more than tumors, cancers, or
other abnormal growths or physical disease can become permanent.” Some claimed
greater “corporeal vigor” for “mixed offspring” but a deterioration in “moral and in-
tellectual endowments,” while still others saw greater intelligence but “frailty,” “less
stamina,” and “inherent physical weakness.”4
A second line of disability argument was that African Americans, because of their
inherent physical and mental weaknesses, were prone to become disabled under con-
ditions of freedom and equality. A New York medical journal reported that deafness
was three times more common and blindness twice as common among free blacks
in the North compared to slaves in the South. John C. Calhoun, senator from South
Carolina and one of the most influential spokesmen for the slave states, thought it a
powerful argument in defense of slavery that the “number of deaf and dumb, blind,
idiots, and insane, of the negroes in the States that have changed the ancient relation
between the races” was seven times higher than in the slave states.5
While much has been written about the justification of slavery by religious leaders
in the South, more needs to be said about similar justifications by medical doctors.
Dr. Samuel Cartwright, in 1851, for example, described two types of mental illness
to which African Americans were especially subject. The first, Drapetomania, a con-
dition that caused slaves to run a way—“as much a disease of the mind as any other
species of mental alienation”—was common among slaves whose masters had “made
themselves too familiar with them, treating them as equals.” The need to submit to
a master was built into the very bodies of African Americans, in whom “we see ‘genu
flexit’ written in the physical structure of his knees, being more flexed or bent, than
any other kind of man.” The second mental disease peculiar to African Americans,
Dysaesthesia Aethiopis—a unique ailment differing “from every other species of men-
tal disease, as it is accompanied with physical signs or lesions of the body”—resulted
in a desire to avoid work and generally to cause mischief. It was commonly known to
overseers as “rascality.” Its cause, similar to that of Drapetomania, was a lack of firm
governance, and it was therefore far more common among free blacks than among
slaves—indeed, nearly universal among them—a lthough it was a “common occur-
rence on b adly-g overned plantations” as well.6
Dr. Van Evrie also contributed to this line of thought when he wrote in the 1860s
that education of African Americans came “at the expense of the body, shortening
the existence” and resulted in bodies “dwarfed or destroyed” by the unnatural exer-
tion. “An ‘educated negro,’ like a ‘free negro,’ is a social monstrosity, even more un-
natural and repulsive than the latter.” He argued further that, since they belonged
to a race inferior by nature, all blacks were necessarily inferior to (nearly) all whites.
It occasionally happened that a particular white person might not be superior to all
black people because of a condition that “deforms or blights individuals; they may
84 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
be idiotic, insane, or otherwise incapable.” But these unnatural exceptions to the
rule were “the result of human vices, crimes, or ignorance, immediate or remote.”
Only disability might lower a white person in the scale of life to the level of being of
a marked race.7 . . .
Daryl Michael Scott has described how both conservatives and liberals have long
used an extensive repertory of “damage imagery” to describe African Americans. Con-
servatives “operated primarily from within a biological framework and argued for the
innate inferiority of people of African descent” in order to justify social and politi-
cal exclusion. Liberals maintained that social conditions were responsible for black
inferiority and used damage imagery to argue for inclusion and rehabilitation; but
regardless of their intentions, Scott argues, liberal damage imagery “reinforced the be-
lief system that made whites feel superior in the first place.” Both the “contempt and
pity” of conservatives and liberals—a phrase that equally well describes historically
prevalent attitudes toward disabled people—framed Americans of African descent
as defective. Scott cites the example of Charles S. Johnson, chair of the social sci-
ence department and later president of Fisk University, who told students in a 1928
speech that “the sociologists classify Negroes with cripples, persons with recognized
physical handicaps.” Like Johnson, Scott is critical of the fact that “African A mericans
were often lumped with the ‘defective,’ ‘delinquent,’ and dependent classes.” This is
obviously a bad place to be “lumped.” Scott does not ask, however, why that might
be the case.8 The attribution of disease or disability to racial minorities has a long
history. Yet, while many have pointed out the injustice and perniciousness of attribut-
ing these qualities to a racial or ethnic group, little has been written about why these
attributions are such powerful weapons for inequality, why they were so furiously
denied and condemned by their targets, and what this tells us about our attitudes
toward disability.
During the long-r unning debate over women’s suffrage in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, one of the rhetorical tactics of suffrage opponents was to point to
the physical, intellectual, and psychological flaws of women, their frailty, irrationality,
and emotional excesses. By the late nineteenth century, these claims were sometimes
expressed in terms of evolutionary progress; like racial and ethnic minorities, women
were said to be less evolved than white men, their disabilities a result of lesser evo-
lutionary development. Cynthia Eagle Russett has noted that “women and savages,
together with idiots, criminals, and pathological monstrosities [those with congenital
disabilities] were a constant source of anxiety to male intellectuals in the late nine-
teenth century.”9 What all shared was an evolutionary inferiority, the result of arrested
development or atavism.
Paralleling the arguments made in defense of slavery, two types of disability ar-
gument were used in opposition to women’s suffrage: that women had disabilities
that made them incapable of using the franchise responsibly, and that because of
their frailty women would become disabled if exposed to the rigors of political par-
ticipation. The American anti-s uffragist Grace Goodwin, for example, pointed to the
“great temperamental disabilities” with which women had to contend: “woman lacks
endurance in things mental. . . . She lacks nervous stability. The suffragists who
9 Baynton / Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History 85
d ismay England are nervesick women.” The second line of argument, which was not
incompatible with the first and often accompanied it, went beyond the claim that
women’s flaws made them incapable of exercising equal political and social rights
with men to warn that if women were given those rights, disability would surely fol-
low. This argument is most closely identified with Edward Clarke, author of Sex in
Education; or, A Fair Chance for Girls. Clarke’s argument chiefly concerned education
for women, though it was often applied to suffrage as well. Clarke maintained that
overuse of the brain among young women was in large part responsible for the “num-
berless pale, weak, neuralgic, dyspeptic, hysterical, menorraghic, dysmenorrhoeic
girls and women” of America. The result of excessive education in this country was
“bloodless female faces, that suggest consumption, scrofula, anemia, and neuralgia.”
An appropriate education designed for their frail constitutions would ensure “a fu-
ture secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the
nervous system.”10
Similarly, Dr. William Warren Potter, addressing the Medical Society of New York
in 1891, suggested that many a mother was made invalid by inappropriate education:
“her reproductive organs were dwarfed, deformed, weakened, and diseased, by arti-
ficial causes imposed upon her during their development.”11 Dr. A. Lapthorn Smith
asserted in Popular Science Monthly that educated women were increasingly “sick and
suffering before marriage and are physically disabled from performing physiological
functions in a normal manner.” Antisuffragists likewise warned that female participa-
tion in politics invariably led to “nervous prostration” and “hysteria,” while Dr. Alm-
roth E. Wright noted the “fact that there is mixed up with the woman’s movement
much mental disorder.” A prominent late n ineteenth-century neurophysiologist,
Charles L. Dana, estimated that enfranchising women would result in a 25 percent
increase in insanity among them and “throw into the electorate a mass of voters of
delicate nervous stability . . . which might do injury to itself without promoting
the community’s good.” The answer for Clarke, Potter, and others of like mind was
special education suited to women’s special needs. As with disabled people today,
women’s social position was treated as a medical problem that necessitated separate
and special care. Those who wrote with acknowledged authority on the “woman
question” were doctors. As Clarke wrote, the answer to the “problem of woman’s
sphere . . . must be obtained from physiology, not from ethics or metaphysics.”12 . . .
Disability figured not just in arguments for the inequality of women and minorities but
also in arguments against those inequalities. Suffragists rarely challenged the notion that
disability justified political inequality and instead disputed the claim that women suffered
from these disabilities. Their arguments took three forms: one, women were not disabled
and therefore deserved the vote; two, women were being erroneously and slanderously
classed with disabled people, with those who were legitimately denied suffrage; and three,
women were not naturally or inherently disabled but were made disabled by inequality—
suffrage would ameliorate or cure these disabilities. . . .
Ethnicity also has been defined by disability. One of the fundamental impera-
tives in the initial formation of American immigration policy at the end of the
nineteenth century was the exclusion of disabled people. Beyond the targeting of
86 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
disabled people, the concept of disability was instrumental in crafting the image
of the undesirable immigrant. The first major federal immigration law, the Act of
1882, prohibited entry to any “lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care
of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” Those placed in the
categories “lunatic” and “idiot” were automatically excluded. The “public charge”
provision was intended to encompass people with disabilities more generally
and was left to the examining officer’s discretion. The criteria for excluding
disabled people were steadily tightened as the eugenics movement and popular
fears about the decline of the national stock gathered strength. The Act of 1891
replaced the phrase “unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming
a public charge,” with “likely to become a public charge.” The 1907 law then
denied entry to anyone judged “mentally or physically defective, such mental
or physical defect being of a nature which may affect the ability of such alien to
earn a living.” These changes considerably lowered the threshold for exclusion
and expanded the latitude of immigration officials to deny entry.13
The category of persons automatically excluded was also steadily expanded. In
1903, people with epilepsy were added and, in addition to those judged insane,
“persons who have been insane within five years previous [or] who have had two or
more attacks of insanity at any time previously.” This was reduced to one “attack”
in the 1917 law; the classification of “constitutional psychopathic inferiority” was
also added, which inspection regulations described as including “various unstable
individuals on the border line between sanity and insanity . . . and persons with
abnormal sex instincts.”14 This was the regulation under which, until recently, gays
and lesbians were excluded. One of the significant factors in lifting this ban, along
with other forms of discrimination against gays and lesbians, was the decision by the
American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to remove homosexuality from its list of
mental illnesses. That is, once gays and lesbians were declared not to be disabled,
discrimination became less justifiable.
Legislation in 1907 added “imbeciles” and “feeble-m inded persons” to the list, in
addition to “idiots,” and regulations for inspectors directed them to exclude persons
with “any mental abnormality whatever . . . which justifies the statement that the
alien is mentally defective.” These changes encompassed a much larger number of
people and again granted officials considerably more discretion to judge the fitness
of immigrants for American life. Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who worked his way through
law school as an interpreter at Ellis Island, later wrote that “over fifty percent of the
deportations for alleged mental disease were unjustified,” based as they often were on
“ignorance on the part of the immigrants or the doctors and the inability of the doctors
to understand the particular immigrant’s norm, or standard.”15
The detection of physical disabilities was a major aspect of the immigration in-
spector’s work. The Regulations for the medical inspection of immigrants in 1917
included a long list of diseases and disabilities that could be cause for exclusion,
among them arthritis, asthma, bunions, deafness, deformities, flat feet, heart disease,
hernia, hysteria, poor eyesight, poor physical development, spinal curvature, vascular
disease of the heart, and varicose veins. . . .
9 Baynton / Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History 87
In short, the exclusion of disabled people was central to the laws and the work
of the immigration service. As the Commissioner General of Immigration reported
in 1907, “The exclusion from this country of the morally, mentally, and physically
deficient is the principal object to be accomplished by the immigration laws.” Once
the laws and procedures limiting the entry of disabled people were firmly established
and functioning well, attention turned to limiting the entry of undesirable ethnic
groups. Discussion on this topic often began by pointing to the general public agree-
ment that the laws excluding disabled people had been a positive, if insufficient, step.
In 1896, for example, Francis Walker noted in the Atlantic Monthly that the necessity
of “straining out” immigrants who were “deaf, dumb, blind, idiotic, insane, pauper,
or criminal” was “now conceded by men of all shades of opinion”; indeed there was
a widespread “resentment at the attempt of such persons to impose themselves upon
us.” As one restrictionist wrote, the need to exclude the disabled was “self evident.”16
For the more controversial business of defining and excluding undesirable ethnic
groups, however, restrictionists found the concept of disability to be a powerful tool.
That is, while people with disabilities constituted a distinct category of persons un-
welcome in the United States, the charge that certain ethnic groups were mentally
and physically deficient was instrumental in arguing for their exclusion. The belief
that discriminating on the basis of disability was justifiable in turn helped justify the
creation of immigration quotas based on ethnic origin. The 1924 Immigration Act
instituted a national quota system that severely limited the numbers of immigrants
from southern and eastern Europe, but long before that, disabilities stood in for na-
tionality. Superintendents of institutions, philanthropists, immigration reformers, and
politicians had been warning for decades before 1924 that immigrants were dispro-
portionately prone to be mentally defective—u p to half the immigrants from south-
ern and eastern Europe were feebleminded, according to expert opinion.17 Rhetoric
about “the slow-w itted Slav,” the “neurotic condition of our Jewish immigrants,” and,
in general, the “degenerate and psychopathic types, which are so conspicuous and
numerous among the immigrants,” was pervasive in the debate over restriction.18 The
laws forbidding entry to the feebleminded were motivated in part by the desire to
limit immigration from inferior nations, and conversely, it was assumed that the 1924
act would reduce the number of feebleminded immigrants. The issues of ethnicity
and disability were so intertwined in the immigration debate as to be inseparable. . . .
Historians have scrutinized the attribution of mental and physical inferiority
based on race and ethnicity, but only to condemn the slander. With their attention
confined to ethnic stereotypes, they have largely ignored what the attribution of
disability might also tell us about attitudes toward disabled people. Racial and eth-
nic prejudice is exposed while prejudice against people with disabilities is passed
over as insignificant and understandable. As a prominent advocate of restriction
wrote in 1930, “The necessity of the exclusion of the crippled, the blind, those
who are likely to become public charges, and, of course, those with a criminal
record is self evident.”19 The necessity has been treated as self-e vident by histori-
ans as well, so much so that even the possibility of discrimination against people
with disabilities in immigration law has gone unrecognized. In historical accounts,
88 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
disability is present but rendered invisible or insignificant. While it is certain that
immigration restriction rests in good part on a fear of “strangers in the land,” in
John Higham’s phrase, American immigration restriction at the turn of the century
was also clearly fueled by a fear of defectives in the land.
Still today, women and other groups who face discrimination on the basis of identity
respond angrily to accusations that they might be characterized by physical, mental, or
emotional disabilities. Rather than challenging the basic assumptions behind the hierarchy,
they instead work to remove themselves from the negatively marked categories—that is, to
disassociate themselves from those people who “really are” disabled—k nowing that such
categorization invites discrimination. For example, a recent proposal in Louisiana to permit
pregnant women to use parking spaces reserved for people with mobility impairments was
opposed by women’s organizations. A lobbyist for the Women’s Health Foundation said,
“We’ve spent a long time trying to dispel the myth that pregnancy is a disability, for obvi-
ous reasons of discrimination.” She added, “I have no problem with it being a courtesy,
but not when a legislative mandate provides for pregnancy in the same way as for disabled
persons.”20 To be associated with disabled people or with the accommodations accorded
disabled people is stigmatizing. . . .
This common strategy for attaining equal rights, which seeks to distance one’s own
group from imputations of disability and therefore tacitly accepts the idea that dis-
ability is a legitimate reason for inequality, is perhaps one of the factors responsible for
making discrimination against people with disabilities so persistent and the struggle
for disability rights so difficult. . . .
Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicu
ously absent in the histories we write. When historians do take note of disability,
they usually treat it merely as personal tragedy or an insult to be deplored and a
label to be denied, rather than as a cultural construct to be questioned and ex-
plored. Those of us who specialize in the history of disability, like the early histo-
rians of other minority groups, have concentrated on writing histories of disabled
people and the institutions and laws associated with disability. This is necessary and
exciting work. It is through this work that we are building the case that disability is
culturally constructed rather than natural and timeless—that disabled people have
a history, and a history worth studying. Disability, however, more than an identity,
is a fundamental element in cultural signification and indispensable for any histo-
rian seeking to make sense of the past. It may well be that all social hierarchies have
drawn on culturally constructed and socially sanctioned notions of disability. If this
is so, then there is much work to do. It is time to bring disability from the margins
to the center of historical inquiry.
NOTES
1. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 160–66. See also Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone
Books, 1989); Douglas C. Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign
Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), chaps. 5–6.
9 Baynton / Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History 89
2. Francois Ewald, “Norms Discipline, and the Law,” Representations 30 (Spring 1990):
146, 149–150, 154; Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (Lon-
don: Verso, 1995); Baynton, Forbidden Signs, chaps. 5 and 6.
3. Samuel A. Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro
Race,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 7 (May 1851): 693; George M. Fredrickson, The
Black Image in the White Mind (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 250–51; J. C. Nott, “The Mu-
latto a Hybrid,” American Journal of Medical Sciences (July 1843), quoted in Samuel Forry, “Vital
Statistics Furnished by the Sixth Census of the United States,” New York Journal of Medicine and
the Collateral Sciences 1 (September 1843): 151–53.
4. John H. Van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination, or Negroes a Subordinate
Race (New York: Van Evrie, Horton, & Co., 1868), 153–55; Forry, “Vital Statistics,” 159;
Paul B. Barringer, The American Negro: His Past and Future (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton,
1900), 10.
5. Cited in Forry, “Vital Statistics,” 162–63. John C. Calhoun, “Mr. Calhoun to Mr. Pak-
enham,” in Richard K. Cralle, ed., The works of John C. Calhoun (New York: D. Appleton,
1888), 5:337.
6. Cartwright, “Report,” 707–10. See also Thomas S. Szasz, “The Sane Slave: A Histori-
cal Note on the use of Medical Diagnosis as Justificatory Rhetoric,” American Journal of Psycho-
therapy 25 (1971): 228–39.
7. Van Evrie, White Supremacy, 121, 181, 221. Van Evrie notes in his preface that the
book was completed “about the time of Mr. Lincoln’s election” and was therefore originally
an argument in favor of the continuation of slavery but presently constituted an argument for
its restoration.
8. Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black
Soul, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), x i–x vii; 12, 208 n.
52.
9. Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 63. See also Lois N. Magner, “Darwinism and the Woman
Question: The Evolving Views of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” in Joanne Karpinski, ed., Critical Es-
says on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 119–20.
10. Grace Duffield Goodwin, A nti-S uffrage: Ten Good Reasons (New York: Duffield and Co.,
1913), 91–92 (in Smithsonian Institution Archives, Collection 60—Warshaw Collection,
“Women,” Box 3). Edward Clarke, Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for Girls (1873; reprint,
New York: Arno Press, 1972), 18, 22, 62.
11. William Warren Potter, “How Should Girls Be Educated? A Public Health Problem
for Mothers, Educators, and Physicians,” Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of New York
(1891): 48, quoted in Martha H. Verbrugge, Able Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social
Change in Nineteenth-C entury Boston (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988),
121.
12. A. Lapthorn Smith, “Higher Education of Women and Race Suicide,” Popular Science
Monthly (March 1905), reprinted in Louise Michele Newman, ed., Men’s Ideas/Women’s Reali-
ties: Popular Science, 1870–1915 (New York: Pergamon Press, 1985), 149; Almroth E. Wright
quoted in Mara Mayor, “Fears and Fantasies of the Anti-S uffragists,” Connecticut Review 7
(April 1974): 67; Charles L. Dana quoted in Jane Jerome Camhi, Women against Women: Ameri-
can A nti-S uffragism, 1880–1920 (New York: Carlson Publishing Co., 1994), 18; Clarke, Sex in
Education, 12.
13. United States Statutes at Large (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1883),
22:214. United States Statutes at Large (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing O ffice, 1891),
90 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
26:1084; United States Statutes at Large (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1907),
34:899. Emphases added.
14. United States Statutes at Large (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1903),
32:1213; United States Public Health Service, Regulations Governing the Medical
Inspection of Aliens (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), 28–29.
15. Statutes (1907), 34:899; United States Public Health Service, Regulations, 30–31;
Fiorello H. LaGuardia, The Making of an Insurgent: An Autobiography, 1882–1919 (1948; reprint,
New York: Capricorn, 1961), 65.
16. U.S. Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Immigration (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1907), 62; Francis A. Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,”
Atlantic Monthly 77 (June 1896): 822; Ellsworth Eliot, Jr., M.D., “Immigration,” in Madison Grant
and Charles Steward Davison, eds., The Alien in Our Midst, or Selling Our Birthright for a Mess of In-
dustrial Pottage (New York: Galton Publishing Co., 1930), 101.
17. See James W. Trent, Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the
United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 166–69.
18. Thomas Wray Grayson, “The Effect of the Modern Immigrant on Our Industrial
Centers” in Medical Problems of Immigration (Easton, Penn.: American Academy of Medicine,
1913), 103, 107–9.
19. Ellsworth Eliot, Jr., M.D., “Immigration,” in Grant and Davison, Alien in Our Midst, 101.
20. Heather Salerno, “Mother’s Little Dividend: Parking,” Washington Post (Sept ember 16,
1997): A1.
10 Domination and Subordination
Jean Baker Miller
What do people do to people who are different from them and why? On the indi-
vidual level, the child grows only via engagement with people very different from her/
himself. Thus, the most significant difference is between the adult and the child. At
the level of humanity in general, we have seen massive problems around a great vari-
ety of differences. But the most basic difference is the one between women and men.
On both levels it is appropriate to pose two questions. When does the engagement
of difference stimulate the development and the enhancement of both parties to the
engagement? And, conversely, when does such a confrontation with difference have
negative effects: When does it lead to great difficulty, deterioration, and distortion and
to some of the worst forms of degradation, terror, and v iolence—b oth for individu-
als and for g roups—that human beings can experience? It is clear that “mankind” in
general, especially in our Western tradition but in some others as well, does not have
a very glorious record in this regard.
It is not always clear that in most instances of difference there is also a factor of
inequality—inequality of many kinds of resources, but fundamentally of status and
power. One useful way to examine the often confusing results of these confrontations
with difference is to ask: What happens in situations of inequality? What forces are
set in motion? While we will be using the terms “dominant” and “subordinate” in
the discussion, it is useful to remember that flesh and blood women and men are
involved. Speaking in abstractions sometimes permits us to accept what we might
not admit to on a personal level.
Temporary Inequality
Two types of inequality are pertinent for present purposes. The first might be called
temporary inequality. Here, the lesser party is socially defined as unequal. Major
examples are the relationships between parents and children, teachers and students,
and, possibly, therapists and clients. There are certain assumptions in these relation-
ships which are often not made explicit, nor, in fact, are they carried through. But
they are the social structuring of the relationship.
The “superior” party presumably has more of some ability or valuable quality,
which she/he is supposed to impart to the “lesser” person. While these abilities vary
with the particular relationship, they include emotional maturity, experience in the
world, physical skills, a body of knowledge, or the techniques for acquiring certain
kinds of knowledge. The superior person is supposed to engage with the lesser in
such a way as to bring the lesser member up to full parity; that is, the child is to be
From Toward a New Psychology of Women. © 1976, 1986 by Jean Baker Miller. Reprinted by
permission of the author.
91
92 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
helped to become the adult. Such is the overall task of this relationship. The lesser,
the child, is to be given to, by the person who presumably has more to give. Although
the lesser party often also gives much to the superior, these relationships are based in
service to the lesser party. That is their raison d’être.
It is clear, then, that the paramount goal is to end the relationship; that is, to end
the relationship of inequality. The period of disparity is meant to be temporary. People
may continue their association as friends, colleagues, or even competitors, but not as
“superior” and “lesser.” At least this is the goal.
The reality is that we have trouble enough with this sort of relationship. Parents
or professional institutions often tip toward serving the needs of the donor instead of
those of the lesser party (for example, schools can come to serve teachers or admin-
istrators, rather than students). Or the lesser person learns how to be a good “lesser”
rather than how to make the journey from lesser to full stature. Overall, we have
not found very good ways to carry out the central task: to foster the movement from
unequal to equal. In childrearing and education we do not have an adequate theory
and practice. Nor do we have concepts that work well in such other unequal so-c alled
“helping” relationships as healing, penology, and rehabilitation. Officially, we say we
want to do these things, but we often fail.
We have a great deal of trouble deciding on how many rights “to allow” to the lesser
party. We agonize about how much power the lesser party shall have. How much can the
lesser person express or act on her or his perceptions when these definitely differ from
those of the superior? Above all, there is great difficulty in maintaining the conception of
the lesser person as a person of as much intrinsic worth as the superior.
A crucial point is that power is a major factor in all of these relationships. But
power alone will not suffice. Power exists and it has to be taken into account, not
denied. The superiors hold all the real power, but power will not accomplish the task.
It will not bring the unequal party up to equality.
Our troubles with these relationships may stem from the fact that they exist within
the context of a second type of inequality that tends to overwhelm the ways we learn
to operate in the first kind. The second type molds the very ways we perceive and
conceptualize what we are doing in the first, most basic kind of relationships.
The second type of inequality teaches us how to enforce inequality, but
not how to make the journey from unequal to equal. Most importantly, its
consequences are kept amazingly o bscure—in fact they are usually denied. . . . How-
ever, the underlying notion is that this second type has determined, and still deter-
mines, the only ways we can think and feel in the first type.
Permanent Inequality
In these relationships, some people or groups of people are defined as unequal by
means of what sociologists call ascription; that is, your birth defines you. Criteria may
be race, sex, class, nationality, religion, or other characteristics ascribed at birth. Here,
the terms of the relationships are very different from those of temporary inequal-
ity. There is, for example, no notion that superiors are present primarily to help
10 Miller / Domination and Subordination 93
inferiors, to impart to them their advantages and “desirable” characteristics. There is
no assumption that the goal of the unequal relationship is to end the inequality; in
fact, quite the reverse. A series of other governing tendencies are in force, and occur
with great regularity. . . . While some of these elements may appear obvious, in fact
there is a great deal of disagreement and confusion about psychological characteristics
brought about by conditions as obvious as these.
Dominants
Once a group is defined as inferior, the superiors tend to label it as defective or sub-
standard in various ways. These labels accrete rapidly. Thus, blacks are described as
less intelligent than whites, women are supposed to be ruled by emotion, and so on.
In addition, the actions and words of the dominant group tend to be destructive of
the subordinates. All historical evidence confirms this tendency. And, although they
are much less obvious, there are destructive effects on the dominants as well. The
latter are of a different order and are much more difficult to recognize.
Dominant groups usually define one or more acceptable roles for the subordinate.
Acceptable roles typically involve providing services that no dominant group wants
to perform for itself (for example, cleaning up the dominant’s waste products). Func-
tions that a dominant group prefers to perform, on the other hand, are carefully
guarded and closed to subordinates. Out of the total range of human possibilities,
the activities most highly valued in any particular culture will tend to be enclosed
within the domain of the dominant group; less valued functions are releg ated to the
subordinates.
Subordinates are usually said to be unable to perform the preferred roles. Their
incapacities are ascribed to innate defects or deficiencies of mind or body, there-
fore immutable and impossible of change or development. It becomes difficult for
dominants even to imagine that subordinates are capable of performing the preferred
activities. More importantly, subordinates themselves can come to find it difficult to
believe in their own ability. The myth of their inability to fulfill wider or more valued
roles is challenged only when a drastic event disrupts the usual arrangements. Such
disruptions usually arise from outside the relationship itself. For instance, in the
emergency situation of World War II, “incompetent” women suddenly “manned” the
factories with great skill.
It follows that subordinates are described in terms of, and encouraged to develop,
personal psychological characteristics that are pleasing to the dominant group. These
characteristics form a certain familiar cluster: submissiveness, passivity, docility, de-
pendency, lack of initiative, inability to act, to decide, to think, and the like. In
general, this cluster includes qualities more characteristic of children than a dults—
immaturity, weakness, and helplessness. If subordinates adopt these characteristics
they are considered well-adjusted.
However, when subordinates show the potential for, or even more danger-
ously have developed other characteristics—let us say intelligence, initiative,
a ssertiveness—there is usually no room available within the dominant framework
94 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
for acknowledgement of these characteristics. Such people will be defined as at least
unusual, if not definitely abnormal. There will be no opportunities for the direct ap-
plication of their abilities within the social arrangements. (How many women have
pretended to be dumb!)
Dominant groups usually impede the development of subordinates and block
their freedom of expression and action. They also tend to militate against stirrings of
greater rationality or greater humanity in their own members. It was not too long ago
that “nigger lover” was a common appellation, and even now men who “allow their
women” more than the usual scope are subject to ridicule in many circles.
A dominant group, inevitably, has the greatest influence in determining a culture’s
overall outlook—its philosophy, morality, social theory, and even its science. The
dominant group, thus, legitimizes the unequal relationship and incorporates it into
society’s guiding concepts. The social outlook, then, obscures the true nature of this
relationship—that is, the very existence of inequality. The culture explains the events
that take place in terms of other premises, premises that are inevitably false, such as ra-
cial or sexual inferiority. While in recent years we have learned about many such falsities
on the larger social level, a full analysis of the psychological implications still remains
to be developed. In the case of women, for example, despite overwhelming evidence to
the contrary, the notion persists that women are meant to be passive, submissive, docile,
secondary. From this premise, the outcome of therapy and encounters with psychology
and other “sciences” are often determined.
Inevitably, the dominant group is the model for “normal human relationships.” It
then becomes “normal” to treat others destructively and to derogate them, to obscure
the truth of what you are doing, by creating false explanations, and to oppose ac-
tions toward equality. In short, if one’s identification is with the dominant group, it is
“normal” to continue in this pattern. Even though most of us do not like to think of
ourselves as either believing in, or engaging in, such dominations, it is, in fact, dif-
ficult for a member of a dominant group to do otherwise. But to keep on doing these
things, one need only behave “normally.”
It follows from this that dominant groups generally do not like to be told about
or even quietly reminded of the existence of inequality. “Normally” they can avoid
awareness because their explanation of the relationship becomes so well integrated
in other terms; they can even believe that both they and the subordinate group share
the same interests and, to some extent, a common experience. If pressed a bit, the
familiar rationalizations are offered: the home is “women’s natural place,” and we
know “what’s best for them anyhow.”
Dominants prefer to avoid c onflict—o pen conflict that might call into question
the whole situation. This is particularly and tragically so, when many members of the
dominant group are not having an easy time of it themselves. Members of a dominant
group, or at least some segments of it, such as white w orking-c lass men (who are
themselves also subordinates), often feel unsure of their own narrow toehold on the
material and psychological bounties they believe they desperately need. What domi-
nant groups usually cannot act on, or even see, is that the situation of inequality in
fact deprives them, particularly on the psychological level.
10 Miller / Domination and Subordination 95
Clearly, inequality has created a state of conflict. Yet dominant groups will tend to
suppress conflict. They will see any questioning of the “normal” situation as threaten-
ing; activities by subordinates in this direction will be perceived with alarm. Domi-
nants are usually convinced that the way things are is right and good, not only for
them but especially for the subordinates. All morality confirms this view, and all
social structure sustains it.
It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the dominant group usually holds all of the open
power and authority and determines the ways in which power may be acceptably used.
Subordinates
What of the subordinates’ part in this? Since dominants determine what is normal
for a culture, it is much more difficult to understand subordinates. Initial expressions
of dissatisfaction and early actions by subordinates always come as a surprise; they
are usually rejected as atypical. After all, dominants knew that all women needed and
wanted was a man around whom to organize their lives. Members of the dominant
group do not understand why “they”—the first to speak o ut—a re so upset and angry.
The characteristics that typify the subordinates are even more complex. A subordinate
group has to concentrate on basic survival. Accordingly, direct, honest reaction to de-
structive treatment is avoided. Open, self-initiated action in its own self-interest must also
be avoided. Such actions can, and still do, literally result in death for some subordinate
groups. In our own society, a woman’s direct action can result in a combination of eco-
nomic hardship, social ostracism, and psychological isolation—a nd even the diagnosis of
a personality disorder. Any one of these consequences is bad enough. . . .
It is not surprising then that a subordinate group resorts to disguised and indirect ways
of acting and reacting. While these actions are designed to accommodate and please the
dominant group, they often, in fact, contain hidden defiance and “put ons.” Folk tales,
black jokes, and women stories are often based on how the wily peasant or sharecropper
outwitted the rich landowner, boss, or husband. The essence of the story rests on the fact
that the overlord does not even know that he has been made a fool of.
One important result of this indirect mode of operation is that members of the
dominant group are denied an essential part of life—the opportunity to acquire self-
understanding through knowing their impact on others. They are thus deprived of
“consensual validation,” feedback, and a chance to correct their actions and expres-
sions. Put simply, subordinates won’t tell. For the same reasons, the dominant group
is deprived also of valid knowledge about the subordinates. (It is particularly ironic
that the societal “experts” in knowledge about subordinates are usually members of
the dominant group.)
Subordinates, then, know much more about the dominants than vice versa. They
have to. They become highly attuned to the dominants, able to predict their reac-
tions of pleasure and displeasure. Here, I think, is where the long story of “feminine
intuition” and “feminine wiles” begins. It seems clear that these “mysterious” gifts are
in fact skills, developed through long practice, in reading many small signals, both
verbal and nonverbal.
96 PART I The Social Construction of Difference: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
Another important result is that subordinates often know more about the
d ominants than they know about themselves. If a large part of your fate depends on
accommodating to and pleasing the dominants, you concentrate on them. Indeed,
there is little purpose in knowing yourself. Why should you when your knowledge
of the dominants determines your life? This tendency is reinforced by many other
restrictions. One can know oneself only through action and interaction. To the extent
that their range of action or interaction is limited, subordinates will lack a realistic
evaluation of their capacities and problems. Unfortunately, this difficulty in gaining
s elf-k nowledge is even further compounded.
Tragic confusion arises because subordinates absorb a large part of the untruths
created by the dominants; there are a great many blacks who feel inferior to whites,
and women who still believe they are less important than men. This internalization of
dominant beliefs is more likely to occur if there are few alternative concepts at hand.
On the other hand, it is also true that members of the subordinate group have certain
experiences and perceptions that accurately reflect the truth about themselves and the
injustice of their position. Their own more truthful concepts are bound to come into
opposition with the mythology they have absorbed from the dominant group. An inner
tension between the two sets of concepts and their derivations is almost inevitable.
From a historical perspective, despite the obstacles, subordinate groups have tended
to move toward greater freedom of expression and action, although this progress varies
greatly from one circumstance to another. There were always some slaves who revolted;
there were some women who sought greater development or self-d etermination. Most
records of these actions are not preserved by the dominant culture, making it difficult
for the subordinate group to find a supporting tradition and history.
Within each subordinate group, there are tendencies for some members to imitate
the dominants. This imitation can take various forms. Some may try to treat their fellow
subordinates as destructively as the dominants treat them. A few may develop enough
of the qualities valued by the dominants to be partially accepted into their fellowship.
Usually they are not wholly accepted, and even then only if they are willing to forsake
their own identification with fellow subordinates. “Uncle Toms” and certain profes-
sional women have often been in this position. (There are always a few women who
have won the praise presumably embodied in the phrase “she thinks like a man.”)
To the extent that subordinates move toward freer expression and action, they
will expose the inequality and throw into question the basis for its existence. And
they will make the inherent conflict an open conflict. They will then have to bear the
burden and take the risks that go with being defined as “troublemakers.” Since this
role flies in the face of their conditioning, subordinates, especially women, do not
come to it with ease.
What is immediately apparent from studying the characteristics of the two groups
is that mutually enhancing interaction is not probable between unequals. Indeed,
conflict is inevitable. The important questions, then, become: Who defines the
conflict? Who sets the terms? When is conflict overt or covert? On what issues is
the conflict fought? Can anyone win? Is conflict “bad,” by definition? If not, what
makes for productive or destructive conflict?
Suggestions for Further Reading 97
Suggestions for Further Reading
Alba, Richard D. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White American Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1990.
Blazina, Chris. Cultural Myth of Masculinity. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Connell, R. W. Masculinities, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2015.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic
Books, 2000.
Feinberg, Leslie. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1997.
Feinberg, Leslie. Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.
Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Gould, Stephen. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984.
Greenbaum, Susan. Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images of P overty.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Gregory, Steven, and Roger Sanjek, eds. Race. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Hubbard, Ruth. The Politics of Women’s Biology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Katz, Jonathan Ned. The Invention of Heterosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
———. Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
U niversity Press, 2010.
Kleinman, Sherryl, Martha Copp, and Kent Sandstrom. “Making Sexism Visible: Birdcages, Martians, and
Pregnant Men.” Teaching Sociology, 35, pp. 126–142.
Lopez, Ian F. Haney. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press,
1996.
Lorber, Judith. Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Lowe, Marion, and Ruth Hubbard, eds. Women’s Nature: Rationalizations of Inequality. New York: P ergamon
Press, 1984.
Memmi, Albert. Dominated Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formations in the United States, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1994.
Roberts, Dorothy. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First
Century. New York: The New Press, 2012.
Roediger, David. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
———. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso,
2007.
Sanday, Peggy R. Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Stryker, Susan. Transgender History. Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008.
Williams, Gregory Howard. Life on the Color Line. New York: Dutton, 1995.
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PA R T IISelectionTitle 99
Understanding Racism,
Sexism, Heterosexism,
and Class Privilege
In Part II, we spend some time analyzing systems of oppression and examining the
relations of dominance and subordination they incorporate almost seamlessly into
daily life. Racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class privilege are systems of advan-
tage that provide those with the “right” race, sex, sexual orientation, and class (or
some intersection of these) with opportunities and rewards that are unavailable
to other individuals and groups in society. Sometimes they work in isolation from
each other, but most often they operate in combination to create a system of
advantage and disadvantage that enhances the life chances of some while limiting
the life chances of others.
The construction of difference as deviance or deficiency underlies the systems
of oppression that determine how power, privilege, wealth, and opportunity are
distributed. We are surrounded by differences every day, but our society places a
value on only some of them. By valuing the characteristics and lifestyles of certain
individuals or groups and devaluing those of others, society constructs some of
its members as “other.” These “others” are understood to be less deserving, less
intelligent, even less human. Once this happens, it is possible to distribute wealth,
opportunity, and justice unequally without appearing to be unfair. The social con-
struction of race, class, gender, and sexuality as d ifference—w here being white,
male, cisgender, European, heterosexual, and prosperous confers the highest
forms of status and privilege while everyone else is considered less able and less
worthy—lies at the heart of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism.
99
100 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
Some people are uncomfortable with words like “racism,” “sexism,” and
“oppression,” which seem to them highly charged and unnecessarily accusatory.
They prefer to talk about “discrimination” and “prejudice.” However, those who
wish to emphasize the complex, pervasive, and s elf-p erpetuating nature of the
system of beliefs, policies, practices, and attitudes that enforce the relations of
subordination and domination in our society find the term “discrimination” too
narrow and too limited to make the point effectively. Words like “racism,” “sex-
ism,” and “oppression” are more appropriate because they capture the compre-
hensive nature of the systems being studied. In Selection 4, Marilyn Frye does a
good job of explaining the meaning of “oppression” in the course of using that
concept to convey the pervasive nature of sexism. Frye uses the metaphor of
a birdcage to illustrate how a system of oppression, in this case sexism, impris-
ons its victims through a set of interlocking impediments to motion. Taken alone,
none of the barriers seems very powerful or threatening; taken together, they are
unyielding.
Racism and sexism are systems of advantage. In the United States, racism per-
petuates an interlocking system of institutions, attitudes, privileges, and rewards
that work to the benefit of white people just as sexism works to the advantage of
men. In Selection 1, Beverly Daniel Tatum elaborates on this definition of racism
(originally offered by David Wellman in his book Portraits of White Racism), and
discusses the resistance that some of us feel about acknowledging both the exist-
ence of racism and the advantages it bestows on people with white privilege.
Once racism is defined as a system of advantages based on race, it is no longer
possible to attribute racism to people of color because clearly they do not sys-
tematically benefit from racism; only white people do. This of course does not
deny that people of all colors are capable of hateful and hurtful behavior, nor does
it prevent us from taking them to task for their prejudice. But it does mean that
we will reserve the term “racism” to refer specifically to the comprehensive system
of advantages that work to the benefit of white people in the United States. For
more on this important and provocative distinction, you will want to turn directly
to the essay by Tatum.
In Selection 2, Eduardo B onilla-S ilva examines the claim made by many white
people in the United States today that racism is a thing of the past and that they
personally do not see race or skin color (or, by extension, sex, class, disability, etc.);
they just see “human beings.” B onilla-S ilva and other sociologists have coined
the term “color-b lind racism” to refer to this new version of racial ideology. In this
essay (a written version of a speech he gave at Texas A&M), B onilla-S ilva argues
that, contrary to what many would like to believe, it is not racists or bigots who
perpetuate the system of racial inequality in this country, but the ordinary behav-
ior of well-m eaning whites as they simply follow “the racial script of America.” In
this way, B onilla-S ilva directs our attention to the ways in which white supremacy
and white privilege are institutionalized by the ordinary operations of society. He
spends most of his essay examining the central frames of color-b lind racism that
allow many who benefit from white privilege to perpetuate the racial status quo
PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege 101
without ever having to take responsibility for society’s ongoing racism. In contrast
to the older and cruder version of racism, Bonilla-S ilva warns us, “[t]oday there
is a sanitized, c olor-b lind way of calling minorities ‘niggers,’ ‘spics,’ or ‘chinks.’”
Today, most whites justify keeping minorities out of the good things in life with
the language of liberalism . . . .”
Angelo Ancheta (Selection 3) asks us to consider racial relations beyond the
binary of black and white, and argues that because legal paradigms, or models,
depend on this dichotomous thinking, they are unable to encompass the com-
plexity of the racialization of Asian Americans. Ancheta offers a discussion of
a nti-A sian violence as illustrative of the racial subordination that Asian Americans
experience, emphasizing that dynamics of immigration and nativism are essential
to how race is configured in the United States.
The term “sexism” refers to the oppression of women by men in a society that
is largely patriarchal. As we discussed, Marilyn Frye provides a powerful analysis of
the sexism that persists in American culture. “Heterosexism” parallels “racism” and
“sexism,” and, according to Suzanne Pharr in Selection 5, involves the assumption
that the world is and must be heterosexual at the same time that it rationalizes
the existing distribution of power and privilege that flows from this assumption.
In her essay, Pharr argues that economics, violence, and homophobia are the
most effective weapons of sexism, and thus homophobia and heterosexism are
oppressive of all women, regardless of their sexual orientation. For more current
statistics on economic inequality (which continue to support Pharr’s claims), take
a look at the material in Part V of this book.
Finally, “class privilege” refers to the system of advantages that continues to
ensure that wealth, power, opportunity, and privilege go hand in hand. In Selection 6,
Gregory Mantsios explores some of the myths about class that mislead people
about their real-life chances and documents the impact of class position on daily
life. Many in the United States are unaware of the full force of class privilege; the
statistics in this article suggest that the class position of one’s family, not hard work,
intelligence, or determination, is probably the single most significant determinant
of future success. This gap between people’s beliefs about what it takes to succeed
and the tremendous role that class privilege plays in determining who is successful
provides a dramatic illustration of the effectiveness of systems of oppression both
in perpetuating the current systems of advantage and in rendering their continuing
operation invisible to so many. This point will be taken up again in Part VIII.
In Selection 7, Annette Lareau looks at the ways in which class affects parenting
practices and documents how middle class children regardless of race are reared
to interact with institutions much differently than their poor and working class
peers. She further explores how these different parenting styles affect how chil-
dren will deal with the educational system and other institutional settings through-
out their lives, thus demonstrating how class intersects with their futures from the
moment they set foot in their elementary school classrooms.
In Section 8, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a c ritical-race theorist, discusses the con-
cept of intersectionality with journalist/blogger Bim Adewunmi. Intersectionality
102 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
is a framework that examines how racism, sexism, and classism interact to form
multiple and compounding layers of oppression. Intersectionality is greater than
the sum of its parts. For example, the experience of racism and sexism that black
women experience can’t be understood by looking at how sexism affects white
women and racism affects black men. Intersectionality calls for an understanding
of the specific and simultaneous ways that different forms of oppression operate.
These are powerful and disturbing claims, and they are likely to provoke equally
strong reactions from readers. Some will feel angry, others will feel depressed and
discouraged, some will feel uncomfortable, others will be skeptical, and some will
simply feel confused. This is understandable. If some people, as these definitions
suggest, have more than their share, then others have less than they deserve,
and each of us must wonder where we will stand in the final computation. Fur-
ther, many readers who are white and working class or middle class will be hard
pressed to imagine what kind of privilege they exercise. They look at their own
lives and the lives of their parents and friends and see people who have worked
very hard for everything they have achieved. The idea that they are privileged may
seem very foreign to them.
These ideas won’t be easy to reconcile. “Heterosexism, class privilege, male
p rivilege—w hat have these abstract and politically charged terms got to do with
me?” many will ask. “I work hard, try to get ahead, wish others well, and feel more
like a victim myself than a victimizer.” Yet this understandable response illustrates
how effectively systems of oppression function in contemporary society to ration-
alize the hierarchy they create, often making its operation invisible both to those
who benefit from it and to those who are shortchanged by it. In addition, it points
to the complicated and ambiguous nature of privilege, in which a single individ-
ual can be privileged in some respects at the very same time that he or she is
disadvantaged in other respects. Let us examine these two points in more detail.
Many people who are privileged fail to realize that they are in fact privileged
because the systems of oppression so effectively make the current distribution
of privilege and power appear almost “natural.” In many cases, people with priv-
ileges have enjoyed them for so long that they have simply come to take them
for granted. Instead of recognizing them as special benefits that come with, for
example, white skin, they just assume that these privileges are things to which
they have a right. For more on this topic, see Peggy McIntosh’s essay, Selection 9,
which does an excellent job of examining how white privilege works.
In other cases, privilege may be difficult to identify and acknowledge because
the individual is privileged in some respects but not in others. For example, those
who are privileged by virtue of their sex or sexual orientation may be disadvan-
taged in other respects—s ay, by virtue of their race/ethnicity or their class position
or both. The disadvantages they experience in some areas may seem so unfair
and so egregious that they prevent them from recognizing the privileges they
nonetheless enjoy. For example, a poor, white, single mother who receives public
assistance and who feels very much at the mercy of an unfair and inhumane sys-
tem might still be able to call upon her white skin privilege or her heterosexual
PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege 103
privilege in certain situations and be oblivious to that privilege because she feels
so disadvantaged in other respects. A working class or lower middle class white
male who has trouble stretching his paycheck to cover all his expenses may be
so preoccupied with his financial situation that he doesn’t recognize the male
privilege and white skin privilege from which he nonetheless benefits—p rivileges
which may not feel at all like privileges to him because he takes them for granted
and regards them as “natural” and “normal.” And finally, since most people are
basically decent and fair, those who are privileged are often simply reluctant to
acknowledge that they have unfair advantages over others because that would
require that they reevaluate their sense of who they are and what they have
accomplished in their lives. Robin DiAngelo’s piece, Selection 10, examines these
very issues. Her essay is a reflection of her own experience as a white woman
who comes from a working class background to demonstrate how racial privilege
interacts with class oppression.
As should by now be clear, all of the thinkers whose work is included in Part II
share the belief that the various systems of oppression operate in relation to one
another, forming an interlocking system of advantages and disadvantages that
rationalize and preserve the prevailing distribution of power and privilege in soci-
ety. As you read these articles, try to keep an open mind about this claim. If these
thinkers are correct, they have something important to tell us about our society
and the forces that will be in place as each of us goes about creating our own
future.
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1 Defining Racism
“Can We Talk?”
Beverly Daniel Tatum
Early in my teaching career, a White student I knew asked me what I would be
teaching the following semester. I mentioned that I would be teaching a course on
racism. She replied, with some surprise in her voice, “Oh, is there still racism?” I
assured her that indeed there was and suggested that she sign up for my course.
Fifteen years later, after exhaustive media coverage of events such as the Rodney
King beating, the Charles Stuart and Susan Smith cases, the O. J. Simpson trial, the
appeal to racial prejudices in electoral politics, and the bitter debates about affirma-
tive action and welfare reform, it seems hard to imagine that anyone would still be
unaware of the reality of racism in our society. But in fact, in almost every audience
I address, there is someone who will suggest that racism is a thing of the past. There
is always someone who hasn’t noticed the stereotypical images of people of color in
the media, who hasn’t observed the housing discrimination in their community, who
hasn’t read the newspaper articles about documented racial bias in lending practices
among well-k nown banks, who isn’t aware of the racial tracking pattern at the local
school, who hasn’t seen the reports of rising incidents of racially motivated hate
crimes in A merica—in short, someone who hasn’t been paying attention to issues of
race. But if you are paying attention, the legacy of racism is not hard to see, and we
are all affected by it.
The impact of racism begins early. Even in our preschool years, we are exposed to
misinformation about people different from ourselves. Many of us grew up in neighbor-
hoods where we had limited opportunities to interact with people different from our
own families. When I ask my college students, “How many of you grew up in neighbor-
hoods where most of the people were from the same racial group as your own?” almost
every hand goes up. There is still a great deal of social segregation in our communities.
Consequently, most of the early information we receive about “others”—people racially,
religiously, or socioeconomically different from ourselves—d oes not come as the result
of firsthand experience. The secondhand information we do receive has often been
distorted, shaped by cultural stereotypes, and left incomplete.
Some examples will highlight this process. Several years ago one of my stu-
dents conducted a research project investigating preschoolers’ conceptions of
Native Americans.1 Using children at a local day care center as her participants, she
asked these three-and four-y ear-o lds to draw a picture of a Native American. Most
children were stumped by her request. They didn’t know what a Native American
was. But when she rephrased the question and asked them to draw a picture of an
From “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations about Race,
pp. 3–13. Copyright © 1997 by Beverly Daniel Tatum. Reprinted by permission of Perseus Books, LLC.
105
106 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
Indian, they readily complied. Almost every picture included one central feature:
feathers. In fact, many of them also included a w eapon—a knife or tomahawk—a nd
depicted the person in violent or aggressive terms. Though this group of children,
almost all of whom were White, did not live near a large Native American population
and probably had had little if any personal interaction with American Indians, they
all had internalized an image of what Indians were like. How did they know? Car-
toon images, in particular the Disney movie Peter Pan, were cited by the children as
their number-o ne source of information. At the age of three, these children already
had a set of stereotypes in place. Though I would not describe three-y ear-o lds as
prejudiced, the stereotypes to which they have been exposed become the foundation
for the adult prejudices so many of us have.
Sometimes the assumptions we make about others come not from what we have
been told or what we have seen on television or in books, but rather from what
we have not been told. The distortion of historical information about people of
color leads young people (and older people, too) to make assumptions that may
go unchallenged for a long time. Consider this conversation between two White
students following a discussion about the cultural transmission of racism:
“Yeah, I just found out that Cleopatra was actually a Black woman.”
“What?”
The first student went on to explain her newly learned information. The second
student exclaimed in disbelief, “That can’t be true. Cleopatra was beautiful!”
What had this young woman learned about who in our society is considered
beautiful and who is not? Had she conjured up images of Elizabeth Taylor when she
thought of Cleopatra? The new information her classmate had shared and her own
deeply ingrained assumptions about who is beautiful and who is not were too incon-
gruous to allow her to assimilate the information at that moment.
Omitted information can have similar effects. For example, another young
woman, preparing to be a high school English teacher, expressed her dismay that
she had never learned about any Black authors in any of her English courses. How
was she to teach about them to her future students when she hadn’t learned about
them herself? A White male student in the class responded to this discussion with
frustration in his response journal, writing “It’s not my fault that Blacks don’t write
books.” Had one of his elementary, high school, or college teachers ever told him
that there were no Black writers? Probably not. Yet because he had never been
exposed to Black authors, he had drawn his own conclusion that there were none.
Stereotypes, omissions, and distortions all contribute to the development of
prejudice. Prejudice is a preconceived judgment or opinion, usually based on lim-
ited information. I assume that we all have prejudices, not because we want them,
but simply because we are so continually exposed to misinformation about others.
Though I have often heard students or workshop participants describe someone
as not having “a prejudiced bone in his body,” I usually suggest that they look
again. Prejudice is one of the inescapable consequences of living in a racist society.
Cultural r acism—the cultural images and messages that affirm the assumed superi-
ority of Whites and the assumed inferiority of people of c olor—is like smog in the
1 Tatum / Defining Racism 107
air. Sometimes it is so thick it is visible, other times it is less apparent, but always,
day in and day out, we are breathing it in. None of us would introduce ourselves
as “s mog-b reathers” (and most of us don’t want to be described as prejudiced), but
if we live in a smoggy place, how can we avoid breathing the air? If we live in an
environment in which we are bombarded with stereotypical images in the media,
are frequently exposed to the ethnic jokes of friends and family members, and are
rarely informed of the accomplishments of oppressed groups, we will develop the
negative categorizations of those groups that form the basis of prejudice.
People of color as well as Whites develop these categorizations. Even a member of
the stereotyped group may internalize the stereotypical categories about his or her own
group to some degree. In fact, this process happens so frequently that it has a name,
internalized oppression. Some of the consequences of believing the distorted messages
about one’s own group will be discussed in subsequent chapters.
Certainly some people are more prejudiced than others, actively embracing and
perpetuating negative and hateful images of those who are different from themselves.
When we claim to be free of prejudice, perhaps what we are really saying is that we
are not hatemongers. But none of us is completely innocent. Prejudice is an integral
part of our socialization, and it is not our fault. Just as the preschoolers my student
interviewed are not to blame for the negative messages they internalized, we are not
at fault for the stereotypes, distortions, and omissions that shaped our thinking as
we grew up.
To say that it is not our fault does not relieve us of responsibility, however. We
may not have polluted the air, but we need to take responsibility, along with others,
for cleaning it up. Each of us needs to look at our own behavior. Am I perpetuating
and reinforcing the negative messages so pervasive in our culture, or am I seeking
to challenge them? If I have not been exposed to positive images of marginalized
groups, am I seeking them out, expanding my own knowledge base for myself and
my children? Am I acknowledging and examining my own prejudices, my own rigid
categorizations of others, thereby minimizing the adverse impact they might have on
my interactions with those I have categorized? Unless we engage in these and other
conscious acts of reflection and reeducation, we easily repeat the process with our
children. We teach what we were taught. The unexamined prejudices of the parents
are passed on to the children. It is not our fault, but it is our responsibility to inter-
rupt this cycle.
Racism: A System of Advantage Based on Race
Many people use the terms prejudice and racism interchangeably. I do not, and I think it
is important to make a distinction. In his book Portraits of White Racism, David Wellman
argues convincingly that limiting our understanding of racism to prejudice does not
offer a sufficient explanation for the persistence of racism. He defines racism as a “system
of advantage based on race.”2 In illustrating this definition, he provides example after
example of how Whites defend their racial advantage—a ccess to better schools, housing,
108 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
jobs—e ven when they do not embrace overtly prejudicial thinking. Racism cannot be
fully explained as an expression of prejudice alone.
This definition of racism is useful because it allows us to see that racism, like other
forms of oppression, is not only a personal ideology based on racial prejudice, but a
system involving cultural messages and institutional policies and practices as well as
the beliefs and actions of individuals. In the context of the United States, this system
clearly operates to the advantage of Whites and to the disadvantage of people of color.
Another related definition of racism, commonly used by antiracist educators and
consultants, is “prejudice plus power.” Racial prejudice when combined with social
power—a ccess to social, cultural, and economic resources and d ecision-m aking—
leads to the institutionalization of racist policies and practices. While I think this
definition also captures the idea that racism is more than individual beliefs and atti-
tudes, I prefer Wellman’s definition because the idea of systematic advantage and dis-
advantage is critical to an understanding of how racism operates in American society.
In addition, I find that many of my White students and workshop participants
do not feel powerful. Defining racism as prejudice plus power has little personal
relevance. For some, their response to this definition is the following: “I’m not really
prejudiced, and I have no power, so racism has nothing to do with me.” However,
most White people, if they are really being honest with themselves, can see that there
are advantages to being White in the United States. Despite the current rhetoric about
affirmative action and “reverse racism,” every social indicator, from salary to life ex-
pectancy, reveals the advantages of being White.3
The systematic advantages of being White are often referred to as White privilege.
In a now w ell-k nown article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,”
Peggy McIntosh, a White feminist scholar, identified a long list of societal privileges
that she received simply because she was White.4 She did not ask for them, and it is
important to note that she hadn’t always noticed that she was receiving them. They
included major and minor advantages. Of course she enjoyed greater access to jobs
and housing. But she also was able to shop in department stores without being fol-
lowed by suspicious salespeople and could always find appropriate hair care products
and makeup in any drugstore. She could send her child to school confident that the
teacher would not discriminate against him on the basis of race. She could also be
late for meetings, and talk with her mouth full, fairly confident that these behaviors
would not be attributed to the fact that she was White. She could express an opinion
in a meeting or in print and not have it labeled the “White” viewpoint. In other words,
she was more often than not viewed as an individual, rather than as a member of a
racial group.
This article rings true for most White readers, many of whom may have never
considered the benefits of being White. It’s one thing to have enough awareness of
racism to describe the ways that people of color are disadvantaged by it. But this new
understanding of racism is more elusive. In very concrete terms, it means that if a
person of color is the victim of housing discrimination, the apartment that would
otherwise have been rented to that person of color is still available for a White person.
The White tenant is, knowingly or unknowingly, the beneficiary of racism, a system
1 Tatum / Defining Racism 109
of advantage based on race. The unsuspecting tenant is not to blame for the prior
discrimination, but she benefits from it anyway.
For many Whites, this new awareness of the benefits of a racist system elicits
considerable pain, often accompanied by feelings of anger and guilt. These uncom-
fortable emotions can hinder further discussion. We all like to think that we deserve
the good things we have received, and that others, too, get what they deserve. Social
psychologists call this tendency a “belief in a just world.”5 Racism directly contradicts
such notions of justice.
Understanding racism as a system of advantage based on race is antithetical to
traditional notions of an American meritocracy. For those who have internalized this
myth, this definition generates considerable discomfort. It is more comfortable simply
to think of racism as a particular form of prejudice. Notions of power or privilege do
not have to be addressed when our understanding of racism is constructed in that way.
The discomfort generated when a systemic definition of racism is introduced is
usually quite visible in the workshops I lead. Someone in the group is usually quick
to point out that this is not the definition you will find in most dictionaries. I reply,
“Who wrote the dictionary?” I am not being facetious with this response. Whose
interests are served by a “prejudice only” definition of racism? It is important to un-
derstand that the system of advantage is perpetuated when we do not acknowledge
its existence.
Racism: For Whites Only?
Frequently someone will say, “You keep talking about White people. People of color
can be racist, too.” I once asked a White teacher what it would mean to her if a stu-
dent or parent of color accused her of being racist. She said she would feel as though
she had been punched in the stomach or called a “low-life scum.” She is not alone in
this feeling. The word racist holds a lot of emotional power. For many White people,
to be called racist is the ultimate insult. The idea that this term might only be applied
to Whites becomes highly problematic for after all, can’t people of color be “low-life
scum” too?
Of course, people of any racial group can hold hateful attitudes and behave in
racially discriminatory and bigoted ways. We can all cite examples of horrible hate
crimes which have been perpetrated by people of color as well as Whites. Hateful
behavior is hateful behavior no matter who does it. But when I am asked, “Can
people of color be racist?” I reply, “The answer depends on your definition of racism.”
If one defines racism as racial prejudice, the answer is yes. People of color can and
do have racial prejudices. However, if one defines racism as a system of advantage
based on race, the answer is no. People of color are not racist because they do not
systematically benefit from racism. And equally important, there is no systematic
cultural and institutional support or sanction for the racial bigotry of people of color.
In my view, reserving the term racist only for behaviors committed by Whites in the
context of a W hite-d ominated society is a way of acknowledging the e ver-p resent
110 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
power differential afforded Whites by the culture and institutions that make up the
system of advantage and continue to reinforce notions of White superiority. (Using
the same logic, I reserve the word sexist for men. Though women can and do have
g ender-b ased prejudices, only men systematically benefit from sexism.)
Despite my best efforts to explain my thinking on this point, there are some who
will be troubled, perhaps even incensed, by my response. To call the racially motivated
acts of a person of color acts of racial bigotry and to describe similar acts committed by
Whites as racist will make no sense to some people, including some people of color.
To those, I will respectfully say, “We can agree to disagree.” At moments like these, it is
not agreement that is essential, but clarity. Even if you don’t like the definition of rac-
ism I am using, hopefully you are now clear about what it is. If I also understand how
you are using the term, our conversation can continue—d espite our disagreement.
Another provocative question I’m often asked is “Are you saying all Whites are rac-
ist?” When asked this question, I again remember that White teacher’s response, and
I am conscious that perhaps the question I am really being asked is, “Are you saying
all Whites are bad people?” The answer to that question is of course not. However,
all White people, intentionally or unintentionally, do benefit from racism. A more rel-
evant question is what are White people as individuals doing to interrupt racism? For
many White people, the image of a racist is a h ood-w earing Klan member or a n ame-
calling Archie Bunker figure. These images represent what might be called active
racism, blatant, intentional acts of racial bigotry and discrimination. Passive racism is
more subtle and can be seen in the collusion of laughing when a racist joke is told,
of letting exclusionary hiring practices go unchallenged, of accepting as appropriate
the omissions of people of color from the curriculum, and of avoiding difficult race-
related issues. Because racism is so ingrained in the fabric of American institutions,
it is easily s elf-perpetuating.6 All that is required to maintain it is business as usual.
I sometimes visualize the ongoing cycle of racism as a moving walkway at the
airport. Active racist behavior is equivalent to walking fast on the conveyor belt. The
person engaged in active racist behavior has identified with the ideology of White
supremacy and is moving with it. Passive racist behavior is equivalent to standing
still on the walkway. No overt effort is being made, but the conveyor belt moves the
bystanders along to the same destination as those who are actively walking. Some of
the bystanders may feel the motion of the conveyor belt, see the active racists ahead
of them, and choose to turn around, unwilling to go to the same destination as the
White supremacists. But unless they are walking actively in the opposite direction at
a speed faster than the conveyor belt—u nless they are actively antiracist—they will
find themselves carried along with the others.
So, not all Whites are actively racist. Many are passively racist. Some, though not
enough, are actively antiracist. The relevant question is not whether all Whites are
racist, but how we can move more White people from a position of active or passive
racism to one of active antiracism. The task of interrupting racism is obviously not the
task of Whites alone. But the fact of White privilege means that Whites have greater
access to the societal institutions in need of transformation. To whom much is given,
much is required.
1 Tatum / Defining Racism 111
It is important to acknowledge that while all Whites benefit from racism, they do
not all benefit equally. Other factors, such as socioeconomic status, gender, age, reli-
gious affiliation, sexual orientation, mental and physical ability, also play a role in our
access to social influence and power. A White woman on welfare is not privileged to
the same extent as a wealthy White heterosexual man. In her case, the systematic disad-
vantages of sexism and classism intersect with her White privilege, but the privilege is
still there. This point was brought home to me in a 1994 study conducted by a Mount
Holyoke graduate student, Phyllis Wentworth.7 Wentworth interviewed a group of
female college students, who were both older than their peers and were the first mem-
bers of their families to attend college, about the pathways that led them to college. All
of the women interviewed were White, from w orking-c lass backgrounds, from families
where women were expected to graduate from high school and get married or get a
job. Several had experienced abusive relationships and other personal difficulties prior
to coming to college. Yet their experiences were punctuated by “good luck” stories of
apartments obtained without a deposit, good jobs offered without experience or ex-
tensive reference checks, and encouragement provided by willing mentors. While the
women acknowledged their good fortune, none of them discussed their Whiteness.
They had not considered the possibility that being White had worked in their favor
and helped give them the benefit of the doubt at critical junctures. This study clearly
showed that even under difficult circumstances, White privilege was still operating.
It is also true that not all people of color are equally targeted by racism. We
all have multiple identities that shape our experience. I can describe myself as
a light-skinned, well-educated, heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian African Ameri-
can woman raised in a middle-c lass suburb. As an African American woman, I am
systematically disadvantaged by race and by gender, but I systematically receive
benefits in the other categories, which then mediate my experience of racism and
sexism. When one is targeted by multiple isms—racism, sexism, classism, heterosex-
ism, ableism, a nti-S emitism, a geism—in whatever combination, the effect is inten-
sified. The particular combination of racism and classism in many communities of
color is life-threatening. Nonetheless, when I, the middle-c lass Black mother of two
sons, read another story about a Black man’s unlucky encounter with a White police
officer’s deadly force, I am reminded that racism by itself can kill.
NOTES
1. C. O’Toole, “The effect of the media and multicultural education on children’s percep-
tions of Native Americans” (senior thesis, Department of Psychology and Education, Mount
Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, May 1990).
2. For an extended discussion of this point, see David Wellman, Portraits of White r acism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), ch. 1.
3. For specific statistical information, see R. Farley, “The common destiny of Blacks and
Whites: Observations about the social and economic status of the races,” pp. 197–233
in H. Hill and J. E. Jones, Jr. (Eds.), Race in America: The struggle for equality (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).
112 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
4. P. McIntosh, “White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack,” Peace and Freedom
(July/August 1989): 10–12.
5. For further discussion of the concept of “belief in a just world,” see M. J. Lerner,
“Social psychology of justice and interpersonal attraction,” in T. Huston (Ed.), Foundations
of interpersonal attraction (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
6. For a brief historical overview of the institutionalization of racism and sexism in our
legal system, see “Part V: How it happened: Race and gender issues in U.S. law,”
in P. S. Rothenberg (Ed.), Race, class, and gender in the United States: An integrated study, 3d ed.
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
7. P. A. Wentworth, “The identity development of n on-t raditionally aged first-g eneration
women college students: An exploratory study” (master’s thesis, Department of Psychology
and Education, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, 1994).
2 Color-B lind Racism
Eduardo Bonilla-S ilva
This is an edited version of a talk given on March 7, 2001, at a forum on racism
at Texas A&M, sponsored by the Multicultural Leadership Forum and the
Department of Multicultural Studies.
For most Americans, talking about racism is talking about white supremacist orga-
nizations or Archie Bunkers. I anchor my remarks from a different theoretical shore
and one that will make many of you feel quite uncomfortable. I contend that racism
is, more than anything else, a matter of group power; it is about a dominant racial group
(whites) striving to maintain its systemic advantages and minorities fighting to subvert the
racial status quo. Hence, although “bigots” are part of America’s (and A&M’s) racial
landscape, they are not the central actors responsible for the reproduction of racial
inequality. If bigots are not the cogs propelling America’s racial dynamics, who are
they? My answer: regular white folks just following the racial script of America. Today
most whites assert that they “don’t see any color, just people”; that although the ugly
face of discrimination is still with us, it is no longer the main factor determining
minorities’ life chances; and, finally, that they, like Dr. Martin Luther King, aspire to
live in a society where “people are judged by the content of their character and not
by the color of their skin.” More poignantly, and in a curious case of group projec-
tion, many whites insist that minorities (especially blacks) are the ones responsible
for our “racial problems.”
But regardless of whites’ “sincere fictions,” racial considerations shade almost ev-
erything that happens in this country. Blacks—a nd d ark-s kinned racial m inorities—
lag well behind whites in virtually every relevant social indicator. For example, blacks
are poorer, earn less, and are significantly less wealthy than whites. They also receive
an inferior education than do whites even when they attend integrated settings. Re-
garding housing, blacks pay more for similar units and, because of discrimination,
cannot access the totality of the housing market in any locality. In terms of social in-
teraction, blacks receive impolite and discriminatory treatment in stores, restaurants,
attempting to hail taxicabs, driving, and in a host of other commercial and social
transactions. In short, blacks are, using the apt metaphor coined by Professor Derrick
Bell, “at the bottom of the well.”
How is it possible to have this tremendous level of racial inequality in a coun-
try where most people (whites) claim that race is no longer a relevant social factor
and that “racists” are a species on the brink of extinction? More significantly, how
do whites explain the contradiction between their professed color blindness and
From the lecture“The Strange Enigma of Racism in Contemporary America,”by Eduardo B onilla-
Silva. Reprinted by permission of the author.
113
114 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
A merica’s color-c oded inequality? I will attempt to answer both of these questions. My
main argument is that whites have developed a new, powerful ideology that justifies
contemporary racial inequality and thus help maintain “systemic white privilege.” I
label this new ideology “c olor-b lind racism” because this term fits quite well the lan-
guage used by whites to defend the racial status quo. This ideology emerged in the
1960s concurrently with what I have labeled the “New Racism.” “New Racism” prac-
tices maintain white privilege, and, unlike those typical of Jim Crow, tend to be slip-
pery, institutional, and apparently nonracial. Post civil rights discrimination, for the
most part, operates in a “now you see it, now you don’t” fashion. For instance, instead
of whites relying on housing covenants or on the Jim Crow signs of the past (e.g.,
“This is a WHITE neighborhood”), today realtors steer blacks into certain neighbor-
hoods, individual whites use “smiling discrimination” to exclude blacks (e.g., studies
by HUD and The Urban Institute), and, in some white neighborhoods, sponsorship
is the hidden strategy relied upon to keep them white. Similar practices are at work
in universities, banks, restaurants, and other venues.
Because the tactics for maintaining systemic white privilege changed in the
1960s, the rationalizations for explaining racial inequality changed, too. Whereas
Jim Crow racism explained blacks’ social standing as the product of their imputed
biological and moral inferiority, color-b lind racism explains it as the product of
market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and presumed cultural deficien-
cies. Below, I will highlight the central frames of color-b lind racism with interview
data from two projects: the 1997 Survey of College Students and the 1998 Detroit
Area Study. The four central frames of color-b lind racism are (1) Abstract Liberalism,
(2) Naturalization, (3) Biologization of Culture, and (4) Minimization of Racism. I discuss
each frame separately.
Abstract Liberalism
Whereas the principles of liberalism and humanism were not extended to nonwhites
in the past, they have become the main rhetorical weapons to justify contemporary
racial inequality. Whites use these principles in an abstract way that allows them to
support the racial status quo in an apparently “reasonable” fashion. For example,
Eric, a corporate auditor in his forties, opposed reparations by relying on an abstract
notion of opportunity. He erupted in anger when asked if he thought reparations were
due to blacks for the injuries caused by slavery and Jim Crow.
Oh tell them to shut up, OK! I had nothing to do with the whole situation. The op-
portunity is there, there is no reparation involved and let’s not dwell on it. I’m very
opinionated about that!
After suggesting that Jews and Japanese are the only groups worthy of receiving
reparations, he added,
But something that happened three Goddamned generations ago, what do you
want us to do about it now? Give them opportunity, give them scholarships, but
reparations . . .
2 Bonilla-Silva / Color-Blind Racism 115
Was Eric just a white man with a “principled opposition” to government intervention?
This does not seem to be the case since Eric, like most whites, makes a distinction
between government spending on behalf of victims of child abuse, the homeless, and
battered women (groups whom he deems as legitimate candidates for assistance) and
on behalf of blacks (a group whom he deems as unworthy of assistance).
Another tenet of liberalism that whites use to explain racial matters is the Jeffer-
sonian idea of meritocracy—“the cream rises to the top.” And whites seem uncon-
cerned by the fact that the color of the “cream” is usually white. For example, Bob,
a student at Southern University, explained his opposition to the idea of providing
blacks unique educational opportunities in meritocratic fashion:
No, I would not. I think, um, I believe that you should be judged on your qualifica-
tions, your experience, your education, your background, not on your race.
Accordingly, Bob opposed affirmative action as follows:
I oppose them mainly because, not because I am a racist, but because I think you
should have the best person for the job. . . . If I was a business owner, I would want
the best person in there to do the job. If I had two people, and had to choose, had to
have one black to meet the quota, I think that’s ridiculous.
Bob then added the following clincher: “I think (affirmative action) had a good
purpose when it was instilled (sic) because it alleviated a lot of anger maybe . . .
minorities felt that they were getting a foot back in the door, but I think times have
changed.” Bob’s argumentative reasonableness is bolstered by his belief that “times
have changed” and that as far as discrimination in America [is concerned], “the bigger
things are already taken care of.”
Another tenet of liberalism that whites employ to state their racial views is the
notion of individualism. For example, Beverly, a co-o wner of a small business and
homemaker in her forties, stated her belief that the government has a duty to see
that no one is prevented from moving into neighborhoods because of racial consid-
erations. Yet, when asked whether the government should work to guarantee that
residential integration becomes a reality, Beverly said the following:
(Sighs) It, it, it just isn’t that important. Where you decide to live is where you decide
to live. If you decided to live in and can afford to live in a very upscale house, great!
If you’re black and you can afford that, fantastic! I mean, people have choices as to
where they live. If they have the economic background or money to do this with . . . I
can’t envision . . . 97 percent of the black people saying, “I’m going to live in a white
neighborhood ’cause it will make my life better.” And I can’t imagine 97 percent of the
white people saying, “I’m gonna move to a black neighborhood ’cause it will make me
feel better.” You know, I, I, where you decide to live is your choice.
Carol, a student at SU, invoked the notion of individual choice to justify her taste for
whiteness. While reviewing her romantic life in response to a question, Carol said:
Um, there really is hardly any (laughs). My romantic life is kinda dry (laughs). I mean, as
far as guys go, I mean, I know you’re looking for um, white versus minority and. . . . I am
interested in white guys, I mean, I don’t want it to look like a prejudice thing or anything.
116 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
After stating her preference for “white guys,” Carol had to do some major rhetorical
work to avoid appearing racist. Thus, she interjected the following odd comment to
save face: “if a guy comes along and he’s black and like I love him, it’s not gonna, I
mean, I, it’s not, I don’t think the white–b lack issue’s gonna make a difference, you
know what I mean?”
Naturalization
The word “natural” or the phrase “That’s the way it is” is often interjected when whites
use this frame to normalize events or actions that could otherwise be interpreted as
racially motivated (e.g., residential segregation) or even as racist (e.g., preference for
whites as friends and partners). For example, Mark, a student at MU, acknowledged
that: “most of my close friends don’t . . . (I) also don’t have that many close black
friends.” Mark reacted immediately to his potentially problematic confession (no
black friends) by saying,
Um . . . I don’t know, I guess that circles are tight. It’s not like we exclude, I don’t
feel like we exclude people. I don’t think that we go out of our way to include
people either, but it’s just kinda like that. It seems like that’s just the way it works out
almost . . .
Later in the interview, Mark, a business major, revealed that most of the students in
the business school are white males. When asked if he thought the way things were
set up in the business school was racist, Mark answered the following:
I don’t really think it’s racist. I just think . . . I don’t know if it’s a perfect example, I just
think it’s an example . . . or just things aren’t set up in such a way where I wouldn’t
say it favors whites. That’s just the way that happens um . . . in the business school.
That’s all.
Ray, another student at MU, naturalized the fact that he had no minority associates
while growing up because, “they lived in different neighborhoods, they went to
different schools” and “It wasn’t like people were trying to exclude them . . . It’s
just the way things were.” Hence, his response to a question about whether blacks
self-s egregate or are made to feel unwelcome by whites was the following:
I would say it’s a combination of the two factors. Um . . . and I don’t think that . . . I
don’t . . . I think it’s fair it’s, uh . . . it’s not necessarily fair to read prejudice into either half
of the bargain. Um . . . I think it’s just, ’em . . . I think it’s like what I was saying earlier,
I think people feel comfortable around people that they feel that they can identify with.
After struggling rhetorically with the implications of his argument, Ray stated that:
“Ah um . . . I think, yes, things are somewhat segregated, but I think it’s more, I think
it’s more about just people . . . feeling comfortable around each other than it is about
active discrimination.”
Detroit whites also used this frame widely. For instance, Bill, a manager in a manu-
facturing firm, explained the limited level of post 1954 school integration as a natural
affair.
2 B onilla-S ilva / Color-B lind Racism 117
Bill: I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault. Because people tend to group with their own people.
Whether it’s white or black or upper-m iddle class or lower class or, you know, upper
class, you know, Asians. People tend to group with their own. Doesn’t mean if a black
person moves into your neighborhood, they shouldn’t go to your school? They should
and you should mix and welcome them and everything else, but you can’t force people
together. . . . If people want to be together, they should intermix more.
Int: OK. Hmm, so the lack of mixing is really just kind of an individual lack of desire?
Bill: Well, yeah individuals, it’s just the way it is. You know, people group together
for lots of different reasons: social, religious. Just as animals in the wild, you know.
Elephants group together, cheetahs group together. You bus a cheetah into an elephant
herd because they should mix? You can’t force that [laughs].
The Biologization of Culture
Modern racial ideology no longer relies on the claim that blacks are biologically
inferior to whites. Instead, it has biologized their presumed cultural practices (i.e.,
presented them as fixed features) and used that as the rationale for explaining racial
inequality. For instance, Karen, a student at MU, agreed with the premise that blacks
are poor because they lack the drive to succeed.
I think, to some extent, that’s true. Just from, like looking at the black people that I’ve
met in my classes and the few that I knew before college that . . . not like they’re—I
don’t want to say waiting for a handout, but to some extent, that’s kind of what I’m like
hinting at. Like, almost like they feel like they were discriminated against hundreds
of years ago, now what are you gonna give me? Ya’ know, or maybe even it’s just their
background, that they’ve never, like maybe they’re first generation to be in college so
they feel like just that is enough for them.
Although many white respondents used this frame as crudely as Karen, most used it
in a kinder and gentler way. For example, Jay, a student at WU, answered the question
on why blacks have a worse overall standing than whites as follows:
Hmm, I think it’s due to lack of education. I think because if they didn’t grow up in
a household that ahhh, afforded them the time to go to school and they had to go
out and get jobs right away, I think it is just a cycle (that) perpetuates things, you know.
I mean, some people, I mean, I can’t say that blacks can’t do it because, obviously, there
are many, many of them (that) have succeeded in getting good jobs and all that . . .
Although Jay admitted “exceptional blacks,” he immediately went back to the cultural
frame to explain blacks’ status.
So it’s possible that the cycle seems to perpetuate itself because it, I mean, let’s say
go out and get jobs and they start, they settle down much earlier than they would
normally if they had gone to school and then they have kids at a young age and they—
these kids have to go and get jobs and so (on).
Detroit respondents used this cultural frame too, but, in general, used it in a more
crude fashion than students. For instance, Ian, a manager of information security in
118 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
an automobile company in his late fifties, explained blacks’ worse status compared
to whites as follows:
The majority of ’em just don’t strive to do anything, to make themselves better. Again,
I’ve seen that all the way through. “I do this today, I’m fine, I’m happy with it, I don’t
need anything better.” Never, never, never striving or giving extra to, to make them-
selves better.
Minimization of Racism
Although whites and blacks believed that discrimination is still a problem in Amer-
ica, they dispute its salience. In general, whites believe that discrimination has
all but disappeared whereas blacks believe that discrimination—o ld-and new-
fashioned—is as American as cherry pie. For instance, Kim, a student at SU, answered
a question dealing with blacks’ claims of discrimination in the following manner:
Um, I disagree. I think that um, I think that it even more like . . . it’s uh . . . I mean,
from what I’ve heard, you pretty much have to hire, you know, you have to (hire)
everyone, you know? They have quotas and stuff . . .
When asked if she believes the reason why blacks lag behind whites is because they
are lazy, Kim said:
Yeah, I totally agree with that, think that um, I mean, again, I don’t think, you know,
they’re all like that, but I mean . . . I mean, I mean . . . it’s just that . . . I mean, if it
wasn’t that way, why would there be so many blacks living in the projects? You know,
why would there be so many poor blacks? If, if they worked hard, if, if they just went
out and went to college and just worked as hard as they could, they would, I mean,
they, they could make it just as high as anyone else.
Detroit whites were even more likely than students to use this frame and to use it in
a direct and crude manner. Sandra, a retail salesperson in her early forties, answered
the question on discrimination as follows:
I think if you are looking for discrimination, I think it’s there to be found. But if you make
the best of any situation, and if you don’t use it as an excuse I think sometimes it’s an
excuse because, ah, people felt they deserved a job, ah whatever! I think if things didn’t
go their way I know a lot of people have a tendency to use . . . prejudice or racism as—
w hatever—a s an excuse. I think in some ways, yes there is . . . umm . . . people who are
prejudiced. It’s not only blacks, it’s about Spanish, or women. In a lot of ways there (is) a
lot of reverse discrimination. It’s just what you wanna make of it.
The policy implications of adopting this frame are extremely important. Since whites
do not believe that discrimination is a normal part of America, they view r ace-targeted
government programs as illegitimate. Thus, Henrietta, a transsexual school teacher in
his fifties, answered a question on reparations as follows:
As a person who was once reverse discriminated against, I would have to say no.
Because the government does not need those programs if they, if people would be
2 Bonilla-S ilva / Color-B lind Racism 119
motivated to bring themselves out of the poverty level. Ah, [coughing] when we talk
about certain programs, when the Irish came over, when the Italians, the Polish, and
the Eastern European Jews, they all were immigrants who lived in terrible conditions
too, but they had one thing in common, they all knew that education was the way out
of that poverty. And they did it. I’m not saying . . . the blacks were brought over here
maybe not willingly, but if they realize education’s the key, that’s it. And that’s based
on individuality.
Conclusions
I have illustrated the four central frames of color-b lind racism, namely, abstract lib-
eralism, naturalization, biologization of culture, and minimization of racism. These
frames are central to old and young whites alike. They form an impregnable yet elastic
ideological wall that barricades whites off from America’s racial reality. An impreg-
nable wall because they provide whites a safe, color-b lind way to state racial views
without appearing to be irrational or rabidly racist. And an elastic wall—a nd, hence,
a stronger o ne—b ecause these frames do not rely on absolutes (“All blacks are . . .” or
“Discrimination ended in 1965”). Instead, color-b lind racism gives room for exceptions
and allows for a variety of ways of using the frames—from crude and direct to kinder
and indirect—for whites to state their racial views in an angry tone (“Darned lazy
blacks”) or as compassionate conservatives (“Poor blacks are trapped in their inferior
schools in their cycle of poverty. What a pity.”).
Thus, my answers to the strange enigma of racism without “racists” is the follow-
ing: America does not depend on Archie Bunkers to defend white supremacy. Modern
racial ideology does not thrive on the ugliness of the past, on the language and tropes
typical of slavery and Jim Crow. Today there is a sanitized, color-b lind way of calling
minorities “niggers,” “spics,” or “chinks.” Today most whites justify keeping minori-
ties out of the good things in life with the language of liberalism (“I am all for equal
opportunity; that’s why I oppose affirmative action!”). And today as yesterday, whites
do not feel guilty about minorities’ plight. Today they believe that minorities have
the opportunities to succeed and that if they don’t, it’s because they do not try hard.
And if minorities dare talk about discrimination, they are rebuked with statements
such as “Discrimination ended in the sixties, man” or “You guys are hypersensitive.”
3 Neither Black nor White
Angelo N. Ancheta
Race Relations in Black and White
“Are you black or are you white?” For Asian Americans the obvious answer would
seem to be “neither.” Yet, when questions of race relations arise, a dichotomy between
black and white typically predominates. Formed largely through inequities and con-
flicts between blacks and whites, discourse on race relations provides minimal space
to articulate experiences independent of a black–w hite framework. The representa-
tion of Asian Americans is especially elusive and often shifts, depending on context,
between black and white.
Popular works on race suggest that expositions of Asian American experiences are
peripheral, more often confined to the footnotes than expounded in the primary anal-
yses. Studs Terkel’s Race frames race relations through a dialogue about blacks and
whites, confined almost entirely to the opinions of blacks and whites. Andrew Hack-
er’s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal contains, as its subtitle
implies, extensive discussions of inequality between blacks and whites, but only a
minimal analysis of inequality among other racial groups.1 The controversial books
The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, and The End of Racism,
by Dinesh D’Souza, go to considerable length to expound arguments that blacks as a
group are less intelligent than whites and suffer from cultural pathologies that inhibit
advancement to the level of whites. When discussed at all, Asian Americans are of-
fered as a “model minority” group, to be contrasted with blacks and likened to whites
because of their higher IQ scores and cultural values stressing family, hard work, and
educational achievement.
News media portrayals of racial minorities suffer from the same tendency to re-
duce race relations to a simple black–w hite equation. Popular television news shows
such as ABC’s Nightline offer recurring programming on race relations, but typically
confine their analyses to b lack–w hite relations. Public opinion polls on race and civil
rights usually exclude Asian Americans as subjects or as participants, or reduce them
to the category of “Other.” News coverage of racially charged events is most often
framed by black versus white antagonisms. . . .
Public policies that reflect and reinforce race relations also approach race in terms
of black and white. Historically, the major landmarks denoting both racial subordi-
nation and progress in racial rights have been measured through the experiences of
Ancheta, Angelo.“Neither Black Nor White,”in Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader,
edited by Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas Chen. Copyright © by Rutgers, the State University of
New Jersey. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.
120
3 Ancheta / Neither Black nor White 121
African Americans. Slavery and its abolition, the black codes and the Reconstruction-
era constitutional amendments, Jim Crow laws and the desegregation cases culmi-
nating in Brown v. Board of Education, the struggles of the civil rights movement and
the federal legislation of the 1960s—these are the familiar signs that have dominated
the landscape of civil rights in the United States. Debates on affirmative action have
occasionally shone the spotlight on Asian Americans, but almost exclusively as unin-
tended victims of affirmative action in higher education. Problems of ongoing racial
discrimination and inequality among Asian American communities are largely ignored.
Not that focusing on black experiences is unjustified. African Americans have
been the largest racial minority group in the United States since the country’s birth,
and continue to endure the effects of racial subordination. By any social or economic
measure, African Americans suffer extensive inequality because of race. In describing
the African American experience, the statement of the Kerner Commission resonates
as strongly today as it did in 1968: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one
black, one w hite—separate but unequal.”2 But to say that our nation is moving to-
ward two separate and unequal societies, however disconcerting, is fundamentally
incomplete. Underlying the Kerner Commission’s statement is the assumption that
our nation’s cities are divisible along a single racial axis. Cleavages between black and
white persist but American race relations are not an exclusively b lack–w hite phenom-
enon and never have been. . . .
Black and White by Analogy
Dualism is a convenient lens through which to view the world. Black or white, male
or female, straight or gay—the categories help us frame reality and make sense of it.
In matters of race, a b lack–w hite dichotomy has been the dominant model, based pri-
marily on the fact that African Americans have been the largest and most conspicuous
nonwhite racial group in the United States. But the legal history of the United States
is punctuated by the abridgment of rights among other racial and ethnic groups such
as Asian Americans, and the country’s changing demographics are mandating new
perspectives based on the experiences of immigrants. Still, the b lack–w hite model is
the regnant paradigm in both social and legal discussions of race.
How can Asian Americans fit within a b lack–w hite racial paradigm? Historian
Gary Okihiro poses the question this way: “Is yellow black or white?” Okihiro sug-
gests that Asian Americans have been “n ear-b lacks” in the past and “n ear-w hites” in
the present, but that “[y]ellow is emphatically neither white nor black.”3 Recognizing
the dominance of the b lack–w hite paradigm in the law, Frank Wu adopts a similar
view proposing that Asian Americans have been forced to fit within race relations
discourse through analogy to either whites or blacks. He posits that American soci-
ety and its legal system have conceived of racial groups as whites, blacks, honorary
whites, or constructive (legal jargon for “implied”) blacks.4
For most of the nation’s history, Asian Americans have been treated primarily as
constructive blacks. Asian Americans for decades endured many of the same disa-
bilities of racial subordination as African Americans—racial violence, segregation,
122 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
unequal access to public institutions and discrimination in housing, employment,
and education. The courts even classified Asian Americans as if they were black. In
the m id-n ineteenth century, the California Supreme Court held in People v. Hall that
Chinese immigrants were barred from testifying in court under a statute prohibiting
the testimony of blacks, by reasoning that “black” was a generic term encompassing
all nonwhites, including Chinese: “[T]he words ‘Black person’ . . . must be taken as
contradistinguished from White, and necessarily excludes all races other than the
Caucasian.”5
Similarly, in Gong Lum v. Rice, decided twenty-seven years before Brown v. Board of
Education, the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of sending
Asian American students to segregated schools. Comparing its earlier rulings on the
“separate but equal” doctrine, the Court stated: “Most of the cases cited arose, it is
true, over the establishment of separate schools as between white pupils and black
pupils, but we can not think that the question is any different or that any different
result can be reached . . . where the issue is as between white pupils and the pupils
of the yellow races.”6 In the eyes of the Supreme Court, yellow equaled black, and
neither equaled white.
In more recent years, the inclusion of Asian Americans in civil rights laws and
race-c onscious remedial programs has relied on the historical parallels between the
experiences of Asian Americans and African Americans. The civil rights protections
available to Asian Americans are most often contingent upon the rights granted to
African Americans. Civil rights laws that apply to Asian Americans, as constructive
blacks, can usually trace their origins to a legislative intent to protect African Ameri-
cans from racial discrimination.
The treatment of Asian Americans as “honorary whites” is more unusual. In the
Reconstruction-era South, Asian Americans were initially afforded a status above
blacks for a period of time during the nineteenth century; Louisiana, for example,
counted Chinese as whites for census purposes before 1870.7 The status was short-
lived: the Chinese were soon reduced to constructive black status under systems of
racial segregation. More contemporary race relations controversies appear to have
elevated Asian Americans to the status of honorary whites, particularly in the minds
of those who oppose r ace-c onscious remedies such as affirmative action. Asian Amer-
icans are often omitted from protection in affirmative action programs as a matter of
course, lumped with whites even in contexts where Asian Americans still face racial
discrimination and remain underrepresented.
The rigidity of the legal system’s treatment of race as either black or white is evident
in civil rights litigation filed by Asian American plaintiffs in the earlier half of this cen-
tury. . . . Asian Americans sought, quite unsuccessfully, to be classified as white under
the law, in recognition of the social and legal stigmas attached to being categorized as
black. Gong Lum, for example, argued that his daughter Martha should not have to
attend the school for colored children in Mississippi because “‘[c]olored’ describes only
one race, and that is the negro.”8 Because his daughter was “pure Chinese,” Gong Lum
argued that she ought to have been classified with whites rather than blacks. The Court
rejected this reasoning and held that yellow was black when it came to segregation.
3 Ancheta / Neither Black nor White 123
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Asian Americans sought
to be classified as white in attempts to become naturalized citizens.9 Congress enacted
naturalization legislation in 1790 to limit citizenship to “free white persons.” After
the Civil War, the law was amended to allow persons of “African nativity” or “Afri-
can descent” to naturalize, but Congress rejected extending naturalization to Asian
immigrants. Asian immigrants sought relief through the courts, but had little success
arguing that they were white: Burmese, Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, and
Korean plaintiffs were all held to be nonwhite; m ixed-race plaintiffs who were h alf-
white and h alf-A sian were also held to be nonwhite.10 The United States Supreme
Court laid to rest any questions about the racial bar in Ozawa v. United States, ruling
that Japanese immigrants were not white, and in United States v. Thind, ruling that
Asian Indian immigrants were not white.11 Asian immigrants were prohibited by
statute from naturalizing through the 1940s, and the racial bar on naturalization was
not repealed until 1952.
From today’s vantage point, these attempts by Asian immigrants to be classified as
white may seem absurd and even subordinative, because they symbolically pushed
blacks down the social ladder relative to whites and Asians. But when the legal
paradigm limits options to black or white and nothing else, curious and unseemly
choices inevitably arise. The solution, of course, is to develop and rely on theories
that comprehend the complexity of race relations, which includes discerning that
the experiences of Asian Americans are not the same as the experiences of African
Americans.
Racism in Context: Anti-A sian Violence
To better understand the experiences of Asian Americans, consider how racial sub-
ordination operates within a specific context: a nti-A sian violence. Racial violence is
not a new phenomenon, and the histories of all racial minorities include extensive
violence, whether it is the genocide of Native American tribes during the expansion
of the United States, the terrorism against blacks in the South, the military conquest
and ongoing border violence against Latinos in the Southwest, or the attacks on Asian
immigrant laborers in the West. Incidents of a nti-A sian violence reveal unique themes
of prejudice and discrimination that illustrate the dynamics of racism against Asian
Americans.12 . . .
The most notorious episode of recent anti-A sian violence was the killing of Vincent
Chin in 1982. Chin, a twenty-s even-y ear-o ld Chinese American, was celebrating his
upcoming wedding at a Detroit bar when he was approached by Ronald Ebens and
Michael Nitz, two white automobile factory workers. Ebens and Nitz thought Chin
was Japanese and blamed him for the loss of jobs in the automobile industry. After
calling Chin a “jap,” the two men chased him out of the bar. They eventually caught
Chin and proceeded to beat him repeatedly with a baseball bat. Chin died from his
injuries a few days later. Ebens and Nitz each pleaded guilty to manslaughter but
received only probation and a fine. Ebens was later convicted of federal civil rights
124 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
violations, but his conviction was overturned on appeal and he was acquitted on
retrial. Neither Ebens nor Nitz spent any time in prison for the killing.
A similar incident occurred in 1989 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Jim (Ming Hai)
Loo had been playing pool with several friends when he was approached by Robert
Piche and his brother Lloyd Piche, who began calling Loo and his friends “chinks”
and “gooks” and blaming them for the death of American soldiers in Vietnam. Once
outside, Robert Piche pistol-w hipped Loo on the back of the head, causing Loo to
fall onto a broken bottle that pierced his brain. Loo died from his injuries two days
later. Robert Piche was convicted and sentenced to thirty-s even years in prison; Lloyd
Piche was sentenced to six months in prison by a state court, and sentenced to four
years in prison for federal civil rights violations.
Another tragic illustration of a nti-A sian violence is the multiple killings of Asian
American children at the Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, in
1989. Patrick Purdy used an A K-4 7 assault rifle to spray bullets into a crowded
schoolyard, killing five children and wounding over twenty others before turning
the gun on himself. Although initially labeled the product of a disturbed mind ob-
sessed with guns and the military, the shootings were later proved to be motivated
by racial hatred. A report issued by the California attorney general’s office found
that Purdy targeted the school because it was heavily populated by Southeast Asian
children.13
Perpetrators who are affiliated with hate groups have been responsible for many
anti-A sian crimes. During the early 1980s, when tensions erupted between Viet-
namese immigrant fishermen and n ative-b orn fishermen in several coastal states,
the Ku Klux Klan engaged in extensive harassment and violence against Vietnamese
fishermen along the Gulf Coast of Texas. Federal litigation was required to end a
pattern of threats, cross burnings, arsons, and shootings.14 In 1990, Hung Truong,
a fifteen-y ear-o ld Vietnamese boy living in Houston, was attacked by two men who
were later identified as white supremacist “skinheads.” After following Truong and his
friends as they walked down the street, the two assailants jumped out of their car, one
wielding a club, and shouted “White power.” They chased Truong and proceeded to
kick and beat him, even as he pleaded for his life. The two men admitted at trial that
they attacked Truong because he was Vietnamese.
In August 1999, Joseph Ileto, a Filipino American postal worker, was gunned
down in California’s San Fernando Valley by Buford Furrow, Jr., a white supremacist
who earlier the same day had riddled the North Valley Jewish Community Center
with over seventy rounds from a semi-a utomatic weapon and wounded several in
dividuals, including three small children. Linked to anti-S emitic and white suprem-
acist groups, Furrow shot Ileto nine times and admitted that he had targeted lleto
because he was a “chink or spic,” terms that were no doubt tied to Furrow’s percep-
tion that an individual like lleto was somehow less than fully American. Ironically,
lleto was wearing a clear symbol of membership in American society—the uniform
of a U.S. Postal Service mail carrier—a t the time he was killed. Pleading guilty to
avoid the imposition of a federal death penalty, Furrow was ultimately sentenced to
multiple life sentences without possibility of parole.15
3 Ancheta / Neither Black nor White 125
More common, however, are incidents that do not involve formal hate groups and
that occur in day-to-d ay interactions among people at work, in schools, at home, and
on the street. Here are some examples, all of which occurred during 2002:
■ A Japanese American man in Rancho Santa Margarita, California was attacked
in his front yard by a perpetrator who threw eggs at him and shouted “You
dirty Jap!” while leaving the scene.
■ While stalled in traffic, a Korean American woman, along with her young
son, were approached by a man who slapped the woman, asked her if
she was Korean several times, and shouted: “Why don’t you go fuck some
Japanese bastard?,” “What are you doing in this country?,” “Go back to your
country,” and “Go back to where you came from.”
■ In a supermarket parking lot in Fort Lee, New Jersey, a Korean American
woman was verbally assaulted by a couple, one of whom yelled, “Where did
you learn to drive? You chink!” After confronting the couple, the woman
was threatened by another customer who yelled, “Yeah, go back to your own
country!” . . .
■ At a business in Los Angeles, a perpetrator brandished a knife and told a
South Asian American victim, “I don’t like Indians or Pakistanis and if you
don’t go back to your country, I’ll kill you.” . . .
■ In Beverly Hills, California, a South Asian American man working as a res-
taurant valet was accosted by an individual who called the man an “Indian
mother fucker” and asked “Are you a terrorist?” before attempting to assault
the victim.16 . . .
Racial Themes
Without question, the examples of a nti-A sian violence demonstrate that overt racism
is still a serious problem for Asian Americans, just as it has been for African Americans
and other racial minorities. Some types of a nti-A sian violence can thus be explained
by treating violence against Asian Americans and other racial minority groups as
expressions of white racism. A nti-A sian violence committed by white supremacists
targeting anyone who is not white fits within a binary model of race that places all
racial minorities in the same category of “nonwhite.”
But many incidents of anti-A sian violence suggest that more complex dynamics
are at work. Members of one Asian ethnic group are often mistaken for being mem-
bers of other Asian ethnic groups. Racial and ethnic slurs are interlaced with nativ-
ist a nti-immigrant rhetoric. Resentment about economic competition, both foreign
and domestic, is often implicated. Even hostility rooted in the United States’ previ-
ous military involvement in Asian countries may be a factor. And a w hite–n onwhite
framework cannot explain racial violence in which members of one nonwhite group
victimize members of another nonwhite group. Several basic themes can be gleaned
from these and other examples of violence against Asian Americans.
126 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
Racialization
One theme is the importance of racial categorizing in a nti-A sian violence. The kill-
ing of Vincent Chin is an example of how anti-A sian violence is racialized: based
on his physical appearance, Chin, a Chinese American, was taken to be a Japanese
national by his killers, who had made him the focus of their anger and frustration
toward Japanese competition in the automobile industry. A perpetrator who makes
the race-b ased generalization that all Asians look alike puts every Asian Ameri-
can at risk, even if the specific antagonisms are targeted against a smaller subset of
people.
The attribution of specific ethnic characteristics to anyone falling within the racial
category of “Asian” is common in anti-A sian violence. For example, when Luyen Phan
Nguyen, a Vietnamese premedical student, was killed in Coral Springs, Florida, in
1992, he was taunted with slurs at a party and later chased down by a group of men
who beat and kicked him repeatedly. Among the epithets directed at Nguyen during
the beating were “chink,” “vietcong,” and “sayonara”—three separate and distinct
ethnic slurs.
Nativism and Racism
Another theme manifested by anti-A sian violence is the centrality of nativism, which
John Higham defines as “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground
of its foreign (i.e., ‘un-A merican’) connections.”17 Asian Americans are equated with
foreigners, or they are at least presumed to be foreign-b orn. Race and nativism thus
intersect to produce a distinctive form of subordination of Asian A mericans—w hat
Robert Chang labels “nativistic racism.”18
In many incidents, Asian American victims are perceived and categorized as for-
eigners by their assailants: Vincent Chin was transformed into a Japanese national;
Jim Loo became a Vietnamese adversary; immigrant merchants were remade as for-
eign investors and capitalists. Even Joseph Ileto, wearing the uniform of a U.S. Postal
Service mail carrier, was reduced to the position of an outsider. Anti-immigrant ep-
ithets such as “Go home!” or “Why don’t you go back to your own country?” fre-
quently accompany a nti-A sian violence, along with specific racial and ethnic slurs.
And under the rubric of foreign outsider, Asian Americans fall into an array of un-
popular categories: economic competitor, organized criminal, “illegal alien,” or just
unwelcome immigrant.
Patriotic racism is a peculiar and especially deep-seated form of nativist racism.
American military conflicts against the Japanese during World War II, against Koreans
and Chinese during the Korean War, and against the Vietnamese during the Viet-
nam War have generated intense animosity against Asian Americans. During World
War II, the federal government’s internment of Japanese Americans, most of whom
were United States citizens, reflected patriotic racism at its worst, as a formal govern-
mental policy. Intimidation and violence against Asian Americans is still common on
December 7 because of the hostility that arises on the anniversary of the bombing of
3 Ancheta / Neither Black nor White 127
Pearl Harbor by Japan. And with the ongoing war against terrorism, South Asians,
coupled with Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, have been subjected to exten-
sive harassment, intimidation, and discrimination.
Racial Hierarchies and Interracial Conflict
A related theme made evident by anti-A sian violence revolves around the inter-
mediate position that Asian Americans appear to occupy on a social and economic
ladder that places whites on top and blacks at the bottom. Black-o n-A sian hate
crimes often contain strong elements of cultural conflict and n ativism—b lacks,
like whites, treat Asians as foreigners. But black-o n-A sian crimes also have strains
traceable to resentment over the economic achievements of Asian Americans, par-
ticularly their entrepreneurial success in the inner cities. The destruction of Korean
immigrants’ businesses in 1992, many located in the historically black residential
area of South Central Los Angeles, reflected a growing anger against Asian American
p rosperity.
In this context, the “model minority” stereotype of Asian Americans becomes
a two-e dged sword, breeding not only incomplete and inaccurate images of Asian
American success but resentment and hostility on the part of other racial groups.
Racial differentiation often places Asian Americans in a middle position within the
racial hierarchy of the United S tates—n either black nor white, and somewhere be-
tween black and white.
The Limits of Black and White
Hate violence is the most extreme form of racial subordination against Asian Amer-
icans, but it sheds light on important differences between the subordination of
Asian Americans and African Americans. A binary model of race based on relations
between blacks and whites cannot fully describe the complex racial matrix that exists
in the U.S. In terms of representation, a black–w hite model ignores or marginalizes
the experiences of Asian Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Arab Americans,
and other groups who have extensive histories of discrimination against them. A
black–w hite model discounts the role of immigration in race relations and confines
discussion on the impact race has had on anti-immigrant policies that affect the
nation’s growing Asian American and Latino populations. A black–w hite model also
limits any analysis of the relations and tensions between racial and ethnic groups,
which are increasingly significant in urban areas where racial “minorities” are now
becoming majorities.
In essence a black–w hite model fails to recognize that the basic nature of dis-
crimination can differ among racial and ethnic groups. Theories of racial inferi-
ority have been applied, often with violent force, against Asian Americans, just as
they have been applied against blacks and other racial minority groups. But the
causes of anti-A sian subordination can be traced to other factors as well, including
128 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
n ativism, d ifferences in language and culture, perceptions of Asians as economic
competitors, international relations, and past military involvement in Asian coun-
tries. Recent immigration from Asian countries has elevated culture and language to
prominent places on the race relations landscape, challenging even the integrity of
the racial category “Asian American.” And the promotion in recent years of a “model
minority” racial stereotype, based on the high education levels and incomes of some
Asian Americans, represents a curious and distorted form of racism, denying the ex-
istence of Asian American poverty and inequality. All of these considerations point to
the need for an analysis of race that is very different from the dominant b lack–w hite
paradigm. . . .
NOTES
1. Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, rev. ed.
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1995). Hacker even suggests that Asian Americans and Lati-
nos, particularly s econd-and later-g eneration individuals, are “merging” into the white race,
through intermarriage and assimilation (18–19).
2. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam,
1968), 1.
3. Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture
(Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1994), 34.
4. Frank H. Wu, “Neither Black nor White: Asian Americans and Affirmative Action,”
Boston College Third World Law Journal 15 (Summer 1995): 225, 249–251.
5. 4 Cal. 399, 404 (1854).
6. 275 U.S. 78, 87 (1927).
7. James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1971).
8. Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78, 79 (1927).
9. Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York and
London: New York University Press, 1996).
10. Ibid., appendix A. As Haney López notes, a legal strategy arguing for whiteness
rather than blackness may have had some tactical advantage at the time, because the 1870
naturalization statute employed a geographic test rather than a racial test of eligibility for
blacks: the law referred to persons of “African nativity, or African descent,” rather than to
“black persons.” More likely, though, Asian American plaintiffs sought to distinguish them-
selves from blacks because of the stigmas attached to being black, and sought the only avail-
able a lternative—to be classified as white.
11. 260 U.S. 178 (1922); 261 U.S. 204 (1923).
12. Note, “Racial Violence against Asian Americans,” Harvard Law Review 106
(June 1993): 1926.
13. Nelson Kempsky, A Report to Attorney General John K. Van de Kemp on Patrick Purdy
and the Cleveland School Killings (Sauamento: California Department of Justice, Office of the
Attorney General, 1989).
14. Vietnamese Fisherman’s Association v. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, S43 F. Supp. 198
(S.D. Tex. 1982) (permanent injunction); Vietnamese Fisherman’s Association v. Knights of the
Ku Klux Klan, 518 F. Supp. 993 (S.D. Tex. 1981) (preliminary injunction).
3 Ancheta / Neither Black nor White 129
15. “Moving Beyond the Past,” AsianWeek, 25 May 2000; Henry Weinstein, “Furrow
Gets 5 Life Terms for Racist Rampage Court: The White Supremacist Wounded Five People
at a Valley Jewish Center and Murdered a Filipino American Postal Worker in 1999,” Los
Angeles Times, 27 March 2001, p. B1.
16. National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, 2002 Audit of Violence against
Asian Pacific Americans: Tenth Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: National Asian Pacific Ameri-
can Legal Consortium, 2004), 14–23.
17. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925
(New York: Atheneum, 1970), 4.
18. Robert S. Chang, “Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race
Theory, Post-S tructuralism, and Narrative Space,” California Law Review 81 (October 1993):
1241, 1255.
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