4 Oppression
Marilyn Frye
It is a fundamental claim of feminism that women are oppressed. The word “oppres-
sion” is a strong word. It repels and attracts. It is dangerous and dangerously fashionable
and endangered. It is much misused, and sometimes not innocently.
The statement that women are oppressed is frequently met with the claim that men
are oppressed too. We hear that oppressing is oppressive to those who oppress as well
as to those they oppress. Some men cite as evidence of their oppression their m uch-
a dvertised inability to cry. It is tough, we are told, to be masculine. When the stresses
and frustrations of being a man are cited as evidence that oppressors are oppressed
by their oppressing, the word “oppression” is being stretched to meaninglessness; it is
treated as though its scope includes any and all human experience of limitation or suf-
fering, no matter the cause, degree or consequence. Once such usage has been put over
on us, then if ever we deny that any person or group is oppressed, we seem to imply
that we think they never suffer and have no feelings. We are accused of insensitivity,
even of bigotry. For women, such accusation is particularly intimidating, since sensitiv-
ity is one of the few virtues that has been assigned to us. If we are found insensitive,
we may fear we have no redeeming traits at all and perhaps are not real women. Thus
are we silenced before we begin: the name of our situation drained of meaning and our
guilt mechanisms tripped.
But this is nonsense. Human beings can be miserable without being oppressed,
and it is perfectly consistent to deny that a person or group is oppressed without
denying that they have feelings or that they suffer.
We need to think clearly about oppression, and there is much that mitigates
against this. I do not want to undertake to prove that women are oppressed (or that
men are not), but I want to make clear what is being said when we say it. We need
this word, this concept, and we need it to be sharp and sure.
The root of the word “oppression” is the element “press.” The press of the crowd;
pressed into military service; to press a pair of pants; printing press; press the button. Presses
are used to mold things or flatten them or reduce them in bulk, sometimes to reduce
them by squeezing out the gases or liquids in them. Something pressed is something
caught between or among forces and barriers which are so related to each other that
jointly they restrain, restrict or prevent the thing’s motion or mobility. Mold. Immobi-
lize. Reduce.
The mundane experience of the oppressed provides another clue. One of the
most characteristic and ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed
people is the double bind—s ituations in which options are reduced to a very few and
From The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory by Marilyn Frye. Copyright © 1983. Used by
permission of Crossing Press, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material outside of this publication is pro-
hibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.
130
4 Frye / Oppression 131
all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation. For example, it is often a
requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we
signal our docility and our acquiescence in our situation. We need not, then, be taken
note of. We acquiesce in being made invisible, in our occupying no space. We partici-
pate in our own erasure. On the other hand, anything but the sunniest countenance
exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous. This means, at the
least, that we may be found “difficult” or unpleasant to work with, which is enough
to cost one one’s livelihood; at worst, being seen as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous
has been known to result in rape, arrest, beating and murder. One can only choose
to risk one’s preferred form and rate of annihilation.
Another example: It is common in the United States that women, especially younger
women, are in a bind where neither sexual activity nor sexual inactivity is all right. If she
is heterosexually active, a woman is open to censure and punishment for being loose, un-
principled or a whore. The “punishment” comes in the form of criticism, snide and em-
barrassing remarks, being treated as an easy lay by men, scorn from her more restrained
female friends. She may have to lie and hide her behavior from her parents. She must juggle
the risks of unwanted pregnancy and dangerous contraceptives. On the other hand, if
she refrains from heterosexual activity, she is fairly constantly harassed by men who try to
persuade her into it and pressure her to “relax” and “let her hair down”; she is threatened
with labels like “frigid,” “uptight,” “m an-h ater,” “bitch” and “cocktease.” The same par-
ents who would be disapproving of her sexual activity may be worried by her inactivity
because it suggests she is not or will not be popular, or is not sexually normal. She may
be charged with lesbianism. If a woman is raped, then if she has been heterosexually
active she is subject to the presumption that she liked it (since her activity is presumed
to show that she likes sex), and if she has not been heterosexually active, she is subject
to the presumption that she liked it (since she is supposedly “repressed and frustrated”).
Both heterosexual activity and heterosexual nonactivity are likely to be taken as proof
that you wanted to be raped, and hence, of course, weren’t really raped at all. You can’t
win. You are caught in a bind, caught between systematically related pressures.
Women are caught like this, too, by networks of forces and barriers that expose
one to penalty, loss or contempt whether one works outside the home or not, is on
welfare or not, bears children or not, raises children or not, marries or not, stays mar-
ried or not, is heterosexual, lesbian, both or neither. Economic necessity; confinement
to racial and/or sexual job ghettos; sexual harassment; sex discrimination; pressures
of competing expectations and judgments about women, wives and mothers (in the
society at large, in racial and ethnic subcultures and in one’s own mind); dependence
(full or partial) on husbands, parents or the state; commitment to political ideas; loy-
alties to racial or ethnic or other “minority” groups; the demands of self-respect and
responsibilities to others. Each of these factors exists in complex tension with every
other, penalizing or prohibiting all of the apparently available options. And nipping
at one’s heels, always, is the endless pack of little things. If one dresses one way, one
is subject to the assumption that one is advertising one’s sexual availability; if one
dresses another way, one appears to “not care about oneself ” or to be “unfeminine.” If
one uses “strong language,” one invites categorization as a whore or slut; if one does
132 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
not, one invites categorization as a “lady”—one too delicately constituted to cope
with robust speech or the realities to which it presumably refers.
The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined
and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence
avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one
between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the
experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby-
t rapped.
Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage,
you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined
by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it,
and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted
to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected
each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires
to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the clos-
est scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed
by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking
at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole
cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it
in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious
that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of
which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each
other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.
It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see
and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great
care and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without
seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are
people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives
are shaped and reduced.
The arresting of vision at a microscopic level yields such common confusion as
that about the male d oor-o pening ritual. This ritual, which is remarkably w ide-spread
across classes and races, puzzles many people, some of whom do and some of whom
do not find it offensive. Look at the scene of the two people approaching a door. The
male steps slightly ahead and opens the door. The male holds the door open while the
female glides through. Then the male goes through. The door closes after them. “Now
how,” one innocently asks, “can those crazy womenslibbers say that is oppressive? The
guy removed a barrier to the lady’s smooth and unruffled progress.” But each repetition
of this ritual has a place in a pattern, in fact in several patterns. One has to shift the level
of one’s perception in order to see the whole picture.
The door-o pening pretends to be a helpful service, but the helpfulness is false. This
can be seen by noting that it will be done whether or not it makes any practical sense.
Infirm men and men burdened with packages will open doors for ablebodied women
who are free of physical burdens. Men will impose themselves awkwardly and jostle
everyone in order to get to the door first. The act is not determined by convenience
4 Frye / Oppression 133
or grace. Furthermore, these very numerous acts of unneeded or even noisome “help”
occur in counterpoint to a pattern of men not being helpful in many practical ways in
which women might welcome help. What women experience is a world in which gal-
lant princes charming commonly make a fuss about being helpful and providing small
services when help and services are of little or no use, but in which there are rarely
ingenious and adroit princes at hand when substantial assistance is really wanted either
in mundane affairs or in situations of threat, assault or terror. There is no help with the
(his) laundry; no help typing a report at 4:00 a.m.; no help in mediating disputes among
relatives or children. There is nothing but advice that women should stay indoors after
dark, be chaperoned by a man, or when it comes down to it, “lie back and enjoy it.”
The gallant gestures have no practical meaning. Their meaning is sym-
bolic. The d oor-o pening and similar services provided are services which really
are needed by people who are for one reason or another incapacitated—u nwell,
burdened with parcels, etc. So the message is that women are incapable. The detach-
ment of the acts from the concrete realities of what women need and do not need is
a vehicle for the message that women’s actual needs and interests are unimportant or
irrelevant. Finally, these gestures imitate the behavior of servants toward masters and
thus mock women, who are in most respects the servants and caretakers of men. The
message of the false helpfulness of male gallantry is female dependence, the invis-
ibility or insignificance of women, and contempt for women.
One cannot see the meanings of these rituals if one’s focus is riveted upon the indi-
vidual event in all its particularity, including the particularity of the individual man’s
present conscious intentions and motives and the individual woman’s conscious per-
ception of the event in the moment. It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately
myopic view and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see
macroscopically. At any rate, whether it is deliberate or not, people can and do fail to
see the oppression of women because they fail to see macroscopically and hence fail
to see the various elements of the situation as systematically related in larger schemes.
As the cageness of the birdcage is a macroscopic phenomenon, the oppressiveness
of the situations in which women live our various and different lives is a macroscopic
phenomenon. Neither can be seen from a microscopic perspective. But when you
look macroscopically you can see it—a network of forces and barriers which are sys-
tematically related and which conspire to the immobilization, reduction and molding
of women and the lives we live.
5 H omophobia as a Weapon
of Sexism
Suzanne Pharr
P atriarchy—a n enforced belief in male dominance and c ontrol—is the ideology and
sexism the system that holds it in place. The catechism goes like this: Who do gen-
der roles serve? Men and the women who seek power from them. Who suffers from
gender roles? Women most completely and men in part. How are gender roles main-
tained? By the weapons of sexism: economics, violence, homophobia.
Why then don’t we ardently pursue ways to eliminate gender roles and therefore
sexism? It is my profound belief that all people have a spark in them that yearns
for freedom, and the history of the world’s atrocities—from the Nazi concentration
camps to white dominance in South Africa to the battering of w omen—is the story of
attempts to snuff out that spark. When that spark doesn’t move forward to full flame,
it is because the weapons designed to control and destroy have wrought such intense
damage over time that the spark has been all but extinguished.
Sexism, that system by which women are kept subordinate to men, is kept in
place by three powerful weapons designed to cause or threaten women with pain
and loss. . . .
We have to look at economics not only as the root cause of sexism but also as the
underlying, driving force that keeps all the oppressions in place. In the United States,
our economic system is shaped like a pyramid, with a few people at the top, primarily
white males, being supported by large numbers of unpaid or low-p aid workers at the
bottom. When we look at this pyramid, we begin to understand the major connection
between sexism and racism because those groups at the bottom of the pyramid are
women and people of color. We then begin to understand why there is such a fervent
effort to keep those oppressive systems (racism and sexism and all the ways they are
manifested) in place to maintain the unpaid and low-p aid labor.
As in most other countries, in the United States, income is unequally distrib-
uted. However, among the industrialized countries of the world, the U.S. has
the most unequal distribution of income of all. (See The State of Working America
2000/2001, p. 388.) What’s more, over the past 30 plus years, income distribution
has become even more unequal. In an OpEd piece distributed by Knight/Ridder/
Tribune NewsService, Holly Sklar reports that poverty rates in 2001 were higher
than in the 1970s and the top 5% of households got richer at the expense of ev-
eryone else. According to the U.S. Census bureau, there were 33 million poor in
the U.S. in 2001 and median pretax income fell for all households except those
From Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism. Published by Chardon Press, Berkeley, CA. Copyright ©
1997 by Suzanne Pharr. Distributed by the Women’s Project, 2224 Main St., Little Rock, AR 72206.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
134
5 Pharr / Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism 135
in the top 5%. In other words, income inequality increased dramatically. In 1967,
the wealthiest 5% of households had 17.5% of the income and by 2001 they had
increased their share to 22.4%, while the bottom fifth had to make do with 3.5% of
aggregate income, down from 4% in 1967 (September 30, 2002). And wealth is even
more unequally distributed than income. According to U.S. government figures for
1997, the wealthiest 10% of U.S. families own more than 72% of the total wealth,
with 39% of the total wealth concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest 1%. In con-
trast, the bottom 40% of the population owns less than 1%.
In order for this top-h eavy system of economic inequity to maintain itself, the
90 percent on the bottom must keep supplying cheap labor. A very complex, intricate
system of institutionalized oppressions is necessary to maintain the status quo so that
the vast majority will not demand its fair share of wealth and resources and bring
the system down. Every institution—schools, banks, churches, government, courts,
media, etc.—as well as individuals must be enlisted in the campaign to maintain such
a system of gross inequity.
What would happen if women gained the earning opportunities and power that
men have? What would happen if these opportunities were distributed equitably,
no matter what sex one was, no matter what race one was born into, and no matter
where one lived? What if educational and training opportunities were equal? Would
women spend most of our youth preparing for marriage? Would marriage be based
on economic survival for women? What would happen to issues of power and con-
trol? Would women stay with our batterers? If a woman had economic independence
in a society where women had equal opportunities, would she still be thought of as
owned by her father or husband?
Economics is the great controller in both sexism and racism. If a person can’t ac-
quire food, shelter, and clothing and provide them for children, then that person can
be forced to do many things in order to survive. The major tactic, worldwide, is to
provide unrecompensed or inadequately recompensed labor for the benefit of those
who control wealth. Hence, we see women performing unpaid labor in the home or
filling low-p aid jobs, and we see people of color in the lowest-p aid jobs available.
The method is complex: limit educational and training opportunities for women
and for people of color and then withhold adequate paying jobs with the excuse that
people of color and women are incapable of filling them. Blame the economic victim
and keep the victim’s self-e steem low through invisibility and distortion within the
media and education. Allow a few people of color and women to succeed among the
profitmakers so that blaming those who don’t “make it” can be intensified. Encour-
age those few who succeed in gaining power now to turn against those who remain
behind rather than to use their resources to make change for all. Maintain the myth
of scarcity—that there are not enough jobs, resources, etc., to go a round—a mong
the middle class so that they will not unite with laborers, immigrants, and the un-
employed. The method keeps in place a system of control and profit by a few and a
constant source of cheap labor to maintain it.
If anyone steps out of line, take her/his job away. Let homelessness and hunger do
their work. The economic weapon works. And we end up saying, “I would do this
136 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
or that—b e openly who I am, speak out against injustice, work for civil rights, join
a labor union, go to a political march, etc.—if I didn’t have this job. I can’t afford to
lose it.” We stay in an abusive situation because we see no other way to survive. . . .
Violence against women is directly related to the condition of women in a society
that refuses us equal pay, equal access to resources, and equal status with males.
From this condition comes men’s confirmation of their sense of ownership of women,
power over women, and assumed right to control women for their own means. Men
physically and emotionally abuse women because they can, because they live in a
world that gives them permission. Male violence is fed by their sense of their right
to dominate and control, and their sense of superiority over a group of people who,
because of gender, they consider inferior to them.
It is not just the violence but the threat of violence that controls our lives. Because
the burden of responsibility has been placed so often on the potential victim, as
women we have curtailed our freedom in order to protect ourselves from violence.
Because of the threat of rapists, we stay on alert, being careful not to walk in isolated
places, being careful where we park our cars, adding incredible security measures
to our h omes—m assive locks, lights, alarms, if we can afford them—a nd we avoid
places where we will appear vulnerable or unprotected while the abuser walks with
freedom. Fear, often now so commonplace that it is unacknowledged, shapes our
lives, reducing our freedom. . . .
Part of the way sexism stays in place is the societal promise of survival, false and
unfulfilled as it is, that women will not suffer violence if we attach ourselves to a man
to protect us. A woman without a man is told she is vulnerable to external violence
and, worse, that there is something wrong with her. When the male abuser calls a
woman a lesbian, he is not so much labeling her a woman who loves women as he is
warning her that by resisting him, she is choosing to be outside society’s protection
from male institutions and therefore from wide-ranging, unspecified, ever-p resent
violence. When she seeks assistance from woman friends or a battered women’s shel-
ter, he recognizes the power in woman bonding and fears loss of her servitude and
loyalty: the potential loss of his control. The concern is not affectional/sexual identity:
the concern is disloyalty and the threat is violence.
The threat of violence against women who step out of line or who are disloyal is
made all the more powerful by the fact that women do not have to do anything—they
may be paragons of virtue and subservience—to receive violence against our lives:
the violence still comes. It comes because of the woman-h ating that exists throughout
society. Chance plays a larger part than virtue in keeping women safe. Hence, with
violence always a threat to us, women can never feel completely secure and confident.
Our sense of safety is always fragile and tenuous.
Many women say that verbal violence causes more harm than physical violence
because it damages self-e steem so deeply. Women have not wanted to hear battered
women say that the verbal abuse was as hurtful as the physical abuse: to acknowledge
that truth would be tantamount to acknowledging that virtually every woman is a bat-
tered woman. It is difficult to keep strong against accusations of being a bitch, stupid,
inferior, etc., etc. It is especially difficult when these individual assaults are backed
5 Pharr / Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism 137
up by a society that shows women in textbooks, advertising, TV programs, movies,
etc. as debased, silly, inferior, and sexually objectified, and a society that gives tacit
approval to pornography. When we internalize these messages, we call the result
“low self-e steem,” a therapeutic individualized term. It seems to me we should use
the more political expression: when we internalize these messages, we experience
internalized sexism, and we experience it in common with all women living in a sexist
world. The violence against us is supported by a society in which woman-h ating is
deeply imbedded.
In “Eyes on the Prize,” a 1987 Public Television documentary about the Civil
Rights Movement, an older white woman says about her youth in the South that it
was difficult to be anything different from what was around her when there was no
vision for another way to be. Our society presents images of women that say it is
appropriate to commit violence against us. Violence is committed against women
because we are seen as inferior in status and in worth. It has been the work of the
women’s movement to present a vision of another way to be.
Every time a woman gains the strength to resist and leave her abuser, we are given
a model of the importance of stepping out of line, of moving toward freedom. And we
all gain strength when she says to violence, “Never again!” Thousands of women in
the last fifteen years have resisted their abusers to come to this country’s 1100 battered
women’s shelters. There they have sat down with other women to share their stories,
to discover that their stories again and again are the same, to develop an analysis that
shows that violence is a statement about power and control, and to understand how
sexism creates the climate for male violence. Those brave women are now a part of a
movement that gives hope for another way to live in equality and peace.
Homophobia works effectively as a weapon of sexism because it is joined with a
powerful arm, heterosexism. Heterosexism creates the climate for homophobia with
its assumption that the world is and must be heterosexual and its display of power
and privilege as the norm. Heterosexism is the systemic display of homophobia in
the institutions of society. Heterosexism and homophobia work together to enforce
compulsory heterosexuality and that bastion of patriarchal power, the nuclear family.
The central focus of the rightwing attack against women’s liberation is that women’s
equality, women’s self-d etermination, women’s control of our own bodies and lives
will damage what they see as the crucial societal institution, the nuclear family. The
attack has been led by fundamentalist ministers across the country. The two areas
they have focused on most consistently are abortion and homosexuality, and their
passion has led them to bomb women’s clinics and to recommend deprogramming
for homosexuals and establishing camps to quarantine people with AIDS. To resist
marriage and/or heterosexuality is to risk severe punishment and loss.
It is not by chance that when children approach puberty and increased sexual
awareness they begin to taunt each other by calling these names: “queer,” “faggot,”
“pervert.” It is at puberty that the full force of society’s pressure to conform to het-
erosexuality and prepare for marriage is brought to bear. Children know what we
have taught them, and we have given clear messages that those who deviate from
standard expectations are to be made to get back in line. The best controlling tactic
138 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
at puberty is to be treated as an outsider, to be ostracized at a time when it feels
most vital to be accepted. Those who are different must be made to suffer loss. It is
also at puberty that misogyny begins to be more apparent, and girls are pressured to
conform to societal norms that do not permit them to realize their full potential. It is
at this time that their academic achievements begin to decrease as they are coerced
into compulsory heterosexuality and trained for dependency upon a man, that is, for
economic survival.
There was a time when the two most condemning accusations against a woman
meant to ostracize and disempower her were “whore” and “lesbian.” The sexual revo-
lution and changing attitudes about heterosexual behavior may have led to some less-
ening of the power of the word whore, though it still has strength as a threat to sexual
property and prostitutes are stigmatized and abused. However, the word lesbian is
still fully charged and carries with it the full threat of loss of power and privilege, the
threat of being cut asunder, abandoned, and left outside society’s protection.
To be a lesbian is to be perceived as someone who has stepped out of line, who
has moved out of sexual/economic dependence on a male, who is w oman-identified.
A lesbian is perceived as someone who can live without a man, and who is there-
fore (however illogically) against men. A lesbian is perceived as being outside the
acceptable, routinized order of things. She is seen as someone who has no societal
institutions to protect her and who is not privileged to the protection of individual
males. Many heterosexual women see her as someone who stands in contradiction
to the sacrifices they have made to conform to compulsory heterosexuality. A lesbian
is perceived as a threat to the nuclear family, to male dominance and control, to the
very heart of sexism.
Gay men are perceived also as a threat to male dominance and control, and
the homophobia expressed against them has the same roots in sexism as does
homophobia against lesbians. Visible gay men are the objects of extreme hatred
and fear by heterosexual men because their breaking ranks with male heterosexual
solidarity is seen as a damaging rent in the very fabric of sexism. They are seen as
betrayers, as traitors who must be punished and eliminated. In the beating and
killing of gay men we see clear evidence of this hatred. When we see the fierce
homophobia expressed toward gay men, we can begin to understand the ways
sexism also affects males through imposing rigid, dehumanizing gender roles on
them. The two circumstances in which it is legitimate for men to be openly physi-
cally affectionate with one another are in competitive sports and in the crisis of
war. For many men, these two experiences are the highlights of their lives, and
they think of them again and again with nostalgia. War and sports offer a cover of
all-m ale safety and dominance to keep away the notion of affectionate openness
being identified with homosexuality. When gay men break ranks with male roles
through bonding and affection outside the arenas of war and sports, they are per-
ceived as not being “real men,” that is, as being identified with women, the weaker
sex that must be dominated and that over the centuries has been the object of male
hatred and abuse. Misogyny gets transferred to gay men with a vengeance and is
5 Pharr / Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism 139
increased by the fear that their sexual identity and behavior will bring down the
entire system of male dominance and compulsory heterosexuality.
If lesbians are established as threats to the status quo, as outcasts who must be
punished, homophobia can wield its power over all women through lesbian baiting.
Lesbian baiting is an attempt to control women by labeling us as lesbians because
our behavior is not acceptable, that is, when we are being independent, going our
own way, living whole lives, fighting for our rights, demanding equal pay, saying no
to violence, being self-a ssertive, bonding with and loving the company of women,
assuming the right to our bodies, insisting upon our own authority, making changes
that include us in society’s d ecision-m aking; lesbian baiting occurs when women are
called lesbians because we resist male dominance and control. And it has little or
nothing to do with one’s sexual identity.
To be named as lesbian threatens all women, not just lesbians, with great loss.
And any woman who steps out of role risks being called a lesbian. To understand
how this is a threat to all women, one must understand that any woman can be
called a lesbian and there is no real way she can defend herself: there is no way to
credential one’s sexuality. (“The Children’s Hour,” a Lillian Hellman play, makes this
point when a student asserts two teachers are lesbians and they have no way to dis-
prove it.) She may be married or divorced, have children, dress in the most feminine
m anner, have sex with men, be celibate—b ut there are lesbians who do all those
things. Lesbians look like all women and all women look like lesbians. There is no guaran-
teed method of identification, and as we all know, sexual identity can be kept hidden.
(The same is true for men. There is no way to prove their sexual identity, though
many go to extremes to prove heterosexuality.) Also, women are not necessarily born
lesbian. Some seem to be, but others become lesbians later in life after having lived
heterosexual lives. Lesbian baiting of heterosexual women would not work if there
were a definitive way to identify lesbians (or heterosexuals).
We have yet to understand clearly how sexual identity develops. And this is dis-
turbing to some people, especially those who are determined to discover how lesbian
and gay identity is formed so that they will know where to start in eliminating it. (Isn’t
it odd that there is so little concern about discovering the causes of heterosexuality?)
There are many theories: genetic makeup, hormones, socialization, environment, etc.
But there is no conclusive evidence that indicates that heterosexuality comes from one
process and homosexuality from another.
We do know, however, that sexual identity can be in flux, and we know that sexual
identity means more than just the gender of people one is attracted to and has sex
with. To be a lesbian has as many ramifications as for a woman to be heterosexual. It
is more than sex, more than just the bedroom issue many would like to make it: it is
a w oman-c entered life with all the social interconnections that entails. Some lesbians
are in long-term relationships, some in short-term ones, some date, some are celibate,
some are married to men, some remain as separate as possible from men, some have
children by men, some by alternative insemination, some seem “feminine” by societal
standards, some “masculine,” some are doctors, lawyers and ministers, some laborers,
140 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
housewives and writers: what all share in common is a sexual/affectional identity that
focuses on women in its attractions and social relationships.
If lesbians are simply women with a particular sexual identity who look and act
like all women, then the major difference in living out a lesbian sexual identity as op-
posed to a heterosexual identity is that as lesbians we live in a homophobic world that
threatens and imposes damaging loss on us for being who we are, for choosing to live
whole lives. Homophobic people often assert that homosexuals have the choice of not
being homosexual; that is, we don’t have to act out our sexual identity. In that case,
I want to hear heterosexuals talk about their willingness not to act out their sexual
identity, including not just sexual activity but heterosexual social interconnections
and heterosexual privilege. It is a question of wholeness. It is very difficult for one to
be denied the life of a sexual being, whether expressed in sex or in physical affection,
and to feel complete, whole. For our loving relationships with humans feed the life
of the spirit and enable us to overcome our basic isolation and to be interconnected
with humankind.
If, then, any woman can be named a lesbian and be threatened with terrible losses,
what is it she fears? Are these fears real? Being vulnerable to a homophobic world can
lead to these losses:
■ Employment. The loss of job leads us right back to the economic conection
to sexism. This fear of job loss exists for almost every lesbian except perhaps
those who are self-e mployed or in a business that does not require societal
approval. Consider how many businesses or organizations you know that will
hire and protect people who are openly gay or lesbian.
■ Family. Their approval, acceptance, love.
■ Children. Many lesbians and gay men have children, but very, very few gain
custody in court challenges, even if the other parent is a known abuser.
Other children may be kept away from us as though gays and lesbians are
abusers. There are written and unwritten laws prohibiting lesbians and gays
from being foster parents or from adopting children. There is an irrational
fear that children in contact with lesbians and gays will become homosexual
through influence or that they will be sexually abused. Despite our knowing
that 95 percent of those who sexually abuse children are heterosexual men,
there are no policies keeping heterosexual men from teaching or working
with children, yet in almost every school system in America, visible gay men
and lesbians are not hired through either written or unwritten law.
■ Heterosexual privilege and protection. No institutions, other than those c reated
by lesbians and g ays—s uch as the Metropolitan Community Church, some
counseling centers, political organizations such as the National Gay and
Lesbian Task Force, the National Coalition of Black L esbians and Gays, the
Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, etc.—a ffirm homosexuality and
offer protection. Affirmation and protection cannot be gained from the
criminal justice system, mainline churches, educational institutions, the
government.
5 Pharr / Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism 141
■ Safety. There is nowhere to turn for safety from physical and verbal attacks
because the norm presently in this country is that it is acceptable to be
overtly homophobic. Gay men are beaten on the streets; lesbians are kid-
napped and “deprogrammed.” The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force,
in an extended study, has documented violence against lesbians and gay
men and noted the inadequate response of the criminal justice system. One
of the major differences between homophobia/heterosexism and racism
and sexism is that because of the Civil Rights Movement and the women’s
movement racism and sexism are expressed more covertly (though with
great harm); because there has not been a major, visible lesbian and gay
movement, it is permissible to be overtly homophobic in any institution or
public forum. Churches spew forth homophobia in the same way they did
racism prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Few laws are in place to protect
lesbians and gay men, and the criminal justice system is wracked with ho-
mophobia.
■ Mental health. An overtly homophobic world in which there is full permis-
sion to treat lesbians and gay men with cruelty makes it difficult for lesbians
and gay men to maintain a strong sense of well-b eing and s elf-e steem. Many
lesbians and gay men are beaten, raped, killed, subjected to aversion therapy,
or put in mental institutions. The impact of such hatred and negativity can
lead one to depression and, in some cases, to suicide. The toll on the gay and
lesbian community is devastating.
■ Community. There is rejection by those who live in homophobic fear, those
who are afraid of association with lesbians and gay men. For many in the gay
and lesbian community, there is a loss of public acceptance, a loss of allies, a
loss of place and belonging.
■ Credibility. This fear is large for many people: the fear that they will no longer
be respected, listened to, honored, believed. They fear they will be social
outcasts.
The list goes on and on. But any one of these essential components of a full life is
large enough to make one deeply fear its loss. A black woman once said to me in a
workshop, “When I fought for Civil Rights, I always had my family and community
to fall back on even when they didn’t fully understand or accept what I was doing. I
don’t know if I could have borne losing them. And you people don’t have either with
you. It takes my breath away.”
What does a woman have to do to get called a lesbian? Almost anything, some-
times nothing at all, but certainly anything that threatens the status quo, anything
that steps out of role, anything that asserts the rights of women, anything that
doesn’t indicate submission and subordination. Assertiveness, standing up for one-
self, asking for more pay, better working conditions, training for and accepting a
n on-traditional (you mean a man’s?) job, enjoying the company of women, being
financially independent, being in control of one’s life, depending first and foremost
142 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
upon oneself, thinking that one can do whatever needs to be done, but above all,
working for the rights and equality of women.
In the backlash to the gains of the women’s liberation movement, there has been
an increased effort to keep definitions man-c entered. Therefore, to work on behalf of
women must mean to work against men. To love women must mean that one hates
men. A very effective attack has been made against the word feminist to make it a
derogatory word. In current backlash usage, feminist equals m an-h ater which equals
lesbian. This formula is created in the hope that women will be frightened away from
their work on behalf of women. Consequently, we now have women who believe
in the rights of women and work for those rights while from fear deny that they are
feminists, or refuse to use the word because it is so “abrasive.”
So what does one do in an effort to keep from being called a lesbian? She steps
back into line, into the role that is demanded of her, tries to behave in such a way that
doesn’t threaten the status of men, and if she works for women’s rights, she begins
modifying that work. When women’s organizations begin doing significant social
change work, they inevitably are lesbian-b aited; that is, funders or institutions or
community members tell us that they can’t work with us because of our “m an-h ating
attitudes” or the presence of lesbians. We are called too strident, told we are making
enemies, not doing good. . . .
In my view, homophobia has been one of the major causes of the failure of
the w omen’s liberation movement to make deep and lasting change. (The other
major block has been racism.) We were fierce when we set out but when threat-
ened with the loss of heterosexual privilege, we began putting on brakes. Our b est-
known nationally distributed women’s magazine was reluctant to print articles
about lesbians, began putting a man on the cover several times a year, and writing
articles about women who succeeded in a man’s world. We worried about our image,
our being all right, our being “real women” despite our work. Instead of talking
about the elimination of sexual gender roles, we stepped back and talked about
“sex role stereotyping” as the issue. Change around the edges for middle-c lass white
women began to be talked about as successes. We accepted tokenism and integra-
tion, forgetting that equality for all women, for all p eople—a nd not just equality of
white m iddle-c lass women with white m en—w as the goal that we could never put
behind us.
But despite backlash and retreats, change is growing from within. The women’s
liberation movement is beginning to gain strength again because there are women
who are talking about liberation for all women. We are examining sexism, racism,
homophobia, classism, anti-S emitism, ageism, ableism, and imperialism, and we see
everything as connected. This change in point of view represents the third wave of
the women’s liberation movement, a new direction that does not get mass media
coverage and recognition. It has been initiated by women of color and lesbians who
were marginalized or rendered invisible by the white heterosexual leaders of earlier
efforts. The first wave was the 19th and early 20th century campaign for the vote;
the second, beginning in the 1960s, focused on the Equal Rights Amendment and
abortion rights. Consisting of predominantly white m iddle-c lass women, both failed
5 Pharr / Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism 143
in recognizing issues of equality and empowerment for all women. The third wave of
the movement, m ulti-racial and m ulti-issued, seeks the transformation of the world
for us all. We know that we won’t get there until everyone gets there; that we must
move forward in a great strong line, hand in hand, not just a few at a time.
We know that the arguments about homophobia originating from mental health
and Biblical/religious attitudes can be settled when we look at the sexism that perme-
ates religious and psychiatric history. The women of the third wave of the women’s
liberation movement know that without the existence of sexism, there would be
no homophobia.
Finally, we know that as long as the word lesbian can strike fear in any woman’s
heart, then work on behalf of women can be stopped; the only successful work
against sexism must include work against homophobia.
6 Class in America
Gregory Mantsios
There wasn’t much attention given to America’s class divide, at least not until a band
of mostly young activists decided to occupy Wall Street in the fall of 2011 and in the
process capture the media spotlight, add the word “99 percenters” to our lexicon, and
change the n ational—and in many ways, the international—d iscourse. While there
has been recent interest in the rising level of inequality, the class divide is anything
but recent and its consequences remain severely understated in the mass media. Per-
haps most importantly, the point that is missed is that inequality is persistent and
s tructural—a nd it manifests itself in a multitude of cultural and social ways.
Americans, in general, don’t like to talk about class. Or so it would seem. We don’t
speak about class privileges, or class oppression, or the class nature of society. These
terms are not part of our everyday vocabulary, and in most circles this language is
associated with the language of the rhetorical fringe. Unlike people in most other
parts of the world, we shrink from using words that classify along economic lines or
that point to class distinctions: Phrases like “working class,” “upper class,” “capitalist
class,” and “ruling class” are rarely uttered by Americans.
For the most part, avoidance of c lass-laden vocabulary crosses class boundaries.
There are few among the poor who speak of themselves as lower class; instead, they
refer to their race, ethnic group, or geographic location. Workers are more likely to
identify with their employer, industry, or occupational group than with other work-
ers, or with the working class. Neither are those at the upper end of the economic
spectrum likely to use the word “class1.” In her study of 38 wealthy and socially
prominent women, Susan Ostrander asked participants if they considered themselves
members of the upper class. One participant responded, “I hate to use the word
‘class.’ We are responsible, fortunate people, old families, the people who have some-
thing.” Another said, “I hate [the term] upper class. It is so non-u pper class to use it.
I just call it ‘all of us—those who are w ell-b orn.”2
It is not that Americans, rich or poor, aren’t keenly aware of class d ifferences—
those quoted above obviously are; it is that class is usually not in the domain of public
conversation. Class is not discussed or debated in public because class identity has
been stripped from popular culture. The institutions that shape mass culture and
define the parameters of public debate have avoided class issues. In politics, in pri-
mary and secondary education, and in the mass media, formulating issues in terms
of class has been considered culturally unacceptable, unnecessarily combative, and
even un-A merican. (See my essay “Media Magic: Making Class Invisible,” on page 562
of this volume.)
The author wishes to thank Maya Pinto for her assistance in updating this article. Greg Mantsios,
“Class in America: Myths and Realities.”© by Gregory Mantsios, 2012. Reprinted by permission of
the author.
144
6 Mantsios / Class in America 145
There are, however, two notable exceptions to this phenomenon. First, it is accept-
able in the United States to talk about “the middle class.” Interestingly enough, the
term middle class appears to be acceptable precisely because it mutes class differences.
References to the middle class by politicians, for example, are designed to encompass
and attract the broadest possible constituency. Not only do references to the middle
class gloss over differences, but they also avoid any suggestion of conflict or injustice.
This leads us to a second exception to the c lass-a voidance phenomenon. We are,
on occasion, presented with glimpses of the upper class and the lower class (the
language used is “the wealthy” and “the poor”). In the media, these presentations are
designed to satisfy some real or imagined voyeuristic need of “the ordinary person.”
As curiosities, the g round-level view of street life and trailer parks and the inside look
at the rich and the famous serve as unique models, one to avoid and one to emulate.
In either case, the two sets of lifestyles are presented as though they have no causal
relation to each other: There is nothing to suggest that our economic system allows
people to grow wealthy at the expense of those who are not.
Similarly, when politicians and social commentators draw attention to the plight
of the poor, they do so in a manner that obscures the class structure and denies any
sense of exploitation. Wealth and poverty are viewed as one of several natural and
inevitable states of being: Differences are only differences. One may even say differ-
ences are the American way, a reflection of American social diversity.
We are left with one of two possible explanations for why Americans usually
don’t talk about class: Either class distinctions are not relevant to U.S. society, or we
mistakenly hold a set of beliefs that obscure the reality of class differences and their
impact on people’s lives.
Let’s look at four common, albeit contradictory, beliefs about class in America that
have persisted over time.
Myth 1: We are a middle-c lass nation. Despite some variations in economic status,
most Americans have achieved relative affluence in what is widely recognized as a
consumer society.
Myth 2: Class really doesn’t matter in the United States. Whatever differences do
exist in economic standing, they are—for the most part—irrelevant. Our democracy
provides for all regardless of economic class: Rich or poor, we are all equal in the
eyes of the law.
Myth 3: We live in a land of upward mobility. The American public as a whole is
steadily moving up the economic ladder and each generation propels itself to greater
economic w ell-b eing.
Myth 4: Everyone has an equal chance to succeed. Success in the United States
requires no more than hard work, sacrifice, and perseverance: “In America, anyone
can become a billionaire; it’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.”
In trying to assess the legitimacy of these beliefs, we want to ask several im-
portant questions. Are there significant class differences among Americans? If these
differences do exist, are they getting bigger or smaller? Do class differences have a
significant impact on the way we live? How much upward mobility is there in the
146 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
United States? Finally, does everyone in the United States really have an equal op-
portunity to succeed and an equal voice in our democracy?
The Economic Spectrum
For starters, let’s look at difference. An examination of available data reveals that
variations in economic w ell-b eing are, in fact, dramatic. Consider the following:
■ The richest 20 percent of Americans hold nearly 90 percent of the total
household wealth in the country. The wealthiest 1 percent of the American
population holds 36 percent of the total national wealth. That is, the top
1 percent own over one-third of all the consumer durables (such as houses,
cars, televisions, and computers) and financial assets (such as stocks, bonds,
property, and bank savings).3
■ There are 323,067 Americans—a pproximately 1 percent of the adult
p opulation—w ho earn more than $1 million annually.4 There are over
1,000 billionaires in the United States today, more than 70 of them worth
over $10 billion each.5 It would take the typical American earning $49,445
(the median income in the United States)—and spending absolutely nothing
at a ll—a total of 202,240 years (or over 2,500 lifetimes) to earn $10 billion.
Affluence and prosperity are clearly alive and well in certain segments of
the U.S. population. However, this abundance is in sharp contrast to the poverty that
persists in America. At the other end of the spectrum:
■ More than 15 percent of the American p opulation—that is, 1 of every 7
people in this country—live below the official poverty line (calculated at
$11,139 for an individual and $22,314 for a family of four).6 In 2010,
there were 42 million poor people in the United S tates—the largest num-
ber since the Census Bureau began publishing poverty statistics more than
50 years ago.7
■ An estimated 3.5 million p eople—o f whom nearly 1.4 million are c hildren—
are homeless.8
■ The 2010 U.S. Census reported that more than 1 out of every 5 children
under the age of 18 lives in poverty.9
Reality 1: The contrast between rich and poor is sharp, and with o ne-third of the
American population living at one extreme or the other, it is difficult to argue that we
live in a classless society.
While those at the bottom of the economic ladder have fared poorly relative to
those at the top, so too have those in the m iddle—a nd their standing relative to the
top has been declining as well.
■ The middle fifth of the population holds less than 4 percent of the national
wealth.10
6 Mantsios / Class in America 147
■ The share of wealth held by the middle fifth 30 years ago was 5.2 percent of
the total. Today’s share held by the middle sector is 23 percent less than what
it was 3 decades ago.11
Reality 2: The middle class in the United States holds a very small share of the
nation’s wealth and that share has declined steadily.
The gap between rich and poor—a nd between the rich and the middle class—
leaves the vast majority of the American population at a distinct disadvantage.
■ Eighty percent of the population—that is, four out of every five Americans, is
left sharing a little more than 10 percent of the nation’s wealth.12
■ The income gap between the very rich (top 1 percent) and everyone else (the
99 percent) more than tripled over the past 3 decades, creating the greatest
concentration of income since 1928.13
This level of inequality is neither inevitable nor universal. The income gap between
rich and poor in a country is generally measured by a statistic called the Gini coeffi-
cient, which provides a mathematical ratio and scale that allows comparisons between
countries of the world. The U.S. government’s own reports using the Gini coefficient
show that the United States ranked number 95 out of 134 countries studied—that is,
94 countries (including almost all the industrialized nations of the world) had a more
equal distribution of income than the United States.14
The numbers and percentages associated with economic inequality are difficult
to fully comprehend. To help his students visualize the distribution of income, the
well-k nown economist Paul Samuelson asked them to picture an income pyramid
made of children’s blocks, with each layer of blocks representing $1,000. If we were
to construct Samuelson’s pyramid today, the peak of the pyramid would be much
higher than the Eiffel Tower, yet almost all of us would be within 6 feet of the
ground.15 In other words, a small minority of families takes the lion’s share of the
national income, and the remaining income is distributed among the vast majority
of m iddle-income and low-income families. Keep in mind that Samuelson’s pyra-
mid represents the distribution of income, not wealth (accumulated resources). The
distribution of wealth is skewed even further. Ten billion dollars of wealth would
reach more than 1,000 times the height of the Eiffel Tower.16
Reality 3: Middle- and l ower-i ncome earners—what many in other parts of the
world would refer to as the working class—s hare a miniscule portion of the nation’s
wealth. For the most part, the real class divide in the United States is between the
very wealthy and everyone else—a nd it is a divide that is staggering.
American Lifestyles
The late political theorist/activist Michael Harrington once commented, “America has the
best-d ressed poverty the world has ever known.”17 Clothing disguises much of the pov-
erty in the United States, and this may explain, in part, the country’s middle-c lass image.
With increased mass marketing of “designer” clothing and with shifts in the nation’s
148 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
economy from blue-c ollar (and often b etter-p aying) manufacturing jobs to w hite-c ollar
and p ink-c ollar jobs in the service sector, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distin-
guish class differences based on appearance.18 The dress-d own environment prevalent
in the high-tech industry (what American Studies scholar Andrew Ross refers to as the
“no-c ollar movement”) has reduced superficial distinctions even further.19
Beneath the surface, there is another reality. Let’s look at some “typical” and n ot-
so-t ypical lifestyles.
American Profile
Name: Harold S. Browning
Father: Manufacturer, industrialist
Mother: Prominent social figure in the community
Principal child-r earer: Governess
Primary education: An exclusive private school on Manhattan’s
Upper East Side
Note: A small, w ell-respected primary school
where teachers and administrators have a
reputation for nurturing student creativity
and for providing the finest educational
preparation
Ambition: “To become President”
Supplemental tutoring: Tutors in French and mathematics
Summer camp: Sleep-a way camp in northern Connecticut
N ote: Camp provides instruction in the
creative arts, athletics, and the natural
sciences
Secondary education: A prestigious preparatory school in
Westchester County
N ote: Classmates included the sons of
ambassadors, doctors, attorneys, television
personalities, and well-k nown business
leaders
Supplemental education: Private SAT tutor
A fter-s chool activities: Private riding lessons
A mbition: “To take over my father’s business”
H igh-s chool graduation gift: BMW
Family activities: Theater, recitals, museums, summer
vacations in Europe, occasional winter trips
to the Caribbean
Note: As members of and donors to the
local art museum, the Brownings and their
children attend private receptions and exhibit
openings at the invitation of the museum
director
6 Mantsios / Class in America 149
Higher education: An Ivy League liberal arts college in
Massachusetts
Major: Economics and political science
A fter-c lass activities: Debating club, college
newspaper, swim team
Ambition: “To become a leader in business”
First f ull-time job (age 23): Assistant manager of operations, Browning
Tool and Die, Inc. (family enterprise)
Subsequent employment: 3 years—E xecutive assistant to the president,
Browning Tool and Die
Responsibilities included: Purchasing (materials
and equipment), personnel, and distribution
networks
4 y ears—A dvertising manager, Lackheed
Manufacturing (home appliances)
3 years—D irector of marketing and sales,
Comerex, Inc. (business machines)
Current employment (age 38): Executive vice president, SmithBond and Co.
(digital instruments)
T ypical daily activities: Review financial
reports and computer printouts, dictate
memoranda, lunch with clients, initiate
conference calls, meet with assistants, plan
business trips, meet with associates
T ransportation to and from work: Chauffeured
company limousine
Annual salary: $324,000
A mbition: “To become chief executive officer
of the firm, or one like it, within the next
five to ten years”
Current residence: Eighteenth-f loor condominium on
Manhattan’s Upper West Side, eleven rooms,
including five spacious bedrooms and terrace
overlooking river
Interior: Professionally decorated and
accented with elegant furnishings, valuable
antiques, and expensive artwork
Note: Building management provides
doorman and elevator attendant; family
employs au pair for children and maid for
other domestic chores
Second residence: Farm in northwestern Connecticut, used
for weekend retreats and for horse breeding
(investment/hobby)
150 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
N ote: To maintain the farm and cater to the
family when they are there, the Brownings
employ a p art-time maid, groundskeeper,
and horse breeder
Harold Browning was born into a world of nurses, maids, and governesses. His world
today is one of airplanes and limousines, five-star restaurants, and luxurious living
accommodations. The life and lifestyle of Harold Browning is in sharp contrast to
that of Bob Farrell.
American Profile
Name: Bob Farrell
Father: Machinist
Mother: Retail clerk
Principal child-r earer: Mother and sitter
Primary education: A medium-size public school in Queens,
New York, characterized by large class
size, outmoded physical facilities, and an
educational philosophy emphasizing basic
skills and student discipline
Ambition: “To become President”
Supplemental tutoring: None
Summer camp: YMCA day camp
Note: Emphasis on team sports, arts and crafts
Secondary education: Large regional high school in Queens
N ote: Classmates included the sons and
daughters of carpenters, postal clerks,
teachers, nurses, shopkeepers, mechanics,
bus drivers, police officers, salespersons
S upplemental education: SAT prep course
offered by national chain
A fter-school activities: Basketball and handball
in school park
Ambition: “To make it through college”
High-s chool graduation gift: $500 savings bond
Family activities: Family gatherings around television set,
softball, an occasional trip to the movie
theater, summer Sundays at the public beach
Higher education: A two-y ear community college with a
technical orientation
Major: Electrical technology
After-s chool activities: Employed as a p art-time
bagger in local supermarket
Ambition: “To become an electrical engineer”
6 Mantsios / Class in America 151
First full-t ime job (age 19): Service-s tation attendant
Note: Continued to take college classes in the
evening
Subsequent employment: Mail clerk at large insurance firm; manager
trainee, large retail chain
Present employment (age 38): Assistant sales manager, building supply firm
T ypical daily activities: Demonstrate products,
write up product orders, handle customer
complaints, check inventory
Transportation to and from work: City subway
Annual salary: $45,261
Additional income: $6,100 in commissions
from evening and weekend work as salesman
in local men’s clothing store
Ambition: “To open up my own business”
Current residence: The Farrells own their own home in a w orking-
class neighborhood in Queens, New York
Bob Farrell and Harold Browning live very differently: One is very privileged, the
other much less so. The differences are class differences, which have a profound im-
pact on the way they live. They are differences between playing a game of handball
in the park and taking riding lessons at a private stable; watching a movie on televi-
sion and going to the theater; and taking the subway to work and being driven in a
limousine. More important, the difference in class determines where they live, who
their friends are, how well they are educated, what they do for a living, and what they
come to expect from life.
Yet, as dissimilar as their lifestyles are, Harold Browning and Bob Farrell have
some things in common: they live in the same city, they work long hours, and they
are highly motivated. More importantly, they are both white males.
Let’s look at someone else who works long and hard and is highly motivated. This
person, however, is black and female.
American Profile
Name: Cheryl Mitchell
Father: Janitor
Mother: Waitress
Principal child-r earer: Grandmother
Primary education: Large public school in Ocean Hill-B rownsville,
Brooklyn, New York
N ote: Rote teaching of basic skills and
emphasis on conveying the importance of good
attendance, good manners, and good work
habits; school patrolled by security guards
Ambition: “To be a teacher”
152 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
Supplemental tutoring: None
Summer camp: None
Secondary education: Large public school in Ocean H ill-B rownsville
Note: Classmates included sons and
daughters of hairdressers, groundskeepers,
painters, dressmakers, dishwashers,
domestics
Supplemental education: None
A fter-s chool activities: Domestic chores,
part-time employment as babysitter and
housekeeper
Ambition: “To be a social worker”
High-s chool graduation gift: Corsage
Family activities: Church-s ponsored socials
Higher education: One semester of local community
college
N ote: Dropped out of school for financial
reasons
First f ull-t ime job (age 17): Counter clerk, local bakery
Subsequent employment: File clerk with temporary-s ervice agency,
supermarket checker
Current employment (age 38): Nurse’s aide at a municipal hospital
T ypical daily activities: Make up hospital beds,
clean out bedpans, weigh patients and assist
them to the bathroom, take temperature
readings, pass out and collect food trays, feed
patients who need help, bathe patients, and
change dressings
Annual salary: $17,850
Ambition: “To get out of the ghetto”
Current residence: Three-room apartment in the South Bronx,
needs painting, has poor ventilation, is in a
h igh-c rime area
Note: Cheryl Mitchell lives with her four-y ear-
o ld son and her elderly mother
When we look at Cheryl Mitchell, Bob Farrell, and Harold Browning, we see three
very different lifestyles. We are not looking, however, at economic extremes. Cheryl
Mitchell’s income as a nurse’s aide puts her above the government’s official poverty
line.20 Below her on the income pyramid are 42 million p overty-s tricken Americans.
Far from being poor, Bob Farrell has an annual income ($51,361) as an assistant sales
manager that puts him above the median income level—that is, more than 50 percent
6 Mantsios / Class in America 153
of the U.S. population earns less money than Bob Farrell.21 And while Harold Brown-
ing’s income puts him in a high-income bracket, he stands only a fraction of the way
up Samuelson’s income pyramid. Well above him are the 323,067 Americans whose
annual incomes exceed $1 million. Yet Harold Browning spends more money on his
horses than Cheryl Mitchell earns in a year.
Reality 4: Even ignoring the extreme poles of the economic spectrum, we find
enormous class differences in the lifestyles among the haves, the h ave-n ots, and the
h ave-littles.
Class affects more than lifestyle and material w ell-b eing. It has a significant impact
on our physical and mental well-b eing as well. Researchers have found an inverse
relationship between social class and health. Lower-c lass standing is correlated with
higher rates of infant mortality, eye and ear disease, arthritis, physical disability, dia-
betes, nutritional deficiency, respiratory disease, mental illness, and heart disease.22
In all areas of health, poor people do not share the same life chances as those in the
social class above them. Furthermore, low income correlates with a lower quality
of treatment for illness and disease. The results of poor health and poor treatment
are borne out in the life expectancy rates within each class. Researchers have found
that the higher one’s class standing is, the higher one’s life expectancy is. Conversely,
they have also found that within each age group, the lower one’s class standing, the
higher the death rate; in some age groups, the figures are as much as two and three
times higher.23
It’s not just physical and mental health that is so largely determined by class.
The lower a person’s class standing is, the more difficult it is to secure housing; the
more time is spent on the routine tasks of everyday life; the greater is the percentage
of income that goes to pay for food, health care (which accounts for 23 percent of
spending for l ow-income families)24 and other basic necessities; and the greater is the
likelihood of crime victimization.25
Class and Educational Attainment
School performance (grades and test scores) and educational attainment (level of
schooling completed) also correlate strongly with economic class. Furthermore,
despite some efforts to make testing fairer and schooling more accessible, current
data suggest that the level of inequity is staying the same or getting worse.
In his study for the Carnegie Council on Children in 1978, Richard De Lone
examined the test scores of over half a million students who took the College Board
exams (SATs). His findings were consistent with earlier studies that showed a rela-
tionship between class and scores on standardized tests; his conclusion: “the higher
the student’s social status, the higher the probability that he or she will get higher
grades.”26 Today, more than 30 years after the release of the Carnegie report, College
Board surveys reveal data that are no different: test scores still correlate with family
income.
154 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
Average Combined Scores by Income (400 to 1600 scale)27
Family Income Median Score
More than $200,000 1721
$160,000 to $200,000 1636
$140,000 to $160,000 1619
$120,000 to $140,000 1594
$100,000 to $120,000 1580
$80,000 to $100,000 1545
$60,000 to $80,000 1503
$40,000 to $60,000 1461
$20,000 to $40,000 1398
less than $20,000 1323
These figures are based on the test results of 1,647,123 SAT takers in 2010–2011.
In another study conducted 30 years ago, researcher William Sewell showed a
positive correlation between class and overall educational achievement. In compar-
ing the top quartile (25 percent) of his sample to the bottom quartile, he found that
students from u pper-c lass families were twice as likely to obtain training beyond high
school and four times as likely to attain a postgraduate degree. Sewell concluded:
“Socioeconomic background . . . operates independently of academic ability at every
stage in the process of educational attainment.”28
Today, the pattern persists. There are, however, two significant changes. On the
one hand, the odds of getting into college have improved for the bottom quartile of
the population, although they still remain relatively low compared to the top. On the
other hand, the chances of completing a 4-year college degree for those who are poor
are extraordinarily low compared to the chances for those who are rich. Research-
ers estimate college completion is 10 times more likely for the top 25 percent of the
population than it is for the bottom 25 percent.29
Reality 5: From cradle to grave, class position has a significant impact on our
well-b eing. Class accurately predicts chances for survival, educational achievement,
and economic success.
M edia-induced excitement over big payoff reality shows, celebrity salaries, and
m ultimillion-d ollar lotteries suggests that we in the United States live in a “rags to
riches” society. So too does news about dot-c om acquisitions and initial public of-
ferings (IPOs) that provide enormous windfalls to young company founders. But
rags-to-riches stories notwithstanding, the evidence suggests that “striking it rich”
is extremely rare and that class mobility in general is uncommon and becoming
increasingly so.
6 Mantsios / Class in America 155
One study showed that 79 percent of families remained in the same quintile (fifth)
of income earners or moved up or down only one quintile. (Of this group, most
families did not move at all).30 Another study showed that fewer than one in five
men surpass the economic status of their fathers.31 Several recent studies have shown
that there is less class mobility in the United States than in most industrialized de-
mocracies in the world. One such study placed the United States in a virtual tie for
last place.32 Why does the United States occupy such a low position on the mobility
scale? Several explanations have been offered: The gap between rich and poor in the
United States is greater; the poor are poorer in the United States and have farther to
go to get out of poverty; and the United States has a lower rate of unionization than
other industrialized nations.
The bottom line is that very affluent families transmit their advantages to the next
generation and poor families stay trapped.33 For those whose annual income is in six
figures, economic success is due in large part to the wealth and privileges bestowed
on them at birth. Over 66 percent of the consumer units with incomes of $100,000 or
more have inherited assets. Of these units, over 86 percent reported that inheritances
constituted a substantial portion of their total assets.34
Economist Harold Wachtel likens inheritance to a series of Monopoly games in
which the winner of the first game refuses to relinquish his or her cash and commer-
cial property for the second game. “After all,” argues the winner, “I accumulated my
wealth and income by my own wits.” With such an arrangement, it is not difficult to
predict the outcome of subsequent games.35
Reality 6: All Americans do not have an equal opportunity to succeed, and class
mobility in the United States is lower than that of the rest of the industrialized world.
Inheritance laws provide b uilt-in privileges to the offspring of the wealthy and add
to the likelihood of their economic success while handicapping the chances for ev-
eryone else.
One would think that increases in worker productivity or a booming economy
would reduce the level of inequality and increase class mobility. While the wages of
workers may increase during good times—that is, relative to what they were in the
past—the economic advantages of higher productivity and a booming economy go
disproportionately to the wealthy, a factor that adds still further to the level of in-
equality. For example, during the period 2001 to 2007, the U.S. economy expanded
and productivity (output per hours worked) increased by more than 15 percent.
During that same period, however, the top 1 percent of U.S. households took two-
thirds of the nation’s income gains, their inflation-a djusted income grew more than
ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent, and their share of the
national income reached its highest peak. At the same time, the inflation-a djusted
weekly salary of the average American during that 6-year economic expansion de-
clined by 2.3 percent.36 Observing similar patterns in U.S. economic history, one
prominent economist described economic growth in the United States as a “spectator
sport for the majority of American families.”37 Economic decline, on the other hand,
is much more “participatory,” with layoffs and cuts in public services hitting middle-
and lower-income families h ardest—families that rely on public services (e.g., public
156 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
schools, transportation) and have fewer resources to fall back on during difficult
economic times.
Reality 7: Inequality in the United States is persistent in good times and bad.
While most Americans rely on their wages or salaries to make ends meet, the rich
derive most of their wealth from such income-p roducing assets as stocks, bonds,
business equity, and non-h ome real estate. This type of wealth is even more highly
concentrated than wealth in general. Over 89 percent of all stocks in the U.S., for
example, are owned by the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans.38 This makes the
fortunes of the wealthy (whether they are corporate executives, investment bank-
ers, or not) closely tied to the fortunes of corporate America and the world of fi-
nance. While defenders of capitalism and the capitalist class argue that what’s good
for c orporate America is good for all of America, recent economic experience has
raised more doubts than ever about this. Putting aside illegal manipulation of the
financial system, the drive to maximize corporate profit has led to job destruction (as
companies seek cheaper labor in other parts of the world and transfer investments
off shore); deregulation (e.g., so environmental protections don’t inhibit corporate
profit); and changes in tax policy that favor corporations (through loopholes) and
those who rely on corporate profit for their wealth (by taxing their capital gains at
lower rates).
Reality 8: The privileges that accrue to the wealthy are tied to the worlds of capi-
tal and finance—w orlds whose good fortune are often the misfortune of the rest of
the population.
Government is often portrayed as the spoiler of Wall Street—a nd at times it is.
There are certainly examples of the government imposing fines for environmental
violations, establishing regulations that protect consumers and workers, restrict cor-
porate conduct, etc. But government as the “great equalizer” often isn’t what it ap-
pears to be. In 2010, for example, when the federal government concluded a fraud
case against a major investment bank (Goldman Sachs), it touted the case as one of
the largest settlements in U.S. h istory—a whopping $550 million dollars. It turns
out that $550 million was less than 4 percent of what the bank paid its executives in
bonuses that year.
Similarly, changes in policy that reduce taxes are often touted as vehicles for level-
ing the playing field and bringing economic relief to the middle class. But at best,
these do little or nothing to help m iddle-and low-income families. More often than
not, they increase the level of inequality by providing disproportionate tax benefits
to the wealthy while reducing public budgets and increasing the costs of such public
services as transportation and college tuition. For example, changes in tax policy over
the last five decades—e specially those during the 1980s—h ave favored the wealthy:
Federal taxes for the wealthiest 0.1 percent have fallen from 51 to 26 percent over
the last 50 years, while the rate for middle income earners has risen from 14 to
16 percent.39
It’s not just that economic resources are concentrated in the hands of a few; so
too are political resources. And it is the connection between wealth and political
power that allows economic inequality to persist and grow. Moreover, as the costs
6 Mantsios / Class in America 157
of p olitical influence rise, so does the influence of the “monied” class. Running for
public office has always been an expensive proposition, but it’s become increasingly
so: It now costs on average, $1.4 million in campaign funds to win a seat in the House
of Representatives and $7 million to win a seat in the U.S. Senate.40 Most politicians
rely on wealthy donors to finance their campaigns. Alternatively, wealthy individuals
who want to make public policy often underwrite their own campaigns.* The average
wealth of U.S. senators, for example, is $12.6 million.41
H igh-p riced lobbyists also ensure that the interests of the wealthy and of corporate
America are well represented in the halls of government. Not surprisingly, organiza-
tions that track the connection between political contributions and votes cast by
public officials find a strong correlation between money and voting.42 It’s not that the
power of the economic elite is absolute; it’s not. The power of the wealthy is often
mitigated by social movements and by grassroots organizations that advocate on
behalf of the poor and working class. The Occupy Wall Street m ovement—like move-
ments that came before it—c hanged not only the public debate, but led to policy
reforms as well. The power of the rich, however, remains so disproportionate that it
severely undermines our democracy. Over three-q uarters of a century ago, such an as-
sault on democratic principles led Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis to observe,
“We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated
in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Talking about the power elite or the
ruling class may put people off, but there is no doubt that the interests of the wealthy
predominate in American politics.
Reality 9: Wealth and power are closely linked. The economic elite have a grossly
disproportionate amount of political power—m ore than enough power to ensure that
the system that provides them such extraordinary privileges perpetuates itself.
Spheres of Power and Oppression
When we look at society and try to determine what it is that keeps most people
down—w hat holds them back from realizing their potential as healthy, creative, pro-
ductive individuals—w e find institutional forces that are largely beyond individual
control. Class domination is one of these forces. People do not choose to be poor or
working class; instead, they are limited and confined by the opportunities afforded or
denied them by a social and economic system. The class structure in the United States
is a function of its economic system: capitalism, a system that is based on private
rather than public ownership and control of commercial enterprises. Under capital-
ism, these enterprises are governed by the need to produce a profit for the owners,
rather than to fulfill societal needs. Class divisions arise from the differences between
those who own and control corporate enterprise and those who do not.
*Over the course of three elections, Michael Bloomberg spent more than $261 million of his own
money to become mayor of New York City. He spent $102 million in his last mayoral election
alone—more than $172 per vote.
158 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
Racial and gender domination are other forces that hold people down. Although
there are significant differences in the way capitalism, racism, and sexism affect our
lives, there are also a multitude of parallels. And although class, race, and gender act
independently of each other, they are at the same time very much interrelated.
On the one hand, issues of race and gender cut across class lines. Women experi-
ence the effects of sexism whether they are well-p aid professionals or poorly paid
clerks. As women, they are not only subjected to stereotyping and sexual harass-
ment, they face discrimination and are denied opportunities and privileges that men
have. Similarly, a wealthy black man faces racial oppression, is subjected to racial
slurs, and is denied opportunities because of his color. Regardless of their class stand-
ing, women and members of minority races are constantly dealing with institutional
forces that hold them down precisely because of their gender, the color of their skin,
or both.
On the other hand, the experiences of women and minorities are differentiated
along class lines. Although they are in subordinate positions vis-à -v is white men, the
particular issues that confront women and people of color may be quite different,
depending on their position in the class structure.
Power is incremental and class privileges can accrue to individual women and to
individual members of a racial minority. While power is incremental, oppression is
cumulative, and those who are poor, black, and female are often subject to all of the
forces of class, race, and gender discrimination simultaneously. This cumulative situ-
ation is what is sometimes referred to as the double and triple jeopardy of women
and people of color.
Chances of Being Poor in America43
White White Hispanic Hispanic Black Black
male/ female male/ female male/ female
female head* female head* female head*
1 in 14 1 in 4 1 in 4 1 in 2 1 in 4 1 in 2
*Persons in families with female householder, no husband present.
Furthermore, oppression in one sphere is related to the likelihood of oppression
in another. If you are black and female, for example, you are much more likely to be
poor or working class than you would be as a white male. Census figures show that
the incidence of poverty varies greatly by race and gender.
In other words, being female and being nonwhite are attributes in our society that
increase the chances of poverty and of lower-c lass standing.
Reality 10: Racism and sexism significantly compound the effects of class in
society.
None of this makes for a very pretty picture of our country. Despite what we like
to think about ourselves as a nation, the truth is that the qualities of our lives and
the opportunities for success are highly circumscribed by our race, our gender, and the
6 Mantsios / Class in America 159
class we are born into. As individuals, we feel hurt and angry when someone is treat-
ing us unfairly; yet as a society we tolerate unconscionable injustice. A more just soci-
ety will require a radical redistribution of wealth and power. We can start by reversing
the current trends that polarize us as a people and adapt policies and practices that
narrow the gaps in income, wealth, power, and privilege. That will only come about
with pressure from below: strong organizations and mass movements advocating for
a more just and equitable society.
NOTES
1. See Jay MacLead, Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Lower-Income
Neighborhood (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995); Benjamin DeMott, The Imperial Middle
(New York: Morrow, 1990); Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and Patterning of
Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); Charles W. Tucker, “A Com-
parative Analysis of Subjective Social Class: 1945–1963,” Social Forces, no. 46 (June 1968):
508–514; Robert Nisbet, “The Decline and Fall of Social Class,” Pacific Sociological Review
2 (Spring 1959): 11–17; and Oscar Glantz, “Class Consciousness and Political Solidarity,”
American Sociological Review 23 (August 1958): 375–382.
2. Susan Ostrander, “U pper-C lass Women: Class Consciousness as Conduct and Mean-
ing,” in Power Structure Research, ed. G. William Domhoff (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publica-
tions, 1980), 78–79. Also see Stephen Birmingham, America’s Secret Aristocracy (Boston:
Little Brown, 1987).
3. Economic Policy Institute, “Wealth Holdings Remain Unequal in Good and Bad
Times,” The State of Working America (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2011),
accessed September 25, 2011, http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/files/files/Figure%20B
_wealth_dis_byclass.xlsx.
4. The number of individuals filing tax returns that had a gross adjusted income of
$1 million or more in 2008 was 323,067 (“Tax Stats at a Glance,” Internal Revenue Ser-
vice, U.S. Treasury Department, available at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/10taxstatscard
.pdf). The adult population (18 years and over) of the United States in 2008 was
229,945,000, according to U.S. Census figures, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population
S urvey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement 2010, available at http://www.census.gov
/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0007.pdf.
5. Forbes. “The World’s Billionaires List: United States,” accessed September 25, 2011,
http://www.forbes.com/wealth/billionaires#p_1_s_arank_-1__225.
6. Based on 2010 census figures. Carmen D eNavas-W alt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and
Jessica C. Smith, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-239, Income, Poverty,
and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government
Printing Office)
7. U.S. Census Bureau, “Poverty,” available at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www
/poverty/about/overview/index.html.
8. National Coalition for the Homeless, “How Many People Experience Homelessness?”
NCH Fact Sheet #2, July 2009, http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/How
_Many.html?.
9. See U.S. Census Bureau, “Poverty,” available at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www
/poverty/about/overview/index.html.
160 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
10. Economic Policy Institute, The State of Working America, accessed September 25,
2011, http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/files/files/Figure%20B_wealth_dis_byclass.xlsx.
11. Edward N. Wolff, “Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the U.S.” Levy E conomics
Institute of Bard College Working Paper no. 502, Levy Economics Institute, A nnandale-o n-
H udson, NY, March 2010.
12. Economic Policy Institute, “Wealth Holdings Remain Unequal in Good and Bad
Times,” The State of Working America (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2001),
accessed September 25, 2011, http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/files/files/Figure%20B
_wealth_dis_byclass.xlsx.
13. Arloc Sherman and Chad Stone, “Income Gaps Between Very Rich and Everyone
Else More Than Tripled in Last Three Decades, New Data Show,” Center for Budget and
Policy Studies, June 26, 2010.
14. See the CIA report The World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications
/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html.
15. Paul Samuelson, Economics, 10th ed. (New York: M cGraw-H ill, 1976), 84.
16. Calculated at 1.5 inches per children’s block and 1,050 feet for the height of the
E iffel Tower.
17. Michael Harrington, The Other America (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 12–13.
18. Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of
American Consciousness (New York: McGraw-H ill, 1982).
19. Andrew Ross, N o-C ollar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs (New York:
Basic Books, 2002).
20. Based on a poverty threshold for a three-p erson household in 2007 of $16,650
(D eNavas-W alt et al., p. 1).
21. The median income in 2007 was $45,113 for men working full time, year round;
$35,102 for women, and $50,233 for households (DeNavas-W alt et. al., p. 6).
22. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Poverty in America: Economic R esearch
Shows Adverse Impacts on Health Status and Other Social Conditions (Washington, DC:
U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2007), 9–16; see also E. Pamuk, D. Makuc,
K. Heck, C. Reuben, and K. Lochner, Health, United States, 1998: Socioeconomic Status and
Health Chartbook (Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, 1998), 145–159;
Vincente Navarro, “Class, Race, and Health Care in the United States,” in Critical Perspectives
in Sociology, 2nd ed., ed. Bersh Berberoglu (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1993), 148–156;
Melvin Krasner, Poverty and Health in New York City (New York: United Hospital Fund of
New York, 1989). See also U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “Health Status
of Minorities and Low Income Groups, 1985”; and Dan Hughes, Kay Johnson, Sara Rosen-
baum, Elizabeth Butler, and Janet Simons, The Health of America’s Children (The C hildren’s
Defense Fund, 1988).
23. Pamuk et al., Health, United States, 1998; Kenneth Neubeck and Davita Glass-
berg, Sociology: A Critical Approach (New York: McGraw-H ill, 1996), 436–438; Aaron
Antonovsky, “Social Class, Life Expectancy, and Overall Mortality,” in The Impact of Social
Class (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1972), 467–491. See also Harriet Duleep, “Measuring
the Effect of Income on Adult Mortality Using Longitudinal Administrative Record Data,”
Journal of Human Resources 21, no. 2 (Spring 1986); and Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power:
Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005).
24. Patricia Ketsche, Sally Wallace, and Kathleen Adams, “Hidden Health Care Costs
Hit Low-Income Families the Hardest,” Georgia State University, September 21, 2011 http://
www.gsu.edu/news/54728.html.
6 Mantsios / Class in America 161
25. Pamuk et al., Health, United States, 1998, figure 20; Dennis W. Roncek, “Danger-
ous Places: Crime and Residential Environment,” Social Forces 60, no. 1 (September 1981),
74–96. See also Steven D. Levitt, “The Changing Relationship Between Income and Crime
Victimization,” Economic Policy Review 5, no. 3 (September 1999).
26. Richard De Lone, Small Futures (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 14–19.
27. College Board, “2011 College-B ound Seniors Total Group Profile Report,” available
at http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/cbs2011_total_group_report.pdf.
28. William H. Sewell, “Inequality of Opportunity for Higher Education,” American
S ociological Review 36, no. 5 (1971): 793–809.
29. Thomas G. Mortenson, “Family Income and Educational Attainment, 1970 to
2009,” Postsecondary Education Opportunity, no. 221 (November 2010).
30. Derived from David Leonhardt, “A Closer Look at Income Mobility,” New York Times,
May 14, 2005; and Katharine Bradbury and Jane Katz, “Trends in U.S. Family Income Mobil-
ity 1969–2006,” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 2009.
31. De Lone, Small Futures, 14–19. See also Daniel McMurrer, Mark Condon, and Isabel
Sawhill, “Intergenerational Mobility in the United States,” (Washington DC: Urban Institute,
1997), http://www.urban.org/publications/406796.html?; and Bhashkar Mazumder, “Earn-
ings Mobility in the U.S.: A New Look at Intergenerational Inequality,” Federal Reserve Bank
of Chicago Working Paper no. 2001-18, March 21, 2001. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.295559.
32. Miles Corak, “Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults? Lessons from a Cross-
Country Comparison of Generational Earnings Mobility” (Bonn, Germany: IZA, 2006).
Available at http://repec.iza.org/dp1993.pdf .
33. Jason DeParle, “Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs,” New York Times,
January 4, 2012.
34. Howard Tuchman, Economics of the Rich (New York: Random House, 1973), 15. See
also Greg Duncan, Ariel Kalil, Susan Mayer, Robin Tepper, and Monique Payne, “The Apple
Does Not Fall Far From the Tree,” in Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic
Success, ed. Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Groves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008), 23–79; Bhashkar Mazumder, “The Apple Falls Even Closer to the
Tree Than We Thought,” in Bowles, et. al., 80–99. For more information on inheritance, see
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “The Inheritance of Inequality,” Journal of Economic Per-
spectives 16, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 2–30; and Tom Hertz, Understanding Mobility in America,
Center for American Progress, available at http://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content
/uploads/kf/hertz_mobility_analysis.pdf?.
35. Howard Wachtel, Labor and the Economy (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984),
161–162.
36. See Hannah Shaw and Chad Stone, “Incomes at the Top Rebounded in First Full
Year of Recovery, New Analysis of Tax Data Shows,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
March 7, 2011, http://www.cbpp.org/files/3-7-12inc.pdf. Also see Andrew Fieldhouse and
Ethan Pollack, “Tenth Anniversary of the B ush-e ra Tax Cuts,” Economic Policy Institute,
June 1, 2011, http://www.epi.org/publication/tenth_anniversary_of_the_bush-era_tax_cuts/.
37. Alan Blinder, quoted by Paul Krugman, in “Disparity and Despair,” U.S. News and
World Report, March 23, 1992, 54.
38. Derived from Edward N. Wolff, “Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the U.S.”
Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, March 2010, table 9. Available at http://www
.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf.
39. The National Economic Council, “The Buffett Rule: A Basic Principle of Tax Fairness,”
White House, April 2012, citing Internal Revenue System Statistics of Income 2005 Public
Use File, National Bureau of Economic Research TAXISM, and CEA calculations. Available at
162 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/Buffett_Rule_Report_Final.pdf. Also cited in
The New York Times editorial “Mr. Obama and the ‘Buffett Rule,’” April 10, 2012. Available at
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/opinion/m r-obama-and-the-buffett-rule.html?_r=0.
40. Campaign Finance Institute, “2010 Federal Election,” accessed March 22, 2011,
http://cfinst.org/federal/election2010.aspx.
41. 2009 figures from the Center for Responsive Politics, “Average Wealth of Members
of Congress,” available at http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/averages.php.
42. See Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), chapter 9; see also MAPLight.org (MAP-
Light tracks political contributions and their impact on the votes of public o fficials).
43. DeNavas-W alt et al., Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United
States: 2010.
7 U nequal Childhoods: Class, Race,
and Family Life
Annette Lareau
Laughing and yelling, a white fourth-g rader named Garrett Tallinger splashes around
in the swimming pool in the backyard of his four-b edroom home in the suburbs on
a late spring afternoon. As on most evenings, after a quick dinner his father drives
him to soccer practice. This is only one of Garrett’s many activities. His brother has
a baseball game at a different location. There are evenings when the boys’ parents
relax, sipping a glass of wine. Tonight is not one of them. As they rush to change out
of their work clothes and get the children ready for practice, Mr. and Mrs. Tallinger
are harried.
Only ten minutes away, a Black fourth-g rader, Alexander Williams, is riding home
from a school open house.1 His mother is driving their beige, leather-u pholstered
Lexus. It is 9:00 p.m. on a Wednesday evening. Ms. Williams is tired from work and
has a long Thursday ahead of her. She will get up at 4:45 a.m. to go out of town on
business and will not return before 9:00 p.m. On Saturday morning, she will chauf-
feur Alexander to a private piano lesson at 8:15 a.m., which will be followed by a
choir rehearsal and then a soccer game. As they ride in the dark, Alexander’s mother,
in a quiet voice, talks with her son, asking him questions and eliciting his opinions.
Discussions between parents and children are a hallmark of middle-c lass child
rearing. Like many middle-c lass parents, Ms. Williams and her husband see them-
selves as “developing” Alexander to cultivate his talents in a concerted fashion. Or-
ganized activities, established and controlled by mothers and fathers, dominate the
lives of middle-c lass children such as Garrett and Alexander. By making certain their
children have these and other experiences, m iddle-c lass parents engage in a process
of concerted cultivation. From this, a robust sense of entitlement takes root in the
children. This sense of entitlement plays an especially important role in institutional
settings, where middle-c lass children learn to question adults and address them as
relative equals.
Only twenty minutes away, in blue-c ollar neighborhoods, and slightly farther away,
in public housing projects, childhood looks different. Mr. Yanelli, a white working-c lass
father, picks up his son Little Billy, a fourth grader, from an a fter-s chool program. They
come home and Mr. Yanelli drinks a beer while Little Billy first watches television, then
rides his bike and plays in the street. Other nights, he and his Dad sit on the sidewalk
outside their house and play cards. At about 5:30 p.m. Billy’s mother gets home from her
job as a house cleaner. She fixes dinner and the entire family sits down to eat together.
Republished with permission of University of California Press Books, from Unequal Childhoods:
Class, Race, and Family Life by Annette Lareau, copyright © 2011; permission conveyed through
Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
163
164 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
Extended family are a prominent part of their lives. Ms. Yanelli touches base with her
“entire family every day” by phone. Many nights Little Billy’s uncle stops by, sometimes
bringing Little Billy’s youngest cousin. In the spring, Little Billy plays baseball on a
local team. Unlike for Garrett and Alexander, who have at least four activities a week,
for Little Billy, baseball is his only organized activity outside of school during the entire
year. Down the road, a white w orking-c lass girl, Wendy Driver, also spends the evening
with her female cousins, as they watch a video and eat popcorn, crowded together on
the living room floor.
Farther away, a Black fourth-g rade boy, Harold McAllister, plays outside on a sum-
mer evening in the public housing project in which he lives. His two male cousins are
there that night, as they often are. After an afternoon spent unsuccessfully searching
for a ball so they could play basketball, the boys had resorted to watching sports on
television. Now they head outdoors for a twilight water balloon fight. Harold tries
to get his neighbor, Miss Latifa, wet. People sit in white plastic lawn chairs outside
the row of apartments. Music and television sounds waft through the open windows
and doors.
The adults in the lives of Billy, Wendy, and Harold want the best for them. Formi-
dable economic constraints make it a major life task for these parents to put food on
the table, arrange for housing, negotiate unsafe neighborhoods, take children to the
doctor (often waiting for city buses that do not come), clean children’s clothes, and get
children to bed and have them ready for school the next morning. But u nlike middle-
class parents, these adults do not consider the concerted development of children,
particularly through organized leisure activities, an essential aspect of good parent-
ing. Unlike the Tallingers and Williamses, these mothers and fathers do not focus on
concerted cultivation. For them, the crucial responsibilities of parenthood do not
lie in eliciting their children’s feelings, opinions, and thoughts. Rather, they see a
clear boundary between adults and children. Parents tend to use directives: they tell
their children what to do rather than persuading them with reasoning. Unlike their
m iddle-c lass counterparts, who have a steady diet of adult organized activities, the
working-c lass and poor children have more control over the character of their leisure
activities. Most children are free to go out and play with friends and relatives who
typically live close by. Their parents and guardians facilitate the accomplishment of
natural growth.2 Yet these children and their parents interact with central institutions
in the society, such as schools, which firmly and decisively promote strategies of con-
certed cultivation in child rearing. For w orking-c lass and poor families, the cultural
logic of child rearing at home is out of sync with the standards of institutions. As a
result, while children whose parents adopt strategies of concerted cultivation appear
to gain a sense of entitlement, children such as Billy Yanelli, Wendy Driver, and Har-
old McAllister appear to gain an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint
in their institutional experiences.
America may be the land of opportunity, but it is also a land of inequality. . . .
this historical moment, middle-c lass parents tend to adopt a cultural logic of child
rearing that stresses the concerted cultivation of children. Working-c lass and poor
parents, by contrast, tend to undertake the accomplishment of natural growth. In
7 Lareau / Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life 165
the accomplishment of natural growth, children experience long stretches of lei-
sure time, c hild-initiated play, clear boundaries between adults and children, and
daily interactions with kin. Working-c lass and poor children, despite tremendous
economic strain, often have more “childlike” lives, with autonomy from adults and
control over their extended leisure time. Although m iddle-c lass children miss out on
kin relationships and leisure time, they appear to (at least potentially) gain important
institutional advantages. From the experience of concerted cultivation, they acquire
skills that could be valuable in the future when they enter the world of work. M iddle-
class white and Black children in my study did exhibit some key differences; yet the
biggest gaps were not within social classes but, as I show, across them. It is these class
differences and how they are enacted in family life and child rearing that shape the
ways children view themselves in relation to the rest of the world.
Cultural Repertoires
Professionals who work with children, such as teachers, doctors, and counselors,
generally agree about how children should be raised. Of course, from time to time
they may disagree on the ways standards should be enacted for an individual child
or family. For example, teachers may disagree about whether or not parents should
stop and correct a child who mispronounces a word while reading. Counselors may
disagree over whether a mother is being too protective of her child. Still, there is
little dispute among professionals on the broad principles for promoting educational
development in children through proper parenting.3 These standards include the
importance of talking with children, developing their educational interests, and play-
ing an active role in their schooling. Similarly, parenting guidelines typically stress the
importance of reasoning with children and teaching them to solve problems through
negotiation rather than with physical force. Because these guidelines are so generally
accepted, and because they focus on a set of practices concerning how parents should
raise children, they form a dominant set of cultural repertoires about how children
should be raised. This widespread agreement among professionals about the broad
principles for child rearing permeates our society. A small number of experts thus
potentially shape the behavior of a large number of parents.
Professionals’ advice regarding the best way to raise children has changed regularly
over the last two centuries. From strong opinions about the merits of bottle feeding,
being stern with children, and utilizing physical punishment (with dire warnings
of problematic outcomes should parents indulge children), there have been shifts
to equally strongly worded recommendations about the benefits of breast feeding,
displaying emotional warmth toward children, and using reasoning and negotiation
as mechanisms of parental control. M iddle-c lass parents appear to shift their behav-
iors in a variety of spheres more rapidly and more thoroughly than do working-c lass
or poor parents.4 As professionals have shifted their recommendations from bottle
feeding to breast feeding, from stern approaches to warmth and empathy, and from
spanking to time-o uts, it is m iddle-c lass parents who have responded most promptly.5
Moreover, in recent decades, middle-class children in the United States have had
166 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
to face the prospect of “declining fortunes.”6 Worried about how their children will
get ahead, middle-c lass parents are increasingly determined to make sure that their
children are not excluded from any opportunity that might eventually contribute to
their advancement.
M iddle-class parents who comply with current professional standards and en-
gage in a pattern of concerted cultivation deliberately try to stimulate their chil-
dren’s d evelopment and foster their cognitive and social skills. The commitment
among w orking-class and poor families to provide comfort, food, shelter, and
other basic support requires ongoing effort, given economic challenges and the
formidable demands of child rearing. But it stops short of the deliberate cultiva-
tion of children and their leisure activities that occurs in middle-c lass families. For
w orking-c lass and poor families, sustaining children’s natural growth is viewed as an
a ccomplishment.7
What is the outcome of these different philosophies and approaches to child
rearing? Quite simply, they appear to lead to the transmission of differential ad-
vantages to children. In this study, there was quite a bit more talking in middle-
class homes than in working-c lass and poor homes, leading to the development
of greater verbal agility, larger vocabularies, more comfort with authority figures,
and more familiarity with abstract concepts. Importantly, children also developed
skill differences in interacting with authority figures in institutions and at home.
Middle-c lass children such as Garrett Tallinger and Alexander Williams learn, as
young boys, to shake the hands of adults and look them in the eye. In studies of
job interviews, investigators have found that potential employees have less than
one minute to make a good impression. Researchers stress the importance of eye
contact, firm handshakes, and displaying comfort with bosses during the interview.
In poor families like Harold McAllister’s, however, family members usually do not
look each other in the eye when conversing. In addition, as Elijah Anderson points
out, they live in neighborhoods where it can be dangerous to look people in the
eye too long.8 The types of social competence transmitted in the McAllister family
are valuable, but they are potentially less valuable (in employment interviews, for
example) than those learned by Garrett Tallinger and Alexander Williams.
The white and Black middle-c lass children in this study also exhibited an emer-
gent version of the sense of entitlement characteristic of the middle-class. They
acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to
actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable
in these settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention.
Although some children were more outgoing than others, it was common practice
among middle-c lass children to shift interactions to suit their preferences. Alex-
ander Williams knew how to get the doctor to listen to his concerns (about the
bumps under his arm from his new deodorant). His mother explicitly trained and
encouraged him to speak up with the doctor. Similarly, a Black middle-c lass girl,
Stacey Marshall, was taught by her mother to expect the gymnastics teacher to ac-
commodate her individual learning style. Thus, middle-c lass children were trained
in “the rules of the game” that govern interactions with institutional representatives.
7 Lareau / Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life 167
They were not conversant in other important social skills, however, such as orga-
nizing their time for hours on end during weekends and summers, spending long
periods of time away from adults, or hanging out with adults in a nonobtrusive,
subordinate fashion. M iddle-c lass children also learned (by imitation and by direct
training) how to make the rules work in their favor. Here, the enormous stress on
reasoning and negotiation in the home also has a potential advantage for future
institutional negotiations. Additionally, those in authority responded positively to
such interactions. Even in fourth grade, middle-c lass children appeared to be acting
on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers and
doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires.
The working-c lass and poor children, by contrast, showed an emerging sense
of constraint in their interactions in institutional settings. They were less likely to
try to customize interactions to suit their own preferences. Like their parents, the
children accepted the actions of persons in authority (although at times they also
covertly resisted them). Working-c lass and poor parents sometimes were not as
aware of their children’s school situation (as when their children were not doing
homework). Other times, they dismissed the school rules as unreasonable. For
example, Wendy Driver’s mother told her to “punch” a boy who was pestering
her in class; Billy Yanelli’s parents were proud of him when he “beat up” another
boy on the playground, even though Billy was then suspended from school. Par-
ents also had trouble getting “the school” to respond to their concerns. When
Ms. Yanelli complained that she “hates” the school, she gave her son a lesson in
powerlessness and frustration in the face of an important institution. M iddle-c lass
children such as Stacey Marshall learned to make demands on professionals, and
when they succeeded in making the rules work in their favor they augmented their
“cultural capital (i.e., skills individuals inherit that can then be translated into dif-
ferent forms of value as they move through various institutions) for the future.9
When working-class and poor children confronted institutions, however, they
generally were unable to make the rules work in their favor nor did they obtain
capital for adulthood. Because of these patterns of legitimization, children raised
according to the logic of concerted cultivation can gain advantages, in the form of
an emerging sense of entitlement, while children raised according to the logic of
natural growth tend to develop an emerging sense of constraint.10
Social Stratification and Individualism
Public discourse in America typically presents the life accomplishments of a person
as the result of her or his individual qualities. Songs like “I Did It My Way,” memoirs,
television shows, and magazine articles, celebrate the individual. Typically, individual
outcomes are connected to individual effort and talent, such as being a “type A” per-
sonality, being a hard worker, or showing leadership. These cultural beliefs provide a
framework for Americans’ views of inequality.
Indeed, Americans are much more comfortable recognizing the power of in-
dividual initiative than recognizing the power of social class. Studies show that
168 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
Americans generally believe that responsibility for their accomplishments rests on
their individual efforts. Less than one-fifth see “race, gender, religion, or class as
very important for ‘getting ahead’ in life.’”11 Compared to Europeans, individuals in
the United States are much more likely to believe they can improve their standard
of living. Put differently, Americans believe in the American dream: “The American
dream that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful o ne—if you work hard
and play by the rules, you should be given a chance to go as far as your G od-g iven
ability will take you.”12 This American ideology that each individual is responsible
for his or her life outcomes is the expressed belief of the vast majority of Americans,
rich and poor.
Yet there is no question that society is stratified. Highly valued resources such as
the possession of wealth; having an interesting, w ell-p aying, and complex job; hav-
ing a good education; and owning a home, are not evenly distributed throughout
the society. Moreover, these resources are transferred across generations: One of the
best predictors of whether a child will one day graduate from college is whether
his or her parents are college graduates. Of course, relations of this sort are not
absolute: Perhaps two-thirds of the members of society ultimately reproduce their
parents’ level of educational attainment, while about o ne-third take a different path.
Still, there is no question that we live in a society characterized by considerable gaps
in resources or, put differently, by substantial inequality. As I explain . . . however,
reasonable people have disagreed about whether families in different economic posi-
tions “share distinct, life-d efining experiences.”13 Many insist that there is not a clear,
coherent, and sustained experiential pattern. In this book, I demonstrate the existence
of a cultural logic of child rearing that tends to differ according to families’ social class
positions. I see these interweaving practices as coming together in a messy but still
recognizable way. In contrast to many, I suggest that social class does have a powerful
impact in shaping the daily rhythms of family life. . .
In sum, I see it as a mistake to accept, carte blanche, the views of officials in
dominant institutions (e.g., schools or social service agencies) regarding how chil-
dren should be raised. Indeed, outside of institutional settings there are benefits
and costs to both of these logics of child rearing. For example, concerted cultivation
places intense labor demands on busy parents, exhausts children, and emphasizes
the development of individualism, at times at the expense of the development of
the notion of the family group. Middle-class children argue with their parents,
complain about their parents’ incompetence, and disparage parents’ decisions. In
other historical moments, a ten-y ear-o ld child who gave orders to a doctor would
have been chastised for engaging in disrespectful and inappropriate behavior. Nor
are the actions of children who display an emerging sense of entitlement intrinsi-
cally more valuable or desirable than those of children who display an emerging
sense of constraint. In a society less dominated by individualism than the United
States, with more of an emphasis on the group, the sense of constraint displayed by
w orking-c lass and poor children might be interpreted as healthy and appropriate.
But in this society, the strategies of the w orking-c lass and poor families are generally
denigrated and seen as unhelpful or even harmful to children’s life chances. The
7 Lareau / Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life 169
benefits that accrue to m iddle-c lass children can be significant, but they are often
invisible to them and to others. In popular language, middle-c lass children can be
said to have been “born on third base but believe they hit a triple.” . . .
NOTES
1. Choosing words to describe social groups also becomes a source of worry, especially
over the possibility of reinforcing negative stereotypes. I found the available terms to de-
scribe members of racial and ethnic groups to be problematic in one way or another. The
families I visited uniformly described themselves as “Black.” Recognizing that some readers
have strong views that Black should be capitalized, I have followed that convention, despite
the lack of symmetry with the term white. In sum, this book alternates among the terms
“Black,” “Black American,” “African American,” and “white,” with the understanding that
“white” here refers to the subgroup of non-H ispanic whites.
2. Some readers have expressed concern that this phrase, “the accomplishment of
natural growth,” underemphasizes all the labor that mothers and fathers do to take care
of children. They correctly note that working-c lass and poor parents themselves would be
unlikely to use such a term to describe the process of caring for children. These concerns
are important. As I stress in the text (especially in the chapter on Katie Brindle, Chapter 5)
it does take an enormous amount of work for parents, especially mothers, of all classes
to take care of children. But poor and w orking-c lass mothers have fewer resources with
which to negotiate these demands. Those whose lives the research assistants and I studied
approached the task somewhat differently than did m iddle-c lass parents. They did not
seem to view children’s leisure time as their responsibility; nor did they see themselves
as responsible for assertively intervening in their children’s school experiences. Rather,
the w orking-c lass and poor parents carried out their chores, drew boundaries and re-
strictions around their children, and then, within these limits, allowed their children to
carry out their lives. It is in this sense that I use the term “the accomplishment of natural
growth.”
3. For discussions of the role of professionals, see Eliot Freidson, Professional Powers;
Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism; and, although quite old, the still valuable col-
lection by Amitai Etzioni, The Semi-P rofessionals and Their Organizations. Of course, professional
standards are always contested and are subject to change over time. I do not mean to suggest
there are not pockets of resistance and contestation. At the most general level, however, there
is virtually uniform support for the idea that parents should talk to children at length, read to
children, and take a proactive, assertive role in medical care.
4. Sharon Hays, in her 1996 book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, studies
the attitudes of m iddle-c lass and working-c lass mothers toward child rearing. She finds a
shared commitment to “intensive mothering,” although there are some differences among the
women in her study in their views of punishment (with m iddle-c lass mothers leaning toward
reasoning and working-c lass women toward physical punishment). My study focused much
more on behavior than attitudes. If I looked at attitudes, I saw fewer differences; for example,
all exhibited the desire to be a good mother and to have their children grow and thrive. The
differences I found, however, were significant in how parents enacted their visions of what it
meant to be a good parent.
5. See Urie Bronfenbrenner’s article, “Socialization and Social Class through Time and
Space.”
170 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
6. Katherine Newman, Declining Fortunes, as well as Donald Barlett and James B. Steele,
America: What Went Wrong? See also Michael Hout and Claude Fischer, “A Century of In-
equality.”
7. Some readers expressed the concern that the contrast to natural would be “un-
natural,” but this is not the sense in which the term natural growth is used here. Rather, the
contrast is with words such as cultivated, artificial, artifice, or manufactured. This contrast in
the logic of child rearing is a heuristic device that should not be pushed too far since, as so-
ciologists have shown, all social life is constructed in specific social contexts. Indeed, family
life has varied dramatically over time. See Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood, Herbert Gut-
man, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925, and Nancy Scheper-H ughes, Death
without Weeping.
8. Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street; see especially Chapter 2.
9. See also David Swartz’s excellent book Culture and Power.
10. I did not study the full range of families in American society, including elite families
of tremendous wealth, nor, at the other end of the spectrum, homeless families. In addition, I
have a purposively drawn sample. Thus, I cannot state whether there are other forms of child
rearing corresponding to other cultural logics. Still, data from quantitative studies based on
nationally representative data support the patterns I observed. For differences by parents’ so-
cial class position and children’s time use, see especially Sandra Hofferth and John Sandberg,
“Changes in American Children’s Time, 1981–1997.” Patterns of language use with children
are harder to capture in national surveys, but the work of Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler,
especially Work and Personality, shows differences in parents’ c hild-rearing values. Duane
Alwin’s studies of parents’ desires are generally consistent with the results reported here. See
Duane Alwin, “Trends in Parental Socialization Values.” For differences in interventions in
institutions, there is extensive work showing social class differences in parent involvement in
education. See the U.S. Department of Education, The Condition of Education, 2001, p. 175.
11. In this book, unless otherwise noted, the statistics reported are from 1993 to 1995,
which was when the data were collected. Similarly, unless otherwise noted, all monetary
amounts are given in (unadjusted) dollars from 1994 to 1995. The figure reported here is
from Everett Ladd, Thinking about America, pp. 21–22.
12. This quote is from President Bill Clinton’s 1993 speech to the Democratic Leader-
ship Council. It is cited in Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream, p. 18.
13. Paul Kingston, The Classless Society, p. 2.
8 I ntersectionality: An Everyday
Metaphor Anyone Can Use
Kimberlé Crenshaw, interviewed by Bim
Adewunmi
Kimberlé Crenshaw is a Civil Rights activist and renowned scholar of gender, race,
and the law. Her writing about the intersection of these three s ocio-p olitical con-
ditions has led to an entirely new way of understanding social oppression and
justice, and so been named Intersectionality.
Departing from the conventional approach of viewing social phenomenon from
a singular lens, such as through gender or race exclusively, Crenshaw writes about
the experience of black women as simultaneously shaped by race and gender, and
looks at the legal and political dimensions that produce patterns of oppression,
marginalization, and subordination.
Here in her classic article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Poli-
tics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Crenshaw describes the problem an
intersectional framework addresses:
The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference,
as some critics charge, but rather the opposite — that it frequently con-
flates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against
women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because
the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other di-
mensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring
differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups,
another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize vio-
lence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women
and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color have fre-
quently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail
occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Although racism and sexism readily
intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antira-
cist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as “woman” or
“person of color” as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of
women of color to a location that resists telling.
Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality has influenced research in sociology, femi-
nist theory, and critical race theory, among others. In the following interview con-
ducted with Crenshaw in 2014, she reflects upon the theory of intersectionality,
its origins, and the ways in which it has been utilized over the last few decades.
From the New Statesman, http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/04/kimberl-crenshaw-
intersectionality-i-wanted-come-everyday-metaphor-anyone-could
171
172 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
•••
For Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA and Columbia, intersectionality theory came
about specifically to address a particular problem. “It’s important to clarify that the term
was used to capture the applicability of black feminism to anti-d iscrimination law,” she
says. In the lecture she delivered at the LSE (London School of Economics) later that
evening, she brought up the case of Degraffenreid vs General Motors, in which five black
women sued GM on the grounds of race and gender discrimination. “The particular chal-
lenge in the law was one that was grounded in the fact that a nti-d iscrimination law looks
at race and gender separately,” she says. “The consequence of that is when African Ameri-
can women or any other women of colour experience either compound or overlapping
discrimination, the law initially just was not there to come to their defence.”
The court’s thinking was that black women could not prove gender discrimination
because not all women were discriminated against, and they couldn’t prove race discrim-
ination because not all black people were discriminated against. A compound discrimin-
ation suit would, in the courts’ eyes, constitute preferential treatment, something nobody
else could do. Crenshaw laughs when she adds: “Of course, no one else had to do that.
Intersectionality was a way of addressing what it was that the courts weren’t seeing.”
Cases like these informed much of her earlier work on intersectionality – trying to
show how these African American plaintiffs’ arguments rested on the ability to show that
the discrimination they were experiencing was the combination of two different kinds
of policies. But there was an additional point to the theory as well: pointing out that
the tools being used to remedy the overlapping discrimination – anti-d iscrimination
law – were themselves inadequate. “You’ve got to show that the kind of discrimination
people have conceptualised is limited because they stop their thinking when the dis-
crimination encounters another kind of discrimination,” she says. “I wanted to come up
with a common everyday metaphor that people could use to say: “it’s well and good for
me to understand the kind of discriminations that occur along this avenue, along this
axis – but what happens when it flows into another axis, another avenue?”
Laid out like this, it may seem baffling that so many have had a problem with
the idea of intersectionality. What is it, I asked Crenshaw, that makes it so difficult
for people to grasp? She pauses briefly before she answers. “I’m only speculating,
but there are lots of different reasons. I mean, intersectionality is not easy,” she says.
“It’s not as though the existing frameworks that we have – from our culture, our
politics or our law – automatically lead people to being conversant and literate in
intersectionality.”
On the charge that intersectionality is not new, she gets philosophical. “Well, a
lot of things aren’t new,” she says. “Class is not new and race is not new. And we still
continue to contest and talk about it, so what’s so unusual about intersectionality not
being new and therefore that’s not a reason to talk about it? Intersectionality draws
attention to invisibilities that exist in feminism, in anti-racism, in class politics, so
obviously it takes a lot of work to consistently challenge ourselves to be attentive to
aspects of power that we don’t ourselves experience.” But, she stresses, this has been
the project of black feminism since its very inception: drawing attention to the era-
sures, to the ways that “women of colour are invisible in plain sight.”
8 Crenshaw / Intersectionality: An Everyday Metaphor Anyone Can Use 173
“Within any power system,” she continues, “there is always a moment – and some-
times it lasts a century – of resistance to the implications of that. So we shouldn’t
really be surprised about it.”
There is sometimes a failure to make analogies, she says. Feminists who have
answers for the questions of class politics and how it plays out along gender lines
sometimes exhibit an unwillingness to apply the same principles around feminism
and race. “That ability to be intersectional – even though it’s not called that – isn’t
replicated in [this] conversation,” she says. I think that the same kind of openness and
fluidity and willingness to interrogate power that we as feminists expect from men
in alliance on questions of class should also be the expectation that women of colour
can rely upon with our white feminist allies.”
I bring up a tweet I recently read, about the “perils of yelling at white women
for a living” to ask what form pushback takes when discussing intersectionality in
feminism. “At the end of the day, it really is a question of power: who has the power
to end the debate? To walk away? To say, ‘I’m done talking about it, and I can go on
with my rhetoric in a ‘business as usual’ kind of response?’” She smiles. “Sometimes
it feels like those in power frame themselves as being tremendously disempowered
by critique. A critique of one’s voice isn’t taking it away. If the underlying assumption
behind the category ‘women’ or ‘feminist’ is that we are a coalition then there have to
be coalitional practices and some form of accountability.”
But she also stresses the importance of black feminists being the originators of
dialogues about their own experience. “When I was writing in the late 80s, there was
a strain of discourse among women who were not the subjects of traditional femi-
nism, to simply make critique a difference,” she says. “So just the claim of ‘woman’ or
‘feminist’, prompted some women of colour to say, “but that’s not me”. Well, yeah –
that might not be you. But say what difference it makes that it’s not you – what
difference does it make in what kinds of interventions come out of a feminist frame
that doesn’t attend to race?” She pauses, spreads her hands. “That is our responsi-
bility. It’s up to us. Granted, the space has to be open and there has to be a sense of
receptivity among the sisterhood, but I really don’t want other women to feel that it’s
their responsibility to theorise what’s happening to us. It’s up to us to consistently
tell those stories, articulate what difference the difference makes, so it’s incorporated
within feminism and within a nti-racism. I think it’s important that we do that apart,
because we don’t want to be susceptible to the idea that this is just about the politics
of recognition.”
No discussion of Crenshaw’s work can be complete without discussing the con-
gressional hearings of October 1991, organised to address the claim that Supreme
Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed a colleague, Anita Hill. In
his denial of the allegations, Thomas said it was a “high tech lynching”. Crenshaw
was part of the legal team that represented Hill – and arguably changed the course
of history with regards to the recognition of sexual harassment in the workplace. A
documentary film, Anita, has been made of the events of the time, a period Crenshaw
describes as “l ife-d efining.”
“When we were defending Anita Hill, it felt like there was 10 of us against the
whole world,” she says. “There was overwhelming criticism of Anita Hill from
174 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
Clarence Thomas’s camp, the Republican camp, from the White House, from the
Senate Judiciary Committee. And the Democrats were not defending her.” Thomas’s
‘lynching’ comment, she says, communicated to many African Americans this was
a race issue – leaving Hill with no base to rally. “Lynching is representative of the
quintessential moment of racism – and that in turn centres African American male
experiences,” she says.
Crenshaw talks about a sort of “collective forgetting” – the fact that black women
were not spared from lynching themselves, and the way that racist sexism played out
for black women involved sexual violence that was never prosecuted. Rosa Parks,
she says, “was a rape crisis advocate before she sat down on that Montgomery bus.
The very fact that there are a range of experiences around sexualised racism that’s not
remembered – and we only remember one experience – is what then replayed itself
in the 1990s.”
She describes coming out of the Capitol to find it ringed by largely African Amer-
ican women “holding hands singing gospel songs in support of Clarence Thomas. It
was like one of these moments where you literally feel that you have been kicked out
of your community, all because you are trying to introduce and talk about the way
that African American women have experienced sexual harassment and violence. It
was a defining moment.”
One consequence of this was Anita Hill’s claim being taken up by mainstream
white feminists – only she was stripped of her race, reinforcing the idea that the case
was a race vs. gender issue. “She simply became a colourless woman, and we as Af-
rican American women feminists were trying to say, “you cannot talk about this just
in gender terms – you have to be intersectional – there is a long history you cannot
ignore,” but they didn’t have the skills to be able to talk about it,” she says. That led
to another big moment: the moment when, as Crenshaw puts it, African American
feminists had to “buy their way into the conversation.”
Nearly 2,000 African American feminists across the US collectively raised $60,000
and bought ad space in the New York Times. The ad, called African American Women
in Defense of Ourselves, was signed by 1,600 women, and covered among other
things, the historical discrimination against black women, as well as what had been
happening in the hearings. “That was a moment where black women came forward.
Twenty years later,” says Crenshaw, “that has been forgotten.” The legacy of the Anita
Hill case is one that subsequent generations of women in the workplace will bene-
fit from. “Many women who talk about the Anita Hill thing, they celebrate what’s
happened with women in general: the fact that we have more elected officials now
because they were outraged when they saw what the men were doing, Emily’s List
came in and really helped women get elected, and so on. So sexual harassment is
now recognised; what’s not doing as well is the recognition of black women’s unique
experiences with discrimination.”
The forgetting is important to note. Crenshaw recalls the strong a nti-h arassment
work of the civil rights movement, and speaks of a “certain ahistoricism” in some
of the conversations around feminism and a nti-racism work. “Intersectionality was
something I wrote in 1986, ’87 and there’s a whole generation now that has come to
8 Crenshaw / Intersectionality: An Everyday Metaphor Anyone Can Use 175
the conversation after black feminism and other forms of intersectional work tilled
the soil,” she says. “And I think sometimes it’s hard for people to imagine what the
world was like at the point when none of that work had been done. So I think it’s
useful to tell genealogies that include social histories – so people have a sense that the
way we talked about it then was as against the constraints of the time. And the way
we talk about it now has built upon that. There are many things that are forgotten,
and many other things that are elevated.”
9 White Privilege
Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Peggy McIntosh
Through work to bring materials from Women’s Studies into the rest of the curricu-
lum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are o ver-p rivileged,
even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will
work to improve women’s status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum,
but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s. Denials which amount to
taboos surround the subject of advantages which men gain from women’s disadvan-
tages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened
or ended.
Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized
that since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phe-
nomenon of white privilege which was similarly denied and protected. As a white
person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others
at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white
privilege, which puts me at an advantage.
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are
taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask
what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invis-
ible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about
which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weight-
less knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools
and blank checks.
Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women’s Stud-
ies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one
who writes about having white privilege must ask, “Having described it, what will I
do to lessen or end it?”
After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged
privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I re-
membered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they
encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive,
even when we don’t see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy
unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.
© 1989 Peggy McIntosh.“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”first appeared
in Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August, 1989, pp. 10–12, a publication of the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom, Philadelphia, PA. Reprinted by permission. Anyone
who wishes to reproduce more than 35 copies of this article must apply to the author, Dr. Peggy
McIntosh, at [email protected]. This article may not be electronically posted except by the
National SEED Project.
176
9 McIntosh / White Privilege 177
My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an un-
fairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to
see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will.
My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out:
whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average,
and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will
allow “them” to be more like “us.”
I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects
of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case
attach somewhat more to s kin-c olor privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geo-
graphical location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined.
As far as I can see, my African American c o-w orkers, friends and acquaintances with
whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place, and line of
work cannot count on most of these conditions.
1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the
time.
2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing hous-
ing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or
pleasant to me.
4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not
be followed or harassed.
5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see
people of my race widely represented.
6. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am
shown that people of my color made it what it is.
7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify
to the existence of their race.
8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white
privilege.
9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race repre-
sented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural
traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair.
10. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color
not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who
might not like them.
12. I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer letters, without
having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the
illiteracy of my race.
13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on
trial.
14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to
my race.
178 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who
constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for
such oblivion.
17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies
and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
18. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to “the person in charge,” I will be
facing a person of my race.
19. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure
I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys,
and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling some-
what tied in, rather than isolated, o ut-o f-p lace, outnumbered, unheard, held
at a distance, or feared.
22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having c o-
workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
23. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race
cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work
against me.
25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative epi-
sode or situation whether it has racial overtones.
26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more
or less match my skin.
I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me
white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to
avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things
are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors
open for certain people through no virtues of their own.
In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed conditions
of daily experience which I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these
perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely d ifferentiated
taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for
everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant
and destructive.
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of assump-
tions which were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of
cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the turf. My
skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself
as belonging in major ways, and of making social systems work for me. I could freely
disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural
forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.
9 McIntosh / White Privilege 179
In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and
oblivious, other groups were likely being made inconfident, uncomfortable, and
alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and vio-
lence, which I was being subtly trained to visit in turn upon people of color.
For this reason, the word “privilege” now seems to me misleading. We usually
think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or
luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work to systematically over-
empower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s
race or sex.
I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power con-
ferred systemically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is
in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list
are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to
you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just
society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity
of the holders as well as the ignored groups.
We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages which we
can work to spread, and negative types of advantages which unless rejected will
always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs
within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for
a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is
an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see
that some of the power which I originally saw as attendant on being a human being
in the U.S. consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.
I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned male
advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like
me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even
outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance and if so, what
we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying
how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students
in the U.S. think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color;
they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not
the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experi-
ence of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage
related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.
Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since
racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantaging associated with
them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of
unearned advantage which rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion,
sex and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are inter-
locking, as the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 continues to remind
us eloquently.
One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both
active forms which we can see and embedded forms which as a member of the
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