Race, Class, and Gender in the United States An Integrated Study

19  Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH
CIRCUIT

No. 14–556. Argued April 28, 2015—Decided June 26, 2015*

Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee define marriage as a union between one
man and one woman. The petitioners, 14 same-sex couples and two men whose
same-sex partners are deceased, filed suits in Federal District Courts in their home
States, claiming that respondent state officials violate the Fourteenth Amendment by
denying them the right to marry or to have marriages lawfully performed in another
State given full recognition. Each District Court ruled in petitioners’ favor, but the
Sixth Circuit consolidated the cases and reversed.

Held: The Fourteenth Amendment requires a State to license a marriage between
two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the
same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-State.
Pp. 3–28.

(a) Before turning to the governing principles and precedents, it is appropriate to
note the history of the subject now before the Court. Pp. 3–10.
(1) The history of marriage as a union between two persons of the opposite sex

marks the beginning of these cases. To the respondents, it would demean a timeless
institution if marriage were extended to same-sex couples. But the petitioners, far
from seeking to devalue marriage, seek it for themselves because of their respect—
and need—for its privileges and responsibilities, as illustrated by the petitioners’ own
experiences. Pp. 3–6.

(2) The history of marriage is one of both continuity and change. Changes, such as
the decline of arranged marriages and the abandonment of the law of coverture, have
worked deep transformations in the structure of marriage, affecting aspects of mar-
riage once viewed as essential. These new insights have strengthened, not weakened,
the institution. Changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a Nation
where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations.

This dynamic can be seen in the Nation’s experience with gay and lesbian rights.
Well into the 20th century, many States condemned same-sex intimacy as immoral,
and homosexuality was treated as an illness. Later in the century, cultural and ­political
developments allowed same-sex couples to lead more open and public lives. Extensive
public and private dialogue followed, along with shifts in public attitudes. ­Questions
about the legal treatment of gays and lesbians soon reached the courts, where they
could be discussed in the formal discourse of the law. In 2003, this Court overruled its

*Together with No. 14–562, Tanco et al. v. Haslam, Governor of Tennessee, et al., No. 14–571, DeBoer
et al. v. Snyder, Governor of Michigan, et al., and No. 14–574, Bourke et al. v. Beshear, Governor of
K­ entucky, also on certiorari to the same court.

530

19 Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015  531

1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186, which upheld a Georgia law that
criminalized certain homosexual acts, concluding laws making same-sex intimacy a
crime “demea[n] the lives of homosexual persons.” Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558,
575. In 2012, the federal Defense of Marriage Act was also struck down. United States
v. Windsor, 570 U.S. ___. Numerous same-sex marriage cases reaching the federal
courts and state supreme courts have added to the dialogue. Pp. 6–10.

(b) The Fourteenth Amendment requires a State to license a marriage between two
people of the same sex. Pp. 10–27.
(1) The fundamental liberties protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Pro-

cess Clause extend to certain personal choices central to individual dignity and au-
tonomy, including intimate choices defining personal identity and beliefs. See, e.g.,
Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 453; Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 484–486.
Courts must exercise reasoned judgment in identifying interests of the person so fun-
damental that the State must accord them its respect. History and tradition guide and
discipline the inquiry but do not set its outer boundaries. When new insight reveals
discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture,
a claim to liberty must be addressed.

Applying these tenets, the Court has long held the right to marry is protected by
the Constitution. For example, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12, invalidated bans on
interracial unions, and Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 95, held that prisoners could
not be denied the right to marry. To be sure, these cases presumed a relationship
involving opposite-sex partners, as did Baker v. Nelson, 409 U.S. 810, a one-line sum-
mary decision issued in 1972, holding that the exclusion of same-sex couples from
marriage did not present a substantial federal question. But other, more instructive
precedents have expressed broader principles. See, e.g., Lawrence, supra, at 574. In
assessing whether the force and rationale of its cases apply to same-sex couples, the
Court must respect the basic reasons why the right to marry has been long protected.
See, e.g., Eisenstadt, supra, at 453–454. This analysis compels the conclusion that
same-sex couples may exercise the right to marry. Pp. 10–12.

(2) Four principles and traditions demonstrate that the reasons marriage is fun-
damental under the Constitution apply with equal force to same-sex couples. The
first premise of this Court’s relevant precedents is that the right to personal choice
regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy. This abiding
connection between marriage and liberty is why Loving invalidated interracial mar-
riage bans under the Due Process Clause. See 388 U.S., at 12. Decisions about mar-
riage are among the most intimate that an individual can make. See Lawrence, supra,
at 574. This is true for all persons, whatever their sexual orientation.

A second principle in this Court’s jurisprudence is that the right to marry is fun-
damental because it supports a two-person union unlike any other in its importance
to the committed individuals. The intimate association protected by this right was
central to Griswold v. Connecticut, which held the Constitution protects the right of
married couples to use contraception, 381 U.S., at 485, and was acknowledged in
Turner, supra, at 95. Same-sex couples have the same right as opposite-sex couples to

532    PART VII How It Happened: Race and Gender Issues in U.S. Law

enjoy intimate association, a right extending beyond mere freedom from laws making
same-sex intimacy a criminal offense. See Lawrence, supra, at 567.

A third basis for protecting the right to marry is that it safeguards children and
families and thus draws meaning from related rights of childrearing, procreation, and
education. See, e.g., Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510. Without the recognition,
stability, and predictability marriage offers, children suffer the stigma of knowing
their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of
being raised by unmarried parents, relegated to a more difficult and uncertain family
life. The marriage laws at issue thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex
couples. See Windsor, supra, at ___. This does not mean that the right to marry is
less meaningful for those who do not or cannot have children. Precedent protects
the right of a married couple not to procreate, so the right to marry cannot be condi-
tioned on the capacity or commitment to procreate.

Finally, this Court’s cases and the Nation’s traditions make clear that marriage
is a keystone of the Nation’s social order. See Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190, 211.
States have contributed to the fundamental character of marriage by placing it at the
center of many facets of the legal and social order. There is no difference between
same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle, yet same-sex couples
are denied the constellation of benefits that the States have linked to marriage and
are consigned to an instability many opposite-sex couples would find intolerable.
It is demeaning to lock same-sex couples out of a central institution of the Nation’s
society, for they too may aspire to the transcendent purposes of marriage.

The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural
and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to
marry is now manifest. Pp. 12–18.

(3) The right of same-sex couples to marry is also derived from the Fourteenth
Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. The Due Process Clause and the Equal
Protection Clause are connected in a profound way. Rights implicit in liberty and
rights secured by equal protection may rest on different precepts and are not al-
ways coextensive, yet each may be instructive as to the meaning and reach of the
other. This dynamic is reflected in Loving, where the Court invoked both the Equal
Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause; and in Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S.
374, where the Court invalidated a law barring fathers delinquent on child-support
payments from marrying. Indeed, recognizing that new insights and societal un-
derstandings can reveal unjustified inequality within fundamental institutions that
once passed unnoticed and unchallenged, this Court has invoked equal protection
principles to invalidate laws imposing sex-based inequality on marriage, see, e.g.,
Kirchberg v. Feenstra, 450 U.S. 455, 460–461, and confirmed the relation between
liberty and equality, see, e.g., M. L. B. v. S. L. J., 519 U.S. 102, 120–121.

The Court has acknowledged the interlocking nature of these constitutional safe-
guards in the context of the legal treatment of gays and lesbians. See Lawrence, 539
U.S., at 575. This dynamic also applies to same-sex marriage. The challenged laws
burden the liberty of same-sex couples, and they abridge central precepts of equality. The
marriage laws at issue are in essence unequal: Same-sex couples are denied benefits

19 Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015  533

afforded opposite-sex couples and are barred from exercising a fundamental right.
Especially against a long history of disapproval of their relationships, this denial
works a grave and continuing harm, serving to disrespect and subordinate gays and
lesbians. Pp. 18–22.

(4) The right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person,
and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amend-
ment couples of the same-sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty.
Same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. Baker v. Nelson is
overruled. The State laws challenged by the petitioners in these cases are held invalid
to the extent they exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage on the same terms
and conditions as opposite-sex couples. Pp. 22–23.

(5) There may be an initial inclination to await further legislation, litigation, and
debate, but referenda, legislative debates, and grassroots campaigns; studies and other
writings; and extensive litigation in state and federal courts have led to an enhanced
understanding of the issue. While the Constitution contemplates that democracy is the
appropriate process for change, individuals who are harmed need not await legislative
action before asserting a fundamental right. Bowers, in effect, upheld state action that
denied gays and lesbians a fundamental right. Though it was eventually repudiated,
men and women suffered pain and humiliation in the interim, and the effects of these
injuries no doubt lingered long after Bowers was overruled. A ruling against same-sex
couples would have the same effect and would be unjustified under the Fourteenth
Amendment. The petitioners’ stories show the urgency of the issue they present to
the Court, which has a duty to address these claims and answer these questions. Re-
spondents’ argument that allowing same-sex couples to wed will harm marriage as an
institution rests on a counterintuitive view of opposite-sex couples’ decisions about
marriage and parenthood. Finally, the First Amendment ensures that religions, those
who adhere to religious doctrines, and others have protection as they seek to teach
the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths. Pp. 23–27.

(c)  The Fourteenth Amendment requires States to recognize same-sex marriages val-
idly performed out of State. Since same-sex couples may now exercise the fundamen-
tal right to marry in all States, there is no lawful basis for a State to refuse to recognize
a lawful same-sex marriage performed in another State on the ground of its same-sex
character. Pp. 27–28.

772 F. 3d 388, reversed.

KENNEDY, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which GINSBURG, BREYER,
SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined. ROBERTS, C. J., filed a dissenting opinion,
in which SCALIA and THOMAS, JJ., joined. SCALIA, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in
which THOMAS, J., joined. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which SCA-
LIA, J., joined. ALITO, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which SCALIA and THOMAS,
JJ., joined.

534    PART VII How It Happened: Race and Gender Issues in U.S. Law

Suggestions for Further Reading

Acuña, Rudolpho. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 7th ed. New York: Prentice Hall, 2010.
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press, 2012.
Anderson, Karen. Changing Women: A History of Racial Ethnic Women in Modern America. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1997.
Aptheker, Bettina. Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History. Amherst, MA:

University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
Baxandall, Rosalyn F., Linda Gordon, and Susan Reverby, eds. America’s Working Women: A Documentary

History—1600 to the Present, rev. ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Berry, Mary Frances. Justice for All: The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle

for Freedom in America. New York: Knopf, 2009.
Cacho, Lisa Marie. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New

York: New York University Press, 2012.
Cluster, Dick, ed. They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee. Boston: South End Press, 1999.
Cott, Nancy F. Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women, 2nd edition. Boston:

Northeastern Press, 1996.
Crenshaw, et al. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: The New

Press, 1996.
Davis, Mike. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economics in the History of the U.S. Working Class.

New York: Verso, 2000.
D’Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Dray, Philip. There Is Power in the Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America. New York: Anchor, 2012.
Duberman, Martin Baum, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., eds. Hidden from History: Reclaiming

the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: New American Library, 1989.
Fleischer, Doris Zames, and Frieda Zames. The Disability Rights Movement from Charity to Confrontation.

Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.
Flexner, Eleanor, and Ellen Fitzpatrick. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United

States, 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Freedman, Estelle B. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York:

Ballantine, 2003.
Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New

York: William Morrow, 1996.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Katz, Jonathan. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.: A Documentary History, rev. ed.

New York: Plume, 1992.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-

Century America, rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Meyer, Doug. Violence against Queer People: Race, Class, Gender, and the Persistence of Anti-LGBT Discrimina-

tion. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Mogul, Joey L., Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People

in the United States. New York: Beacon, 2012.
Murolo, Priscilla, A. B. Chitty, and Joe Sacco. From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illus-

trated History of Labor in the United States. New York: The New Press, 2003.
Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University

Press, 1999.

Suggestions for Further Reading  535

Richie, Beth. Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation. New York: New York
University Press, 2012.

Rios, Victor. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York: New York University Press
2011.

Robson, Ruthann. Lesbian (Out)Law: Survival Under the Rule of Law. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1992.
Ruiz, Vicki L., and Ellen Carol DuBois, eds. Unequal Sisters: An Inclusive Reader in U.S. Women’s History,

4th ed. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2007.
Silliman, Jael, and Anannya Bhattacharjee. Policing the National Body: Race, Gender, and Criminalization.

Boston: South End Press, 2002.
Spade, Dean. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. Boston: South

End Press, 2011.
Stanley, Eric. Captive Genders : Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. Oakland, CA: AK Press,

2011.
Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: Multicultural American History. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.
———. From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Culture in America, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1994.
Tang, Eric. Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto. Philadelphia: Temple University

Press, 2015.
United States Commission on Human Rights. Indian Tribes: A Continuing Quest for Survival. Washington,

DC: United States Commission on Human Rights, 1981.
Wagenheim, Kal, and Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim, eds. The Puerto Ricans: A Documentary History, rev. ed.

New York: Markus Wiener, 2008.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010.

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PA R T VIIISelectionTitle  537

Maintaining Race, Class,
and Gender Hierarchies:
Reproducing “Reality”

In the end, the most effective forms of social control are invisible. Tanks in the
streets and armed militia are obvious reminders that people are not free, and they
provide a focus for anger and an impetus for rebellion. More effective by far are
the beliefs and attitudes a society fosters to rationalize and reinforce prevailing
distributions of power and opportunity. It is here that stereotypes and ideology
have an important role to play. They shape how we see ourselves and others; they
affect how we define social issues; and they determine whom we hold respon-
sible for society’s ills. If distorted, each plays a part in persuading people that dif-
ferences in wealth, power, and opportunity are reflections of natural differences
among people, not the results of the economic and political organization of soci-
ety. If the distortions are truly effective, they go beyond rationalizing inequality to
rendering it invisible. Once again we find that the social constructions of gender,
race, and class are hierarchies at the heart of a belief system that makes the pre-
vailing distribution of wealth and opportunity appear natural and inevitable rather
than arbitrary and alterable. In U.S. society, the stereotypes and values transmitted
through education and the media have played a critical role in perpetuating rac-
ism, sexism, heterosexism, and class privilege even at those times when the law
has been used as a vehicle to fight discrimination rather than maintain it.

The selections in Part VIII examine some of the ways in which we are social-
ized to buy into belief systems that reinforce existing social roles and class posi-
tions and blunt social criticism. Stereotypes and discriminatory ideology are

537

538    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

p­ erpetuated by the institutions in which we live and grow and which provide us
with information and values: Education, religion, and our families, along with the
media, encourage us to adopt a particular picture of the world and our place in it.
These institutions shape our perceptions of others and give us a sense of our own
future. In effect, they construct what we take to be “reality.”

The mass media selectively provides information, promotes values, and teaches
us who and what we should regard as important. Along with other institutions, it
shapes our definition of community, painting a picture of society divided between
“us” and “them.” By making inequities and suffering appear to be the result of
p­ ersonal or group deficiency rather than the consequences of injustice, the rep-
resentations of race, class, and gender often depicted in mass media tend to rec-
oncile people to the status quo and prevent them from seeking change. Violence
and the threat of violence reinforce ideology and threaten with pain or death
those who challenge the prevailing system or its conventions and prescriptions.

In the first selection in Part VIII, Mark Snyder uses examples from psychological
research to show how important people’s expectations are in shaping their per-
ceptions of others and in determining how they behave. In particular, these studies
raise serious questions about the “objectivity” of interviewers’ evaluations of job
candidates and applicants for admission to educational programs; the studies
suggest that how we see others often says more about our own unconscious ste-
reotyping and expectations than about the individuals being evaluated. As Snyder
points out, some of the most interesting studies in education show that teachers’
expectations are at least as important as a child’s innate ability in determining how
well the child does in school. The unconscious beliefs that people harbor can have
powerful consequences for the life chances and well-being of others.

While men in our society continue to be judged by the jobs they hold and their
earning power, women continue to be judged according to a narrow and  rigid
standard of beauty. The messages that bombard young women from an early age
foster the belief that a tiny waist is infinitely more important than an advanced
degree or a technical skill. Although many women have made considerable strides
in the world of work, the prevailing ideology continues to assert that being attrac-
tive (read “thin”) enough to capture the right man is the real way to success.
Aside from its heterosexist bias, this emphasis on physical appearance (and, con-
sequently, on unhealthy standards for body weight) is simply one more way in
which women are distracted from their own self-interest and achieving true power
and status in society. In Selection 2, Sharlene Hesse-Biber explores some of the
consequences of the ways in which women have been encouraged to internalize
an artificial and generally unattainable standard of beauty.

In Selection 3, Michael Parenti offers an account of our society as a plutocracy,
a system of rule by and for the rich, rather than a democracy, a system of rule by
and for the people. In this book excerpt, Parenti discusses the ways in which our
social institutions are organized to perpetuate rule by the rich and the ways in
which we are socialized to embrace a system of beliefs that reinforces the existing
social hierarchy. He suggests that all of us are getting both a clear message that

PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”  539

material success is the measure of a person’s worth and the related suggestion
that, by implication, the poor aren’t worth very much and so we should not waste
society’s resources on them.

While Gregory Mantsios, the author of Selection 4, would undoubtedly agree
with Parenti’s conclusion, he argues that in addition to playing a major role in fos-
tering racial, ethnic, gender, and class stereotypes, the media’s programming and
perspectives affect our ability to “see” class at all. “By ignoring the poor and blur-
ring the lines between working people and the upper class,” he writes, “the news
media creates a universal middle class.” By adopting the perspective of those who
are most privileged, the media distorts the realities of daily life and encourages
most of us to identify with the needs and interests of a privileged few.

It would be difficult if not impossible to underestimate the role that education
plays in reproducing the social hierarchy (for more on this, see Annette Lareau in
Part II). Jonathan Kozol has written numerous books about this role. In Selection 5,
he describes what he calls “the governmentally administered diminishment in the
value of children of the poor.” Kozol’s thesis is that education in the United States
continues to be separate and unequal to such an extent that it both constitutes
and perpetuates a system of apartheid.

While Gregory Mantsios’s selection talks about the media’s ability to make class
issues disappear, Angela Davis suggests in Selection 6 that the criminal justice
system in the United States performs a similarly magical feat by making social
problems disappear. In her essay, Davis examines the recent trend toward priva-
tizing the nation’s prison system and argues that imprisonment has become the
government’s response to social problems. She writes: “Homelessness, unemploy-
ment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems
that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them
are relegated to cages.”

For an altogether different take on the perpetuation of stereotypes, the next
two selections examine the influence of the entertainment industries of Hollywood
and professional sports. Jon Ronson writes in Selection 7 about typecasting and
the role of the entertainment industry in fueling the conflation of Islam and ter-
rorism. He speaks with Muslim actors about how they negotiate the ethics of
playing one-dimensional stereotypic roles with the pragmatic concerns of finding
work and needing to pay the bills. Ronson notes that the public that consumes
television and films that perpetuate these stereotypes is complicit in this. He asks,
Where is the outrage? David Zirin offers another example, from the world of pro-
fessional sports, in Selection 8. Zirin compares the Washington Redskins to the
Florida Seminoles, asking why there has been so much public opposition to the
Washington team’s use of a slur against Native Americans in their name while
silence has surrounded the Florida team’s appropriation of a tribal name which
is accompanied by “interactive minstrelsy” such as fans’ war chanting, doing the
“Tomahawk chop,” and wearing feather headdresses. He explores the myth that
actual Seminoles have agreed to this usage and shows how this “agreement” is
constituted as part of a larger economic project. Zirin suggests that both team

540    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

names and the continued imagery and stereotypes that are associated with them
are forms of institutionalized racism that the public helps propagate.

The final selections turn to the very real and very tragic consequences of ste-
reotyping in relation to law enforcement, and how such stereotyping is ultimately
condoned in the mass media. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s
pieces (Selections 9 and 10) both look at the recent cases of police violence
against young unarmed black men. Coates’s article reflects that by casting Michael
Brown as “no angel,” the New York Times sets an impossible standard for morality:
does one need to be angelic to be safe from violence? Cottom takes this question
of morality a step further by asking whether targeted groups or individuals are
responsible to keep themselves safe by signaling that they are not threatening.
Adapting behavior to mediate assumptions and stereotypes is a common coping
practice used by different marginalized groups. Cottom asks us to consider the
toll that this takes and the consequences of this stress.

1    Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes

Mark Snyder

Gordon Allport, the Harvard psychologist who wrote a classic work on the nature of
prejudice, told a story about a child who had come to believe that people who lived in
Minneapolis were called monopolists. From his father, moreover, he had learned that
monopolists were evil folk. It wasn’t until many years later, when he discovered his
confusion, that his dislike of residents of Minneapolis vanished.

Allport knew, of course, that it was not so easy to wipe out prejudice and errone-
ous stereotypes. Real prejudice, psychologists like Allport argued, was buried deep
in human character, and only a restructuring of education could begin to root it out.
Yet many people whom I meet while lecturing seem to believe that stereotypes are
simply beliefs or attitudes that change easily with experience. Why do some people
express the view that Italians are passionate, blacks are lazy, Jews materialistic, and
lesbians mannish in their demeanor? In the popular view, it is because they have not
learned enough about the diversity among these groups and have not had enough
contact with members of the groups for their stereotypes to be challenged by reality.
With more experience, it is presumed, most people of good will are likely to revise
their stereotypes.

My research over the past decade convinces me that there is little justification for
such optimism—and not only for the reasons given by Allport. While it is true that
deep prejudice is often based on the needs of pathological character structure, ste-
reotypes are obviously quite common even among fairly normal individuals. When
people first meet others, they cannot help noticing certain highly visible and distinc-
tive characteristics: sex, race, physical appearance, and the like. Despite people’s best
intentions, their initial impressions of others are shaped by their assumptions about
such characteristics.

What is critical, however, is that these assumptions are not merely beliefs or at-
titudes that exist in a vacuum; they are reinforced by the behavior of both prejudiced
people and the targets of their prejudice. In recent years, psychologists have collected
considerable laboratory evidence about the processes that strengthen stereotypes and
put them beyond the reach of reason and good will.

My own studies initially focused on first encounters between strangers. It did not
take long to discover, for example, that people have very different ways of treating
those whom they regard as physically attractive and those whom they consider physi-
cally unattractive, and that these differences tend to bring out precisely those kinds
of behavior that fit with stereotypes about attractiveness.

In an experiment that I conducted with my colleagues Elizabeth Decker Tanke and
Ellen Berscheid, pairs of college-age men and women met and became acquainted

Psychology Today © Copyright 1982. www.Psychologytoday.com

541

542    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

in telephone conversations. Before the conversations began, each man received a
Polaroid snapshot, presumably taken just months before, of the woman he would
soon meet. The photograph, which had actually been prepared before the experiment
began, showed either a physically attractive woman or a physically unattractive one.
By randomly choosing which picture to use for each conversation, we insured that
there was no consistent relationship between the attractiveness of the woman in the
picture and the attractiveness of the woman in the conversation.

By questioning the men, we learned that even before the conversations began,
stereotypes about physical attractiveness came into play. Men who looked forward
to talking with physically attractive women said that they expected to meet decid-
edly sociable, poised, humorous, and socially adept people, while men who thought
that they were about to get acquainted with unattractive women fashioned images of
rather unsociable, awkward, serious, and socially inept creatures. Moreover, the men
proved to have very different styles of getting acquainted with women whom they
thought to be attractive and those whom they believed to be unattractive. Shown a
photograph of an attractive woman, they behaved with warmth, friendliness, humor,
and animation. However, when the woman in the picture was unattractive, the men
were cold, uninteresting, and reserved.

These differences in the men’s behavior elicited behavior in the women that was
consistent with the men’s stereotyped assumptions. Women who were believed (un-
beknown to them) to be physically attractive behaved in a friendly, likeable, and
sociable manner. In sharp contrast, women who were perceived as physically unat-
tractive adopted a cool, aloof, and distant manner. So striking were the differences
in the women’s behavior that they could be discerned simply by listening to tape
recordings of the woman’s side of the conversations. Clearly, by acting upon their
stereotyped beliefs about the women whom they would be meeting, the men had
initiated a chain of events that produced behavioral confirmation for their beliefs.

Similarly, Susan Anderson and Sandra Bem have shown in an experiment at Stan-
ford University that when the tables are turned—when it is women who have pictures
of men they are to meet on the telephone—many women treat the men according to
their presumed physical attractiveness, and by so doing encourage the men to con-
firm their stereotypes. Little wonder, then, that so many people remain convinced
that good looks and appealing personalities go hand in hand.

Sex and Race

It is experiments such as these that point to a frequently unnoticed power of stereo-
types: the power to influence social relationships in ways that create the illusion of
reality. In one study, Berna Skrypnek and I arranged for pairs of previously unac-
quainted students to interact in a situation that permitted us to control the informa-
tion that each one received about the apparent sex of the other. The two people were
seated in separate rooms so that they could neither see nor hear each other. Using a
system of signal lights that they operated with switches, they negotiated a division of

1 Snyder / Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes  543

labor, deciding which member of the pair would perform each of several tasks that
differed in sex-role connotations. The tasks varied along the dimensions of mascu-
linity and femininity: sharpen a hunting knife (masculine), polish a pair of shoes
(neutral), iron a shirt (feminine).

One member of the team was led to believe that the other was, in one condition
of the experiment, male; in the other, female. As we had predicted, the first member’s
belief about the sex of the partner influenced the outcome of the pair’s negotiations.
Women whose partners believed them to be men generally chose stereotypically mas-
culine tasks; in contrast, women whose partners believed that they were women
usually chose stereotypically feminine tasks. The experiment thus suggests that much
sex-role behavior may be the product of other people’s stereotyped and often errone-
ous beliefs.

In a related study at the University of Waterloo, Carl von Baeyer, Debbie Sherk,
and Mark Zanna have shown how stereotypes about sex roles operate in job in-
terviews. The researchers arranged to have men conduct simulated job interviews
with women supposedly seeking positions as research assistants. The investigators
informed half of the women that the men who would interview them held tradi-
tional views about the ideal woman, believing her to be very emotional, deferential
to her husband, home-oriented, and passive. The rest of the women were told that
their interviewer saw the ideal woman as independent, competitive, ambitious, and
dominant. When the women arrived for their interviews, the researchers noticed that
most of them had dressed to meet the stereotyped expectations of their prospective
interviewers. Women who expected to see a traditional interviewer had chosen very
feminine-looking makeup, clothes, and accessories. During the interviews (video-
taped through a one-way mirror) these women behaved in traditionally feminine
ways and gave traditionally feminine answers to questions such as “Do you have plans
to include children and marriage with your career plans?”

Once more, then, we see the self-fulfilling nature of stereotypes. Many sex differ-
ences, it appears, may result from the images that people create in their attempts to
act out accepted sex roles. The implication is that if stereotyped expectations about
sex roles shift, behavior may change, too. In fact, statements by people who have
undergone sex-change operations have highlighted the power of such expectations
in easing adjustment to a new life. As the writer Jan Morris said in recounting the
story of her transition from James to Jan: “The more I was treated as a woman, the
more woman I became.”

The power of stereotypes to cause people to confirm stereotyped expectations
can also be seen in interracial relationships. In the first of two investigations done at
Princeton University by Carl Word, Mark Zanna, and Joel Cooper, white undergradu-
ates interviewed both white and black job applicants. The applicants were actually
confederates of the experimenters, trained to behave consistently from interview to
interview, no matter how the interviewers acted toward them.

To find out whether or not the white interviewers would behave differently toward
white and black job applicants, the researchers secretly videotaped each interview
and then studied the tapes. From these, it was apparent that there were substantial

544    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

differences in the treatment accorded blacks and whites. For one thing, the inter-
viewers’ speech deteriorated when they talked to blacks, displaying more errors in
grammar and pronunciation. For another, the interviewers spent less time with blacks
than with whites and showed less “immediacy,” as the researchers called it, in their
manner. That is, they were less friendly, less outgoing, and more reserved with blacks.

In the second investigation, white confederates were trained to approximate the
immediate or the nonimmediate interview styles that had been observed in the first
investigation as they interviewed white job applicants. A panel of judges who evalu-
ated the tapes agreed that applicants subjected to the nonimmediate styles performed
less adequately and were more nervous than job applicants treated in the immediate
style. Apparently, then, the blacks in the first study did not have a chance to display
their qualifications to the best advantage. Considered together, the two investigations
suggest that in interracial encounters, racial stereotypes may constrain behavior in
ways to cause both blacks and whites to behave in accordance with those stereotypes.

Rewriting Biography

Having adopted stereotyped ways of thinking about another person, people tend to
notice and remember the ways in which that person seems to fit the stereotype, while
resisting evidence that contradicts the stereotype. In one investigation that I conducted
with Seymour Uranowitz, student subjects read a biography of a fictitious woman
named Betty K. We constructed the story of her life so that it would fit the stereo-
typed images of both lesbians and heterosexuals. Betty, we wrote, never had a steady
boyfriend in high school, but did go out on dates. And although we gave her a steady
boyfriend in college, we specified that he was more of a close friend than anything
else. A week after we had distributed this biography, we gave our subjects some new
information about Betty. We told some students that she was now living with another
woman in a lesbian relationship; we told others that she was living with her husband.

To see what impact stereotypes about sexuality would have on how people remem-
bered the facts of Betty’s life, we asked each student to answer a series of questions
about her life history. When we examined their answers, we found that the students
had reconstructed the events of Betty’s past in ways that supported their own ste-
reotyped beliefs about her sexual orientation. Those who believed that Betty was a
lesbian remembered that Betty had never had a steady boyfriend in high school, but
tended to neglect the fact that she had gone out on many dates in college. Those who
believed that Betty was now a heterosexual tended to remember that she had formed
a steady relationship with a man in college, but tended to ignore the fact that this
relationship was more of a friendship than a romance.

The students showed not only selective memories but also a striking facility for
interpreting what they remembered in ways that added fresh support for their ste-
reotypes. One student who accurately remembered that a supposedly lesbian Betty
never had a steady boyfriend in high school confidently pointed to the fact as an
early sign of her lack of romantic or sexual interest in men. A student who correctly

1 Snyder / Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes  545

remembered that a purportedly lesbian Betty often went out on dates in college was
sure that these dates were signs of Betty’s early attempts to mask her lesbian interests.

Clearly, the students had allowed their preconceptions about lesbians and hetero-
sexuals to dictate the way in which they interpreted and reinterpreted the facts of
Betty’s life. As long as stereotypes make it easy to bring to mind evidence that sup-
ports them and difficult to bring to mind evidence that undermines them, people will
cling to erroneous beliefs.

Stereotypes in the Classroom and Work Place

The power of one person’s beliefs to make other people conform to them has been
well demonstrated in real life. Back in the 1960s, as most people well remember,
Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal and his colleague Lenore Jacobson entered
elementary-school classrooms and identified one out of every five pupils in each
room as a child who could be expected to show dramatic improvement in intellectual
achievement during the school year. What the teachers did not know was that the
children had been chosen on a random basis. Nevertheless, something happened in
the relationships between teachers and their supposedly gifted pupils that led the
children to make clear gains in test performance.

It can also do so on the job. Albert King, now a professor of management at North-
ern Illinois University, told a welding instructor in a vocational training center that
five men in his training program had unusually high aptitude. Although these five
had been chosen at random and knew nothing of their designation as high-aptitude
workers, they showed substantial changes in performance. They were absent less
often than were other workers, learned the basics of the welder’s trade in about half
the usual time, and scored a full 10 points higher than other trainees on a welding
test. Their gains were noticed not only by the researcher and by the welding instruc-
tor, but also by other trainees, who singled out the five as their preferred coworkers.

Might not other expectations influence the relationships between supervisors and
workers? For example, supervisors who believe that men are better suited to some
jobs and women to others may treat their workers (wittingly or unwittingly) in ways
that encourage them to perform their jobs in accordance with stereotypes about dif-
ferences between men and women. These same stereotypes may determine who gets
which job in the first place. Perhaps some personnel managers allow stereotypes to
influence, subtly or not so subtly, the way in which they interview job candidates,
making it likely that candidates who fit the stereotypes show up better than job seek-
ers who do not fit them.

Unfortunately, problems of this kind are compounded by the fact that members
of stigmatized groups often subscribe to stereotypes about themselves. That is what
Amerigo Farina and his colleagues at the University of Connecticut found when
they measured the impact upon mental patients of believing that others knew their
psychiatric history. In Farina’s study, each mental patient cooperated with another
person in a game requiring teamwork. Half of the patients believed that their partners

546    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

knew they were patients, the other half believed that their partners thought they were
nonpatients. In reality, the nonpatients never knew a thing about anyone’s psychiatric
history. Nevertheless, simply believing that others were aware of their history led
the patients to feel less appreciated, to find the task more difficult, and to perform
poorly. In addition, objective observers saw them as more tense, more anxious, and
more poorly adjusted than patients who believed that their status was not known.
Seemingly, the belief that others perceived them as stigmatized caused them to play
the role of stigmatized patients.

Consequences for Society

Apparently, good will and education are not sufficient to subvert the power of ste-
reotypes. If people treat others in such a way as to bring out behavior that supports
stereotypes, they may never have an opportunity to discover which of their stereo-
types are wrong.

I suspect that even if people were to develop doubts about the accuracy of their
stereotypes, chances are they would proceed to test them by gathering precisely the
evidence that would appear to confirm them.

The experiments I have described help to explain the persistence of stereotypes.
But, as is so often the case, solving one puzzle only creates another. If by acting as if
false stereotypes were true, people lead others, too, to act as if they were true, why
do the stereotypes not come to be true? Why, for example, have researchers found so
little evidence that attractive people are generally friendly, sociable, and outgoing and
that unattractive people are generally shy and aloof?

I think that the explanation goes something like this: Very few among us have
the kind of looks that virtually everyone considers either very attractive or very
­unattractive. Our looks make us rather attractive to some people but somewhat less
attractive to other people. When we spend time with those who find us attractive,
they will tend to bring out our more sociable sides, but when we are with those who
find us less attractive, they will bring out our less sociable sides. Although our actual
physical ­appearance does not change, we present ourselves quite differently to our
admirers and to our detractors. For our admirers we become attractive people, and
for our detractors we become unattractive. This mixed pattern of behavior will pre-
vent the development of any consistent relationship between physical attractiveness
and personality.

Now that I understand some of the powerful forces that work to perpetuate social
stereotypes, I can see a new mission for my research. I hope, on the one hand, to find
out how to help people see the flaws in their stereotypes. On the other hand, I would
like to help the victims of false stereotypes find ways of liberating themselves from
the constraints imposed on them by other members of society.

2    Am I Thin Enough Yet?

Sharlene Hesse-Biber

“Ever since I was ten years old, I was just a very vain person. I always wanted to be
the thinnest, the prettiest. ’Cause I thought, if I look like this, then I’m going to have
so many boyfriends, and guys are going to be so in love with me, and I’ll be taken
care of for the rest of my life. I’ll never have to work, you know?”

—Delia, college senior

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

Pretty, vivacious, and petite, Delia was a picture of fashionable perfection when she
first walked into my office. Her tight blue jeans and fringed Western shirt showed off
her thin, 5-ft frame; her black cowboy boots and silver earrings completed a presenta-
tion that said, “Look at me!”

The perfect picture had a serious price. Delia had come to talk about her “prob-
lem.” She is bulimic. In secret, she regularly binges on large amounts of food, then
forces herself to vomit. It has become a powerful habit, one that she is afraid to break
because it so efficiently maintains her thin body. For Delia, as for so many others,
being thin is everything.

“I mean, how many bumper stickers have you seen that say ‘No Fat Chicks,’ you
know? Guys don’t like fat girls. Guys like little girls. I guess because it makes them
feel bigger and, you know, they want somebody who looks pretty. Pretty to me is
you have to be thin and you have to have like good facial features. It’s both. My final
affirmation of myself is how many guys look at me when I go into a bar. How many
guys pick up on me. What my boyfriend thinks about me.”

Delia’s Story

Delia is the eldest child, and only girl, in a wealthy Southern family. Her father is a
successful dentist and her mother has never worked outside the home. They fought a
lot when she was young—her father was an alcoholic—and they eventually divorced.
According to Delia, both parents doted on her.

“I’ve never been deprived of anything in my entire life. I was spoiled, I guess,
because I’ve never felt any pressure from my parents to do anything. My Dad would
say, ‘Whatever you want to do, if you want to go to Europe, if you want to go to law

Am I Thin EnoughYet? The Cult of Thinness and the Commercialization of Identity by Sharlene Hesse-Biber
(1996): Extracts totaling 3,820 words from 7–9, 12–14, 32, 34, 35, 36, 39, 42 & 43. Copyright © 1996 by
Oxford University Press, Inc. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, USA.

547

548    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

school, if you don’t want to do anything . . . whatever you want to do, just be happy.’
No pressure.”

He was unconcerned about her weight, she said, but emphasized how impor-
tant it was to be pretty. Delia quickly noticed this message everywhere, especially
in the media.

“I am so affected by Glamour magazine and Vogue and all that, because that’s a line
of work I want to get into. I’m looking at all these beautiful women. They’re thin. I
want to be just as beautiful. I want to be just as thin. Because that is what guys like.”

When I asked what her mother wanted for her, she recited, “To be nice and pretty
and sweet and thin and popular and smart and successful and have everything that I
could ever want and just to be happy.” “Sweet and pretty and thin” meant that from
the age of ten she was enrolled in a health club, and learned to count calories. Her
mom, who at 45 is “beautiful, gorgeous, thin,” gave her instructions on how to eat.

“‘Only eat small amounts. Eat a thousand calories a day; don’t overeat.’ My mom
was never critical like, ‘You’re fat.’ But one time, I went on a camping trip and I gained
four pounds and she said, ‘You’ve got to lose weight.’ I mean, she watched what I ate.
Like if I was going to get a piece of cake she would be, ‘Don’t eat that.’”

At age 13 she started her secret bingeing and vomiting. “When I first threw up
I thought, well, it’s so easy,” she told me. “I can eat and not get the calories and not
gain weight. And I was modeling at the time, and I wanted to look like the girls in
the magazines.”

Delia’s preoccupation with thinness intensified when she entered high school. She
wanted to be a cheerleader, and she was tiny enough to make it. “When I was sixteen
I just got into this image thing, like tiny, thin . . . I started working out more. I was Joe
Healthy Thin Exercise Queen and I’d just fight eating because I was working out all
the time, you know? And so I’m going to aerobics two or three times a day sometimes,
eating only salad and a bagel, and like, no fat. I just got caught up in this circle.”

College in New England brought a new set of social pressures. She couldn’t go run-
ning every day because of the cold. She hated the school gym, stopped working out,
and gained four pounds her freshman year. Her greatest stress at college had nothing
to do with academics. “The most stressful thing for me is whether I’m going to eat
that day, and what am I going to eat,” she told me, “more than getting good grades.”

After freshman year Delia became a cheerleader again. “Going in, I know I weighed
like 93 or 94 pounds, which to me was this enormous hang-up, because I’d never
weighed more than 90 pounds in my entire life. And I was really freaked out. I knew
people were going to be looking at me in the crowd and I’m like, I’ve got to lose this
weight. So I would just not eat, work out all the time. I loved being on the squad,
but my partner was a real jerk. He would never work out, and when we would do
lifts he’d always be, ‘Delia, go run. Go run, you’re too heavy.’ I hadn’t been eating that
day. I had already run seven or eight miles and he told me to run again. And I was
surrounded by girls who were all so concerned about their weight, and it was just
really this horrible situation.”

College life also confirmed another issue for Delia, a cultural message from her
earliest childhood. She did not want to be a breadwinner. She put it this way, “When

2 Hesse-Biber / Am I Thin Enough Yet?  549

I was eight I wanted to be President of the United States. As I grew older and got to
college I was like, wow, it’s hard for women. I mean, I don’t care what people say. If
they say the society’s liberated, they’re wrong. It’s still really hard for women. It’s like
they look through a glass window [sic]. They’re vice presidents, but they aren’t the
president. And I just figured, God, how much easier would it be for me to get married
to somebody I know is going to make a lot of money and just be taken care of . . . I
want somebody else to be the millionaire.” . . .

Economic and career achievement is a primary definition of success for men. (Of
course, men can also exhibit some self-destructive behaviors in pursuit of this suc-
cess, such as workaholism or substance abuse.) Delia’s upbringing and environment
defined success for her in a different way. She was not interested in having a job that
earned $150,000 a year, but in marrying the guy who did. She learned to use any tool
she could to stay thin, to look good, and to have a shot at her goal.

No wonder she was reluctant to give up her behavior. She was terrified of losing
the important benefits of her membership in the Cult of Thinness. She knew she
was hurting psychologically and physically, but, in the final analysis, being counted
among “the chosen” justified the pain.

“God forbid anybody else gets stuck in this trap. But I’m already there, and I don’t
really see myself getting out, because I’m just so obsessed with how I look. I get per-
sonal satisfaction from looking thin, and receiving attention from guys.”

I told Delia about women who have suggested other ways of coping with weight
issues. There are even those who advocate fat liberation, or who suggest that fat is
beautiful. She was emphatic about these solutions.

“Bullshit. They live in la-la land . . . I can hold onto my boyfriend because he
doesn’t need to look anywhere else. The bottom line is that appearance counts. And
you can sit here and go, ‘I feel good about myself twenty pounds heavier,’ but who
is the guy going to date?”

A Woman’s Sense of Worth

Delia’s devotion to the rituals of beauty work involved a great deal of time and
energy. She weighed herself three times a day. She paid attention to what she put in
her mouth; when she had too much, she knew she must get rid of it. She had to act
and look a certain way, buy the right clothes, the right makeup. She also watched
out for other women who might jeopardize her chances as they vied for the rewards
of the system.

A woman’s sense of worth in our culture is still greatly determined by her ability to
attract a man. Social status is largely a function of income and occupation. Women’s
access to these resources is generally indirect, through marriage.1 Even a woman with
a successful and lucrative career may fear that her success comes at the expense of
her femininity. . . .

Cultural messages on the rewards of thinness and the punishments of obesity are
everywhere. Most women accept society’s standards of beauty as “the way things are,”

550    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

even though these standards may undermine self-image, self-esteem, or physical well-
being. Weight concerns or even obsessions are so common among women and girls
that they escape notice. Dieting is not considered abnormal behavior, even among
women who are not overweight. But only a thin line separates “normal” dieting from
an eating disorder.2 . . .

Profiting from Women’s Bodies

Because women feel their bodies fail the beauty test, American industry benefits
enormously, continually nurturing feminine insecurities. Ruling patriarchal interests,
like corporate culture, the traditional family, the government, and the media also
benefit. If women are so busy trying to control their bodies through dieting, exces-
sive exercise, and self-improvement activities, they lose control over other important
aspects of selfhood that might challenge the status quo.3 In the words of one critic, “A
secretary who bench-presses 150 pounds is still stuck in a dead-end job; a housewife
who runs the marathon is still financially dependent on her husband.”4

In creating women’s concept of the ideal body image, the cultural mirror is more
influential than the mirror reflecting peer group attitudes. Research has shown that
women overestimate how thin a body their male and female peers desire. In a recent
study using body silhouettes, college students of both sexes were asked to indicate
an ideal female figure, the one that they believed most attractive to the same-sex
peer and other-sex peer. Not only did the women select a thinner silhouette than the
men,5 but when asked to choose a personal ideal, rather than a peer ideal, the women
selected an even skinnier model.

Advertisements and Beauty Advice:
Buy, Try, Comply

Capitalism and patriarchy most often use the media to project the culturally desirable
body to women. These images are everywhere—on TV, in the movies, on billboards,
in print. Women’s magazines, with their glossy pages of advertising, advertorials, and
beauty advice, hold up an especially devious mirror. They offer “help” to women,
while presenting a standard nearly impossible to attain. As one college student named
Nancy noted in our interviews,

The advertisement showed me exactly what I should be, not what I was. I wasn’t tall,
I wasn’t blonde, I wasn’t skinny. I didn’t have thin thighs, I didn’t have a flat stomach.
I am short, have brown curly hair, short legs. They did offer me solutions like dyeing
my hair or a workout or the use of this cream to take away cellulite. . . .

Not everyone is taken in, of course. One student I interviewed dismissed the im-
ages she saw in the advertising pages of magazines as “constructed people.”

I just stopped buying women’s magazines. They are all telling you how to dress, how
to look, what to wear, the type of clothes. And I think they are just ridiculous. . . . You

2 Hesse-Biber / Am I Thin Enough Yet?  551

can take the most gorgeous model and make her look terrible. Just like you can take
a person who is not that way and make them look beautiful. You can use airbrush-
ing and many other techniques. These are not really people. They are constructed
people.

Computer-enhanced photography has advanced far beyond the techniques that
merely airbrushed blemishes, added highlights to hair, and lengthened the legs with
a camera angle. The September 1994 issue of Mirabella featured as a cover model
“an extraordinary image of great American beauty.” According to the magazine, the
photographer “hints that she’s something of a split personality . . . it wasn’t easy
getting her together. Maybe her identity has something to do with the microchip
floating through space, next to that gorgeous face . . . true American beauty is a
combination of elements from all over the world.” In other words, the photo is a
computerized composite. It is interesting that Mirabella’s “melting pot” American
beauty has white skin and predominantly Caucasian features, with just a hint of
other ethnicities.

There are a number of industries that help to promote image, weight, and body
obsession, especially among women. If we examine the American food and weight
loss industries, we’ll understand how their corporate practices and advertising cam-
paigns perpetuate the American woman’s dissatisfaction with her looks.

The American Food Industry:
Fatten Up and Slim Down

. . . It is not uncommon for the average American to have a diet cola in one hand
and high-fat fries and a burger in the other. Food and weight loss are inescapably a
key part of the culture of the 1990s. The media bombard us with images of every
imaginable type of food—snack foods, fast foods, gourmet foods, health foods, and
junk foods. Most of these messages target children, who are very impressionable, and
women, who make the purchasing decisions for themselves and their families. At the
same time women are subjected to an onslaught of articles, books, videos, tapes, and
TV talk shows devoted to dieting and the maintenance of sleek and supple figures.
The conflicting images of pleasurable consumption and an ever leaner body type give
us a food consciousness loaded with tension and ambivalence.

Social psychologist Brett Silverstein explains that the food industry, like all indus-
tries under capitalism, is always striving to maximize profit, growth, concentration,
and control. It does so at the expense of the food consumer. “[It] promotes snack-
ing so that consumers will have more than three opportunities a day to consume
food, replaces free water with purchased soft drinks, presents desserts as the ultimate
reward, and bombards women and children with artificially glamorized images of
highly processed foods.”6

Diet foods are an especially profitable segment of the business. . . .
In 1983, the food industry came up with a brilliant marketing concept, and in-
troduced 91 new “lite” fat-reduced or calorie-reduced foods.7 The success of lite

552    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

products has been phenomenal. The consumer equated “lightness” with health. The
food industry seemed to equate it with their own expenses—lite foods have lower
production costs than “regular” lines, but they are often priced higher. . . .

The Diet and Weight-Loss Industry:
We’ll Show You the Way

. . . Increasingly, American women are told that they can have the right body if only
they consume more and more products. They can change the color of their eyes with
tinted contacts, they can have a tanned skin by using self-tanning lotion. They can
buy cellulite control cream, spot firming cream, even contouring shower and bath
firming gel to get rid of the “dimpled” look. One diet capsule on the market is sup-
posed to be the “fat cure.” It is called Anorex-eck, evoking the sometimes fatal eating
disorder known as anorexia. It promises to “eliminate the cause of fat formation . . .
so quickly and so effectively you will know from the very start why it has taken more
than 15 years of research . . . to finally bring you . . . an ultimate cure for fat!”8 . . .

There are currently more than 17,000 different diet plans, products, and programs
from which to choose.9 Typically, these plans are geared to the female market. They
are loaded with promises of quick weight loss and delicious low-calorie meals. . . .

Many of these programs produce food products that they encourage the dieter to
buy. The Jenny Craig member receives a set of pre-packaged meals that cost about $10
per day. (It allows for some outside food as well.) Some diet companies are concerned
with the problem of gaining weight back and have developed “maintenance” products.
Maintenance programs are often expensive and their long-term outcomes are unproven.
What can be proven are bigger profits and longer depen­dence on their programs.

The Dis-eased Body:
Medicalizing Women’s Body Issues

The therapeutic and medical communities tend to categorize women’s eating and
weight problems as a disease.10 In this view, behavior like self-starvation or compul-
sive eating is often called an addiction. An addiction model of behavior assumes that
the cause and the cure of the problem lies within the individual. Such an emphasis
fails to examine the larger mirrors that society holds up to the individual.11

. . . While a disease model lessens the burden of guilt and shame and may free
people to work on change, it also has political significance. According to feminist
theorist Bette S. Tallen, “The reality of oppression is replaced with the metaphor
of addiction.” It places the problem’s cause within a biological realm, away from
outside social forces.12 Issues such as poverty, lack of education and opportu-
nity, racial and gender inequality remain unexamined. More important, a disease-
oriented model of addiction, involving treatment by the health care system, results in
profits for the medical-industrial complex. Addiction, Tallen notes, suggests a solution

2 Hesse-Biber / Am I Thin Enough Yet?  553

that is personal—“Get treatment!”—rather than political—“Smash patriarchy!” It re-
places the feminist view, that the personal is political, with the attitude of “therapism,”
that the “political is personal.”13 One of Bette Tallen’s students told her that she had
learned a lot from reading Women Who Love Too Much after her divorce from a man
who had beaten her. Tallen suggested that “perhaps the best book to read would not
be about women who love too much but about men who hit too much.”14

The idea that overweight is a disease, and overeating represents an addiction,
reinforces the dis-ease that American women feel about their bodies. The capitalist
and patriarchal mirror held before them supports and maintains their obsession
and insecurity. . . .

Women continue to follow the standards of the ideal thin body because of how
they are rewarded by being in the right body. Thinness gives women access to a
number of important resources: feelings of power, self-confidence, even femininity;
male attention or protection; and the social and economic benefits that can follow. . . .

NOTES

1.  Pauline B. Bart, “Emotional and Social Status of the Older Woman,” in No Longer
Young: The Older Woman in America. Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Aging,
ed. Pauline Bart et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Institute of Gerontology, 1975),
pp. 3–21; Daniel Bar-Tal and Leonard Saxe, “Physical Attractiveness and Its Relationship
to Sex-Role Stereotyping,” Sex Roles 2 (1976): 123–133; Peter Blumstein and Pepper W.
Schwartz, American Couples: Money, Work and Sex (New York: Willian Morrow, 1983); Glen
H. Elder, “Appearance and Education in Marriage Mobility,” American Sociological Review 34
(1969): 519–533; Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging,” Saturday Review (Septem-
ber, 1972), pp. 29–38.
2.  J. Polivy and C. P. Herman, “Dieting and Binging: A Causal Analysis,” American Psy-
chologist 40 (1985):193–201.
3.  Ilana Attie and J. Brooks-Gunn, “Weight Concerns as Chronic Stressors in Women,”
in Gender and Stress, eds. Rosalind K. Barnett, Lois Biener, and Grace Baruch (New York:
Free Press, 1987), pp. 218–252.
4.  Katha Pollitt, “The Politically Correct Body,” Mother Jones (May 1982): 67. I don’t
want to disparage the positive benefits of exercising and the positive self-image that can
come from feeling good about one’s body. This positive image can spill over into other areas
of one’s life, enhancing, for example, one’s self-esteem, or job prospects.
5.  See Lawrence D. Cohn and Nancy E. Adler, “Female and Male Perceptions of Ideal
Body Shapes: Distorted Views Among Caucasian College Students,” Psychology of Women
Quarterly 16 (1992): 69–79; A. Fallon and P. Rozin, “Sex Differences in Perceptions of Desir-
able Body Shape,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 94 (1985): 102–105.
6.  Brett Silverstein, Fed Up! (Boston: South End Press, 1984), pp. 4, 47, 110. Individu-
als may be affected in many different ways, from paying too much (in 1978, concentration
within the industry led to the overcharging of consumers by $12 to $14 billion [p. 47]) to
the ingestion of unhealthy substances.
7.  Warren J. Belasco, “‘Lite’ Economics: Less Food, More Profit,” Radical History Review
28–30 (1984): 254–278; Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 241.
8.  Advertised in Parade magazine (December 30, 1984).

554    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

 9.  Deralee Scanlon, Diets That Work (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1991), p. 1.
10.  See Stanton Peele, Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out of Control (Lexing-
ton, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1989).
11.  There are a few recovery books that point to the larger issues of the addiction
model. Anne Wilson Schaef’s book, When Society Becomes an Addict, looks at the wider in-
stitutions of society that perpetuate addiction. She notes that society operates on a scarcity
model. This is the “Addictive System.” This model assumes that there is never enough of
anything to go around and we need to get what we can. Schaef sees society as made up of
three systems: A White Male System (the Addictive System), A Reactive Female System (one
where women respond passively to men by being subject to their will), and the Emerging
Female System (a system where women lead with caring and sensitivity). Society needs to
move in the direction of the Emerging Female System in order to end addiction. Another
i­mportant book is Stanton Peele’s Love and Addiction. Another book by Stanton Peele, The
Diseasing of America: How the Addiction Industry Captured Our Soul (Lexington, MA: Lex­
ington Books, 1989), stresses the importance of social change in societal institutions and
­advocates changing the given distribution of resources and power within the society as a way
to overcome the problem of addiction. See Anne Wilson Schaef, When Society Becomes an
Addict (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), and Stanton Peele, Love and Addiction (New York:
New American Library, 1975).
12.  Bette S. Tallen, “Twelve Step Programs: A Lesbian Feminist Critique,” NWSA Journal
2 (1990): 396.
13.  Tallen, “Twelve Step Programs: A Lesbian Feminist Critique,” 404–405.
14.  Tallen, “Twelve Step Programs: A Lesbian Feminist Critique,” 405.

3   Institutions and Ideologies

Michael Parenti

Corporate Plutocracy

American capitalism represents more than just an economic system; it is a plutocracy,
that is, a social order ruled mostly for and by the rich. Along with business enterprises
and banks, the nation’s cultural institutions—that is, its universities, p­ ublishing houses,
mass-circulation magazines, newspapers, television and radio s­tations, professional
sports teams, foundations, hospitals, churches, private museums, and ­charities—
are mostly chartered as corporations, ruled by boards of directors (or “trustees” or
“regents” as they might be called) composed overwhelmingly of affluent business
people who exercise final judgment over institutional matters.

Consider the university. Private and public institutions of higher education are run
by boards of trustees with authority over all matters of capital funding and budget;
curriculum and tuition; degree awards; and hiring, firing, and promotion of faculty
and staff. Daily decision-making power is delegated to administrators but can be eas-
ily recalled by the trustees when they choose. Most trustees are successful business
people who have no administrative or scholarly experience in higher education. As
trustees, they take no financial risks because their decisions are covered by insurance
paid out of the university budget. Their main function seems to be to exercise oligar-
chic control over the institution.

Almost all of “our” cultural institutions are ruled by nonelected self-p­ erpetuating
boards of affluent corporate representatives who are answerable to no one but them-
selves. We the people have no vote, no portion of the ownership, and no legal deci-
sion-making power within these institutions.

We are taught to think that capitalism breeds democracy and prosperity. The pri-
vate-enterprise system, it is said, creates equality of opportunity, rewards those who
show ability, relegates the slothful to the lower rungs, creates national prosperity, and
bolsters democracy. Little is said about how capitalism has supported and flourished
under some of the most repressive regimes and impoverished Third World nations.

The corporate enterprise system places a great deal of emphasis on commercial
worth: how to compete and get ahead. As Ralph Nader notes, the free market “only
stimulates one value in society—the acquisitive, materialistic, profit value.” What
about the values relating to justice, health, occupational and consumer safety, regard
for future generations, and equitable social relations?1

Among the key purveyors of plutocratic culture is our educational system. From
grade school onward, students are given a positive picture of America’s history,

Republished with permission of Cengage Learning, from Democracy for the Few, Michael Parenti,
9th edition © 2010. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

555

556    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

i­nstitutions, and leaders. Teachers tend to concentrate on the formal aspects of gov-
ernment and accord scant attention to the influence that wealthy, powerful groups
exercise over political life. Instructors who wish to introduce a more revealing view
invite critical attention from their superiors. High school students who attempt to
explore controversial issues in student newspapers have frequently been overruled
by administrators and threatened with disciplinary action.2

School texts seldom give more than passing mention to the courageous history of
labor struggle or the corporate exploitation of working people at home and abroad.
Almost nothing is said of the struggles of indigenous Americans (or Native American
“Indians”), indentured servants, small farmers, and Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern,
and European immigrants. The history of resistance to slavery, racism, and U.S. ex-
pansionist wars goes largely untaught in our classrooms.3

Schools and media are inundated with informational materials provided free by
the Pentagon and large corporations to promote a highly favorable view of the military
and to boost privatization, deregulation of industry, and other blessings of the free
market.4 Numerous conservative think tanks and academic centers have emerged,
along with conservative journals, conferences, and endowed chairs, all funded by
right-wing foundations, big corporations, and superrich individuals.

Many universities and colleges have direct investments in corporate America,
holding stock portfolios worth billions of dollars. Such bountiful endowments are
to be found especially in elite Ivy League schools like Yale, Harvard, Brown, Colum-
bia, and others. More and more college presidents and other top administrators are
drawn directly from corporate America with no experience in teaching, research, or
university administration. Their salaries are skyrocketing and their fringe benefits are
increasingly lavish, including such things as year-long paid leaves at full salary. Some
administrators and faculty earn handsome sums as business consultants. Corporate
logos are appearing in classrooms and student union buildings. Academic-based sci-
entific research is being increasingly funded and defined by corporations that have
a vested interest in the results of the research. With its financing of chairs and study
programs, private industry is influencing who is hired and what is taught.5

Meanwhile library budgets, scholarships, course offerings, teaching staff, and
student services are being cut back. At most universities and colleges, tuition has
climbed more than 30 percent in the last decade years. Tenured and other full-time
faculty positions are being replaced with underpaid part-time adjuncts. Some 40 per-
cent of all college teachers are adjuncts, working for no benefits, and carrying heavy
teaching loads for paltry pay.6

Ideological Orthodoxy

In academia, politically radical faculty, and even students, have suffered politically
motivated negative evaluations and loss of stipends, grants, and jobs. Professors,
journalists, managers, bureaucrats, and most other professionals who wish to advance
their careers learn to go along with things as they are and avoid espousing radical
views that conflict with the dominant economic interests of capitalist society.7 . . .

3 Parenti / Institutions and Ideologies  557

Although we are often admonished to think for ourselves, we might ask if our
socialization process puts limits on doing so. Ideological orthodoxy so permeates the
plutocratic culture that it is often not felt as indoctrination. The most effective forms
of tyranny are those so deeply ingrained, so thoroughly controlling, as not even to be
consciously experienced as constraints.

In a capitalist society, mass advertising sells not only particular products but a
way of life, a glorification of consumer acquisitiveness. Born of a market economy,
the capitalist culture downplays cooperative efforts and human interdependence.
People are expected to operate individually but toward rather similar goals. Every-
one competes against everyone else, but for the same things. “Individualism” in this
corporate-­dominated culture refers to acquisitiveness and careerism. We are expected
to get what we can for ourselves and not be too troubled by the problems faced by
others. This attitude, considered inhuman in some societies, is labeled approvingly as
“ambition” in our own and is treated as a quality of great social value.

Whether or not this “individualism” allows one to have much control over one’s
own life is another story. The decisions about the quality of the food we eat, the goods
we buy, the air we breathe, the prices we pay, the wages we earn, the way work tasks
are divided, the modes of transportation available to us, and the images we are fed by
the media are usually made by people other than ourselves.

People who occupy privileged positions within the social hierarchy become com-
mitted to the hierarchy’s preservation and hostile toward demands for a more equita-
ble social order. Economically deprived groups are seen as a threat because they want
more, and more for the have-nots might mean less for the haves. Class bigotry is one
of the widely held forms of prejudice in American society and the least examined.

The plutocratic culture teaches that material success is a measure of one’s worth,
and because the poor are not worth much, then society’s resources should not be
squandered on them. In capitalist society, the poor are generally seen as personally
deficient, the authors of their own straitened circumstances. Rarely are they consid-
ered to be the victims of poverty-creating economic forces: high rents, underemploy-
ment, low wages, unattended illnesses, disabilities, and other such features of the free
market. As the American humorist Will Rogers once said, “It’s no crime to be poor,
but it might as well be.”

In a society where money is the overriding determinant of one’s life chances, the
drive for material gain is not merely a symptom of a greed-driven culture but a factor
in one’s very survival. As corporate power tightens its grip over the political economy,
many people have to work still harder to keep their heads above water. Rather than
grasping for fanciful luxuries, they struggle to provide basic necessities. If they need
more money than was essential in earlier days, it is partly because essentials cost so
much more.

Because human services are based on ability to pay, money becomes a matter of
life and death. To have a low or modest income is to run a higher risk of insuffi-
cient medical care, homelessness, and job insecurity, and to have less opportunity
for education, recreation, travel, and comfort. Thus, the desire to “make it,” even at
the expense of others, is not merely a wrong-headed attitude but a reflection of the
material conditions of capitalist society wherein no one is ever really economically

558    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

secure except the superrich, and even they forever seek to secure and advance their
fortunes through further capital accumulation.

For those who enjoy the best of everything, the existing politico-economic system
is a smashing success. For those who are its hapless victims, or who are concerned
about the well-being of all and not just themselves, the system leaves a great deal to
be desired. . . .

Public Opinion: Which Direction?

The opinions most Americans have about socioeconomic issues are decidedly more
progressive than what is usually enunciated by political leaders and right-wing media
pundits. Surveys show substantial majorities strongly favoring public funding for
Social Security, nursing home care, and lower-priced prescription drugs. Substan-
tial majorities support unemployment insurance, disability assistance, job retraining,
child care, price supports for family farms, and food stamps for the needy, while
opposing tax cuts for the very rich and privatization of social services. Large major-
ities want improvements in managed health care and favor a universal health insur-
ance program run by the government and funded by taxpayers. The public generally
supports a stronger, not a weaker, social safety net. By nearly three to one, the public
rejects cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security.8

Large majorities feel that the gap between rich and poor is growing, and that
government has a responsibility to try to do away with poverty and hunger, that
abortion should be a decision made by a woman and her doctor, and that racial mi-
norities should be given fair treatment in employment—but not special preferences
in hiring and promotion. After many years of strong support for organized labor,
Americans became much less positive toward unions during the grim days of the
2009 ­recession.9

Sixty percent agree that large corporations wield too much power. A majority
believes that corporate executives care very little about the environment, are given to
falsifying company accounts, and are lining their own pockets. Large majorities say
that corporations have too much influence over government. Most Americans are
concerned about the environment. A majority also favors the death penalty and being
“tough” on crime. Yet 60 percent agree that the president has no right to suspend
the Bill of Rights in time of war or national emergency. By a five-to-three majority,
Americans support the idea of a public health plan to compete with private insurance.
Only 25 percent of Americans say banks are honest and trustworthy.10

In sum, on many important issues, a majority seems to hold positions at variance
with those maintained by ideological conservatives and reactionaries and closer to
the ones enunciated by liberals and progressives.

Opinion polls are only part of the picture. There is the whole history of democratic
struggle that continues to this day and remains largely untaught in the schools and
unreported in the media. It is expressed in mass demonstrations, strikes, boycotts,
and civil disobedience—targeting such things as poverty, unemployment, unsafe

3 Parenti / Institutions and Ideologies  559

n­ uclear reactors, nuclear missile sites, and U.S. wars abroad. There have been mass
mobilizations in support of legalized abortion, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights,
and environmental protections. There have been organized housing takeovers for the
homeless, protests against police brutality, and noncompliance with draft registration.
The Selective Service System admitted that over the years some 800,000 young men
have refused to register (the actual number is probably higher).11 At the same time,
major strikes have occurred in a wide range of industries, showing that labor mili-
tancy is not a thing of the past.

This is not to deny that there remain millions of Americans, including many of rel-
atively modest means, who succumb to the culture of fear propagated by right-wing
reactionaries. They fear and resent gays, ethnic minorities, feminists, immigrants,
intellectuals, liberals, peace activists, environmentalists, evolutionary scientists, com-
munists, socialists, labor unions, Muslims, and atheists. They swallow the reactionary
line that government is the enemy (not the powerful interests it serves), and they
are readily whipped into jingoistic fervor when their leaders go to war against vastly
weaker nations.

Yet this society does not produce large numbers of conservative activists. There
are no mass demonstrations demanding tax cuts for the rich, more environmental
devastation, more wars, more tax cuts for the rich, or more corporate accumulation
of wealth.

Despite the mind-numbing distractions of a mass culture and the propaganda
and indoctrination by plutocratic institutions, Americans still have concerns about
important issues. Political socialization often produces contradictory and unexpected
spin-offs. When opinion makers indoctrinate us with the notion that we are a free and
prosperous people, we, in fact, begin to demand the right to be free and prosperous.
The old trick of using democratic rhetoric to cloak an undemocratic class order can
backfire when people begin to take the rhetoric seriously and translate it into dem-
ocratic demands.

There are those who love justice more than they love money, those who do not
long for more acquisitions but for a better quality of life for all.

Democracy: Form and Content

Americans of all political persuasions profess a dedication to democracy, but they
tend to mean different things by the term. . . . D​ emocracy refers to a system of gov-
ernance that represents in both form and content the interests of the broad populace.
Decision makers are to govern for the benefit of the many, not for the advantages of
the privileged few. The people hold their representatives accountable by subjecting
them to open criticism, the periodic check of elections, and, if necessary, recall and
removal from office. Democratic government is limited government, the antithesis of
despotic absolutism. . . .

We are taught that capitalism and democracy go together. The free market sup-
posedly creates a pluralistic society of manifold groups, a “civic society” that acts

560    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

i­ndependently of the state and provides the basis for political freedom and prosper-
ity. In fact, many capitalist societies—from Nazi Germany to today’s Third World
dictatorships—have private-enterprise systems but no political freedom, and plenty
of mass destitution. And the more open to free-market capitalism they become, the
poorer they seem to get. In such systems, economic freedom means the freedom to
exploit the labor of the poor and get endlessly rich. Transnational corporate capi-
talism is no guarantee of a meaningful political democracy, neither in Third World
countries nor in the United States itself.

When it works with any efficacy, democracy is dedicated to protecting the well-­
being of the many and rolling back the economic oppressions and privileges that
serve the few. Democracy seeks to ensure that even those who are not advantaged by
wealth or extraordinary talent can earn a decent livelihood. The contradictory na-
ture of “capitalist democracy” is that it professes egalitarian political principles while
generating enormous disparities in material well-being and actual political influence.

Some people think that if you are free to say what you like, you are living in a
democracy. But freedom of speech is not the sum total of democracy, only one of its
necessary conditions. Too often we are free to say what we want, while those of wealth
and power are free to do what they want to us regardless of what we say. Democracy
is not a seminar but a system of power, like any other form of governance. Freedom
of speech, like freedom of assembly and freedom of political organization, is mean-
ingful only if it is heard and if it keeps those in power responsive to those over whom
power is exercised.

Nor are elections a sure test of democracy. Some electoral systems are so thor-
oughly controlled by well-financed like-minded elites or rigged by dishonest officials
that they discourage meaningful dialogue and broad participation. Whether a politi-
cal system is democratic or not depends not only on its procedures but on the actual
material benefits and the social justice or injustice it propagates. A government that
pursues policies that by design or neglect are so steeply inequitable as to damage the
life chances of large sectors of the population is not democratic no matter how many
elections it holds.

It should be repeated that when we criticize the lack of democratic substance in
the United States, we are not attacking or being disloyal to our nation itself. Quite
the contrary. A democratic citizenry should not succumb to state idolatry but should
remain critical of the powers that work against the democratic interests of our nation
and its people.

NOTES

  1.  Nader quotes in Home and Gardens, August 1991.
  2.  For examples of censorship of high-school newspapers, see http://www.ioerror.us
/2005/11/30/two-high-school-newspapers-censored/ and http://www.beverly-underground
.com/editorials.htm.
  3.  On the biases of textbooks, see Michael Parenti, History as Mystery (City Lights,
1999), 11–21.

3 Parenti / Institutions and Ideologies  561

  4.  Mark Maier, “High-School Economics: Corporate Sponsorship and Pro-Market Bias,”
­Dollars and Sense, May/June 2002.
 5. Jennifer Washburn, University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education
(Basic Books, 2005); also report in Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 November 2008.
 6. San Francisco Chronicle, 13 November 2005.
  7.  Stephen Best, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Peter McLaren (eds.), Academic Repression:
­Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2009).
  8.  Economic Policy Institute, www.epinet.org/pulse; New York Times, 24 May 2005;
Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, Health Letter, June 2004.
  9.  Gallup Polls, http://www.gallup.com/.
10. http://harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/HarrisPoll.
11.  Stephen Kohn, The History of American Draft Law Violations 1658–1985 (Greenwood
Press, 1986).

4  Media Magic: Making Class I­nvisible

Gregory Mantsios

Of the various social and cultural forces in our society, the mass media is arguably
the most influential in molding public consciousness. Americans spend an average
twenty-eight hours per week watching television. They also spend an undetermined
number of hours reading periodicals, listening to the radio, and going to the mov-
ies. Unlike other cultural and socializing institutions, ownership and control of the
mass media is highly concentrated. Twenty-three corporations own more than one-
half of all the daily newspapers, magazines, movie studios, and radio and television
outlets in the United States.1 The number of media companies is shrinking and their
control of the industry is expanding. And a relatively small number of media outlets
is producing and packaging the majority of news and entertainment programs. For
the most part, our media is national in nature and single-minded (profit-oriented) in
purpose. This media plays a key role in defining our cultural tastes, helping us locate
ourselves in history, establishing our national identity, and ascertaining the range of
national and social possibilities. In this essay, we will examine the way the mass media
shapes how people think about each other and about the nature of our society.

The United States is the most highly stratified society in the industrialized world.
Class distinctions operate in virtually every aspect of our lives, determining the nature
of our work, the quality of our schooling, and the health and safety of our loved ones.
Yet remarkably, we, as a nation, retain illusions about living in an egalitarian society.
We maintain these illusions, in large part, because the media hides gross inequities
from public view. In those instances when inequities are revealed, we are provided
with messages that obscure the nature of class realities and blame the victims of class-
dominated society for their own plight. Let’s briefly examine what the news media, in
particular, tells us about class.

About the Poor

The news media provides meager coverage of poor people and poverty. The coverage
it does provide is often distorted and misleading.

The Poor Do Not Exist

For the most part, the news media ignores the poor. Unnoticed are forty million poor
people in the nation—a number that equals the entire population of Maine, Vermont,
New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York combined.
Perhaps even more alarming is that the rate of poverty is increasing twice as fast as the
population growth in the United States. Ordinarily, even a calamity of much smaller

Copyright © by Gregory Mantsios. Reprinted by permission of the author.

562

4 Mantsios / Media Magic: Making Class ­Invisible  563

proportion (e.g., flooding in the Midwest) would garner a great deal of coverage and
hype from a media usually eager to declare a crisis, yet less than one in five hundred
articles in the New York Times and one in one thousand articles listed in the Readers’
Guide to Periodic Literature are on poverty. With remarkably little attention to them,
the poor and their problems are hidden from most Americans.

When the media does turn its attention to the poor, it offers a series of contradic-
tory messages and portrayals.

The Poor Are Faceless

Each year the Census Bureau releases a new report on poverty in our society and
its results are duly reported in the media. At best, however, this coverage empha-
sizes annual fluctuations (showing how the numbers differ from previous years) and
ongoing debates over the validity of the numbers (some argue the number should
be lower, most that the number should be higher). Coverage like this desensitizes
us to the poor by reducing poverty to a number. It ignores the human tragedy of
poverty—the suffering, indignities, and misery endured by millions of children and
adults. Instead, the poor become statistics rather than people.

The Poor Are Undeserving

When the media does put a face on the poor, it is not likely to be a pretty one. The
media will provide us with sensational stories about welfare cheats, drug addicts,
and greedy panhandlers (almost always urban and Black). Compare these images
and the emotions evoked by them with the media’s treatment of middle-class (usu-
ally white) “tax evaders,” celebrities who have a “chemical dependency,” or wealthy
businesspeople who use unscrupulous means to “make a profit.” While the behavior
of the more affluent offenders is considered an “impropriety” and a deviation from
the norm, the behavior of the poor is considered repugnant, indicative of the poor in
general, and worthy of our indignation and resentment.

The Poor Are an Eyesore

When the media does cover the poor, they are often presented through the eyes of the
middle class. For example, sometimes the media includes a story about community
resistance to a homeless shelter or storekeeper annoyance with panhandlers. Rather
than focusing on the plight of the poor, these stories are about middle-class opposition
to the poor. Such stories tell us that the poor are an inconvenience and an irritation.

The Poor Have Only Themselves to Blame

In another example of media coverage, we are told that the poor live in a personal and
cultural cycle of poverty that hopelessly imprisons them. They routinely center on the
Black urban population and focus on perceived personality or cultural traits that doom
the poor. While the women in these stories typically exhibit an “attitude” that leads

564    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

to trouble or a promiscuity that leads to single motherhood, the men possess a need
for immediate gratification that leads to drug abuse or an unquenchable greed that
leads to the pursuit of fast money. The images that are seared into our mind are sexist,
racist, and classist. Census figures reveal that most of the poor are white, not Black or
Hispanic, that they live in rural or suburban areas, not urban centers, and hold jobs
at least part of the year.2 Yet, in a fashion that is often framed in an understanding
and sympathetic tone, we are told that the poor have inflicted poverty on themselves.

The Poor Are Down on Their Luck

During the Christmas season, the news media sometimes provides us with accounts
of poor individuals or families (usually white) who are down on their luck. These
stories are often linked to stories about soup kitchens or other charitable activi-
ties and sometimes call for charitable contributions. These “Yule time” stories are as
much about the affluent as they are about the poor: they tell us that the affluent in
our society are a kind, understanding, giving people—which we are not.* The series
of unfortunate circumstances that have led to impoverishment are presumed to be a
temporary condition that will improve with time and a change in luck.

•••

Despite appearances, the messages provided by the media are not entirely disparate.
With each variation, the media informs us what poverty is not (i.e., systemic and
indicative of American society) by informing us what it is. The media tells us that
poverty is either an aberration of the American way of life (it doesn’t exist, it’s just
another number, it’s unfortunate but temporary) or an end product of the poor them-
selves (they are a nuisance, do not deserve better, and have brought their predicament
upon themselves).

By suggesting that the poor have brought poverty upon themselves, the media is
engaging in what William Ryan has called “blaming the victim.”3 The media identi-
fies in what ways the poor are different as a consequence of deprivation, then defines
those differences as the cause of poverty itself. Whether blatantly hostile or cloaked
in sympathy, the message is that there is something fundamentally wrong with the
victims—their hormones, psychological makeup, family environment, community,
race, or some combination of these—that accounts for their plight and their failure
to lift themselves out of poverty.

*American households with incomes of less than $10,000 give an average of 5.5 percent of their
earning to charity or to a religious organization, while those making more than $100,000 a year
give only 2.9 percent. After changes in the 1986 tax code reduced the benefits of charitable giving,
taxpayers earning $500,000 or more slashed their average donation by nearly one-third. Further-
more, many of these acts of benevolence do not help the needy. Rather than provide funding to
social service agencies that aid the poor, the voluntary contributions of the wealthy go to places
and institutions that entertain, inspire, cure, or educate wealthy Americans—art museums, opera
houses, theaters, orchestras, ballet companies, private hospitals, and elite universities. (Robert
Reich,“Secession of the Successful,”New York Times Magazine, February 17, 1991, p. 43.)

4 Mantsios / Media Magic: Making Class I­nvisible  565

But poverty in the United States is systemic. It is a direct result of economic and
political policies that deprive people of jobs, adequate wages, or legitimate support.
It is neither natural nor inevitable: there is enough wealth in our nation to eliminate
poverty if we chose to redistribute existing wealth or income. The plight of the poor is
reason enough to make the elimination of poverty the nation’s first priority. But pov-
erty also impacts dramatically on the nonpoor. It has a dampening effect on wages in
general (by maintaining a reserve army of unemployed and underemployed anxious
for any job at any wage) and breeds crime and violence (by maintaining conditions
that invite private gain by illegal means and rebellion-like behavior, not entirely un-
like the urban riots of the 1960s). Given the extent of poverty in the nation and the
impact it has on us all, the media must spin considerable magic to keep the poor and
the issue of poverty and its root causes out of the public consciousness.

About Everyone Else

Both the broadcast and the print news media strive to develop a strong sense of
“we-ness” in their audience. They seek to speak to and for an audience that is
both affluent and like-minded. The media’s solidarity with affluence, that is, with the
middle and upper class, varies little from one medium to another. Benjamin DeMott
points out, for example, that the New York Times understands affluence to be intel-
ligence, taste, public spirit, responsibility, and a readiness to rule and “conceives itself
as spokesperson for a readership awash in these qualities.”4 Of course, the flip side to
creating a sense of “we,” or “us,” is establishing a perception of the “other.” The other
relates back to the faceless, amoral, undeserving, and inferior “underclass.” Thus, the
world according to the news media is divided between the “underclass” and everyone
else. Again the messages are often contradictory.

The Wealthy Are Us

Much of the information provided to us by the news media focuses attention
on the concerns of a very wealthy and privileged class of people. Although the
concerns of a small fraction of the populace, they are presented as though they
were the concerns of everyone. For example, while relatively few people actually
own stock, the news media devotes an inordinate amount of broadcast time and
print space to business news and stock market quotations. Not only do busi-
ness reports cater to a particular narrow clientele, so do the fashion pages (with
$2,000 dresses), wedding announcements, and the obituaries. Even weather and
sports news often have a class bias. An all news radio station in New York City, for
example, provides regular national ski reports. International news, trade agree-
ments, and domestic policy issues are also reported in terms of their impact on
business climate and the business community. Besides being of practical value to
the wealthy, such coverage has considerable ideological value. Its message: the
concerns of the wealthy are the concerns of us all.

566    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

The Wealthy (as a Class) Do Not Exist

While preoccupied with the concerns of the wealthy, the media fails to notice the way
in which the rich as a class of people create and shape domestic and foreign policy.
Presented as an aggregate of individuals, the wealthy appear without special interests,
interconnections, or unity in purpose. Out of public view are the class interests of
the wealthy, the interlocking business links, the concerted actions to preserve their
class privileges and business interests (by running for public office, supporting politi-
cal candidates, lobbying, etc.). Corporate lobbying is ignored, taken for granted, or
assumed to be in the public interest. (Compare this with the media’s portrayal of
the “strong arm of labor” in attempting to defeat trade legislation that is harmful to
the interests of working people.) It is estimated that two-thirds of the U.S. Senate is
composed of millionaires.5 Having such a preponderance of millionaires in the Sen-
ate, however, is perceived to be neither unusual nor antidemocratic; these millionaire
senators are assumed to be serving “our” collective interests in governing.

The Wealthy Are Fascinating and Benevolent

The broadcast and print media regularly provide hype for individuals who have
achieved “super” success. These stories are usually about celebrities and superstars from
the sports and entertainment world. Society pages and gossip columns serve to keep the
social elite informed of each others’ doings, allow the rest of us to gawk at their excesses,
and help to keep the American dream alive. The print media is also fond of feature sto-
ries on corporate empire builders. These stories provide an occasional “insider’s” view of
the private and corporate life of industrialists by suggesting a rags to riches account of
corporate success. These stories tell us that corporate success is a series of smart moves,
shrewd acquisitions, timely mergers, and well thought out executive suite shuffles. By
painting the upper class in a positive light, innocent of any wrongdoing (labor leaders
and union organizations usually get the opposite treatment), the media assures us that
wealth and power are benevolent. One person’s capital accumulation is presumed to
be good for all. The elite, then, are portrayed as investment wizards, people of special
talent and skill, whom even their victims (workers and consumers) can admire.

The Wealthy Include a Few Bad Apples

On rare occasions, the media will mock selected individuals for their personality
flaws. Real estate investor Donald Trump and New York Yankees owner George Stein-
brenner, for example, are admonished by the media for deliberately seeking publicity
(a very un-upper class thing to do); hotel owner Leona Helmsley was caricatured
for her personal cruelties; and junk bond broker Michael Milkin was condemned
because he had the audacity to rob the rich. Michael Parenti points out that by treat-
ing business wrongdoings as isolated deviations from the socially beneficial system of
“responsible capitalism,” the media overlooks the features of the system that produce
such abuses and the regularity with which they occur. Rather than portraying them as

4 Mantsios / Media Magic: Making Class ­Invisible  567

predictable and frequent outcomes of corporate power and the business system, the
media treats abuses as if they were isolated and atypical. Presented as an occasional
aberration, these incidents serve not to challenge, but to legitimate, the system.6

The Middle Class Is Us

By ignoring the poor and blurring the lines between the working people and the
upper class, the news media creates a universal middle class. From this perspective,
the size of one’s income becomes largely irrelevant: what matters is that most of “us”
share an intellectual and moral superiority over the disadvantaged. As Time magazine
once concluded, “Middle America is a state of mind.”7 “We are all middle class,” we
are told, “and we all share the same concerns”: job security, inflation, tax burdens,
world peace, the cost of food and housing, health care, clean air and water, and the
safety of our streets. While the concerns of the wealthy are quite distinct from those
of the middle class (e.g., the wealthy worry about investments, not jobs), the media
convinces us that “we [the affluent] are all in this together.”

The Middle Class Is a Victim

For the media, “we” the affluent not only stand apart from the “other”—the poor, the
working class, the minorities, and their problems—“we” are also victimized by the
poor (who drive up the costs of maintaining the welfare roles), minorities (who com-
mit crimes against us), and workers (who are greedy and drive companies out and
prices up). Ignored are the subsidies to the rich, the crimes of corporate America, and
the policies that wreak havoc on the economic well-being of middle America. Media
magic convinces us to fear, more than anything else, being victimized by those less
affluent than ourselves.

The Middle Class Is Not a Working Class

The news media clearly distinguishes the middle class (employees) from the work-
ing class (i.e., blue collar workers) who are portrayed, at best, as irrelevant, out-
moded, and a dying breed. Furthermore, the media will tell us that the hardships
faced by blue collar workers are inevitable (due to progress), a result of bad luck
(chance circumstances in a particular industry), or a product of their own doing
(they priced themselves out of a job). Given the media’s presentation of reality, it is
hard to believe that manual, supervised, unskilled, and semiskilled workers actually
represent more than 50 percent of the adult working population.8 The working class,
instead, is relegated by the media to “the other.”

•••

In short, the news media either lionizes the wealthy or treats their interests and those
of the middle class as one in the same. But the upper class and the middle class do
not share the same interests or worries. Members of the upper class worry about stock

568    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

dividends (not employment), they profit from inflation and global militarism, their
children attend exclusive private schools, they eat and live in a royal fashion, they call
on (or are called upon by) personal physicians, they have few consumer problems,
they can escape whenever they want from environmental pollution, and they live on
streets and travel to other areas under the protection of private police forces.*9

The wealthy are not only a class with distinct life-styles and interests, they are a
ruling class. They receive a disproportionate share of the country’s yearly income,
own a disproportionate amount of the country’s wealth, and contribute a dispro-
portionate number of their members to governmental bodies and decision-making
groups—all traits that William Domhoff, in his classic work Who Rules America, de-
fined as characteristic of a governing class.10

This governing class maintains and manages our political and economic structures in
such a way that these structures continue to yield an amazing proportion of our wealth
to a minuscule upper class. While the media is not above referring to ruling classes in
other countries (we hear, for example, references to Japan’s ruling elite),11 its treatment
of the news proceeds as though there were no such ruling class in the United States.

Furthermore, the news media inverts reality so that those who are working class
and middle class learn to fear, resent, and blame those below, rather than those
above, them in the class structure. We learn to resent welfare, which accounts for
only two cents out of every dollar in the federal budget (approximately $10 bil-

lion) and provides financial relief for the needy,** but learn little about the $11

billion the federal government spends on individuals with incomes in excess of
$100,000 (not needy),12 or the $17 billion in farm subsidies, or the $214 billion
(twenty times the cost of welfare) in interest payments to financial institutions.

Middle-class whites learn to fear African Americans and Latinos, but most violent

crime occurs within poor and minority communities and is neither interracial***

nor interclass. As horrid as such crime is, it should not mask the destruction and
violence perpetrated by corporate America. In spite of the fact that 14,000 innocent
people are killed on the job each year, 100,000 die prematurely, 400,000 become
seriously ill, and 6 million are injured from work-related accidents and diseases, most
Americans fear government regulation more than they do unsafe working conditions.

Through the media, middle-class—and even working-class—Americans learn
to blame blue collar workers and their unions for declining purchasing power and

*The number of private security guards in the United States now exceeds the number of public
police officers. (Robert Reich,“Secession of the Successful,”New York Times Magazine, February 17,
1991, p. 42.)

**A total of $20 billion is spent on welfare when you include all state funding. But the average state
funding also comes to only two cents per state dollar.

***In 92 percent of the murders nationwide the assailant and the victim are of the same race (46 per-
cent are white/white, 46 percent are black/black), 5.6 percent are black on white, and 2.4 percent
are white on black. (FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1985–1986, quoted in Raymond S. Franklin,
Shadows of Race and Class, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1991, p. 108.)

4 Mantsios / Media Magic: Making Class I­nvisible  569

economic security. But while workers who managed to keep their jobs and their
unions struggled to keep up with inflation, the top 1 percent of American families
saw their average incomes soar 80 percent in the last decade.13 Much of the wealth
at the top was accumulated as stockholders and corporate executives moved their
companies abroad to employ cheaper labor (56 cents per hour in El Salvador)
and avoid paying taxes in the United States. Corporate America is a world made
up of ruthless bosses, massive layoffs, favoritism and nepotism, health and safety
violations, pension plan losses, union busting, tax evasions, unfair competition,
and price gouging, as well as fast buck deals, financial speculation, and corporate
wheeling and dealing that serve the interests of the corporate elite, but are generally
wasteful and destructive to workers and the economy in general.

It is no wonder Americans cannot think straight about class. The mass media is
neither objective, balanced, independent, nor neutral. Those who own and direct
the mass media are themselves part of the upper class, and neither they nor the rul-
ing class in general have to conspire to manipulate public opinion. Their interest is
in preserving the status quo, and their view of society as fair and equitable comes
naturally to them. But their ideology dominates our society and justifies what is in re-
ality a perverse social order—one that perpetuates unprecedented elite privilege and
power on the one hand and widespread deprivation on the other. A mass media that
did not have its own class interests in preserving the status quo would acknowledge
that inordinate wealth and power undermines democracy and that a “free market”
economy can ravage a people and their communities.

NOTES

 1.  Martin Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources, Lyle Stuart (New York, 1990),
p. 71. See also Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Beacon Press (Boston, 1990).
 2.  Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, “Poverty in the United States:
1992,” Current Population Reports, Consumer Income, Series P60–185, pp. xi, xv, 1.
 3.  William Ryan, Blaming the Victim, Vintage (New York, 1971).
 4.  Benjamin Demott, The Imperial Middle, William Morrow (New York, 1990), p. 123.
 5. Fred Barnes, “The Zillionaires Club,” The New Republic, January 29, 1990, p. 24.
 6.  Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality, St. Martin’s Press (New York, 1986), p. 109.
 7. Time, January 5, 1979, p. 10.
 8. Vincent Navarro, “The Middle Class—A Useful Myth,” The Nation, March 23, 1992,
p. 1.
 9.  Charles Anderson, The Political Economy of Social Class, Prentice Hall (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J., 1974), p. 137.
10.  William Domhoff, Who Rules America, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967),
p. 5.
11.  Lee and Solomon, Unreliable Sources, p. 179.
12.  Newsweek, August 10, 1992, p. 57.
13.  Business Week, June 8, 1992, p. 86.

5  Still Separate, Still Unequal

America’s Educational Apartheid

Jonathan Kozol

Many Americans who live far from our major cities and who have no firsthand knowl-
edge of the realities to be found in urban public schools seem to have the rather vague
and general impression that the great extremes of racial isolation that were matters
of grave national significance some thirty-five or forty years ago have gradually but
steadily diminished in more recent years. The truth, unhappily, is that the trend, for
well over a decade now, has been precisely the reverse. Schools that were already
deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now, while
thousands of other schools around the country that had been integrated either vol-
untarily or by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating. . . .

“There are expensive children and there are cheap children,” writes Marina War-
ner, an essayist and novelist who has written many books for children, “just as there
are expensive women and cheap women.” The governmentally administered dimin-
ishment in value of the children of the poor begins even before the age of five or
six, when they begin their years of formal education in the public schools. It starts
during their infant and toddler years, when hundreds of thousands of children of
the very poor in much of the United States are locked out of the opportunity for
preschool education for no reason but the accident of birth and budgetary choices
of the government, while children of the privileged are often given veritable feasts of
rich developmental early education.

In New York City, for example, affluent parents pay surprisingly large sums of
money to enroll their youngsters, beginning at the age of two or three, in extraordi-
nary early-education programs that give them social competence and rudimentary
pedagogic skills unknown to children of the same age in the city’s poorer neighbor-
hoods. The most exclusive of the private preschools in New York, which are known
to those who can afford them as “Baby Ivies,” cost as much as $24,000 for a full-day
program. Competition for admission to these pre-K schools is so extreme that private
counselors are frequently retained, at fees as high as $300 an hour, to guide the par-
ents through the application process.

At the opposite extreme along the economic spectrum in New York are thou-
sands of children who receive no preschool opportunity at all. Exactly how many
thousands are denied this opportunity in New York City and in other major cities
is almost impossible to know. Numbers that originate in governmental agencies in
many states are incomplete and imprecise and do not always differentiate with clarity
between authentic pre-K programs that have educative and developmental substance

Adapted from The Shame of the Nation (Crown Publishers, 2005). Reprinted by permission of the
author.

570

5 Kozol / Still Separate, Still Unequal  571

and those less expensive child-care arrangements that do not. But even where states
do compile numbers that refer specifically to educative preschool programs, it is
difficult to know how many of the children who are served are of low income, since
admissions to some of the state-supported programs aren’t determined by low income
or they are determined by a complicated set of factors of which poverty is only one.

There are remarkable exceptions to this pattern in some sections of the nation. In
Milwaukee, for example, virtually every four-year-old is now enrolled in a preliminary
kindergarten program, which amounts to a full year of preschool education, prior to
a second kindergarten year for five-year-olds. More commonly in urban neighbor-
hoods, large numbers of low-income children are denied these opportunities and
come into their kindergarten year without the minimal social skills that children
need in order to participate in class activities and without even such very modest
early-learning skills as knowing how to hold a crayon or a pencil, identify perhaps
a couple of shapes and colors, or recognize that printed pages go from left to right.

Three years later, in third grade, these children are introduced to what are known
as “high-stakes tests,” which in many urban systems now determine whether students
can or cannot be promoted. Children who have been in programs like those offered
by the “Baby Ivies” since the age of two have, by now, received the benefits of six or
seven years of education, nearly twice as many as the children who have been denied
these opportunities; yet all are required to take, and will be measured by, the same
examinations. Which of these children will receive the highest scores? The ones who
spent the years from two to four in lovely little Montessori programs and in other
pastel-painted settings in which tender and attentive and well-trained instructors read
to them from beautiful storybooks and introduced them very gently for the first time
to the world of numbers and the shapes of letters, and the sizes and varieties of solid
objects, and perhaps taught them to sort things into groups or to arrange them in a
sequence, or to do those many other interesting things that early childhood specialists
refer to as prenumeracy skills? Or the ones who spent those years at home in front
of a TV or sitting by the window of a slum apartment gazing down into the street?
There is something deeply hypocritical about a society that holds an eight-year-old
inner-city child “accountable” for her performance on a high-stakes standardized
exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing
her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years earlier.

Perhaps in order to deflect these recognitions, or to soften them somewhat, many
people, even while they do nor doubt the benefit of making very large investments in
the education of their own children, somehow—paradoxical as it may seem—appear
to be attracted to the argument that money may not really matter that much at all. No
matter with what regularity such doubts about the worth of spending money on a
child’s education are advanced, it is obvious that those who have the money, and who
spend it lavishly to benefit their own kids, do not do it for no reason. Yet shockingly
large numbers of well-educated and sophisticated people whom I talk with nowadays
dismiss such challenges with a surprising ease. “Is the answer really to throw money
into these dysfunctional and failing schools?” I’m often asked. “Don’t we have some
better ways to make them ‘work’?” The question is posed in a variety of forms. “Yes,

572    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

of course, it’s not a perfectly fair system as it stands. But money alone is surely not the
sole response. The values of the parents and the kids themselves must have a role in
this as well you know, housing, health conditions, social factors.” “Other factors”—a
term of overall reprieve one often hears—“have got to be considered, too.” These latter
points are obviously true but always seem to have the odd effect of substituting things
we know we cannot change in the short run for obvious solutions like cutting class size
and constructing new school buildings or providing universal preschool that we actu-
ally could put in place right now if we were so inclined.

Frequently these arguments are posed as questions that do not invite an answer
because the answer seems to be decided in advance. “Can you really buy your way to
better education for these children?” “Do we know enough to be quite sure that we
will see an actual return on the investment that we make?” “Is it even clear that this
is the right starting point to get to where we’d like to go? It doesn’t always seem to
work, as I am sure that you already know,” or similar questions that somehow assume
I will agree with those who ask them.

Some people who ask these questions, although they live in wealthy districts
where the schools are funded at high levels, don’t even send their children to these
public schools but choose instead to send them to expensive private day schools.
At some of the well-known private prep schools in the New York City area, tuition
and associated costs are typically more than $20,000 a year. During their children’s
teenage years, they sometimes send them off to very fine New England schools like
Andover or Exeter or Groton, where tuition, boarding, and additional expenses rise
to more than $30,000. Often a family has two teenage children in these schools at the
same time, so they may be spending more than $60,000 on their children’s education
every year. Yet here I am one night, a guest within their home, and dinner has been
served and we are having coffee now; and this entirely likeable, and generally sen-
sible, and beautifully refined and thoughtful person looks me in the eyes and asks me
whether you can really buy your way to better education for the children of the poor.

As racial isolation deepens and the inequalities of education finance remain un-
abated and take on new and more innovative forms, the principals of many inner-city
schools are making choices that few principals in public schools that serve white
children in the mainstream of the nation ever need to contemplate. Many have been
dedicating vast amounts of time and effort to create an architecture of adaptive strate-
gies that promise incremental gains within the limits inequality allows.

New vocabularies of stentorian determination, new systems of incentive, and
new modes of castigation, which are termed “rewards and sanctions,” have emerged.
Curriculum materials that are alleged to be aligned with governmentally established
goals and standards and particularly suited to what are regarded as “the special needs
and learning styles” of low-income urban children have been introduced. Relentless
emphasis on raising test scores, rigid policies of nonpromotion and nongradua-
tion, a new empiricism and the imposition of unusually detailed lists of named and
numbered “outcomes” for each isolated parcel of instruction, an oftentimes fanati-
cal insistence upon uniformity of teachers in their management of time, an openly
conceded emulation of the rigorous approaches of the military and a frequent use of

5 Kozol / Still Separate, Still Unequal  573

terminology that comes out of the world of industry and commerce—these are just
a few of the familiar aspects of these new adaptive strategies.

Although generically described as “school reform,” most of these practices and
policies are targeted primarily at poor children of color; and although most educators
speak of these agendas in broad language that sounds applicable to all, it is under-
stood that they are valued chiefly as responses to perceived catastrophe in deeply
segregated and unequal schools.

“If you do what I tell you to do, how I tell you to do it, when I tell you to do it,
you’ll get it right,” said a determined South Bronx principal observed by a reporter
for the New York Times. She was laying out a memorizing rule for math to an as­
sembly of her students. “If you don’t, you’ll get it wrong.” This is the voice, this
is the tone, this is the rhythm and didactic certitude one hears today in inner-city
schools that have embraced a pedagogy of direct command and absolute control.
“Taking their inspiration from the ideas of B. F. Skinner . . . ,” says the Times, pro-
ponents of scripted rote-and-drill curricula articulate their aim as the establishment
of “faultless communication” between “the teacher, who is the stimulus,” and “the
students, who respond.”

The introduction of Skinnerian approaches (which are commonly employed in
penal institutions and drug-rehabilitation programs), as a way of altering the attitudes
and learning styles of black and Hispanic children, is provocative, and it has stirred
some outcries from respected scholars. To actually go into a school where you know
some of the children very, very well and see the way that these approaches can affect
their daily lives and thinking processes is even more provocative.

On a chilly November day four years ago in the South Bronx, I entered P.S. 65, a
school I had been visiting since 1993. There had been major changes since I’d been
there last. Silent lunches had been instituted in the cafeteria, and on days when chil-
dren misbehaved, silent recess had been introduced as well. On those days the stu-
dents were obliged to sit in rows and maintain perfect silence on the floor of a small
indoor room instead of going out to play. The words SUCCESS FOR ALL, the brand
name of a scripted curriculum—better known by its acronym, SFA—were promi-
nently posted at the top of the main stairway and, as I would later find, in almost
every room. Also frequently displayed within the halls and classrooms were a number
of administrative memos that were worded with unusual didactic absoluteness. “Au-
thentic Writing,” read a document called “Principles of Learning” that was posted in
the corridor close to the principal’s office, “is driven by curriculum and instruction.”
I didn’t know what this expression meant. Like many other undefined and arbitrary
phrases posted in the school, it seemed to be a dictum that invited no interrogation.

I entered the fourth grade of a teacher I will call Mr. Endicott, a man in his mid-
thirties who had arrived here without training as a teacher, one of about a dozen
teachers in the building who were sent into this school after a single summer of short-
order preparation. Now in his second year, he had developed a considerable sense of
confidence and held the class under a tight control.

As I found a place to sit in a far corner of the room, the teacher and his young
assistant, who was in her first year as a teacher, were beginning a math lesson about

574    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

building airport runways, a lesson that provided children with an opportunity for
measuring perimeters. On the wall behind the teacher, in large letters, was written:
“Portfolio Protocols: 1. You are responsible for the selection of [your] work that en-
ters your portfolio. 2. As your skills become more sophisticated this year, you will
want to revise, amend, supplement, and possibly replace items in your portfolio to
reflect your intellectual growth.” On the left side of the room: “Performance Standards
Mathematics Curriculum: M-5 Problem Solving and Reasoning. M-6 Mathematical
Skills and Tools . . .”

My attention was distracted by some whispering among the children sitting to the
right of me. The teacher’s response to this distraction was immediate: his arm shot
out and up in a diagonal in front of him, his hand straight up, his fingers flat. The
young co-teacher did this, too. When they saw their teachers do this, all the children
in the classroom did it, too.

“Zero noise,” the teacher said, but this instruction proved to be unneeded. The
strange salute the class and teachers gave each other, which turned out to be one of a
number of such silent signals teachers in the school were trained to use, and children
to obey, had done the job of silencing the class.

“Active listening!” said Mr. Endicott. “Heads up! Tractor beams!” which meant,
“Every eye on me.”

On the front wall of the classroom, in handwritten words that must have taken
Mr. Endicott long hours to transcribe, was a list of terms that could be used to praise
or criticize a student’s work in mathematics. At Level Four, the highest of four levels
of success, a child’s “problem-solving strategies” could be described, according to
this list, as “systematic, complete, efficient, and possibly elegant,” while the student’s
capability to draw conclusions from the work she had completed could be termed
“insightful” or “comprehensive.” At Level Two, the child’s capability to draw conclu-
sions was to be described as “logically unsound”; at Level One, “not present.” Ap-
proximately 50 separate categories of proficiency, or lack of such, were detailed in
this wall-sized tabulation.

A well-educated man, Mr. Endicott later spoke to me about the form of classroom
management that he was using as an adaptation from a model of industrial efficiency.
“It’s a kind of ‘Taylorism’ in the classroom,” he explained, referring to a set of theo-
ries about the management of factory employees introduced by Frederick Taylor in
the early 1900s. “Primitive utilitarianism” is another term he used when we met
some months later to discuss these management techniques with other teachers from
the school. His reservations were, however, not apparent in the classroom. Within the
terms of what he had been asked to do, he had, indeed, become a master of control.
It is one of the few classrooms I had visited up to that time in which almost nothing
even hinting at spontaneous emotion in the children or the teacher surfaced while I
was there.

The teacher gave the “zero noise” salute again when someone whispered to another
child at his table. “In two minutes you will have a chance to talk and share this with
your partner.” Communication between children in the class was not prohibited but
was afforded time slots and, remarkably enough, was formalized in an expression

5 Kozol / Still Separate, Still Unequal  575

that I found included in a memo that was posted on the wall beside the door: “An
opportunity . . . to engage in Accountable Talk.”

Even the teacher’s words of praise were framed in terms consistent with the lists
that had been posted on the wall. “That’s a Level Four suggestion,” said the teacher
when a child made an observation other teachers might have praised as simply “pretty
good” or “interesting” or “mature.” There was, it seemed, a formal name for every
cognitive event within this school: “Authentic Writing,” “Active Listening,” “Account-
able Talk.” The ardor to assign all items of instruction or behavior a specific name was
unsettling me. The adjectives had the odd effect of hyping every item of endeavor.
“Authentic Writing” was, it seemed, a more important act than what the children in
a writing class in any ordinary school might try to do. “Accountable Talk” was some
thing more self-conscious and significant than merely useful conversation.

Since that day at P.S. 65, I have visited nine other schools in six different cities
where the same Skinnerian curriculum is used. The signs on the walls, the silent sig-
nals, the curious salute, the same insistent naming of all cognitive particulars, became
familiar as I went from one school to the next.

“Meaningful Sentences,” began one of the many listings of proficiencies expected
of the children in the fourth grade of an inner-city elementary school in Hartford
(90 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic) that I visited a short time later. “Noteworthy
Questions,” “Active Listening,” and other designations like these had been posted
elsewhere in the room. Here, too, the teacher gave the kids her outstretched arm,
with hand held up, to reestablish order when they grew a little noisy, but I noticed
that she tried to soften the effect of this by opening her fingers and bending her elbow
slightly so it did not look quite as forbidding as the gesture Mr. Endicott had used.
A warm and interesting woman, she later told me she disliked the regimen intensely.

Over her desk, I read a “Mission Statement,” which established the priorities and
values for the school. Among the missions of the school, according to the printed
statement, which was posted also in some other classrooms of the school, was “to
develop productive citizens” who have the skills that will be needed “for successful
global competition,” a message that was reinforced by other posters in the room. Over
the heads of a group of children at their desks, a sign anointed them BEST WORK-
ERS OF 2002.

Another signal now was given by the teacher, this one not for silence but in order
to achieve some other form of class behavior, which I could not quite identify. The
students gave exactly the same signal in response. Whatever the function of this
signal, it was done as I had seen it done in the South Bronx and would see it done
in other schools in months to come. Suddenly, with a seeming surge of restlessness
and irritation—with herself, as it appeared, and with her own effective use of all the
tricks that she had learned—she turned to me and said, “I can do this with my dog.”

“There’s something crystal clear about a number,” says a top adviser to the U.S.
Senate committee that has jurisdiction over public education, a point of view that is
reinforced repeatedly in statements coming from the office of the U.S. education sec-
retary and the White House. “I want to change the face of reading instruction across
the United States from an art to a science,” said an assistant to Rod Paige, the former

576    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

education secretary, in the winter of 2002. This is a popular position among advocates
for rigidly sequential systems of instruction, but the longing to turn art into science
doesn’t stop with reading methodologies alone. In many schools it now extends to
almost every aspect of the operation of the school and of the lives that children lead
within it. In some schools even such ordinary acts as children filing to lunch or recess
in the hallways or the stairwells are subjected to the same determined emphasis upon
empirical precision.

“Rubric For Filing” is the printed heading of a lengthy list of numbered categories
by which teachers are supposed to grade their students on the way they march along
the corridors in another inner-city district I have visited. Someone, in this instance,
did a lot of work to fit the filing proficiencies of children into no more and no less
than thirty-two specific slots:

“Line leader confidently leads the class. .  .  . Line is straight. .  .  . Spacing is
right. . . . The class is stepping together. . . . Everyone shows pride, their shoulders
high . . . no slumping,” according to the strict criteria for filing at Level Four.

“Line is straight, but one or two people [are] not quite in line,” according to the
box for Level Three. “Line leader leads the class,” and “almost everyone shows pride.”

“Several are slumping. . . . Little pride is showing,” says the box for Level Two.
“Spacing is uneven. . . . Some are talking and whispering.”

“Line leader is paying no attention,” says the box for Level One. “Heads are turning
every way. . . . Hands are touching. . . . The line is not straight. . . . There is no pride.”

The teacher who handed me this document believed at first that it was written as
a joke by someone who had simply come to be fed up with all the numbers and ac-
counting rituals that clutter up the day in many overregulated schools. Alas, it turned
out that it was no joke but had been printed in a handbook of instructions for the
teachers in the city where she taught.

In some inner-city districts, even the most pleasant and old-fashioned class activi-
ties of elementary schools have now been overtaken by these ordering requirements.
A student teacher in California, for example, wanted to bring a pumpkin to her class
on Halloween but knew it had no ascertainable connection to the California stan-
dards. She therefore had developed what she called “The Multi-Modal Pumpkin Unit”
to teach science (seeds), arithmetic (the size and shape of pumpkins, I believe—this
detail wasn’t clear), and certain items she adapted out of language arts, in order to
position “pumpkins” in a frame of state proficiencies. Even with her multi-modal
pumpkin, as her faculty adviser told me, she was still afraid she would be criticized
because she knew the pumpkin would not really help her children to achieve ex-
pected goals on state exams.

Why, I asked a group of educators at a seminar in Sacramento, was a teacher
being placed in a position where she’d need to do preposterous curricular gym-
nastics to enjoy a bit of seasonal amusement with her kids on Halloween? How
much injury to state-determined “purpose” would it do to let the children of poor
people have a pumpkin party once a year for no other reason than because it’s
something fun that other children get to do on autumn days in public schools
across most of America?

5 Kozol / Still Separate, Still Unequal  577

“Forcing an absurdity on teachers does teach something,” said an African-Ameri-
can professor. “It teaches acquiescence. It breaks down the will to thumb your nose
at pointless protocols to call absurdity ‘absurd.’ ” Writing out the standards with the
proper numbers on the chalkboard has a similar effect, he said; and doing this is
“terribly important” to the principals in many of these schools. “You have to post the
standards, and the way you know the children know the standards is by asking them
to state the standards. And they do it—and you want to be quite certain that they do
it if you want to keep on working at that school.”

In speaking of the drill-based program in effect at P.S. 65, Mr. Endicott told me
he tended to be sympathetic to the school administrators, more so at least than the
other teachers I had talked with seemed to be. He said he believed his principal had
little choice about the implementation of this program, which had been mandated for
all elementary schools in New York City that had had rock-bottom academic records
over a long period of time. “This puts me into a dilemma,” he went on, “because I
love the kids at P.S. 65.” And even while, he said, “I know that my teaching SFA is a
charade . . . if I don’t do it I won’t be permitted to teach these children.”

Mr. Endicott, like all but two of the new recruits at P.S. 65—there were about
fifteen in all—was a white person, as were the principal and most of the administra-
tors at the school. As a result, most of these neophyte instructors had had little or no
prior contact with the children of an inner-city neighborhood; but, like the others I
met, and despite the distancing between the children and their teachers that resulted
from the scripted method of instruction, he had developed close attachments to his
students and did not want to abandon them. At the same time, the class- and race-
specific implementation of this program obviously troubled him. “There’s an expres-
sion now,” he said. “The rich get richer, and the poor get SFA.” He said he was still
trying to figure out his “professional ethics” on the problem that this posed for him.

White children made up “only about one percent” of students in the New York
City schools in which this scripted teaching system was imposed,1 according to the
New York Times, which also said that “the prepackaged lessons” were intended “to
ensure that all teachers—even novices or the most inept”—would be able to teach
reading. As seemingly pragmatic and hardheaded as such arguments may be, they
are desperation strategies that come out of the acceptance of inequity. If we did not
have a deeply segregated system in which more experienced instructors teach the
children of the privileged and the least experienced are sent to teach the children of
minorities, these practices would not be needed and could not be so convincingly
defended. They are confections of apartheid, and no matter by what arguments of
urgency or practicality they have been justified, they cannot fail to further deepen
the divisions of society.

There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education. There ought to
be; we measure almost everything else that happens to them in their schools. Do kids
who go to schools like these enjoy the days they spend in them? Is school, for most of
them, a happy place to be? You do not find the answers to these questions in reports
about achievement levels, scientific methods of accountability, or structural revisions
in the modes of governance. Documents like these don’t speak of happiness. You

578    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

have to go back to the schools themselves to find an answer to these questions. You
have to sit down in the little chairs in first and second grade, or on the reading rug
with kindergarten kids, and listen to the things they actually say to one another and
the dialogue between them and their teachers. You have to go down to the basement
with the children when it’s time for lunch and to the playground with them, if they
have a playground, when it’s time for recess, if they still have recess at their school.
You have to walk into the children’s bathrooms in these buildings. You have to do
what children do and breathe the air the children breathe. I don’t think that there is
any other way to find out what the lives that children lead in school are really like.

High school students, when I first meet them, are often more reluctant than the
younger children to open up and express their personal concerns; but hesitation on
the part of students did not prove to be a problem when I visited a tenth-grade class
at Fremont High School in Los Angeles. The students were told that I was a writer,
and they took no time in getting down to matters that were on their minds.

“Can we talk about the bathrooms?” asked a soft-spoken student named Mireya.
In almost any classroom there are certain students who, by the force of their di-
rectness or the unusual sophistication of their way of speaking, tend to capture your
attention from the start. Mireya later spoke insightfully about some of the serious
academic problems that were common in the school, but her observations on the
physical and personal embarrassments she and her schoolmates had to undergo cut
to the heart of questions of essential dignity that kids in squalid schools like this one
have to deal with all over the nation.
Fremont High School, as court papers filed in a lawsuit against the state of Cali-
fornia document, has fifteen fewer bathrooms than the law requires. Of the limited
number of bathrooms that are working in the school, “only one or two . . . are open
and unlocked for girls to use.” Long lines of girls are “waiting to use the bathrooms,”
which are generally “unclean” and “lack basic supplies,” including toilet paper. Some
of the classrooms, as court papers also document, “do not have air conditioning,”
so that students, who attend school on a three-track schedule that runs year-round,
“become red-faced and unable to concentrate” during “the extreme heat of summer.”
The school’s maintenance records report that rats were found in eleven classrooms.
Rat droppings were found “in the bins and drawers” of the high school’s kitchen,
and school records note that “hamburger buns” were being “eaten off [the] bread-
delivery rack.”
No matter how many tawdry details like these I’ve read in legal briefs or deposi-
tions through the years, I’m always shocked again to learn how often these unsanitary
physical conditions are permitted to continue in the schools that serve our poorest
students—even after they have been vividly described in the media. But hearing of
these conditions in Mireya’s words was even more unsettling, in part because this
student seemed so fragile and because the need even to speak of these indignities in
front of me and all the other students was an additional indignity.
“The problem is this,” she carefully explained. “You’re not allowed to use the
bathroom during lunch, which is a thirty-minute period. The only time that you’re
allowed to use it is between your classes.” But “this is a huge building,” she went

5 Kozol / Still Separate, Still Unequal  579

on. “It has long corridors. If you have one class at one end of the building and your
next class happens to be way down at the other end, you don’t have time to use the
bathroom and still get to class before it starts. So you go to your class and then you
ask permission from your teacher to go to the bathroom and the teacher tells you,
‘No. You had your chance between the periods . . .’

“I feel embarrassed when I have to stand there and explain it to a teacher.”
“This is the question,” said a wiry-looking boy named Edward, leaning forward
in his chair. “Students are not animals, but even animals need to relieve themselves
sometimes. We’re here for eight hours. What do they think we’re supposed to do?”
“It humiliates you,” said Mireya, who went on to make the interesting statement
that “the school provides solutions that don’t actually work,” and this idea was taken
up by several other students in describing course requirements within the school. A
tall black student, for example, told me that she hoped to be a social worker or a doc-
tor but was programmed into “Sewing Class” this year. She also had to take another
course, called “Life Skills,” which she told me was a very basic course—“a retarded
class,” to use her words—that “teaches things like the six continents,” which she said
she’d learned in elementary school.
When I asked her why she had to take these courses, she replied that she’d been
told they were required, which as I later learned was not exactly so. What was required
was that high school students take two courses in an area of study called “The Techni-
cal Arts,” and which the Los Angeles Board of Education terms “Applied Technology.”
At schools that served the middle class or upper-middle class, this requirement was
likely to be met by courses that had academic substance and, perhaps, some relevance
to college preparation. At Beverly Hills High School, for example, the technical-arts
requirement could be fulfilled by taking subjects like residential architecture, the de-
signing of commercial structures, broadcast journalism, advanced computer graphics,
a sophisticated course in furniture design, carving and sculpture, or an honors course
in engineering research and design. At Fremont High, in contrast, this requirement was
far more often met by courses that were basically vocational and also obviously keyed
to low-paying levels of employment.
Mireya, for example, who had plans to go to college, told me that she had to
take a sewing class last year and now was told she’d been assigned to take a class
in hairdressing as well. When I asked her teacher why Mireya could not skip these
subjects and enroll in classes that would help her to pursue her college aspirations,
she replied, “It isn’t a question of what students want. It’s what the school may have
available. If all the other elective classes that a student wants to take are full, she has
to take one of these classes if she wants to graduate.”
A very small girl named Obie, who had big blue-tinted glasses tilted up across her
hair, interrupted then to tell me with a kind of wild gusto that she’d taken hairdress-
ing twice! When I expressed surprised that this was possible, she said there were
two levels of hairdressing offered here at Fremont High. “One is in hairstyling,” she
said. “The other is in braiding.”
Mireya stared hard at this student for a moment and then suddenly began to cry.
“I don’t want to take hairdressing. I did not need sewing either. I knew how to sew.