Analyzing Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender - Prof. Erik O. Wright, Study notes of Introduction to Sociology

Download Analyzing Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender - Prof. Erik O. Wright and more Study notes Introduction to Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Lecture 7 Sociology 298 Intersections & Interactions: Thinking about the relationship between Class and Other forms of Inequality March 12, 2002 These three sessions will deal with the problem of understanding the intersections and interactions of class, race and gender. Mostly I will focus on how to conceptualize this issue, although we will discuss a number of specific historical/empirical problems as well. I. The problem of laundry list oppressions There is a tendency in some currents of radical theory to want to treat all forms of oppression symmetrically. One therefore frequently encounters lists of various sorts: sexism, racism, classism, ageism. In one sense this is a legitimate move: in terms of the lived experience and identity of people there is no a priori reason to regard any form of oppression as intrinsically “worse” than others, as more harmful than another. The oppression of people with handicaps can create harms as deep as class or gender. (When middle class kids asked in a survey whether they would prefer to be poor or be grossly obese without the possibility of losing weight, they say poor). Nevertheless, if the implication of the laundry list is that the specificities of the mechanisms of oppression are of secondary importance, or that all oppressions have the same explanatory importance for all problems, then I think this is a mistake. The task of a critical theory of class, race and gender, then, is to understand the specificity of the causal interactions of these social relations. Sorting these issues out is especially important since, in recent years, perhaps the biggest challenge to class analysis among radical intellectual has revolved around the problem of the relationship between class and other forms of oppression and struggle, particularly gender and race. The characteristic form of this challenge involves the accusation that Marxist class analysis is guilty of one or more of the following sins: 1. The concept of class in Marxism is gender-blind and/or race-blind, whereas class relations are inherently gendered and racialized. 2. Marxist class analysis tends to “reduce” gender and race to class. That is, gender and race oppression are treated as if they can be fully explained by class oppression. 3. Marxist class analysis treats race and gender as “epiphenomena” -- that is, as effects which are not themselves causally important for anything else. They are treated as “surface phenomena”, symptoms of something else, but not important in their own right. The first of these accusations is, I believe, broadly correct: that is, the concept of class, as formulated within Marxism is defined in ways that bracket gender and race. However, I think it is a strength rather than a weakness of the concept of class that it does not pack gender and race into class. I think in general the concept of class should be nongendered and nonracialized, but 2 that the use of class in explanations – class analysis – should systematically concern itself with intersections and interactions of class and other forms of oppression. In the case of the second and third accusations, there are certainly examples in the Marxist tradition of analyses which reduce race and gender to class, and perhaps – although I cannot come up with an instance – examples where race and gender are viewed as epiphenomena. But neither of these accusations fit most contemporary Marxist-rooted class analysis, and I would certainly insist that neither race nor gender are reducible to class: these concepts identify real relations with real causal powers and they have independent sources of variation. In elaborating a strategy for class analysis to engage problems of race and gender, we therefore face both conceptual and theoretical problems: 1. The conceptual problem: how to give specificity to different forms of social division that can be thought of as generating harms. Race, gender and class are all forms of social division. From the normative vantage point of emancipatory social critique, all involve oppressions in the general sense of imposing harms on people. What precisely defines the specificity of these different forms of social division? 2. The theoretical problem: how should we understand the logics of interaction of different forms of social division. Once we have clarified the conceptual standing of these different social relations, how should we approach their intersections and interactions within explanations? These two problems appear in the analysis of both class and gender and class and race. For some issues I will focus on one of these rather than the other, but this is just because of time constraints. We will begin today with the conceptual problem. For this I will focus more on the issue of race than gender. We will then turn to the problem of understanding the causal interactions with class. For that we will look at both race and gender. II. the problem of Theoretical Specificity 1. Methodological point: what do we mean by “theoretical specificity”? In the fall of 2001 in the UN conference on Racism there was a resolution proposed by a number of delegations that “Zionism is a form of racism”. Many people regard this as an absurd statement; others regard it as capturing some underlying, deep theoretical unity between Zionism and other, more generally accepted forms of racism. Of course, in part this is a political rather than theoretical question: the forging of certain kinds of alliances and the challenge to certain kinds of policies may depend upon how different phenomena are grouped together. But this may also be a theoretical problem: a problem of identifying the kind of causal mechanisms which justify grouping together what might otherwise seem as disparate phenomena. The methodological problem of “specificity” involves providing a theoretical understanding of a particular form of social interaction so that we know when specific empirical Lecture 7. Intersections of Class and other oppressions 5 gender is a social construction that transforms biological sexes into socially salient categories, racial constructions transform biological lineages into social divisions. Typically the biological lineage is linked to some socially recognized and symbolically salient visible physical attribute (technically: phenotypic differences), but this need not be the case. Anti-Semitism in Europe was not linked to any consistent, visible phenotypic characteristics. You could be blonde and blue-eyed and be a Jew, but being a Jew still meant being born into a Jewish lineage. ii. Racial division becomes racial oppression when it corresponds to some form of socially-significant exclusion, typically with a strong economic dimension, but also political and cultural exclusion. iii. When racial division takes the form of racial oppression, the oppressed group is also invariably stigmatized, given an inferior social status, in the extreme case regarded as an inferior type of human beings in the biological not just social sense (and sometimes even subhuman). It is possible that the stigmatization and status denigration can continue even if the exclusions have largely disappeared. The most striking example was anti-Semitism in Germany. Racial oppression, then is (i) a social division rooted biological lineage, typically, but not invariably associated with physical markers, (ii) in which some form of socially-significant exclusion is tied to that lineage, and (iii) the excluded group is stigmatized as in one way or another inferior. Now, this provisional definition of the distinctively racialized form of oppression did not, directly, make any reference to class. But a class-relevant idea enters in criterion ii: exclusion. Remember that in the definition of exploitation one of the three principles was the exclusion principle, and the idea of social relations of production centers on rights and powers over resources, which are fundamental powers of exclusion. It is this linkage between class-centered exclusions rooted in property rights and racialized exclusions centering on biological lineage that constitutes the axis for the intersection of race and class. 4. Why should the mechanisms which define racial oppression be causally salient? The three criteria for racial oppression certain descriptively specify a form of social relations which will powerfully impact the lives of people. But this does not really, yet, provide an account for what might be called the causal robustness of this form of oppression: why racial divisions, once they become socially institutionalized as forms of oppression, are so durable? Why racialized oppressions create such intense conflict and emotional salience? We will discuss this more systematically tomorrow, but I want to offer some initial comments here: I think the answer lies in the ways racialized divisions tap into two dimensions of social existence Lecture 7. Intersections of Class and other oppressions 6 that have deep salience quite apart from the problem of oppression: 1. communal solidarity: the nature of the immediate social conditions for interpersonal reciprocity and solidarity in the mundane lives of people. A general question to ask about any setting of social interaction and cooperation is: what are the processes at work which facilitate trust and reciprocity among people, thus making solidarities possible. Albert and Hahnel stress this dimension of racialized division: it is a kind of oppressive transformation of community. 2. kinship and family: the nature of the social practices of endogamy and exogamy which generate intergenerational ties and structures of obligation, solidarity and reciprocity. Community and kinship are two pivotal ways in which solidarities are forged. These are both, in different ways, central to understanding collective action: they both help provide conditions under which individuals become willing to make sacrifices for some collective purpose. Racialized oppression thus brings together in one causal nexus a division rooted in kinship and family – because the racial division centers on biological lineage – and communal cleavage – because of the exclusions linked to racial division. This melding of two axes of potential solidarity is, at least in part, which gives racialized oppression such robust causal force. III. Causal interactions of class and race/gender Analysis of the causal inter-relationship between class and nonclass oppressions involves two related, but still different sorts of problems: 1. Analyses of the effects of class, race and gender on each other. 2. Analyses of the joint effects of class, race and gender in explaining various things. What I want to do here is simply clarify how to think about these questions. 1. Effects of class, race and gender on each other. A. Effects of RACE/GENDER on CLASS There are two main ways that race/gender affect class: (1). Shaping the way people are tied to the class structure a. allocating people into class locations: discrimination affects probabilities of getting into class locations either because of blocking access to relevant resources (credit markets, educational attainment) or through direct exclusions (marriage bars, color bars, glass ceilings, etc) Lecture 7. Intersections of Class and other oppressions 7 b. shaping various indirect linkages of people to class structures. Critical example = the way people are linked to class structures via family and kinship relations. (2). shaping the nature of class locations themselves. Both gender and race can have a direct impact on the nature of class relations themselves. Given certain forms of gender relations or race relations, some kinds of class locations are much more likely to occur to be filled by individuals. Examples: ! race: slavery and repressive sharecropping in a liberal democracy ! gender: forms of slavery in antiquity; personal secretary B. Effects of CLASS on GENDER/RACE: (1). Functional explanations & interest explanations: Aspects of Race and gender relations are functionally explained by class. Race: divide & conquer. Basic argument: Functional explanation: racism divides the working class, undermining radical forms of class organization. Such divisions are stable and reproduced because they actually do weaken the working class and thus are functional for capitalism Interest explanation At various times in history, capitalists encourage racism, believing correctly that this will weaken the working class. Racial divisions are intensified as a conscious strategy by capitalists. Gender: An example of functional explanations of unequal gender relations: The provision of unpaid domestic labor is beneficial for capitalists by lowering the costs of reproducing labor power (since some of those costs are provided by unpaid domestic services) and this explains why women have traditionally been housewives in capialism. (2) Class structure may obstruct change even if other oppressions are not functional for reproducing class structures: Two basic arguments 1. class structures shapes resources available for struggle: class structure ! access to resources ! affects struggles over nonclass oppressions 2. Struggles over nonclass oppressions require mobilization of solidarities and popular power and this mobilization is threatening to dominant classes (pandora’s box problem) so they act to undermine such struggles: