Not seeing this complexity sets us up to participate unknowingly in systems that produce all kinds of consequences, both good and bad. At the same time, we cut ourselves off from our potential to do something about consequences we want to change. When white people act in racist ways, for example, they often rush to make the point that they are not themselves racist. “I didn’t mean it,” they say, or “I misspoke,” or “I made a mistake [by saying that], and I’m sorry.” They almost never respond with something like, “I guess the racism in the world gets into all of our lives, including mine, and I’d better look at that to see what that means for me.”
In terms of impression management, everything said in self-defense is probably true: they did not intend to say or do anything that would hurt someone or add racism to the impression people have of them. But this is beside the more important point that the racist content of social action is real, and if people choose—consciously or not—to be vehicles for its expression, this says something about the systems they participate in and about them as participants. In a racist society, talk and action that reflect and reinforce white privilege are paths of least resistance that tell us more about society than about ourselves. But the choices we make in relation to those paths tell us something about who we are in relation to them, and if we don’t see that, we cannot do anything about the paths or about ourselves.
Few things in sociological practice are as important or as tricky to grasp as the relationship between people and systems. In an individualistic society, the path of least resistance is to ignore systems altogether or to see them as vague menacing forces that threaten to swallow us up. The truth, however, is more complicated than that, and with far more potential for creative living.
Our relationship to a system’s culture, for example, is dynamic and alive, with us creating the world as much as we are created by and through it. We are objects of culture—described, valued, and limited by its ideas about who we are and how we ought to think, feel, and behave. We are also subjects of culture, the ones who believe, who value, who expect, who feel, who use, who write and talk and think and dream. We are creators of culture, part of an endless stream of human experience—sensing, interpreting, choosing, shaping, making. We are the ones who make culture our own so that we often can’t tell the point where it leaves off and we begin, or whether that point exists at all. We are recipients of culture, socialized and enculturated. We are the ones who internalize ideas, taking them inside ourselves where they shape how we participate in social life and thereby make it happen. And this thing we make happen is at the same time the cultural force that shapes us as we happen.
As a creative medium that we share with others, culture is not us, but it also is not completely external to us. It exists through us as we exist through it. It is among and of us. Our participation in it provides a way to participate in other people’s lives. In this sense, there is no clear, fixed boundary that separates us from culture and, therefore, no clear, fixed boundary that separates us from other people. Culture is like the air. It is everywhere, and as humans we cannot live without it. We can live without any particular culture, but not without some culture.
Like the air, culture flows in and out of us in ways that make it impossible to draw a true line between ‘I’ or ‘us’ and ‘it.’ The air is both outside us and inside every cell of our bodies. As beings, we are of the air, but in a particular form that distinguishes us from dogs or ferns or bacteria. And since we all share this relationship with the air—as with culture—in a way we are all of one another. You are part of flowing and mixing with the same air that inhabits me.
Culture provides ideas and materials to work with as we make ourselves and social life happen from one moment to the next, but we have to decide what to do with them. Culture isn’t something that can think or decide or do anything, nor is any other aspect of social systems or the systems themselves. We are not autonomous and independent in relation to systems, but we also aren’t puppets on a string. We are somewhere in between in a far more creative place.
We’re like jazz improvisers who cannot play without learning the basics of music. They have to know the difference between a sharp and a flat and between major and minor and how notes combine to make different kinds of chords. They have to know how to blend time, rhythm, and sound so they can shape the flow of the music and stay in sync while they play together. In other words, they need to know how symbols and ideas define and underlie jazz as a musical form and how they shape the way musicians think, hear, imagine, and relate to one another in ways both structural and ecological. But the social forms that limit them are also what they use to create, to bend and play with the ‘rules,’ to test the limits in ways that sound both familiar (‘music,’ ‘jazz’) and new, what it means to improvise.
This doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want, even though jazz can sound that way, as if everyone is doing their own thing oblivious to everyone else. In fact, however, they are deeply aware of one another and the form within which they play all the while they’re making it up as they go along. Beneath the seeming creative disorder lies an unarticulated inner discipline based on their shared participation in a social system. This is what gives the entire piece its musical integrity and its social integrity as something happening not merely within individual musicians but also among them. This ability to play within a form and yet improvise around and, at times, beyond it is what gives jazz its unmistakable character. As with jazz and its musicians, so also with social life and us.
Making Systems Happen
Social interaction consists of all the ways that we create and sustain a particular sense of reality out of which our lives, systems, and social life happen. Social interaction is the interplay between us and systems that works through both action and appearance. If employees in a bank, for example, dress in clown costumes and gorilla suits, customers will have a hard time identifying the bank as a company where they can confidently deposit their money. Appearance and action mirror each other. The hushed atmosphere in a typical bank and the quiet, efficient way that tellers handle transactions sustain the shared sense that this is a serious place where your money will be well taken care of. People don’t laugh a lot in banks or make jokes about bank failures or embezzlement, just as airline pilots and flight attendants don’t make funny remarks about crashes or bombs.
In fact, in the United States, especially since the events of September 11, 2001, you run the risk of being arrested for making jokes in an airport about possibly carrying a bomb onto a plane. This policy exists because the shared sense that flying is a safe way to travel is a fragile social reality even without the threat of terrorism and it can be sustained only by controlling anything that people might say or do to indicate otherwise. As I sit in my seat at 30,000 feet, reading a book or listening to music on my iPod, I’m usually unaware of the fine line that separates the alternate realities of safety and imminent danger, and everything around me is designed to encourage me not to. The comfort of the seats, the availability of movies, food, reading material, music, air-conditioning, heat, Wi-Fi, and phones—all create a sense of reality that, when I consider where it is taking place, is in some ways absurd. But I accept the situation and make it ‘normal’ and unremarkable in my mind until something happens to suggest otherwise.
Every social situation is defined by a reality that exists only as people actively shape and support it.10 In something as simple as a conversation, we have to engage in a kind of dance of gestures, talk, and body language to sustain a shared sense that this thing we call a conversation is, in fact, happening from one moment to the next. We can use all kinds of methods, for example, to assure people that we are paying attention to what they’re saying. We look at them, nod our heads now and then, murmur an occasional “uh-huh,” smile or laugh at the funny parts, frown at something serious, ask a question or make a comment that’s related to what they said. Without that assurance, the idea that a conversation is happening cannot be sustai
ned as a shared reality.
A workshop exercise makes this point come alive. People pair off and one person tells a story to the other while the partner pretends to be completely oblivious to what’s being said (sometimes going to sleep). It’s an awful experience for the speakers, who typically cannot think of what to say next or can but cannot get their mouths to say it. In this sense, ‘having a conversation’ is a reality that we create and sustain between us, and everything we do or don’t do figures into making it happen. The methods are something we have to learn, and they vary from one system to another.
In some societies, for example, a sign of paying attention in a conversation is looking at the other person’s eyes from time to time. In other societies, however, this is considered a sign of disrespect if done by someone lower in authority toward someone higher. So, when typical middle-class white teachers in U.S. schools try to have a conversation with students from any number of Latin American or Asian societies, they find their students seeming to shirk their responsibility to help keep the conversation going (thinking, perhaps, the students are trying to conceal some wrongdoing), when what is really going on is a show of respect and politeness. What sustains a conversation in one system can have just the opposite effect in another.
We continually use our beliefs of how reality is constructed to figure out from one moment to the next what is happening and how to do our part to keep it going. At the movies, for example, I walk up to the theater and notice a line of people extending out the front door and down the sidewalk. I take this to mean that the theater hasn’t started selling tickets for the next show and that I’m supposed to go to the end of the line and wait for it to move. The social reality of a waiting line is a fragile one, because most people would rather be at the front than farther back. It is so fragile that the smallest thing can make it come undone. It takes only a few people to leave the line, for example, and go into the door ahead of everyone else for people to start doubting that it is in fact a ‘line’ in which the rules of staying in place and waiting your turn apply. When this happens, the line can fall apart physically and as a shared social reality, which depends on certain patterns of social action to maintain a consensus that it exists.
Because the methods we use to sustain a social reality are used over and over again, they often take on a ritual quality.11 Intimate relations between marital partners, for example, are usually based on the assumption that the two people love each other. Since an assumption is just an idea, it is sustained through rituals that call attention to it as part of the reality these two people participate in day after day. Such rituals might include saying, “Good night” before going to sleep, perhaps accompanied with a kiss, or saying, “I love you” before ending a phone conversation, or kissing as part of saying good-bye when going off in separate directions at the start of a day.
We may not think of such rituals as sustaining a reality until our partner fails to enact them, especially over a period of time. In itself, each “I love you,” each kiss, each “Good night” does not amount to much, but as part of a fabric that holds together the social reality of a love relationship, it can take on much greater significance. It may not take many lapses to raise insecurity in a partner or worry that something is wrong in the relationship, that the assumption of love and commitment is weaker than it was or may never have been what they thought. Those rituals are like many interaction rituals in that we do not know they are there until someone deviates from them and we notice the hole in the social fabric that marks where they are supposed to be.
Large Structures in Everyday Life
A focus on interaction naturally draws us toward individuals, but it is important to keep in mind that almost everything we say or do happens in relation to one social system or another and often has implications for larger systems, even though we do not know it at the time.
Linguist Deborah Tannen, for example, has written several books on how women and men talk to one another.12 She notices that men tend to talk in ways that enhance their status—they are more likely than women to interrupt during conversations, use aggressive language and tones of voice, and avoid doing anything that might suggest a lack of control, such as asking for directions or saying they do not know the answer to a question. Women, on the other hand, are more likely than men to interact in ways that support personal relationships—to listen attentively while others talk, wait their turn rather than interrupt, avoid verbal aggression, and be more open about their doubts. Tannen explains these patterns as a relatively simple matter of children playing in same-sex groups as they grow up, thereby socialized by their peers to interact in different ways. They grow up in what amounts to different cultures, Tannen argues, and behave accordingly.
The problem with Tannen’s approach is that she never links such differences to the larger social context that makes them paths of least resistance. She tells us, for example, that a boy learns to interact aggressively by hanging out with other boys, but she doesn’t say where those boys learn to interact aggressively. It’s as though boys and girls invent different patterns spontaneously and all by themselves, rather than learning them as part of their socialization into the larger society they both inhabit.
More importantly, Tannen doesn’t ask what kind of society would have paths of least resistance that lead men to seek status and women to attend to personal relationships. She barely mentions that we live in a society that is male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered. In such a world, men who seek status and women who tend to personal relationships also reinforce male privilege and the oppressive price that privilege exacts from women.
When women and men interact along paths of least resistance, they do more than talk differently. They also play a part in making a particular kind of society happen from one moment to the next. When men interrupt and women don’t object, when men answer questions even when they do not know the answer and women remain silent or say they don’t know even when they do, when men argue aggressively for their point of view and women raise questions and otherwise show an openness to alternatives— this is how the system of male privilege happens in order to shape a major structural feature of society as a whole and all of the systems, from family to workplace, included in it.
This is true of every form of social inequality, whose patterns of inclusion and exclusion, advantage and disadvantage, reward and punishment contribute to privileging some groups over others. In all kinds of workplaces, for example, white women, people of color, people who are LGBT, * and people with disabilities find themselves on the receiving end of messages that make them feel like unwelcome outsiders. Sometimes these messages are overt and deliberate, but often they are woven into the everyday fabric of interaction.
As Rosabeth Moss Kanter has observed about corporations, for example, when men use strong language in the presence of women, they may make a point of apologizing to the women.13 While the men may think they are being sensitive or polite, they are also sending the message that without the women there, they wouldn’t have to pay such close attention to how they talk. By apologizing, men draw attention to the exceptional nature of women’s presence and identify women as outsiders who interfere with what would otherwise be regarded as the normal flow of conversation.
Gays and lesbians experience this kind of exclusion all the time in the form of an ongoing assumption by heterosexuals that everyone else is heterosexual, too.14 Since coming out carries all kinds of risks at work, for example, gays and lesbians have to be careful in the simplest everyday interactions, such as Monday morning talk about what coworkers did over the weekend. When heterosexuals try to imagine telling someone all about their family without ever using a word that indicates anyone’s gender, they get some idea of what it’s like to be gay or lesbian in the typical workplace. A heterosexual has nothing to lose by casually revealing a partner’s gender, as when a woman refers to her partner as ‘he.’ But a lesbian who does the same thing could find herself in trouble, excluded if not harassed
and discriminated against in ways that threaten her livelihood. Since heterosexuals have much greater freedom to talk about their personal lives, such talk becomes a form of privilege, because it is denied to others.15 That heterosexuals are rarely aware of this is also part of their privilege.
In a society that privileges whiteness, people of many races must deal with patterns of interaction that exclude and discriminate. The messages ‘You are not white’ and ‘You don’t belong here’ are sent in a variety of ways. Black men, for example, are routinely treated as objects of fear in public places, as white people hug packages and bags more tightly against their bodies as they pass by or avoid the encounter by crossing the street. Black people also often have their presence challenged, however politely.
A black partner in a large law firm, for example, came to work early one morning and was confronted by a young newly hired white attorney who did not know whom he was talking to.
“Can I help you?” the young man asked pointedly. When told “No,” he repeated the question until the senior lawyer angrily explained who he was.
A black federal judge tells the story of waiting for a cab with several colleagues—all dressed in suits and ties—outside a prominent hotel in a major city. A white woman drove up in her car, got out, and handed the judge her keys as she strode into the hotel.16
In such ways, the large structures of social inequality that characterize entire societies play themselves out in everyday life. The countless ways that such systems limit and damage people’s lives don’t usually take the form of overt and deliberate harm. Instead, they happen through a particular choice of words, a tone of voice, the timing of a silence or an averted gaze, or a seemingly innocent question. Such patterns make it difficult for members of dominant groups to appreciate that their privilege even exists, not to mention the cost that their privilege exacts from others. And those patterns also make it difficult for members of subordinate groups to endure the small everyday exclusions and insults, no single one of which carries great weight but which accumulate into the kind of burden that gives oppression its name.
The Forest and the Trees Page 16
