The only reason it is important to understand social life is that it produces consequences that matter, which is what drew me to sociology in the first place. Those consequences include everything that happens as we participate in social systems—everything, no matter how small and inconsequential or how large and profound, from two people accidentally bumping into each other while getting on a bus (“Excuse me.” “No problem.”) to the legal definition of marriage, conflict between social classes, global warming, war, and the fate of the Earth. Some consequences are external to social systems, such as the extinction of various species of life as a result of global warming (although the cause of that warming itself has everything to do with social systems). The rest, however, take place in the context of social systems, including the characteristics of systems themselves, such as cultural beliefs or norms or the distribution of power. The result is an unending cycle of movement and change through which social life happens on multiple levels and people’s lives happen in relation to it.
Figure 4. A model for sociological thinking.
Part of what changes are worldviews themselves, including sociology, which came into being as a product of social life only a few centuries ago and has been changing ever since. Like everything else, worldviews are both a consequence of social life and what makes everything else possible by shaping our sense of reality. The idea of race, for example, as a core element of the American worldview with profound consequences over hundreds of years came from somewhere as a result of people participating in certain social systems during a particular period of history—which puts us in the interesting position of using one worldview to understand another.
Where White Privilege Came From
The history of white privilege is a long and complicated story, too long and too complicated for me to tell completely here,1 but what I can do is identify major aspects of the story as a way to show how the sociological model works.
We begin with the long history of the British struggle to conquer Ireland and subjugate its people. This structural relation of domination along with British frustration in the face of stubborn resistance gave rise to a cultural belief that the Irish were an inferior and savage people, not merely in the organization of their societies but in their nature as human beings. The British came to see the Irish as something like a separate species altogether, possessing inferior traits that were biologically passed from one generation to the next.
In perceiving the Irish in this way, the British were changing their worldview by creating a concept of race that encouraged them to see other peoples as subhuman if not inhuman. By not seeing them as members of their own kind, they saw them instead as objects to be controlled through any means necessary, not as human beings whose suffering might be an occasion for empathy and restraint. Using such a worldview, it would seem to the British both reasonable and right that they would assert control through the use of force, much as they would over the land or nonhuman animals.
When the British came to North America in the seventeenth century, they brought with them a worldview that included the idea of race and a view of themselves as a people destined to dominate any land in which they might choose to establish themselves. To this was added the explosive growth of industrial capitalism as an economic system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose structure is organized around capitalists’ ability to control the conditions and resources on which profit depends.
In the early stages of capitalism, for example, markets were the object of control, as capitalists bought goods in one place and took them to another where they were in scarce supply and could command a higher price than the one they originally paid. Later, as capitalists became involved in the production of goods, profit depended more on the ability to control workers and natural resources than on markets—the less the capitalist pays for labor and materials, the more is left over for the capitalist to keep.
The ecology of North America lent itself to agriculture on a massive scale, and the capitalist demand for land and cheap labor far outstripped the available supply. Most of the land that was to become the United States was gained through a system of military and political dominance over Native Americans, a campaign of deceit, broken treaties, and military conquest that included the use of forced migration (now known as ethnic cleansing) and genocide, practices that today would be considered crimes against humanity.2
Most of the labor was drawn from the population of indentured European servants, Native Americans, and Africans, none of whom was initially held in a state of perpetual slavery. The structure of the capitalist system, however, and the British worldview in which they saw themselves as an inherently and distinctly superior race of people combined to lay down a path of least resistance leading in that direction.
Attempts to convert indentured white servants to permanent slaves failed because most were from England and had too strong a sense of their rights as individuals to allow it. It proved equally impractical to enslave Native Americans, because they could easily escape and disappear among native populations. This left black Africans, who were not among their own people in their own land and whose physical features made them stand out among the rest of the population, leaving them with no place to hide should they manage to run away. They alone were selected for the status of permanent slavery.
Complicating the process, however, was the existence of sacred cultural beliefs and values on which the fledgling democracy was founded. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with its Bill of Rights clearly contradict such practices as genocide, conquest, forced migration, slavery, the buying and selling of human beings, and the denial of basic rights to dignity, self-determination, and freedom.
To resolve the contradiction, the concept of race was invoked to create cultural categories of ‘white’ and ‘nonwhite’ human beings. Native Americans, whose societies Thomas Jefferson had regarded as equal to those of Europeans—and in some ways superior—were increasingly regarded as biologically and socially inferior and doomed either to be absorbed into the English way of life or made to disappear altogether.
Unlike Native Americans, however, Africans were held in a state of perpetual bondage that extended to their biological descendants. Because of this, the concept of race was carried to an extreme by defining white people as a separate and biologically superior species and black people as innately inferior and therefore incapable of learning or advancing themselves. This view, in turn, was used to justify holding black people in a permanent status of subordination to white people, on whom they supposedly were to depend for guidance and discipline. It was a common belief among white people that they were doing Africans a favor by bringing them to live in service as a kind of deliverance from what they assumed was an inferior and savage existence in Africa.
It is important to emphasize that prior to the British experience with the Irish and the enslavement of Africans in North America, the cultural concept of race, including such categories as ‘white’ and ‘color’ as social markers of inferiority and superiority, did not exist.3 Notice, then, how cultural ideas can come into being as a way to justify structural arrangements and how those same ideas can go on to play a role in shaping other systems in various ways, such as the subordination of Africans and Native Americans when English migrants came to North America to make new lives for themselves. This kind of interaction among the various characteristics of social systems is basic to understanding how social life happens—everything is connected to and has the potential to affect everything else.
Structural patterns of dominance also operate among whites, of course, and the concept of race has played a role in this as well. In the nineteenth century, for example, white people in dominant classes carried out a campaign to encourage lower- and working-class white people to think of themselves as white—to make the ascribed status of ‘white’ an important part of their social identity and worldview. This was offered as a form of compensation for their miserable situation as workers,
as in ‘I may be poor, but at least I’m white.’4
Since then, racial identity has played an important role in distracting white workers from the realities of capitalism by encouraging them to focus on race instead of class. At the turn of the twentieth century, for example, when the labor movement was at its peak, unions routinely excluded workers of color. When white unions went on strike to enforce demands for better working conditions, employers often brought in people of color as strikebreakers, hoping white workers would channel their energy and anger into issues of race and away from the reasons that caused them to go on strike in the first place. Today, similar dynamics operate around issues related to affirmative action and immigration policy.
This history happened through the participation of individual people in social systems of various kinds, but it is important to note that none of it had to happen as it did. The characteristics of systems produce paths of least resistance for people to follow, but nothing in the nature of those paths precludes the possibility of people choosing otherwise.
There was, for example, overwhelming support for the doctrine of Manifest Destiny as part of the American worldview that was used to justify the conquest of new territory and the practice of slavery, but there was also opposition. The abolitionist movement, for example, was based on a radically different worldview when it came to the subject of race and slavery. And protesters like Henry David Thoreau were willing to go to prison rather than pay taxes to fund a war against Mexico instigated solely to enlarge the United States by taking Mexican land. People who participate in social systems, in short, are not robots or puppets in relation to them and their dominant worldview. A system’s characteristics can load the odds in ways that create paths of least resistance, but the rest depends on what people choose to do from one moment to the next.
Most of the choices we make are unconscious, it being in the nature of paths of least resistance to make our choices appear to be the logical, normal things to do without our having to think about them. This means, of course, that we can participate in systems in ways we are not aware of, help produce consequences without knowing it, and be involved in other people’s lives, historically and in the present, without any intention to do so. I came to this awareness for myself through tracing my own family’s connection to the history of the United States, including white privilege and racism.
On the face of it, the path of least resistance is for me to jump to the conclusion that since, as far as I know, I do not behave in overtly racist ways and since my ancestors are not from the South and did not own slaves, this troubling history has nothing to do with me. But the history of race in this country and how it plays out today show that things are more complicated than that.
My mother’s grandfather, for example, migrated from Connecticut to Wisconsin, where he bought land and started what became a prosperous dairy farm. As it turns out, the land he purchased had been taken from the Ho-Chunk Native American tribe several decades earlier, even though the federal government had promised to protect forever their rights to their ancestral homeland. That promise was honored only until white miners showed an interest in rich deposits of lead on Ho-Chunk land, and so the United States reneged on its promise and called in its army to force the Ho-Chunk from their land in spite of the treaty.
From the Ho-Chunk point of view, my great-grandfather had purchased stolen property, but since white people had the power to make and enforce the law, they could also decide what was stolen and what was not, and so he was allowed to purchase the land without a second thought. He went on to be a successful farmer in the midst of the booming U.S. economy that, as the saying goes, was a rising tide that lifted all boats, including his. For people of color, however, who were systematically denied the opportunity to own their own ‘boats,’ the rising industrial capitalist tide brought little benefit.
When my great-grandfather died, the farm was inherited by my grandfather, and when my grandparents died, it was sold, and my mother and her four siblings each received a share of the proceeds. And when my parents bought their first house in 1954, they used her modest inheritance for the down payment. They also obtained an affordable mortgage from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which was set up after World War II to help returning veterans buy their own homes. Being ordinary citizens, they may well have been unaware of the fact that federal regulations and guidelines governing FHA loans overwhelmingly favored whites over veterans of color, putting them on the receiving end of white privilege in one of the biggest transfers of wealth in U.S. history. Regardless of whether my parents knew it, however, the effect was the same.5
My parents now had a ‘boat’ of their own that was lifted by the rising tide of an expanding economy in the 1950s and 1960s, and when my wife and I wanted to buy our first house in the 1980s and didn’t have enough money for the down payment, we borrowed it from my mother. Now we had a boat that we were able to sell some years later so that we could then build the house that we are living in now—a house that, I recently learned, is sitting on land that was once part of the homeland of the Massacoe tribe, from whom it was taken by white people in the seventeenth century. The method by which it was taken was illegal under colonial law, but when those who took the land offered to share it with the colony, the officials decided not to interfere.
I could say this history has nothing personally to do with me, that it was all a long time ago and caused by someone else, that my ancestors were all good, moral, and decent people who never killed or enslaved anyone or drove anyone from their land. Even if that were true (I’ll never know for sure), the only way to let it go at that is to ignore the fact that if someone were willing to take the time to follow the money, they would find that some portion of the house and land that we now call home can be traced directly back through my family history to the laws and practices that white people have collectively imposed through their government and other institutions, back to the capitalist Industrial Revolution and the exploitation of people of color that made it possible, and back to the conquest, forced expulsion, and genocide through which the land that is now the United States was first acquired by Europeans. In other words, some portion of this house is our share of the benefits of white privilege passed on and accumulated from one generation to the next.
For some white people, the share of benefits is greater or less than for others, depending on, among other things, the dynamics of social class. But one thing is certain: collectively, the white population of the United States now holds an enormous unearned advantage of wealth and power. Regardless of what kind of people we are as individuals or what we have or have not done ourselves, that advantage cannot be uncoupled from the history of race and racism in this country. The past is more than history. It is also present in structural distributions of wealth and power and cultural ideologies, laws, practices, beliefs, and attitudes whose effect is to justify, defend, and perpetuate the system of white privilege. And the past is present in the huge moral dilemmas that arise from such a history and the question of what to do about the unnecessary suffering and injustice that continue to result from it.
The path of least resistance in any system is to adhere to a worldview in which none of these considerations are acknowledged and to accept the organization of social life as just the way things are and were always meant to be. This is especially true of dominant groups in systems of privilege, who can indulge in the luxury of obliviousness, the freedom to live unaware of the system they participate in and how and with what effect.
By contrast, there is no moment of greater awareness for anyone than when they step off the path of least resistance and both the path and the system of which it is a part become visible. There is also no moment of greater potential to make a difference. In 1960, for example, most public accommodations were racially segregated throughout the American South. One day, in Greensboro, North Carolina, four young African American college students walked into a Woolworth’s and bought school supplies for their first term in
college and then sat down at the lunch counter and asked for menus. The waitress, however, refused to serve them—“We don’t serve your kind here”— and told them to leave.6
They were furious at being treated this way, being from Northern cities where racism and segregation were certainly alive and well but not in such a blatant form. For weeks, they argued among themselves about what to do, until finally they decided to return to the lunch counter and refuse to leave until they were served like everyone else. As they sat on the stools that day, they were threatened, verbally abused, and physically manhandled and had food and drink thrown on them, and yet they refused to leave. Finally, the manager announced that the lunch counter was closed. As the students rose to leave, they said they would return the next day. And they did, along with others who had heard of their actions, and then still more the day after that, until every seat was occupied by a person of color openly defying the overt racial segregation that had been a hallmark of the South for hundreds of years.
Within a matter of weeks, news of what happened in Greensboro spread and prompted similar sit-ins across North Carolina and then, within a few months, throughout the South in all kinds of public accommodations. The eventual result was an end to this form of segregation.
Notice what these young men did and did not do. They did not try to change anyone’s mind. They did not speak, much less argue, with anyone or hand out written statements. Instead, they made use of the fact that every social system happens only through the participation of individuals, any one of whom has the potential to change how the system happens by stepping off the path of least resistance. By changing the way the system happened, they changed that thing larger than themselves that shapes people’s experience, behavior, and expectations about what is supposed to happen from one moment to the next. In other words, they discovered that changing the way a system happens is a far more powerful—and potentially more dangerous—strategy than trying to change individuals one at a time.
The Forest and the Trees Page 20
