Elite White Men Ruling

Who, What, When, Where, and How

Joe R. Feagin, Kimberley Ducey, Joe Feagin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138191822
• eBook ISBN: 9781317276548
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the "who, what, when, where, and how" of elite-white-male dominance in U.S. and global society. In spite of their domination in the United States and globally that we document herein, elite white men have seldom been called out and analyzed as such. They have received little to no explicit attention with regard to systemic racism issues, as well as associated classism and sexism issues. Almost all public and scholarly discussions of U.S. racism fail to explicitly foreground elite white men or to focus specifically on how their interlocking racial, class, and gender statuses affect their globally powerful decisionmaking. Some of the power positions of these elite white men might seem obvious, but they are rarely analyzed for their extraordinary significance. While the principal focus of this book is on neglected research and policy questions about the elite-white-male role and dominance in the system of racial oppression in the United States and globally, because of their positioning at the top of several societal hierarchies the authors periodically address their role and dominance in other oppressive (e.g., class, gender) hierarchies.

1

The Elite-White-Male Dominance System

As explained in the Introduction, we focus on the elite-white-male dominance system and, more specifically, three of its major subsystems—systemic sexism (heterosexism), systemic classism (capitalism), and systemic racism. U.S. and other North American history is very centrally about human beings who are greatly shaped by these hierarchical, oligarchical, and constantly intertwined subsystems. These human beings thus vary greatly in life opportunities, choices, and patterns because of these societal ranking and rewarding systems. Grounded in many empirical social science studies, our conceptual framework understands that ordinary men and women of most racial backgrounds and most class positions have long been unjustly subordinated and made unequal to elite white men. In most major institutional areas, most white women and most men and women of color are subordinate to elite white men, have far less political-economic power, and thus in many ways lack substantial command over much of their own societal futures.

While hierarchically arranged categories of human beings are conventionally seen as natural social results, they all are in fact socially constructed. These hierarchical oppressions involve the successful assertion of bodily and other material control by the dominant groups over those down the ladders of gender, class, and racial subordination. In these hierarchies a great many are subordinated while others are socially dominant, and the greatest material and social gains come to those who are most dominant. The hierarchies emerging in most of North America originated in early European colonization across the globe, a history examined below. As we will see, European colonizing goals were centrally materialistic—that is, to secure land and labor and to develop production and markets to profit Europeans and European Americans, especially in the upper classes. In the chapters that follow we seek to analyze from several viewpoints the oscillation, dynamism, and character of elite-white-male rule in North America’s past history and in the present.

Interlocking Framing: The Great Chain of Being

How did the country that became the United States, in particular, develop this overarching system of elite-white-male dominance with its large-scale subsystems of social oppression? The oldest of these is the patriarchal-sexist subsystem. In the 16th and 17th centuries this old European system of oppression was redeveloped in North America and was joined and shaped by two other subsystems of oppression—capitalistic class oppression and systemic racial oppression. In their early and later developments these three structures of oppression have been intertwined and extended across whole societies, including the North American colonies and later United States.

The European colonizers brought to North America a social subordination and categorization system that was adapted to the new society they created, thereby shaping it in fundamental ways. Central to their Christian worldview had long been a mental framing of the world that emphasized a grand hierarchical structure called the “great chain of being,” a view dating back to the ancient Greeks. In the early Christian era, the Christian God and angels were placed at the top of this ladder of beings. Below them was a well-developed hierarchy of superior and inferior human beings and then other animal groups. The higher up that ladder, the more socially valued a group was; the lower down, the less socially valued. In the view of the formidable men who headed up the Christian groups that dominated Europe, and soon North America, virtuous Christians were above unvirtuous non-Christians, the highly ranked aristocrats were above lower-status ordinary people, and the more privileged men were above subordinated women.¹ Accepting the chain-of-being hierarchy and its rationalizing framing was a Christian duty. Disrupting it would mean social chaos—or so decreed the powerful European men who aggressively perpetuated it. Standing up to the views of this elite was against established religion and threatened societal stability.

The great-chain-of-being perspective was an integral part of English and other European men’s sexist, elitist-class, and Eurocentric framing of the world as they invaded the lands of indigenous peoples in North America and Africa. Seeking to rationalize their violent dominance of non-European peoples, European leaders and their implementing assistants framed them as being near the bottom of this great chain of being, with Europeans and their colonial descendants at the top of terrestrial beings. English and other European colonialism in the Americas generated a social system with a hierarchical and racialized division of status and labor where European American (soon self-named “white”) men were at the top, with European American women well below, and indigenous and African American men and women even lower at the bottom of this imposed hierarchy. Unsurprisingly, given who enforced this social hierarchy, European men were regularly viewed as “superior” and “manly,” while an ever-expanding group of colonized and subordinated non-European peoples (male and female) were framed as “inferior” and “weak.”²

Over the centuries since this early imperialistic colonization, the most powerful European and European American men, with aid from enabling acolytes, have regularly imposed or substantially shaped sexist, classist, and racist hierarchical structures in countries across the globe. Today, as in the past, this elite-white-male power is rooted in and buttressed by major societal organizations and institutions—and thus is systemic, firmly established, and undergirded by threats of force.

Intersectionality, Interactionality, and Coreproduction

Given this overarching elite-white-male dominance system, let us explore a bit more the relationships of its gender, class, and racial oppression subsystems. How are these component subsystems related and interrelated? Especially since the 1960s civil rights movements, numerous social science and humanities scholars have focused on certain aspects of the intersectionality of these important subsystems. These intersections seem to have been analyzed in detail for those most oppressed, especially the intersectionality that situates African American women and other women of color. Indeed, some groundwork for analyzing the intersectional situation of African American women appeared well before the 1960s movements in the work of activists and analysts from Sojourner Truth and Frances E. W. Harper in the mid-19th century to Anna Julia Cooper and Maria Stewart later in that century. For example, in her 19th century speeches and novels Harper provided penetrating assessments of the dominance of patriarchal norms as they negatively affected all women, and especially black women.³

Most recently, several African American scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Davis, and Patricia Hill Collins have been in the forefront of those accenting a much more developed intersectionality theory and empirical analyses. Coining the term “intersectionality” for critical race studies, Crenshaw was a pioneer in critiquing mainstream feminist studies for not considering the intersectional position of black women, who jointly face both systemic sexism and systemic racism. In her work Davis has examined, among other intersectionality issues, how enslaved black women were long racialized and gendered—exploited for their labor and “breeders” of enslaved children. In her pioneering intersectionality research, Philomena Essed has examined what she terms the “gendered racism” faced by black women in the United States and Europe.⁴ As suggested previously, Collins has provided a major and detailed social science analysis of intersectionality issues in regard to how racial oppression intersects with gender oppression, and how understanding these intersections forms a distinctive black feminist epistemological perspective.⁵

In addition, over the last century white Marxist-Feminist scholars have examined the intersectional relationship of gender oppression and class oppression, with a particular emphasis on the materialistic basis of this oppression. They have been critical of mainstream Marxists for paying little attention to the conditions of women and of the radical feminist tradition for being too psychological in analyses of such issues as marriage and women workers. Marxist-Feminist researcher Zillah Eisenstein has analyzed how the contemporary United States still has a well-developed patriarchal system in which women must struggle for their liberation and a positive sense of self.⁶ A Marxist-Feminist perspective, as Heidi Hartmann argues, regularly defines “patriarchy as a set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women.”⁷ Well-established societal institutions, such as monogamous heterosexual marriage, thus provide male control over women’s access to essential productive resources (e.g., their relationship to the job economy) and control over women’s family and sexual labor. In this way, the early European patriarchal system and its male exploitation of women’s labor provided a major template for the later exploitation of colonized peoples overseas.⁸

In this book we add to social science analysis of these systems of oppression by examining in specific detail the most powerful group, the elite white men, at the intersectional top of the hierarchical gender, class, and racial subsystems. This society-creating and society-shaping group is rarely called out as such and has almost never been systematically analyzed by social scientists. This group of societal overlords makes many of the most important everyday decisions that create, shape, and sustain the sexist, classist, and racist subsystems. They interlink and interconnect these subsystems—physically, materially, and socially.

In addition, these subsystems do much more than accommodate each other, for they regularly codetermine and coreproduce one another. One subsystem rarely operates in isolation of the others. For example, within the modern capitalistic system important economic positions are often significantly determined and defined by the intersecting impacts of the sexist and racist subsystems. The hierarchical arrangement of jobs often has a major gendered component (e.g., women disproportionately in clerical positions, men disproportionately in senior management) or a racial component (e.g., blacks disproportionately in lower-paying jobs, whites disproportionately in better-paying jobs) that is not understandable just from an economic-class viewpoint. Theoretically, a profit-oriented capitalistic system does not require such gendered and racialized placements of workers. In turn, the long-term patterns of gendered and racialized job positions within the capitalistic economy help to reproduce other aspects of the larger sexist and racist subsystems of oppression. Additionally, the latter subsystems work to reinforce and coreproduce the class subsystem in numerous ways, including the gender and racial splitting up of the working class to the general benefit of the dominant capitalist class. For example, these subsystems create within capitalism a distinctive “reserve army of labor”—for instance, workers of color who are paid less by discriminating employers, and thereby also undermine the wages of many white workers. Unmistakably, over centuries critical aspects of these subsystems of subjugation have become interlocking and resistant to change, so that one subsystem significantly and regularly helps to coreproduce the others.⁹

Throughout this book we see how powerful this coreproduction process is in maintaining the elite-white-male dominance system. Some decades back, a group of critical social theorists briefly developed this useful concept, which they defined as a major “causal force at work in historical development. Spheres co-reproduce when the dynamics of one reproduce the defining relations of others.”¹⁰ We adopt here a holistic social science perspective that accents this reality of the major subsystems of sexist, classist, and racist oppression being coreproducing, interconnected, and intertwined. For the sake of a clearer explanation, we mainly consider in this book these three coreproducing subsystems of the elite-white-male dominance system, but we must keep in mind the interconnections of these particular systems of oppression with other systems of oppression in western societies like the United States. Thus, our approach will be to look beyond surface appearances and prevailing mythologies to critical societal realities that have long been regularly hidden and thoroughly disguised.

Unity and Divisions in the Ruling Elite

Many analysts who research or theorize systemic sexism, classism, and racism are periodically accused of “essentialism.” This often involves the claim that there is such diverse experience within these categories that generalizing is unwarranted. However, other analysts counter that this “postmodern” attention to human differences has become so exacting that it leaves little room for the necessary unifying claims against major societal oppressions. That people in categories such as “women” or “African Americans” do not always experience subordination in the same manner does not mean that most do not share many similarly oppressive experiences as part of a socially oppressed group. As legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw has put it, a major project for all oppressed people is reflecting deeply on the “way in which power has clustered around certain categories and is exercised against others. This project attempts to unveil the processes of subordination and the various ways in which those processes are experienced by people who are subordinated and people who are privileged by them.”¹¹

As we will see throughout this book, much research demonstrates that substantial majorities of large subordinated groups such as women or African Americans face broadly many similar gender and/or racial experiences with the dominant white male group. In that sense they do constitute oppressed groups because that oppressor group has routinely and powerfully made that so in material, legal, and other social terms.

Much empirical evidence demonstrates that the major institutions of U.S. society have long been shaped and operated by a small white and male elite, one that has taken on a more or less oligarchical form since the earliest century. Consider the foundational example of the 55 delegates at the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention. They were all white men, and almost all were members of a privileged elite within the colonial society. All agreed that the new U.S. government must be powerful enough to protect private property, and thus undergird and sustain current and future class and racial inequality. Well-off white Americans had to protect themselves against rebellious enslaved workers, indigenous Americans, and landless whites—a principal reason for the second amendment protecting armed state militias. James Madison, the influential shaper of the Constitution, wrote of the “class with” property and the “class without” property and thereby noted increasing national inequality, which he wished to be constitutionally protected. A leading northern delegate, Gouverneur Morris, likewise agreed that property is the “main object of Society.”¹²

These Constitution-makers did protect propertied interests, again mainly those of white men with substantial property such as early capitalists. For instance, Article I of the Constitution prevents state governments from interfering with contract obligations, and the Constitution’s Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit federal and state governments from taking private property without “due process of law” and “just compensation.” Ever since, the mostly elite or elite-vetted federal and state judges have generally made certain that propertied wealth is well-protected.¹³

The U.S. Constitution, together with other early political documents, did not create...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Elite White Men: The 21st Century Problem
• 1 The Elite-White-Male Dominance System
• 2 Elite White Male Dominance: A Contemporary Overview
• 3 White Imperialism, Racism, and Masculinity: 1890s–1940s
• 4 White Imperialism, Racism, and Masculinity: Globalization Since the 1950s
• 5 More Oligopolistic Capitalism: The Current Neoliberal Era
• 6 The Politics of Systemic Racism: Domestic Change and Reaction
• 7 Seeking the American Dream: The Case of African Americans
• 8 Systemic Sexism, Racism, and Classism: A Troubled Present and Future
• Epilogue: Making Real “Liberty and Justice for All”
• Notes
• Index