Making Sense of Race, Class, and Gender

Commonsense, Power, and Privilege in the United States

Celine-Marie Pascale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135776350
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Using arresting case studies of how ordinary people understand the concepts of race, class, and gender, Celine-Marie Pascale shows that the peculiarity of commonsense is that it imposes obviousness—that which we cannot fail to recognize. As a result, how we negotiate the challenges of inequality in the twenty-first century may depend less on what people consciously think about "difference" and more on what we inadvertently assume. Through an analysis of commonsense knowledge, Pascale expertly provides new insights into familiar topics. In addition, by analyzing local practices in the context of established cultural discourses, Pascale shows how the weight of history bears on the present moment, both enabling and constraining possibilities. Pascale tests the boundaries of sociological knowledge and offers new avenues for conceptualizing social change.

In 2008, Making Sense of Race, Class and Gender was the recipient of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, of the American Sociological Association Section on Race, Gender, and Class, for "distinguished and significant contribution to the development of the integrative field of race, gender, and class."

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INTRODUCTION

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man [sic] at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.—And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. (Wittgenstein 1951, 50)

The universe is made of stories, not atoms. (Muriel Rukeyser, quoted in Write to the Heart)

In the United States, the twenty-first century opened with white women and people of color still struggling for adequate health care, reproductive rights, and equal wages, as well as for access to employment and education. Racial profiling is still considered “good policy,” and more frequently, a matter of national security. Recent legislation and sentencing procedures have produced the largest per capita prison population in the world—as well as unprecedented government-sponsored surveillance, disappearances (aka renditions), and torture. At the same time, the federal government has reduced funding for welfare, public education, public broadcasting, and arts. Everyday the nation enjoys an abundance of food, but the workers who harvest the fields and orchards still labor under the enormous risks of pesticide poisoning. In some cases, migrant farm workers live in conditions of slavery and in other cases they earn wages as low as $50 for every 4,000 pounds of produce picked (Nieves 2005). Millions of adults and children, unable to afford housing, live in cardboard shelters on sidewalks, in doorways, and under freeways.

While gains in civil rights have been considerable, those gains surely are both incomplete and under erosion. Both inside and outside of the academy, the need for progressive politics is evident; however, less clear is the adequacy of the original civil rights vision to deal with contemporary issues of inequality (cf., Omi 1996). In the United States, capacities for social justice organizing remain tenuously anchored to the class-based analyses of the (largely white male) political left and the “identity-based” politics of people of color, feminists, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements. Clearly, all marginalized people are in need of more effective organizing strategies. This book takes as its premise that how we negotiate the challenges of inequality in the twenty-first century depends less on what we consciously think about “difference” and more on what we inadvertently assume. By examining practices that reveal commonsense knowledge, this book makes a unique contribution that demonstrates how race, gender, and class are made visible and meaningful as apparently routine matters of social difference. My analysis illustrates how commonsense knowledge can sustain systems of inequality without mobilizing conscious feelings of bigotry or prejudice. Further, I examine how commonsense functions to naturalize historical relations of power and privilege. Throughout, I consider how local practices, and the discourses that shape local practices, are analytically, pragmatically, and politically linked.¹ I retheorize race, gender, and class and explore corresponding implications and strategies for social change.

In addition, an overarching goal of this book is to produce a fuller understanding of the productive force of language with respect to race, gender, and class. I draw from both ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis to analyze the production of commonsense knowledge at local and cultural levels. Ethnomethodology is an interpretative paradigm that examines local contexts to understand how people cooperatively engage in practices that produce a sense of a shared, objective social world.² As such, it provides important tools for examining local practices that constitute race, gender, and class. However, precisely because ethnomethodological analyses are not intended to address the broader cultural contexts that inform interaction, they often create the appearance that each person is an entirely autonomous subject—free to speak or act in accord with her or his own free will within the confines of a local context. Therefore, I draw from poststructural discourse analysis to situate an understanding of local practices within broader cultural discourses. The analytical interest for poststructural discourse analysis does not regard what one says, but rather, what constitutes the domain of the sayable from within which one is able to speak—hence the characteristic concern with issues of power and culture. Poststructuralist analyses (cf., Butler 1990; 1997a, 1997b; Derrida 1976, 1982; Foucault 1977, 1978, 1980) examine the conditions of knowledge from within which meaning is constructed.

Foucault’s (1978) and Butler’s (1990, 1993) concern with the social processes that produce and naturalize sex, gender, and sexuality nearly inverts the sense of agency central to ethnomethodology. Yet, despite an emphasis on discursive practices, poststructural analyses of the historical and cultural processes of discursive formations can create the appearance that daily interactions are functionally overdetermined.³ If all of social thought and interaction is determined by the limits of a preexisting language, it becomes impossible to understand resistance and change as anything but accidental. Hence, and one can see why ethnomethodology might provide important and complementary tools for analysis.

Poststructural discourse analysis and ethnomethodology, each working at different levels of analysis, provide analytical resources for understanding race, class, and gender as activities or processes. Both are premised on epistemologies that regard language as a constitutive force that produces social realities, rather than as a transparent vehicle for communication. Broadly speaking, both ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis decenter the subject—that is, they conceptualize subjects as constituted, rather than as preexisting, stable entities. And, both deny an empirical epistemology in which the meaning of a cultural text simply has to be read, in order to be understood. Ethnomethodology exposes the practical reasoning subsumed in everyday practices, while poststructural discourse analysis reveals the cultural processes through which this reasoning is invented and subsumed. This book does not synthesize the fields of ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis but draws tools from each paradigm to produce a fuller understanding of local practices and cultural processes. It is the first book to draw from both ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis to analyze empirical data. And, as such, it demonstrates a potentially powerful means for understanding race, gender, and class in new ways.

Subsequent sections in this chapter introduce readers to a sociological understanding of commonsense knowledge as well as to a broad overview of epistemological divisions in scholarship regarding race, gender, and class. To orient readers to the underlying ethnomethodological and poststructural aspects of this book, I have included a final section that sketches critical aspects of each of the interpretative frameworks that inflect this analysis. In addition, I provide a brief explanation of why this particular analytical framework is useful, given the numbers of other existing ways to analyze language. This section also seeks to clarify potential confusions between this style of analysis and that of related fields. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book.

Commonsense: A Vernacular Morality

Commonsense knowledge is a saturation of cultural knowledge that we cannot fail to recognize and which, through its very obviousness, passes without notice. To the extent that notions of commonsense rest on shared cultural resources, they are able to pass unnoticed in interaction. For instance, a fifteenth-century manual on manners cautions: “It is unseemly to blow your nose in the tablecloth” (Elias 1978, cited in Pollner 1987). Such admonitions are no longer necessary, precisely because they have become a matter of commonsense. A hallmark of commonsense is the belief that the world exists precisely as it is seen; if someone could stand where I am, they would see things the same way as I do.⁴ Further, by excluding some topics from consideration, while making others appear obvious, commonsense prepares one to think about the world in particular ways (Handel 1982, 56).

The finite simplicity of commonsense presents the world as self-evident and familiar by reducing the availability of information that would present contradictions, ambiguities, or complications. To the commonsense view, the world appears to be finite and familiar—something that everyone can and should recognize (Geertz 1983). Since there is no motivation to investigate what you already know, “the ontological assumptions of commonsense protect it from scrutiny” (Handel 1982, 56). The knowledge of commonsense is not open to debate, persuasion, or compromise; it has no need of authorities because things simply are what they are.

What sets commonsense knowledge apart from other forms of knowledge is its extraordinary power to eclipse competing accounts of reality; and, in this way, commonsense knowledge functions as a forceful vernacular morality. The moral authority of commonsense lies in its ability to marginalize other ways of knowing more completely, precisely because it is taken by everyone to be beyond dispute (Miller 1993, 361). In contrast to other forms of knowledge, commonsense is more thoroughly naturalized.

Through commonsense we recognize who “looks” familiar—who belongs and who does not. Morality has long been a tool for recognizing “people like us,” and a basis for treating people “not like us” differently. ⁵ Commonsense functions as a vernacular morality through unreflexive daily practices that reinforce the value people place on their own lives and the lives of others (Schneider 1984; Spector 1987). As such, the sense of normalcy that underpins community is, in part, a product of commonsense knowledge.

Within sociology, the study of moral and ethical values developed along functionalist lines concerned with understanding social decay and social cohesion beginning with Durkheim and Weber and continuing through Parsons.⁶ The functionalist roots of morality made it a good fit for early studies of deviance, which developed in American sociology.⁷ By contrast, Frankfurt School theorists Horkheimer and Habermas developed a more radically critical analysis of the production of morality. For instance, Horkheimer (1933) argues that morality is a product of bourgeois society; moral values and education are needed precisely because “the common good” contradicts the immediate interests of most people.⁸ Habermas departed from the more characteristic Frankfurt School analyses to draw from Kohlberg’s psychological stages to argue that morality is not an imposition of alien standards on individuals but inheres in the structure of language—normative validity claims are dependent on a communicatively achieved consensus (Habermas 1993).

The premise of this book is that commonsense knowledge about race, class, and gender is both moral and ideological; it is always the hegemonic effect of power that masks the very relations domination that it articulates. Ideological hegemony operates in the assumptions that we make about life and the things we accept as natural.⁹ “‘Look, you can see for yourself how things are!’ ‘Let the facts speak for themselves’ is perhaps the arch-statement of ideology—the point being, precisely, that facts never ‘speak for themselves’ but are always made to speak by a network of discursive devices” (Zizek 1994, 11). Relations of power become naturalized through commonsense.¹⁰ This is precisely why it is important to examine the commonsense knowledge that allows us to believe that we simply see (or simply fail to see) the presence of gender, race, and class. The “difference” that commonsense leads one to recognize is not just the opposite of sameness; there are far more differences among people that pass unnoticed or without consequence. “Difference” is always a relationship—not a characteristic—shaped by histories of force, exploitation, and domination. These historical relationships are submerged beneath the apparently simple, commonsense recognitions of race, gender, and class.

To understand the production of commonsense knowledge in talk and representation, we do not need to know what is actually “true,”—what “really” is the case—we need only to know what is accountable as true (Handel 1982, 39). Consider, for instance, that in the United States, people commonly say “the sun rises,” “the sun travels across the sky,” and “the sun sets”—even though we know the sun does not move. In the sixteenth century Copernicus proved Ptolemy’s theory of the universe, developed in the second century, to be false. In the twenty-first century, our knowledge is Copernican—that is we know the earth rotates on its axis and the sun remains stationary—yet our language is still Ptolemaic. Almost five hundred years after Copernicus, people still talk as if the sun turns and the earth remains stationary.¹¹ Even astronomers talk about the sun rising and setting. It is not just that we have learned to see the sun move—very violent political, religious, and scientific struggles are submerged in what passes for commonsense in talk about sunrises and sunsets. Knowledge is always a series of struggles (Foucault 1994); language sustains the gaps between knowledge and perception. If we have yet to reconcile a Ptolemaic language with a Copernican reality, how might commonsense knowledge inform talk about, and representations of, race, gender, and class?

Race, Gender, and Class

Scholars have been writing about the social construction of race at least as far back as Frederick Douglas, Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois. The literature on race today is rich with cross currents. Racial formation theory (Omi and Winant 1994) offers a comprehensive analysis of the systematic and simultaneous production of the historical social, legal, political, and economic processes that produced racialized subjects in the United States. Many scholars (cf., Almaguer 1974, 1994; Fields 1983, 1990; Glenn 1985, 2002; Jones 1985; Lowe 1996; Roediger 1991, 1994; Saxton 1971, 1990; Wellman 1993) have elaborated on the historical construction of race during a variety of periods. In addition, critical race theory (cf., Crenshaw 1991, 1995; Delgado 1982, 1995, 1998; Lopez 1996, Matsuda 1989, 1993) provides important insights into both racialization and hate speech through analyses of court rulings. Other scholars analyze the social construction of race and related inequalities (cf., Carby 1987, 1997; Collins 1993; Davis 1983; Gilroy 1993, 2000; Kelley 1994; Lubiano 1992, 1997a, b). Additionally, a field of critical white studies turned the analytical lens from systems of oppression to material analyses of privilege (cf., Blee 1991; Frankenberg 1993, 1997a, b; Ignatiev 1995; Lipsitz 1998; Lopez 1996; Perry 2004; Roediger 1991, 1994, 2002).

It would be fair to say that although each analytical approach is different, historical, legal, and social constructionist analyses share an epistemological continuity that is grounded in the materiality of lived experience. More recently, the epistemological presumption that we can know the world through our lived experience has been troubled by poststructural analyses which critique the “evidence of experience” by arguing that all experience is itself already an interpretation (Scott 1988, 1991). Poststructural analyses refocus understandings of race as an effect of discursive processes, cultural texts, and constitutive performances (cf., Appiah 1985; Chabram-Dernersesian 1997; Dei 2004; Denzin 2001; Fregoso and Chabram 1994; Hall 1993, 1997a, b, c, d, e; Johnson 2003; Kincheloe 1998; Wright 2004). The analytical aim of poststructural discourse analyses is to interrogate cultural knowledge that regulates identity and subjectivity (see Hall 1997c, 6).

Much has been written about the various ways that race is socially produced—yet by and large, people still believe they can see race just by looking. Some scholars argue that we need to eliminate race from the public imagination (cf., Gilroy 2000) while others argue that “whiteness” must be more visibly, and differently, inserted into public notions of race (cf., Lipsitz 1998; Omi and Winant 1994). This book contributes to academic debates about race by locating and deconstructing cultural assumptions in daily practices that make race both apparently self-evident and inherently meaningful.

The commonsensical presence of gender, like that of race, seems at times impervious to new knowledge. Stoller (1968) is often credited with making the distinction between gender, as culturally constructed masculinity/femininity, and sex, as a biological attribute. This distinction forms an enduring legacy that underpins analytically rich fields of materialist feminist analyses (cf., Aptheker 1982, 1989; Bordo 1993, 1999; Ferree 1996; Moraga 1983), standpoint feminism (cf., Hartsock 1987; Collins 1993), and postcolonial feminisms (cf., McClintock 1995; Mohanty 1985). More recently, the notions of gender, which once shaped the women’s liberation movement and feminist scholarship, have become troubled. The de-centering effects of postmodernity challenge distinctions between sex and gender through critiques of the “naturalness” of sex and sexuality (Fuss 1989, 1991; Sedgwick 1990) and more broadly challenge notions of reified gendered subjects through theories of performativity (Bell 1999; Butler 1990, 1993, 1995, 1997b; Minh-ha 1989, 1997). However, despite this rich intellectual ground of research and debate, to a commonsense view, gender still appears to be simply the nature of persons.

Further, at a time of unprecedented gaps between rich and poor, the presence and meaning of class in daily life is arguably more vague than at any other time in history. Historically, scholars examined class formation by focusing on the ownersh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Routine Matters: Racialization in Everyday Life
• Chapter 3 All the Right Stuff: Gender and Sexuality
• Chapter 4 Class: A Representational Economy
• Chapter 5 Moving Forward
• Appendix A: Interviewees
• Appendix B: Collection of Newspaper Articles
• Endnotes
• References
• Index