From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond

Cultural Images and the Shaping of US Social Policy

K. Sue Jewell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415042536
• eBook ISBN: 9781134951895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How do the mass media contribute to the social and economic advantages of the privileged and the subjection of African American women? Does America really care about providing equal opportunities for African American women? Passionately written and supported with detailed evidence this book shows the deeply rooted abiding cancer of oppresion in American society. It reveals the formal and informal ways in which African American women have been exluded from equal participation before and after the time of slavery. It will shock many who complacently believe that America is already a land on equality and it will give new heart to the many others who experience racism and sexism as daily facts of life.

1

The Status of African American Women

The Role of Ideology and Mythology

The purpose of this book is to examine factors that contribute to the social, political, economic, legal and educational disenfranchisement of African American women. Specific attention is focused on the structures and dynamics in the United States that result in African American women remaining on the periphery of mainstream society. Specifically, I examine how the privileged class uses images and ideology to maintain its social power and economic wealth, while consigning African American women to a depressed socioeconomic status. I argue that those who have a monopoly on power and wealth use the mass media and societal institutions to ensure their privileged status through the maintenance of various systems of domination (i.e. race, sex and class inequality).

Many have attempted to explain the marginality of African American women, and other groups such as African American men, Native Americans, Chicanos and poor Whites, by examining social dislocations such as poverty, unemployment, school dropout rates, out-of-wedlock pregnancy and so forth. Explanatory models that explicate the exclusion of African American women and members of their community using these factors and conditions tend to arrive at strategies for resolving such conditions that are highly ineffective. In addition, they lend themselves to social policies and programs that are incapable of significantly improving the level of participation of African American women, men and children in salient institutions in American society. One of the consequences of this approach is that it raises false hopes among African American women and other disenfranchised groups. Equally alarming is that failed social policies and programs are viewed by Whites as indicators that African American women and members of their community cannot succeed even with the help of government-funded programs and a national social policy designed to remedy past and ongoing injustices.

This approach to eradicating the societal ills that confront African American women, men and children is not without some merit. Certainly, those who believe that education, social policies and laws alone will make marked improvements in the socioeconomic status of African American women and their community base their convictions on the history of other racial and ethnic groups that they believe have achieved through these measures. Another more plausible explanation for subscribing to the premise that the acquisition of education, the formulation of social policies and the passage of laws, in our existing social system, will lead to the elevation of an entire disenfranchised group is because those in power establish that such a correlation exists. These measures tend to have a greater impact on individuals than on groups of individuals. Moreover, during and after the Civil Rights Movement, these initiatives had a greater impact on those African Americans who were already experiencing higher levels of participation in microcultural systems than on individuals who were outside these systems. African American women who had already begun to attend historically Black colleges benefited more from affirmative action, college grants and low-interest loans than African Americans who had little knowledge of, or participation in, such systems. Therefore, these efforts have had a differential impact on African Americans depending on their class and previous experience with accessing certain institutions either at the microcultural or macrocultural level.

It is doubtful that such initiatives alone will ever elevate African Americans as a group, because the problem that results in low levels of educational achievement, unemployment, poverty and a myriad of other problems also influences the nature of social policies and laws that are instituted. These policies, laws and practices are not designed to improve substantially the life chances of African American women and other members of their community. Rather, social policies, laws and societal institutions are intentionally designed to benefit the privileged class. Other groups who benefit from these policies do so because their race, gender and class result in their access to more societal resources. Perhaps the most common reason that individuals embrace these proposals, which focus almost exclusively on eradicating poverty, increasing levels of educational achievement and establishing social policies and laws, as necessary requisites for elevating the status of African American women and their community, is fear. This fear, which is generally suppressed, yet tends to temper activism and the strategies that activists propose to elevate the status of African American women and others, stems from the knowledge that if the real problem, that of controlling societal resources and maintaining systems of domination, is challenged, the solution becomes one of revolution rather than reform. In other words, when the goal is for African American women to achieve equality with White men in a capitalist society then another group must emerge as a replacement for African American women. Based on the prevailing ideology, there must always be groups who dominate and those who are dominated. It is believed that these elements are essential to maintain a system of competitive individualism. According to this belief – which is the foundation that supports capitalism – systems of domination breed competition, which serves as an incentive for production. Hence, should African American women achieve equality, they will be required to exploit, oppress and discriminate against another group of individuals. However, if the goal of African American women is to help construct a society where resources are allocated based on individual need and the contributions that individuals make toward creating and maintaining resources, then society must undergo monumental change. Thus, the goal for African American women, and others who seek equality for all people as well as an equitable allocation of resources, is one of societal transformation rather than reformation. The former requires eradicating stereotypes, dispelling myths and supplanting ideologies which serve as the basis for patriarchy and other systems of domination.

Many who pursue temporary and rudimentary approaches to improving the life chances of African American women and their communities do so understanding that those who have a monopoly on, and control of, power will use any means necessary to maintain their power advantage. These activists are willing to bargain and negotiate with the privileged for minor concessions, recognizing that efforts to improve significantly the life chances of African Americans will result in a major reallocation of societal resources; and a societal metamorphosis. Realistically, such an overhaul in the social system transcends the United States and the North American continent, as it is international in scope. Dismantling the political machine that places and sustains the nation’s power and wealth in the hands of a small number of individuals requires social revolution and not merely social reform. There are many who are honest, albeit naive, in believing that African American women and their community will reach parity with White males if they simply achieve a higher level of education or successfully complete job-training programs. These individuals, like the masses of Americans, are the victims of ideological hegemony in that they have been inculcated, with the effective aid of the mass media, with a belief in meritocracy. That is, the belief that an individual’s rewards are commensurate with her investment. However, an individual’s capacity to invest or produce is determined by certain ascribed qualities such as race, gender, family background and class, as well as achieved attributes like education and occupation. Further, those who accept this ideology ignore the fact that our social system is pre-established, with a reward structure that allocates resources based more on ascribed than achieved qualities. This line of reasoning also presupposes the fallacy that all White males are treated as equals, and includes a belief in fairness and equality. I do not accept the premise that African American women and their community will experience significant social, economic, political and educational opportunities simply by addressing symptoms of problems such as those already stated.

It is my belief that the problem confronting African American women and members of their community is the fact that a paucity of individuals in the United States have a monopoly on power and wealth.¹ Moreover, this privileged class, in constructing a system to maintain its power, has developed a belief system to explain the differential access and acquisition of various societal groups to resources and institutions in the United States. This belief system uses race, gender and class to explain achievement and why different groups of individuals have more or less access to wealth and power. In effect, race, ethnicity, gender and class are the primary factors that are used to explain differential access to societal resources. These same qualities have also become systems of division and domination which protect the interests of those who mediate societal resources and institutions.

Accordingly, Thompson states that, “ideology is more than a world view, value system or set of beliefs which members of a society hold in common and which thereby serves to guarantee or underwrite the cohesion of the social order. In the last analysis its most fundamental characteristic is that it serves to maintain relations of power and domination.”²

That is, an individual’s capacity to achieve, and thus to acquire, societal resources is largely determined by racial group membership, gender and social class status. Each of these factors has an ordinal rank, with related values. For example, being male is more highly valued than being female. Race is another factor that produces division among the masses, whereby the privileged assign a higher rank to those of European descent than to individuals of non-European descent. Variations in rank are highly delineated relative to ethnic background, race and class. The social scientist’s broad delineations of social class have become further divided and assigned values. Hence, the traditional three class divisions of lower, middle and upper have become further delineated into six categories, whereby each class has been further subdivided into three classes. For instance, the middle class contains the lower-middle class, the middle-middle class and the upper-middle class. Such a delineation, based on the Weberian model of defining class on the basis of life chances and values possessed by each class within the broader class, has questionable utility for scientific purposes.³ However, this stratification system and related typologies are quite useful to the privileged who employ these models to explain why certain individuals, depending on their race, ethnic background, gender and class, have greater access to societal resources and therefore occupy higher strata because they possess certain qualities (belief, values, abilities, etc.) that those in lower strata do not possess.

These typologies also serve to divide and factionalize the masses. Essentially, those who mediate societal institutions and monopolize society’s resources have developed and proliferated a belief system that supports the differential distribution of wealth and power in the United States. In effect, the privileged maintain their power and wealth by establishing a number of artificial factors and conditions that create dissension among the masses. They do so by constructing a social hierarchy of discrimination where individuals higher on the hierarchy, with whom they are more closely aligned, have relatively more access to societal resources and institutions than those who are placed lower on this hierarchy.⁴ The myths and stereotypes that constitute this belief system are developed by the privileged to ensure that those outside the privileged class do not recognize their commonality and direct their dissatisfaction and disillusionment to those who control society’s resources and institutions. Instead, because of these divisions, individuals with certain qualities, generally ascribed characteristics, are the functionaries who help to maintain systems of domination. These functionaries perceive themselves to be of greater worth than those who are positioned in what are defined as lower strata. Further, these functionaries, with attributes of race, gender and class which predetermine their self-worth, attempt to wield power and domination over those who possess qualities predefined as inferior. In so doing, they protect the power and wealth of the elite as well as their own relative power and material advantages.

The structures and functions that the privileged use to reinforce and perpetuate the social system, and that grant certain groups greater access to societal resources and institutions than others, require ongoing scrutiny and scientific investigation. It is this social order that places African American women at the very bottom of the social hierarchy of discrimination. In other words, who has a legitimate right to benefit from various societal resources? Although many questions are raised by the conceptualization of a social hierarchy of discrimination, one of the most crucial is: why are African American women located at the lowest rung of the hierarchy?

I believe that the determination of positioning on the social hierarchy of discrimination is based on how closely individuals approximate the race and gender of the privileged class. Some scholars suggest that the privileged class’s predilection for those who resemble them is based on their desire to propagate or clone themselves.⁵ According to this theory, the more a group of individuals resembles those in power the greater the likelihood that cloning can occur. Colloquially stated, like is attracted to like. Therefore, White males occupying different social classes are positioned below the highest class of White males, those who have a monopoly on power and wealth. Next, males of color are stratified according to ethnicity and skin color, with those of lighter complexion placed higher in this hierarchy than their darker-complexioned counterparts. This group is followed by White females, who share a common race with men of privilege. On the lowest level of the hierarchy are females of color who are also stratified. Like their male counterparts, ethnicity and skin color are determinants of positioning for this group. Clearly, African American women have the least common physical attributes in terms of race and gender, compared to White men who belong to the privileged class. There are, however, similarities between the privileged class’s perceptions of African American women and themsleves in terms of emotional make-up, such as assertiveness, decisiveness, independence and their task orientation, meaning their determination to accomplish goals. And it is on this basis that African American women challenge the authority and privilege of, and represent a threat to, those who occupy the highest position on this hierarchy, the privileged White male. C. Wright Mills argued that members of the power elite at the top of the hierarchy have similar backgrounds. He said that because of their common characteristics and experiences they tend to trust each other, that their trust for each other increases with ongoing interaction, and that their continued association cements what they believe they have in common. Mills also believed that the power elite which is at the “top of modern society is increasingly unified and often seems willfully coordinated.”⁶ It should be noted that those who control power and wealth can also become victims of discrimination. However, when this occurs the perpetrators are more likely to be individuals who share their victims’ power advantage, and not institutions.

The Myth of Meritocracy

Historically, little emphasis has been placed on the use of a schema such as this to differentiate relative degrees of power and wealth. Such sophisticated mechanisms of domination are not a necessity until a society reaches the stage of development where there is a growing disparity between the upper and middle classes and those who live in abject poverty. In effect, when a society reaches a level of economic development that requires the specialized labor of its workers, pseudo-social classes, such as the working class and middle class, emerge and expand. In a capitalist society differential incentives or rewards are provided to members of these different classes, determined by the privileged class’s valuation of their labor. The maintenance of such a social system is facilitated through the use of various systems of domination that include class stratification as well as other artificial divisions based on race and gender. It is also the case that force and the threat of force continue to be employed when necessary to bring about conformity and to maintain the social order. Prior to a society reaching this developmental stage, the privileged class relies more on the use of force and the threat of force to maintain its control over societal resources and to ensure conformity among the masses.

According to Gersh, it was not until the late nineteenth century, with rapid industrialization, that the disparity between the rapidly growing upper and middle classes and those experiencing dire poverty became enormous and visible.⁷ It was during this period that those who were benefiting immensely from an inequitable distribution of society’s resources, through the exploitation of the labor of the poverty class, realized that it was imperative to develop explanations for their wealth and the poverty of the masses. The poor claimed that they were being exploited. The wealthy proferred other explanations to counter claims by the country’s poor that their labor was being exploited. In effect, those who were garnering an inordinate amount of society’s resources argued that their material and monetary advantage was attributable to higher levels of intelligence and to virtues that were absent among the lower classes and non-European peoples, including African American women. Essentially, the privileged maintained that achievement, based on merit, was the basis for the fact that some individuals had greater access to, and acquisition of, societal resources than others. In addition to advancing this premise, the privileged provided financial support for the development of instruments such as standardized tests that, by design, validated this assumption.⁸ Asante, employing an Afrocentric conceptual model, argues that the idea of the inferiority of non-European people, particularly Africans, was a part of European thought as early as the seventeenth century.⁹

Ideological Hegemony: A Covert Method of Social Control

Gramsci’s notion that ideological hegemony, and not the traditional use of arms, is the preferred method by which developed societies maintain an unjust social order has a great deal of utility in the United States and in other Western nations.¹⁰ Gitlin discusses Gramsci’s explanation of hegemony in the following statement:

Hegemony is a ruling class’s (or alliance’s) domination of subordinate classes and groups through the elaboration and penetration of ideology (ideas and assumptions) into their common sense and everyday practice: it is the systematic (but not necessarily or even usually deliberate) engineering of mass consent to establish order. No hard and fast line can be drawn between the mechanisms of hegemony and the mechanisms of coercion, the hold of hegemony rests on elements of coercion, just as force or coercion over the dominated both presupposes and reinforces elements of hegemony. In any given society, hegemony and coercion are interwoven.¹¹

In effect it is through ideological hegemony that those in power control not only the means of production but also the production of ideas. Just as constructing tenable belief systems that enable those in power to rule with the consent of the masses is essential to maintaining an inequitable distribution of society’s resources, so proliferating these belief systems is critical as well. It is the primary responsibility of the mass media to assume this latter function. Therefore the media’s role in defining the entitlements of African American women and the privileged men who control society’s power and wealth, individuals at two polar extremes, is a major focus of this book.

I believe that the mass media, called “consciousness industries” by Becker, are used as an instrument by the privileged to define and legitimize entitlements, by proliferating certain belief systems, based largely on myths and stereotypes.¹² These entitlements refer to the rights of certain groups within society to have greater or lesser access to its resources and institutions. When the populace accept these beliefs about entitlements, they are ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Status of African American Women: The Role of Ideology and Mythology
• 2. The Social Significance of Cultural Imagery
• 3. Cultural Images as Symbols of African American Womanhood
• 4. Imagery of African American Womanhood: Underlying Conditions – Social and Economic Considerations
• 5. Cultural Imagery of African American Women and Empiricism
• 6. Gender-Oriented Social Policy: An Agenda for Improving the Status of African American Women
• 7. The US Legal System: Protecting the Rights of the Privileged
• 8. Determining Entitlements: The Exclusionary Nature of Cultural Imagery
• 9. A Microcultural Response: Alternatives to Macrocultural Institutional Support
• 10. Redefining Images of African American Womanhood and Reshaping Social Policy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index