Poverty, Racism, and Sexism

The Reality of Oppression in America

Christopher B. Doob

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000382082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica sociale

Exploring the structural causes and consequences of inequalities based on a person's race, class, and gender, Poverty, Racism and Sexism: The Reality of Oppression in America concentrates on this formidable set of disadvantages, demonstrating how Americans are adversely affected by just one or a combination of three social factors.

Grounded in sociological thought, the text highlights unfolding stories about major social inequalities and relentless campaigns for people's rights. Weaving together such concepts as individualism, social reproduction, social class, and intersectionality, the book provides a framework for readers to understand the vast injustices these groups encounter, where and why they originated, and why they continue to endure.

Poverty, Racism and Sexism is a compact, versatile volume which will prove an invaluable resource for those studying social inequality, social problems, social stratification, contemporary American society, social change, urban sociology, and poverty and inequality.

1

Living at Risk

Sociologist Alexis McCurn was starting a research project in Central East Oakland, a poor, largely Black city. One morning the bus in which she rode passed a small park, and McCurn saw women and men asleep on benches or on the grass and others talking while drinking from bottles in paper bags. As the bus proceeded along a thoroughfare, she noticed a number of Black women in their late twenties to mid-thirties, stationing themselves on this busy street with at least a block separating them. These were likely to be sex workers.

Not long after McCurn had started her ride, a Black man, probably in his late thirties, approached where she was sitting and slid into the seat behind her. Grasping the safety bar on the top of her seat, the man leaned forward and in a low voice asked, “How much do you charge for an hour?” Quickly McCurn turned around and said, “That’s not my business.” The man, however, was not convinced and indicated that he would “make it worth … [her] while.” Fed up, McCurn replied loudly, “I am not a prostitute.” The man was irritated. He said, “You don’t have to get loud with me” (McCurn 2017, 52).

McCurn concluded that because she was a fairly young Black woman who found herself in a poor area where prostitution was prevalent, the man felt confident that she was a sex worker. In McCurn’s study this was one of her first encounters with the local people, and she soon concluded that it was fairly typical of the assaults on their self-image that young Black women living in poor urban communities often suffer (McCurn 2017, 52–53).

Such assaults are known as microaggressions—disrespectful behavior, whether intended or not, that indicates the person initiating the action considers the other individual an inferior (Krivkovich et al. 2018). Clearly the microaggressions involved the three central issues featured in this work. To begin, the residents were all poor, living in a city “that has long struggled with drug activity, poverty, and violence” (McCurn 2017, 52).

Racism and sexism also played prominent roles. McCurn noted that in Central East Oakland, Black men encountered “a routinely denied mainstream masculine status.” To compensate for this denial, they frequently sought to dominate Black women, inflicting verbal and physical sexual harassment and even assault while struggling to build a satisfactory sense of male identity. Living in a disadvantaged community containing many poor Black men, young Black women could often find themselves “targets of sexually predatory male behavior.” Furthermore, McCurn noted, extensive mass-media representations of Black women have “reinforce[d] the widespread internalized view of them as subordinate and worthy of oppression and assault” (McCurn 2017, 54).

Like the women featured in McCurn’s research, the people discussed in the upcoming chapters frequently must endure a variety of painful, debilitating conditions. Sometimes the situation involves one disadvantaged status they possess, and sometimes as in the McCurn study more than one. Certain fundamental ideas discussed in the upcoming section will generally guide the discussion.

A Conceptual Framework for Analyzing At-Risk Groups

A risk is the probability of an unwanted outcome involving exposure to loss or injury. In this work what one might consider the most obviously powerful groups—the wealthy, whites, and men—have created risks for historically oppressed groups—the poor, racial minorities, and women. However, risks result from additional sources, including self-destructive behavior. People take risks frequently—driving without a seat belt, drinking too much, forsaking dietary restrictions a doctor advocated, and so forth (Clearwatch Security 2020; Protection Circle 2017). “Disadvantaged” can serve as an alternative designation for the three at-risk categories of people represented in this work.

The original researchers examining risks were epidemiologists, who dealt with the incidence, location, and control of diseases. A risk factor is an element in a situation that increases the probability of a certain outcome, usually an unpleasant one such as a disease or some other negative condition (Creavey et al. 2018, 483–84; Offord and Kraemer 2000). While extensive attention to risk factors focuses on susceptibility to diseases, the conditions exacerbating psychological, economic, political, and social problems the members of the three categories of people featured in this book suffer can also be risk factors.

The pervasive risks poor individuals, racial minorities, and women face bring to mind conflict theory, which is a perspective contending that the struggle for wealth, power, and prestige in society should be the central concern of sociology. It certainly is a central concern throughout this book. The young Black women living in the poor area that McCurn described are almost certain to suffer the adverse effects of that struggle.

Conflict theory has benefited from Karl Marx’s insightful, economically grounded analysis, which originated in the nineteenth century but continues to provide insight into the workings of modern society. Within the capitalist system, Marx focused on two social classes, which differ in their relationship to the means of production—the factories, farms, and businesses where goods and services are developed and dispersed. The bourgeoisie is the class with ownership of the various means of production. That ownership provides wide-ranging power and control over business activity as well as other major sectors of society. The proletariat comprises the workers who do not own the means of production. They must labor for wages because they have no other source of income (Marx and Engels 1959, 4).

Marx described capitalism as a brutal system, driven by the bourgeoisie’s unrelenting pressure for ever-expanding profits. The value of a product is largely based on the monetary worth of a worker’s labor. However, Marx emphasized, workers only receive a small, subsistence portion of the value of their labor. Marx strongly condemned the capitalist system when he wrote, “The bourgeoisie … has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudalities that bound man to … [others in the work world] and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’” (Marx and Engels 2005, 43).

Marx observed that to keep control of capitalism, the bourgeoisie has powerful tools available. One is ideology, which involves the complex of values and beliefs that support a society’s social-stratification systems and their distribution of wealth, income, and power (Cole 2019; Doob 2019, 34). Clearly support for capitalism has been a major contributor to American ideology.

In his well-known The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, sociologist Max Weber commented on how religion seemed to promote Americans’ commitment to capitalism. He noted that the early Puritan settlers believed in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, which stated that before birth God selected people either for salvation or damnation. While individuals could not influence that outcome, they could get an indication which it would be by examining the evidence. In actuality, Weber emphasized, Calvinism “gave … groups of religiously inclined people a positive incentive to asceticism” (Weber 1958, 121)—specifically, a powerful reason to work hard, to save, and to invest what they had saved to become wealthy and manifest the certainty that they were heading toward salvation. Eventually the doctrine of predestination no longer held sway, but the practical measures promoting capitalist activity involving working hard and seeking wealth remained highly influential throughout the society (Weber 1958).

While widespread support for capitalist activity persists, it appears that a unified American ideology is problematic, with survey data suggesting that party membership provides a clear indication of a split in shared values and beliefs. For example, a nationally representative sample of American residents 18 and older found that Democrats and Democratic leaners are almost twice as likely as their Republican counterparts to say that the country has too much inequality—78 percent vs. 41 percent—and an even greater disparity between the two parties’ supporters exists on whether or not the government should make the reduction of economic inequality a priority, with 61 percent of Democrats and just 20 percent of Republicans agreeing with that course of action (Horowitz et al. 2020).

Another influential concept used in this work has its groundwork in Marxist theory and its unrelenting criticism of capitalism (Bhattacharya and Ferguson 2018). Social reproduction is the process by which people belonging to certain categories, such as social classes, have differing access to the valuable resources that influence the transmission of inequality from one generation to the next (Bourdieu 1977; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). Research on the topic has tended to reach a distinct conclusion—which, according to sociologist Jay MacLeod, “attempts to show how and why the United States can be depicted more accurately as the place where ‘the rich get richer and the poor stay poor’ than as ‘the land of opportunity’” (MacLeod 2009, 7–8). Historically, however, “the land of opportunity” idea has received extensive support.

In the late nineteenth century, Horatio Alger, Jr. wrote over 100 stories about poor boys who moved to a big city and through hard work, perseverance, and good fortune eventually became wealthy---“rags to riches” was the theme (Encyclopedia Britannica 2020). It was a popular idea, embraced by many Americans for decades. On the other hand, as MacLeod suggested, the concept of social reproduction takes an opposing position, emphasizing the persistent sources supporting social inequality that remain prominent and influential in the society.

Some of the benefits associated with social reproduction are obvious, such as a family’s economic status, which permits parents in the more affluent social classes to obtain the various goods and services that can support their children’s success in school and elsewhere while the poor and others in lower-income classes cannot afford to do so and as a result have less access to those benefits.

During the social-reproduction process, children in more affluent classes receive additional, less obvious advantages. For instance, compared to their poor counterparts, middle-class parents are more inclined to provide a planned socialization experience for their children—to use extensive dialogue to give them knowledge and support that both supplies useful information leading to a successful life and encourages them to be confident and self-content and, in addition, increases the likelihood that as parents themselves the children will transmit that same advantages to their offspring (Talbot 2015).

All in all, one might consider that the concept of social reproduction suggests that life resembles a competitive race without a conventional common starting point for all participants; instead they are strewn out at the start, with the family into which they are born determining the location they receive.

Photo 1.1 While the material advantages parents in more affluent social classes can transmit to their children are significant, they are also more likely than the poor to provide their offspri...