Part I:The Social Construction Of Difference: Race, Class, Gender & Sexuality (continued)

1. PART I:
The Social Construction
Of Difference:
Race, Class, Gender &
Sexuality
Continued…

2. RACIAL FORMATION
• The Myth of Race
• Social construct of race since the birth of the U.S.
• White European descendants viewed themselves as an
innately superior in intelligence and ability (5)
• Dred Scott case – imported slaves and their descendants
were members of a lesser race

3. RACIAL FORMATION
• Social construct of race since the birth of the U.S.
• White European descendants viewed themselves as an
innately superior in intelligence and ability
• Dred Scott case – imported slaves and their descendants
were members of a lesser race

4. RACIAL FORMATION
• Act of land ownership an indication of superior
intelligence and character
• Class status and land ownership used to exclude African
Americans and poor whites from voting

5. RACIAL FORMATION
• Race - The Census Bureau defines race as a person’s self-
identification with one or more social groups
• White, Black or African American, Asian, American
Indian and Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Other
Pacific Islander, or some other race. Survey respondents
may report multiple races
• U.S. Census Bureau

6. RACIAL FORMATION
• Ethnicity determines whether a person is of Hispanic
origin or not
• Hispanic or Latino and Not Hispanic or Latino
• Hispanics may report as any race
• U.S. Census Bureau

7. RACIAL FORMATION
• Hispanic: a Spanish-speaking person living in the U.S.
• Does include persons from Spain
• Latino: person of Latin American origin, including
Caribbean (anything south of border)
• Does include Brazil, but not Spain
• Spanish: the language Hispanics speak
• Spaniard: a person born in Spain

8. RACIAL FORMATION
• Ethnicity refers to shared cultural practices,
perspectives, and distinctions that set apart one group
of people from another = ethnicity is a shared cultural
heritage
• The most common characteristics: ancestry, a sense of
history, language, religion, and forms of dress

9. RACIAL FORMATION
• Racial Identity: a sense of group or collective identity based on
the person’s perception that he or she shares a common heritage
with a particular racial group
• What are some reasons why a person would identify with a
race versus another?
• Rachel Dolezal

10. RACIAL FORMATION
• Racism. An ideology or belief system that hierarchically
organizes groups into different “races,” such that some groups
are believed to be superior or inferior to others; and a system of
inequality made up of policies and practices in which opportunity
is enabled or limited based on racial identity.

11. CREATING WHITE PRIVILEGE
• White Privilege. The benefits, advantages, and opportunities
available to people who are identified as white; these privileges
can be economic, cultural, social, psychological, etc.
• How White Privilege works

12. CREATING WHITE PRIVILEGE
• In what ways does White Privilege manifests itself today?
• The Privilege Test

13. CREATING WHITE PRIVILEGE
• Redlining. Real estate related practice that puts services, financial and
otherwise, out of reach for residents of certain areas based on race or
ethnicity.
• It normally includes the systematic denial of mortgages, insurance, loans and
other financial services based on location (and that geography area’s history)
rather than an individual's qualifications and creditworthiness. Redlining is
most palpable in minority neighborhoods.
• The Disturbing History of the Suburbs

14. MASCULINITY AS HOMOPHOBIA: FEAR, SHAME, AND
SILENCE IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER IDENTITY
• Kimmel frames the entire essay by questioning the assumption that masculinity is
stable and unchanging. He uses the inclusive “we” to emphasize the
pervasiveness of this assumption.
• Gender is constructed and redefined over time and through various social
interactions.
• The many meanings of gender depend on the historical moment and specific
circumstances in which it is being constructed.
• Kimmel says that situating gender construction in a historical context challenges
the more static understanding of gender

15. MASCULINITY AS HOMOPHOBIA: FEAR, SHAME, AND
SILENCE IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER IDENTITY
• The Genteel Patriarch derived his identity from landownership
• Heroic Artisan embodied the physical strength and republican virtue of the
yeoman farmer, independent urban craftsman, or shopkeeper.
• The Marketplace Man (or Manhood) derived his identity entirely from his success
in the capitalist marketplace as he accumulated wealth, power, and status.

16. TRANSGENDER FEMINISM
• According to Susan Stryker, transgender feminism can help us see how gender
operates as part of an apparatus of social control (“transgender stigma”):
• Stryker argues that gendered social control operates beyond how “women’s bodies”
are regulated (e.g., reproductive control).
• She says that when a person transgresses gender expectations, they face the threat of
losing their gender status, of being questioned about whether they are really a
woman.
• She asks us, why is it a “put-down to call some lesbians mannish”? And why does a
working class woman doing certain kinds of physical labor or a middle class
professional woman achieving a certain level of accomplishment call their femininity
into question?

17. TRANSGENDER FEMINISM
• Issues linked to being transgender according to Stryker:
• Stryker gives examples from her own life: She experiences misogyny (to the extent she
appears as a woman) and homophobia (to the extent she appears as a man).
• She is subject to the social stigma attached to being officially diagnosed as mentally ill
(through the classification of gender identity disorder (what is now called gender
dysmorphia).
• She experiences the insecurity of lacking proper documents due to difficulty of and
cost of changing identification documents that reflect her gender identity.
• She encounters discrimination in housing and the workplace because of her identity.
• And she has been the victim of hate crimes.

18. DEBUNKING THE PATHOLOGY OF POVERTY
• In his infamous 1965 report Daniel Patrick Moynihan argues that African American
family values were responsible for persistent high rates of poverty and violence.
• Poverty rates rise during recessions, go down during economic recoveries, and federal
antipoverty programs enacted in the 1960s played a role in reducing poverty rates in
later recessions.
• According to Greenbaum, it is not the actions of poor parents but our societal
condoning of economic exploitation at all levels of the economy (and the actors that
have most impact are those with wealth and power) that cause recessions—this is
cultural.
• For example, employers choosing not to pay their workers for overtime is a cultural
choice.
• Another example: The 2008 recession led to 3.6 million lost jobs and up to 4 million
home foreclosures, but the people behind the Wall Street collapse have not been
punished, and in fact, have been “perversely rewarded”[through bail outs, for example].

19. DISABILITY AND JUSTIFICATION OF INEQUALITY IN
AMERICAN HISTORY
• Categories historians and scholars most studied in their efforts to understand the
justifications for inequality in the United States:
• Gender, race, and ethnicity
• Baynton notes that the concept of disability has been used to “justify discrimination against
other groups by attributing disability to them:
• Women’s suffrage, African American freedom and civil rights, and the restriction of
immigration.
• Down syndrome was called “Mongolism” because the syndrome was believed to be the
result of a biological reversion by Caucasians to the Mongol racial type.
• Two of the justifications for slavery that were based on disability arguments:

20. DISABILITY AND JUSTIFICATION OF INEQUALITY IN
AMERICAN HISTORY
• African Americans were considered by white Americans to lack sufficient intelligence to
participate or compete with white Americans; African Americans were thought to be prone to
becoming disabled under conditions of freedom and equality due to their “inherent physical and
mental weakness.”
• Disability arguments used to oppose women’s suffrage in the nineteenth century:
• Opponents of women’s suffrage pointed to the “physical, intellectual, and psychological flaws of
women, their frailty, irrationality, and emotional excess.”
• Laws on immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used disability as a
rationale for exclusion
• There was widespread support for U.S. laws that denied access to migrants on the grounds that
it was positive for society to exclude “imbeciles,” “feeble-minded persons,” and the “deaf, dumb,
blind, idiotic, insane, pauper, or criminal.”

21. DOMINATION AND SUBORDINATION
• Temporary Inequality. Parties briefly not at an equal
standing. The lesser party is socially defined as unequal.
• Ex. Parent and child, teacher and student, counselor and client
• “Superior” serves in a mentor-like capacity to the “Lesser” person
• “Superior” expected to impart wisdom based on their life experience,
emotional maturity, physical skills, knowledge, etc.
• The “Lesser” is helped along and served by “Superior”
• Relationship works towards an end

22. DOMINATION AND SUBORDINATION
• Permanent Inequality. The lesser party is defined by birth.
• Criteria may be race, sex, class, nationality, religion, or another category
• Superiors do not necessarily present to help the Lessers.
• No assumption that the purpose of the relationship is to end the inequality
• Superiors seen as the Dominants; Lessers as the Subordinate