Inheritance and Hegemony Topic Proposal.

Inheritance and Hegemony

-How the American Workforce is structured by who you know not what you know

I am working on Inheritance and Hegemony because I want to find out how labor is allocated in the DC/Baltimore Metropolitan area in order to help my reader better understand their place within the American workforce.

In a George Lipsitz comments in his article How Racism takes place that 80-90 percent of jobs in America are not announced in any forum. Obviously this means that 80-90 percent of workers in America have their current position because they have an in, a relationship that allowed them to cut the proverbial jobs line and garner employment. What makes this investigation so important is that the American people have lived under the veil of the “meritocracy” concept for far too long. How can people traverse the workforce if they are constantly being acculturated with false ideal of how labor is dueled out in American society? As far as my personal interest in this topic it stems simply form the fact that every job I have had so far in my short life has come from a contact or connection not applying and interviewing.

Historically inheritance in the labor force has just been accepted as the status quo, sons took over for their fathers, if you father was a businessman, you were a businessman, if your father was a fisherman, you were a fisherman. After the industrial revolution and urbanization this line became blurred. Ideals arose, like meritocracy, where the poor started to believe they could go from rags to riches, especially in America. My focus will be looking at current hiring practices, most likely no older than a decade, so 2000-2010. Further I will be looking exclusively in the DC/Baltimore metropolitan area and expect to look at data for both private and public sector labor.

American Studies is an interdisciplinary field, it is important then to look at both subjective and objective data when researching. I want to look at objective data on the division of labor, who is getting what jobs, what do the numbers say, etc. I also want to attempt to find some subjective data, data from interviews or anything that can reveal how real people in America feel about labor. I want to know if people think there a glass ceilings that their class, race, gender, etc. create that keep them down or on the other hand that allow them to succeed.

Tom's Question: Inheritance and Hegemony

I am working on Inheritance and Hegemony because I want to find out how labor is allocated in the DC/Baltimore Metropolitan area in order to help my reader better understand their place within the American workforce.

Article Analysis 2 - Racial Formations

    In Racial Formations the authors Michael Omi & Howard Winant discuss the historical perspectives on race, specifically the idea that race has been considered an issue of biologics and this objective view has been used as the justification for different treatment of different races, predominately the subjugation of non-whites to whites.  Omi and Winant propose that this objective view has to change, that there is no hard science to back up the concept of race, that race is entirely a social concept. They suggest that race must be, in that light, viewed as a personal and subjective reality that each individual contextualizes in herself or himself. That when the individual is able to make a choice about their identity we will be able to view and “understand race as an unstable and “decentered” complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle” (Omi & Winant 15).
    Omi and Winant examine race from a historical American experience, first examining a Susie Guillory Phillips attempt to change her official racial distinction, she was unsuccessful. Omi and Winant pointing out that this lack of success was due to the fact society, at the time, viewed race as objective truth, stone and unchanging, and they point to the one drop rule, that until Loving v. Virginia (1967) you were considered Black or African American if you had one-thirty-second “Negro Blood,” an amount that is clearly biologically insignificant.
    The analysis moves to a look at European first contact with natives of the Americas; that Europeans originally were conflicted as to if Native-Americans were even human beings, religiously whether they even had redeemable souls. As interactions continued with natives prominent European thinkers such as Linnaeus with Systema Naturae, a concept which classified organisms on a hierarchy, looked at race, in the same respect, as a characteristic with natural hierarchical qualities and abilities to distinguish people of color as less advanced. Omi and Winant saw this as creating the ability for Whites to view social constructs such as slavery as being justifiable because people of color were lesser, were subservient and subordinate to whites, naturally, as part of natures law.
    Omi and Winant refute these biological ideas as problematic, each individual has an individual genetic makeup based on differences that supersede race and make race a poor if not null determiner in someone’s attributes. They talk of prominent sociologists Max Weber and Franz Boas, Boas who is attributed with the refutation of the biological concept of race. Omi and Winant say traditional American culture viewed “[a]ny racial intermixture mak[ing] one “nonwhite” (Omi and Winant 11). They say that if race is viewed in the proper social context it should be seen in what they call Racial Formation; racial formation being the term that denotes race in society as “the process by which social economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings” (Omi and Winant 12).
    Using the racial formation formula, then, allows members of American society to determine, prejudge a person and their characteristics by simply determining what race they are attributed. And while, of course, this racial ideology has been problematic as Omi and Winant point out citing the Ku Klux Klan and the position of subordinate races as underclass and dependent on their white superiors; Omi and Winant also see that if people of color subjectively make the distinction of what race they are and they then have the power to have a deterministic role in deciding their identity, racial formation can be a functional social construct. And this is seen as Omi and Winant conclusion or their goal, that race is seen as ever changing and determined not by an objective truth, but the subjective identity of each individual.
    Omi and Winant main method or strategy for determining the social focus that underlies race as opposed to the old world view of race as biology comes predominately from historical examination. An examination that allowed them to create their concept of “Racial Formation.” Tracing ideas of race from colonial times to present day American culture Omi and Winant have effectively shown not only how our ideas of race have changed, but also how they formed and reformed in the first place. Their historical analysis allows the reader to realize race is not the solid, objective concept that many preconceive it to be, that race is ever shifting, ever changing and only in this light can it effectively function in society.
    In many ways I agree with Omi and Winant that viewing race objectively, he is black, she is white, only serves to disadvantaged and demean individuals who themselves have their own subjective identity, an identity that is often distinct and unique from how society perceives them. The only thing that I find problematic is that any time a concept is discussed, race for instance, it is given meaning and codified and thusly the more a concept is delved into the more meaning it is given. In some ways this kind of analysis only gives more credence to those who would distinguish individuals into groups and this case groups based on race further disintegrating human individuality.
    I suppose the obvious question is how do we define race, is it subjective, objective, is it instead an archaic term that inherently subjugates and oppresses those considered non-white, non-dominant?

Article Analysis 1 - Hegemony

            T. J. Jackson Lears’ discussion on Hegemony focuses on the concept that the complexity of language and symbols is employed to manipulate the many into following the norms dissented by the elite few.  Lears emphasizes the work of Antonio Gramsci, who Lears accredits the original conceptualization of Cultural Hegemony. Lears remarks, “The available vocabulary helps mark the boundaries of permissible discourse, discourages the clarification of social alternatives and makes it difficult for the dispossessed to locate the source of their unease, let alone remedy it” (569-570). Essentially Lears is proposing that the everyday language and everyday discourse is already set by the elites and that essentially stops the disenfranchised from changing social norms, even if they feel marred by them, because their everyday language lacks the ability for them to contextualize their tribulations. Lears extends this concept saying Gramsci model for the lower class to rise up was what he called counter-hegemony. Counter-hegemony being the process where the disenfranchised change the way they use language and conceptualization and shift cultural norms away from the elite, but, of course, the problem inherit with this possibility is the lack of available language for the marginalized to employ in their counter-hegemonical revolution.

            Lears summarizes saying that they are many methods to study society, but more often than not they ignore the Human Voice, a key part of society from Lears’ perspective. And Lears believes this is why Gramsci’s method is most relevant for historians, Lears says, “Gramsci recognized that the ground of all culture is the spontaneous philosophy absorbed and shaped by each individual” (593). Hegemony employs the concrete methods used by other, but does not leave the individual behind.

            Lears speaks of a plethora of methods that have been attempted when analyzing society. He speaks of functionalism, symbolic interactionism and cultural anthropology, describing these methods as inferior to Gramsci’s Hegemony. Lears comments that Hegemony allows one to analyze systematic features without reducing society to a single system. Further, that, Hegemony is superior to Geertz’s symbolist approach, which reduces symbols into a “cultural system,” because symbols understood in a hegemonic sense realizes that symbols give more power to some groups than others and thus create not a functional system, but dysfunctional conflict, that symbols like language is another method for elitist control. Ultimately Lears sees the flexibility of Gramsci’s Hegemony as the most effective method because it allows for the most versatile analysis.

            Lears pulls most of his information for this article from translations of Gramsci’s writings, which Lears comments are not many when compared with the complete works of Gramsci. This possible means there is more to be understood from Gramsci with a better grasp of his works. Lears also pulls from different historians and specifically from those individuals whose work employs the semiotic approach such as Hayden White. Lears seemingly sees promise in using symbols to discern the ebb and flow of society and essentially that is Lears point that prominent symbols in society tend to favor the dominant elite and force the weak into following them.

            Hegemony does seemingly seem to be an effective method for describing the way society works. Gone is the time when a king can compel his citizens to do what he pleases. Controlling symbols and language is a more effective and invisible method for keeping the subordinate in their place and maintaining the supremacy of the powerful. The only criticism of Lears piece is that he seems to dismiss functionalism, cultural anthropology and semiotics as by themselves flawed and incorrect, but in many ways Hegemony is a piecemeal approach to those entire concept intertwined into an overarching theory, which supposes they are all correct, but are only parts of a whole.

            If hegemony is the prevalent method for societal control it would be interesting to examine, what in our everyday lives do we see as hegemonic language and symbology that is steering our thoughts and ideas?