A hierarchy is "a system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority." In our society's hierarchical system, groups of people are ranked - socially located - one above the other according to a number of factors that give them higher status and/or authority.
The simplest way to see the hierarchy is to look at the US distribution of wealth:
(These are 2001 statistics from United for a Fair Economy. The concentration of wealth has since increased).
1% OWN 33% = 99% OWN 67%
5% OWN 58% = 95% OWN 42%
10% OWN 70% = 90% OWN 30%
50% OWN 97% = 50% OWN 3%
This is clearly a hierarchical distribution of wealth, with a few people at the top owning most of the wealth. This hierarchy has existed throughout our country's history. Our society's institutional and systemic power is organized to support this hierarchical distribution of wealth - otherwise, it would not exist.
Our country was founded as a democracy - "a system of government by the whole population." Democracy was created as a reaction against - and an alternative to - the hierarchical societies that have existed throughout history. The United States holds itself up as the first and best example of democracy.
The democratic ideals we claim are supposed to be an antidote to hierarchy. Yet here we are. So - how did we get here?
Until democracy came along, hierarchical societies were simply a given - it was all people had known. Those were the good old days of openly hierarchical societies. Those on top had all kinds of perverse explanations for why they were meant to be at the top of the hierarchy - but they were openly on top of a structure everyone could "see."
Their democratic descendants have a more difficult role to play. They too offer perverse justifications for being on top - but they have to do this while also pretending they are not actually on top of a purposeful hierarchical structure.
The people who built this country built a hierarchy while denying they were building a hierarchy while explaining and justifying the existence of the hierarchy they knew would be seen in spite of their denials. It all gets very confusing. Democracy required the Power Structure building the hierarchy to hide the hierarchy behind a Curtain of Popular Deceit, deceit that creates confusion and division among the populace and makes the hierarchy hard to "see."
The Progressive Myth described in the first post on this site is a local example of a piece of this Curtain of Popular Deceit. I want to look more closely at the dynamics within the White Community - my community - in this social arrangement.
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An American "White Community" doesn't exist in the traditional sense. White people largely separated along economic class lines many generations ago. There is a little social interaction and a lot of civic interaction between the White Upper and White Middle classes. Neither interacts much with the White Lower class - except when someone in the White Lower class provides a service of some kind - and those interactions tend to be a bit awkward.
But White people of all classes are bound together by the significance of Whiteness in our society. White people created and institutionalized the deeply held Myth of White Superiority. Mythical White Superiority does not stand on its own. In this country, it is always tied to the Myth of Black Inferiority. These are the two sides of the most genuine American coin - two sides of the original piece of the Curtain of Popular Deceit. So in this perverse sense, there is a White Community.
The White Community Upper, Middle and Lower classes play distinct roles in the Curtain of Popular Deceit, in maintaining the hierarchy. "My people" - my ancestors, my family and friends - are from the Upper and Middle classes. My people financially benefit from the role we play in maintaining the hierarchy, as evidenced by our social location in the hierarchy. The White Lower class plays their role just as dutifully - yet, they receive relatively few financial rewards.
White people in the middle and upper tiers of our society's hierarchy are largely uncomfortable with discussions of race outside their immediate circles. While the word Nigger is still used, that crude characterization of Black as less than human is more often avoided than accepted in these tiers. Most just prefer not to think or talk about race - and most have structured their lives so that the issue rarely interrupts their day to day world. When race does interrupt their routine, most have been socialized in the aspects of civilities William Chafe described as "generosity toward those less fortunate than oneself... " and the paternalism that accompanies this view. While this view is just as grounded in the White Superiority - Black Inferiority Myth as is Nigger, they don't really think about that. If confronted with this reality, they are usually offended and they deeply resist understanding it.
White Upper and Middle class people tend to publicly insist that race is not relevant anymore. Yes, unfair things happened in the past but the past is the past. Look at Tiger and Oprah and Condaleeza - and now Obama. Look at the Black middle class. Let's move on. They use their control of the instruments of public dialogue - the media and the civic infrastructure - to frame issues from this perspective.
At the same time they send very different messages to the White people in the lower tiers of the hierarchy. One of the most open examples is the Republican Party's Southern Strategy. The party that openly promotes the interests of the people at the very top of the hierarchy built a decades-long national majority with a Southern Strategy that targeted Lower Class White people with this message: elite White liberals, motivated by White guilt, are using the government to help (inherently inferior) Black people play the victim to gain economic advantages over you. While the Republican national majority is now falling apart, the immigration issue has breathed new life into the "us against them" message that the Power Structure has cultivated in the White lower tiers of the hierarchy since Reconstruction. The Democratic Party - a purveyor of the Progressive Myth - has no relationship with Lower Class White people and is so entangled in its own ineffective paternalistic approach to race, poverty, education and related issues that that this message remains relevant and effective.
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The Myth of White Superiority - Black Inferiority is deeply rooted in our society and in all of the people raised in this society. But this Myth is not as simple as Black and White - we have to understand the complexity of the Myth. Heeding the White insistence that the racial past is past and no longer relevant will only ensure the Myth's continuation. The only way to end the Myth is to face it. Citizens, all of whom are victims of the Myth in one way or the other, must come together to together to deconstruct the Myth and understand what it is doing to us all.
Consider this passage from a letter written by a White Southerner in the late 19th Century:
"Shortly after the little cargo that the (slave ship) Wanderer brought were scattered around, I saw some of them at work in a large garden in Columbus, Ga., and was told that they were docile and quickly learned to dig and to hoe but that it was hard to teach them to eat cooked meat. They wanted it raw and bloody. They were miserable little runts, "Guinea negroes," with thick lips and flat noses; but they grew up into better shape and made good servants and I know were far better off than in their native jungles, the prey of stronger tribes and made food for cannibals."
The writer was my great, great, great grandfather. This was not a personal family letter. It was published in the Atlanta Constitution, in papers throughout the South and as far north as Iowa.
Charles Henry Smith was a Georgia lawyer, mayor, state senator and civil war officer - a prominent member of the Power Structure - who wrote under the name Bill Arp. He took his name from a real person named Bill Arp - an uneducated White Lower class acquaintance of Smith's. Bill Arp became one of the most widely read newspaper columnists in the South during the Reconstruction era.
The excerpt above is an example of the White Southern mainstream's portrayal of Black people - a portrayal that continued well into this century - as less than human, animal like, and naturally blood thirsty. The mythical portrayal of Blacks must always be understood in relation to Whites - in this case, Whites could tame the beasts and put them to good use in their service. Arp also paternalistically explained how this was actually in the beasts' best interest.
In the decades after slavery ended, Whites sometimes resorted to acts of terrorism to maintain the social order. Public lynching was the favored terrorist act. Bill Arp used his popular forum to occasionally cheer on the terrorists, justifying the terror with another important aspect of the Myth that still lives, the Black man's animalistic sexual threat to White women. Here are two chilling excerpts from Arp columns, "I would lynch every brute who assaulted a white woman. I could see him massacred or burned or hanged, drawn and quartered.” And, “as for lynching, I repeat what I have said before, ‘Let the good work go on. Lynch ‘em! Hang ‘em! Shoot ‘em! Burn ‘em!’”
Arp's writing about the relationship between White people at the top of hierarchy and those in the lower tiers provide important insight into those relationships today. Charles Henry Smith appropriated Bill Arp's name with Arp's happy consent. Smith often wrote in an exaggerated version of the of the uneducated White Southerners' dialect - the "cracker dialect" - with a wink to Bill Arp and his White Lower class peers, as a way of mocking Northerners and the Northerner view that all White Southerners were ignorant fools. A hundred years later, those "blue collar" comedians on Comedy Central are making careers of playing on the modern version of this theme - Poor White People As Ignorant Fools - with a wink to those being mocked.
This Poor White People As Ignorant Fools theme is one of the most confusing and important pieces of the Myth of White Superiority - Black Inferiority - one we really need to get a handle on. I am going to further explore Arp's views on White class relationships in the next post.
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