EDITOR’S NOTE: Ervin Matthew is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Cincinnati who specializes in issues around race, class and gender, social inequality and education. CityBeat is running his guest editorial in response to the heightened debate over the role of Black Lives Matter in criminal justice reform efforts.
Some are put off by #BlackLivesMatter because they see it as exclusionary and feel devalued.
This perception isn’t accurate, but the irony is that such invisibility is what the movement is answering.
“Black lives matter” isn’t saying that black lives should matter more than others; it means that the criminal justice system treats black lives as less valuable and shouldn’t.
The Declaration of Independence holds that “all men are created equal,” yet society took a long time before acknowledging that this included blacks.
That we still have a good bit of distance between our expressed ideal and empirical reality, we hold this truth, also, to be self-evident.
This claim may be jarring for people who feel that they are being blamed for the ills of society. They fear that others view them as social problems.
However, this is misguided, because all group inequality is structural. Statuses are privileged or subordinated, not individuals; people merely wear the benefits or demerits of their combinations of statuses.
Step back from race for a moment and turn toward an axis of inequality most people rarely think about: handedness. Most of society is righthanded, some people are lefthanded, some are ambidextrous and some are cross-dominant. Yet, our default assumptions favor righties.
Long ago, people thought lefties were children of the devil and acted accordingly.
By and large, we no longer think such nonsense today. Ideas changed, but look around society and notice that the structure remains. It’s even still an insult to offer the left hand to shake when greeting someone.
Most are not only unaware of the origin of this bias, but don’t notice the bias at all — unless they are one of the few who aren’t righthanded.
I step into many classrooms and see that all desks are made for righties except for one row. People notice that row is for lefties, but rarely consciously realize that all others aren’t.
This is society in a microcosm — the rationale for institutional design may or may not still be championed, but the structure remains.
It isn’t that righties are privileged, so much as that righthandedness is. This is not self-selected, but righthanded people benefit without noticing it.
We can tell lefties to learn to do things righthanded and then they’d be equal at once, but the folly of such an idea is obvious.
Similarly, white privilege refers to status, not individuals. It is social-structural whiteness that is privileged, sometimes even to the detriment of whites.
Lefties aren’t blaming righties if they walk into my class and lament the lack of appropriate seating options for them; students didn’t place the desks or set the layout for the classroom, which was done well before they ever set foot in that class and maybe even before they were born, if the classroom is old enough and the furniture is bolted into place.
Similarly, white individuals aren’t being blamed for inheriting structure.
The protest that they didn’t choose their race is true, so it is misguided to blame or feel blamed by the revelation that social-structural whiteness is privileged.
Yes, there are points when being a minority is an advantage, same as there are times when being a lefty helps (e.g. when competing in some sports).
This isn’t typically true privilege for the subordinated, though; it’s a case of default assumptions of privilege harming the superordinated.
Statuses have assumptions and expectations. Structural treatment is based on those assumptions, not on individual characteristics.
Some enthusiastically embrace these assumptions, others reject them and some are unaware of them.
The same holds true for status privilege.
Indeed, it’s hard to disavow privilege even if one wants to. Default assumptions mean that the structure has to change, not just people. If we want to know about the privileging of status (rather than individuals), be status-favored and try to disavow it.
The backlash is often HUGE.
All of this means that subordination doesn’t require intent. In fact, apathy often works just as well.
This doesn’t mean that attitudes don’t matter. They do, but to effect systemic change, they need to be applied to alter the social structure itself.
Culture and structure live in a feedback loop: structure codifies culture, and culture justifies existing structure.
We must act with intent if we want the society we idealize. This requires courage, especially for those with privileged status. For them, the backlash is partly a claim that this “isn’t your fight” and partly a warning to other privileged people not to take it on, either.
(For an infamous example, think of white Freedom Riders who were attacked or killed alongside black colleagues for working to enable voting rights for blacks in the 1960s.)
Fear of systemic backlash often keeps many people from working to make things right, but a better society for all lives on the other side of that fear.
As we consider the implication of #BlackLivesMatter and other calls for social justice, ask ourselves on which dimensions we are privileged and what the assumptions of those statuses are; do the same for our subordinated statuses.
Ask ourselves why we accept for ourselves and others the dictates of a structure we didn’t create if we don’t cherish them.
Then, let’s act with intent and courage from whatever social locations our statuses offer us — not to battle each other, but to create the society we idealize.
CONTACT ERVIN MATTHEW: [email protected]
