spoilation

ALL RED FEATHER MATERIALS ARE ALWAYS FREE TO STUDENTS AND TO THOSE WHO TEACH THEM....T R Young

Managing Spoiled Identities


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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES

by

T. R. Young
The Red Feather Institute

Mini-Lecture 96-02: Strategies in the Management of Spoiled Identities.

Dedicated to Stanley Saxton who tried, all his life, to teach tolerance, love
and grace to hundreds and hundreds of students around the country.

Stan Saxton died on 5 April, 1999.  Those of us who loved him will miss him.
He leaves his wise and good wife, Jenny and three lovely daughters.


  1. In the previous lecture on Identity Wars, I suggested some of the social sources of racism, ethnic 'cleansing,' sexism, anti-gay as well as invective directed at those who oppose identity wars the later under the rubric of 'political correctness.'

    In this mini-lecture, I would like to follow up by suggesting some social movements and personal tactics by which people respond to racism, sexism, ethnocentricism and bigotry in general.

    The point of this lecture is, of course, to help create emancipatory knowledge...especially for the children who are hurt so badly by racist terms and for, as well, parents of all kinds and colors who do their best for their natural and adopted children  but have to struggle against the racism build into so many social structures and into so many Ethnic majorities. 

  2. The Spoilation of Social Identities. My neighbor, Ken T., is a world class neighbor: I travel a lot, I need a lot of advice and often help in gardening and managing a couple wood-lots and I need to know what's going on in the neighborhood...Ken is most helpful

    But, in an easy and untroubled way, Ken injects racist, sexist and bigoted terms in his everyday speech...'tother day, talking about the coming fate of O.J. Simpson, Ken surprized my by alluding to a Jewish conspiracy which would, after the present civil suit brought by the Brown and Goldman family, Ken surmised that this alleged conspiracy would see to the assassination of O.J.; I was astounded...Why is that? Because Goldman is a 'jew-boy' and they watch after their own. This from an otherwise sensible and solid citizen...a college graduate [UMinn] and a fine, fine neighbor.

  3. Theory. Your generation is, I think, less bigoted than mine...in my generation, racism, sexism and national chauvinism is part and parcel of our socialization. In school, politics, media and too many other wise fine religious sensibilities, part of the strategy of getting and keeping social honor and social status depends upon the systemmatic degradation of the 'other.' In my generation, terms like wop, kike, mick, polack, nigger, coon, bohunk, jap, chink, as well as a whole inventory of body parts with which to refer to to women were unmediated by hint of moral outrage.

    Many, many people, labeled by such pejorative ethnic terms, have had a lot of trouble in everyday life.

    The most general theoretical point I can make is that pejorative labels subvert the symbolic interactional process.  Those who are defined as wop, polack, mick, nigger or chink do not have the same status in the interactional process by which the forms of social reality are created in everyday life.

    In particular, key assumptions in symbolic interactional theory are rendered invalid by such appellations.  Chief among them is the assumption about mind, self and society being twinborn; when such terms are used, there is an epistemological and existential break between mind and the particular social identity thus so badly used.   Afro-Americans do not think of themselves as 'niggers.'  Italian-Americans do not think of themselves as 'wops.' German-Americans do not think of themselves as 'huns' or 'krauts.'  And Asia-Americans certainly do not think of themselves as 'Chinks,' 'Slopes' or  'Japs.'  And women most certainly do not accept the terms used in male solidarities which reduce them to body parts.

    Symbols thus to not call forth the same meanings in two parties in interaction when one is a racist and the other a minority group member as a de-politicized symbolic interaction theory would have it.

    Nor is the Looking Glass Process or the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy realized.   The kind of social reality created by this most cruel interaction is at best a mere fragment of social reality and the status-roles, values, norms and responses produced by racist and sexist language do not take the shape of those lovely smooth curves so much desired by those who quantify, analyze, summarize and generalize.

    The greatest damage in racist and sexist societies in which those terms are used with particular force with easy sanctions against those who rebel and resist...the greatest damage done is to the Self-System.  The inventory of social identities in the self system of the racist is distorted since the high status self-conferred by racist epithet do not carry over to status honor in other realms of social life...the racist buys a short and ugly self esteem among peers but not among out-groups; not within formal organizations oriented to skill, experience and productivity; not within religious organizations fully committed to sister- and brotherhood.

    And the self-system of children subjected to such ugly interaction is also greatly damaged.  Socialization is subverted; the presentation of self in every day life is distorted; the ability to be self-directed and self-renewing is undermined.

    Verbal abuse yields more than just negative status for the racist; it creates great problems in social peace and social control...the promise of a good and peaceable society is the final victim of racist obloquy.

  1. The Assimilation of minority groups. The use of pejorative tactics to define and to elevate one group over another works well in agrarian, feudal, slave and tribal societies. To its credit, such tactics do not work well in capitalist systems...considerations of profit and cost tend to eradicate historic preferences in both labor market and commodity market...if women, Hispanics, afro-Americans, or Asians work more cheaply, are more vulnerable to exploitative labor practices or have the resources to buy commodities, then the capitalist tends to shift both jobs and adverts to that group.
  2.   This shift in labor market and commodity market took place in an irreversible process during and immediately after WWII...women were hired in the millions to staff the assembly lines during WWII. Blacks were hired in the hundreds of thousands to work the mines, mills, factories and farms as young angle males went into the service.
  3.   Emancipatory Strategies in the Management of Spoiled Identities.
  1. After the war, a great many women went back to unpaid domestic labor...a lot did not. Many went into 'women's' work or to college or into their own business...these women, with income not mediated by father, husband, brother or other male, formed the social base for a new women's movement which aimed to end the use of invidious social psychological tactics as a way to define and celebrate male social identities. In earlier movements, most women were still handicapped by dependence upon a male and upon male control of church, state, family, economy and courts. This new movement had tactical advantages, forged in part by earlier movements and in part by their own success in school, law, economy and media.
  2. After WWII, a great many afro-Americans were pushed out of factories, mills, mines and shops...by laws giving preference in hiring to service men...those who survived. Yet a great many afro-Americans stayed in the industrial cities and formed the social base for the great social movements against racist practices. In 1954, after a course in community organizing at the Highlander Institute in Tenn., Rosa Parks refused to give up a seat to a white male and the Civil Rights Movement was born... as a strategy in the management of a spoiled identity.
  3. Gay and Lesbian social movements also formed social movements to repair the harm done to presenting identities they valued. In the 60's, 70's and 80's, blacks, women and gay/lesbians faced hostile police, hostile courts, hostile media and hostile opinion.

    Yet their economic, political and, increasingly moral power made it possible for the social base to withstand direct violence and private repressions. With economic power, political power came. Laws were changed and the courts ruled against both overt police violence and private discrimination. As women took more and more positions in the various media and became a larger and larger part of academic life, these bastions of identity spoilation were lost to males, racists, bigots and chauvinists of many stripes.

    With liberals, marxists, feminists and gays in Hollywood, cinema began, in the 50's, to project a different image of minorities. Those of you who have seen the Woody Allen flick, The Front, will have seen some of that history...Sidney Poitier, recently honored at the White House for his portrayal of strong black males, was a first in a long string of such portrayals...Television too, a most important tool in the cultural wars, was lost to the arsenal of those who used ideas and images to win social honor and social standing at the expense of other groups.

    The Churches remained a strong-hold for both male and racial preference as well as hostile presentation of gay/lesbian identities. But a wide variety of liberation theologies were emerging out of these social movements which may, in future, further remove the clergy from direct spoilation of social identities.

    The Black Muslim movement deserves special mention here. In the 60's, it became a very important instrument for the management of spoiled identities...spoiled black male identities, that is. In the Black Muslim movement, men could/must walk with pride and speak with dignity. Black Muslim neighborhoods became places of peace and safety comparable to those of the Hutterites and Amish in terms of social honor and respect.

  1. Other Strategies. In the long hard history of identity management, there have been a wide variety of both pro-social as well as pretheoretical responses to the various crises in identity presentments.

    Sometimes people form Parallel Social Institutions. In the 60's there were parallel schools, businesses, bars, sports, banks, and domestic arrangements as well as churches for blacks, women, gays and other excluded minorities.

    Sometimes people go underground and form the same social lifeworlds. When courts, police, politicians and social opinion do not permit parallel institutions, people do go underground and form, as Goffman put it, a rich underlife.

    If people cannot form parallel institutions and if underground institutions are untenable, migration serves as a tactic in the management of spoiled identities...indeed, the Puritans, Pilgrims Quakers, Shakers, Amish, and a dozen other forbidden social identities moved to the Americas in order to found more accomodating social life worlds. The Garvey Movement of the 20's can be understood as a tactic in the identity wars of the USA.

    Social movements, parallel structures, underground structures and migrations are the more theoretically sound strategies to manage spoiled identities.

  2. Pre-theoretical Responses to Spoiled Identities.

    A great many forms of behavior are not helpful to the management of spoiled identities for a number of reasons...which shall be clear as we go along.

    1. Hate crimes. Hate crimes vary from graffiti on walls in graveyards to murder, arson and assault. They are pre-theoretical in that they do not change the social conditions which produce identity wars and they often escalate in unpredictable ways...then too, one puts one=self into immediate jeopardy in the more democratic societies in which they occur...police and the courts do not always look with favor upon hate crimes in these days.
    2. Riots and uprisings. In the 60's and into the 70's there were hundreds of riots and uprising in US ghettos...Watts is a case in point...most of the homes and some of the businesses destroyed were not the homes and businesses of the 'class enemy' but rather those of one's own friends and neighbors.
    3. Teenage pregnancy...for young women in the underclass, discarded by schools, ignored by the state, surplus to the labor market and to a kinship system already stressed by social processes out of their remedy...becoming a Mother offers a valued social identity...valued that is, for most of history and for most of those mothers who have the resources with which to rear children. Teenagers in Sweden, France and England are sexually active at an earlier age and are more active than are teenagers in the USA. Becoming a mother is not a solution to identity problems in Europe; it is in the USA....there are other factors in the production of surplus mothers and surplus children [surplus to our society; not of course, surplus to the human project]. Access to sexual education, access to birth control resources, employability of fathers, as well as access to educational opportunity generally factor in as key variables in accounting for rates of teenage pregnancy. More about this in another lecture based upon some most interesting work by Patti Hamilton and her team at Texas Woman's University.
    4. Drugs and Alcohol. For most of human history, drugs and alcohol have been used as solidarity supplies and as pathways to the holy. In the identity wars at hand, they are used to dull the pain of spoiled identities. For a few dollars, one can buy surcease from such ugly social politics; one can feel, think and act with confidence, with elan, and with spontaneity...for a few hours or minutes. Drugs are most helpful to those who want to opt out of the identity wars for a while. They are not a long term solution.

You can think of a great many more ways in which people respond to the despoilation of mind, self and social identity. The basic framework here, I think is helpful to that task. Good luck in your own private wars.

Next week, before I go to Texas to see my all-time favorite grad students, I will give you a mini-lecture on how to find the Yellow Brick Road to Success in American Sociology...in response to a couple posts I have had recently from grad students who find it difficult to fit into the grad departments in which they find themselves.

Take good care, TR