Hegemony: Welfare, Police, Protests
Sociological Meanderings Towards Collective Well-Being
Lull’s opening statement — that “hegemony is the power or dominance that one social group holds over others” is clearly pertinent to the world as it is in the 21st Century, in the 2020s: the past few years as have been shaped by police brutality, protests, the covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the January 6th insurrection (to name but a few). As has been pointed out by many a scholar — Keeanga-Yaamahta Taylor, from Princeton, among them — people of color’s over-representation among those most impacted by COVID is a direct result of the wealth inequities of racism that have placed people of color among the essential workers (members of the proletariat) and thus having faced the daily risk of exposure (which continues to this day).
In our “dependency relationships” (Scott) we now know that we wouldn’t be able to eat without those who do food labor — from farm workers to grocery store stockers. And, as Lui points out, food workers (some of the “proletariat” among us) are disempowered, while food corporations (the owners of which are the “bourgeoisie”) are empowered. And, more complexly, white food workers have wealth privilege while their co-workers of color are disempowered through lower wages and poor working conditions (Lui).
But Lull’s opening paragraph concludes with this: “hegemony is more than social power itself; it is a method for gaining and maintaining power” (61).
So, then, hegemony is about how systemic power is socially constructed — because it is not, in fact, a naturally occurring phenomenon — and about how systemic power is maintained over time. Or, in other words, hegemony is about how we come to accept the conditions of inequality, and how we come to participate in the maintenance of the conditions of inequality.
It is here that culture enters the picture. We are socialized into a language, into values and beliefs, and into rituals, that (with or without our awareness) function to maintain these inequities. For example, in the United States, we value “hard work” and we speak in ways that regularly evoke this value. We use this language to justify wealth (“they worked for it, they deserve it!”) and we use this language to justify poverty (“if only they’d work harder, they’d have a better life!”). This language is also racialized: I’ve heard many of my white friends and family members use the language of the “hard-working immigrant,” which is usually coded in reference to their Mexican neighbors, as well as the “welfare cheat,” which is usually coded in reference to African American women.
Check out this short video clip on the myth of the “welfare queen”:
These are “single stories” that “dehumanize” (Adichie). If you’re wondering how they dehumanize, it’s because worth isn’t granted based on existence, but instead on some abstract notion of “hard work.” What I’m illustrating here is that my white friends and family members are using a hegemonic language — are using culture — to justify inequality without even realizing that that’s what they’re doing. Their intentions are (most often) good; the consequences of their language, and their actions “maintain dominance and power” (Lull).
Hegemony is often invisible in this way. It’s not obvious like violence; it’s insidious.
Hegemony is the “single story” that Adichie refers to: pervasive in popular culture (books, the news, social media) and dangerous. Dehumanizing. As she describes it, it’s insidious. “If you start the story with the arrow of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British with their guns, then you have a very different story” (Adichie). Starting with the arrow of the Native Americans frames the British as defending themselves. Starting with the arrival of the British — which is the historically accurate starting point — makes clear the looting and genocide that the British instigated.
In the context of George Floyd’s murder and the protests during the summer of 2020: If you start the conversation with the “illegal” acts of the Black man murdered by the police, and not with the centuries-long practice of the police murdering Black men, then you are using a language that justifies the systemic racism, a language that blames-the-victim, rather than a language that challenges the patterns, consequences, and brutality of systemic racism.
Breonna Taylor was killed in her own home because her Black male partner looked like a “suspect.” To tell this as a whole story, and not a single story, means that the story started with slavery, which then became the story of lynching during the Jim Crow era, and is now the story of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs (Alexander, 2010). But to be clear, it’s not a story in the sense that it’s not fictional. This is the factual story of American history.
I listened to a podcast recently, and about 20 minutes in, there’s this profound moment of pause. Sociologist Matthew Desmond stated this fact: “So at the height of slavery, the combined value of all enslaved people was more than that of all the railroads and all the factories of the nation combined.” Then, long pause. Both the interviewer and the interviewee experienced a momentary loss of words, while that fact sat in the air.
How is this about hegemony, you wonder? Because the language of white racial superiority was used to justify the brutal, dehumanizing system of slavery — we didn’t just institutionalize a race-based system of slavery, we built up a culture of white racial superiority to justify it. It was argued that my white ancestors deserved their wealth, when in reality, it was given to them, and taken away from Native Americans, Africans, and Indigenous Mexicans.
This language — this insidious, covert language — is central to how hegemony functions. It’s how we can be good people, who through the socialization process, come to believe and act in ways that maintain inequality. It’s how we come to believe that people on welfare are “cheating the system” and/or “lazy,” rather than people who need help because they are farm workers or waitresses who aren’t paid a minimum wage, because these classes are exempt from minimum wage laws (Lui). And as sociologists Meghan Burke (2019) and Jill Quadagno (1994) point out, our language and beliefs around welfare, in particular the myth of the “welfare queen,” make clear “how deeply racism has impacted changes in the welfare system [1996 Welfare Reform, in particular]” (Burke, p. 10). Our unwillingness to pay taxes (for food, for education, for health care) is hegemonic — it is a belief that no matter our intention, results in the unequal distribution of resources, such that people who have sufficient money and employment can purchase homes and health care, while people without are left to wade through the stigmatization of welfare and/or be sent into “dangerous dependencies” (Scott). And in this latter state, from a lack of health care to the stress of poverty and racism, people are more at risk from both COVID and police brutality: hence the anger, frustration, and protests that come from the “proletariat” being the “revolutionary class” (Marx).
The antidote to hegemony is a “sociological imagination” that engages in critical thinking to explore both the cultures and structures that maintain inequality. And more than that, the antidote is reflected in Collins’ call for developing a “sociological imagination” infused with empathy. The antidote is in Mills’ call to use our biography — our agency, our privilege, our hope, our ability to act — to shape history in the direction of equality. Our attitudes and our actions matter, because they shape policy, and policy reaches everyone. As Scott makes clear, social policy is at the root of the harm that people cause. So, Welfare Policy shapes the actions of the people working in the welfare office, just as Criminal Justice Policy shapes the actions of the people working at the police stations. So when we act/change, we act/change to shape both attitudes (biography) and policy (history); or, ourselves and society.
Michelle Alexander — a prominent scholar known for her work with criminal justice reform — wrote this in the New York Times:
With that, I will say, as always, please take care of yourselves and each other.
Be well,
Dr. Monica Edwards
First written: June 8, 2020
Edited: October 4, 2022
