Walking Towards Accountability — Challenging Institutionalized Patriarchal White Supremacy
Sociological Meanderings Towards Collective Well-Being
Let’s talk about two words that are central to sociological analysis: they start with the letter “I” and yet the more we learn about them sociologically the more we are pushed toward a more equitable “we.”
INSTITUTIONALIZED & INTERSECTIONALITY
One goal of late for this class has been to explore how patriarchal white supremacy is built into social institutions: the workplace, the family, and education. We’ve done this also with an intersectional focus, exploring how white men and women’s experience diverges from that of men and women of color. In this process, we’ve uncovered a few institutionalized patterns:
- A lack of institutionalized accountability shapes the perpetuation of patriarchal white supremacy.
- White women use white supremacy to get what patriarchy denies them.
We will come back to the issue of accountability; here I will start with the latter point.
One aspect of patriarchy that we’ve learned through writers such as Rebecca Solnit and Sara Ahmed is that sexual harassment in public space is one of the harmful indignities that women must negotiate while living in a male dominant society. At the same time, when we think about power as intersectional, we can see how “white women’s toxic tears” and “learned helplessness” are a way for white women to “gain power” (Hatmaker). While white women — and I’m included in this as a white woman — must negotiate this daily public harassment, we are nonetheless protected by patriarchy in a way that women and men of color are not (Dill 1999). We are the “damsel in distress” that the policing system is set up to protect (Hatmaker).
This dynamic is what led to bell hooks’ insights about her experiences in graduate school (as compared to her white classmates). She wrote that, “tolerating the humiliations and degradations we were subjected to in graduate school did not radically call into question their integrity, their sense of self worth.” …White students were not living daily in a world outside campus life where they also had to resist degradation, humiliation” (hooks p. 58–59). Indignities build up, they compile, in one lifetime and across generations. To be clear, white women are disempowered in patriarchy, through sexual harassment (as highlighted by McLaughlin’s research) and especially through care work. This is why women (in general) experienced such significant burdens and burnout during COVID when schools closed — because a presumed homemaker is built into the structure of education — significantly shifting daily negotiations around work and family life (Collins et al).
But life is complex, and power shifts across social contexts, and intersectionality highlights this complexity and these shifts.
Let’s go back to Sara Ahmed’s argument: “stranger danger is an effective as well as affective script: some bodies become dangerous, others endangered” (p. 24). We must understand this from an institutional perspective — institutions protect those deemed endangered (white women) and harm those deemed dangerous (men and women of color). At the micro level of daily life — when speaking of actual bodies in actual danger, that’s when we see the inequity: those perceived as endangered experience less of a threat to their bodies, their lives. When we “do gender” (West and Zimmerman), when we carry our bodies out into the world, we also experience the institutionalized process of “determining gender” (Westbrook and Schilt). And “determining gender,” as highlighted by Garnette Cadagon, is a life and death negotiation:
Here we can see that while (white) women are socialized to fear “stranger danger,” this socially constructed fear is relational, and puts men of color at significant daily risk of harm (police brutality). Rebecca Solnit — a white woman — also speaks of the potential harms of walking in the world, though for the most part those who threaten her and others like her (me!) are not sanctioned to do so by the state. This is a clear example of institutionalized and intersectional power dynamics.
James Baldwin wrote often about how power (white supremacy, patriarchy) corrupts our humanity. When white women call the police on people of color doing daily things — birdwatching, getting a Frappuccino, walking for the pleasure of walking — or when white (women) teachers deny students of color extensions or punish their lateness, as hooks’ describes; which is to say, when we use white supremacy to gain what patriarchy denies us (power), we are really, in the language of Baldwin, denying the humanity of people of color and exposing our flagging morality.
This is why institutionalized accountability matters. This is why the protests of the summer of 2020, and the ongoing social activism of BLM, demands repercussions for police brutality. The “fag discourse” that C.J. Pascoe outlines is concerning not just because of its impact on the humanity of the boys who are most harmed by such a discourse, but also because of the teachers and administrators who bear witness but do not disrupt.
Social change, then, requires that we are willing to be disruptors. We must find a path to accountability, to morality, and to shared humanity. This is why scholars, activists and politicians alike explore issues like reparations and restorative justice.
As Ani DiFranco writes in her song Not A Pretty Girl, “…what if there are no damsels in distress, what if I knew that, and I called your bluff?”
Take good care of yourselves and each other.
Dr. Monica
