Inscribed in Our Blood

The Sociocultural and Political Constructions of Race and Gender

Adopting a postmodern perspective, I previously wrote about the fluidity of identities and documented how the identities attributed to me shifted with time and context (Sewpaul, 2007). As Samuels and Ross-Sheriff (2008, p. 8) claimed, “our sets of assets and disadvantages and oppressions and privileges change as our contexts change.” Race, class, and gender are socially, culturally, and politically constructed categories, aimed at maintaining social hierarchies (Alcoff, 2002; Browne & Misra, 2003; Sewpaul, 2007) and power relations, so that some groups of persons remain privileged at the expense of others. Appiah (2001, p. 224) affirmed that race is a dangerous falsehood; however, “the problem … is that group identity seems to work only—or, at least, to work the best—when it is seen by its members as natural; as ‘real.’” The same applies to gender. Yuval-Davis (2006, p. 201) contended that, “gender should be understood not as a ‘real’ social difference between men and women, but as a mode of discourse [italics added] that relates to groups of subjects whose social roles are defined by their sexual/biological difference.” On the basis of biological manifestations, people have attached to them social descriptors and cultural extensions that have come to be widely accepted and naturalized.

A whole range of assumptions slips into our minds when we think or hear of individuals in certain categories, such as black, Indian, black male, Indian woman, white, and so on. Categorization has an instantaneous symbolism for those within and outside defined categories, and the material and substantive implications of categorization for people are immense, as absurd as the categories in themselves may be. Thus, the questioning of the use of social categories in redress policies (Maré, 2011) calls for an anticategorical approach (McCall, 2005). The anticategorical approach remains a utopian ideal, and considering current class discrepancies—still largely based on race and gender in South Africa—perhaps a pragmatic impossibility. Mehrotra (2010) contended that the anticategorical approach has been least used in social work, given “professional commitments to practice, lived lives, and material realities” (p. 424). Nevertheless, the anticategorical approach challenges us to think of the possibility of a world beyond categories. A pragmatic approach would use categories with reflectivity directed at an active deconstruction and reconstruction of the attributes and meanings attached to categories, as advocated by Hall (1985). The anticategorical approach does not cohere with intersectionality, in which social identities and privileges and/or disadvantages are inextricably linked to categories, as reflected in the next section.

Understanding Intersectionality

Intersectionality, defined as “the mutually constitutive relations among social identities” (Shields, 2008, p. 301), is aimed at “making sense of interlocking societal oppression experienced by subordinated groups” (Syed, 2010, p. 61). Adopting the lens of intersectionality enables us to examine the social divisions and power relations that affect people’s lives. As Mehrotra (2010, p. 418) noted, “One of the biggest challenges of studying intersectionality as a woman of color is the ways in which the intellectual work and personal experiences converge, … because of the complex ways in which it is lived in one’s own life.” This point has particular salience for me as a woman of Indian descent in South Africa, where my identity is often contested because I am neither white nor black—two of the prototypical group identifications in contemporary South Africa—white predominantly in terms of economic power and the predominant, universal marker of difference (Dyer, 2003; Giroux, 1997; Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008; Warner, 2008), and black in terms of political power, with a growing black elite (Bond, 2005). Dyer (2003, p. 23) wrote about whites being “placed as the norm, the ordinary, the standard … At the level of racial representation … whites are not of a certain race, they are just the human race.” However, as in the American context (Gallagher, 2003), whiteness in contemporary South Africa is perceived by some to be a social disadvantage on account of redress policies. Yet, whites hold most of the wealth and the majority of managerial and professional positions; whites dominate, with 73.1% in the top management positions in South Africa (Department of Labour, 2011).

Given the legacy bequeathed on South Africans by apartheid, the complexity of racial dynamics is such that with a relative disregard for the imperatives of intersectionality, there is a taken-for-granted assumption that all blacks are disadvantaged and all other designated racial groups are advantaged. Contrary to the reconciliatory vision espoused by Nelson Mandela in postapartheid South Africa, Mhone (2011) found in a local study that some participants “saw the fall of apartheid as the fall of white domination and the rise of black domination,” which according to one of them “meant removal of anything that represented white in his organization and reconstructing it to reflect African-ness” (p. 86). Given that South African blacks were relegated to the lowliest status under apartheid, one can understand the attitude of vengeance. However, replacing one form of racialized domination with another is not the solution to South Africa’s atrocious and painful past. It is contrary to the affirmation and protection of the constitutional rights of all South Africans. We need to move away from using race as the sole determinant in redress, an approach that has failed to make South Africa a more equal society. “Redress,” Maré (2011, p. 62) argued, “in its several necessary forms, cannot be constricted by a narrow focus on race” (italics in original). Maré further argued that “it was in exploring the interaction between ‘race’ and ‘class’ that understanding of apartheid lay, and in addressing that articulation that the process of social change would occur and a new ‘post’ apartheid democratic South Africa would come to be” (p. 69). Policy debates and social programs must be informed by an understanding of disadvantage and/or privilege in relation to the combination of race, class, and gender as key intersecting criteria in relation to other criteria, such as sexual orientation, disability, geographic location, language, and nationality.

Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach (2008) and Warner (2008, p. 457) used the concept of intersectional invisibility to describe the phenomenon by which individuals with intersecting subordinate identities are made invisible. As Warner explained, “Within a social category (e.g., race), those members that have more social power or status within that group tend to be perceived as prototypical for that social category … When individuals are non-prototypical in multiple social groups, … they are rendered intersectionally invisible. This invisibility leads to consequences such as misrepresentation, marginalization, and disempowerment.”

While Indian men in South Africa, for example, may occupy a subordinate identity in relation to white men, Indian women, in an androcentric society, are “marginalized members within marginalized groups [which] relegates them to a position of acute social invisibility” (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008, p. 381) as are black women, who, on account of historical and contemporary injustices and inequalities, are more subordinate than any other racial group. It is still the African black woman who remains at the bottom of the social stratification system and experiences the greatest onslaught of poverty and oppression. But since class and context do mitigate this subordination, we should not essentialize the experiences of all black women. Hill-Collins (2000) maintained that black women are uniquely situated in that they stand at the crossroad where two powerful systems of oppression come together—race and gender—as is discussed next.

The Power of Ideology, Racism, and Gender Role Stereotypes

I begin this section by reflecting a scenario that has left an indelible imprint on my mind.

My daughter is playing school with two of her cousins—a boy Serushan, aged 7, and his sister, Kerishia, aged 5. She is talking to them in a dull, monotonous tone of voice. I tell her: “Preshanthi, what are you doing? You are going to put the kids to sleep.” She replies: “What must I do; I am playing Mrs. X, and this is how she speaks.” “Play another teacher,” I say. “Like who?” she asks. In jest, I say: “Play Professor [name withheld].” Serushan instantaneously responds: “How? Preshanthi is a girl; she can’t be a professor.”

Although this scenario may seem trivial, it reflects a complex web of sociopsychological, cultural, and structural factors. That by age 7, a boy has imbibed a world of women’s presumed inferiority simply by being of this world is an indictment of the various structures of society in which gender–role stereotypes are reproduced on a daily basis. The ideologies that we hold are reflected in, and reinforced by, activities in the home and school, cultural norms and practices, religion, politics, and the media. Our thinking, in turn, shapes social policies and social structures, reflecting a circular and dialectical relationship between structure and agency. Serushan was not explicitly informed that women are inferior. He learned that this is just how the world is. In discussing the power of ideology, Althusser (1971) claimed that ideology has no history; it is eternal. However, as I discuss later, Althusser’s view is overdeterministic and denies the place of human agency. Since ideology is socially, culturally, and politically constructed, if people are provided with alternative learning experiences, whether formal or informal, they have the ability to disrupt dominant thinking. Sometimes a single word, phrase, or observation can constitute an epiphany that makes us question and alter the ideas and values that we have grown up with.

Although gender roles have been changing over time, the largely entrenched stereotypes of men and of women remain. Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach (2008, p. 389) asserted that the power of androcentricism ensures that “men define the prototypical person in most domains.” Once during a radio talk show in which the debate was whether or not South Africa was ready to have a woman as its next president, a man called in and, with a great deal of conviction, said that he believed that a woman could never hold such a position. If this man had the benefit of reflective dialogue and reflective thinking, he might have realized that what he presumed to be his were values, thoughts, and beliefs inscribed in him within the family and reinforced by other dominant social institutions. The relationship between structure and agency is, indeed, an extremely complex one and needs to be seen in dialectical, not dichotomous, terms. More often than not, it is difficult to distinguish what is within or outside our cognitive frames. When we say, “I think,” “I believe,” “I know,” we should ask ourselves how do we know, believe, or think, and where do our knowledge, thoughts, and beliefs come from. Each of us has the power to disrupt or to reinforce dominant thinking. But the problem with ideology is that “we experience ideology as if it emanates freely and spontaneously from within us as if we were its free subjects, ‘working by ourselves’” (Althusser, quoted in Hall, 1985, p. 108)—the voluntary intellectual imprisonment of the free subject. This makes it difficult for us even to think about engaging in such epistemological exercises.

Supporting the complexity of the relationship between structure and agency, Althusser (1971) pointed out the paradox implied by the term subject: It means both a “free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions” (p. 182). It also means a “subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission” (p. 182). Hall (1985, p. 100) asked the following: “A critical question in developed liberal democracies is precisely how ideology is reproduced in the so-called private institutions of civil society—the theatre of consent [italics added]—apparently outside the direct sphere of play of the State … How a society allows the relative freedom of civil institutions to operate in the ideological field—day after day, without direction or compulsion by the State.” This theater of consent, played out in our daily lives, is depicted as follows:

I arrive in Sweden (I do not site the city and use a pseudonym for the purpose of anonymity) after a few months of e-mail contact with a colleague there. A staff member from the International Office meets me. She expresses surprise; she was told that she would have to pick up a man. My contemporary and fellow professor there (I call her Maria) had always assumed that I was a man. She told me that on receiving a proposal from me, she commented to her colleagues: “This guy is so organized.”

Despite the more heightened awareness that one would expect in institutions of higher learning, the status of men, especially white men, often gets upgraded to doctor or professor even when men do not have the requisite qualifications, while the status of women, who have the required credentials, gets downgraded to Mrs. or Ms. If women, as a category, have low status and position compared to men, being a woman of color relegates one to an even lesser status. Once while I conducted a leadership training workshop with a group of students from the Students Representative Council of the former Natal Technikon, the students said that they initially thought I was part of the catering team (we had arrived at the same time). Given the nature of the workshop, I introduced myself by my first name, we sat in a circle on the floor and were soon into exercises on race, class, gender, power, leadership, and status. The environment was such that it allowed for the free sharing of ideas and thoughts. Some of the students said that even when we began the session, they were confused; they thought I must be “the professor’s assistant,” and they were still expecting a white, male professor to arrive. They struggled with their own cognitive dissonance. The reflective exercises and my sharing with them some of my assumptions about race and gender constituted powerful forms of praxis. The sessions opened up spaces for the students, who were all African black, to confront stereotypes about race and gender; how these stereotypes might mediate the performance of their leadership roles; and how we can begin to deconstruct dominant thinking and socialized senses of inferiority, believe in ourselves, and develop confidence enough to reach our highest possible standards.

While race and gender have lost their scientific credibility, they have not lost their ontological power. With regard to race, Alcoff (2002, p. 15) cogently argued, “In the very midst of our contemporary scepticism toward race stands the compelling social reality that race, or racialised identities, have as much political, sociological and economic salience as they have ever had. Race tends toward opening up or shutting down job prospects, career possibilities, available places to live in, potential friends and lovers, reactions from police, credence from jurors and presumptions by one’s students [and one’s colleagues!]”

Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach (2008) claimed that people generally consider men to be the prototypical college professors and women to be the prototypical schoolteachers, since working with children is considered a feminine task that women are more naturally suited for. However, women of color also face what Blake (quoted in Sanches-Hucles & Davis, 2010, p. 173) called “‘gendered racism’ when they are unable to separate the individual effects of each aspect of their identities.” In a study of academic leaders, Turner (2002) found that women of color experienced far more challenges than their white women contemporaries. Women of color described feeling socially invisible, a greater pressure to conform and make fewer mistakes, greater isolation, difficulty in being perceived as credible, and having limited power and fewer opportunities. Jaschik (2008, p. 1) described the “quiet desperation of academic women” who reported that the system undervalued their work, denied them opportunities to live balanced lives, and overtly discriminated against them; the women had to contend with “deeply entrenched inequalities.” Women occupy only 19% of top management positions in South Africa (Department of Labour, 2011). Responding to the poor representation of women in higher education, Ramphele (quoted in McGregor, 2008, p. 1) acceded that “this bias is … found among our academic leaders … So our young people learn that leaders are men.” These inscriptions need to be confronted, challenged, and changed as is discussed in the next section.

Toward an Alternative Consciousness: Implications for Social Work

Althusser (1971, p. 176) concluded that “individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects … even before [they are] born.” Although ideology is false consciousness, it is, according to Althusser (p. 175), about the only consciousness we have. As products of our world, “those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology.” Given its nonconscious nature, the “accusation of being in ideology only applies to others never to oneself” (p. 175); thus, we rarely recognize our own collusion in reproducing prejudices and stereotypes. It is difficult to think outside the box, but what Althusser offered is a critical self-consciousness. In the Althusserian tradition, individual agency is overdetermined by ideology, a view countered and challenged by emancipatory theorists who have argued that critical awareness can contribute to developing alternative paradigms and to radical change. I support the theses of Hall (1985), Freire (1970), Giroux (1994, 1997), and Gramsci (1971, 1977) that speak to the power of emancipatory pedagogical strategies as catalysts in engendering human agency. Hall (1985, p. 103) countered the determinism of Althusser, this way: “We are not entirely stitched into place in our relation to the complex field of historically-situated ideological discourses exclusively at that moment alone, when we enter the ‘transition from the biological existence to human existence.’ We remain open to be positioned and situated in different ways, at different moments throughout our existence.”

Linked to the work of Althusser is the work of Gramsci (1971, 1977), which differentiates between common sense and good sense. Common sense refers to our generally held assumptions—what is inscribed in our blood. Gramsci (1971) argued that on account of ideological hegemony, change could not come from the masses, at least not at the beginning, except through the mediation of intellectuals—thus, the important role of social workers as public intellectuals in community education and of social work educators who use emancipatory strategies. The role of ideology becomes critical to the extent that it has the potential to reveal truths by deconstructing historically conditioned social forces or to reinforce the concealing function of common sense. It is thus vital that common sense be subject to critical interrogation (Gramsci, 1971), so we are able to shift from being the “subjected being” to a subject that is the “author of and responsible for its actions” (Althusser, 1971, p. 182).

As social work educators, we are often confronted with the following challenges: (1) the normalization of poverty and inequality and the internalization of oppression (Freire, 1970, 1973; Mullaly, 1998, 2002; Pheterson, 1986) among students who have grown up with disadvantage and (2) the normalization of privilege, particularly in relation to race and gender (Giroux, 1983, 1997; Pease, 2010; Pease & Fook, 1999). The normalization of privilege, referred to as internalized domination, is defined as “the incorporation and acceptance by individuals within a dominant group of prejudices against others” (Pheterson, 1986, p. 147). The normalization of both oppression and privilege is linked to the common sense assumptions that we carry, manifested in the attitude that we get what we deserve without considering the structural determinants of our lives. This point is particularly salient in that students who have normalized poverty and inequality and privilege often expect nothing better for users of services—the sociostructural arrangements are deemed to be natural. On the basis of the understanding that there is a relationship between one’s understanding of the world and one’s structural location in it, I make efforts—through reflective dialogue, debate, drama, students’ presentations, reflective assignments (including students’ biographies), and journaling—for students to transform common sense into good sense (Gramsci, 1971), so as to understand and challenge external sources of oppression and to understand and undo sources of privilege. In encouraging students to engage with their own biographies (which are used as the basis of praxis and reflection in and on action, as proposed by Freire (1970), I share my own (see Sewpaul, 2003) with them, citing Giroux’s (1997, p. 159) contention that an “examination of the historical and social constructs of our lives helps to … rewrite the complex narratives that make up [our] lives.” The emphasis in the student-centered work is simultaneously on human agency and the impacts of structural factors on our lives and on the relationship between freedom and responsibility.

As social work educators, we must adopt a critical multiculturalism by which we help students to examine how racism and sexism, in various forms, get reproduced historically and institutionally, and in doing so, we must, consistently through word and deed, reject essentialist and stereotypical views regarding race and gender. While multiculturalism generally focuses on the other, with an emphasis on their deficits, Giroux (1997, p. 236) called for an insurgent multiculturalism that provides “dominant groups [italics added] with the knowledge and histories to examine, acknowledge, and unlearn their own privilege” and to “[deconstruct] the centres of colonial power and [undo] the master narratives of racism [and sexism].”

Having had the benefit of emancipatory education, one student Ingrid, wrote:

In my first year, Vishanthie taught a course on human behaviour and the social environment. It was underpinned by critical theory, and it cut through to the first causes of social problems. Integrated in the course were reflective exercises that required us as students to relate the material to ourselves and reflect on privilege and oppression in our own lives. The transformation and liberation that I experienced rekindled the passion and desire to extend the liberation to others. (see Sewpaul, Østhus, & Mhone, 2011, for details)

Because language plays a powerful role in maintaining ideological hegemony, we have to analyze and deconstruct language—and to deconstruct stereotypes and attributes attached to certain categories—on a regular and consistent basis (Giroux, 1997; Hall, 1985; Sewpaul, 2003). As Hall (1985, p. 112) emphasized, “Ideological struggle actually consists of attempting to win some new set of meanings for an existing term or category, of dis-articulating it from its place in a signifying structure. For example it is precisely because ‘black’ is the term which connotes the most despised, the dispossessed, the unenlightened, the uncivilized, the uncultivated, the scheming, the incompetent, that it can be contested, transformed and invested with a positive ideological value.”

It is part of the epistemology described by Hall that informed the black consciousness movement that popularized the slogan Black Is Beautiful that shaped the struggle against racial oppression under apartheid in important ways. Gramsci (1971, 1977) and Giroux (1983, 1997) noted that the development of critical consciousness may lead to critical action. Although subjective intentions alone pose little threat to the existing sociopolitical order (Giroux, 1983), social action must be preceded by an awareness that makes the need for such action comprehensible.

Conclusion

Reflecting on personal and professional encounters, I have discussed how we are products of society and have inscribed into us dominant notions of gender and race. Confronting and acknowledging the influence of external systems on our thinking and behavior and engaging in an ideological critique are the first steps toward understanding and undoing oppression and privilege, in repudiating the inscriptions built into us, and in working toward constructive and radical change. Awareness represents an important step in getting people to act as engaged and responsible citizens who question, challenge, and confront the structural basis of social life, and as social work educators we have enormous power to do so, as I discussed earlier (see Sewpaul, 2003; Sewpaul et al., 2011). While strongly advocating the need for structural changes, radical pedagogy confirms that it is the self that must be the main site of politicization (Giroux, 1997). Whereas Althusser’s notion of the interpellated subject leaves little or no room for human agency, the theses of Freire, Giroux, Hall, and Gramsci, as discussed earlier, provide hope and strategies for the development of an alternative consciousness that can empower people to challenge the sociopolitical and cultural determinants of racial, gender, and class oppression and to demand policy and legislative changes toward greater equality, social justice, and solidarity.