Abstract
Joe Feagin and various associates have, over the years, assembled a voluminous library that takes on white men and systemic racism. We would cite this archive, but to do so would take up the entire space allotted for this review!
Feagin’s latest, with Kimberly Ducey, is Elite White Men Ruling. The text’s introduction begins with a blistering review of the continued dominance of white men. It then makes an odd claim: “In our experience, almost no social analysts have made regular and systemic use of a specific term and concept like ‘elite white men’” (p. 2). A Google Scholar search of the term “elite white men” reveals over 875,000 results, employed by luminaries such as Patricia Hill Collins, Dana Nelson, Maxine Baca Zinn, and Bonnie Thornton Dill. And even more scholarship has been written that speaks to “elite” white men under different terms (e.g., “privileged,” “exclusive,” “upper class”). Notwithstanding this straw man, Feagin and Ducey’s point is taken, despite an avalanche of scholarship in this area, much layperson discourse and media coverage often fail to explicitly name “elite white men” as the actors driving the reproduction of inequality via interlocking racial, class, and gendered interests and logics.
Elite White Men Ruling contains eight chapters, bookended by an introduction and epilogue. The first two chapters lay out the theoretical approach, much of which is a recapitulation of structural racism theory, peppered with some gender and class critiques, while the next two chapters are historical overviews of “white imperialism, racism, and masculinity” from 1890 to present day. The next four chapters engage the current neoliberal era (chapter 5); US domestic policy changes and reactions (chapter 6); repression of African Americans (chapter 7); and systemic sexism, racism, and classism in the transition from the Obama to the Trump presidency (chapter 8).
As the subtitle refers, the text sets out to inform the reader just “Who, What, When, Where, and How” elite white men rule. The text is particular important for evaluating our “postoppression” era (“postracial,” “postgender,” etc.), whereby many assume we have gone beyond systemic and habitual oppression via a linear view of past and future in which progress is promised. Yet, the “How” breaks little new theoretical ground, as many of the claims are repetitious of those in Feagin’s earlier work. We wished for more explanation and less description of the processes by which race, gender, and class, as salient social categories, exert external causal power to force actors to (re)tred pathways of social action and unequal order. For example, while chapter 8 provides an excellent commentary on Trump’s popularity among elite white men, how do we also explain the rise of “Bernie Bros” among similarly situated white men?
In so doing, the book lacks dialogue with theoretical development in aligned fields and perspectives from critical race theory, cultural sociology, Afro-pessimism, and transnationalism to scholarly voices from the global south and most curiously, intersectionality (which is discussed only in passing on pages 5, 6, and 11). And while the topic of globalism is broached (mainly in terms of US imperialism), one is left with a picture that the ruling hegemony of elite white men as only a US phenomenon and social problem.
Despite these issues, Elite White Men Ruling is an excellent text for introducing the sociologically uninitiated to the continued deluge of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism that saturates everyday life with a rising tide that drowns out the voices of women, the working classes, and people of color, while seemingly lifting only those boats manned by the already privileged. If anything, the text refuses to invisibilize the beneficiaries cum mechanisms of inequality, those “…elite-white-male policymakers and their associates [that] have routinely hindered the social, economic, and political mobility of most Americans of color, all the while proclaiming the common racialized mythology of American individualism with its strong accent on individual effort bringing opportunity and material success” (p. 212).