You’ve heard of “structural,” racism, but why doesn’t anyone know what a “structure,” is?
Good question.
I've been thinking a lot about the terms “structure,” and “structural,” and how they get used in contradictory ways. For instance, patterns of intentional discrimination, like, hiring managers preferring White candidates with criminal records over identical Black candidates without criminal records, will often be described as “structural.”
At other times, the idea that racism is “structural,” is used to downplay the role of individual bigotry in racist “systems.” Which makes a kind of sense, but then, what is a system but groups of people? And how does a hiring manager discriminate, except as an individual? Maybe the hiring manager isn’t actually racist, maybe she’s responding to what she thinks will please her boss. Maybe the Black candidates she puts forward tend to be rejected by her boss, and she wants to avoid putting forward candidates her boss won’t hire anyway.
So that means her boss is racist right? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe the positions he’s hiring for tend to be public facing, most of his customers are White, and he’s worried they might not respond as well to a Black face as to a White one.
That means the customers are racist right? Some probably are, and even if it's nowhere near a majority; for the Black employee, there being a sizable portion of your employer’s customer base be dissatisfied with your service no matter what you do, can’t possibly be good for your career. But even if none of the customers are racist, however we define and measure that, the expectation that they might be has trickled down to the boss, through the hiring manager and then onto the prospects of the Black applicant, who remains jobless for being Black.
But what if the hiring manager actually is racist and wants to avoid recommending Black hires if at all possible because she believes Black people are dangerous and untrustworthy?
Black candidate unemployed.
What if the boss is racist and wants to reject Black candidates whenever possible?
Again, unemployed.
If we restrict our view to this individual case, we have one person’s sad story. But what if this is replicated across the country? Well, first of all, how would we establish that? We might look at the unemployment statistics by race. We might put them in conversation with what we would expect the employment gap to be between Blacks and Whites by controlling for education, experience, age, geographic distribution, criminal record, etc. etc. etc. etc. to determine that even when controlling for all relevant discriminating factors, there remains an unaccountable gap between Black and White unemployment. One easy way to describe this would be as “structural racism.” But, having accounted for all the so-called “material differences,” between the Black and White populations, what does “structural,” even mean?
If we’re defining “structural” as “rules, norms and laws that reinforce racial hierarchy even in the absence of actual bigotry,” what are those “rules, norms and laws,” and how can we be so sure bigotry isn’t at play, or that these “structures,” don’t primarily function by allowing Whites to act out their bigotry in ways that appear racially neutral when articulated in terms of existing “structures?”
The basic assumption many people bring to the idea of “structural,” racism is that there is some correlation between the lack of overt racism in places of business (schools and any other place where people can be hired and fired) and the level of racism present in the attitudes of White Americans. There’s little reason whatsoever to believe that there is such a correlation. The difference in the general social acceptability of racism can be traced to the legal regime of civil rights, which leaves organizations open to federal lawsuits if they are found in violation of laws outlawing racial discrimination. Such laws, combined with a willingness to protest and publicize such discrimination; another social legacy of the civil rights movement, has made the formal areas of society; the areas that are legally delineated as being outside of the private sphere where discrimination remains legal, actively hostile to overt racism. There is therefore no reason to leave out or minimize “individual bigotry,” on the baseless assumption that it has ceased to be a major social force1.
This is before we even get into interrogating how material inequities come to be and what allows them to persist and how that coming to be and persistence intersects with individual acts of discrimination.
As highlighted above, intentional discrimination frequently gets described as “structural,” while “structural racism,” is also supposed to represent the systemic persistence of racial hierarchy beyond the realm of individual discrimination.
The easiest explanation for this seeming contradiction would be carelessness and the misuse of words. There certainly is some of that, as there always is when “everybody” is expected to talk about what few have studied or thought deeply about. This issue is complicated by the fact that there are at least three major sociological schools that deploy the concept of “social structures,” and all three take a slightly different approach to it.
These schools have contributed to our understanding of the word structure, without being concretely differentiated in the public mind. It’s as if three people were talking to each other about their hometown of Springfield, with one being from Massachusetts, another from Illinois and the third from Missouri. They might eventually realize that they’re talking about three completely different cities, but that realization would be harder to arrive at if none of them were aware that different states even existed. Similarly, I suspect that while reasonably educated people are aware that different schools of social thought exist, they might assume that the idea of a “structure,” is so basic, that it must be fundamentally the same thing across schools. Imagine if our three Springfielders lived in cities that had basically the same layout, and the same monuments with the same names, similar histories and similar social fabrics. Each talker would probably notice subtle differences in how his two companions described their “common,” home town, but there would be so much overlap, and so little possibility of there being another Springfield, that they would ignore these differences and assimilate them subtly, even contradictorily, into their own memories.
As there are at least three Springfields, there are also at least three “structures.” Failing to understand this, and failing to interrogate their differences and similarities, leads to the kind of confusion described above.
The three structures are, roughly in order: The base-superstructure theory of Karl Marx, the sociological framework called structural-functionalism, and structural anthropology as articulated by French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
These three “structural,” accounts of social reality represent the search for an account of human social life that transcends the limits of human subjectivity, which is not to say they represent the search for an understanding of society that disregards human subjectivity. They are all efforts to account for continuity, for what makes social order possible, for what rivets and steel beams hold together the social machine, or the social architecture; depending on your preferred metaphor.
Thus, they have enough in common to co-exist and be confused. All three dominated the social sciences during the middle decades of the 20th century, which helps explain how it has become possible to so casually deploy “structure,” and “structural,” in contradictory ways.
While most theoretical terms borrow from the language of everyday life, their relationship to the everyday, practical terms they draw from depends on how common the word being turned into theoretical terminology is in everyday language, and how closely the theoretical term is associated with a particular theory.
For instance, while the terms proletariat and proletarian have a common meaning apart from Marxist theory, they are such uncommon words that if anyone has any idea what a proletarian or a proletariat are, it is almost certainly in the context laid out by Marxist theory.
“Structure,” is both an extremely common word and a core component of multiple schools of social study. Its commonness makes it evocative, and empowers those who hear it to use it, regardless of their familiarity with any particular theoretical school. This character of the word was exacerbated in the mid-twentieth century as “structure,” dominated the social scientific landscape through three different schools of thought: Marxism, structural functionalism, and structural anthropology.
From the Marxist idea of the superstructure, we get the idea that the material base of society, how resources are created and distributed, determines the socio-cultural forms and consciousness of society: the superstructure. By this reckoning, racism, as a part of that social consciousness, arises out of the ideological needs of a capitalist social order.
From structural-functionalism we get the idea that society is like a giant machine with each part playing its role. In this sense, we might look at racism as a phenomenon that either promotes or hinders this functioning, and at how social structures, like laws, norms and institutions, promote racism or undermine it and what that means for society as a whole.
From structural anthropology, we get the idea that behind interpersonal human interactions there are unconscious structures of understanding and meaning that determine and define them.
Marx, arguably, gave rise to the idea of a social structure, through his concept of the superstructure. Both Weber and Durkheim, the major theorists of structural-functionalist sociology, drew on Marx and his analysis of the relationship between the economic basis of society and society as a whole, while also being heavily critical of it. Louis Althusser, sought to expand on the idea of the superstructure and understand how capitalism reproduces and preserves itself through ideology and culture.
At the same time as Levi-Strauss and Althusser had come to prominence, American sociology was dominated by Talcott Parsons, who drew heavily on Weber and Durkheim. So you have three dominant schools of social analysis, that all center concepts of “social structure.”
If you hear every prominent social theorist and academic talk about “structures,” it’s easy to assume that in some sense, they must all be talking about the same thing, even if you never really interrogate the different theoretical frameworks at play. The legacy of this, I argue, continues to this day, as remains common to discuss “social structure,” in ways that draw on all three of these schools, without actually interrogating the differences. This seems to be the best explanation for the contradictory ways that “structure,“ gets deployed.
But what is even more interesting, is that while structure frequently gets used to describe everything in society that is not based on individual attitudes: the economic system, law, norms etc. all three ways of theorizing “structure,“ have a component that is centered on individual attitudes, individual perspectives and interpersonal relations.
Claude Levi-Strauss is the most obvious, because most of his theorizing came through observing the inner workings of small “tribal,” societies. Levi-Strauss was particularly interested in kinship, how societies organize family relationships. He was interested in formal rules governing kinship. For instance, who it was considered permissible to marry, what the patterns of inheritance were between family members: Does a son inherit from his father or from his maternal uncle etc. But notably, in addition to these formal and explicit structures, Levi-Strauss interrogated the actual relationships between family members: Were the relations between brother and sister close and congenial or distant and hostile? Were fathers and sons typically close, loving and familiar while uncles were distant and authoritative, or were fathers distant and authoritative while uncles were close and familiar? In understanding systems and structures of kinship, he considered it important to observe formal rules governing family relations, while also accounting for patterns in attitude that seemed too regular to simply be coincidental or based on the particular people involved. His ideas about how human dynamics could be understood in terms of basic underlying “structures,” that are universal; similar to language being understood as a limited series of rules and sounds put together in a variety of ways, but reflecting a basic overall structure, were heavily influential in the middle of the century. Though in principle, the basic structure that Levi-Strauss proposed to uncover could be used to explain human society on any scale, how exactly to do that was much more fraught.
As this structuralism of Levi-Strauss was taking the intellectual world by storm, Louis Althusser was becoming internationally well known for his extensive effort to characterize precisely how the superstructure of society grew out of its base, as Marx had argued. This he did most prominently in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” published in 1970. Those who would reduce racism to a simple outgrowth of capitalism attempting to justify itself, often then make the mistake of assuming that if capitalism were to be abolished that would solve the problem of racism. They tend to ignore the independent life of culture, and that ideologies cannot be manufactured out of thin air; they must build on what already exists in order to make their ideologies legible, so that they will “make sense,” to and for the masses of people for whom these capitalist elites seek to “make sense,” of capitalism. I speak more about “legibility,” and go into detail about the ideological framework into which racism arose in this blog post. But, suffice it to say, that capitalist societies are not culturally identical. While there certainly is a tendency to mono-culture among capitalist societies, there are cultural differences in their superstructures, despite identical material bases.
Understanding this, allows us to appreciate ideologies not simply as growing out of material bases, but as “structures,” of their own having continuity across systems of production, just as systems of production have continuity across the cultural changes a society undergoes. In thinking through the rise of racism, it comes to make more sense why a medieval European society that defined itself as beset by Jewish “demons” on the inside and Muslim “heathens” on the outside, found it easy, during the transition from feudalism to colonial capitalism, to justify its slave trading by casting West Africans as subhuman beasts of burden who benefited from slavery through being brought to Christ.
We’ve thus far looked at two ways that a knowledgeable person in the middle decades of the 20th century might’ve spoken about “structure,“ in a learned way, a way reflecting the best in contemporary progressive thought. One way would’ve focused on racism as a social phenomenon growing out of the capitalist order’s need to legitimize itself, the other out of unspoken understandings that allow people to reliably navigate complex social circumstances. In both cases, there are explicit understandings alongside subjective dynamics that function by creating attitudes in the individuals in a population.
The structural-functionalist school of thought looks at society as an organism with various components: the state, schools, the family, etc. who all contribute to its overall functioning. It too is deeply concerned with individual attitudes. As I said above, during the middle of the 20th century, mainstream American sociology was dominated by Talcott Parsons, whose 1937 work “The Structure of Social Action,” remains a seminal text. Parsons drew heavily on the work of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, major founders of structural-functionalism, and through it, sociology. Both Weber and Durkheim, in addition to analyzing society on the broad institutional level, also analyzed how that society cultivated attitudes in people, and how these attitudes, once they become common and reliable enough, could be treated as social realities “structures,” just as much as law, government or the economic system. Emile Durkheim called these “social facts,“ and defined them as: “ways of acting, thinking and feeling which possess the remarkable property of existing outside the consciousness of the individual.”
Durkheim argued that social facts were not simply our analysis of the ways of acting, thinking and feeling that are most common, but rather that they are ways of thinking, acting and feeling that are common because they are social facts. Durkheim might say, racism is a social fact of American society, not because racism is common in American society; but that racism is common in American society, because it is a social fact of American society, that racism exercises a “coercive,” power over the minds of most Americans, simply because racism is a part of the basic system of meaning that forms the common social understanding which constitutes American identity.
To elaborate on what Durkheim means, we can think of the institution of marriage, not as a legal, but as a social institution. Marriage isn’t a social fact because of how many married people there are, in fact, marriage is at an all time low, yet it remains as much a social fact as ever. Marriage is part of the way individuals think about their society and how our society thinks about itself. It’s part of the basic grammar of society. And because it is part of the basic grammar of society, it comes to take on a coercive power that transcends how prevalent marriage actually is. In a sense, our social order presupposes marriage as a thing that exists, and because it does so, basically every person in our society does so as well. We don’t have to rediscover marriage for ourselves every generation, we need never conjure it in our consciousness anew, neither can we toss it away by an act of will. Even if we abolished marriage as a legally protected union, it would persist for some time as a social fact. Our relatives by marriage would remain our relatives, we would find it impossible to see the “married” couple of fifty years as simply two unrelated people who live together. This thing of marriage defines and helps to form our consciousness as something beyond it.
This basic system of meaning is reinforced by media, educational institutions and the interpersonal, informal learning we all receive while training to navigate the social world. Note that in the definition I quoted above, he refers to a social fact as a way of “thinking and feeling,” that also exists beyond the “consciousness,” of the individual. To return to racism: This leaves the door open for people who consider themselves racist consciously, and these people are certainly important to the functioning of racism as a system; but also for people who don’t think of themselves as racist consciously, but who nevertheless participate in the systems of meaning that are held together by racism. Unconscious ideological structures can give rise both to explicit sociopolitical understandings and to un-articulated principles of reasoning and narration which are reflected in the explicit articulations of individuals. Existing outside the consciousness of the individual does not preclude the individual consciously holding views consistent with a social fact, the social fact is simply what unites their understanding with the understanding of those who do not consciously hold views that comport with a given social fact, or who consciously hold some views which comport and others that don’t.
I’m not referring here to implicit bias, about which I have strong criticisms. I’m referring to racism that is present consciously, even if it’s not present consciously as racism. Rather than thinking of ideological racism, as I think most people do, as the belief that certain groups of people are naturally inferior, or that certain groups of people aren’t fully human, we should think of ideological racism as any belief which justifies the current reality of racial inequality, that argues such inequality is just. Some of these ideas will be race blind, such as privileging the needs of a capitalist system, over the need to rectify injustices that place certain people at an inertial disadvantage in the market through the compounding of the effects of past discrimination. Others will be race conscious, like the belief that a group’s culture is inferior, or that areas where a group lives tend to be bad areas.
Max Weber’s work on what he calls “social action,” catches another element of how individual attitudes help to constitute the overall social structure. He defines action as: “human behavior when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful.” And social action he defines as: “an action in which the meaning intended by the agent or agents involves a relation to another person’s behavior and in which that relation determines the way in which that action proceeds.” Many of the behaviors associated with racism could be considered examples of social action. Lynchings are obviously social actions, not because they involve large numbers of people, but because they involve people acting on a shared meaning of what it “means,” to them for somebody to be Black, and what it “means,” to them for somebody to be White.
Let us take the example of a Black landowner who got into a dispute with a White man over a property boundary during the Jim Crow era. A similar dispute between two White men might lead to bad blood, a fistfight, or even one man murdering the other, but none of these would play out quite the same way between a Black man and a White man.
The White man is likely to approach the matter with considerably more imperiousness and aggression, because of his understanding of himself as a White man and what that “means,” to him, and because of his understanding of his neighbor as a Black man, and what that means in relation to him as a White man. Ultimately, all these meanings are meaningless socially, but for the expectation both men have that these meanings will be accepted and understood in a reliable way by other White men, men who have the power to do something about these common meanings and understandings. If the Black man in the scenario is judged by his White neighbor as not acting consistent with the meanings attached to their respective skin colors, the White man can reliably expect that if the other Whites are alerted to this breach, they will respond as a lynch mob. Their forming a lynching mob reflects their expectation that other White people, from the White local sheriff (assuming he isn’t directly involved) to the White mayor, to the White governor (again, assuming they aren’t involved directly) all the way up to the White president will tolerate and even defend their prerogative as White men to lynch Black men. Whether these elites do so because of their understanding of “legal structures,” rationalized by the phrase: ‘Murder is a state crime, and I as the president have no role in preventing murders’ or because of more general social structures which may be rationalized as “Well, that nigger knew what would happen when he raised his hand to a White man,” or “We’re outnumbered, and if niggers think they can resist White people, pretty soon, they’ll run everything,” or even “Well of course I think what the lynchers did was wrong, but what can I do? Take on the whole community?”
Similar in kind if not extent to the example with which I began this piece, they all add up to a lynched man and an unpunished lynch mob.
I’ve considered here the lynch mob in terms of Weberian social action. But, if we bring Durkheim and his social facts into the mix, then racism can be thought of as a social fact that makes social action possible. Social action can also be thought of as both demonstrating and creating social facts. The “meaning,” of Black and White which the White neighbor takes for granted as a part of reality, because it has been his entire training and experience, is a social fact. He then acts toward his Black neighbor based on that social fact and, in most cases, his Black neighbor would defer to him out of concern for his own safety. This deference is a social action because the Black man in a violently racist society does it based on what he anticipates will happen to him at the hands of his fellow human beings if he doesn’t. If he doesn’t defer, the resultant lynching or beating or burning or mutilating or bombing reinforces racial hierarchy as a social fact, by reinforcing, affirming and confirming the idea that it is “correct,” “ok,” and “necessary,” for “White,” people to treat “Black,” people this way.
These social facts and social actions are no less “structures,” than the law which fails to protect the Black landowner; the lynch mob is no less a “structure,” than the court and its all-White jury who pronounce the lynch mob members not guilty. All are social facts based on social actions that operate based on social facts that are based on social actions and on and on ad imperium. We might just as well analyze the lynch mob in part based on the model of structural anthropology, if we think of White and Black as akin to kinship structures. The White man expects deference from his Black neighbor based on his understanding of their social relationship much as a parent expects it from a child or an elder from a junior member of a family group, and when he doesn’t get it he either takes his structural prerogative to assert his authority through individual violence, or he summons his racial “kinsmen,” to defend their structural prerogative by defending his structural prerogative through the lynching ritual; much as an aggrieved Bronze Age father in Judea had the biblical right to have his rebellious son stoned to death by the village.
From the Marxist perspective, we could see the dispute between two neighbors as part of capitalism’s ideological self-preservation. Because Southern capitalism had always been both materially built on the backs of exploited Black people and ideologically justified by the mythology of Black racial inferiority, the core way the White elite was able to enlist the White masses in support of itself was by offering them Black flesh, both as an ideological justification to enhance their sense of personal status no matter their economic position, and as a ready-made scapegoat, or sacrificial lamb, to take their frustrations out on whenever they became dissatisfied with their place in the overall system of capitalism.
We might imagine the White neighbor wants more land, but that land has become so expensive because most of it belongs to big plantation owners. Or, perhaps the price of cotton has gone down because the big plantation owners have flooded the market, thus, requiring small landowners to produce more cotton to maintain a certain standard of living. Both the Black and White small farmer are victim to the same impersonal market forces, but, one way to break free of the free market’s fetters is available to the White farmer alone. He badgers his Black neighbor to sell his land at a steep discount. The neighbor refuses, first deferentially, then flatly then obstinately, in response to his White neighbor’s first high handed, then imperious, then vicious tone. The White man seeks to strike his Black neighbor, his blow is deflected then returned. The White man reports to his White neighbors that his Black neighbor “doesn’t know his place.” If the Black neighbor is lucky he gets run out of town. If he’s unlucky; we need not detail the macabre, bloody ritual that ensues, which not only clears the way for a White man to acquire a Black man’s land cheaply, but re-inscribes his and all White men’s collective right to the land and all it produces. In this way, “impersonal market forces” meet social forces that are impersonal and personal at the same time.
Now, the stereotypical Marxist analysis here would be that the bourgeoisie is dividing the working class by race to keep control. And true, in my parable above, we might imagine a rich White man, owner of a 10,000 acre plantation, whose property is safer, because when White smallholders covet more land or chafe under the conditions from which the big planter benefits, the White smallholder turns his rage not toward the sturdy white pillars of the planter’s mansion, but toward the Black smallholder, the Black day laborer, anybody Black he can lay hands on, because the power to do so assures him, however poor he might be, that he still has an unimpeachable status: A badge of nobility to match his Black neighbor’s badge of slavery. This is what W.E.B Du Bois described as a “psychological wage;” it is an addendum to the White man’s paycheck made not in cash, but in the fact of Black suffering, and an awareness of one’s unique power as a White to create and profit from that suffering.
The approach I have taken in considering the reparations question highlights what it means to take these different faces of social structure into account. According to a certain material/structural analysis, giving every descendant of Africans who were enslaved in this country enough money to have as much wealth as the average white family, would not only be a blow toward ending structural racism, it would actually constitute the end of structural racism. For those who want to reduce racism to differences in ”intergenerational wealth” if the average wealth of a Black American were equal to the average wealth of a white American, then in a free market capitalist society, we would be able to secure the same resources that whites are able to secure for themselves, resources they use to make their lives better, protect themselves, and ensure the prosperity of their offspring; while also occupying the exact same social positions that whites occupy in society, in proportion to our presence in society.
So, theoretically, 13% of CEOs would be Black, because the exact same percentage of Black people would be able to send their kids to the right schools, provide them with the right experiences, and Black people would be sufficiently represented in the right networks, and have access to the levers that whites currently use to get themselves into these positions; levers that Black Americans currently lack access to, which leads to our under-representation in these positions.
The problem with this is that it ignores the fact that in between Black wealth being equalized through reparations, and any good you can imagine from Black-and-white wealth being equalized through reparations, there will be a period where the individual Black Americans has as much money as the individual white American, but will primarily have no choice but to put that money in white banks, and even if they have a choice, they will be being advertised to, propagandized and influenced, through white owned airwaves, that white banks are the safest place to put their money.
Such people may believe in the abstract that Black controlled and Black owned banks/credit unions are great symbols of community pride, but in plotting a path to their own economic well-being, and believing that having a “white,“ level of money should entitle them to function as a white person in a capitalist society, many, in fact probably most, would go with the white banks, particularly because those banks would have the financial wherewithal to offer them even better terms than the existing but still very small Black banks and credit unions. A purely economic analysis of racism, whether we’re talking about a Marxist one or a structural-functionalist one, doesn’t take account of racial ideology and individual prejudices, and can’t account for the fact that white owned banks would exploit and degrade Black borrowers and Black account holders simply because the people who run and control the banks think such people are inferior, and don’t feel that it is morally wrong on a basic level to cheat such people, and can create circumstances in which even those who don’t feel this way will be forced and incentivized to act this way. Capitalism itself, the base, is not in any way harmed by a society in which Black people are 13% of every income decile.
If in the immediate term there is a loss of cheap labor due to all the Black people who no longer have to find a way to content themselves with minimum wage, the importation of cheap foreign labor from a global labor market would certainly resolve the issue. The base would stay the same but the superstructure would change. There is, however, another option, one that would be more likely if reparations were distributed through solely individual checks. The superstructure, the current functional structure of a racist, anti-Black society, would find it more ideologically fulfilling, to bleed Black people dry. In this scenario, letting us escape the economic and social shackles of slavery, freeing us from our historical position at the bottom, while importing cheap foreign labor; would perfectly preserve the capitalist base as readily as bleeding us dry; but only one is an ideal state of affairs according to the existing dictates of the cultural superstructure. What fulfills the internal ideological sinews of the existing structure is what I would expect to happen, because to do otherwise would require a massive change in the consciousness of most of the American population, a fundamental reordering of how it understands itself and of the narrative framework through which Americans think about themselves and justify their places in the world. This consciousness, this narrative framework, the structure and superstructure, are as self-reinforcing and resistant to change as anything else in this society.
Upon re-reading, it occurred to me that one might argue that the fact that publicizing racism can be used to pressure people to not be racist, even in the absence of potential legal sanction, heavily implies a substantive change in attitudes. i would point out a few things: 1. A vocal minority can readily cow a majority. If you knew that no more than 20% of the population found something you believed to be abhorrent, the apotheosis of evil in fact, that would be sufficient to convince most people to keep their mouths shut about it in most situations. From the standpoint of businesses, even if something wouldn’t get them sued, mortally offending 20% of the population is certain to be bad for business, so of course, they seek to avoid that, and to separate themselves as quickly and efficiently as possible from anybody or anything that would do so. In this way, overt racism has been largely consigned to a sphere of obscurity which masks its continued ubiquity.