Monday, September 16, 2013

Double Consciousness and the Looking Glass Self

Recent events, such as those that led to the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his killer, have exposed the fact that Black experiences in the USA can still resemble those that inspired W.E.B. DuBois to originate the concept of "double consciousness." Many African-Americans must still often present "two faces", one to their own social circle and another to the dominant society; and must negotiate two different sets of normative expectations as they move between them. This article examines the continuing relevance of the concept, and also how it connects to another familiar idea: the looking-glass self.

            As with many sociological concepts, double consciousness is a living idea that has variations in how it is understood and applied. Furthermore, DuBois invited such a diversity of interpretation in how he phrased the concept. This paper contends that there are two features of the definition that need to be highlighted and extended to the modern arena of race. The first aspect is, as DuBois defined it, "this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity (DuBois, 1897: 194)." This formulation has strong parallels with Charles Horton Cooley's concept of "The Looking Glass Self", especially in how it corresponds to Cooley's definition that "in imagination we perceive in another's mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it (Cooley, 1964: 184)." We use society as a mirror (see here) and imagine what that mirror reflects when we look into it. If we think the image in the mirror is one that society dislikes, we feel shame. This is useful in understanding the role played by shame in double consciousness; the shame that results from "measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." 

            This is where the second component of DuBois' formulation becomes crucial. This notes that the African-American "ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder (DuBois, 1897: 194)." When this is added to the first part, we are left with a person looking into a "looking glass" that does not accept that the person is fully human because a Negro cannot be an American. DuBois viewed the person as striving bravely but in vain to unite their Black and American selves in a society that refuses to accept that such a marriage could ever exist. Indeed, for white America at that time, the concept of African-American was a form of semantic miscegenation: an illegitimate racial union.     
           
            How does this resonate today? Barack Obama made an important contribution to answering that objection when he gave a press conference reacting to the protests that followed the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Obama noted that most Black males have had the experience of being profiled negatively as a threat:

There are very few African American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often (NPR, 2013).

            Such profiling strongly resembles the DuBois notion of "contempt" and it compels the Black male to monitor his "looking-glass self" more closely and warily than a White male in identical circumstances. Some students will object that negative White responses only occur when the male is dressed in attire associated with street gangs, such as the hoodie.  However, this can be debunked by citing testimonies such as that of Father Bryan Massingale, who is a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and a professor of theology at Marquette University. He records that:

Once, while walking on a busy and well-lit street at night, I was abruptly stopped by the police, rudely questioned and roughly searched, under the suspicion that I was the perpetrator of a robbery—only to later discover that the only characteristic I shared with the actual criminal was the pigmentation of our skin, he being much younger, shorter, and heavier than I. This happened despite my being a priest, a university professor, and a respected member of the community (or so I would have thought). The police offered no apology. Nor, to be honest, did I really expect one. Living with such terror and indignity is to be expected (Massingale, 2013).

            Testimonies such as these challenge the complacent assumption of some Whites that only those who dress in deviant ways (deviant as defined by the hegemonic culture) need to fear surveillance, profiling and a hostile looking-glass.

REFERENCES

Cooley, Charles Horton (1964) Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Schocken . (Orig. pub. 1902.)
DuBois, W.E.B., 'Strivings of the Negro People.' Atlantic Monthly 80, no. 478 (August 1897): 194-198.
Massingale, Father Bryan, 'When profiling is “reasonable,” injustice becomes excusable', U.S. Catholic blog, July 2013, retrieved on September 1st, 2013, from http://www.uscatholic.org/blog/201307/when-profiling-"reasonable"-injustice-becomes-excusable-27574
NPR, 'Transcript: President Obama's Remarks On Trayvon Martin Ruling', 19.7.2013, retrieved on September 1st, 2013, from http://www.npr.org/2013/07/19/203679977/transcript-obamas-remarks-on-trayvon-martin-ruling.
Roberts, Frank, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Huffington Post, 8.16.2013, retrieved on September 1st, 2013, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-leon-roberts/lee-daniels-double-consci_b_3767252.html.
Scott, A.O., Black Man, White House, and History, New York Times, 15.8.2013, retrieved on September 1st, 2013, from http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/movies/lee-daniels-the-butler-stars-forest-whitaker.html?pagewanted=all.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Making The Familiar Strange

Exercises

To make the familiar strange, I would ask you to perform mental exercises in which you ask yourself several questions:

1) How would my society appear to a visitor from another planet, or a past century?

2) Why do people raised in some Islamic cultures regard the west as decadent and fallen? Why do even some American religious fundamentalists believe this?

3) Can you recall a time as a child when you entered a particular social setting for the first time (school, church, restaurant) and thought, "This is odd, strange, scary"?

4) Imagine if you were to change all of your parents' and teachers' beliefs into hypotheses that had to be tested and proved?

5) Imagine if you started from the assumption that all social knowledge is open to challenge and has to be defended through evidence and logic.

Questions A Stranger Might Ask

Upon carrying out the exercises described above, these questions may occur to you:

a) Why are there such huge gaps in wealth and prestige between rich and poor?

b) Why do we identify a certain group as African-American when their last ancestor born in Africa may have died 200 years ago? Why do we not do the same with Americans who have European ancestry that is often more recent?

c) Why do women seem to acquire new identities when they dye their hair a different color? What is the social meaning of blonde, brunette, etc?

d) Why did Michael Jackson change the color of his skin?

e) Why are western societies monogamous? Why can't we have several life-partners at the same time?

f) Why do so many people have eating disorders?

Please Note

Adopting this position and asking these questions does not mean that a sociologist is being anti-American or anti-Western or anti-Christian or anti-capitalist. It is possible that a sociologist could answer all these questions in a way that affirms the status quo (some, but not all, functionalists do precisely that). It is more likely, however, that a sociologist who does these exercises will never accept 'the familiar' at face value ever again.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

What Is Sociology?

My preferred definition of Sociology is that it is the scientific study of social relationships between individuals, groups and institutions. It demonstrates how the choices and actions of each person, group and institution are enabled and constrained by their interdependence. All people are dependent on others for the fulfillment of their emotional, physical and psychological needs (such as love, companionship, security, food and shelter) and this dependence compels them to modify their behavior to meet the expectations, needs and demands of those upon whom they depend. They do this by performing roles and conforming to social norms. Sociologists apply quantitative and qualitative methods to study these processes.

Two examples can serve to illustrate this definition. Firstly, in order to obtain the money needed to survive, most individuals in western societies must perform paid labor for an employer. Whilst they are performing that labor, they must behave in accordance with the employer's formal rules and informal expectations. Someone working in a call center, for example, must often perform a scripted conversation and be willing to absorb customer frustration and rudeness without responding as they would do in a non-work situation. This is inherently stressful as it involves the suppression of personal emotion and character. Secondly, in order to maintain a sexual relationship or friendship, a person may adopt a submissive mode of behavior, indicating that there is a severe imbalance of dependence between them and their partner. Such imbalances provide a basis for exploitation, as do imbalances in any other form of interdependent relationship. A sociologist would wish to explain such exploitation in order to perhaps educate the victim how to end it.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Interdependence

All our social actions take place in relation to other individuals, groups and institutions upon whom we are dependent to certain degrees. This article presents a model that puts these interdependent relationships into five categories, defined as emotional, sexual, financial, market and normative.

Emotional dependence arises from the human needs for love, joy, companionship and approval. Its most common expression is within the family, where it can often result in imbalances. The mother and father may have different access to the public sphere, which makes one more dependent on the other than the other is on them. Differences in personal strength and confidence are magnified in the intensely private space of a marriage or other long-term partnership. The nuclear family also places children in a position of heightened vulnerability, as a child's self-esteem depends on the approval (or lack of approval) of just two people, namely its parents, with whom it is confined and from whom it cannot escape.

Sexual dependence is often credited to 'human nature', but sociologists emphasize the social basis of the intensity and direction of the sex drive. A teenage boy's self-esteem is often tied to the social perception of his sexual success with girls, which has the effect of turning those girls into commodities. Fear of being perceived negatively may motivate females to make sexual choices they would otherwise avoid, either by having sex in order to not appear 'frigid', or by refusing sex in order to avoid being labeled a slut. Dependence can also be manipulated by the male in order to create sexual coercion in the form of the female's sexual consent gained by fear of losing the male's approval and love.

Financial dependence is perhaps the main obstacle to the enjoyment of human freedom. A person who does not own property must get a job, which in turn means performing a role in a manner desired by the employer. The relationship of employer-employee is almost always unbalanced in favor of the employer, and an imbalance of interdependence is almost always likely to lead to exploitation. Employees are often vulnerable to role strain from conflicting job demands: for example, they may have to meet sales targets that are so stringent that they can only be achieved dishonestly (by lying to the customer) yet the employee must pretend that the business they work for is honest, scrupulous and legitimate.

Financial dependence is also a feature of industrial patriarchy, whereby the wife is confined to a lower-paying job than the husband (or to non-paying domestic labor), thereby allowing the husband to claim dominance as the 'breadwinner'.

Market dependence is the process whereby our economic opportunities are dependent on the activities of others, many of whom we will never meet. For example, this chart shows how house prices in Fort Myers have fallen since 2006:



A person who bought a house for $250,000 in 2006 would find herself in 2010 with a mortgage far in excess of her house's value, yet this price drop was entirely due to the actions of others.

Similarly, someone who buys groceries at a major US supermarket is benefiting from the exploitation of the labor that produces those goods; for example, such goods may come from an agricultural laborer in Immokalee who has been denied basic human rights due to being undocumented. Whilst the consumer may express a willingness to pay higher prices to finance a fairer wage, there is little indication of a public desire to take political action to secure that outcome.

Marx defined economic interdependence as a situation in which "what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no-one willed...an aggregate mean, a common resultant."

Finally, normative dependence arises from the fact that all persons entering a social interaction must have some awareness of behavioral rules. An individual would be severely disadvantaged if he or she entered a culture whose rules were unknown to him or her. Someone who does know the norms but is unable to fulfill them (for example, someone with a physical or psychological disorder that makes them unable to conform to rules of polite interaction) is likely to experience stigma and shame.

Marx expressed the idea of normative dependence in his dictum that "The tradition of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Role Strains of Mother and Father

Role strain is the stress caused by the incompatible pressures of a single role. I would make the following arguments about parental roles in western societies. Firstly, the west has materialistic norms, which means that the roles are expected to provide material wealth, measured by a 'nice' house, car, computer, cellphones, and so on. If you believe that parents could opt out of this materialism, imagine what would happen at their children's first days at school, when status roles among schoolfriends are established by the kids questioning each other about what things they have at home. The non-materialist parent must cope with the pressures exerted by the fact that the neighborhood is materialist, and passes on this culture via the schoolyard. There is also, of course, the constant pressure of TV advertising targeted at kids.

To meet these norms, parents work long hours. However they are also expected to spend 'quality time' with their children. How can this be accomplished if work pressures are causing burn-out and taking up most waking hours. This is especially problematic for the mother who works the second shift.

The additional sociological factor burdening many mothers is their physical isolation. The modern western mother is perhaps the first mother in history who was required to do the job solo, with no supports from sisters and neighbors. The western myth of 'self-reliance' means that such women often stay silent and take their Mother's Little Helpers.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Choice

Can humans exercise free choice? Yes they can, but only within the limits of:

1) Their dependence on others. If I am totally dependent on a small circle of people for love, self-worth and money, my life is likely to be spent pleasing them, not pleasing me.

2) How mentally scarred their childhood left them. Again, your mum and dad have the power to empower you or to totally screw you up. The moment of your birth is a pair of dice being rolled: will you get good parents or will you be thrown to the wolves of fate?

3) The social development of their society. For example, a Jew born in Germany in 1920 or an African-American born in Florida in 1890 would find their choices somewhat limited. Someone born in the age of the Internet will have more choices than someone from my generation regarding sources of information, but this presupposes that her parents can afford a computer and Internet connection, and that they will allow the child to browse freely.

We can infer some sociological rules from the above points. Firstly, we can make choices but we do not choose the context in which we make them. Secondly, we often make blind choices: we are given several different doors through which we can walk, but we cannot choose what will be on the other side of each door. The best we can do is try to interview people who walked through those doors before us, and learn from their experiences.

Thirdly, there are so many roles in life that are chosen for us rather than by us. We do not choose the roles of son and daughter. We do not choose how we play the role that our employer gives us: they control the money and thus control your behavior. You have to smile while being forced to jump through hoops, and you have to take shit from bosses and customers. It's the American way (but also the British way: infact we probably taught you it).

Durkheim's 'Suicide'

Durkheim's 'Suicide' can be read on-line here. A table of the four types can be viewed here.


High
Low
Integration
1. Altruistic suicide
3. Egoistic suicide
Regulation
2. Fatalistic suicide
4. Anomic suicide

It is important to note that low integration produces egoistic suicide whereas it is low regulation (literally loss of norms) that produces anomic suicide. This distinction is often blurred, even in textbooks.