Chapter Seven:

Race, Class, Ethnicity, Caste, and Family Life

Introduction

Like gender, race, class, ethnic background and caste are structural conditions, which impact how family life plays out. These variables are ordained by a society, determined to be important and then acted upon behaviorally, leading to ranking differences among people. In this chapter I will use observations and information I gained on my most recent trip on Semester at Sea which was filmed by Road Rules and shown on MTV in the summer and fall of 1999. I visited the Bahamas, Cuba, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, China and Japan. It became painfully obvious on that trip that every society has a pecking order and sets up a hierarchy of inequality. Societies may use skin color, income, historically accrued wealth, ethnic background, or birth-ascribed rank to determine where a family fits in the system. In every part of the world people make ranking distinctions between themselves and others. Sometimes those rankings are benign; however, other times these distinctions lead to war, genocide and cruel discrimination that can be severe enough to cause even death.

When I returned from circumnavigating the world I drove down the coast of Washington, Oregon and California. One night I stopped in a motel nestled in the redwoods of California. In the office I found the owner, a 40ish man of Indian origin. I was surprised to find someone who looked so similar to the people I had just encountered on my travels through India. What I discovered was that this man was part of a subcaste from the Gujarti region of India; his people were of the Hindu religion and served as vaishyas or traders. Back in India they had once been employed to calculate tithes that were owed to medieval kings by farmers in their region near the Arabian Sea. Upon their arrival in the U.S., through the pattern of chain migration of immigrants, they gradually bought up 50 percent of all motels in the United States, although they only make up 1 percent of the American population (Varadarajan, 1999, 36-37).

What this encounter showed me is that although we think there is no caste system in the U.S., in fact, vestiges of the uniquely Indian-based stratification system have found their way into American society. I realized that caste, like race, class, ethnicity and gender, are ways we divide people. I saw, too, that lives are lived following preconceived paths set out by these structural conditions of one’s society. Needless to say family life is impacted by these structures. I saw this man and his wife raising their two daughters far from India, still following Indian traditions while living the American dream.

The Indian caste system is based upon a “jati” (a verb meaning “to be born”), just as one is born into a family. A jati extends the concept of family to a larger social group of cousins, potential in-laws, and acquaintances whom one can expect to marry. There are several thousand jatis or caste communities, throughout India (Elder, 1996, 49).

You will remember from Chapter Five that caste is a hierarchy of rank that locks individuals into the grouping of their parents and is immutable. Where one is born, one remains. It is also an inequitable system as certain castes are usually associated with certain occupations. For example the dalits are those who were once called “untouchables” because they were associated with polluting roles in Hindu society. Untouchables were given the jobs of dealing with human waste, cleaning latrines, sweeping streets, and removing the dead carcasses of animals. They were to be avoided because they might demean those of higher castes, especially the Brahmins, or priestly caste. Mahatma Gandhi crusaded on their behalf and the name was changed to “harijans,” or children of God. Now they are known as dalits, or the “oppressed,” a name which reflects their attempt to seek recognition as equal members of Indian society.

While I was in India I visited a Dalit village and saw abysmal accommodations and squalor that shocked me. Poor families were jammed into small huts, no latrines or running water were evident, and children were clearly emaciated, struggling to survive. Across the road was a village of higher castes who refused to talk or interact with their neighbors for fear of contamination. Although my hosts said that the government had done much to eliminate the discrimination against the dalits, it was obvious that more was needed.

In contrast, I visited the home of a high ranking Brahmin, or member of the priestly caste. In that home I saw what looked like a typical American homelife. The family had TV, a home entertainment system, a microwave, many rooms for only four people and a sense of entitlement and power that came of their rank. It was clear that caste, although said by some to be diminishing in importance, still remains a method of division in Indian society. Every society has such divisions. In India they are called caste. In the U.S., the divisions are based race and class. In Brazil, it might be class, and in South Africa it is generally race.

These distinctions between people, the creation of the hierarchy of social order, is known by social scientists as social stratification.

ADD PHOTO: 7.1

Social Stratification

Stratification is a common feature of systems of shared social inequality. It is a set of socially ranked categories, whether given at birth or not. If it is given at birth, as in the Indian castes, then the ranking is traditionally defined. For example, a society will indicate that some people are intrinsically worth more than others, will rationalize this difference by developing a myth of the origin of this difference and will legitimate the system that keeps the differences in place (Berreman, 1972, 40). A society will also say what behaviors are acceptable for each group and give different rewards to each group. Importantly, then each group is given “different access to goods, services, livelihood, respect, self-determination, peace of mind, pleasure and other valued things including nourishment, shelter, health, independence, justice, security and long life” (41).

We know that in the U.S., for example, people on welfare receive a poorer quality of health care, are looked down upon by our society, live in poor housing and have less money available for leisure and fun activities. They also receive inferior education and can’t buy as much as wealthier people. That is what is meant by differing rewards and access. The point is that every society decides who will be on the top and who will be on the bottom, whether it is determined by skin color, money, upbringing, sex or ethnic background. Family life reflects these differences, since families are embedded within these social structures. The unequal distribution of opportunities also have consequences in terms of life expectancy and basic quality of life.

Now we will look at some of the types of divisions that societies make, looking specifically at countries that reflect a more exaggerated delineation than we may see at home. It is important to remember that in the U.S. we have these distinctions, but because of our false consciousness we tend to ignore them when they are close to us. I challenge you to use these examples to consider how we make distinctions at home and how they are similar or different in other places.

Fluidity of Race and Ethnicity Definitions

Race is, in fact, a very complicated concept. Although in the U.S. we like to think we know what race is: black, white, Latino, biracial, Asian, the reality is that these are arbitrary social constructions that change over time and place. What was once called black or white, even in the U.S., has changed. We know that “a person defined as white in the year 2002 might have been defined as black or Irish or Italian at various times in American history” (Gallagher, 1999, 1). Race, and the often-used term ethnicity, are social constructions because their meanings develop through a focus on characteristics that a given society deems as socially important. Gallagher says that they are social products that are based on cultural values, not on scientific facts.

Racial and ethnic definitions are based on the physical traits a society chooses to value or devalue. In fact each society’s values are based on a different set of historical experiences, cultural circumstances and political definitions. Thus ideas about race and ethnicity can vary both between and within countries. Usually people think of race as the sharing of inherited characteristics, something that is defined as shared physical distinctions. Racial groups are thought of as separate and see themselves, or others see them, as unique. Ethnicity, on the other hand, is often defined as the sharing of a common origin or a separate subculture. The distinction is not about physical characteristics but about sharing a culture which is transmitted through language, religion and history.

I’ll give you some examples of the fluidity of racial and ethnic delineations. In the U.S. people who are of mixed Black and white backgrounds are now defined as biracial by the U.S. Census Bureau. However, under apartheid, until 1994, the same people would have been called African in South Africa. In the U.S. under antimiscegenation laws families were sometimes parted by the attempted “passing” as white of a lighter skinned family member. This led to the break up of families and a denial of one’s ancestral origins.

A person of Indian origin in the U.S. would be defined as Asian, while in South Africa that person would be called “coloured,” a term we would find offensive if used in the U.S. In Britain people who are not white are called Black, whether they are from Africa, India or any other non-white country of origin. In the U.S, someone born Black in the south might have tried to pass as white in the north if he or she was light skinned. In Brazil where there is much less of a racially-defined hierarchy, children of the same family can be categorized through intermediate racial groupings. Thus sisters and brothers in the same family might be placed in different categories, all of which would come under the main category Brazilian (Omi & Winant, 1999, 11). Needless to say this can have traumatic consequences for people within the same family. The race you belong to depends on where you live, your family and the historical era you live in. The point is that race and ethnicity, like gender, are social constructions.

They are created by people and they can change, given the social historical moment. When Jews, Irish and Italians first came to the U.S, they were not called white; they were in a racially ambiguous state. Now they are all considered white. This illustrates the social construction of race. Definitions are constantly changing and with the change come different opportunity structures and access to resources.

Race

In 1992, I had the honor of spending two weeks with Archbishop Desmond Tutu while we sailed from Brazil to South Africa. During that remarkable time I was able to have a private audience with the man I see as a cross between Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King. Tutu was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 and later went on to establish the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after the end of apartheid.

During my meeting with him, I asked a question I had long been trying to answer for myself. “Why is it,” I asked, “that people do not want to deal with issues of race? And how is it best to approach the topic as a teacher?” He gave a deep sigh and told me that this was also one of the hardest questions he had ever confronted. But, his answer was about FEAR. “People,” he said, “are afraid of what they might lose and what might happen to them when they confront others of a different race.” In South Africa, whites were afraid of retaliation by blacks at the end of apartheid. It has not come. In the U.S. we fear the unknown and of difference. He urged me to continue to reach students on the subject and not to run away from this most difficult subject just because people do not want to deal with it.

I tell you this story because, as a colleague of mine once said, “Racism is like a serpent living in the ceiling of our house. One day the serpent will emerge again and we will have to slay it” (Scott, private communication, 1999). In other parts of the world it is at the forefront of the discourse, while in the U.S., where race has been an issue since this country began, we don’t like to talk it. Yet as W. E. B Du Bois, famed early civil rights leader and educator, put it, “the color line is still with us” (Zinn, 1980, as reprinted in Gallagher, 1999, 4).

In South Africa the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, organized in 1994, met for years to hear about the racial atrocities committed there under apartheid. The Commission, headed by Tutu, heard testimony from both blacks and whites about their participation in brutality and atrocities during that era. Linked to the telling was application for amnesty, which was determined after the party told the whole truth. The idea was that truth and amnesty would be linked to reconciliation and would move the country beyond racial divisions (Jones, 1998, 204). It was a unique approach to dealing with horrific behaviors on both sides. Rather than prosecute the criminal acts, the Commission decided to hear the truths and then forgive those who committed them. In only a few cases have they actually decided to bring criminal charges against the perpetrators. Although the testimony was sometimes difficult for those who were the victims, ultimately it is hoped that this approach will be effective in healing the racial divisions and transitioning the country to harmony between the races (Asmal, Asmal & Roberts, 1996).

What went on in South Africa is the most blatant example of the worst that can happen as a result of racial distinctions. Even today, much work has to be done to heal the racial wounds. The impact of this trauma was great on family life in South Africa, injuring families who lost fathers, mothers, sons and daughters who disappeared into prisons, some never to return. Now the impact is happening as families begin to hear the truth about what occurred to their loved ones who were brutalized under apartheid. Some are forgiving those who murdered and maimed their family members. The economy in South Africa was divided into two countries, one for whites that resembled the first world, another for Blacks and coloureds (mixed race peoples) whose life was like those in other third world countries. Let’s take a look at apartheid in South Africa and its impact on family life.

South Africa and Race

White supremacy in South Africa began with the Dutch settlement at Cape Town in 1652. For 3 1/2 centuries, the white minority expanded and built its racial hegemony over the non-white majority (Ramsay, 1999, 159). Through a gradual process of enslaving, creating servitude and taking over of land, the whites were able to move the indigenous Khoisan and Bantu-speaking peoples out of their homelands and impose a system of domination that lives on even today. The Boers, originally Dutch speaking farmers, evolved a language known as Afrikaans, a form of Cape Dutch. Gradually they moved north, seeking good farmland. They did so also to move away from the British, who were slowly arriving in the region. The Boers killed many Zulus and other local peoples along the way. By the 1860s, whites were growing in numbers and putting indigenous Africans on reservations in order to continue their expansion.

Although the British took over rule of Cape Colony in the nineteenth century and treated the Africans somewhat better, the lines of racial stratification were well entrenched. By early in the twentieth century, the British and Boers fought a war in which Boers, blacks and coloureds were interned in concentration camps. By 1910, when the war ended, an independent country of South Africa was formed, primarily made up of former British settlements and Afrikaner republics. The Bantu speaking peoples (the linguistic groups of the region) were relegated to subservient positions.

By 1948 the Afrikaners were voted into office and formalized apartheid, a separation of peoples. New laws of segregation were enacted which imposed pass laws, under which Black peoples were forced to carry “passbooks” at all times to prove that they lived in certain areas. If they needed to go somewhere else, permission had to be applied for. Under the Group Areas Act more than 80% of South Africa was reserved for whites, who were no more than 14% of the population (Ramsay, 160). Blacks were confined to townships or on white-owned farms. Ten homelands were established in poor, rural parts of the country, where blacks had to live unless they had work near the cities or on the white farms. These homelands were called nations and spread black citizens out so that there was no black majority in any one area, leaving the whites in control. Coloureds and Asians were never given any clear status; they remained ambiguous, never quite white and not black either. All groups were pitted against each other, with job classifications established to reserve the best jobs for whites, the middle level positions for Asians and Coloureds and unskilled positions for blacks (160).

Consequences of Apartheid on Families

“While for whites apartheid was an ideology of mass delusion, for Blacks it meant continuous suffering” (160). Large numbers of Blacks were forcibly moved when they squatted in white areas, seeking jobs there to feed their families. In the squatter camps and townships, the Blacks lived in fear of raids by police coming to check on their pass-books. The camps themselves were hovels, with one spigot of running water for thousands of people. They were ringed by barbed wire and surrounded by tanks, with white soldiers patrolling the periphery. Children lived in terror that their parents would be rounded up for not having the right passbooks, or for being members of radical organizations. Terror and fear were constant emotions present under apartheid.

I visited the squatter camps and townships in 1992 and 1999, and was appalled to see what is the richest country in Africa, thousands of people living in horrific conditions. Many of my students and I were physically sickened by the squalor, the sadness and the poverty. Education was second rate, people traveled countless miles to white areas for employment, when they could find it, and conditions were overcrowded, with numerous health hazards.

Resistance to white domination by Blacks has been a significant part of South African history, and impacts family life greatly. Blacks have fought against whites since 1659, up to the present time. The African National Congress, which was founded in 1912 to focus on black liberation, was long an outlawed Black association. Many of its leaders were incarcerated for many years because of their political activity against the white government. In 1960 there was a massacre of 60 persons in Sharpeville during a peaceful protest against the pass-books. In the 1960s, Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for what ended up being 22 years because of his political activity as part of the militant branch of the ANC. In 1976 there were riots in Soweto, a Johannesburg township, when students protested the unequal educational system. The Black Consciousness Movement, led by Steven Biko, urged the unification of all black peoples in South Africa. Biko was killed in 1977 at the hands of the dreaded security police.

Because of increased agitation by the ANC, coupled with worldwide sanctions against the South African government, by 1990 the then-president F. W. deKlerk, of the white supremacist party (the National Party) released Nelson Mandela from prison and began the process of dismantling apartheid. In 1994 Mandela was elected the first Black president of South Africa, and the painful and difficult process of rebuilding a country with deep racial hatreds began.

South Africa suffered greatly under apartheid. Whites argued that they knew little about what the government was doing. Most whites only knew Blacks as servants and blacks often saw whites as the devil and as their enemies. Family life was deeply affected by these separations. In a moving tale of life under apartheid, Mark Mathabane writes in his book, Kaffir Boy (1986) about the humiliation and dehumanization that he experienced. He watched his father dragged away in the middle of night during a raid. He described begging for food, of fearing the first white people he ever laid eyes on and of being insulted and beaten because of his skin color. His mother struggled to feed the children and keep them in school, paying for the fees and the clothing with her meager savings.

Interestingly when Mathabane came to the United States, after receiving a tennis scholarship, he said that he found much the same situation here. Although, he said, the signs of apartheid were more subtle in the United States, it was just less physically obvious that discrimination was rampant.

ADD PHOTO: 7.2

Under apartheid family life was significantly impacted by the movement of adult males to the cities or to mine areas seeking employment. Old people, some women and children remained in the rural regions, keeping the family plots of land and living off the money sent home by the adults. This strategy existed to keep wages low for the workers, offloading the costs of human reproduction and maintenance. It might be useful to use a Marxist or a Conflict theoretical perspective to explain what happened in South Africa and why the races were kept apart. By understanding that it was economically expedient to create the separation and inequality. If we understand that it paid off for whites, we see why the apartheid system lasted so long and was so effective.

Life in South Africa is somewhat better now, since the end of apartheid. Public health and educational facilities were desegregated, and a national constitution has made South Africa one of the most equitable in the world, at least on paper. Unfortunately centuries of inequity are not undone in just a few years. There are still parties committed to white supremacy; the government does not have enough money to complete all the projects necessary to bring blacks to parity with whites; education is still poor for Blacks; there is a huge unemployment rate; there are competing black nationalist parties, vying to take over the reigns of government. Nelson Mandela stepped down as president in 1999 and President Thabo Mbeki is faced with enormous political and economic challenges as the second black president of the country.

Family life in South Africa is still problematic because of the consequences of apartheid. Life expectancy is low, with men living until 54 and women until 58. The literacy rate is 82%. And South Africa is currently the most murderous country in the world, with the highest rates of homicide (Ramsay, 158). AIDS is on the rise in alarming proportions. Between 1990 to 1995 the infection rate increased by 1,123% (Daley, 1998a). Today almost 3 million South Africans, about 12% of all adults, are infected with HIV. This leaves children orphaned at a young age, many of them left to care for their siblings. Money that might have gone to AIDS prevention went instead to the apartheid battle.

Under apartheid, a system known as the “dop” was established, under which Black and coloured workers in the wine industry were given a weekly allotment of wine as part of their salary. The purpose was to addict laborers to alcohol and to keep them working for virtually nothing (Daley, 1998a, A1). The consequence is that now, once the allotment has been curtailed, researchers at the University of Cape Town Foundation for Alcohol Related Research are finding that the incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome is quite high. In the U.S. the rate is 0.2 percent; even among Native Americans, whose rate of alcoholism has been documented to be quite high, the rate of fetal alcohol syndrome is 2.0%. In South Africa the rate is 11% among children of the vineyard farm workers!

South Africa is also experiencing a rise in child abuse and child sexual abuse. Government officials are concerned about the situation and are forming task forces to recommend new laws to deal with the incidence (Jacobson, 1999). Rapes, both marital and stranger rapes, are also on the rise. Other studies indicate that the fact that family members have to migrate for work has also had a destructive effect on the family life. Family members have shown migration-related stresses, and have developed a state of being in chronic crisis. Their children show emotional distress through behavior problems (Steyn & Viljoen, 1996).

Clearly the demise of apartheid has not ended the difficulties. Family life in South Africa, particularly for Blacks, has been problematic since before apartheid; it just got worse under that system.. South Africa remains one of the most fascinating countries in the world to follow and watch. Because of its long history of entrenched and legalized racism, and now with a new era of attempted reconciliation, it could serve as a model for the rest of the world in overcoming and healing deep racial wounds.

Race in the United States

The situation in the United States bears many similarities to racial conditions in South Africa. Remember what Mathabane said, that the situations in both countries are quite similar, only the signs are down here. The situation is just a hundred years beyond the time of the signs coming down.

Historically blacks entered the U.S. through force, slavery. As early as the mid-1600s settlers here needed cheap labor to grow food for subsistence and tobacco for export. Because they could not force the Indians to work for them, fearing retaliation, and could not import white servants in sufficient numbers, they turned to slaves (Zinn, 1980, 34-45). Africans were torn from their families, marched thousands of miles in chains, sold at auction and placed on slave ships in spaces no bigger than coffins. Many died, numbers estimated of up to 50 million perishing in what is now called the “middle passage,” the stage between freedom and slavery. By 1800, estimates are that between 10 and 15 million people came to the U.S. under these conditions (38).

Once here, the situation they found was one of antagonism and mistreatment, much like conditions between whites and blacks in South Africa. As Zinn has pointed out, the color black has always been distasteful to whites. As early as 1600, English dictionaries define “black” as being deeply stained with dirt, soiled, dirty or foul (40). However, when blacks and whites of similar economic conditions interacted, they often had cordial relations, so much so that laws had to be enforced to separate the races.

As the plantation system grew, so did slavery and family life, along with it. With the growth came the need for new slaves imported from Africa. If one views plantations in the south of the United States there are similarities in housing accommodations between those homes and housing seen in Africa. Africans brought their cultures with them and formed new families, emulating the family systems they had left behind. Different groups of people, Ibo from Nigeria, Ghanians, individuals from Sierra Leone, Angolans, Congolese, Senegalese, Gambians, people from Guinea-Bissau, Liberians, all from the “Slave coast of Africa” and all millions of miles from home, formed new family groupings, slowly losing some of their heritage, but holding on to some vestiges from the past.

For example, to this day on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, a dialect known as Gullah is spoken, and food is cooked that emulates the traditions of the African slave coast. These peoples, brought from Sierra Leone, came to work in the rice and cotton fields. Slaves were brought to the upper colonies like Pennsylvania and Rhode Island as artisans and craftsmen. In the southern colonies they were brought to be agriculturalists. To this day grazing patterns for herding animals, for example emulate those of Africa, rather than European patterns (Elliot, 1999).

Racial slavery was possible because whites considered blacks heathen savages who needed to be civilized and whites believed that blacks lacked a civilization of their own. In fact, some believed they were doing blacks a favor, since they would now be christianized and finally have a religion. Justification was even found in the biblical story of Ham. The slavers believed non-whites were enslaveable due to their legal and cultural vulnerability. Of course we now know that enslaved peoples had their own ancient civilizations and religions, but they were not recognized. Once here, they had no legal rights, and, deprived of their culture, were open to victimization (Elliot, 1999). In fact, a Marxist or Conflict theory analysis here would argue that it was necessary to maintain the idea of blacks as heathen savages because then it was acceptable to exploit them for their labor and not feel guilt. It becomes merely an economic arrangement, using chattel who are less than human.

Classic American racism developed in the 1800s, when the debate over slavery coincided with U.S. expansion westward (Jaret, 1995, 131). Massachusetts had outlawed slavery as early as 1783, when a slave argued that the state constitution said all men were free and equal and the courts agreed with him. But the need for slaves for cotton production superseded the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and slave owners argued that the right to private property (slaves) had priority over slaves’ rights to freedom (132). Soon thereafter, proslavery forces developed a dehumanizing racist ideology that blacks were biologically inferior to whites and therefore not really human, more like beasts, and therefore enslaveable.

The territorial expansion also gave rise to racism. This was mainly about Native Americans, who were seen as savages and unable to be “civilized.” The spirit of Manifest Destiny ordained that whites were to bring factories, buildings, growth and “progress” to the world, and gave justification for the killing of native peoples who stood in the way. Mexican Americans were viewed as lazy, dirty, violent and cruel, which also justified taking over the land they held in the Southwest (133).

Social Darwinism, the belief that the “survival of the fittest” of the human species justified the domination of superior groups over inferior ones. Although it did not come into existence until later in the century it later served as a justification for whites being defined as having the right to judge and subjugate others. The idea of the “White Man’s Burden” was another way to justify distinctions and classification of peoples. According to this argument, the “higher” races’ job was to uplift the “backward” races and to Americanize them to follow the norm set by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans.

Interestingly we are now seeing a rise of such thinking once again. This time it is in the form of white supremacist groups such as the Aryan Nation, the White Patriot Party and the Ku Klux Klan, all of which espouse hatred of any group other than whites. They do so out of fear that their social status, economic condition, and political influence are declining (138). Hate group members tend to be working class, blue collar workers and others whose lives are not economically stable. There is often a correlation between economically difficult times and the rise of hate group activity.

Consequences of Racism in the United States

Many students in my classes argue that slavery ended a hundred years ago and that they are not responsible for the inequities of the past. They also allege that blacks now have equal opportunity under the law and that affirmative action programs and legislation have eradicated the differences between blacks and whites. Unfortunately, this is another “no problem problem” as I discussed when we were looking at gender. In Chapter Six, I cited Deborah Rhode, Professor of Law at Stanford, who argued that many Americans fail to see the problems still faced by women, blame women for their own problems and deny the need for anyone to take personal responsibility for the problem (Rhode, 1997, 1). We have a similar situation in relation to race. We can see the consequences of racism in South Africa, but it is harder for us to perceive when it is close to home. I’ll give you some examples to make my point.

For five years I volunteered at a maximum security state prison in Elmira, New York. There I ran a college lecture series for inmates who have high school diplomas or have obtained their GED. That experience was quite eye-opening. For one thing the men are primarily Black and Latino, with a few white, working class participants. They are somewhat atypical from other inmates who have not attained the GED. All of these inmates are extremely well read, articulate and very street smart. In fact, the class was far more challenging and exciting than my usual college level classes. Many of the inmates are there because of having committed felonies, including murder, robbery, burglary and rape. All are serving long sentences. What I was often struck with is the intelligence of this group. They challenged me intellectually in ways that my mainstream college students did not. They put information together in fascinating and creative ways and asked provocative questions that kept me on my toes. I found myself doing lots of homework after class. I was distressed at the waste of their talents and knowledge, as they languish in prison. New York State does not fund higher education for inmates, and none of these men are able to obtain college degrees because of this.

Why, you might ask, are these intelligent men locked away? I asked them that very question and got some fascinating answers. Many of them said they were smart in school but some had been humiliated by teachers early on in school. Others did well but found no jobs after completing high school, and turned to crime. Others said that they did not want to be criminals but found no other alternative work in their neighborhoods. One white man described coming from a middle-class family and hanging out with bikers, who taught him to be a criminal. Another described doing well in a private school, but then finding no job or money to go to college. All describe the experiences of racism especially in the criminal justice system.

In what has been described as a “culture of discrimination” (Minority troopers, B2) in the criminal justice system, Black state police officers in New Jersey have alleged racial mistreatment of both drivers on the road and minorities on the police force. They describe a culture that condones racist remarks, racial profiling in which minorities are regularly pulled over and searched because of their skin color, and ridicule and harassment of officers who complained. Racial profiling is a phenomenon that is receiving more attention at the policy levels of government since it appears to be a common pattern in police forces.

The discriminatory application of capital punishment is also particularly noteworthy. Wolfgang and Riedel (1973) found that blacks are more likely than whites to be executed for the same crimes, and that people who can afford good lawyers are far more likely to escape execution than those who lack the means to hire the best legal defenders.

Life for blacks who are not in prison is plagued with inequity as well. This gravely impacts family life on a daily basis. Many social scientists who study the problem argue that the older patterns of racism and discrimination impact the present situation and leads to a continuation of inequality. Blacks in the U.S. face more prejudice and discrimination than any other group, partly because they are more easily identifiable. The legacy of slavery labeled them as inferior, and that labeling continues to this day. Job discrimination and changes in the economic sectors keep blacks out of the labor force to a greater degree than any other group. The unemployment rate for black males is twice that for white males. Without a high school degree, the rate rises to three times higher than for white men (Oliver & Shapiro, 1990). Fifty four percent of all black men between 18 and 29 are unemployed (Massey & Denton, 1999, 316). Over one-half of black households report assets of $5,000 or less, and 30% say they have no assets at all, while only 9% of all white families report having no assets. The median net worth of black households is $4,169, while white households are worth $43,279.

It is true that blacks are now in the middle class but the majority of black workers remain in manual labor and lower-end service jobs. Only 16% of black households earn over $50,000 while 47% of white households do. And even in the middle class black Americans still report hundreds of instances of blatant and subtle bias in their daily lives (Feagin, 1991). 34 out of every 100 white men have college degrees, while only eleven out of every 100 black men do. Black families suffer as a result of technological advances that have put black men out of jobs. For example black men began losing jobs between the 1950s and the 1970s, and now there is little employment available for African-American men (Billingsley, 1992, 132). Still employed as blue-collar workers, with diminishing job opportunities open to them, black men are often blamed for being unemployable, when in fact, it might be due to the fact that there are fewer jobs available.

Black women die in childbirth at a rate of four times higher than that of white women and black babies have twice the infant mortality rate as white; black babies die at 17.6 per 1,000 versus 8.5 for white live births. Blacks are also employed in the most dangerous jobs where they face a 37 percent greater chance of occupational injury and a 20% greater chance of death. Blacks live to an average of 69.2 years, while whites to 75.6 years. Black families benefit less from the positive consequences of technological changes that seem to benefit whites (Billingsley, 1992, 131). For example since the turn of the 20th century white infant mortality was reduced from 43 per 1,000 births to ten, while blacks infant mortality is the same level that it was for whites two decades ago (131). The AIDS death rate is three times higher for blacks than it is for whites. Clearly family life is impacted daily by the consequences of racism in the United States today.

Black children have a 30% higher chance of dying before the age of fourteen than do white children. While blacks make up only twelve percent of the population, they are 45% of the people killed by police officers. The average sentence for a juvenile delinquent who is white is two years and 6 weeks, while black youth receive average sentences of five years and 7 months.

The number of black households headed by single black women with children grew in the forty years between the 1950s and the late 1990s (Kaplan, 1997). The rates were 25 percent in the ‘50s and up to 61 percent in the ’90s. Of these families more than half will have daughters who were or will become single mothers themselves. Birthrates for single black women have climbed in those 40 years two to three times more than white women of the same ages which was seventeen years old or lower (3). There are a number of theories about why this rate has risen so dramatically, including the one idea stated by Elaine Bell Kaplan that black single mothers are seen as social deviants and that they chose to reproduce more of their own kind as a slap in the face of America’s “family values” (5). Other theories include the belief that there are no jobs available to such women and that the economy’s structure makes it difficult for black mothers to find a place from themselves in the upwardly mobile society (6).

Family life is severely affected by the racism that blacks experience in American society. In a study done in 1998 the authors found that black families tend to rely on their kin to help cope with the daily racism they experience at work and in public (St. Jean & Feagin, 1998, 297). The family spirit seems to help them but also transfers the pain of bigotry to family members leading to an emotional price being paid by the whole family for the racism they experience. But it also helps with a collective memory, by facing adversity a sense of family is preserved. Both black men and women are aware of the history of victimization and the current inequities based on race and deal with it on a daily basis, with their families helping them to cope with it.

Prejudice + Discrimination = Racism

Why are there such enormous differences between the races? Why do people dislike others? Why do we look down on people or think they are inferior to us? Here it will be useful to define our terms and to understand that as much as each of us might like to allege that we are bias-free, we all carry within us some of the internalized attitudes that pervade our culture. We carry values that have been taught to us by our families, the media, and the dominant society. None of us is pure enough to have missed or overcome that learning. Sometimes we act on those attitudes; sometimes we carry them quietly within us. The problem is that they impact family life and lead to difficulties for real people trying to live and raise their children.

Prejudice is the belief that another group is inferior. It is an attitude and a prejudgment made based solely on the basis of membership in a category. It is the thought. Prejudice presumes that an individual has objectionable qualities that have been ascribed to his/her group. In fact, a truly prejudiced person will go on making incorrect judgments even in the face of contradictory information. Sometimes prejudice can view another group favorably, but for the most part social scientists argue that prejudice is a negative prejudgment.

Prejudice is usually based on misinformation and is taught through socialization and programming by those around you. We have to be taught to hate and fear; it is not innate and genetic. It is not voluntary, either; it is merely the best thinking the person has at the moment. Usually no one has educated the prejudiced person to be aware of biases. Unfortunately we all display prejudice to some extent, when we cross the street to avoid someone of a different group, when we dislike their music, or wince at their behaviors, when we don’t listen, when we discredit and discount another. When we stereotype another group we are carrying on the prejudice.

Examples of a prejudice might be saying that all Blacks can dance, all Jews are cheap, that all Native Americans are alcoholics, or that people on welfare “breed like jackrabbits.” Think about some of your own examples, we all know them.

Many times we have prejudicial ideas but do not show them because we know that it is unacceptable to do so. Discrimination is the acting out of prejudice. It is the behavior that follows the attitude, the overt action that is taken. Discrimination is the active expression of the negative attitude that leads to unfair treatment.

Racism is the combination of both thought and behavior. It is the ingrained set of attitudes and actions that has an ideology, which justifies the subjugating of others. It is usually justified on a variety of grounds, like religious or scientific, and then the belief is acted upon. Those of us in the social sciences argue that racism is perpetrated by the dominant group in a society upon the minority group. It is about who is in power and how that power is manifested. Racism denies the minority group full participation in the society. We can show our racism individually, toward people. We can also show that racism through our institutions, which continue to perpetuate the inequality.

You might ask why I include this information about prejudice, discrimination and racism when discussing the family. These three phenomena impact family life greatly. When a child in a family is more likely to die, the quality of life is compromised. When a mother dies of AIDS the children of that family suffer. When a head of household cannot earn a living, that factor is devastating to the family. The structural condition of race is profoundly important to the quality of family life.

Patricia Hill Collins, a noted Black sociologist has pointed out, for example, that the increasing rates of Black single mothers is a structural, racial construction. It is the result of racism. She notes that it is the industrial mix that characterizes the employment base of an area that articulate the family organization (1998). For example, where there are heavy industries such as oil refineries, families will remain intact, with men staying home and working. If men have to leave for employment, or if women go to places where there are female labor dependent jobs, like garment work, then the family life will become more female-headed. Thus family structures are impacted by the structures of society that perpetuate racism and discrimination.

Ethnicity

Earlier I made the distinction between race and ethnicity. Ethnicity, as I said before, is shared cultural heritage, race is often thought of as shared physical characteristics, The cultural factors are transmitted through language religion, national origin and a sense of common history. Some ethnic groups share no common physical traits and exist only because they conceive of themselves as a group. They may believe they share a common ancestry and are bound together by nationality or culture. Nowadays race and ethnicity are used together (Berreman, 1972, 41).

Ethnicity is birth-ascribed: you are defined as part of an ethnic group when you are born into it. Some (Jaret, 1995, 51) define ethnicity as a sense of “peoplehood,” the sense of attachment one has to a group, a “we” feeling that is a consciousness of being the same kind. It is about being part of a community, even if you are of differing sex, socioeconomic class and age. The term “ethnic” comes from the Greek word “ethnos” or “ethnikos” which means nation or people (66). Examples might be American Jews who feel a peoplehood and ethnic bond with Jews in Israel, or Southern Italians or people of Irish extraction, all of whom feel an affinity for people of the same background. You can’t change your ethnic affiliation, although you can change how strongly you identify with that group.

Ethnicity is as important in influencing family life as is race. The language one speaks, the food one eats, the holidays one celebrates, the religion one practices, are all ethnically related. Think about your own ethnic background. How does it impact your life and the life of your family? It’s usually most important at holidays, family events and crucial life stages such as weddings and funerals.

Ethnicity has had a large impact on family life worldwide. Recently the war in Kosovo was related to ethnic differences between the Albanians and the Kosovars. More often than not, wars are fought because of ethnic conflict. Ethnic differences can lead to genocide, which is the killing of groups of people as in the “ethnic cleansing” of Albanians. It can also lead to ecocide, which is the destruction of the environment surrounding a group of people. An example of that might be the destruction of the rainforest in Brazil and the resultant loss of life of the indigenous peoples who live there. There is also ethnocide, which is the destruction of the culture of an ethnic group. A contemporary example of that might be the destruction of the Tibetan Buddhist religion through the intermarriage with Han Chinese settlers in current day Tibet.

Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide in Rwanda

As an example of the consequences of ethnicity on family life I would like to describe to you what occurred in Rwanda in 1994. I tell you about this because many of my students have been shocked to learn of this horror, wondering why it had never come to their attention before. They had heard about Kosovo and knew about the ethnic conflicts there, but had never learned about an equally horrific tragedy in Africa. They wondered why the world did not intervene in this incident the way NATO chose to in Kosovo. I leave you to answer that question for yourself.

Rwanda is a small country about the size of Maryland that sits in East Africa, neighboring Burundi, Uganda, the Central African Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. All of its citizens are black African except for a very small white, expatriate community. The ethnic composition is 89% Hutu, 10% Tutsi, and 1% Twa (Ramsay, 122-23). These ethnic differences are primarily based historically on what kind of work the groups do. They all share the same language and look the same physically, although the Tutsi are supposedly somewhat taller. Hutu are primarily pastoralists, meaning they are farmers and herders. They had gotten along well and there was lots of intermarriage between the two main groups. In the traditional social order the Twa were considered the outcasts, the Hutu were the servants and the Tutsi were the aristocrats. Historically the Hutu cared for the cattle and served the Tutsi, who protected them.

During the colonial era, the old order of things was changed and the Hutu became coffee growers, through the encouragement of the German and Belgian colonists. Because of western concepts of ethnicity, distinctions were made between the groups, with the Tutsi being favored by the colonists who saw them as lighter skinned. Discontent grew because land was crowded and by the 1950s conflict developed between the groups. The Hutu began to rebel against the Tutsi aristocracy, and by 1962, the traditionally Tutsi-dominated government shifted to Hutu. From the 1960s until today there has been continued interethnic competition for power. The Tutsi have sought independence, wanting to establish their own country and actually formed a revolutionary group based in neighboring Uganda.

On April 6, 1994, the Hutu president of the country, and the president of neighboring Burundi, who was also Hutu, were shot down in their plane. Within half an hour of their deaths, a slaughter of Tutsi began, urged on by Hutu extremists who alleged that Tutsi had killed the president. Death lists were prepared by local Hutu chiefs and within a few months over 500,000 Tutsi were massacred. One newspaper article described Tutsi huddled in a church, seeking asylum, being turned over to the Hutu, who systematically slaughtered a few thousand in a matter of hours. In neighboring Tanzania, bodies were found floating down the river at a rate of 80 an hour, entering Lake Victoria almost 100 miles from the Rwandan border (122). Estimates of total number killed are now at between 500,000 to 800,000 (Krulfeld, 1999).

Plans for the genocide had been going on for quite awhile, before the killing of the Hutu president (Ramsay, 122). Death squads had already begun slaughtering Tutsi months earlier. The UN was already there as a peacekeeping force, but took no action during this crisis; in fact, U.N. soldiers were evacuated to protect them from harm. Over one-third of the Tutsi population was killed. Then those who survived began to retaliate. In all, over 3 million Rwandans, both Tutsi and Hutu, fled in panic across the borders of other countries, all trying to save their lives and the lives of their children. To this day there are over 1 million refugees still in Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda, all waiting to go home and being barred from doing so by the Hutu-dominated government. The situation remains tense and contentious.

How does this affect family life? Families were destroyed. Children watched their parents being maimed and killed. Babies were taken from their pregnant mothers’ bellies. Young men who had their hands cut off so they would carry the story out, now traumatized by their experiences and unable to work or feed their families. Families were in flight. They became refugees, homeless and struggling. They lived in desolate and overcrowded camps, searching for their loved ones and struggling to survive. Families that might have had a Tutsi wife and a Hutu husband were now forced to break up, and the country and families were in chaos. Needless to say there were countless orphans as well. Many of those children were homeless and had to be taken in by relatives or even strangers. Many of the children had to fend for themselves and raise their younger siblings. All this because of ethnic differences!

Ethnic conflict is the source of social upheaval and directly impacts family life in tremendous ways. Although it might appear that ethnicity is about people hating others of different ethnic groups, sometimes it is really deeper than that. Often what appears to be ethnic conflict is really political conflict. For example, the issue of ethnicity in Rwanda is really about who is in political power there. The minority Tutsi ran the country; the Hutu took over, the Tutsi wanted independence, and the Hutu slaughtered them because of the desire to maintain political power without having to cede money and territory to them. What was once no difference at all became culturally-constructed difference that led to war and genocide. The economy was suffering from this political process and eventually war ensued. What we find in situations like this is that transnational migrations are taking place because of these culturally constructed ethnic differences.

Transnational Migrations and Family Life

Transnational migrations are movements of people, populations who move because conditions within their homelands are forcing them to go (Krulfeld, 1999). Immigrants may decide to leave their homes because economic conditions are such that they are seeking to better themselves. Many of your grandparents and great-grandparents came to the U.S. for this reason. Migrants travel because they are seeking work; they cross borders to avoid starvation and move with the seasons, seeking any employment they can find. Sometimes migrants are legal, allowed into a country for a season and then forced to leave. Some are also illegal, coming across borders hoping to hide and blend into the new homeland. Refugees flee because of political repression or war; they flee for a specific reason: fear of political persecution (Krulfeld, 1999).

The point is that, although borders between countries appear permanent, in fact, they are permeable. They are crossed regularly, and are not as effective as we might like to think. Think, for example, how Rwanda’s neighbors were impacted by the civil war there. There has been a regular ebb and flow of peoples across the borders, taxing the economies of the neighbors. Sometimes there is a cyclical migration, with people going back and forth, when the danger passes or the economy changes. Communities are not bounded entities—they move, change and reformulate. For example, sometimes refugees are joined by their immigrant family members, and thus become being both refugee and immigrant families. The process is a globally dynamic one. In fact, it is a whole world system in which various ethnic and racial groups move from their homelands to take up residence in new places. It happens all the time.

In the recent past as many as 16-20 million people a year have had to flee their homelands (Krulfeld, 1999). Often the reason for the displacement is ethnicity and race. Decisions about whose rights are denied are usually racially or ethnically based. This displacement necessitates for creativity of the human spirit. Families must deal with where to go, what they do with themselves, and how to survive in the face of such trauma. Families are forced to be quite versatile, learning to live in refugee camps, then in new homes where they probably do not speak the language. Children often become the interpreters for families. Where once traditional expectations of behavior prevailed, now children are in positions of authority. Roles are challenged and families are forced to adapt and change in ways they might never have thought imaginable.

From this discussion, you can imagine the significant consequences ethnicity and race have on family life. They sometimes determine whether you will live or die. They impact employment, education, mortality rates, mental health and health. In a study of Cambodian refugees living in Thailand almost half of the 993 family members experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression. Many had seen the killing of their families and forced labor. The result of that trauma to their families has had lasting effects in their lives (Mollica, Donelan, Tor, Lavelle, Elais, Frankel & Blandon, 1993). Clearly race and ethnicity have significant influence on how life will be lived, on the quality of life and on life style. They are an important structural condition that cannot be overlooked.

Class Differences

Equally important to family life is one’s class background. Class is part of the socio-structural system, determining where one fits, this time in terms of socio-economic status. How class is determined is actually quite a complicated process. It is not just about how much money one earns, nor only about educational level or occupation. Current work on class indicates that the term refers to access to power (or lack thereof), consciousness about one’s position in life, the ability to pass the status on to one’s children, one’s educational level, and the actual control that one has over his or her life (Barker, 1991). It also has a lot to do with culture, values, norms and world view. One’s social origins play an important role in determining class.

For a woman class involves other factors as well. A woman’s class status might also be defined by her husband/partner’s earnings. There is a dynamic interaction that comes as a result of the class one is born into, the class of one’s partner, and one’s current income. People are more mobile into or out of different classes than they are in relation to race, ethnicity and caste. They can leave their class origins through marriage, education or training. In fact, people also move down in class, depending on availability of opportunities. However, the reality is that very few people move up or down in any significant numbers. It tends to more of a myth that people can get rich and change their life styles.

In the U.S. many people would argue that they are middle class, no matter how much they earn. In one of my classes I regularly do a median distribution of income per year. I ask the students what class they belong to. Then I chart the income distribution for the class. About 3/4 of the students say they are of the middle class. However, when we look at the spread of income alone, not even including family wealth, which is about other acquired assets like stocks and property, we find that the lowest income is approximately $15,000 and the highest is 3 million a year. The median distribution is over $80,000, well over the approximate national median of $45,000, in the United States. Yet all of the students have told me that they are middle class.

The U.S. has the widest gap between rich and poor among the core countries. The richest 10 percent own almost 80 percent of real estate, more than 90 percent of securities (stocks and bonds) and about 60 percent of all the money in bank accounts. In fact, the situation has gotten worse since the 1970s. The incomes of the richest fifth of the population are increasing, while those of the poorest fifth are decreasing at a rate of 0.78 per year. Ninety percent of all American families own only 28 percent of the wealth in the U.S. (Mantsiso, 1996, 98)!

In the U.S., we tend to identify four classes: the upper class, the middle class, the working class and the poor. We talked briefly about these divisions in Chapter Four when we learned about the history of family life in core countries. The upper class is generally considered to be of two types: the old rich and the new rich. The old rich are people like the Rockefellers and duPonts, those who have had wealth for generations and have established lifestyles that many of us envy. Old money means expensive private education for their children, affluent homes and social clubs and secluded communities. The new rich are people who have recently earned large amounts of money, perhaps from investment or technology, but have not yet attained the prestige associated with the old wealth. But they live well. They make up about 8 percent on the U.S. population (164).

Those who are “super rich,” be it from new or old money, include about 420,000 households in the U.S. The average value of their wealth is $8.9 million (Mantsiso, 1996, 98). Family life for them emulates life on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” although not without emotional trauma and difficulties too. For example, wife battering, child abuse and sexual abuse still occur within upper class families, even with the insulation of money surrounding them.

The middle class is made up of educated professionals, small business owners and bureaucrats in the service sectors. Their lifestyles are more moderate, they tend to live in the suburbs and share the American value of upward mobility and affluence. They tend to spend more than they earn and their patterns of consumption have been described as “conspicuous.” They make up about 43% of the population (164). Worldwide there is the spreading of the idea of being middle class. For example in Brazil there is the recent (since 1960) phenomenon of the emergence of the democratic middle class family, who resembles the American middle class family in many ways (Westfield, 1997). There tends to be more egalitarian relationships developing between men and women, there is a belief in individual liberty, the ability for a child to express his or her true feelings to the parents and the increasing possibility of divorce in the case of an unhappy marriage (30).

The working class are those people who are employed in skilled, semi-skilled or unskilled labor. They are the “working people” who belong to labor unions, and “blue collar workers” who live close to the edge economically. There is actually more racial and ethnic diversity in the working class than in the other classes, in that new immigrants are likely to begin in this class when they arrive (Mantsiso, 166). Lillian Rubin (1994) has studied working class families in America and notes that there are greater similarities than differences among Black, Asian and white working-class families. She found that the working-class were hidden from view and have an enormous struggle in making ends meet. She noted that “when the economy falters, families tremble” (223) and that working class families, regardless of race or ethnicity share common worries and difficulties raising their families. Their lifestyles are not that different from one another.

The poor are only 11.8 percent of the population, and are considered “down on their luck.” These are folks who are in poverty, either the working poor or receiving public assistance. Sometimes they are called lower class. Any family of four earning less than $17,029 is considered poor by government calculations (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000b). Many are working poor who do not make enough money to raise themselves above the poverty line, even though one of the partners in the home may have a full time job. Low wages are often the cause of poverty. In 1999 2 million Americans worked full-time throughout the year and were still poor. Currently there are 32.3 million people considered poor in the United States.

Contrary to public opinion not all poor people are on public assistance nor do people stay on public assistance for generations. In recent research Gottschalk, McLanahan, and Sandefur (1994) found that people are in poverty only temporarily, with only 12 percent of people on public assistance lasting for 5 or more years and only 5 percent having spells of poverty when they are forced to receive public assistance of 7 or more years. So much for the myth of the generational dependence on public assistance. This research began charting families from 1968, so the new welfare laws of 1996 played no role in these low numbers.

With differences in class come differences in quality of life and quality of family life. Hunger, for example, is alive and well in the U.S., with 20 million poor Americans experiencing hunger for at least some period of time each month (Mantsiso, 1996, 97). More than 2 million poor people live in NYC alone, and one in eight Americans live in poverty. Parents are unable to feed their children. There is a direct connection between socioeconomic status and health. The U.S. is nineteenth in the world in infant deaths, at 10.6 per 1,000 live births. This places us behind Spain, Singapore and Hong Kong (99). If you look at poor Blacks, the rate rises to 18.2, placing the U.S. in 28th position behind Bulgaria and equal to Costa Rica. Family life is directly impacted by poverty and hunger.

Class is directly correlated with deaths by cancer, chronic disease, and surgical and medical complications. The rate of health problems in poor neighborhoods is several times greater than in wealthy neighborhoods. These numbers are related to inadequate nutrition, exposure to occupational and environmental health hazards, and access to health care. The poor cannot afford common hospital procedures that those with medical insurance receive.

Matrix of Domination

Class is a position that people are placed in because of the social stratification system; it is a product of being limited and confined by opportunity structure. Adding race and gender to the matrix increases the chances of poverty and of lower class standing (103). Patricia Hill Collins (1996) argues that race, class and gender are categories of analysis that are essential in understanding the structural bases of domination and subordination. In other words, there is no hierarchy of victimization. These three variables weave together to create a system of systematic inequities. So Black women have less opportunity to make money or obtain education than do white males, for example. It is this intersection of race, class and gender that impacts family life differentially depending on one’s position in the structure. If one is a middle class Black, racism will be somewhat different than it is for a poor Black American, for example. Sexism is experienced differently by an upper class woman than by a woman of color. It is this matrix of domination that allows for understanding the differential experiences of people within similar systems. Members of groups holding minority status in the U.S., for example, must get their children ready to participate and survive in a society that is stratified along racial and ethnic lines. They are forced to teach their children about the consequences of racism, while still trying to help them develop positive self images and to function in a racist society (Arendell, 1998).

Let’s look at family life in Brazil, for another example.

Brazil and Class

Perhaps one of the most inequitable societies in the world, in terms of class disparities, is Brazil. Brazil’s population is the largest in Latin America, and is as ethnically diverse as any in the world. African slaves were imported beginning in the sixteenth century, after the Europeans displaced the indigenous peoples and labor was needed to work the land. Today most Brazilians are descendants of Indians, Africans and Portuguese. There are also new immigrants who come from Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The Brazilian culture is a mix of all these influences.

Because Brazil has had military dictatorships, mass uprisings and political upheavals, it is a newly emerging market economically and has extreme poverty, lots of violence, and disturbing exploitation of its poor. Nonetheless, it has become the 10th largest economy in the world, primarily through the exploitation of its vast resources. Recently Brazilians opened the largest industrial park in the developing world (McMullen, 1999) and the country has been considered a miracle in terms of its quick economic growth. Unfortunately the growth primarily benefited the upper classes, who enjoyed the consumer goods that came along with the boom. Agriculture was neglected, and the country could not feed itself and had to import food. The poor have suffered.

Class membership in Brazil is based a chiefly on income, family history and connections, education, social behavior, tastes in housing, food and dress as well as personality, appearance and talent (Goodwin, 1998). Some scholars argue that what looks like racial difficulties seem to be class based problems. By this I mean that poverty and the great disparities between rich and poor are what divides the country, not skin color. However, it is also important to mention that in Brazil, darker skinned people earn 40 percent less than whites who are in the same profession. So there seem to be some racial inequities present, even if most people in the country say they have no racial problems. In fact, class is the biggest division in Brazil.

Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992) studied family life in the favelas of Brazil. Favelas are slum shanty towns that dot the Brazilian cities, built by rural-urban migrants in search of employment. They are squatter villages, often rigged with electricity stolen by using cords strung across yards and shanties. I have visited favelas and found them squalid, a maze of narrow streets, with latrines and water spigots placed sporadically around the area for public use.

Living in these favelas, Scheper-Hughes found that life was focused on violence. The women were beaten regularly by their partners and death was ever present. It appears that “mother love and child death” were the experiences of families there. With a 25 percent infant mortality rate, many of those babies died because of inadequate diets. Mothers began to know which babies would live or die and they developed a sense of “mortal neglect” which was a fatalistic withholding of nourishment and maternal care. They maintained a distance from their children because conditions were so distressing that they had to protect themselves from the inevitable and regular loss. The political/economic situation had put them there, and they had no way to protect their children from the inevitability of death. In fact, her book is called Death Without Weeping. In Brazil class membership is life-giving and life-taking. To be poor in Brazil means to die earlier and to often see the loss of one’s children.

Interestingly, lower-income families in Brazil also tend to be more mother-centered than upper class families (Fonesca, 1991). Because women are often the heads of household in the Brazilian slums, they become the center of the economic and decision-making coalition with their children. There is strong solidarity between groups of women, daughters and daughters’ children, because it provides continuity and security. Often, if there is any employment at all, the women work as domestics, cooks, washerwomen or seamstresses. Although men are not frequently at home, the women come to rely on their male blood relatives in time of need or for protection. Blood becomes far more important than marriage, and deep-bonded kinship patterns serve as the basis for family life in the favelas of Brazil (154-155).

Why?

For generations scholars have been trying to explain why the inequities of social stratification exist. Why is there racism, elitism, anti-ethnic bias? As I noted in the earlier chapter on theory, there are two schools of thought about how to explain social problems: the structural functionalist (or order approach) and the social conflict model.

If you remember, the structural functionalists (I called them the consensus makers) believe that the world is harmonious and ordered. They argue that humankind is basically good and that people can achieve whatever they set out to do because society is integrated, whole and for the most part, at peace. These people accent patterns of inclusion, of the orderly integration and assimilation of racial and ethnic groups into the dominant society.

The social conflict theorists say that the world is a struggle between groups of people in a hierarchical system and all are vying for scarce resources and power. They give more attention to the persisting inequality that leads to an unequal distribution of resources associated with racial and ethnic subordination (Feagin & Feagin, 1993, 26). It is from this social conflict model that I will provide an explanation for social inequality.

Social Conflict Explanations of Inequality

Some social theorists think that there is a caste system of inequality. Remember that early in this chapter I said that caste was a hierarchy of rank which locks individuals into the grouping of their parents and is immutable (unchanging). In this thinking it is said that the U.S. has a caste system, much like India’s, and that a system of institutionalized discrimination perpetuates it. In fact, social theorists have even used the term American apartheid, just like South African apartheid (keeping separate).

W. E. B. Du Bois, an important African-American social theorist and civil rights activist, said that racial oppression was really about class oppression that comes from capitalism. He argued that as long as Black workers were excluded from full citizenship by those who owned the workplaces and other dominant capitalists, there would be no racial equality. Another Black thinker, Oliver Cox, argued that slavery was really about the need to find cheap labor for the plantations, and had little to do with skin color. He said that the search for cheap labor by a profit-oriented capitalist class led to a system of racial subordination that continues to this day (Feagin, 1991, 35). These two thinkers believe that race and class oppression are one and the same.

Some theorists argue that race and class oppression are separate but related systems. If you remember from an earlier chapter, internal colonial theory says that current inequalities are due to a long history of exploitation of workers who were needed to fuel capitalism. This is what led to slavery and to the exploitation of Native American, Mexicans and later Asians here in the U.S. Exploitation is based on the colonists first engaging in external colonialism in other parts of the world, but then needing laborers here as well. Thus it is in the interest of whites to keep low-wage paid laborers because they can reap enormous profits (36). They talk about how the government has played a role in legitimating the exploitation of minorities, and say that African-Americans, in particular are still a “colony” in the United States. These theories would also have relevance in other parts of the world where the elite still need the poor and ethnic minorities to do the labor in those societies. Thus the elite in Brazil need the poor in the favelas for the low-paid work they do. As we have seen throughout this book, this all has daily impact on the way that family life is lived in these places in the world. This is an example of how world-systems theory explains the functioning of family life in periphery countries.

Asians and Asian Americans would be another example of people who can be explained by the conflict theory. Espiritu (1997) has argued that Asians are constructed as neither “black” nor “white” (109). As an intermediary group between blacks and whites they are the “non white other,” who receive special opportunities but also unique disabilities. They are in an alien status: where historically they were above blacks in the hierarchy of domination, but able to take over work that blacks could do. Now they are in the “model minority” status, in which they are almost white, but not quite white (109).

Contemporary conflict theorists are saying that race and class are intertwined; they are not one and the same thing, nor are they separate, Instead they are like threads woven together and you need to pull out the threads and look at each closely to understand why groups are oppressed. It is an interactive system.

For conflict theorists there are four classes: the capitalists who own and control capital investments and buy the labor of others. Then there are the managers, who administer the capitalists’ investments and have gained control over the work of others; the petit bourgeoisie, who are the small group of merchants who own businesses and work for themselves, and finally the working class, the largest group, who sell their labor to employers in return for wages and salaries (37). The dominant class in the political/economic system is the capitalist class, who subordinate all the rest of us, be we white or nonwhite for their own profit. But then the nonwhite workers suffer from structural discrimination for being workers and also from being workers of color. In this process of class and then racial exploitation, two threads are intertwined to create a crosscut of race and class discrimination.

Here are some examples that will make this more understandable. If one is from the working class that person makes less money than the capitalists or the managers, and if one is a person of color that person makes less money than a white worker. As we know from earlier statistics, this means quite a bit in terms of how your life and the life of your family are impacted. So it is important to real people and it means that family life will be easier or harder depending on your race or class position.

In Brazil, for example, if you are poor and Black you might lose your child to malnutrition at a young age. In the U.S. you might get sick and not have health care because of your race and class position. If you are richer and of an ethnic group that has been well assimilated, your life chances are better.

Let’s Add Gender to the Mix: Gendered Racism

Feminist theorists have added gender to the system of oppression and some have said, as Patricia Hill Collins once did, that racism has many gendered forms. Black women are exploited both as blacks and as women and the racism they suffer differs from what men experience. For example, under slavery women were sex objects for white men. White women are still the standard of beauty which black women try to live up to and judge themselves by. Black women are disproportionately found in lower paying jobs as secretaries or domestics. These are examples of gendered racism. Other feminist theorists have pointed out triple oppressions: race, class and gender, all of which have cumulative effects that put women of color, like our Brazilian example, in subordinate positions to men of color and to the majority of the white population (43).

Summary and Conclusions

Race, ethnicity, class and caste are all social constructions. With these constructions come differences in family life that are called structural arrangements. Rather than blaming individual poor or Black or minority groups for their conditions, we understand now that the way a society is set up creates these problems. Then families have to adapt, change and respond to these social constructions. Thus race, class, caste and ethnicity disparities have an external cause and are part of the fabric within which families have to operate.

In this chapter we looked at the concept of caste and saw that it was a hierarchy of rank that is based on at what level a person is born. Some thinkers believe that we have a caste system in the U.S. Social stratification was defined as the social ranking and categorization of people, determining the inherent worth of individuals based on a social category. We looked at the fluid definitions of race and ethnicity, realizing that people can be called a race at one point in time, and an ethnic group at another. We defined the terms race and ethnicity—race being alleged physical differences, while ethnicity is more culturally and historically defined. We then saw that it might be best to use the term racial/ethnic for the sake of simplicity.

We looked a bit at the history of apartheid in South Africa and saw some of the consequences on families. Then, by looking at the history and statistics of race relations in the U.S., we saw the consequences of racial differences here. We defined social Darwinism and saw that racism, prejudice and discrimination in the U.S. have their roots in the debate over slavery and the territorial expansion to the west.

Ethnicity was then addressed and we saw that ethnicity is a sense of peoplehood and a shared cultural heritage. We looked at Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing that took place there in 1994, understanding the painful consequences that ethnic differences can take. We discussed transnational migrations and refugees, immigrants and migrant workers and their family lives, and learned that many transnational migrations take place because of racial and ethnic conflicts.

Later we got to class and saw it as a fluid category, sometimes meaning how much money one earns, but also meaning level of education, inherited wealth and with whom one associates. Then we discussed the matrix of domination and the intersection of race, class, ethnicity and gender, using Brazilian families as an example.

Finally we looked at the social theorists and their explanations as to why people treat others differently. Focusing primarily on the social conflict theorists we saw that race and ethnic differences are really about class differences, and that capitalist arrangements are at the root of difficulties between people.

Gendered racism was the final form we dissected. Here we saw that there is differential discrimination based on an interplay between race, gender, ethnicity and class. As much as we might like to tease out the differences for argument sake, people’s lives, especially women’s and children’s lives are made more difficult because of their place in the social stratification system.

But it really isn’t all so bad as it seems. Family lives are hard, depending on these variables, but remarkably enough people go on, and even thrive, in the face of enormous difficulties.

In the next few chapters we are going to look at the joys of family life. When families form, when people partner, marry, decide to have and raise children and even when and if they break up, there is a vitality and a resilience. Now we will turn to family formation, marriages and partnering, raising children and intergenerational relationships to see the elasticity and staying power that family life has. Once again we will continue on our journey around the world. I have seen many of these examples first hand; I have spoken with these people and I have been in their homes. I ask you to continue this journey with me, into the homes and lives of families in the world.