ROTHENBERG NOTES:

Introduction:

• “Gender” and “Sex” are differentàgender refers to a set of socially constructed meanings that are associated with each sex, and these meanings vary from culture to culture and over time.
• Whiteness and white privilege were constructed historically alongside race differenceàultimately with the goal of protecting the wealth and power of the privileged elite.
• “it is not difference itself that leads to subordination, but the interpretation of difference
• 19^th century ideology: being poor indicated that an individual was morally flawed and therefore deserved his or her poverty. This takes the blame off of society
• “U.S society is organized in such a way as to make hierarchy or class itself appear natural and inevitable”—reinforced by capitalism

Racial Formations: Michael Omi and Howard Winant

· Racial debate is threefold: scientific, political and religious

· Origins of race conciousness: imperialsm and colonialism

· Race is a social concept

· Hypo-decent: affiliation with the subordinate group rather than the superordinate group in order to avoid the ambiguity of intermediate identity

· Racial formations: the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories

· In our society, racial identity signifies personal identity

· “We also become disoriented when people do not act “black”, “Latino” or indeed “white”**

· The historical construction of racial categories is masked by the idea that race is something based in nature and something that is immutable

· “the racial category “black” evolved with the consolidation of racial slavery” (18)—supports the notion that racial formations are driven by social, economic and political forces/changes

Constructing Race, Creating White Privilage: Pem Davidson Buck

· Kathleen Brown: the control of women’s bodies became crucial to the maintenance of whiteness

· Psychological wage: emphasis that whiteness as a benefit in itself

How Jews Became White Folks: Karen Brodkin

· Euroraces: dividing the different European “races”

· “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew”—same as the “hypo-decent” theory

· GI Bill of Rights: a federal program that was designed to assist demobilized GI’s and young families—ultimately the program systematically discriminated against African Americans, allowing white Americans of European decent to move upward socially while preventing African Americans from doing so. Such programs reinforced white/nonwhite racial distinctions even as intrawhite racialization was falling out of fashion.

· Pulling up the bootstraps=myth of meritocracy

Night to His Day, The Social Construction of Gender: Judith Lorber

· “Gender is such a familiar part of every day life that it usually takes a deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are suppose to act to pay attention to how it is produced” (54)

· Transgendered people: supports the notion that in U.S society, sex (anatomy)=gender, since most transgendered people chose to have a sex change in order to validate their transformation