Unmasking the differences: Nonviolence and social control

Cross Currents, Spring, 2002 by Gloria Albrecht

However, it is also true that in this age of postindustrial capitalism middle- and upper-class white men are experiencing their own fears of loss of income, social position, and control. Despite the numbers indicated above, a 1993 Newsweek poll of white males reported that 56 percent believed they were losing an advantage in terms of jobs and incomes. Sixty percent believed that white males are more frequently targets of antagonism from women and minority men. Fifty-two percent felt white males were losing their influence over U.S. culture, including style, entertainment, and the arts. (46) In fact, the shift from an industrial to a service-based economy has seen a drop in the real wages of men. Downward mobility in terms of income and occupational change is now beginning to touch more and more people whose middle-class status was always assumed to be the starting point of achieving more abundance. Structural changes in the job market place increasing pressures on the new entrants to the market as fewer middl e-class jobs are being created. For the first time since the Depression, most workers can expect to earn less than their parents. (47) The biggest losers in this downward trend are white males. (48) In 1986, the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress estimated that had women riot entered the wage labor market in great numbers in the last two decades, real family income would have dropped 18 percent between 1980 and 1986. (49) The impact of these economic changes and of the increasing presence of white women and women and men of color into what have been all white male prerogatives was described by Glenn Bucher:

Because whiteness and maleness and heterosexual preference were the primary qualifications of those who shaped and controlled collective social life, each straight white male was led to believe in the potential of his own future....

For straight white males to see that they are on the way down the American ladder of success is no casual discovery....

What is more frightening is that blacks, women, and homosexuals are moving in to take places previously reserved for straight white males. With their emergence comes the prerogative to make and to write history. History is beginning to expose straight white males for what they really have been and are. (50)

In this particular social context, Hauerwas's proposals become part of the ongoing social discourse. On the one hand, this discourse acknowledges the fear that the dominant group holds toward others. It rightly identifies the fear that arises when one's social location is at risk, or even just imagined to be at risk. It names the moral chaos that occurs when the moral basis for one's privileged social identity is challenged. It rightly identifies the temptation to violent defense of one's dominant position. However, by universalizing these feelings, by claiming that these are the sins of all humans, Hauerwas's anthropology serves to obfuscate the reality of this concrete system of domination and its relationships of unequal power from which his audience benefits. Confronted by the challenges of others, white middle- and upper-class women and men may be comforted by a gospel that removes from us the ability or responsibility to respond to structural injustice.