Social Inequalities

The modernity that emerged from Enlightenment ideas and the technological innovations of the Industrial offered the promise not only of greater prosperity but also of a more just society. In Europe, at least, the absolute power of monarchs, the aristocracy, and the Church was challenged, and old dogmas were discredited by rational and scientific thought. At the same time, advances in technology brought mechanization to many trades and gave birth to new industries, increasing wealth and bringing hope of improvement to people’s working lives.

Class consciousness

As the modern industrialized society became established, however, it became apparent that it was not the utopian dream that had been expected. By the 19th century, many thinkers had begun to realize that this progress came at a cost, and that some of the promises had yet to be kept. Instead of becoming more just, modern industrial society had created new inequalities.

Among the first to study the new social order was Friedrich Engels, who saw the emergence of a working class exploited by the owners of the mills and factories. With Karl Marx, he identified oppression of this class as the result of capitalism, which in turn fueled and fed off industrialization.

Marx and Engels considered the social problems of industrial society in material, economic terms, and saw inequality as a division between the working class (the proletariat) and the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie). Later sociologists also recognized that social inequality is manifested in a class system, but suggested that the stratification was more complex. Max Weber, for example, proposed that as well as economic situation, status and political standing also play a part. Perceptions of class and the issue of class consciousness became focuses for sustained sociological study of inequality, including the concept of “habitus,” as explained by Pierre Bourdieu.

Racial oppression

While Engels and Marxconcentrated on the economic disparity between the classes, others realized that it was not only the working classes that suffered social injustice. Harriet Martineau highlighted the gap between the Enlightenment ideal of equal rights and the reality of modern society. Her experiences in the US, where she encountered slavery, showed that even in a democracy founded on ideals of liberty, some groups— women, ethnic minorities, and the working classes—were excluded from participation in shaping society. The connection she made with these various forms of oppression was re-explored by bell hooks some 150 years later.

Even when slavery was finally abolished, true emancipation was incomplete; the political exclusion of black people—by being denied the vote—persisted in the USA well into the 20th century. Black people in the USA and Europe also faced prejudices as a hangover from slavery and European colonialism that have persisted to the present day. Sociologists such as W.E.B. Du Bois examined the position of ethnic groups in predominantly white European industrial societies, and in the 20th century attention became focused on the connections between race and social inequality. Elijah Anderson began his study of black people and their association with the concept of “the ghetto”; Edward Said analysed negative Western perceptions of “the East”; and British sociologists such as Paul Gilroy sought to find ways of eradicating racism in modern multicultural societies.

 

Gender equality

Women likewise struggled for political suffrage, but even after this had been achieved they faced  injustice in societies that remained fundamentally patriarchal through the 20th century and up to the present day. It had taken “first wave” feminism over a century to get women the vote, and the task of the second wave, starting soon after World War II, was to examine and overcome persistent social injustice based on gender.

Rather than simply addressing the economic and political factors underlying the continued oppression of women, Sylvia Walby suggested a comprehensive analysis of the social systems that maintain society’s patriarchal structure, while R.W. Connell pointed out the prevalence of conventional perceptions—socially constructed forms—of masculinity that reinforce the concept of patriarchal society

 

I BROADLY ACCUSE THE BOURGEOISIE OF SOCIAL MURDER

Living in England from 1842 to 1844, the German philosopher Friedrich Engels had seen, first-hand, the devastating effects of industrialization on workers and their children. The bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, he said, knowingly causes the workers’ “life of toil and wretchedness... but takes no further trouble in the matter.”

He claimed the bourgeoisie was turning a blind eye to their part in the early deaths of their workers, when it was within their power to change things, so he accused them of “social murder.” In the 1840s, England was seen as the workshop of the world; it enjoyed a unique position at the center of the Industrial Revolution. Engels observed that it was undergoing a massive but silent transformation that had altered the whole of English civil society.

Industrialization had driven down prices, so handcrafted work, which was more expensive, was less in demand; workers moved to the cities only to endure harsh conditions and financial insecurity. The industrialized, capitalist economy lurched from boom to bust, and workers’ jobs could quickly disappear. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie grew richer by treating the workers as disposable labor.

The legacy of industrialism

In Engels’ first book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, he described the appalling way of life of the workers, or proletariat, in Manchester, London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, and found similar situations in all these cities. He reported filthy streets with pools of stagnant urine and excrement, filled with the stench of animal putrefaction from the tanneries. cholera outbreaks occurred, along with constant epidemics of consumption and typhus. Workers were packed into one-room huts or the cellars of damp houses that had been built along old ditches to save the house-owner money. They lived in conditions that defied all consideration of cleanliness and health, Engels said—and this in Manchester, “the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world.

The proletariat were worked to the point of exhaustion, wearing cheap clothing that gave no protection against accidents or the climate. They could buy only the food spurned by the bourgeoisie, such as decaying meat, wilted vegetables, “sugar” that was the refuse of soap-boiling firms, and cocoa mixed with earth.

When work disappeared and wages failed, even this meager diet proved impossible, and many workers and their families began to starve; this caused illness and a continued inability to work, should work become available. Doctors were unaffordable, and very often entire families starved to death. The worker, Engels explained, could only obtain what he needed — healthy living conditions, secure employment, and a decent wage — from the bourgeoisie, “which can decree his life or death.” He was insistent that this hugely exploitative, capital-owning class should therefore take immediate steps to change workers’ conditions and stop its careless murder of an entire social class.

Friedrich Engels

Political theorist and philosopher Friedrich Engels was born in Germany in 1820. His father was a German industrialist who struggled with Engels’ reluctance to attend school or work in the family business. As a teenager, he wrote articles under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald, which gained him access to a group of left-wing intellectuals.

After working for a short time in a family factory in Manchester, England, he became interested in communism. In 1844 he traveled to Paris, where he met Karl Marx and became his colleague and financial sponsor. They jointly wrote The Communist Manifesto, and worked together until Marx’s death in 1883, after which Engels completed the second and third volumes of Das Kapital, along with many books and articles of his own.

THE PROBLEM OF THE 20TH CENTURY IS THE PROBLEM OF THE COLOR LINE

Toward the end of the 19th century, the US social reformer and freed slave Frederick Douglass drew attention to the continuing prejudice against black people in the US. He claimed that although blacks had ceased to belong to individuals, they had nevertheless become slaves of society. Out of the depths of slavery, he said, “has come this prejudice and this color line,” through which white dominion was asserted in the workplace, the ballot box, the legal courts, and everyday life.

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois investigated the idea of the color line in The Souls of Black Folk. A literary, sociological, and political landmark, it examines the changing position of African-Americans from the US Civil War and its aftermath to the early 1900s, in terms of the physical, economic, and political relations of black and white people in the South. It concludes that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line”— the continuing division between the opportunities and perspectives of blacks and whites. Du Bois begins his study by pointing out that no white person is willing to talk about race explicitly, choosing instead to act out prejudice in various ways. But what they really want to know is this: “How does it feel to be a problem?”

Du Bois finds the question unanswerable, because it only makes sense from a white perspective—black people do not see themselves as “a problem.” He then examines how this duality of perspective has occurred and gives the example of his first encounter with racism. While at primary school, a new pupil refused to accept a greeting card from Du Bois, at which point “it dawned on me that I was different from the others.”

He felt like them in his heart, he says, but realized that he was “shut out from their world by a vast veil.” Initially undaunted, he says that he felt no need to tear down the veil until he grew up and saw that all the most dazzling opportunities in the world were for white people, not black people. There was a color line, and he was standing on the side that was denied power, opportunity, dignity, and respect.

Identity crisis

Du Bois suggests that the color line is internal too. Black people, according to him, see themselves in two ways simultaneously : through the reflection of the white world, which views them with amused contempt and pity, and through their own sense of self, which is more fluid and less well defined. These combine to form what Du Bois calls a doubleconsciousness: “...two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

The unfolding history of the black person in the US is, Du Bois claims, the history of this inner conflict, which itself is a result of the external, worldly battle between black and white people. He suggests that a black person wants to merge the doubleconsciousness into one state, and find a true African-American spirit that does not Africanize America, nor “bleach his African soul in a flood of white Americanism.”

The Freedmen’s Bureau

How had black people become the “problem”? To try to explain this issue, Du Bois looks to the history of slavery in the US and the turning point of the Civil War. According to him, slavery was the real cause of the war, which started in 1861. As the Union army of the northern states marched into the South, slaves fled to join it. At first, slaves were returned to their owners, but the policy changed and they were kept as military labor

In 1863, slaves were declared free, and the government set up the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (also called the Freedmen’s Bureau) to issue food, clothing, and abandoned property to the “flood” of destitute fugitive former slaves (men, women, and children). However, the Bureau was run by military staff ill-equipped to deal with social reorganization. The Bureau was also hampered by the sheer size of the task: the promise of handing over slave-driven plantations to former slaves “melted away” when it became clear that over 800,000 acres were affected.

One of the great successes of the Bureau was the provision of free schools for all children in the South. Du Bois points out that this was seen as a problem, because “the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro.” The opposition to black education in the South “showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood.”

At the same time, the Bureau sowed division in legal matters. According to Du Bois, it used its courts to “put the bottom rail on top”—in other words, it favored black litigants. Meanwhile, the civil courts often aided the former slavemasters. Du Bois describesmwhite people as being “ordered about, seized, imprisoned, and punished over and over again” by the Bureau courts, while black people were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful (white) men.

The Bureau also opened a Freedman’s Bank in 1865 to handle the deposits of former slave men and women. This initiative was hampered by incompetency, and the bank eventually crashed, taking the dollars of the freedmen with it. Du Bois says that this was the least of the loss, because “all the faith in saving went too, and much of the faith in men; and that was a loss that a nation which today sneers at Negro shiftlessness has never yet made good.”

The Bureau had set up a system of free (non-slave) labor and ex-slave proprietorship, secured the recognition of black people as free people in courts of law, and founded common schools. The greatest failing of the Bureau was that it did not establish goodwill between the former masters and the ex-slaves; in fact, it increased enmity. The color line remained, but instead of being explicit it now operated in more subtle ways.

Compromise or agitation?

Following the post-war period known as the Reconstruction, some of the newly won black rights started to slip away. A ruling in a US legal case (Plessy vs Ferguson, 1896) made segregation in public places permissible and set a pattern of racial separation in the South that lasted until Brown vs Board of Education, 1954. Anxiety caused by modernity also fueled a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and its nativist white supremacism, accompanied by a rise in racist violence, including lynchings.

In 1895 the African-American politican Booker T. Washington had given a speech now known as “the Atlanta Compromise.” He suggested that black people should be patient, adopt white middleclass standards, and seek selfadvancement by self-improvement and education to show their worth. By foregoing political rights in return for economic rights and legal justice, Washington argued that social change would be more likely in the longer term. This accommodating stance became the dominant ideology of the time.

Du Bois disagreed strongly, and in The Souls of Black Folk he said that while black people did not expect full civic rights immediately, they were certain that the way for a people to gain their rights “is not by voluntarily throwing them away.” Du Bois had hoped to eliminate racism and segregation through social science, but he came to believe that political agitation was the only effective strategy.

Stretching the color line

In 1949, Du Bois visited the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, where two-thirds of the population had been killed during the Nazi occupation, and 85 percent of the city lay in ruins. He was shocked by the experience, which he said gave him a “more complete understanding of the Negro problem.” Faced with such absolute devastation and destruction, and knowing that it was a direct consequence of racist segregation and violence, Du Bois reassessed his analysis of the color line and declared it a phenomenon that can occur to any cultural or ethnic group. In his 1952 essay for the magazine Jewish Life, “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” he writes: “The race problem... cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of... human hate and prejudice.” It is therefore not color that matters so much as the “line,” which can be drawn to articulate difference and hatred in any group or society.

Activist and scholar

Du Bois became one of the founder members of the civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His ideas were concerned with people of African descent everywhere, and during the 1920s he helped found the Pan-African Association in Paris, France, and organized a series of pan-African congresses around the world. However, at the time of writing about the African soul, in the early 1900s, he said that the conditions that were necessary to achieve a true and unified African-American spirit had not yet been reached.

Du Bois applied systematic methods of fieldwork to previously neglected areas of study. The use of empirical data to catalog the details of black people’s lives enabled him to dispel widely held stereotypes. For example, he produced a wealth of data on the effects of urban life on African- Americans in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), which suggests that rather than being caused by anything innate, crime is a product of the environment. His pioneering sociological research and thinking was a huge influence on later prominent civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Du Bois is recognized as one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century.

THE POOR ARE EXCLUDED FROM THE ORDINARY LIVING PATTERNS, CUSTOMS, AND ACTIVITIES OF LIFE PETER TOWNSEND (1928–2009)

Poverty was defined by the social campaigner Seebohm Rowntree at the beginning of the 20th century as astate in which “total earnings are insufficient to obtain the minimum necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency.” This is the “subsistence level” definition of poverty, which has been used by governments to determine the cost of a person’s basic needs such as food, rent, fuel, and clothing.

Food banks have faced surging demand in recent years. They meet basic needs, but often include non-essential foodstuffs that are now considered normal for people to have.

However, in 1979 the British sociologist Peter Townsend said that “poverty” should be defined not in absolute terms, but in terms of relative deprivation. He indicated that every society has an average level in terms of living conditions, diet, amenities, and the type of activities people can participate in. Where an individual or family lacks the resources to obtain these, they are socially excluded from normal life, as well as being materially deprived. Other factors, such as poor skills or bad health, must also be taken into account.

Townsend — a leading campaigner who cofounded the Child Poverty Action Group — pointed out that there was an assumption that poverty had been steadily decreasing in affluent societies. But he drew attention to the increasing income gap between those at the top and lower levels of society, and said that when a country becomes wealthier, but income distribution is markedly uneven, the number of people in poverty is bound to increase.

 

THERE AIN’T NO BLACK IN THE UNION JACK

In his book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, British sociologist Paul Gilroy focuses on racism in Britain in the 20th century. He points out that in the 1970s Britain worried about its “national decline” almost obsessively, and many commentators ascribed this to the “dilution of homogenous and continuous national stock”— specifically, Gilroy says, to the arrival of black people in Britain.

Gilroy indicates that fixed notions of nationality, such as “Britishness,” may not be intentionally racist, but they have racist consequences. In seeking to define Britishness, 20th-century writers always seemed to imagine a white Britain—black people were seen as permanent outsiders. They were denied authentic national membership on the basis of their “race,” and it was often assumed that their allegiance lay elsewhere.

While accepting that the idea of race has been a historical and political force, Gilroy says that it is no more than a social construct a concept created in society. Where some sociologists have suggested a discussion of “ethnicity” or “culture” instead, Gilroy proposes that we should abandon all of these ideas. Whatever terms we use, he says, we are creating a false idea of “natural” categories by putting disparate people into different groups, leading to a division between “them” and “us.”

 

Raciology

According to Gilroy, all these types of discussion leave us enmeshed in what he calls “raciology”—a discourse that assumes certain stereotypes, prejudices, images, and identities. Anti-racists find themselves inverting the position of racist thinkers, but are nevertheless unable to displace the idea of racism altogether. The solution, Gilroy suggests, lies in refusing to accept racial divisions as an inescapable, natural force, and instead developing “an ability to imagine political, economic, and social systems in which ‘race’ makes no sense.”