Modern-Day Racism in the Western World - Essay Example

Modern-day Racism in the Western World: Comparison of Two Books 2006 It is true that America has come some way from the racial prejudices that marked the pre-Civil War days. Globalization and economic forces have brought about a greater degree of assimilation of various minority groups, be they black or brown, or from Africa, Latin America or Asia, into the mainstream social fabric of America. Slavery of African-American laborers or the ghettoisation of Latin American immigrants may not be as explicit any more while democracy and egalitarianism have become the buzzword in America, considered to be the melting pot of all cultures. Yet, the distinctive bar that the white Americans continue to maintain in the collective consciousness is quite apparent. The two books under review – Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence and Joe Feagin and Eileen O’Brien’s Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence – clearly show through interview-based surveys that despite economic compulsion towards more interaction with minority communities, prejudices remain in the white sub-consciousness. The working conditions that the immigrants are subjected to are seen by the white employers, not as exploitative, but because “they are foreign and unassimilable” (p. 18, Hondagneu-Sotelo) and cultural pathology against work (Feagin and O’Brien). Hondagneu-Sotelo has researched into the lives of domestic workers from Mexican and Central American origin, whom she considers the largest minority in the country, in Los Angeles. The majority-minority relationship, which may be thought to be a love-hate relationship of sorts, is typical of America and can be duplicated in any other city or region, the author claims. Domestic workers have occupied a prominent role in America for long – as ‘love labor’ by black slave women prior to the Civil War and in a more legalized manner under the Jim Crow laws. With the influx of immigrants from other parts of the world, the composition of domestic worker population has naturally become wider. With the relative ascendancy of the African-American population, newer immigrants from other parts of the world, who are even poorer, take up the space of domestic work. With the days of slavery gone by, informal networks through friends and relatives bring the employer and the employee in contact with each other. While domestic work during the colonial days encompassed a whole range of jobs that is domestic work involves childcare and house cleaning activities, done typically by women. Hence, the modern-day sociological study of domestic workers relates to the employee-employer relationship particularly that of women. Besides, with American white women increasingly joining the workforce, domestic work is left to paid staff, who are typically immigrants, who “subsidize the careers… of their employers” (p. 25) often at the expense of their own children. Hondagneu-Sotelo has found an interesting hierarchy in the composition of domestic workers as well (chapter 4). The upper class white American families usually employ European immigrants who can read and write English and have legal papers; the middle class employ Latin American or Asian immigrants who can read and write English and have legal papers and the relatively poorer white Americans who need domestic workers employ Latin American and Asian workers who are uneducated and have no legal papers. Not surprisingly, the wage rates and work conditions significantly vary between these three groups. The agencies who work as mediators often prepare the workers according to the hierarchy as well. In part 2 of the book, aptly entitled “Finding Hard Work Isn’t Easy”, the author describes this “whole other world”, in which the employment process is completely disorganized, in which immigrant worker agencies and the employer reference networks play the main role. Thus, despite the absence of overt slavery, the roots of exploitation exist in the informal and unequal nature of the job market, where the employees are inherently dependent on the employer networks who determine the terms of employment. The class structure of the employers and the referees determine which worker will be employed by each of the class segments. While the wage rates are hardly ever negotiated in an economic manner, the domestic workers say in the interviews that they would prefer to be regarded for the service that they are employed for rather than by a complacent attitude, which results in a situation when some employers often feel guilty about 'having so much' around someone who 'has so little,' the women who do the work resent not their affluence but the job arrangements, which generally give little other than living wages (chapter 7). From the explicit humiliation of the system of slavery, the domestic workers have moved perhaps to a stage ahead - to an implicit guilt-ridden exploitative one. The worker yearns for professional relationship in which they are given their due share of respect. Instead, they have to deal with employers, ranging from the benevolent who exhibit some amount of “maternalism” to coldness in attitude or downright abusive. The types of work that the domestic staff engages in also determine their working conditions. Typically, as Hondagneu-Sotelo finds, the live-in nannies and housekeepers are what the author calls, “transnational mothers”, since they live with their employers, living behind their own children in the home countries to be reared by grandparents or other relatives (chapter 1). The hierarchy of domestic work follows the order of live-in nanny/housekeeper – live-out nanny housekeeper/nanny – live-out housecleaner. The live-out category can afford to live independently and keep their children with them while living in a less servile atmosphere. The average wage for a Los Angeles live-in is $3.80 an hour, which is of course untaxed since paid informally, working 16 hour a day six days a week, with pension and health insurance concepts unheard of and vacations dependent on the benevolence of the employer. The top rung live-out housecleaner may earn $300 a week, working sex hours a day. Interestingly, as the author finds, the employers don’t see themselves as employers nor their homes as work sites (p. 139). Hence, they expect a ‘maternalistic’ approach from the workers while the latter expect a more-or-less professional attitude. The clash of expectations seems to be at odds with each other. While Hondagneu-Sotelo based her study on interviews of the domestic workers, Feagin and O’Brien has studied racism in the minds of the white employers through wide-ranging interviews of white influential people in business, academia, government and other professions on their views and attitudes about blacks and other minority communities. It emerges from the survey that, while overt racism is not evident, prejudices have continued to creep into the “collective white consciousness” (as the title of the book suggests). Quite like in Hondagneu-Sotelo’s study, these white men do not consider their position as exploitative but the disadvantageous position of the minorities the result of family breakdowns and cultural pathology working against meaningful employment. Rather than recognizing the harmful effects of segregation, they aver “reverse discrimination” against the whites. As one interviewee says, “I don’t like affirmative action, because I wouldn’t … want my accountant to be someone who passed his accountancy examination because he got an extra ten points because he was a black person or a green person or a purple person” (p 97). This survey is more of a study between the white employer-black employee, with references to Latin American or Asians being brought up as model employees in contrast to the lethargic blacks. In contrast to subjects of the previous book discussed, the interviewees in this book spend little time with the black community either at work or in their social lives. The interpretations and the attitude reflected are largely colored by this lack of knowledge, according to the authors. Hence, with the exception of civil rights activists and people who come from multi-racial families, most of the interviewees fall in the categories of ultra-traditionalists (who blame cultural pathology as the cause of backwardness of the black minority) and modernists (who to some extent are subject to sympathy or ‘autopathy’ (p 64), the latter being a stage when the subject actually feels the pains of racial discrimination). Expectedly, the older generation who grew up in the pre-Civil Rights days, are more conservative while the younger generation, who have interacted, albeit to a limited extent, with minority communities in school, college, playgrounds, office, etc., are moderate. The black minority, too, takes pains to be non-confrontationists and non-threatening in their bid to fit into the mainstream. Hondagneu-Sotelo’s book is an attempt to see the immigrant domestic worker – white employer relationship from a Marxist viewpoint. She recognizes that the wider range of immigrants in the work force has, in fact, increased and not mitigated the exploitative system. The labor system has become more formalized in contrast to the days of slavery. Now, the system of reference-employment and agencies working to perpetuate the exploitative nature of domestic work, in addition to lack of education of minorities and the limited job opportunities outside the domestic realm, has in fact brought about some sort of quasi-legalization of the system. As solutions to the problem, she offers a re-look at the labor and tax laws as well as the wage laws that should incorporate the domestic workers. On the other hand, Feagin and O’Brien has concentrated on the black minority as victims of racial prejudices and considers the “browning of America” as a coercive force towards mitigation of racial prejudices. In the wake of increased migration from all over the world and the renewed emergence of racial prejudice post 9/11 events, this does not seem to be a likely outcome. However, the complacency of the white employers and the reluctance to admit of their implication in the structure of prejudice is obvious in the interviewees, most of who seem to be facing such probing questions for the first time in their lives. On the whole, I think Hondagneu-Sotelo does a better job in analyzing racism in middle to upper class American sub-consciousness. Her book, though a survey on Latina domestic workers in Los Angeles, gives a glimpse of the problems that most poor immigrant workers face in America. On the other hand, Feagin and O’Brien’s book is narrowly focused on white-black relationship alone and the racism towards other communities is not touched at all. Rather, it is presumed that with the influx of more immigrants from different parts of the world will reduce racism in America. Also, Hondagneu-Sotelo gives some suggestions regarding labor and tax laws while Feagin and O’Brien leaves it on more immigration to solve the problem. Works Cited Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence, Berkeley: University of Californa Press, 2001 Feagin, Joe R.and Eileen O'Brien, White Men on Race: Power, Privilege, and the Shaping of Cultural Consciousness, Beacon Press, 2003 Read More