Obama and Me
My Quest to Understand the Possibilities of the Social Self
Jacey Reese
Distinction Paper
04/18/08
Introduction
In response to anti-American statements made by his pastor, presidential hopeful Barack Obama recently spoke earnestly and off message about race in contemporary America. His oration deviated from common political platitudes and indirectly addressed many ideas bearing great sociological significance. In its entirety, the speech mapped historical points of divergence between blacks and whites and illustrated the resulting social contexts for both groups. Additionally, Obama implored Americans to look beyond these social milieus perpetuating racism in order to create a more cohesive and empathetic nation. In doing so, he raised many issues which have shaped my learning arc as a sociology/anthropology major at St. Olaf. By invoking ideas of social context, cultural relativity, agency and collective liberation through solidarity under a racial lens, Obama’s speech perfectly mirrors my progression of thought concerning the individual in the social world.
This essay superimposes my understanding of the individual under societal constraints on Obama’s comments regarding America’s racial divide. Excerpts from Obama’s speech follow related subheadings and are subsequently linked to my journey in thought as a sociology/anthropology major. Through this stylistic device I will illuminate both the obstacles confronting the individual as a social product and her/his capacity to surmount those obstacles as social agents capable of aggregating and mobilizing. It is important to note, however, that my arc does not follow linear patterns of learning from first-year to senior year, but rather a more fluid evolution wherein I return to first-year concepts to answer senior year questions.
Social Context
“A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.”
“Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch…So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.”
In the aforementioned excerpts, Obama elucidates the varying vantage points from which we view social contexts in terms of race. Underpinning this powerful argument is the belief that our subjective realities are neither right nor wrong, but are the result of contextual differences between two groups of people. Beginning with Introduction to Sociology and continuing with Sociological and Anthropological Theory courses, I began to grasp the power of social context and its stronghold over the socialized actor.
Humans are not produced in a cultural vacuum, but rather are subject to a legion of forces which mold the human prototype into a distinct social being. The forces exerted are experienced differently by different people and result in a gamut of various life situations and subjective realities. The sum total of these forces comprises a social context under which we are socialized. We, ultimately, are mirrors of our social context. In Professor Tom Williamson’s Anthropological Theory class I learned that during the socialization process we internalize a set of dispositions, what Pierre Bourdieu terms “habitus”, which shape the way we see and react to the world. This habitus limits our ability to see the social world critically and leads to patterned behavior consistent with our social location. As Peter Berger succinctly states, “Each class milieu forms the personality of its constituency by innumerable influences beginning at birth and leading up to graduation from prep school or reformatory, as the case may be” (81-82). Similarly, Max Weber argues that we lived in an extremely rationalized world run by bureaucracies that shape our every action. Actors in Weber’s “Iron Cage of Bureaucracy” existed as cogs in the machine—behaving in ways deemed appropriate by larger social structures. Furthermore, if actors behave outside the parameters consistent with their social location, they are held in check by various forms of social control that maintain the status quo and the unchallenged state of their habitus. I saw then, that we not only restrained by our habitus—a reflection of our society—but also by mechanisms of social control, acting as a second line of defense lest we defy social norms.
For example, as a college student I have been trained to see procrastination as a virtue among my peers, so it is unlikely that I will finish this distinction paper with prudence in the weeks prior to the deadline. This is a lesson I learned at a very young age from television and friends. However, if I do defy this social norm and attempt to complete the paper posthaste, there are mechanisms of social control in place to stifle my efforts. Because such promptness is nearly unanimously scorned amongst students, I would be subject to the scrutiny of my peers who ultimately uphold the social norms and status quo. Therefore, I not only fight the ideologies deeply engrained through socialization, but also the derision of my peers as a form of social control to keep me from making so audacious a decision.
Grappling with the powerful forces of social context throughout my sophomore and junior years, I hopelessly wondered how people cohabitating the same social world, but inundated in such different social contexts (e.g. white and black, rich and poor) could reconcile their differences and empathize with the situation of their diametric opposite. Moreover, I perceived a deterministic social world where the individual was merely a cultural product, devoid of individual agency. As a result, I saw humans as puppets on strings with social structures at the helm. It is appropriate, then, that under these conditions I acknowledged the prospect of cultural relativity.
Cultural Relativity
“The anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”
The bulk of Obama’s speech rationalized the anger of both white and black Americans. He understood that people can inhabit the same physical space yet, due to their prescribed social statuses, experience their world very differently. In this way, Obama indirectly summons W.I. Thomas’ ideas of subjective reality. Thomas acknowledged the proclivity for social context to shape the way we view the world and argued that a “social situation is what it is defined to be by its participants” (Berger 84). As a result, people with different life situations rarely have intersecting perspectives and opinions. However, given that all people are capable of rational thought, they have the ability and wherewithal to empathize with one another’s social situation.
As I buckled under the weight of the Iron Cage and ostensibly deterministic social contexts, I questioned the fabric that connected all humans. Then, serendipitously, Professor Samiha Peterson introduced me to Max Weber’s concept Verstehen. William T. Tucker defines Verstehen as,
a methodological tool designed to discover the nature of the (social) situation—including in the concept, ‘nature of the situation,’ the coercive forces (i.e., normative prescriptions, observable values held by the different individuals composing the situation, and the apparent goals of these individuals in terms of their known values and situational norms)—in which human social action takes place (164).
Weber argued that we have the ability to metaphysically assume the role of another to empathize and understand social situations outside our realm of experience. Although social contexts encompass and mold individuals, we can act as cultural relativists and attribute meaning to the actions of people from any social context. Moreover, in lieu of simply dismissing others’ actions as absurd, through Verstehen we can glean significant meaning from social actors who invariably function under external constraints.
Understood as such, Verstehen becomes a useful tool to break down the barriers erected by social contexts and foster understanding between all rational social actors.
On a similar note, anthropologist Clifford Geertz believed “that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” and that if we understand the cultural context (webs) which shapes an individual, we can more adequately understand her/his actions (5). Moreover, Geertz argued that we can achieve understanding through “thick description”, studying every dimension of our social contexts. Through thick description we have the capacity to understand and provide accurate renderings of social contexts.
The ideas of Geertz, Weber and Thomas developed and honed my skills of cultural relativity, yet understanding other social contexts was not enough. Although I learned that astute observers could breach contextual boundaries by assuming the role of cultural relativist, I now saw that people create, perpetuate and remain subject to their powerful social context—begging the question: can anyone defy the status quo?
Human Agency
“What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.”
To reach our current state of existence, considering our relatively egalitarian social landscape, certain individuals defied the odds and reacted against oppressive social contexts to transform society. Obama’s above quote ingeniously draws emphasis on individuals who conceived ideas outside of the parameters of their social context and changed the society. Their historical presence is an effective repudiation to deterministic arguments constricting human action to merely socially determined behavior and adequately highlights the existence of human agency.
The fact that society is different than it was two-hundred years ago confirms that active agents have challenged the confines of social context. Surely, social context shapes and conditions an individual, but it is essential to understand that “the imagination, at both the level of the individual and the level of public culture, can always exceed the limits of any given position”(Ortner 13). All societies are dynamic and contain within them individuals adept to challenge enduring social conditions. By my senior year, I understood that we must acknowledge human agency and the human tendency to transcend these social conditions. In my eyes, people were no longer passive recipients or willing conduits diffusing prevailing ideologies. Instead, I saw that it was possible, albeit rare, for an individual to express her/his agency and alter society. Emirbayer and Mische (1998) provide an appropriate conceptualization of acting agents:
As they respond to the challenges and uncertainties of social life, actors are capable of distancing themselves (at least in partial exploratory ways) from the schemas, habits, and traditions that constrain social identities and institutions. This capacity for what Mead calls ‘distance experience’ enables them to reconstruct and innovate upon those traditions in accordance with evolving desires and purposes (984).
This functional definition of human agency accurately renders independent human action as the impetus to change in society.
Even Max Weber attributed the birth and subsequent expansion of modern capitalism to the creativity of a select few entrepreneurial minds not subscribing to the then prevalent other-worldly asceticism of the traditional economy. A confluence of disintegrating traditional values and adventure capitalists’ innovative (yet avaricious) ideas concerning capital gains gave birth to modern capitalism. As human agents, entrepreneurs worked within past economies but reconfigured them to extract profit. As Weber argues, “Coexisting everywhere with these external modes of economic organization were persons with an adventurous frame of mind—who mocked all ethical restrictions on action”(21). Although I may disagree with the principles of these adventure capitalists, they nevertheless provide further evidence that humans are active agents.
Recalling Weber’s statement regarding adventure capitalists, I surmised that there exists a subtle interplay between historical contingencies and active agents—pulling me further from traditional structural-functional thought. Now that I perceived individuals as active agents, I understood that the status quo does not continue to exist because humans passively internalize their social context, but because of coercive social structures’ disproportionate amount of power over the individual. Many people see the workings of their social context but lack the power to change it. Like puppets on strings, we are moved by social structural puppeteers. However, if we attune ourselves to the subtle workings of social structures, we comprehend how to change social conditions; not by cutting the strings because it is impossible to live outside of society, but by seeing the ways powerful social structures control us. As Peter Berger argues, “unlike puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step towards freedom” (176). Considering this epiphany, however, I still had difficulty seeing how people from different backgrounds but experiencing similar plight could coalesce to transcend oppressive environments.
Solidarity Movements and Liberation Sociology
“I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.”
The human agent does not alone beget social change, but rather galvanizes other individuals to join in solidarity movements to create the momentum for such change. Karl Marx avers that an elite few possess the majority of power in society. However, within the proletariat masses lay the majority of human capital and democratic power—people who collectively possess the wherewithal to usurp the power of the elite and transform the social order. It is the majority who resides in the margins of society but has been strategically divided by social categories (i.e. race, class, gender, etc.). However, if they aggregate and acknowledge their common struggle, as Obama says, they can change their social world. As Mary Elizabeth Hobgood argues,
When diverse subordinates and their dominant allies discover common cause together, the status quo will not continue. Allies may and do disagree, they do not have a common identity, and they may lack a single normative framework. However, when they understand common concerns, sorrows, and joys as the real connections among them, they can work together to interrupt exploitation and oppression even if disagreements remain. (143)
According to this statement, when various subordinated groups become allies and utilize their collective voice, social change becomes possible.
During my senior year, I grasped the emancipatory power of solidarity movements and the research on the margins which begat them. I began to lean in the way of liberation sociology, a school of thought I had learned about in Sociological Theory, which always sides with the oppressed. Analysis from the margins provides the most comprehensive commentaries on power and dominant social structures. Analysis from this perspective is helpful, “because they [the marginalized] know what it means to be a marginalized person attempting to survive within a social context designed to benefit the privileged few at their expense” (De La Torre 16). It is from this kind of analysis—the type that deconstructs privilege and reveals inequality—that solidarity movements arise.
Conclusion—Human Diversity
Through this essay I attempted to reveal, engaging Obama’s speech, that just as societies are dynamic, so are the individuals who comprise them. One person’s aberration from the rules of any given social context negates all claims repudiating human agency. Moreover, the Iron Cage of Bureaucracy may exert itself on everyone, but no two people experience it identically. After four years of study, I clearly understood that socialization affects everyone differently and produces a breadth of diversity.
I encountered this very intimately while studying in Vietnam. While utilizing my recently acquired tools of analysis I found myself trying to categorize and compartmentalize the Vietnamese people. Emerging contradictions between traditional values and modern lifestyles stymied my ethnographic efforts. I could not make sense of the ostensible cacophony between things like filial piety and modern independence. However, as I sat amidst the buzzing motorbikes and Buddhist monks with BlackBerrys on the eve of my return, I had an epiphany. Society is made by people and thus by its people it’s molded. More clearly, as Professor Thomas Williamson succinctly put it, “Vietnamese society is whatever Vietnamese people do.” Vietnamese people did not act unVietnamese, because it is they who define Vietnamese culture. Sociologists and anthropologists can develop ideal types but they cannot generalize to every individual. This priceless lesson liberated me from the tightly girding atmosphere of academia which urges its academics to define everything.
The power of social context and our reluctance to bestow credit to the human agent rankled Obama, as well. In discussing the idea of a perfect union he stated, “And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.” Like Obama, my journey through sociology/anthropology has allowed me to see the formidable forces conforming active agents and still understand their ability to change.
Works Cited
Berger, Peter L. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. New York: Anchor Books, 1963.
Emirbayer, Mustafa and Ann Mische. “What is Agency?” The American Journal of Sociology. 103.4 (1998): 962-1023.
De La Torre, Miguel A. Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins. New York: Orbis Books, 2004.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures; Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Hobgood, Mary Elizabeth. Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2000.
Ortner, Sherry B. New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Tucker, William, T. “Max Weber’s ‘Verstehen’.” The Sociological Quarterly. 6.2 (1965): 157-165.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 3 rd ed. Trans. Stephen Kalberg. Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2002.
