Race & Inequality in America

Transcript for Student Voices

José Itzigsohn and Michelle Liu

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You’re listening to Student Voices, a podcast featuring student-led interviews of Brown University faculty based on the Race & in America panel discussion series, curated by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in partnership with the Office of the Provost.

Michelle Liu: I'm Michelle Liu, an undergraduate studying statistics and sociology. And I'm speaking with Professor of Sociology, José Itzigsohn, about the recent panel discussion on Race and Inequality in America.

José Itzigsohn: Thank you, Michelle. I'm José Itzigsohn, Professor of Sociology. So, you have some questions, I guess?

ML: Yes. What a wonderful discussion you had with the panelists. It brought up some interesting ideas and points that I want to ask you a little bit more about. First, how does racial capitalism relate to patterns of assimilation in the US?

JI: Oh, that's a great question. I mean, I prefer not to use the word assimilation…because it's loaded, it implies, usually it implies assimilating into whiteness and into certain standards of the white middle class, but it is true that, you know, immigrants come here, and they want to be part of the society. And the question is how people who come here become part of the society. And racial capitalism is central to that process, because racial capitalism is the socio-economic—it’s the place where the socio-economic structure intersects the structure of racial classification and exclusions. And in fact, the labor market, the housing market, schools: all the institutions that, in a sense, construct our position in society or socioeconomic status, if you will, are racialized. So, if we are going to think about how immigrants incorporate into the society, they incorporate into the society that is divided by class and race, what we call racial capitalism. So we need to understand how that society works and what are the structures of stratification in that society and the mechanisms of mobility to understand the trajectories and the predicament of different immigrant groups. So, understanding racial capitalism helps us understand what happens when immigrants come into this country and they become part of this country both in terms of their socio-economic position and in terms of the construction of their identity because they encounter also a racial structure that classifies them in some racial category. So, I would say that, you know, understanding racial capitalism provides us with an important framework to analyze this social process.

ML: Exactly, and I think that segues very well to my next question in that you mention race and class being such central elements of this process of coming to the United States and adapting to society: what's the importance of considering their intersection? Why specifically is it unique?

JI: Well, yes. See, it's very important to understand the intersection of race and class, and we can add gender, because if we want to understand the different positions of people in the society, particularly as their social position in a system of inequality or the construction of their identity or reconstruction of their sociability, they are, in a sense, influenced by all the structures that we mentioned in the previous questions—you know, job, housing, education, et cetera. And those institutional fields are structured around intersections of race and class. The idea is that it is not only your race that determines, you know, your possibilities of mobility and your experience and your identity. And it's not only your class that affects, again, your possibilities of mobility or identity, or who you socialize with, but it is the intersection of race and class. And that's something that, you know, Du Bois already made very clear already in his 18—what was the year, 98 or 99?—book, The Philadelphia Negro, and particularly in Black Reconstruction, that in a sense the different experiences of people were given by this intersection. So, for example, he was explaining in The Philadelphia Negro that the Black community in Philadelphia had different experiences according to class, so you couldn't speak of race as being the only thing that affected the Black community in Philadelphia, which at that point was heavily affected by open discrimination and lack of opportunities, but even within that situation, there were class differences that determined possibilities of action and, you know, Du Bois then develops his theory of the “Talented Tenth” that later, he abandons. And in Black Reconstruction, he explains the fact of the lack of unity of the workers’ movement in the United States as a result of the workers’ movement—labor—having very different experiences, as a result of racialization. So, if we are social scientists—you know, me, a social scientist—and we want to understand both, you know, American inequality, stratification, and also the way people construct their identities, their experiences, we need to pay attention to the different positionalities in terms of race and class and how they intersect and also how race and class intersect with gender. Because it is the intersection of these three dimensions of categorization and inequality that construct the different predicaments, the different experiences of people, the possibilities for identity, for collective action, for identification, and also the different ways in which American society is stratified.

ML: Exactly, and I think also you're speaking to an overall theme of intersectionality and how it constructs unique experiences for people of different classes, of different genders, races at a certain crossroads.

JI: Yeah, no, and let me add there, because sometimes people think about intersectionality as well, you know, I'm, you know…for us, kind of combinations of you know, where we come from, I am this and I am that or…and intersectionality doesn't refer to that—to ancestry, different countries. Intersectionality refers to our positionality in relation to different systems of power and inequality: in patriarchy, which refers to gender; racism, which refers to race; and, you know, the class system, which is class, what class refers to...the system of inequality, which creates class.

ML: I think that's a very important distinction. And we talked a lot about just the overall patterns we see of race, class, gender, and forms of discrimination. But how would someone at Brown—we’re in college—encounter the racialized class system you speak about?

JI: Well, you know, Brown, and every college, is a racialized organization. There is a new field, I mean, there is sociology of organizations that, you know, it exists for a long time, but, surprisingly or not surprisingly, for a long time it ignored that organizations are racialized and are also genderized, which means that in terms of their structures of authority, rewards, operations, who they serve, they are structured around race, and gender, and class. So, if you think about Brown, Brown is an historically white university that has been diversified, but still, in terms of the composition of its student body, it can go still some way in terms of diversifying the composition of its student body. It is an organization that, in the composition of its professoriate, it used to be very non-diverse and it is diversifying, but it still has to go. And I want to say, in the last 20 years Brown has done a lot of progress in terms of diversifying its student body, its professoriate, and also in diversifying the content of what it teaches, because a new composition, a new demographic composition of the students also comes with new questions and new demands in terms of what are relevant subjects of knowledge. For example, ethnic studies, Africana studies are areas that are the result of the demand from students, usually student mobilization. So that's one of the ways in which you can see the racial and class characteristics of an organization, you know, how it responds to those demands, or what kind of topics of study are considered legitimate topics of study. So, you know, and in terms of class, Brown has been making efforts to diversify its composition and it has the first-generation student—the U-Fli. I don’t know what the acronym stands for.

ML: Yeah, the U-Fli Center.

JI: But it is, you know, designed to provide support for First-Gen students at what is basically an elite university. Brown is a university which is basically for elites to reproduce elites, you know, people who come to Brown go out of Brown and get great jobs, and that's great—but usually, it's like, the elite reproducing itself. So, Brown has been making, you know, efforts to, you know, bring different people in terms of class, in terms of race, you know, it used to be a time in which Brown was a male organization, you know? It was a university for men, and, you know, at some point it incorporated women and it was a time in which all the professoriate was male. So, it has been diversifying, it has done a lot of progress, but, you know, it still has a way to go. So, in the functioning for the organization, in the structure of authority in the, you know, in which clientele it serves or who is in the organization, what are the content is produced, in all those aspects we can see Brown, or any college, or any organization, as an organization that is structured around race, class and gender.

ML: Yeah. Thank you so much for all those answers, professor. You bring up such important points and relevant discussion topics.

JI: Well, thanks for the questions! And thanks for this interview, Michelle, it’s been great.

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Student Voices is a feature of the Race & in America digital publication series developed by the Brown University Library. Our theme music is “see the unseen” by Butter. Explore the series at digitalpublications.brown.edu.