Abstract
Needless to say, the dominant explanatory framework among our students generally is still individualism, and when it comes to their career trajectories, American dreams and equal opportunities predominate. Where I currently teach, the Historically Black University (HBCU) of civil rights fame North Carolina A and T University, it is more complicated.
Highlights
The dominant explanatory framework among our students generally is still individualism, and when it comes to their career trajectories, American dreams and equal opportunities predominate
A central characteristic of this Historically Black University (HBCU) common sense is to combine incoherently anti-establishment talk of structures and systems with “you can make it if you try” talk. What this means in practice is that class is collapsed into “race,” so that structures and systems amount to “the white power structure.”
That the rich may not like key elements of their system is indicated in my example, from Michael Moss‟s discussion of the Food Giants in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. This is one of the best books for teaching both the limits of individualist explanations in their many guises and the power of structural explanations rooted in the contradictory imperatives of capital accumulation, all the more persuasive as it is written by someone who never articulates a sentence about capitalism
Summary
The dominant explanatory framework among our students generally is still individualism, and when it comes to their career trajectories, American dreams and equal opportunities predominate. “moving around the inequalities”) the names and identities so that a larger percentage of white men, for example, got the As and Bs. The first model where race and gender effects are abstracted out is crucial for understanding the precise role that racism and sexism play in reproducing class structures.
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