The Master Status of Inequality
Muhammed Asadi

The achieved status of a person in any society that ascribes a universal inferior status to a group is always secondary (to such ascribed status) and trumped by it. Ascribed Status of women in the U.S. is based on norms involving motherhood and sexuality based appearance. Identity verification and salience (of women's identity)  therefore is based on these two aspects of their role driven personality regardless of what their other achievements might be. Everything else about them effectively becomes invisible or 'veiled' in social consciousness.As the dominant identity marker of social recognition, the ascribed status almost always becomes the person’s Master Status.  For example, the ascribed status of African Americans in the U.S. is based on racial definitions of personality and the negative connotations that accompany such categorization. Therefore regardless of the achieved status (for example a PhD) of a Black individual, he or she is still judged as intellectually 'retarded ' (disproportionate channeling of Black students to EMR classes in public schools is a reflection of this) based on the social criteria of membership that describes this oppressed minority group in the U.S.  It is for this reason the Blacks that make it to the middle classes but are still treated as the ‘underclass’ (poverty is given a black face in the U.S even though 3/4^th of the poor are whites) have to conspicuously display symbols of class success in order to be ‘respected’; this might involve driving a BMW or wearing expensive designer suits, symbols that go much beyond Middle Class income as compensation for a damaged ascribed status.

Similarly, immigrants from non-European countries are assigned a Master Status based on the subordinate status of their countries and the poverty that exists therein. Ascribed status thus serves to categorize people and homogenize them to members of the dominant group. The dominant group sees them in terms of their negative ascribed status (and stereotypes that go with it )and as a result reproduces the inequalities based on race, gender and nationality that exist within the United States on the structural level. Together with this there is organized suspicion about minorities that is culturally reproduced in that every good act and intention by them is interpreted by the dominant group to be a deceptive attack on its privilege. Such divisions of course help the elite and not the overall members of the dominant group whose life-experience is drastically reduced (a narrow life) by such separation and homogenization of self based on false feelings of superiority even though they might get incremental benefits that some have conceptualized as 'white privilege'.

When a member of a devalued master status group attempts to authenticate his or her identity, the one that developed in their home country or family environment, that is the one where they see themselves as an “equal” member of a social group because others see them as “equal”, this leads to anxiety and frustration due to extrinsic ascriptions of inferiority. As Mead (his I and the ME) and Charles Horton Cooley (the ‘looking glass self’) both implied, you view yourself as others have viewed you and identity development follows as a result of such ‘memory images’ of others behavior towards you and your reflexivity based on those memory images. Therefore, whenever an identity fails to be verified through social interaction, it leads to an emotional response of anxiety which leads to emotional management of the kind that tries to bring the discrepant identity in tune with the objective reality outside, the person's actual identity gets displaced by the perceived ascribed social identity. The person with a devalued Master Status therefore inevitably loses his or her self esteem (which is endemic to women and minorities in the U.S.) as he or she devalues himself/herself in order to ‘manage’ the crisis that led to anxiety. This involves replacing the previous ‘self’ with a new identity according to the definitions of the dominant group in a society, a devalued, “inferior” identity. This process is similar to the ‘self fulfilling prophecy’ known to social psychologists as the 'Thomas Theorem'.

However, as Arlie Hochschild elaborates in “The Managed Heart” (1983), based on the "Personality Market” section of C. Wright Mills’ “White Collar” (1951), once an ‘inauthentic’ self replaces the real self due to social forces and emotional management, the person becomes estranged or alienated from themselves. It leads to what Marx defined as alienation, a feeling of normlessness/meaninglessness similar to what Durkheim would define as ‘anomie’. Unchecked alienation leads to pressures for social change through organized social movement formation, if access of the oppressed to adequate resources is potentially available. The elite faced by these conditions, since they benefit from social divisions have undertaken a three pronged effort to diffuse the effects of social alienation produced by a social structure that they command: i) dissipating feelings of alienation through wide scale supply of alcoholic beverages that become part of a culture and its ideal ‘escape mechanism’,  ii) atomization of people and lack of their access to resources that prevents organization of social movements and iii) incorporating the symbols of the grieving parties (for example the election of Obama as President to symbolically signify an end to social divisions) without the necessary structural changes that would shift the negative Master Status associated with the oppressed.

Management of alienation, the motor behind social revolutions through class consciousness, is an ‘active’ intervention based manipulation of the power elite.The manifestation of this active intervention involves (using Omi and Winant's (1986) conceptualization) gender, racial and national formations that vary with time.This 'management' of divisive meanings is done for one primary reason in advanced capitalism: If social divisions based on devalued Master Statuses were to fail, the residual anxiety in a capitalistic society would inevitably lead to focused class conflict, which eventually would lead to the downfall of the rule of the many by the few. Preventing this through superfluous social divisions reflected in access to life chances and formation of social relationships, that then become “natural” due to social definition by the elite and its structural translation, is therefore of utmost importance to those that want to maintain inequality in our world.

 

References:

Clay-Warner, Jody and Dawn T. Robinson. Editors. 2008. Social Structure and Emotions. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Inc

Hochschild, Arlie. 1983 (2003). The Managed Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mills. C. Wright. 1951. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press.

Neubeck, Kenneth J and Davita Silfen Glasberg. 2004. Sociology: Diversity, Conflict and  change. New York: McGraw Hill

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States, 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge.