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The Culture Struggle

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One of the persistent ideological teachings in the United States is that our society is notably free of ideological teachings. — location: 36 ^ref-45358

professional associations emphasize their commitment to independent expertise, and fail to recognize that they are wedded to the dominant politico-economic social structure. — location: 97 ^ref-19481

The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. . . . The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress. — location: 116 ^ref-49004

Four centuries of “deeply ingrained” Catholic culture was discarded within a few years once they deemed their class interests to be at stake. — location: 143 ^ref-48569

Protestant fundamentalism “encourages people to accept their lot in life without protest and to focus instead on the afterlife.” — location: 152 ^ref-38083

religious attachment can be strongly linked to material concerns. — location: 159 ^ref-57793

Cultural explanations divorced of politico-economic realities readily lend themselves to such facile obfuscation. — location: 170 ^ref-59011

we are creating less of our culture and buying more of it, until it really is no longer our culture. — location: 239 ^ref-50807

it is easier to be entertained than informed, although it is seldom more interesting. — location: 256 ^ref-18303

With the ascendancy of commodified mass culture we see a loss of people’s culture. — location: 263 ^ref-32536

the twin blows that McCarthyism and television delivered upon us in the early 1950s. — location: 266 ^ref-20661

The television . . . has taken many of our children away from their hobbies, play, games, streets, and greens for at least twenty hours a week. Only the few odd ones out who watch little or no television continue to play. — location: 278 ^ref-47482

In regions throughout the world, indigenous communities and their lands are being obliterated by western corporations whose goal is to transform living nature into commodities, and commodities into dead capital, treating the environment itself as a disposable resource. — location: 291 ^ref-5059

quite often in the commodity world it is the other way around: supply creates demand. — location: 296 ^ref-9107

The 1952 listing was a response to a homophobic culture and longstanding self-confirming practices within psychiatry itself. And the 1974 decision to rescind was a response to the political struggle waged by gays against that homophobic culture. Both decisions demonstrate (a) how cultural bias permeates belief systems—including scientific systems that presume to be free of cultural bias, and (b) how culture is not always a fixed and immutable construct but sometimes can be changed by consciously organized agitation. — location: 407 ^ref-56233

let us tolerate other cultures without romanticizing them or uncritically accepting the view they have of themselves. There are often many unhappy and mistreated people in the professedly stable societies of the world. To respect another culture does not mean one must embrace every aspect of it, unless one is prepared to argue that the culture is perfect in all respects. — location: 537 ^ref-31593

Though culture permeates all our perceptions, it is not the totality of human experience. — location: 559 ^ref-38794

such international declarations demonstrate the existence of a transcultural consciousness regarding human values, a consciousness that does not treat all conditions as locally fixed and beyond universal standards. — location: 584 ^ref-37352

were not the slaveholders themselves cultural imperialists? They not only suppressed abolitionist dissent within their own society, but also built their “Southern way of life” upon the labor of Africans who had been forcibly wrenched from their families, homelands, languages, and religions—that is, from their way of life. — location: 626 ^ref-12005

segregation itself was legislated by government fiat, a cultural imperialism imposed upon African-Americans by an array of post-Reconstruction state laws and lynch-mob rule. — location: 632 ^ref-47702

Approximately two-thirds of the world’s captive laborers are debt slaves in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. — location: 646 ^ref-1596

authorities have arrested anti-slavery activists for defaming Mauritania’s good name, insisting that servitude no long exists in their country. — location: 650 ^ref-55095

a law is not likely to transform a cultural practice when it is left unenforced—especially when it infringes upon a highly lucrative traffic. — location: 652 ^ref-47457

Where cultural relativism goes wrong is when it becomes a cloak for oppression, when it is used to claim a hands-off immunity for crimes against humanity. — location: 667 ^ref-38938

“The first step of scientific thought consists precisely in seeking to go beyond the vision that social systems have of themselves.” — location: 672 ^ref-25873

Perceiving a society “purely on its own terms” usually means seeing it through the eyes of dominant groups that exercise a preponderant influence in shaping its beliefs and practices. — location: 674 ^ref-61216

as of 2005, most of Afghanistan remained under the control of warlords who opposed any move toward female emancipation. — location: 717 ^ref-53875

“During the Taliban we were living in a graveyard, but we were secure,” opined one female revolutionary activist. Now women are easy marks for rapists and armed marauders. — location: 719 ^ref-4210

As one Iraqi feminist noted, “The condition of women has been deteriorating. . . . This current situation, this fundamentalism, is not even traditional. It is desperate and reactionary.” — location: 736 ^ref-48438

Women in places like Iraq and Afghanistan need international support and assistance, but invading their countries and destroying their towns, villages, and infrastructures is not the way to proceed. — location: 738 ^ref-21107

imperialism—in the name of “humanitarian war”—inflicts great harm upon the recipient population, especially its most vulnerable and besieged members, for whom the foreign occupiers actually have little discernible regard. — location: 740 ^ref-44846

Murder is the second leading cause of death among young American women. — location: 745 ^ref-42042

Statistically, a woman’s home is her most dangerous place—if she has a man in it. — location: 749 ^ref-12443

Those who demand respect for their culture may have a legitimate claim or they may really be seeking license to commit crimes against the more vulnerable elements within their society. There are basic rights that transcend all cultures, as even governments acknowledge when they outlaw certain horrific customs and sign international accords in support of human rights. — location: 756 ^ref-19077

“The boys never meant any harm against the girls. They just wanted to rape.” — location: 763 ^ref-22034

twelve million women in the United States have been raped, or one in eight (some estimates are higher)—often by men they know, including family members. — location: 778 ^ref-48973

One in four report being sexually molested as a child, usually repeatedly over prolonged periods of time by a close relative. — location: 779 ^ref-6263

Over 29 percent of rapes in the United States involve females eleven years old or younger. Another 32.3 percent are between eleven and seventeen years old. — location: 782 ^ref-30281

An eleven-year-old boy in rural Pakistan was accused of walking unchaperoned with a woman from a higher caste. The tribal council ordered a retaliation: four council members took turns raping the boy’s eighteen-year-old sister, thereby shaming the whole family. Bruised and sobbing, the girl was forced to walk home naked in front of hundreds of laughing and jeering villagers. — location: 797 ^ref-56706

One investigation in India found that 80 percent of prostitutes came to their profession after being banished from their communities because they had been “made filthy” by rape. — location: 811 ^ref-20980

how humans can be tyrannized by social convention. — location: 841 ^ref-50388

The patriarchs go to horrific lengths—even killing their own—to maintain standards and appearances within the prevailing community. — location: 841 ^ref-8805

In the dismally narrow contours of village life, the tyranny they exercise over women is one of the few things they have going for themselves. Like so many people who enjoy special proprietary rights, they will kill to keep what they have, treating the murder of the offensive creature as if it were a morally elevating obligation, a cleansing operation. — location: 859 ^ref-15870

men who are busy terrorizing their women and keeping them underfoot are less inclined to act in unison against the injustices of the wider social formation. — location: 863 ^ref-59987

The rape and murder of women is itself a key mechanism of social control, keeping the population divided, repressed, shamed, while perpetually inflicting wounds upon itself, family against family, male against female, male against male, embattled and paralyzed by their homicidal codes of honor. — location: 864 ^ref-38613

In several instances, they have attacked and killed serial rapists who had terrorized whole neighborhoods. “We have all waited for police to act, but nothing happens. The molestations and rapes go on and nobody does anything,” — location: 872 ^ref-10165

He called upon female students not to hesitate to kill the man who tries to rape them, because in India fighting a case against a rapist is far more difficult than fighting a case of murder in self-defense. — location: 875 ^ref-23971

Too often marriage is not a mutual bonding but a one-sided bondage. The entrapped women have no say in the matter. In various countries around the world, mullahs, warlords, tribal chieftains, or other prestigious or prosperous males lock away as many wives as they can get their hands on. — location: 899 ^ref-26318

Marriage has historically been more closely linked to property than to love, and property arrangements have tended to benefit the male spouse. — location: 918 ^ref-44875

For generations we lived with legally mandated same-race marriage. The last of these miscegenation laws remained on the books until 1967. — location: 932 ^ref-7170

taking the sacred vows of holy matrimony is no guarantee against the foulest domestic deeds. — location: 943 ^ref-12157

families as in any other. Indeed, conservative religious affiliation is “one of the greatest predictors of child abuse, more so than age, gender, social class, or size of residence.” — location: 945 ^ref-45701

As women gain in education and earning power and become less economically dependent on men, they are less likely to stay in abusive marriages. — location: 951 ^ref-55390

If there were a 51 percent murder rate or suicide rate or narcotics abuse rate, society itself would be uninhabitable. Yet with 51 percent of all marriages ending in divorce, society has not unraveled. — location: 964 ^ref-36616

The very act of bonding in tribal solidarity places an implicit boundary around one’s group. — location: 1016 ^ref-13068

With brotherhood comes “otherhood.” — location: 1018 ^ref-7130

conflicts arise not only between people who are different from each other but often between those most proximate and much the same. — location: 1030 ^ref-22996

You’ve got to be carefully taught not to hate and fear. Recent research indicates that just “letting children be children” does not always insure the absence of prejudice, certainly not in a society that has so much of it to begin with. — location: 1044 ^ref-61014

The killing of one’s own nationals is murder, a crime to be punished. The killing of foreign adversaries during war is hailed as an act of patriotic heroism. — location: 1059 ^ref-57316

“Which of these three thinkest thou was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves?” asks Jesus. The lawyer has to concede it was the Samaritan. — location: 1070 ^ref-10554

what a revolutionary advance it is to commemorate universal sisterhood, even—or especially—in a world where millions of women still endure dreadful victimization. — location: 1077 ^ref-8982

the problem of ethnic oppression is not purely one of “hearts and minds.” — location: 1082 ^ref-21335

By keeping African-Americans, Latinos, and others in an ethnically delineated underclass—as an extra supply of marginalized underpaid workers who increase the competition for jobs—racism helps to secure the “reserve army of labor” that puts a downward drag on wages for the entire society. — location: 1088 ^ref-18610

an ethnically delineated underclass then becomes the object of resentment among White workers who blame their own underemployment and income losses on African-Americans, Latinos, recent immigrants, or whomever, rather than on the bosses. — location: 1096 ^ref-33013

The dominant interests are safest if workers are busy fighting each other for crumbs rather than concerting for a larger slice of the pie. — location: 1100 ^ref-36878

Ethnic resentments heat up, and group is set against group in a competition for increasingly scarce resources, all to the benefit of those who create the scarcity. An old story. — location: 1102 ^ref-49999

if not fit for freedom, then slaves must remain in bondage forever, for it was the system of slavery itself that was preventing them from showing their ability for anything but slavery. — location: 1121 ^ref-16306

The real problem for the slaveholder was not that his chattels were unequipped for freedom but that they showed themselves all too apt and ready for it. After emancipation, “not fit for freedom” became “not fit for equality.” — location: 1125 ^ref-21664

Slavery and racism go together because they bolster the same oppressive social relationships. — location: 1127 ^ref-50309

slaveholders needed to gain access to a fixed and profitable workforce so that they might live well off the superexploitation of African labor. The White colonizers abducted Black people to toil on land they stole from Red and Brown people. — location: 1129 ^ref-10999

The imperialists are not out to victimize darker peoples per se; racism is not the central motive of imperialism, just a useful adjunct. — location: 1135 ^ref-58501

One inhabitant of Plymouth Bay colony from 1627 to 1645, the pleasure-loving Thomas Morton, took the trouble to fraternize with the Native Americans and found them “more full of humanity than the Christians.” — location: 1145 ^ref-29495

where Morton saw a fecund and beautiful land “with all her faire indowments,” the Puritans saw only a godless, howling wilderness filled with evil spirits and “dangerous wild beasts,” a land they would hate until they could subdue and metamorphose it into personal property. — location: 1153 ^ref-54177

they came as murderous plunderers but presented themselves to the world as civilizing saviors. — location: 1177 ^ref-755

racism has been not just an internalized personal attitude but an externalized social relation that continually bolsters the very conditions that seem to lend it confirmation and make it so functional. — location: 1185 ^ref-39907

racism is the rational outcome of an irrationally skewed and unjust system of privilege and exploitation. — location: 1212 ^ref-51160

To be in need of no one is supposedly to be more developed and liberated.150 Thus are the unfortunate necessities of modern-day alienation and social isolation transformed into virtuous accomplishments. — location: 1364 ^ref-44368

even a simple commodity like coffee “has nothing to do with individual will and everything to do with economics and history.” — location: 1377 ^ref-57804

Socio-economic grievances and personal maladies and unhappiness can cause some people to embrace specious solutions, gravitating toward hokey healers, sham shamans, and other cult leaders. — location: 1379 ^ref-58797

Real self-empowerment, however, should combine personal awakening with a concern for the social and political forces that act upon us. — location: 1380 ^ref-25563

the self-absorbed political quietism of hyper-individualism does not bring us toward any real social liberation nor, for that matter, any real personal liberation. — location: 1385 ^ref-54543

the brains of these sightless persons had not developed the capacity to organize visual perception. — location: 1407 ^ref-13685

“For the most part,” wrote Lippmann, “we do not first see and then define, we define first and then see. — location: 1418 ^ref-54281

more often than we realize, we accept or decline an idea, depending on its acceptability within the dominant culture. — location: 1422 ^ref-30209

Our readiness to accept something as true, or reject it as false, rests less on its argument and evidence and more on how it aligns with the preconceived notions embedded in the dominant culture, assumptions we have internalized due to repeated exposure. — location: 1424 ^ref-40000

among mainstream opinion makers, this unanimity of implicit bias is treated as “objectivity.” — location: 1426 ^ref-39273

If given the choice to consider a new perspective or mobilize old arguments against it, it is remarkable how quickly people start reaching for the old arguments. All this makes dissent that much more difficult but that much more urgent. — location: 1441 ^ref-29535

People who never complain of the orthodoxy of their mainstream political education are the first to complain about the dogmatic “political correctness” of any challenge to it. — location: 1444 ^ref-2818

Far from seeking a diversity of views, they defend themselves from exposure to such diversity, preferring to leave their conventional political opinions unruffled. — location: 1445 ^ref-26608

“So your protest is not really that you’re getting only one side but that, for the first time, you’re departing from that one side and are being exposed to another view and you don’t like it.” — location: 1454 ^ref-63857

Conventional opinions fit so comfortably into the dominant paradigm as to be seen, not as opinions, but as statements of fact, as “the nature of things.” — location: 1458 ^ref-8583

is not a matter of becoming the faithful instrument of any particular persuasion but of resisting the misrepresentations of a subtle but thoroughly ideological corporate dominated culture. — location: 1519 ^ref-20676

At the Dawn of Tyranny, — location: 1601 ^ref-47966

“Imperialism and Culturalism Complement Each Other,” — location: 1623 ^ref-5195

San Francisco Chronicle, 4 July and 19 July 2002. — location: 1678 ^ref-45368