Some of you may recall that Jennifer Lawrence drew some attention earlier this year for an essay she wrote describing the pay gap that exists between her and her male colleagues in film. In a recently published interview in the New Yorker, Chris Rock belatedly responded to Lawrence's sentiment by musing, "You hear [her] complaining about being paid less because she's a woman -- If she was black, she'd really have something to complain about." The comment was contextually relevant because Rock was discussing black TV actor Leslie Jones, but it also exemplifies an essential element in the continued survival of unequal power structures: the rhetoric and politics that turns one oppressed group against another.
Hierarchies Cut Both Ways
The politics of both the left and the right are plagued in different ways by this cannibalism of the oppressed. In Republican rhetoric, the gaze is constantly directed downward towards the groups that fall below oneself in the echelon of hierarchies. Fear of anger from the less privileged unites people behind policies of oppression. Comparisons between oneself and those same lesser others pacifies any discontent that one might experience with the entrenched inequalities that emerge from such a fascistic worldview. Trump and his supporters personify this particular perversion in modern America. Less educated, economically disadvantaged whites unite in their fear of racialized others (first Latinos, then Muslims) who are constructed as plausible threats to the relative prosperity those white folks currently enjoy. Trump's male supporters can be safely reaffirmed in their presumption of male dominance when their candidate belittles Hillary and accuses her of playing the woman card.
Rock's comments exemplify the problem on the left, where instead people's focus is turned to those higher on the hierarchy pyramid. He suggests that Lawrence doesn't really have a legitimate complaint because she doesn't possess the most oppressed intersection of identities. In one stroke, he's turned someone who should be an ally in the fight against the hegemony of the white male into an apparent adversary.
Divide and Conquer
A year and a half ago I was talking to one of the smartest people I know as we blazed through the tunnel of buildings that surround the prettiest stretch of Atlanta's downtown connector about some of these same issues. I was expressing my continued amazement at the fact that so many people were so susceptible to narratives of racial or sexual superiority. He suggested to me that such narratives were inextricably entwined with classism and hierarchy. His argument was essentially that a person who isn't being given an objectively fair deal will have an easier time accepting it if he has a frame of reference that makes it look like a good deal. A white male employee who has to work too many hours for less compensation and fewer benefits might still feel content with his life if he has a sense of sovereignty over his family unit at home, or an inherent notion of worth and importance relative to another racial group.
The divisive effect of such tacit identity politics is two-fold; not only does it help us accept the raw bargain we all get from the elites in whose hands economic and political power is concentrated, it also gives us some sense of complicity in that inequality, and therefore fear of repercussions. A white man that feels guilty for his white privilege is inherently divided from others. His interested become realigned with those of the oppressor group. Forming alliances to push back against oppression becomes increasingly difficult. The process is replicated with each division, with every line of divisive identity we draw amongst ourselves. Just like the Tutsis who were empowered by the Belgians to rule over the Hutu majority, just like the various Syrian resistance groups that have fragmented and turned on each other, the only victor when we turn on each other is the status quo power structure.
Unwitting Tools
Please don't believe that I'm accusing Chris Rock of intentionally trying to undermine challenges to social change. I'm 100% confident that it wasn't his intention, in fact. But his words demonstrate a natural fact that grows out of the desperation of skewed capitalistic competition: it's totally normal to resent those who have things you haven't got. That whole "grass is greener" idiom grows out of deeply rooted human psychology, and that fact is being exploited by the ruling groups of the Western World to militate against greater social and economic equality. Maybe there's no explicit design by any particular group or person to divide us against each other; it doesn't matter. Whenever we participate in this kind of friendly fire, we're taking steps backward, carrying everyone farther away from a better world. So Chris Rock, would it really be so hard to acknowledge that the world would be a better place if both Leslie Jones and Jennifer Lawrence were being paid what they should be paid? Any man that tells the slave to stop complaining is a servant of the master.
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