In this article, Miller describes the permanent and temporary inequalities, and explains some of the relationship dynamics between subordinates and their dominants. Miller explained how often since the very survival of the subordinate depends on the decision making of the dominants, those inferior will become acutely aware to the tendencies and character of those above them. By excluding them from positions of power and delegating them the work that nobody else wants to do, the dominants take away any semblance of feedback from their subordinates. They keep the subordinates in these positions and offer them no agency, molding them to fit the stereotypes they wish to enforce. The dominants do not understand their inferiors, but the inferiors understand the dominants, but not themselves.
An example of this conundrum is vividly explained in Richard Wright’s Native Son, a book I read in my FYS last year. As an impoverished, young black teenager living in Chicago, Bigger Thomas is frustrated that his girlfriend and his mother do not fight back against the system in the same violent manner that he does, but his is blind to his own reality since he begins to fit a sterotype that the white politicians and media of Chicago assign to young black men. Author Richard Wright described Bigger as living behind a veil- he could see the powers that exploited his family, but these powers could not see or understand him. Wright built these ideas off of famous African American scholar WEB Du Bois, who wrote about the double consciousness of black Americans.
The book you read last year definitely ties into the whole idea of Domination vs subordination. I’ve always found it interesting however that the subordinates do tend to put up with the dominate class until they can cause the same amount of fear that the dominate class caused them. its almost like the roles reverse to make things more equal.
I love the points made here. Beverly Tatum also touches on these ideas in her book “Why Do All of the Black Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria”. When she came to speak on campus she used the analogy of the maid knowing everything about the family she works for despite the family normally knowing nothing about the maid.