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Pearl harbored: race, gender and public memories of Pearl Harbor and 9/11/2001

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Pearl harbored: race, gender and public memories of Pearl Harbor and 9/11/2001

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PEARL HARBORED:
RACE, GENDER AND PUBLIC
MEMORIES OF PEARL HARBOR AND 9/11/2001

by

Robert Aaron Hollenbaugh

______________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SOCIOLOGY)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Robert Aaron Hollenbaugh
ii
DEDICATION

To Melissa
for encouraging me to reach further
&
To Makela and Miya
who are constant sources of joy, pride and hope

Each of you inspires the best in me
and holds my deepest love
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My dissertation was not a solo endeavor. Many people helped me complete it,
and many more aided my larger journey through graduate school. I am proud to mention
some people whose influence has been especially important and whose support has meant
a great deal to me personally and professionally. A giant thanks to Mike Messner, who
has been a wise and steady advisor throughout the dissertation process. I have done well
to follow his counsel and probably should have done so more often. He supported this
project at each step, and I will always be grateful for the care he has shown me as he
ushered me forward, and finally led me to the finish line. Merril Silverstein has been a
trusted advisor and colleague for many years. Each time I left his office I felt the scholar
in me shining, usually inspired to move forward and do better. I cannot thank him
enough for all the guidance he gave me. Leland Saito graciously worked with me
through coursework, qualifying exams and finally the dissertation while always offering
thoughtful feedback and support. I appreciate his ultimate focus on the end prize. Ann
Tickner has always shown my work the utmost respect, and I learned so very much from
her emphasis on the process and feminist methodology, which these pages have surely
been too short on. Ed Ransford and Tim Biblarz have also been particularly meaningful
advisors during my graduate school career, and I thank them both for their counsel.
Thanks to Jeff Montez de Oca, James Thing, Belinda Lum, Cheryl Cooky and Marc de
Jong for helpful conversation and feedback on some of the ideas in these pages and for
their collegial support.
iv
The entire Fujiwara family has been a source of support, and will always help
define home for me. I would like to thank Tom and Yetsuko Fujiwara for their care and
encouragement over many years; it has meant more than you could know. Thanks to
Mitch Fujiwara and his family, including Maxi, who gave me a trial run at childcare. To
Mark Fujiwara and family, a special thanks for all the validation, and for getting me to
leave my room, finally! Thanks also to Lynn Fujiwara and her family, especially for her
advice and willingness to help whenever possible as I moved along; her experience
getting through somewhat normalized this process. Special thanks to Kyra Ioppolo for
helping us make so many special memories. Melissa Fujiwara, my menehune, partner
and wife, has been an incredible strength not only throughout graduate school, but also in
our larger journey together. Working on two dissertations and raising two babies has
been a strain on our very sanity; I wouldn’t have it any other way, and I can’t imagine it
without Melissa. I truly don’t know that I could have completed the manuscript without
her near-constant work over the past years, be it on her own research, caring for our
daughters or aiding my progress. I sought her counsel on this project much too
infrequently. Her insights, edits and suggestions improved the research and manuscript
immeasurably. Melissa believed in my abilities even when I doubted them, and without
her support I would not have completed my doctorate, and probably wouldn’t have
attempted it. I owe her so very much. Makela and Miya have inspired me to continue
moving forward, and provided me with a whole lot of fun along the way. I am so grateful
to have had them both along for this ride with me to balance my life and reinforce what is
most important.
∞ Engage! ∞
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgements

List of Tables

List of Figures

Abstract

Preface

Chapter 1: From Pearl Harbor to September 11: Theorizing the Significance
of Race and Gender

Chapter 2: Methodology

Chapter 3: Fear and Loathing at the End of History: Media Patterns from
Pearl Harbor and September 11
th

Chapter 4: (E)racing the Past: The “Greatest Generation” and the Journey
to Colorblind Racial Ideology

Chapter 5: Performance Anxiety: Masculinities at War & the ‘Civilization
Paradox’

Chapter 6: Conclusion

Bibliography

ii

iii

vi

vii

viii

x

1

34

50

75

121

164

178
vi
LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1: Description of Waves by Event

Table 3.2: Number of Newspaper Articles Mentioning Pearl Harbor and
Oklahoma City by Month

Table 3.3: Motive by Event and Wave (percent)

Table 3.4: Newspaper Treatment of Japanese Americans and Arab and
Muslim Americans

Table 3.5: Portrayal of US as Civilized, Enemy as Backward by Event

Table 3.6: Portrayal of US as Honorable, Enemy as Sneaky by Event

Table 3.7: Portrayal of US as Moral, Enemy as Immoral by Event

Table 3.8: Masculinity Descriptions by Event

Table 3.9: Portrayal of US and Enemy as Aggressive by Event

Table 3.10: Portrayal of US as 'Soft' and Enemy as Tough by Event

Table 3.11: Portrayal of US as Brave by Event

Table 4.1: Portrayal of Japanese Americans and Arab/Muslim Americans
Respectively, by Event

Table 5.1: Newspaper Portrayals of Pearl Harbor-era Versus 9/11-era:
Number of articles portraying US as either 'soft' or 'tough'

54

57

61

63

63

64

66

68

70

71

72

105

155

vii
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1: Idealized Vision of Social Group Membership

Figure 1.2: Actual Social Group Membership

Figure 3.1: Prevalence of Homefront Frame by Event

Figure 3.2: Prevalence of Natural Primary Framework by Event

Figure 3.3: Newspaper Articles Mentioning Pearl Harbor and Oklahoma
City, centered on Sept. 2001

Figure 3.4: Workplace Propaganda Poster by Heppenstall Co. Steel
Forgings, Pittsburgh, PA. 1943

Figure 5.1: The Best Way to Ensure Peace

Figure 5.2: Theoretical Model of the "Civilization Paradox" : Common
Sense Notions of Relative Toughness versus Intellect

Figure 5.3: The Spanish Brute Adds Mutilation to Murder, 1898

Figure 5.4: Be Careful! Its Loaded!, 1898

Figure 5.5: Theoretical Model of the Links between Men & Masculinity
and Nationalism, adapted from Nagel 1998

Figure 5.6: Media Describing US as Soft and Enemies as Tough by 6
Month Wave Intervals

25

27

56

56

58

69

125

128

131

132

135

156

viii
ABSTRACT

This study explores interactions between race, gender and citizenship focusing on how
race and gender ideologies shape “common sense” understandings and public memories
of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon
and the World Trade Center. In turn, I examine how these public disasters inform and re-
shape “common sense” notions of race and gender. Through an analysis of newspaper
coverage of these events, and interviews with two cohorts of people—those who were
young adults in 1941, and 2001 respectively—I analyze how people incorporate and
express common sense discourses about race and gender. I uncover the ways past race
and gender ideologies intersect with contemporary ones, with attention to the ways legal
and social rights of non-whites remain vulnerable. My media analysis illuminates the
importance of race, gender, and collective anxiety in constructing 9/11 and Pearl Harbor
as national disasters. Members of the WWII generation often shared “revisionist
memories” by applying colorblind ideals to the past, depicting more harmonious racial
conditions than actually existed. While they deployed colorblind language when talking
about most people of color, members of this older age cohort did not when referring to
Muslims or Arabs, thus revealing an incomplete internalization of colorblindness. While
both generations adhere differently to a colorblind sensibility, both cohorts equally reveal
a masculinist orientation, illustrating what little shift has occurred in gender regimes
relating to nationalism and foreign policy. After 9/11, members of both age cohorts drew
from a frame I call the “civilization paradox,” personifying the US as increasingly

ix
feminized while “Muslim extremists” were depicted as exemplars of social backwardness
and unchecked masculinity. This illuminates how both raced and gendered sensibilities
simultaneously reinforce hierarchies and reframe conflicts. Looking at racial and gender
formation through an intergenerational life course perspective provides clues about the
transformation of ideologies over time, and how definitions of citizenship and belonging
respond to major social events. I conceptualize gender and race as mutually-constituting
systems of power. By linking these concepts, I add empirically to the theoretical work
done on race relations, intersectionality, and critical masculinity studies.

x
PREFACE

Early on September 11, 2001 in my suburban apartment outside of Los Angeles, I
awoke to ready myself for my own personal battle against thirty miles of traffic toward
downtown Los Angeles and my day’s teaching commitments. As I turned on my tiny
bedroom television, my partner’s shower steam flowing from the bathroom, NBC’s
coverage of the morning’s horrors flashed on the screen. “Was it an accident?” was the
question being asked as I tuned in, but within minutes a second flight ferociously
slammed into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Experienced from thousands of
miles away through the safety of a television, I had no sense of personal danger. I
watched, frozen in my boxer shorts, T-shirt and morning exhaustion, for many minutes in
a deeper-than-normal morning malaise.
I got in my car a short time later, finding the traffic worse than ever, with Los
Angeles’ major freeway interchanges cut off in a security effort to thwart any potential
attack. When I arrived at the University of Southern California’s University Park campus
it was not a normal day, and discussions of the morning attacks were everywhere,
including the sociology of the family course in which I was a teaching assistant. As I
write this now, a great distance from those memories of that long-ago September, I doubt
my own mind and its clarity. The story of this research began on 9/11/2001 and stretched
back to the winter of 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i. The pages that
follow are a sociological account of the memories, icons and representations we hold
about momentous times. These times, as I felt on many occasions sitting in living rooms

xi
and on patios with the folks I interviewed in the course of my research, enliven us, wake
our often-mundane lives and throw us into the midst of history. This personal connection
to these history-changing events also connects us to one another and our collective
illustrations of important events. We all share these memories.
September 11, 2001 will always be known for the terrorist attacks that killed so
many people in such a dramatic demonstration of destruction. The immediate
comparisons with Pearl Harbor hooked my internal critical sociologist on investigating
the role of memory in interpreting the present. September 11, like other major events,
was processed through fear and scapegoating. With the state, major media sources and
public reactions contributing to a social milieu where common racial and ethnic themes
were utilized in conjunction with gendered ideas to construct a new enemy. Adding a
twist of contemporary colorblind racial values and the analysis of public memories and
ideologies surrounding Pearl Harbor and 9/11 offered a window into understanding how
major events can impact people’s views. I could also see that preexisting gender and
racial ideologies affected the way 9/11 was being understood, framed, and reacted to. As
I now refer back to my memories of September 11
th
and the days and weeks that followed
I know my own memories are colored by the intervening years. My study that follows is
not a reference to either Pearl Harbor or 9/11 as they exist, but to the thoughts that
surround them.

1
CHAPTER 1
FROM PEARL HARBOR TO SEPTEMBER 11:
THEORIZING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE AND GENDER

Sunday morning, on the verge of winter in the United States, the tide of war had
arrived at a naval base on the Pacific shores of Oahu, Hawai’i. When Japanese bombers
hit Pearl Harbor on December 7
th
1941, it was around noon throughout the continental
US, but in an era where radio rather than television was the dominant press medium,
many ordinary citizens learned of the attack Sunday night or Monday. Papps Grilenz was
sixteen, shopping for shoes with his father and brother in New York City when they
heard over the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked: “my father turned white
because he knew my brother and I, we were going to go… and I remember like it was
yesterday. Picture a can of sardines. That's how the subway looks. It was so quiet and
thoughtful you could hear a pin drop, other than the noise from the train.” Jessie Raines
was twenty-two and a university student at a dance when she heard the news going
around: “it was the first time that we were directly attacked and of course all the men, the
ROTC guys, went immediately.” Memories of where people were and what they were
doing were generally filled with details far different than normal memories, reflecting
surprise and a high level of importance characteristic in flashbulb memories (Brown and
Kulik 1977).
The early hours of the second Tuesday of September 2001 began normally for
millions of Americans, but soon turned into “the Pearl Harbor of terrorism” (CBS News

2
Special Report 2001). In the hours that unfolded in the morning and throughout the day,
media coverage of the “Attack on America” was sprinkled with mention of the Pearl
Harbor attack of almost sixty years prior, a day which finally launched the US and it’s
public opinion into the awaiting jaws of world war. The extent to which the historical
events are comparable is debatable,
1
but the meaning of them in the mind of Americans is
keenly linked: surprise, “sneak” attacks on unsuspecting citizens. One World War II
veteran who enlisted with the US Marine Corps in response to Pearl Harbor described the
American public’s surprise to the events in similar terms, both characterizing flashbulb
moments: “A sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, a date that will live in infamy… the whole
country was in a state of disbelief, and we were completely unprepared.” On 9/11, “like
everyone else I saw the planes going in there and couldn't believe it. Beyond belief.
There was so much surrealism.” What linked these two events, other than a discourse of
shock, is the ‘common sense’ with which the perpetrators could be described: cowardly,
sneaky and perhaps above all uncivilized. Pearl Harbor was an analogy after the 9/11
attacks that carried with it narratives of shock and surprise, but also images of an enemy,
of an appropriate response and of just war. World War II was a point of comparison, but

1
The Japanese military attack on Pearl Harbor was first a military strike against a military target, which
ushered the beginning of a conventional war between nation-states. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were
arguably acts of civilian criminality against civilian targets, which could therefore not be the focus of a
retaliatory military response, or even a declaration of war. Nevertheless, the Pearl Harbor imaginary stuck,
partially fueling the maneuvers against the Taliban government of Afghanistan, and the Congressional
authorization for the President to execute “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations,
organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that
occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future
acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons” in order
to bring the perpetrators of the 9/11 actions to justice and to prevent further attacks (United States Congress
2001).

3
in the absence of a reputable foe the racial and gendered ideologies of the Pearl Harbor
era became key sources of common sense knowledge about 9/11.
In this dissertation I analyze the interrelational character of gender and race
through two distinct disasters of public memory in the US: Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Georg
Simmel (1955) believed that conflicts and enemies bring societies a collective unity, and
Pearl Harbor and 9/11 offer examples of this as large-scale events which impacted the US
and in a sense united its people. The events also provided a context for collective self-
realization. What are we and what are we not? This is part of Simmel’s insight, that
rather than values or religion, background or peoplehood, a collective enemy might
provide an accord attainable only when attacked from outside. Taking on a defensive
character and defining self through an externalized enemy requires more than a
superficial conception of facts and events, and more than, for example, knowledge that
passenger airliners were used as weapons against prominent American targets. Who are
we against? Indeed, after the initial shock, this may have been the primary question on
the minds of Americans on 9/11 and after. While Pearl Harbor provided a clear answer
to this question, it is one that continues to linger, as subsequent chapters will show, in the
minds of my interviewees years after 9/11 in the midst of an amoebic ‘war on terror.’ I
cannot help but come back to Simmel for what must be part of the reason so many remain
interested in knowing the enemy: they yearn to know themselves and their compatriots, to
know what they are by way of what they are not. Our common sense ideologies provide
a key to forming this knowledge—to be understandable, the answers to the “who are
they” questions must gel with common sense, with strongly held social ideals, many of

4
which are internalized to the point of invisibility. As Peter Berger (1963) articulated,
sociology at its best challenges the taken-for-granted, and shows that oftentimes “things
are not what they seem.” Here I explore the way racialized masculinities in the US
provide a means through which these two events and their perpetrators are understood,
and how such knowledge relates to US global hegemony in ways that are obscured to
many people though the magic of common sense. My questions surround the
interpretations of these two history-changing events by people who I term temporal
witnesses, two generations that were young adults at the time of Pearl Harbor and 9/11
respectively, and how their ‘common sense’ informed their interpretations and the
meanings they made of the events in question.
My analysis of race, gender and power depends on a term for culturally well-
know traits and taken-for-granted social ‘facts,’ what Antonio Gramsci called “common
sense.” Gramsci’s concept forms the basis of the ideological, socially constructed
processes of race and gender which Omi and Winant (1994) as well as Connell (1987)
respectively describe as ‘hegemonic.’ A brief review of this concept is needed, and
informs my understanding of the variability and the endurance of race and gender as
social facts. Gramsci thought of common sense as folkloric notions that were
incoherently organized but deeply rooted in the cultural understandings of a given
society, roughly comparable to what contemporary sociologists might call ‘frames’ or
‘schemas’ (Gitlin 1977; Goffman 1986 [1974]; Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford
1986). Although common sense is disjointed and non-universal, it is a powerful,
conservative social force that resonates with much of the populace, impedes social

5
reforms and acts as a culturally valid anchor to the past (Gramsci 1971b). Critical to
Gramsci’s notion of common sense is the usage and power of language to shape thought
and action (see Gramsci 2000). Perhaps most significantly, common sense is not
reflexive, existing in an uncritical location in the human senses, and varying by degree
depending on social location.
2

Hegemony, described by Gramsci as leadership of a society by an historical bloc
of classes and/or other social groups, requires a connection with common sense, an
appeal to these fundamental cultural inventories. Indeed, common sense, and latching on
to these cultural undercurrents is necessary for not only conservative social forces, but as
Durkheim noted (1961 [1925]), for reformers and revolutionaries as well; without a
strong link to people’s commonsensical outlooks social change is impractical and likely
to strike a collective society as unfounded (see Pearce 1989:43-45). While Gramsci
viewed common sense as uncritical and unthinking, he contrasted this with critically,
logically informed values, or “good sense,” which represented a higher stage of
understanding and the potential for progressive social change. Common sense then, is
the foundation for my discussion of race and gender, memory and the deeply-held,
uncriticized assumptions that accompany it; this cultural knowledge is very important
because it is the foundation for social action on the everyday individual level as well as
structural actions in institutions.
This dissertation intervenes in the literature on intersectionality, especially the
theorization of masculinity and race, as well as race literature that attempts to more fully

2
In Gramsci’s writing, social location refers specifically to social class and to the distinction between
urban/rural, and peasant/worker.

6
understand the weight and modulation of hierarchical ideas in the US over time, their
evolution and generational intricacies. The review of the literature that follows traces
influential and relevant theories in gender and masculinity studies, race and ethnicity, and
intersectionality. I draw on citizenship to illustrate the connectedness of gender and
racial ideologies to common sense and the state. Finally, social elaborations of
generations and memory are very applicable to my multi-generational inquiry.

Memory
Sociological analyses that rely on memories of any sort, be they individuals
through interviewing or surveys, or official public memories and monuments should
account for their inherent character. Halbwachs (1992) wrote extensively on memory
between the two world wars, and died in 1945 after being interned in a Nazi
concentration camp. Halbwachs thought of memory in a somewhat revolutionary
manner: that it was not a construction of an individual mind, but was always a creation of
the social milieu. According to his theory, memories cannot exist in solitary
confinement, nor are they necessarily good reflections of the actual past; nor were
memories and their selectivity individually edited by repression, as Freud’s theories
suggested. If memories are not reflections of individuals, but of their social influences,
they are perhaps best understood as markers of collective understanding or collective
common sense. Not only are memories social, but people’s age seems to be a major
predictor of their recollections and the importance they place on those recollections
(Conway 1996; Schuman and Scott 1989). Adolescence and young adulthood seems to

7
be a formative time in terms of the significance and lasting impact of memories
(Finkenauer, Gisle, and Luminet 1997). While ideals and values change throughout the
life course, they are most malleable and formative during this time, and less so as one
ages (Conway 1997; Holmes and Conway 1999). Memories are not only impacted by
milieu, but of special concern and interest is that they are recalled in a conversation with
a person’s social context at the moment of recollection (Halbwachs 1992). Memories of
50 years prior or 5 weeks prior are all subject to this same limitation of authenticity,
although the older memory is more likely to have been recalled on more occasions and
thus may be more altered. According to current research on memory and recognition,
memories are reinterpreted every time they are evoked, and so become increasingly
distant from the original the more often they are called to the conscious mind (Nader
2003a; Nader 2003b). These reformulations are of special concern when discussing
social issues that have changed over time and are subject to social desirability biases in
which people have self-serving interests in fitting their responses in the context of
broader discourses they believe are socially preferred (Carsey 1995). While this offers a
challenge to researchers, it also can reveal interesting aspects and selectivity of memory.
We know that not only do people selectively remember, but they also selectively forget
or ignore certain recollections or simply fail to remember some aspects of the past
(Baumeister and Hastings 1997). Reflections and memory then, if understood as re-
interpretations through a contemporary lens and in a certain context, are very valuable
qualitative data that not only tell us about the past, but also about the present.

8
Race
A review of sociological race literature reveals a relative lack of influence of
gender scholarship in the field. Although I find that theoretical innovations open the door
for analyses of race that are cognizant of gender, much of this opportunity is left
unnoticed. Although for a century social scientists have challenged any notion that race
is inherent (cf Boas 1912 [1911]; Du Bois 1999 [1903]), much of the sociological
scholarship continues to treat racial groups as coherent and unchanging. Omi and
Winant’s (1994 [1986]) racial formation perspective challenged this assumption,
asserting that the ideological battles to define the boundaries and character of ‘race’ are
inherently political and contentious, while their outcomes have very real consequences.
While some scholars have registered a concern that analyses of race may be taken from
the experiences of the everyday to the level of ideological construction (Wellman 1993
[1977]), Omi and Winant’s approach provides the language for a more fluid and nuanced
analysis of racial meanings. This new fluidity, and especially the theorizations of
evolving racialization over time, is critical for my study’s emphasis on the importance of
time, memory and dominant racial frames on people’s thoughts. This includes the ways
racial common sense may change, and the important role of the ‘racial state’ in creating
or undermining such meanings.
Winant (2001) has further claimed that a paradigm shift occurred in US racial
ideology and practice after World War II, arguing that the US moved from a period of
racial coercion, or rule-by-force, to an institutional system of racial consent, where the
state gained legitimacy by acquiescing to human rights and civil rights pressures (Wilson

9
1980). Winant claims that this shift has meant an improvement over the former system of
racial rule, but that the hierarchies of race remain intact in a less overt form. The
argument that US racial hierarchies have shifted to become more liberally oriented is also
reflected in work done by Bobo et al. (1997), who use the term “laissez-faire racism” to
describe the post-WWII era and the decline of the Jim Crow brand of bigotry. Bobo et al.
describe how US common sense generally began to regard African Americans as
culturally inferior after WWII,
3
in contrast to more biologically-driven notions of race
hierarchy during the Jim Crow period and the latter 19
th
century (Kevles 1995). This
point is elaborated further by Bonilla-Silva (2003b), who describes the modern US
operating within a framework of ‘colorblind racism,’ where racial inequality is justified
and reproduced through cultural racism, the denial of the existence of significant racial
barriers and the naturalization of social strife and inequity. In short, Bonilla-Silva argues
that the modern racial era in the US has removed racism from its vocabulary—and in
doing so it has normalized the racial experiences of whites to the detriment of
contemporary civil rights efforts.
4

Recent work on whiteness has begun to describe and deconstruct the racial
formation of ‘white’ as a racial category, and Omi and Winant have influenced much of
this work. While DuBois (1973 [1935]) was surely the first sociologist to describe what

3
The notion that culture was the primary barrier to the success of some racial/ethnic groups was
constructed by noted anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who coined to term “culture of poverty” (1959). Later,
Moynihan’s (1965) famous US Dept. of Labor report, The Negro Family, applied this reasoning to the US,
largely holding ‘black matriarchy’ responsible for urban Black poverty. What Bobo and Bonilla-Silva
point to is the normalization of these respective theses, made forty years ago by social scientists, into a
coherent form of interpreting racism that is now dominant in the US.
4
Note the congruence of language and ideology present in the observation that “race” as a topic has largely
been eradicated from public discourse, and that it is often met with discomfort when it is. The power of
this linguistic move is more interesting considering the primacy of language in Gramscian thinking in
framing common sense and aiding hegemonic ideologies.

10
we now call ‘whiteness’ in his discussion of the cultural and status dividend it paid to
poor whites during the post-Civil War Reconstruction, Roediger (1991) is perhaps best
known, and his work is among the earliest to thoroughly interrogate the historical
construction of this privileged racial position in the US, arguing that working class
European immigrant groups actively sought to define themselves as racially white or
“Caucasian” while contrasting themselves with African Americans, a topic elaborated
further by others (Jacobson 1998). Critical race scholar Haney Lopez (1996) describes
the definition of whiteness in US law as not only contradictory and variable, but
dependent largely on common sense notions of an ‘ideal,’ white American identity. The
construction and importance of whiteness in the modern turn towards “colorblind racism”
is explained to a great degree by Waters (1990), who describes the choices of middle
class whites to identify their ethnicity (or not identify their ethnicity at all), and relates
this choice to a misunderstanding that whites in general have about the nature of race in
the US. According to Waters, because ethnicity lacks negative consequences for whites,
and since they may freely choose it or not, they tend to view markers of ancestry as
personal and meaningful, but not as predictive of their life chances (in causal terms,
whites often conceive of ancestry as a dependent rather than an independent variable).
Many whites mistakenly transpose these assumptions and experiences onto the racial
experiences of people of color, failing to distinguish any major differences between white
ethnicity and racial ancestry. Therefore, the experiences of whiteness become the
foundation for the troubling assumption that, with the downfall of legalistic racism, the
US became a colorblind nation. As Harris (1995) has described, US law through part of

11
the 1950s held whiteness literally as a form of property protected by the courts. The
aftermath of this legal advantage and the cultural foundations that went along with white
privilege continue to affect the material advantages of whites (Oliver and Shapiro 1995),
racial political maneuverings (Saito 1998), and ideological taken-for-grantedness of racial
privilege (Lipsitz 1998; McIntosh 1995).
While some understandable apprehension to studies of whiteness have appeared,
as Rothenberg (2002) notes, white privilege and whiteness as it is fundamentally linked
to Americanness, and is “the other side of racism,” a side which is often ignored to the
disservice of our understanding. Studies of whiteness, and of white privilege, as
Anderson (2003) has held, are useful only to the degree to which they are related to the
institutionality of race and its material consequences. Not only does my study seek to
expand on this foundation, but it challenges some recent suggestions by sociologists that
examinations of intersecting forms of stratification (eg, race, class and gender) should
aim to “predict their combined and independent effects” (Bonilla-Silva 2004:194, n1); I
contend that a suggestion that we disentangle race, gender and class (as well as other axes
of stratification) reveals the limits of prior approaches to understanding intersectionality
as a problem of additional or multiplying negative impacts. Mathematical models that
hope to explain and quantify causality for individuals who occupy two of more socially
devalued positions, for example Black women (see Beale 1995), make the mistake of
essentializing such groups. Racial, ethnic, and gender groups are not composed of
similarly situated persons, in spite of our common linguistic patterns of speech; a point

12
well-made decades ago in debates about feminism and the universal “woman”
(Combahee River Collective 1983 [1977]; Moraga and Anzaldua 1983).

Critical Approaches To Masculinity
Moving towards more specific theoretical elaborations of gender types,
investigations of masculinity are particularly important, especially in discussing acts of
war and violence. My investigation centers on the maintenance and re-enforcement of
hegemonic masculinity and whiteness during times of social threat, which are closely
linked to times of war and conflict; I would term this an investigation of masculine
whiteness. Inspired by the post-war feminist movement, many men began a critical
engagement with the concept of masculinity within patriarchical society. Among these
early scholars were Andrew Tolson (1979) and Joseph Pleck (1974), who critiqued the
Western construction of the ‘masculine role’ and its alienating character. Despite some
outdated assumptions about gender ‘role’ socialization and often a reliance on structural
Marxism, these early masculinity scholars’ major critiques depicted many of the limits of
gender organization in Western societies. Connell’s (1987) further elaborations of a
layered, structural theory of gender, and of “hegemonic masculinity” as a carrier of
power, status, recognition and legitimacy are a firm basis for current critical work related
to masculinities. As Connell (1987; 1995) and Kimmel (1996) both argue, gendered
interactions and images, masculinity specifically, are constantly being defended, proven

13
and restated. The aftermaths of the two most recent attacks on US territory,
5
the
12/7/1941 Pearl Harbor attacks and the 9/11/2001 terrorist assaults in Washington, DC
and New York City provided socially appropriate impetuses for the articulation of
hegemonic masculinity and of retaliatory measures (Messerschmidt 1993).
Messerschmidt’s (2000:13) concept of “masculinity challenges,” “contextualized
interactions that result in masculine degradation,” is useful for interpreting the responses
in the US to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. These events represented a challenge to the
collective masculinity, to the character of the US as a world power, and therefore
necessitated an appropriately strong, appropriately gendered response. This response,
however, even if in line with hegemonic masculinity, is not predetermined; hegemonic
masculinity is somewhat malleable, and dominant forms of masculinity can and do
change by place and time (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Messner 2007). However,
there is an undeniable tie between hegemonic masculinities, at least over time, which
lends legitimacy and connects them: their attachment to common sense requires that
changes be recognizable and rather than revolutionary be evolutionary.
The post-9/11 period, as Tickner (2002) has expressed, was characterized by a
remasculinization of media and of the activities and efforts of men to respond to the
newly baptized threat. This pattern matches that found by Jeffords (1989) in her study of
the post-Vietnam US, where cultural representations depicted an insecure masculinity
struggling to regain its prior footing. Violence, dominance and subordination are sites

5
It is notable that Hawai’i was a US ‘territory’ in 1941 but not a state until 1959. Therefore, the attacks of
December 7
th
1941 were against US military forces stationed in a US colony and not in the heart of the
United States. In this way these two events are distinct; yet in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks,
this was rather inconsequential, as the defining element of December 7
th
was the treacherous attack on the
United States as a symbolic entity, the same fundamental sentiment of 9/11.

14
where masculinity is constructed and reinforced (Messner 2003), and in the arena of
international affairs and global strategy, men and hegemonic notions of masculinity
remain entrenched and resilient (Cohn 1993; Enloe 2000; Tickner 1992; Tickner 2001).
Hegemonic masculinity, then, can be used as a critical lens through which Pearl Harbor
and 9/11 can be viewed, but this theoretical concept’s utility extends beyond descriptions
of an ideal gender type. Masculinities, by Connell’s definition, are ordered and
hierarchical, with the hegemonic type defined not only in accord with specifically
gendered characteristics, but along with racial and class characteristics as well.
Specifically, in the global West hegemonic masculinity is heterosexual, of positive class
standing, and white.
6
While the victories of the feminist and civil rights movements may
have legally decreased the privilege of white men, as Messner (2004) has shown, the
defense of this hegemonic masculinity and of men’s collective “interests” in the gender
order are culturally widespread, and men globally continue to operate as filters through
which reforms must pass (Connell 2005). As I elaborate further below, re-articulating,
reinforcing and defending hegemonic masculinity by definition simultaneously pinpoints
and can also validate racial hierarchies.

Multiple Identities: Gender and Race
Intersectionality, double jeopardy, multiplicity, matrix of domination, among
others are terms used to describe how people are at once situated in many categories
simultaneously. Some terms have come out of favor, such as ‘double jeopardy,’ as

6
Audre Lorde (1984a) aptly describes this same subject as the “mythical norm.”

15
analyses typically address or acknowledge that we are all situated in many more than two
axis of social classifications: gender, sexuality, race, class, age, etc. Much of this
literature can inform our theoretical and empirical knowledge about the complicated
social processes involved in a social identity, in how a subject is seen, understood and
responded to as a result of hegemonic ideologies.
7

Baca Zinn and Dill (1994) have forwarded an approach to the study of
race/gender intersections which they term “multiracial feminism.” Concerned with
highlighting the significance of the intersecting social conditions which gender and racial
status produce, Baca Zinn and Dill along with many other sociologists and gender
scholars have interrupted and contributed to the now well accepted notion that studies of
gender must be complicated by markers of race (as well as class and sexuality).
Responding to a similar Western-centered, middle-class bias in gender studies, Mohanty
(1991) successfully criticized the universal construction of the gendered subject,
“woman,” challenging the field to produce theoretically informed work that would
accurately reflect the complexity and multiplicity of gender as a inconsistent social
category. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (2000) has been one of the most effective
scholars at bridging the gap between race and gender studies, conceptualizing multiple
forms of structured oppression as existing in an historically specific “matrix of
domination.” In Collins’ descriptive tracing of Black feminist thought, she places the
positionality of Black women in its historical context to show how the “matrix of

7
Hegemonic ideologies are abided by universally and leave room for variation, but it can be said that there
are clear ideas that are understood even by people who do not hold them, which are common and dominant.

16
domination” organized multiple forms of oppression while also providing the context for
resistance and agency.
Glenn (1999) has contributed greatly to the theoretical elaboration of race and
gender intersections, emphasizing their “relationality” and the potential for bridging the
theoretical gaps between the two bodies of work by highlighting their socially
constructed natures. Attempting to bridge the gap between understandings of race and
gender, Glenn (2002) discusses citizenship, defined broadly, to illuminate the difficulties
faced in expanding traditional Western notions of the white male citizen to include
women and people of color. Similar contentions have been well made by scholars
specifically concerned with the international scene, notably Yuval-Davis (1999) whose
concept of the “multi-layered citizen” underscores the multiple subjectivities which
overlap to form social identities. Yuval-Davis provides a theoretical elaboration that
expands the debate about intersectionality to the global level, taking notice of the
extremely divergent realities of women around the world in terms of race, ethnicity,
nationality, class and variable views of gender. Yuval-Davis (1997) also has used the
language of citizenship as a way to discuss marginalization in many forms; according to
her analysis, certain women, because of their social class, ethnicity or other identity
markers are more likely not to be considered citizens or legitimate members of the state.
In short, citizenship is considered along a continuum of inclusion and exclusion from full
social membership, and is always viewed in relation to the power of the state to protect,
overlook, or discipline.

17
Using citizenship conceptually provides an important point of departure from
some formulations of intersectionality. West and Fenstermaker (1995:13) have pointed
to the problems associated with mathematical models of intersectionality, most notable
that it is “simultaneity that has eluded our theoretical treatments.” In other words, much
of the theorizing done in this tradition has made honest and useful efforts to understand
how multiple social hierarchies come together to cause diverse and complicated types of
subordinations, yet this effort has yet to emphasize the simultaneous ways that race,
sexuality, nationality, gender, class, and other forms of social categorization are
experienced as relational. Citizenship, or social citizenship as first outlined by Marshall
(1992 [1950]) and understood as access to the rights, privileges and validation of a broad
community, can provide a lens by which not only multiple forms of oppression can be
placed, but multiple forms of social privilege as well. In this sense, speaking of
citizenship allows for the location and identification of social hierarchies as they are
lived: in a social context where they exist side-by-side. Race and gender are historical
systems of power that structure social interaction, but they do not exist in isolation from
one another, nor separate from other aspects of social location. In a sense, citizenship
studies open a possibility for discussing simultaneous hierarchies, unhampered by
confusion over how to draw the lines of intersection. My approach emphasizes the
falseness of such lines, and the potential of moving beyond categorical approaches that
separate different aspects of identities.

18
Citizenship: Embodying Common Sense
Citizenship, according to T.H. Marshall (1992 [1950]:6), “is a kind of basic
human equality associated with the concept of full membership of a community.”
Marshall split the concept into three parts, covering the civil, political, and social spheres
of a society, where full membership would be indicated by coverage in all three areas.
Marshall’s innovation was his description of social citizenship as being a product of the
twentieth century, defined in relation to inequality that could not be contained in political
or civil notions of citizenship (Shafir 1998). Social citizenship was not an easily
measurable concept, but “the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the
life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society” (Marshall
1992 [1950]:8). If we are to accept Marshall’s definition of citizenship as full
membership in a community or society, there are further theoretical concerns which come
quickly to the fore. It is essential to recognize that, by design, citizenship in all arenas are
and have always been both inclusionary and exclusionary, welcoming some into the
ranks of citizen while shunning others through various means. The roots of the US
citizen are clearly not neutral nor are they inclusive. Originally, most principalities
limited full legal participation in the civil and political spheres to white men of property.
Revisiting citizenship is important for one reason in particular: scholars have made
considerable efforts to speak of commonalities and differences between types of social
inequality (race and gender in particular), and discussions of citizenship, as defined by
Marshall, provide a discourse from which that discussion can claim a common language
and a theoretical foundation.

19
Although legalistically citizenship may be binary, notions of social citizenship
move beyond descriptions of citizenship rights and discuss issues of access. Important
works have complicated citizenship, squeezing the notion and revealing its limitations:
what subjects have been incorporated and which excluded, and how have these
concoctions been modified through intervention strategies aiming to grow or shrink
citizenship? Dissecting the lived experiences of social subjects implies much more than
occupation, economic rewards and educational outcomes. For distinctly qualitative
measures, a notion of belonging, broadly defined, is needed. Turning to work that can
inform the important question of citizenship will fill in a void that needs theoretical
elaboration, and also begins the difficult task of uniting gender and race in a theoretical
language which emphasizes their linked status. Citizenship then, in this context, can be
though of as what Ong (1996) as well as Rosaldo and Flores (1997) have elaborated as
cultural citizenship and not formal political citizenship. Cultural citizenship relates to
acceptance in a society or community which is culturally pluralist rather than
assimilationist, where practicing cultural difference does not mean second-class
membership. The emphasis on the term cultural is of great significance, as I will argue
that social group identities, such as race and gender, are social constructions that draw
their weight from cultural ‘common sense.’ Additionally, I argue that the state plays a
fundamental role in laying the foundations in the realm of group subjectivity and
citizenship status.

Bounding Citizenship: the state and its concern

20
The rationale for states to be concerned with citizenship is fundamentally tied to
the economic and political circumstances within it. Subjects within the geographical
boundaries of a state are a resource to be tapped. Foucault has termed this resource “bio-
power,” meaning that life itself is a resource in the form of labor, population and milieu
(1990:143). As Foucault explains it, harnessing the potential of bio-power is an
intimately political process taken on by governmental structures (state and otherwise) to
discipline the process of life itself and regulate bio-power through influence over
populations and societies.
For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in
political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that
only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality;
part of it was passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of
intervention. Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over
whom the ultimate domination was death, but with living beings and the mastery
it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life
itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave
power its access even to the body (Foucault 1990:142-143).

Discipline is necessary precisely because subjects are disobedient and seek to escape
administration, but maintaining a regulated flow of bio-power, the resource of life itself,
requires a level of management of the population and the subject within it. Citizenship,
then, should be scrutinized with the assumption that organized social institutions,
including the state, have an interest in the governability of bodies and communities. This
being the case, it is certain that citizenship, as both a formal legal designation of
individuals and as a measure of full community membership, is vitally important for the
containment of bio-power. Homogenous subjects have been neither a reality nor an ideal
in the US, with social hierarchy being a disciplinary mechanism for societal placement.

21
The US form of citizenship was racialized from the very beginning of European contact
with the Americas, and has continued not only because of tradition but also due to the
resources presented through bio-power (Zinn 1995). Population control is an important
part of Western discourses on sexuality, and is enforced vigorously upon the bodies of
women, while the desirability of a racially ‘appropriate’ populace was first codified in the
1790 US Naturalization Act that forbade non-whites from becoming citizens and
continued through countless immigration control mechanisms aimed at maintaining a
white supremacist hierarchy (Ancheta 1998; Glenn 2002; Horsman 1997; Okin 1992;
Thomas 1998; Young 1989). It is important to recognize the competing sides to this
specific control process; both the privilege of full citizenship that has been reserved for
white males (at times with restrictive class limitations), and the fully intentional
marginalization of non-citizens whose bio-power could be exploited at reduced social
costs which are advantageous to many. Resources in this case are not restricted to labor
in the Marxian sense, but apply broadly to aspects of population, for example, the sexual
work of women were required in terms of births and in terms of a division of labor that
enforced male dominance through economic means while profiting from the work that
went unpaid in households and communities (Engels 1972 [1884]). The regulation of a
populace, then, is based in part on concerns over bio-power and maintaining its
availability in culturally apposite ways.
8
Such availability requires disciplinary
mechanisms that are not always overtly enforced, but are to be fully internalized by

8
Contemporarily, you can see modern states increasingly concerned with population, either overpopulation
or depopulation as in some post-industrial countries (Rabinow and Rose 2006).

22
certain subjects as a reward, while multiple systems of intersecting positionalities
(gender, race, class, etc) ensure some benefits, and many limitations to others.
States or nations, understood as ‘imagined communities’ whose borders and
members are dynamic, are identified by markers of community and nationhood
(Anderson 1991); in the US, the origins of nationhood were defined in relation to
whiteness, and citizenship within such a community was both gendered and racialized.
Omi and Winant (1994:81) have referred to the US specifically as a “racial state,” which,
“from its very inception has been concerned with the politics of race.” Statehood itself,
and the subjects within it, were by definition racialized. Similarly, Connell (1987) has
described the state as a patriarchical institution, a site from which subjects’ gender and
sexuality are policed. Indeed, exclusionary policies protecting the definition of a citizen
as a legal status reserved for white men was a state enterprise with effects that are
incalculable. Connell and Omi and Winant see the state as a coercive force in the lives of
subjects, but not a totalitarian one dependent upon force or violence. These scholars
utilize Gramscian hegemonic theory and make central the claim that subjects themselves
are self-disciplinarians, very much in line with Foucault’s (2003) notions of dispersed
power, holding cultural viewpoints that interact dialectically with governmentalities to
produce a society in which many subjects at least partially consent. Gender and race
ideology become lenses through which subjects make their lives intelligible, and in this
way these social constructs become very real bases of subjectivity. In the same way, race
and gender are methods of classification by which the US state has bestowed citizenship.
In the post-WWII era, when racial distinction was de-legitimized as a method for

23
conferring legal citizenship and the participation of women in all levels of society was
stirred into equality discourses, what remained centrally relevant to citizenship studies
was that aspect Marshall described as social. Acceptance and a living standard of
comparable value within a given community embodies social citizenship for Marshall
(1992 [1950]). Outcomes then are critically important in assessing the contemporary
status of US citizenship.
The import of citizenship as a formal status exemplifies the methods employed in
less formalized arenas of social life, where men and women of color and white women do
not fit the ‘ideal’ description of a subject citizen. An example of the sensibilities
employed to limit citizenship are is the 1856 US Supreme Court decision known as Dred
Scott that clarified the interest of the state in regulating citizenship. The decision stated
that African Americans could not be citizens primarily because the US Constitution had
been written to apply only to whites, and the obviousness of their intentional exclusion
was common-sensical (Bell 1992). The decision was important not only in increasing the
pressures that eventually would culminate in the Civil War, but also because they clearly
illustrate what is at stake in granting citizenship status, even in a legal way, to subjects
with marginalized statuses. Citizenship implies belongingness as well as a standard of
respect and treatment that was always intentionally violated not only in the slave
institution but also in ‘free states.’ Indeed, chief justice Taney alleged in his majority
opinion in Dred Scott that the historical conditions of African Americans held that
They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior
order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or
political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man

24
was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to
slavery for his benefit (Taney 1856).

Taney goes on to mention that citizenship in itself would still not guarantee political
access or equal protections, and specifically mentions that “[w]omen and minors, who
form a part of the political family, cannot vote” (Taney 1856). Importantly, Taney
invoked history as the justification for exclusion from the domain of legal citizenship,
and the social history of exclusion and oppression will continue to be essential even when
legal restrictions to citizenship are lifted, for customary exclusion from full community
membership are systematically, intentionally and continually withheld from women and
people of color. Indeed, justice McLean dissenting from the majority in Dred Scott
identified clearly the grounds upon which African Americans are excluded from
citizenship: “In [Taney’s majority] argument, it was said that a colored citizen would not
be an agreeable member of society. This is more a matter of taste than of law” (McLean
1856, emphasis added). First, McLean identifies citizenship as a social status
purposefully reserved for “agreeable” members of society, implying that citizenship as a
concept is informed by social hierarchies as well as common sensibilities that honor
them. Second, the dissenting justice finds that citizenship is a subjective construct
shaped by “a matter of taste.” This latter point leads to a serious questioning of
‘citizenship as taste’ rather than as law. This idea serves as a point of departure in
discussing citizenship below: it is more than a legal notion, for even the apparent
obviousness of these formal definitions are a matter of taste and ‘common’ understanding
of dominant social groups. We cannot then look at citizenship and the diversity of
citizens as if the realities of hierarchy have been wiped clean, as if US ‘taste’ is a clean

25
palate. As scholars we must look, as Taney indicates in denying citizenship to Dred
Scott, to the past and to the history of intended exclusion for clues that can inform our
thinking about modern social hierarchy and social citizenship.

Theoretically Grappling with Multiplicity

To properly draw the link between multiple hierarchy sets, such as race and
gender, an ideal-typical description of these hierarchy sets is needed in order to properly
compare across groups within each hierarchy set (Weber 1949:97). The ideological
backdrop for hierarchy sets rests on the assumption that there are social groups which can
be differentiated and assigned particular values and legitimacy. Such values are cultural,
non-universal and not unproblematic—yet do represent a ‘common sense’ which is not
entirely agreed upon but can be identified by subscribers and dissenters alike. Sexuality
exemplifies this clearly: Referring to Figure 1.1, members of US society can readily
identify the groups which make up the various pegs on the sexuality hierarchy.
Heterosexuals become ‘normal,’ an expected and validated sexual identity whose
character is common sensically essentialized. By ‘normal,’ I mean to give us language
which describes the idealization of popular conceptions of group commonality;

Figure 1: Idealized Vision of Social Group Memberships Figure 1.1 Idealized Vision of Social Group Membership

26
heterosexism is a powerful, ‘common sense’ and ‘normal’ construction in which essential
heterosexualism is centered as dominant and normal, tied to hegemonic masculinity and
emphasized femininity (Connell 1995). Normality implies hierarchy and power relations
that are not only popularly held, but which are structural as well, codified by individual
as well as institutional actions and expectations. Lesbians and gay men in the sexuality
hierarchy become ‘othered’ as do bisexuals and transgendered persons, separated from
‘normals’ and standing in contrast to and often becoming the center of political projects
that call for increased normalization of sexuality (see Stein 2001). These rigid group
characterizations center on a dichotomous differentiation between ‘normality' and
otherness, a sort of essentialism which Lowe (1991) finds as a characteristic of
“discourses of domination.” In reality, as illustrated in Figure 1.2, ‘normals’ represent a
small proportion of subjects within each hierarchy set. Most subjects fall within the
margins of the hierarchical extremes of the ‘normal’ and the ‘other’. Yet the hierarchy
itself is dependent upon the illusory rigidity of social group differentiation; without
distinct boundaries it becomes increasingly difficult to privilege ‘normals’ and limit
‘others.’ Discursive power-knowledge systems in which intersecting socio-cultural
subject positions serve to construct a ‘common sense,’ while being inadequate ‘good
sense’ descriptions of material reality. Classical Marxist references to misinterpretations
of the social world would refer to such hegemonic ideology, somewhat simplistically, as
‘false consciousness.’ When we begin stacking multiple social hierarchical sets in three
dimensions, the overlapping status of subject positions is illustrated. Subject
positionalities are multiple and interactive. Because of this, our endeavors to understand

27
the formation and recreation of social group categories, such as race and gender, must not
ignore these interacting effects.

This conceptual framework, the modeling of multiple subject positionalities, and
the separation of the idealized ‘normals’, ‘marginals’ and ‘others’ can be viewed as
problematic—too idealized perhaps and too simplistic, not to mention static. It is through
Antonio Gramsci’s exploration of hegemony that I conceptualize the ways positionalities
within structured hierarchies can move and change hierarchical locations. The intention
of these three ideal subject titles should not be read as an essentialism of each.
Discursive social categories cannot be static, and respond to social conditions and
historical circumstances. Hegemony, as outlined most completely by Gramsci, has been
a theoretical framework utilized by sociologists as diverse as Omi and Winant (1994) and
Connell (1987) in attempts to explain the robustness of racial and gender power-
knowledge systems respectively. Hegemony has come to fill this theoretical gap because
it accounts for structural conditions while emphasizing the changability of power
dynamics, not discounting the ability of subjects to express agency within the context of

Figure 2: Actual Social Group Memberships Figure 1.2 Actual Social Group Membership

28
discourse yet also viewing ruling groups as composed of ‘historic blocs’ of political-
ideological coalitions. In addition, hegemonic formations view ruling ‘historic blocs’ and
subaltern groups as engaged in an interaction in which total domination cannot be
achieved (Gramsci 1971b:161). Hegemony is always a work in progress, dependent on
some degree of consent from a given population. Many scholars have used Gramsci’s
Marxist theoretical ideas to illuminate many empirical questions, especially since the
1960s, and much discussion has occurred as to the direct applicability of such ideas.
Laclau and Mouffe (2001), for example, have contended that Gramsci’s theory of
hegemony, in spite of its advantages over scientific Marxism needs some fundamental
reorganization to account for the multiple discursive subject positions that are clearly as
important as social class, upon which Gramsci’s framework centered. Other theoreticians
contend that Gramsci’s theory of hegemony necessarily accounts for other types of
marginal positionalities, as class is not referred to in Gramsci’s theory as static nor is
class consciousness or political affiliation given a priori (Rosenthal 2002). Sociologists
have been generally less concerned with the more incidental, micro aspects of the
Gramscian theory than scholars in other disciplines, and have tended to focus their
attention on the applicability of hegemony to explaining socio-historical phenomena and
especially the potency of discursive formations over time. I also follow the latter model,
preferring to acknowledge by default the potential problems found in Gramsci’s
discussions of hegemony, especially considering that Gramsci did not write ‘theory’ as
we may think of it in the contemporary academic sense but was most interested in
political struggle and applicability to direct action.

29
With these theoretical tools, the task of analyzing the contexts connecting 9/11 to
Pearl Harbor is more possible. Race, gender and masculinity and interdisciplinary
intersectionality theories inform the complex contexts of both Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
The ways 9/11 was evaluated, experienced and reflected upon five years afterwards,
however, is also critically linked to the international context within which racial and
gender constructions are created. Pearl Harbor, and decades of Japanese foreign relations
were contextualized in a backdrop of Japanese industrialization and their defeat of Russia
in the Russo-Japanese war, which was the first defeat of a European country by a non-
European one. As Russia was and is at best on the margins of Europe, the significance of
Russia’s defeat by the Japanese Navy is probably more accurately understood as one of
the first defeats of a dominantly-white nation’s military by a non-white nation’s military
in modern history.
9
The US annexation of Hawaii was in large part a reaction to the
growth of Japan’s economic and military strength (LaFeber 1997), and US ties to and the
increasing economic importance of East Asia. When Japan did become an aggressive
colonial and military power in the 1930s it validated a scare in the US, especially on the
Pacific coast, that Japan might either economically or militarily have its sights on US
territories. These fears were buffered by Japanese immigration to both Hawaii and the
west coast of the US, a racist backlash against Japanese immigrants actually led to high-
level negotiations between Japanese and American political leaders in the first decade of
the 1900s (Takaki 1989). Pearl Harbor occurred not in a vacuum unrelated to racial ideas
in the US, or to the related issue of Japan’s desire to be a strong, aggressive nation on par

9
It would probably be second in time to Italy’s defeat at the hands of Ethiopia in 1896 (Davidson 1994),
but it is questionable how major a defeat that was outside of the Horn of African.

30
with those of the West on economic and military power, and not to be dominated as
China had been by European powers. These contexts informed the responses Americans
had to Pearl Harbor at the time, and this global environment had become more complex
sixty years later on that fateful September morning.
The terrorist attacks in the US on 9/11/2001 were truly a postmodern,
postindustrial benchmark of the changes the globe had seen since World War II. The
attack came from airplanes, as at Pearl Harbor, but from American ones. The men
responsible were civilians, and they were from many countries. Their skills were the
same as any going about an occupational pursuit: patience, planning and execution. They
needed no assets or military hardware, no backing of a nation-state or military, and no
combat training. Using every advantage of the shrinking age of rapid globalization, these
men attacked the centers of US economic and military power, not with a mission to
destroy or defeat the US, but to scare and shock its people and reveal its weakness.
Where Pearl Harbor was a bomb on the bow, 9/11 was a bowshot over the bow, never
truly a military threat, but a civilian one. US intervention in the Middle East, most
recently prior to Pearl Harbor in Iraq with the Gulf War and its aftermath, including
stationing US troops in various Arab nations, and Afghanistan with retaliatory air strikes
against supposed terrorist camps for the bombings of American embassies in Nairobi,
Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in East Africa. Though the 9/11 attacks were not
acts of war in a military sense, their immediate magnitude and damage to life and
property was on the scale of a military conflict. Americans already had preconceived,
mostly negative ideas about Arabs prior to 9/11 (Muscati 2002), but the degree of racism

31
increased exponentially afterwards (Abdo 2006) along with official hate crimes against
Muslims (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2001).
These terrorist incidents, more so than Pearl Harbor, elevated a discourse relying
on notions of cultural inferiority and backwardness to differentiate the ‘enemies’, as they
could not be as easily located as during prior wars. While white men had been advancing
their nations’ interests around the world in the name of civilization for centuries—the
first voyages to the Americas were ripe with these ideas (Zinn 1995)—it became an
aggrandizing occupation around the turn of the 20
th
century and was represented in
Rudyard Kipling’s (1899) poetry line, urging civilized men to “take up the white man’s
burden” to spread the gospel of civilization outward from Europe.
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
…
Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

Civilizing was a hard job indeed, and one men rather than women were more naturally
suited for (Stoler 1997). After 9/11, this doctrine of civilization and Western superiority
that had taken the imagination of US President Theodore Roosevelt in his masculine fight

32
against decadence and American “race suicide” a century prior and led to a re-affirmation
of imperialist ideologies (Bederman 1995). The days of the “self-determination of
nations,” as Roosevelt and Churchill (1941) upheld in their Atlantic Charter gave way to
public sentiments that distrusted the will of Middle Easterners themselves to decide
appropriately between ‘us’ (the West) and ‘them’ (terrorists). Suddenly it was clear to
many Americans, as the ever-more-popular Samuel Huntington’s (1996) argument went,
that a clash of civilizations was ongoing and the suitable option was engagement with it.
In conjunction with a history of prejudice tied to cultural stereotypes and backwardness,
9/11 magnified, in a milieu where racial or ethnic differences are discussed in coded
terms that often invoke culture (Bobo and Smith 1998), the “white man’s burden.” With
a prominent commitment to appear neutral and fair, ideologies of masculinity and
civilization still propelled American common sense after 9/11.

Memory and generational research helps inform the theoretical contributions of
work in the areas of race, gender and intersectionality to help us study and interpret the
ways in which ideologies are applied and utilized to describe and make sense of socially
turbulent incidents. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 are two of the most central singular events in
the history of the US. These events were bound to be compared in some way, even if
only as a general guidepost for the 9/11 attacks. The usefulness of Pearl Harbor as a
metaphor for 9/11 is only of limited use, but the events do share some strong similarities,
at least as far as the characterization and dehumanization of ‘enemies’ in both eras. The
Japanese and Arab terrorists both came to be understood as lacking essential aspects of

33
cultural awakening; backwards in some manners that harked to their racial and ethnic
character as well as their fitness to be left independent, self-determinate and equal.
Ultimately the US views of Japan and the people of the islands transformed, but the
racism and ethnocentrism lasted long after the military conflicts had ended (Dower 1986;
Koshiro 1999). Not only were these eras characterized by the physical marginalization of
women in the US (Tickner 2002), but also of a reinvigorated hegemony of a tough and
unwavering masculinity to be presented to the world. In that way it was fitting for a man
who played a political cowboy, but whose true background was Ivy-League and upper
class, to be President of the US on 9/11, mirroring the sort of political-gendered play in
which the US state played a no-negotiating, dominant masculinity.

34
CHAPTER 2

METHODOLOGY

Methodology was a central concern when I embarked on this research process, a
subject whose importance was strengthened considerably by my exposure to feminist
theory. Specifically, standpoint epistemologies and their focus on the connection
between methodology and theory, gained my attention and informed the making of my
dissertation project from the early stages. The notion that any one person’s knowledge is
a reflection of their social and structural position and their experiences is not
controversial in sociology. Standpoint theories of knowledge raise the methodological
ante by encouraging researchers to acknowledge this and incorporate it into theory and
research practice. The search for one ‘truth’ is therefore elusive, although certain brands
of standpoint theory discuss the existence of standpoints that are better at viewing society
than others. Doing in-depth interviews that emphasized language, discourse and the
construction of public memories, I embraced the view that every person I spoke to came
from a positionality that helped inform their ideas, recollections and syntheses of public
issues. This aided my subsequent analysis and in presenting results in the subsequent
chapters.
Standpoint theories of knowledge and science have both challenged and
demanded an expansion of enlightenment notions of understanding reality. The
past few decades have seen increasingly common and acknowledged challenges
to theoretical assumptions based on abstracted approaches in the social sciences.
Anthropologists Marcus and Fischer (1999:9) held that “the most interesting
theoretical debates in a number of fields have shifted to the level of method, to
problems of epistemology, interpretation, and discursive forms of representation.”

35
Feminist standpoint scholars challenge the notion that abstracted science is
possible, and that objective “truth” could be reached. At the same time,
standpoint epistemologies sought to widen the net of social understanding to
center the experiences of women rather than centering the lives of men. It is
important to recognize that standpoint theory is a reflection of the feminist
movement, a political statement on the part of women whose lived experiences
have been ignored and marginalized. Standpoint theory should be viewed in
relation to feminism as a political movement, as an effort to bring to the fore
issues in women’s lives that have been ignored, and in the academy it is a
reflection of a similar political effort. Therefore, it is an effort by scholars who
are reflecting political efforts to alter academic disciplines; in this way, feminism
in the academy is specifically an effort to expand the vision of knowledge by
altering methodological and theoretical approaches to studying society. It is at its
center a standpoint effort. Women of color, responding to the hegemonic
“woman” too often claimed by white feminists and women’s organizations
demanded an inclusion of their experiences, insisting that they be accounted for
and incorporated into a broadened notion of feminism (hooks 1981). The
demands and critiques of women and people of color for their positions and social
circumstances to be recognized is at the heart of standpoint theories. These
theories seek to invalidate abstract empiricism and form a knowledge that
describes and analyzes the world without trying to remove the investigator from
the research, now widely recognized as an impossibility, and trust insider
knowledge as a valid starting point for investigation (Denzin 1997).

Standpoint theories have gained reputability in sociology through efforts by
feminists to displace the focus on detached empiricism as the source of an unbiased
knowledge about social “reality.” Notable ‘classical’ sociologists have drawn upon
methods and claimed theoretically that there was intrinsically a form of relativity in
intellectual musings. Nancy Hartsock’s (1983) early description of a feminist standpoint
drew directly from Marx’s approach to studying stratification through the structural
position of the proletariat. Simmel (1950) recognized the unique point of view which
outsiders possessed when analyzing a society when they were relatively uninterested in
the social arrangements in his classic essay “The Stranger.” Interestingly, Simmel’s own
experiences as a European Jew directly informed his discussion in this essay of the

36
‘outsider’ viewpoint of European Jews. Max Weber (1949:52-53) recognized the
inseparability of scientific inquiry, circumstances and values, specifically relating to the
“means” and “ends” of particular research projects. Mannheim, a foundational scholar in
the sociology of knowledge, may have best conceived of the contemporary
methodological questions standpoint scholars have sought to ask:
[A]ll historical knowledge must start with the assumption that there are spheres of
thought in which it is impossible to conceive of absolute truth existing
independently of the values and position of the subject and unrelated to the social
context…. The question then arises: which social standpoint vis-à-vis of history
offers the best chance for reaching an optimum truth (1985 [1936]:79-80)?

This question is fundamentally related to the writing and purpose of Sandra Harding
(1991) in her discussion of “less false” knowledge, recognizing the partiality of all forms
of understanding, yet rejecting a radical relativism which suggests there is no truth to be
found. Merton (1972) summed up the discussion within the sociology of knowledge as a
debate about the methodological skill of “insiders” versus “outsiders” to study particular
phenomena in the social world. Sociological descriptions of the insider/outsider status
complements well standpoint epistemologies as long as positivist or unbiased notions of
empiricism are done away with. In a sense, theories of non-abstract knowledge based on
experiential knowledge suggest that everyone is an insider, if only that subjects are
‘inside’ differing structural positions. Recent feminist descriptions of gender using
standpoint epistemologies aim to highlight gendered practices that are often overlooked
in academic disciplines dominated by studies by men and centering men’s reality.
Sandra Harding (1986) brought standpoint epistemologies into prominent view
through her work on the philosophy of science and especially the gendered nature of

37
scientific inquiry. In short, standpoint perspectives of knowledge reject universalist
knowledge claims that lay at the center of western enlightenment traditions. Scientific
investigations cannot be divorced from the social contexts, cultural baggage, gendered
assumptions and progressive visions of their inquirers. As importantly, not only should
we recognize the inability of knowledge to be “value-free,” we should also avoid striving
for these types of understandings. Early feminist standpoint perspectives had in common
their calls for the lives of women to be centered rather than marginalized, ignored or
erased. Smith (1990:28) states that “[w]e are the authoritative speakers of our
experience” in an effort to center lived lives rather than “abstracted conceptual”
knowledge which she finds centrally problematic in sociology. Her efforts are centering
women rather than men, whose centrality in scientific studies have been invisibilized and
normalized. This fairly represents standpoint efforts, whose politics and intellectual work
must be viewed as a collaboration with the feminist politics (Harding 1997).
Hartsock’s early effort to prescribe standpoint theory owes theoretical
contribution to Marx, and to the broader Marxist notion of material life as the root of
knowledge about oppression. Fundamentally, “[m]aterial life (class position in Marxist
theory) not only structures but sets limits on the understanding of social relations”
(Hartsock 1983:285). Hartsock holds that social location frames the ability of social
subjects to view and interpret the social world; consequently, some “see” better than
others. This same argument is made by Haraway (1988), who has argued convincingly
that privileged subjects will have limited sight, as their positionality confines their ability
or willingness to recognize the institutional power arrangements from which they benefit.

38
Therefore, theoretical concerns are raised about the methodologies utilized for
knowledge-building investigations. Incorporating women’s lives and insights, it was
convincingly argued, filled in the voids left by analyses that tried to ignore gendered
relations and illuminated gender much better than if investigators used detached methods
or centered men’s lives. Haraway (1988) has warned, however, that women’s
standpoints are also situated and incapable of offering a complete picture of social
relations. It appears from this body of work that a singular analysis of any issue will be
limited by the standpoints reflected in research materials and by the researcher. This
illustrates what empiricists have repeatedly emphasized, that being multiple
investigations of the same phenomena, although empiricists’ emphasize the need to test
theories while standpoint methodologists desire a more diverse pool of lived experience
from which to draw theoretical conclusions.
Moving towards addressing issues of “difference” within feminism and standpoint
perspectives specifically was not clear-cut. If, as purveyors of standpoint epistemologies
had suggested, women’s lives were centered and provided a clearer viewpoint from
which to analyze social relations, then who were the “women” to be centered? What
Lorde (1984b) calls the myth of universal sisterhood centers western middle-class white
women, highlighting the problem of a theoretical paradigm that assumes there is a
singular “women’s position.” Hekman’s (1997) more recent critique of standpoint
epistemologies points out that political considerations pushed standpoint scholars to
assert that women’s lives illuminated a truer view of reality, being careful to reject
notions of relativism and emphasize the existence of a social truth. If this was so, it

39
created a problem with regard to issues of differences among women—women do not
share a common standpoint—due to hierarchies of race/ethnicity, class and sexuality. If
there is truth to be found, which women can best locate it? The strength of standpoint
theory, its focus on lived experience as a foundation for knowledge, seemed to run into
difficulties theoretically if, as some claimed, women’s standpoint revealed a truth about
the social world. The lack of consideration of such a question by early standpoint
scholars and their tendency to universalize women was limiting, but notable efforts by
Harding (1998), Haraway (1988; 1989) and Collins (1986; 2000) clarified a standpoint
position that could readily include differences among women by rejecting the notion that
certain positionalities had a monopoly on accuracy.
While Harding has been widely cited for continuing to stress the importance of
multiple standpoints, none of which can access the totality of social experience, this has
not led to uniformity among standpoint scholars about the role of truth claims. Smith
(1990:34) maintains that Harding’s approach contains “such a degree of ontological
tolerance” that it defeats the very purpose of inquiry, which is to know more about the
social world, but not necessarily find a ‘truth’. However, I believe the postcolonial
emphasis Harding has taken adds much to our ability to better understand the structures
of intersecting ideologies, even thought the picture is not as clean as one may like.
Fortunately Harding’s approach to a multiplicity of perspectives allows for the non-
uniformity of standpoints and knowledge that is based on diverse experiences. This
however, has not been the only critique of standpoint methods. A notable critique is one
that is skeptical or dismissive of an approach where knowledge and theory are based on

40
lived experience that is specifically limited to select groups. Suleri (1994) claims that “to
privilege the racial body” and its lived “anecdotes” as sources of theoretical power is to
mistakenly trust contemporary lived experience, resulting in simplistic, ahistorical
criticism. I find such an attack unwarranted, and while there is a privileging of the
contemporary among standpoint scholars, there is also a recognition that lived experience
is not temporally generalizable. As Collins (2000) has shown in her work on Black
feminist thought, lived experience and non-academic knowledge is a critical for gaining a
fuller understanding of the significance of marginal subjectivities.
Standpoint epistemologies are useful for three important reasons. Most clearly is
the fit of standpoint epistemologies with the long-established sentiment of subjectivity in
intellectual work (see Kuhn 1962). As mentioned earlier, sociologists for the greater part
of a century, and longer if we refer back to Marx, have accepted the reality that no one
viewpoint is unbiased or able to view a complete truth. Secondly, following notably from
Haraway’s (1988) notion of “situated knowledges,” epistemologies that account for
structural location (for example, gender, race and class) as primary determinants of a
subject’s ‘vision’ are useful in empirical work. While it is acknowledged that empirical
work is limited by the quality of the available information or data, there are few
systematic ways to evaluate sources, especially for qualitative research. Standpoint
epistemologies suggest methods for interpreting and analyzing information and evidence,
and situating it within a structural framework that is concerned with the positionality of
the source. Finally, standpoint theories, while critiqued for their lack of parsimony, are in
fact strengthened by their ability to expand, to incorporate and take seriously critiques

41
offered by an expanded global framework. Because knowledge is taken from lived
experience, social structures can be interpreted as differential in terms of stratification,
yet also point to similarities. Viewing standpoint theories as limited by diversity is
counter-productive, since by now it is recognized that there can be no uniformity in the
labeling of oppression in multicultural, multinational, and multiracial world.
Sociology, like other social science disciplines, is a product of a western imperial
history (Connell 1997; Stauder 1993), and the knowledge produced must be viewed in
this context (Bernal 1993; Harding 1998; Said 1978). Global inquiry requires not only
the consideration of intercultural distinctions but a representation of diverse standpoints
representing various types of science. Just as western feminism has incorporated some of
the critiques made by Mohanty (2003), whose work could in itself be seen as a project in
emphasizing the complexity of lived experience rather than universality, recognizing
multiplicity allows for greater complexity in social science research. Issues of difference
are not only relevant for matters of US domestic racial and ethnic diversity, but are
significant in an aim for theoretical elaboration of a global gender order that can account
for geographically and culturally specific forms of patriarchy. As I describe below, the
insights of standpoint perspectives helped inform the interview process and especially to
contextualize my analysis of the responses I received.

Study Details
The primary source of data for my dissertation was in-depth interviews with two
generations of US residents, one that experienced their late teens and early twenties

42
around the time of Pearl Harbor and WWII and the other the same age around 9/11/2001.
Eighteen respondents from the WWII generation were interviewed as well as ten from
the 9/11 period. Interviews ranged between 35 and 120 minutes, with two exceeding two
hours, and all were audio recorded. Respondents were recruited using informal
networks, postings on community center boards and referrals. I followed a loose
interview schedule that included items I felt were necessary for my own purposes, but
generally the interviews followed the pace of the interviewee in order to elicit a
comfortable environment that had the tone of a conversation rather than a formal
interview. Recordings of the interviews were transcribed and coded by topic.
Much of the interviews of the WWII generation were devoted to personal
reflections and stories of importance to the person being interviewed, with their
recollections surrounding the World War II era being primary. For this generation the
detail of the interviews resembled life histories contained to only a certain stage of life.
Not only did this provide a wonderful backdrop to contexts that this age cohort found
important, but it allowed my subjects to share and pass on their heritage, a process they
generally enjoyed. The average age of the WWII generation was eighty-six. Eight
women and eight men participated with two identifying themselves as African American,
four as Jewish American, three as Asian American and nine as white. The overall good
health of my participants is likely a selection effect, and they have relatively high levels
of education, seven reporting college experience beyond a bachelor’s degree, three with a
bachelor’s degree and six with a high school diploma or less.

43
The younger 9/11 generation were born between 1976 and 1987, making them
between 14 and 25 on September 11, 2001 with an average age of eighteen. Six men and
four women participated, all born in the US, with two self-identifying as white, two as
Jewish, one person each identifying as Asian American, American Indian, Latino,
Persian, Armenian and biracial. These respondents were also well educated, with all of
them having college experience and most having bachelors degrees at the time of the
interview. Interviews with this generation were shorter than those with the older
generation, and they spent much less time discussing the past and conceptualizing their
experiences as important. As a person slightly older than this group, I found the process
of formally interviewing them about their perceptions and experiences much more
difficult, and they were generally more difficult and driven by specific questions of mine
rather compared to interviews with the WWII generation.
My respondents shared meaningful memories and intimate ideas with me, and
while the research process is inherently unequal and perhaps exploitative (Stacey 1991),
the words are theirs, the meanings are representations of a social context, group
memberships and positionalities (Bobo and Kluegel 1993), of cherished ideals that extend
well beyond the individual. I want to make clear that I have analyzed their words with
care and in a detail outside the realm of everyday communication. While the data was
collected purposefully as if these interviews were a part of a conversation, I have
scrutinized the words and discourses of my respondents in much more detail than is
usual. The analyses and conclusions I offer here, and the presence of racist and sexist
ideologies that most of us would like to have disappear, are not directed at individuals,

44
indeed we are missing the major point if we are trying to label people racist (Bonilla-
Silva 2003b) or sexist. Rather, structural and institutional layers of society where race
and gender remain important and comprehensible as a means of organizing people are the
objects I direct my criticism towards. The honesty of my respondents, as troublesome as
it sometimes appears, is much appreciated; their names and identifying information have
been altered to ensure anonymity.

Reflecting on My Dissertation Research
I approached the interviews for this work as self-reflexively as I could, aware of
my own role as an interviewer and its potential impact on the folks I spoke to. There
were certain challenges in this process, especially relating to my own hesitation as an
interviewer in specific instances. For example, I had difficulty asking a lot of probing
questions of the older people of color I interviewed, particularly when they were
describing a circumstance that seemed to be uncomfortable and painful. I expect that I
lost some incredible data due to this. In my position as a white male I felt uncomfortable
inquiring deeply about the emotions associated with discrimination as to not cause the
person I was speaking to more pain or anxiety. I certainly did not want to create an
environment where I was asking these older people of color to explain themselves. As I
engaged critically with whiteness, it seemed important critiques of racial common sense
likely would be absent from many whites’ perspectives. Thus, my interviews included
whites and people of color, with the understanding that the views of my subjects are not

45
necessarily representative of their respective racial or ethnic group, but an indication of
their standpoint.
Age created an issue that was a challenge and a bonus for me. For the younger
generation of participants I had an easy and less formal rapport, as they were generally
only a few years younger than I. I ended up having more informal conversations, which
was at times helpful, as people would get caught up in conversation. At the same time
the formality of the interview was beneficial in that it provided a clear indicator that I was
seeking the opinions, insights and knowledge of my participants. The older participants
tended to see the interview more formally, explained things in more depth and took more
time to complete the interview. The more informal tone along with our similar ages led
to more common language and understanding with younger participants and thus less
actual text and discourse from which to uncover meaning. Additionally, older sources
tended to know instinctively that, being much younger, I would need to be educated and
receive more explanation on the contexts of their stories and opinions. Although I had
spent over a year on background research and newspaper coding from 1941-1942 before I
began interviewing, I found it useful to play up my lack of knowledge so my participants
could fill me in. I enjoyed these interview intensely and I think the feeling was mostly
reciprocal.
The interviews were filled with conversation, as I had only a short list of points to
cover in each interview rather than a formal interview schedule. This free flowing
approach was a much better fit for my own approach and probably facilitated more of the
conversational responses I was hoping for. While I approached all of the interviews

46
seeking opinions and experiences of those who were young adults at or around Pearl
Harbor or 9/11, I also asked specific questions about race and ethnicity. Respondents did
not often seem uncomfortable with these inquiries; yet, sometimes they did say things I
found disagreeable, uninformed or racist. I made efforts to get further explanation when I
would hear these comments. While I never outwardly disagreed with respondents or
argued with them, I asked follow-up questions in an effort to understand their viewpoint
and to make them explain them out loud. I found this to be an issue for the older
respondents only, as each of the younger ones adeptly avoided using offensive or
controversial racial language.
This work became more meaningful, more significant than I expected it would. I
approached my research, especially the media accounts, in an effort to objectively
describe what I saw, to let the patterns and stories of this research find me. I worked as
planned, mostly unimpeded, until about midway through my 9/11 media research. The
in-depth interviews only elevated my connection to this work, as it was increasingly clear
that both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 impacted so many so deeply. I had my own vivid
memories of that day, the dramatic and horrible images that so many millions of the
world’s people viewed on live television and later through the endless replays of the
Twin Towers crumbling, of people jumping to their deaths from the heights of these
enormous objects. As I read the New York Times from the days after 9/11, I came upon
and coded a few stories that described and reproduced final conversations, voice
messages and e-mails from those who died on 9/11 to family and friends. As I came to
the end of one such article, I read a description of Jeremy Glick, a passenger on United

47
Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania, and his final phone conversation with his
wife. Lyzbeth Glick remembered the ‘I love yous’ that they shared, and that Mr. Glick
had told her that he loved their daughter, Emma and “whatever decisions you make in
your life, I need you to be happy, and I will respect any decisions that you make.” As the
father of an 11-month old daughter at the time, the significance, the care and the finality
of this brief description inside a short newspaper article brought me to tears as I inserted
myself into Jeremy Glick’s story. From that time on, I regarded this project not only as
important research, but as a project that also touched on the lives of thousands of people
whom I never knew. Thousands of families lost lifetimes of potential memories, children
lost parents, aunts and uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers in both Pearl Harbor,
the World War that encircled it and the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001. Although I never
had intentions or expectations of it, researching the events described in this manuscript
changed my life and my outlook.
After reading news accounts of the events and the circumstances around them,
including many describing the personal horrors and tragedies of survivors, widowers and
widows, their stories changed my story, and the story enclosed within these pages. I
recall one October day in 2006 reading the Los Angeles Times story of Floyd Rasmussen
wandering outside the Pentagon, calling to his wife: “I'm here! Come find me!” I began
to weep, alone in the early morning chill of my home office surrounded by my family
pictures and the coldness of bookshelves and printed journal articles. This project and
analysis is a very personal one not only because of the time, work and commitment
involved, but also because what started as national tragedies also began to reveal the

48
countless everydays that defined Pearl Harbor and 9/11, everydays that were filled with
pain, emotion, courage, fear and love. I found the people inside these history-making
events. In short, I rediscovered the sociological imagination with a depth that I
previously lacked.
My connections to the research also went beyond my topics and the horrible
consequences of Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The people represented in these pages were
gracious enough to sit with me and have conversations about subjects that often brought
them back to a painful past. This was especially true of my older participants, many of
whom lost family and friends during WWII. These women and men were generous with
their time, and I felt true connections with them as I heard them reflect on the past and
ponder the future. From the military experiences of WWII I heard from men and women
who served to those who worked stateside on the war effort, they were all proud of their
accomplishments and contributions from that time. I won’t pretend to be a casual
observer of these testimonies, and I could not help but notice the utter contrast for those
true war years during the 1940s with the post-9/11 period where the only sacrifices
Americans were asked to make was to shop at a mall. As I listened to stories of these
sometimes romanticized war years I became more disenchanted with contemporary
American politics, just as my older respondents seemed to have done. Writing these
chapters that follow as a critical sociologist was sometimes difficult, as I had affections
for many of the people whose words and recollections fill these chapters, and yet
critiquing the ideological logic behind their words sometimes felt like criticizing the
people themselves. Coming to terms with this was personally a challenge, but I grew to

49
see my critiques as aimed at institutional patterns that help continue racial and gender
orders instead of at the individuals who have internalized these styles.

50
CHAPTER 3

FEAR AND LOATHING AT THE END OF HISTORY:

MEDIA PATTERNS FROM PEARL HARBOR AND SEPTEMBER 11TH

The unity of a group is often lost when it has no longer any
opponent… A group’s complete victory over its enemies is thus
not always fortunate in the sociological sense.
_____________________
Georg Simmel (1955)

The end of the cold war a decade before September 11, 2001 provided solace for a
number of commentators, as liberalism and all its market and political ramifications
seemed validated. To some hopeful commentators, such as Fukuyama (1989) the victory
of Western liberalism was a final and inevitable “end of history.” September 11, 2001
occurred in this political context, lacking the international boogeyman the Soviet Union
provided to the United States post-WWII. Campbell (1992) describes the tendencies of
foreign policy and with it the construction of national borders to harden differences and
easily engender ‘otherness’ in the process. Ideologies have a very influential role to play
in the making of policy, and especially foreign policy where the making of enemies and
adversaries is of particular relevance (Hunt 1987). Racial and ethnic ideologies are
particularly easy to cultivate, as their divisiveness does not only play in domestic fronts
(see O'Reilly 1995), but also especially well in cross-border relations (Borstelmann
1999). For this chapter, we will discuss the ideological representations of the enemies

51
and of the US during the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 periods, relying primarily on newspaper
coverage.
On September 11, 2001 the scale of the terrorist attacks in New York and
Washington shocked the United States and its residents.
10
That attack unsettled
Americans and their collective sense of security like nothing in recent memory; indeed,
many of my respondents who came into adulthood around the time of Pearl Harbor
identified 9/11 much more with fear and anxiety over issues of personal safety than they
did with Pearl Harbor. Cultural analysts such as Swidler (1986) have pointed to
“unsettled” times as providing both new strategies for action while at the same time
urging society to lean heavily on ideology to move towards newly valued ends. In these
situations, the past becomes more than memories but also a guide to action based on
strongly held cultural narratives (Ross 2002). Institutions of leadership can affect new
policies and institute them during such times, such as the radically different foreign
policy agenda of the GW Bush presidency (Daalder and Lindsay 2003), but only to a
limited degree. While the US President and the state more broadly have a lot of influence
on media attention and portrayal of foreign policy (Cohen 1995), these messages must be
make appeal to some level of public sensibilities to be received well. Such limitations of
action are not forced onto a society’s leadership, or as Gramsci referred to them as,
historical blocs. Opportunities of action and social change are available to the degree that
they overlap with underlying principles of action and cultural symbols valued in a given

10
Some of the comparisons with Pearl Harbor emerge out of this common sense of shock that accompanied
both events.

52
society (Gramsci 1971a). Simply put, common sense as it exists in the collective minds
of the populace provides a blueprint for and limits on action; ignoring or pushing against
strongly held public sentiment is not possible without the of coercion rather than consent.
These same principles apply to mass media, such as large circulation newspapers
or television programs, whose stories, frames and the like need to abide by certain
unspoken standards of common sense. In the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001,
the host of the ABC television network’s “Politically Incorrect,” Bill Maher, pushed the
boundaries of nationalist common sense when discussing the terrorists who killed
themselves and so many others that day. The Washington Post described Maher’s
commentary this way:
Responding to President Bush's characterization of the Pentagon and World Trade
Center terrorists as “cowards,” Maher said: “We have been the cowards lobbing
cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.
11
That's cowardly.” He added, “Staying
in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not
cowardly” (Farhi 2001).

Maher’s comments were outside of prescribed frames of understanding of “the terrorists”
and their rationales. President Bush’s White House Press Secretary said of Maher’s
comments, “people have to watch what they say and watch what they do,” a warning that
was wiped off the official White House transcript of the briefing (Pope 2001). Maher’s
late-night program was summarily cancelled as sponsors pulled their support from the
show. Maher’s opinion, which amounted to a counter-hegemonic viewpoint, was
censored not through any legal means, but due to its disagreement with notions of
cultural common sense, advocated by ‘experts’, and the marketplace response to the

11
This is a reference to what was at the time US monitoring and air-to-surface bombings of targets in Iraq.

53
demands of such sentiments. Policymakers and government representatives, and foreign
policy ‘experts’, often frame the accepted language, even when such recommended
discourses do nothing to help explain and understand a situation (Enloe and Rejai 1972).
As we will see below, the 9/11 terrorists were largely understood and framed in
newspapers as lacking any context in terms of a motive or rational, interpretable
explanation. Any sense that a motive or rationale was at work on the part of terrorists
was often treated as excusing their acts of mass violence, and dubbed unpatriotic.
Advertisement-based media as much as any other industry has been a key to post-
WWII consumer capitalism, constructing demand for everything from homes and
automobiles while appealing to senses of individualism and mobility central to American
values (Canclini 2001; Lipsitz 1995). Mainstream media outlets also have great power to
influence discourse (Chavez 2001), while also mirroring social values (Anderson 2001;
Spigel 1995). In Gender Advertisements, Goffman (1979:6) describes the importance of
media’s appeal to core social values for being understood: “…our most common and
most basic way of thinking about ourselves: an accounting of what occurs by an appeal to
our “natures,” an appeal to the very conditions of our being.” Those cultural keystones
that appear natural are important in that they provide a lens into the underbelly of
hegemonic ideology that is often concealed precisely because they are taken for granted.
This chapter will explore the most common patterns that emerged from the analysis of
1458 newspaper articles following the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 events. What appears is an
effort to make visible some of that ideological underbelly that goes unnamed and often

54
unseen, with a specific focus on issues that address our concern with gender and race
across these events.
This chapter is based in large part on the coding and analysis of the frames used in
the New York Times and Los Angeles Times stories in the aftermaths of Pearl Harbor and
9/11. Three one-week waves were included following each event, as Table 3.1 describes.
Wave 1 is immediately following the event, wave 2 is 6 months after, and wave 3 is 1
year after. All articles were coded by the frames utilized to describe the story, and by
subject and substance. According to Goffman (1986 [1974]), and those whose work has
followed in this tradition (see Dobratz, Shanks-Meile, and Hallenbeck 2003; Fujiwara
2005; Gitlin 1977; Gonos 1977; Noakes and Wilkins 2002; Snow, Rochford, Worden,
and Benford 1986), frames are conceptualized as shorthands for social interpretations—
allowing for quick and easy recognition or and interpretation of a situation informed by
verbal, written or situational cues that lead to a certain “definition of the situation.”
Additionally, keyword analysis using Lexis-Nexus was done following 9/11 to trace the
connection of that event to Pearl Harbor as described by major television news sources in
2001 and 2002.

Table 3.1: Description of Waves by Event

Wave Time Lag Pearl Harbor Articles 9/11 Articles
1 none 8 Dec 1941 to 14 Dec 1941 549 11 Sep 2001 to 18 Sep 2001* 376
2 6 months 7 Jun 1942 to 13 Jun 1942 185 11 Mar 2002 to 17 Mar 2002 48
3 1 year 7 Dec 1942 to 13 Dec 1942 148 11 Sep 2002 to 17 Sep 2002 152
Totals 882 576

*Wave 1 includes the date of the event, reflecting after-event responses reported in late or special
editions

55

General Patterns of Newspaper Coverage
After 9/11, the home front became the front line for the American ‘war on terror’.
In contrast, Pearl Harbor was not viewed even in a significant way as threatening the
‘homefront’ of the continental US. Figure 3.1 breaks down frames that focused on the
“homefront” or the domestic front. Approximately three-quarters of all articles from the
9/11 era used a homefront frame, situating this concern as a primary aspect of the story
and its content. In contrast, Pearl Harbor and its aftermath was concerned with a
conventional military campaign, and while 33 percent of articles immediately following
Pearl Harbor were concerned with the homefront, this number declined to under 20
percent in December 1942. The concern with the domestic sphere is not surprising given
the unique attack on 9/11 and the domestic security concerns that were the focus of
public and media attention.
Natural primary frames draw and reflect common notions about cause-and-effect
or simply describe the outlines of a ‘natural’ process or activity (Goffman 1986 [1974]).
These frames are powerful because they not only describe something but they portray it
as natural. Goffman compares this to painting a verbal or written picture of a natural
landscape, yet when the social world is the object of inquiry this ‘naturalness’ is often
more of a common understanding than an actual reflection of a ‘natural’ setting or
situation. These frameworks were especially prevalent after 9/11, illustrated in Figure
3.2. At wave 3, almost 73 percent of articles were influenced by a natural primary

56
framework, much higher than post-Pearl Harbor. This increase may be related to the
focus on the safety of the homefront, and the descriptions of its status.

Figure 3.1: Prevalence of Homefront Frame by Event
76.3
64.6
75
33.2
12.4
19.6
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
1 2 3
Wave
Percent
Sept 11
Pearl
Harbor
Figure 3.2: Prevalence of Natural Primary Framework by
Event
48.1
54.2
72.4
33
33.8
54.1
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
1 2 3
Wave
Percent
Sept 11
Pearl
Harbor

57

Table 3.2: Number of Newspaper Articles
Mentioning Pearl Harbor and Oklahoma
City by Month
Month Pearl Harbor Oklahoma City
Sep-00 292 118
Oct-00 279 144
Nov-00 439 104
Dec-00 807 235
Jan-01 271 166
Feb-01 360 242
Mar-01 493 198
Apr-01 523 849
May-01 1862 1267
Jun-01 1447 1503
Jul-01 766 333
Aug-01 680 165
TOTAL 8219 5324
Pre-
Sept
2001
Ratio 1.54 : 1
Sep-01 4047 2631
Oct-01 1283 1066
Nov-01 1166 566
Dec-01 2253 616
Jan-02 827 459
Feb-02 568 288
Mar-02 738 379
Apr-02 468 364
May-02 838 333
Jun-02 637 316
Jul-02 536 316
Aug-02 511 283
Sep-02 1211 563
Oct-02 472 347
Nov-02 533 218
Dec-02 785 157
TOTAL 12826 6271
Post-
Sept
2001
Ratio 2.05 : 1

58
Why Pearl Harbor?
When I first began this research I wondered what drove the focus on Pearl Harbor
after the 9/11 terrorist incidents. The bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in
Oklahoma City had been only six years before 9/11, and had been the most devastating

terrorist attack in US history. Few commentators described 9/11 in terms of Oklahoma
City. Figure 3.3 shows the number of references to Pearl Harbor and the Oklahoma City
Bombing, centered on September 2001 in newspapers around the country. A predictable
spike appears in September 2001 for both Pearl Harbor and Oklahoma City. In that
month, as shown in Table 3.2 Pearl Harbor was mentioned in 4047 articles, and the
Oklahoma City bombing in 2631 articles.
The important trend relevant to how 9/11 reinvigorated Pearl Harbor in American
public consciousness comes when looking at the ratios of articles pre- and post-
September 2001. Pearl Harbor was mentioned in 1.54 articles per 1 mentioning the
Figure 3.3: Newspaper Articles Mentioning Pearl Harbor and
Oklahoma City, centered on Sept. 2001
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
3500
4000
4500
9/00 12/00 3/01 6/01 9/01 12/01 3/02 6/02 9/02 12/02
Pearl Harbor
Oklahoma City Bombing

59
Oklahoma City bombing from September 2000 until August 2001. Only in April, the
anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, was this event mentioned more often. After
9/11 the ratio went to 2.05 to 1, a 25 percent increase in mentions of Pearl Harbor relative
to Oklahoma City from October 2001 to December 2002. For television stories on the
anniversary dates of Pearl Harbor (December 7) and Oklahoma City (April 19), the
increased importance of Pearl Harbor is clearer. On ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and CNN
combined, Oklahoma City received more attention in stories generally, ratio of 4.05 to 1
for 1996 through 2000. In 2001 Pearl Harbor received more attention at a ratio of 1.5 to
1, and from 2002 to 2006 again Oklahoma City had more television stories mentioning it,
1.4 to 1. Beginning in 2002, Pearl Harbor day received a nearly tripling of attention
relative to the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing against the pre-2001 years.
The resurgence of Pearl Harbor as a national event in 2001 was not simply due to
the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Rather, 9/11 carried frames of understanding that mirrored
those describing Pearl Harbor. This is why Oklahoma City receives less attention
following 9/11 relative to Pearl Harbor, as the frame of reference, in spite of the direct
connection to terrorism, diverges from that associated with 9/11. The remainder of this
chapter will discuss the common frames of understanding that contributed to the
comparisons between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. These frames are inseparable from
sensibilities surrounding gender, and race and ethnicity.

Motive

60
While media outlets reported on nearly anything surrounding the 9/11 event, most
newspaper articles I covered often did not make conclusions about the motives of either
Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Overall 76 percent of 575 articles following Pearl Harbor did not
portray any motive driving the attack, and where a rationale was mentioned 12 percent
described it in strategic Japanese interests. Even more, after 9/11, 93 percent of articles
described no motivation for these attacks, the most common explanation being the values
of terrorists, with only 2.6 percent of 570 stories fitting this categorization. Where
motives were not directly discussed in most newspaper articles, other frames serve as
sources if information that gave hints about the origins of the attacks. The relative lack
of any discussion of the causes of 9/11 illustrates one major tenet of assumptions about
the attacks which we will discuss below: namely that 9/11 could not be explained and to
make even an attempt to do so was a blasphemous anti-American deed. Then-President
GW Bush illustrated this approach to interpreting terrorism in April 2002; “There’s no
way to make peace with those whose only goal is death.” Table 3.3 shows that only 1
article out of 570 discussed 9/11 as potentially a response to American policy, in spite of
the obviousness of such an inquiry (see Blum 1995; Johnson 2000).
The lack of discussion of the motivation of the 9/11 terrorists can partially be
explained by connecting it to the prior discussion in chapter three of the civilization
paradox. Arab and Muslim terrorists were interpreted by my interviewees as reactive and
unthinking, representing a brand of humanity long-abandoned in the West. There was
not a significant discussion in the newspapers I analyzed about why terrorists targeted the
US in September 2001. Table 3.3 shows that 93 percent of articles after 9/11 provide no

61
Table 3.3: Motive by Event and Wave (percent)
Pearl Harbor 9/11
Wave 1 2 3 Total 1 2 3 Total
None Indicated 82.9 57.4 76.2 76.0 92.0 95.8 94.5 93.0
Response to US or Allied Action 0.9 1.0 0.7 0.3 0.2
Strategy 7.0 32.6 5.0 12.3 1.6 1.1
Expansion 4.3 9.3 8.9 6.3 -- -- -- --
Crazy or Unbalanced 2.0 1.2 0.8 2.1 0.7 0.9
Their Values 2.3 7.9 2.8 2.7 2.1 2.7 2.6
Other 0.6 0.8 1.0 0.0 2.7 2.1 0.0
TOTAL N 345 129 101 575 376 48 146 570

discussion or even mention of the motives of the terrorists. After Pearl Harbor, 76
percent of articles similarly did not discuss the motivations of the Japanese attack on
Hawai’i. Yet this comparison is perhaps more misleading than others to use as a direct
comparison to the American response to these events. In December of 1941, many
suspected war with Japan was inevitable, or at least likely (Prange, Goldstein, and Dillon
1982). It was clear that Japanese expansion in Asia was directly against US interests and
stated policies (LaFeber 1997), and on the morning of December 7
th
, 1941 The New York
Times had a story about Japanese envoys expected arrival to discuss avoiding all-out
military conflict between the two nations. As much as a Pearl Harbor exists in the public
imaginary as a sneak attack (Rosenberg 2003), there certainly were clear indications that
Japan would likely soon be a military adversary to the US. No such conditions existed in
2001. While terrorists and international radical Islamic groups had been attacking US
targets for years, these events were not central to interpreting the US responses after 9/11.
If anything, a detailed discussion of motivations following the Japanese raid on Pearl

62
Harbor was unneeded and would have been a repetitive exercise in light of the common
understanding of WWII prior to December 1941.
It is curious why so little discussion of the 9/11 bombing described the reasons
why terrorists may have carried out such a devastating attack. Ideologies that portray
terrorists as representatives of cultural backwardness and political violence in the Middle
East would be consistent with the lack of exploration into why the 9/11 attacks occurred
or what may have contributed to their planning. We will directly address these issues
below discussing race in the news media.

Us and Them: Race-Related Patterns in News Media, 1941 & 2001
Racial discourse and its appearance in mass media is a well-studied phenomena
(eg Hall 1993; Hall 1995; Hamamoto 1994; Shim 1998). Our focus in on the three waves
of newspaper coverage after Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and major patterns of discourse that
were embedded in the coverage. One general pattern prevalent in the coverage was an
emphasis on colorblind language, and an outward stand against discrimination in the 9/11
era relative to that of Pearl Harbor. Specifically, considering all articles coded that
mention domestic groups associated with an external ‘enemy’ (Japanese Americans and
Arab and Muslim Americans respectively) 54 percent after Pearl Harbor discussed
Japanese Americans as suspicious, a number that decreased to 29 percent after 9/11 with
regard to Arabs and Muslims in the US. More strikingly, after Pearl Harbor none of these
articles made any mention or emphasis on fair or equal treatment, while after 9/11, 54
percent of articles mentioning Arab or Muslim Americans emphasized the value of racial

63
and ethnic equality. This overall pattern is shown in Table 3.4. I take a comparative
approach to describing these patterns, situating the ‘enemy aggressors’ in these two
events and the US collectivity as they are portrayed. I will address three patterns in this
section that are particularly salient issues concerning race and nation: civilization,
integrity, and morality. All of these are characteristics which have been historically
associated with whites on one end and racialized ‘others’ on levels below that (Horsman
1981).
Table 3.4: Newspaper Treatment of Japanese
Americans and Arab and Muslim Americans
As Suspicious Emphasizing Equality
Pearl Harbor 54.0% 0.0%
Sept 11 29.0% 54.0%

Huntington’s (1996) bold description of a basic clash of values between ‘Muslim’
and ‘Western’ civilizations depicts a basic tenet of post-9/11 media coverage: glaring
values differences exist between cultures and nations where terrorists come from and the
US and West generally. In these discussions of cultural difference, Western values are
not merely differentiated, but elevated in comparison. Table 3.5 shows that Pearl
Harbor’s depiction of the enemy as uncivilized while the US is civilized peaked in wave

Table 3.5: Portrayal of US as
Civilized, Enemy as Backward by
Event
Wave 1 2 3
Pearl Harbor 3.0% 3.8% 6.8%
Sept 11 20.7% 31.3% 28.3%

64
3 at 6.8 percent of the articles coded. In contrast after 9/11 this was a key point of
comparison, with over 20 percent of articles in all waves making this depiction, and in
waves 2 and 3 around 30 percent. While the Japanese were certainly demonized, their
depictions were not normally as uncivilized or as antithetical to civilization, as so often
was the case following 9/11. This civilization narrative is perhaps the most critical one
present in the newspaper depictions of 9/11, as it informs the others in the discussions to
follow. This narrative has a long historical precedent that was easily discernable during
the 19
th
century’s European imperial expansion projects, seemingly with origins in
European Christianity (Fredrickson 2002). Middle Eastern and Muslim societies were
not only depicted as culturally backward and essentially “other,” but like others in the
colonial world, as in need of ‘help’ to enter the modern world (Said 1978).
Table 3.6: Portrayal of US as
Honorable, Enemy as Sneaky by
Event
Wave 1 2 3
Pearl Harbor 6.2% 6.5% 16.9%
Sept 11 29.0% 45.8% 41.4%

President Franklin Roosevelt referred to December 7
th
1941 famously as “a date
which will live in infamy” in his address to Congress after the attack, referring to the
Japanese “sneak attack” and sealing one of the primary meanings of the event in public
consciousness. The bombing of Pearl Harbor is most discursively linked to the narrative
of the “sneak attack” and in the decades that have followed this image appears to have
grown more distinct and comparatively emphasized over other meanings of that date
(Rosenberg 2003). Newspaper discussions of Pearl Harbor, however, did not tend to

65
emphasize this “sneak attack” framework. Table 3.6 describes the emphasis of
newspaper stories along an axis of honorability, showing that during WWII the framing
of Japan as sneaky while the US was just the opposite increased over time, growing
sharply during wave 3 to nearly 17 percent of articles. Yet 9/11 outpaced Pearl Harbor in
newspaper descriptions of this specific pattern. Over 40 percent of articles actually
depicted the US as honorable in contrast to the enemies of the period, a huge proportion
compared to Pearl Harbor. Referencing the civilization frame discussed above adds a
racial component to this discussion. In comparison these two events increasingly can be
differentiated, and issues of general morality of the groups involved in the various events
becomes central.
Ultimately 9/11 was viewed in much more moralistic terms than was Pearl
Harbor. It is undeniable that 9/11 was much more of a shocking event; in 1941 many
expected war with Japan; what surprised so many was the nerve of the Japanese to attack
the US directly and with such ambition (see Prange, Goldstein, and Dillon 1982; Prange,
Goldstein, and Dillon 1991a; Prange, Goldstein, and Dillon 1991b). Further, high US
military and government officials were well aware of an impending Japanese attack, even
perhaps if details, such as the exact place and time, were not known exactly (see Stinnett
2000). While terrorist incidents provided a backdrop for analyzing 9/11 after the fact,
there was no direct precursor nor an indicator widely known that a major domestic attack
was imminent. Further, the intensity of media depictions of the two events were vastly
different. As, Kevin, one of my younger interviewees who was a college student on 9/11
described:

66
I think the way it was covered with sort of different from any other, previous huge
story in the way that, just the way that news shows packaged it, it seemed very
much like some science fiction movie. And just the way in which we were
watching things unfold in real time, I guess, the technology was different and so
they were able to show us more and have this 24-hour coverage, etc. I think the
thing that interests me in terms of my experience with the media coverage is that a
year later, like when the first anniversary of 9/11 happened, there was the release
of the couple TV shows that included footage from the attack, and there was this
sort of repackaging of how we felt as a nation watching this, that for me pretty
fully contradicted my experience of it, and so it felt like major media was sort of
trying to redefine our memory of what 9/11 is.

After 9/11 there was a media intensity that was wholly focused in the terrorist attacks,
leading psychologists to conclude that television coverage had induced post-traumatic
stress disorder even in places geographically remote from the attacks and at no direct risk
of danger themselves (Propper, Stickgold, Keeley, and Christman 2007).

Table 3.7: Portrayal of US as Moral,
Enemy as Immoral by Event
Wave 1 2 3
Pearl Harbor 5.6% 4.3% 17.6%
Sept 11 34.6% 41.7% 36.8%

The drama of 9/11, and the fact that the primary targets were civilian played into
the numerous articles where simple morality was a driving force. Table 3.7 describes the
newspaper accounts where the US is the moral actor and the enemy is the immoral one.
Pearl Harbor’s moral/immoral portrayal increases significantly at wave 3 to over 17
percent, yet is much lower than any of the 9/11 waves and their similar depictions. As
discussed previously, the lack of historical context and description of any motivation on
the terrorists behalf may be inflating this number. It is not the proportion of news articles

67
reporting 9/11 in moral terms that is surprising necessarily: to call the gruesome attack on
civilians immoral is hardly to stretch the truth, although discussions of ‘morality’
following 9/11 necessarily leaves open US foreign policies which have had immensely
deadly outcomes for civilians in various regions and nations (Bhargava 2002). The
importance of this frame is in the larger ability or inability of media consumers to
disaggregate ‘terrorists’ from ‘Muslims,’ an issue raised in-depth in Chapter 3. As Said
(1997) has written, US media have a strong ability to influence perception in
circumstances where no everyday images exists of Muslims; where the only Muslims on
television or in the news are in some way wrongdoers. When hate crimes against
Muslims increased over one-thousand percent in 2001 relative to 2000 some transference
of underlying ethnic and racial tension is illustrated (Federal Bureau of Investigation
2001; Muscati 2002). Such a pattern leads to the concern that because terrorism and
Islam are so closely connected in the news media that these frames of reference will
impact all Arab and Muslim Americans, who after 9/11 were subjected to increased
scrutiny, surveillance and discrimination (Abdo 2006; Kang 2002). Moralistic
terminology is appropriate for discussions of 9/11, probably much more so than
following Pearl Harbor, but should also be done in context, with the understanding that
Arabs and Muslims in the US, like other Asian Americans, have been racialized along an
axis of otherness, as distinctly not American (Tuan 1998). This makes Americans of
Middle Eastern ancestry particularly vulnerable to international events, and especially to
the constructions of their presence as a domestic extension of an external enemy.

68
Gender References After Pearl Harbor and 9/11

Table 3.8: Masculinity Descriptions by Event
Pearl Harbor Sept 11
Enemy Unbalanced 174 19.7% 2 0.3%
Balanced 273 31.0% 472 81.9%

US Unbalanced 2 0.2% 1 0.2%
Balanced 143 16.2% 155 26.9%

Total Event Articles 882 576

Gender messaging was apparent in both eras, and especially prevalent were
aspects of gender associated with hegemonic, or dominant forms of masculinity. These
proved especially interesting over time, as we can see overall patterns of masculinity
described in Table 3.8. Unbalanced masculinity here is defined as an article defining a
character or group as aggressive but ‘soft’ or unable to carry out their ambitions.
Balanced masculinity is more in line with hegemonic descriptions, where aggressiveness
goes along with the strength to assert one’s desire. Table 3.8 shows of all the articles
from each era, 19.7 percent of articles from the Pearl Harbor period described the
Japanese as unbalanced; aggressive but unable to follow through on their goals or threats.
This is a large distinction from the 9/11 period, where almost no articles paint terrorists in
this light. Similarly, Americans and the US generally do not get classified as unbalanced
after either event. Figure 3.4 is a workplace propaganda poster used in the US steel
industry, and illustrates well ideas about the Japanese that are consistent with doubting

69
their toughness and ability to carry out their aggressive tendencies. In the poster, a
Japanese man is at a school desk studying while a seemingly endless number of his peers
appear robot-like behind him doing the same thing. The message is that the Japanese
may have aggressive tendencies, but their emphasis is not on toughness as much on
technical knowledge and learning, calling into question whether they can pull off their
grand visions. This image of Asian men as wimpish or not tough has been a long-lasting
controlling image which has been cast upon and resisted by Asian and Asian American
men (Chen 1999; Espiritu 1997; Espiritu 2001; Fong-Torres 1992).

Figure 3.4: Workplace Propaganda
Poster by Heppenstall Co. Steel
Forgings, Pittsburgh, PA. 1943

70
Table 3.9: Portrayal of US and Enemy
as Aggressive by Event
Wave 1 2 3
Pearl Harbor 2.3% 21.6% 27.0%
Sept 11 16.5% 37.5% 32.2%

The enemies of 9/11 were described as highly aggressive, with nearly 82 percent
of all newspaper articles from that period showing them as aggressive and firmly able to
carry out their goals. This is by far the highest proportion of any group described here,
and it connects well to the depiction of terrorists as antithetical to both civilization and
morality. This extremely high occurrence may also be a reflection of the high level of
US public anxiety after 9/11 and the fear of another terrorist attack (Jayasuriya 2002).
Table 3.8 provides a good level of comparison with the post-9/11 terrorists’ depiction and
those characters representing the US. We can see that terrorists are much more often
describe as both aggressive and capable, Americans were depicted this way about 27
percent of the time.
Table 3.9 describes the portrayal of both the US and ‘the enemy’ as aggressive.
During Pearl Harbor, waves two and three increased dramatically in the portrayal of both
the US and the Japanese as aggressive, to 21 and 27 percent of all articles respectively
from only 2 percent during wave 1. September 11
th
was characterized more in newspaper
articles by dual aggression, increasing from 16 to 37 percent from wave 1 to wave 2.
Wave 3 settled back to 32 percent of articles showing both the US and terrorists as
aggressive, still higher than any wave during Pearl Harbor. Looking back to Table 4.8,
which showed the portrayal of the combination of aggressive and ‘hard’ characteristics, it

71
becomes clear that the way the US versus terrorists are described is very different even
when both are shown as aggressive. Terrorists have an edge and dedication to their cause
along with aggression unique across both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 newspaper coverage.
This relates directly to a central issue shown in media depictions that related to
toughness.

Table 3.10: Portrayal of US as 'Soft'
and Enemy as Tough by Event
Wave 1 2 3
Pearl Harbor 5.5% 4.3% 2.7%
Sept 11 27.9% 18.8% 19.1%

Articles showing the US as soft while the enemy is tough are depicted in Table
3.10. This pattern of depiction is nearly absent during Pearl Harbor, and emerges
strongly after September 11
th
. During wave 1 after 9/11 nearly 28 percent of articles
described the US as ‘soft’ and terrorists by contrast as tough. These numbers decrease in
waves 2 and 3 as the US is shown less often as soft. Table 3.11 further informs the vision
of newspaper coverage, illustrating the depiction of the US and its representatives as
brave. This table shows the opposite pattern occurring in the two events. During Pearl
Harbor the representation of the US as brave increased from 9 percent in wave 1 to
almost 19 percent in wave 3. For 9/11, the US is depicted as brave nearly 9 percent of
the time in wave 1, decreasing to 6.6 percent in wave 3. September 11
th
and Pearl Harbor
was seen very differently through the lens of newspaper coverage, as the traditional war
era of WWII increased the vision of US bravery. Dissimilarly, 9/11 had a relatively low

72
illustration of the US as brave, and after the initial attack the lack of direct conflict in this
supposed war left fewer options for depictions of bravery. While 9/11 was often
described in ‘war’ terms there was really no front or battle lines, no places of conflict
with the exception of airport terminals and border crossings.

Table 3.11: Portrayal of US as Brave
by Event
Wave 1 2 3
Pearl Harbor 9.0% 13.0% 18.9%
Sept 11 8.8% 6.3% 6.6%

The Importance of Media Patterns
Depiction of aggressiveness and being ‘hard’ or tough is much stronger than even
the depictions of the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. The resulting collective message from
the newspaper media was that terrorists were ultimately more dangerous, more
threatening and more worthy of enduring fear and fright than was the war state of
militarist Japan during WWII. This illustration reminds me distinctly of the urban legend
of the stranger-placed razor blade in the apple on Halloween. Best and Horiuchi (1985)
discuss how social anxiety emerges out of social strains, and in these cases stories do
much to captivate our collective attention and cull our anxieties. Often, as Best and
Horiuchi describe in their work on urban legends, there are no answers to be found in the
distractions of bizarre and wacky stories which media sources do well to play up. While
I make no causal link between media attention and its brand of coverage and public
opinion, it is clear that media are key modifiers of meaning in our increasingly connected

73
and saturated electronic world (Lipsitz 1990). Media may represent common sensibilities
while they also magnify certain narratives that fit their commercial and professional
interests. The media successfully helped to induce and focus a fear that far outstripped
the actual dangers of terrorism after 9/11. When comparing Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and
their media frames it borders on ridiculous the way collectively terrorists were shown as
nearly invincible forces of evil that could scarcely be stopped. As Males (1998) has
described, often media attention and the framing of public issues are distinctly different
from observable trends and dangers. Newspaper depictions often suffer from the same
superficiality of television news, where “if it bleeds, it leads” is a rule that often leads
“news” into the realm of entertainment rather than fair journalism that informs the
populace (Kerbel 2000).
Muslims and Middle Easterners have been depicted in the US largely through
mass media. These media representations create the foundational image of most
Americans’ view of this diverse part of the world and its peoples. Said (1997) was
careful to illustrate these media images largely as characters rather than representations of
reality. Covering the “Muslim world” has very often been synonymous with reporting on
terrorism or oil supply issues, lacking the depth necessary for diverse presentations and
furthering stereotypes. It is important to remember that these are depictions in two large,
mainstream American newspapers, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
While colorblind rhetoric was not institutionalized during the WWII years, outright
racism and prejudice were still challenged in their basic fairness, still contradictory to
American ideals of liberty and freedom (Pettigrew 1964), and these papers avoided

74
depicting it. Their efforts in this vein were very apparent after 9/11, when statements of
equality went alongside depictions of ethnic stereotyping and frames that encourages
such conclusions about Arabs and Muslims collectively.
Where the spread of communism in the 20
th
century produced a US policy of
containment, accompanied by the assumption that communist states would wither
eventually and heel to liberal economics as the natural mode of economic activity,
confronting terrorism took a different mode. After 9/11 the stated US policy was to end
terrorism, a notably lofty goal bathed in rhetoric rather than reality. Where containment
had horrific effects in 20
th
century US foreign policy, leading to the disastrous Vietnam
War among other entanglements, this policy may be more appropriate for a confrontation
with terrorism. An ideological battle cannot be won outright or completely. Notably, the
civilization versus barbarian frame, which posits much of the Arab and Muslim worlds as
lacking forward thinking, implicated vast swaths of people too large to be outright beaten
into defeat in a war on terrorism. At the same time, the view that terrorists were
extremists even in the context of their own societies strongly suggests that containing
them would be a productive way to confront their ideas; probably much more productive
than declaring ‘war’ on their tactics. That both these frames existed simultaneously
created a problem in the US and its collective ability to understand the reality of the
threat and respond to it.

75
CHAPTER 4

(E)RACING THE PAST:
THE “GREATEST GENERATION” AND THE
JOURNEY TO COLORBLIND RACIAL IDEOLOGY

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
_____________________
William Faulkner (1951)

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, one college professor described his search to find a
language to discuss the days’ events:
We do not yet know what questions to ask. How do you even frame a dialogue
about something that is unlike anything in your previous experience? I reach for
the analogues, but I cannot see them right now. How much context do you need
before you can discuss the “text” (Poulos 2003:239)?

To answer, we rely on others, on our collective memories built over years and often
through great effort, and from those older than us who have helped to construct these
collective memories that become so meaningful when meaningfulness is elusive
(Halbwachs 1992). When we refer to these collective memories, or when we draw on
them, we rarely think of them as shifting with the social tides, evolving to meet new
collective values. When my elders reflect on a past to which I am not privy, I trust their
descriptions and interpretations. When Japanese Americans organized meetings with
Arab Americans after 9/11 to discuss the domestic situation, to warn against the injustices
they endured during the WWII era, I listened carefully. If there is any reputable source of

76
knowledge about the past, assumedly it is people who lived through it. Yet, when
recollections are more representative of the present than the past, who and what can be
believed? Am I to believe it at face value when one white respondent after another
describes the racial conditions of the WWII era as a sort of NIMBY
12
-filled orgy of
equality, where seemingly everyone’s families, parents and selves were fair-minded, or
defensive of the rights of people of color? I must admit that skepticism did gain
momentum when these same stories filled my ears, much to the contrast of the people of
color I interviewed. Their WWII lives were not privileged by whiteness, by an ability to
see what they wanted to see, nor did history’s years act as a prism of colorblindness about
the era.
Each of the people of color I spoke to described systemic racism that was a major
part of their World War II experience. One Japanese American man described his
dismay at being discharged from military service, and intense effort to be re-enlisted into
the military after Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese Navy. To no avail, Japanese
Americans were recoded as ineligible for service at that time. One African American
woman described her journey through nursing school, and matter-of-factly explained the
existence of only five nursing schools in the country that would train African Americans.
Another described her segregated community, where Japanese Americans were neighbors
with African Americans before the WWII internment camps forcibly relocated her
neighbors to horse stalls in the Santa Anita racetrack outside of Los Angeles. Taking
seriously all of my interviews with members of the WWII generation illustrates the

12
Acronym for “not in my back yard”

77
power of privilege, and how white privilege in particular allows for a ‘collective
forgetting’ of a real past in favor of one much more palatable and in line with the
colorblind ideals so often relied on today.
Language has a powerful impact on social ideologies and action. In one of the
most famous speeches of the century, Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired a crowd on the
Washington Mall and audiences around the world when he spoke of a future of equality,
where color would be meaningless. The backdrop was the intense racism that plainly
saturated Jim Crow in the south. Today, being colorblind is the agreed upon path of
behavior in public, a front stage act of social consensus, where faux pas are keenly
avoided. In this front stage, race is largely off-limits. In an extreme version of this
adherence to colorblindism, there is a movement, successful in eliminating affirmative
action programs in several states, ultimately encouraging the elimination of racial
language at all (Stovall 2001). Speaking about race just perpetuates its existence, the
argument for such a movement argues. Discourse and language can frame a discussion,
and affirmative action, like many social issues relating to race, has effectively been
decoupled from historical context (Ledesma 2007). This chapter dissects the use of
memory and narrative surrounding the events of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 to understand
how colorblind vernacular frames conversations about race.
Sociologists, following Mannheim’s (1952) description of generational cohorts
and their important impact on collective social understanding have described the social
milieu surrounding adolescence and young adulthood as crucial to forming political
perspectives and worldviews (Schuman and Scott 1989), including consciousness of

78
racial events (Brown and Kulik 1977; Griffin 2004). Although the crux of racial
formation theory rests on the malleability of racial ideologies across time, and collective
memory studies suggest that individuals’ core ideologies are formed at a critical time in
adolescence and young adulthood, few studies focusing on generation-specific racial
values and ideologies have been done. Generations, it has been argued, are characterized
by specific conceptions of the social world that can change to accommodate social
contexts only somewhat (Conway 1997), reflecting in large part their experiences at that
critical stage of identity formation during adolescence and young adulthood. This
chapter focuses on the generation that came of age during and around Pearl Harbor and
World War II, to assess how their remnant racial ideologies, formed in the social milieu
of the 1930s and 1940s, inform their contemporary racial attitudes and beliefs, with a
special focus on the racial politics surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Using in-depth
interviews of eighteen seniors with an average age of 85, I found evidence that their
ideologies have shifted with the times, and have come to include variations of and
opinions about colorblindness. In spite of this, members of this older generation maintain
sets of values that date their racial ideologies, and colorblind language in many cases
appears as an add-on to a ideological repertoire built during a period of more coercive
racial rule (Crenshaw 1995; Winant 2001). The movement of history and social etiquette
is not lost on people of any age, and my respondents were well aware of the changes in
the politics of race, even when their own use of contemporary race-speak was strikingly
incomplete. Additionally, through these older Americans, we can trace the genealogy of
the racial milieu from the past 70 years, which can provide clues to these racial formation

79
movements. This generational cohort also provides a lens through which we can examine
how social assumptions and explanations of race have and have not changed.
The understudied area of generational or age difference regarding racial ideology
and attitudes is curious because it offers an informative piece to understanding the
continuing undercurrent of racism in the era of colorblindness. Some sociologists have
moved away from studying individuals in an effort to highlight institutions (Wellman
1993 [1977]); yet individuals’ attitudes about race are not randomly assigned. Ideas
emerge in relation to structural racial hierarchies and ideological traditions. In addition,
largely superficial studies of racial attitudes using survey techniques have yielded
optimistic results that are in clear contrast to qualitative methods that are better suited for
probing racial attitudes and ideologies (Bonilla-Silva and Forman 2000; Pager and
Quillian 2005). I investigate the lineages of “common sense” racial ideology, using the
term in the Gramscian (see Cirese 1982; Gramsci 1971b) sense, shifting towards a ‘new
color-blind racism’ competing with the formation of racial ideas in the 1930s and 1940s,
where race relations straddled the paternalism of legal segregation and the future of civil
rights struggle (van den Berghe 1967), where whiteness openly operated as currency
protected by the state (Harris 1995). I focus my attention on US citizens over 75 years
old for two reasons: 1) in tracing the evolution of US racial ideology it makes sense to
begin with older generations that have experienced various forms of racial etiquette and
value norms; 2) because it appears generation is important in forming lasting ideologies
that become reference points which subsequent ideologies must engage (Holmes and
Conway 1999). Americans who were adolescents and young adults when Pearl Harbor

80
occurred should possess lingering ideologies from this time in race relations; yet some
conversation with new modes of racial ideology should also be present.
Studies of collective memory suggest core ideological systems are developed
through adolescence. Does racial ideology similarly become solidified, and how do these
patterns of thought change as new racial ideas become hegemonic? Departing from
Bonilla-Silva’s (2003b) work on color-blind racism, I analyze the discourse of my
respondents to determine whether their racial ideologies have adopted contemporary
‘colorblind’ characteristics. I also look at the degree to which their views are associated
with patterns of racial thought more in line with their older generational status, as
theories of cohort crystallization suggest (Schuman and Scott 1989). We then have an
opportunity to dissect the language and ideologies of older adults whose values and
points of reference are rooted in World War II. How have they adapted contemporary
racial ideologies, and how do they use memories to which their generation is privy to
help them understand changes in race relations? We must keep in mind that: 1) these
interviews provide insights into individual perceptions, ideas and opinions of the
respondent at the time of the interview, considering that all memories are subject to
revision and forgetting, as they are recreated when retold (Nader 2003a; 2003b); 2)
individual memories are contextual, can never be “recalled” exactly and are always
reinterpreted depending on social contexts (Halbwachs 1992); 3) memories, ideas and
reflections of the past are often rearticulated to fit a persons’ own positive self-portrait,
and also to favorably situate those social groups to which they belong (Baumeister and
Hastings 1997). Finally, the interview process probably more so than research done at a

81
distance is infused with respondents’ impression management—performing in a manner
reflective of how they would like to be viewed (Goffman 1959)—which is a significant
issue, especially with the study of sensitive topics such as race and ethnicity.

Race ‘Common Sense’ and Hierarchies of Culture and Nation:
A backdrop to studies of race

Domestic racial ideas and attitudes are linked to international and global trends.
The Japan-bashing, for example, that took place in the 1980s in the US emerged directly
from economic competition and used explicit racialist imagery to describe Japan, with
Asian Americans caught in the cross-fire of racial antagonism (Frank 1999).
International pressures, for example, impact domestic US racial policies when a need to
polish the US image of democracy abroad during the early Cold War period coincided
with domestic pressure to enact civil rights reforms (Dudziak 2000). We shouldn’t be
surprised that racial ideology in the US would be intertwined with global politics in an
increasingly small world. Theories and claims about racial hierarchies in Europe and the
Americas are keenly tied to a history of colonialism, imperialism (Horsman 1997), and to
enduring beliefs about cultural if not biological inferiority of Africans, Asians and
Indigenous people to Anglo-Saxon whites (Cox 2000 [1948]). Consistent with Said’s
(1978) Orientalism, which described the influence of cultural experts and leaders in
shaping the colonialism-friendly image of ‘orientals’ as culturally backward relative to
Europeans, American attitudes towards the Middle East and its people are largely

82
comparable (Little 2002).
13
In large part, this American ‘orientalism’ seems to be an
obvious crack in the armor of colorblindism that dominates public discourses about race
and ethnicity.
The racial contexts in place when Pearl Harbor and 9/11 occurred were different
for Japanese Americans and Arab and Muslim Americans, groups immediately regarded
with suspicion after these two events. However, people of Japanese decent endured harsh
nativist sentiments throughout the early 20
th
century which often led to limits on their
legal and social rights. In California, for instance, alien land laws barred those ineligible
for citizenship, meaning anyone who was not legally defined as white, from owning land
(Daniels 1977). As fears about Japanese immigration and immigrants already in the US
mounted in the early 20
th
Century, a deal was struck between the Japanese and US
governments to severely restrict immigration through a “Gentleman’s Agreement.” This
agreement, lasting from 1908 to 1924, helped ensure a minimal level of treatment for
Japanese immigrants in the US (for instance, not segregating them in schools, as San
Francisco tried in 1907) in exchange for nearly stopping all Japanese immigration
(Takaki 1989). As Japan’s empire and strength grew, especially following her victory
over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, US interests were challenged and
threatened by this emerging Pacific rival. Domestic US race and ethnic relations tended
to reflect this newfound rivalry, and the imperial, expansionist notions of Japan that
emerged in the 20
th
Century became a direct threat to US influence in Asia and the

13
Omi & Winant’s (1994) definition of racial projects is useful here; they define them as efforts to
reorganize systems of stratification based on the characteristics associated with human bodies. I believe the
current conditions in which Arabs and Muslims in the US, and internationally, find themselves fits with this
definition.

83
Pacific (Lyman 2000). When Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese Navy on
December 7, 1941 American worries about “Yellow Peril” already were centered on
Japan, and Japanese Americans were catching hell for it (Daniels 1993). The eventuality
of internment was already keenly on the minds of Japanese Americans both on the West
Coast and in Hawai’i as they responded to persistent rumors throughout 1941 that they
would be held in concentration camps if war broke out with Japan (Robinson 2001:88).
In short, a long history of racialization and exclusion preceded Pearl Harbor and framed
the treatment of Japanese Americans after December 7, 1941.
The racial and ethnic history of Arab and Muslim Americans as September 11,
2001 dawned was much more complex than that of Japanese Americans. Various
national and ethnic groups, unlike the case with East Asians along with Japanese, were
adjudicated in the early 20
th
century differentially (Gualtieri 2001). Very often
immigrants from the Middle East were labeled “white” and therefore eligible for
citizenship, which was never the case with East Asian immigrants. However, while it has
often been assumed that Arab and Middle Eastern immigrants were assimilating prior to
WWII, Gualtieri (2004) points out the contradiction and insecurity in the racialization of
Arab ethnic groups during this time. Where Japanese Americans were well established as
racialized subjects prior to Pearl Harbor, September 11, 2001 changed the racial equation
for Arab and Muslim Americans (see Jamal and Naber 2008). Increases in hostility
meant much more insecurity for Americans of Arab or Muslim ancestry even in
progressive regions of the country (Naber 2006). The terrorist attacks of 9/11 faced Arab
and Muslim Americans with a newfound visibility and with it a new position in the racial

84
and ethnic politics of the US (Read 2008). The backlash that followed 9/11 was centered
around a cultural logic which cast a fictional Arab/Muslim character in conflict with
American nationalist fury (Naber 2008). So damaged was the characterization of Arabs
after 9/11 that efforts, such as Public Service Announcements (PSAs), to rehabilitate the
image of Islam in the US shied away from including Arabs in their efforts, instead
highlighting Muslims of other ethnic backgrounds in the US (such as whites, Latinos and
African Americans) (Alsultany 2007). In short, 9/11 represented a breaking point in
Arab/Muslim American racialization and the beginning of a new logic surrounding their
citizenship and belonging.
Both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were connected to global and international politics.
Japan was a nation on the fast track to competing with Europe and the US economically
and militarily throughout the 20
th
century. Caricatures of Japanese people or the nation
as a whole were not in any manner similar to those describing Germany in World War II
or prior. The markedly different treatment of Japanese American US citizens during the
war years, even when compared to Germany POWs who were at times accepted into
American communities, illustrates the degree of racialization (Dower 1986; United States
Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians 1997). After 9/11,
orientalism linked Muslims, Arabs and other Middle-Eastern, South or Central Asian
ethnic groups together and depicted these groups as backward and uncivilized or lacking
a value for progress and modern thought. As race is a political construct, providing
advantages and disadvantages depending on its definitions (Haney Lopez 1996), race has
been rearticulated in the US in a global context and with 9/11 as a backdrop, national

85
security, personal safety, and fear are important aspects of the emergent racialization of
Arabs and Muslims. As we will see, many of my respondents are concerned for their
safety, and the security of US society broadly. Safety and fear are constructed ideas
influenced by outside forces, but they are ones that dramatically affect people’s
perceptions and behaviors (Glassner 1999); race being linked to safety and fear make
racial politics even more emotionally stirring and personal. As one WWII generation
respondent said, “I certainly don't feel safe and I don't know among my friends anybody
that gives us a safe feeling. It's a whole different feeling [than during World War II].” A
discussion of this global backdrop of terrorism and its impact on perceptions of race in
the US after 9/11 deserves consideration (see Harlow and Dundes 2004).
While hegemonic racial ideologies have shifted in the US since World War II,
there have been a myriad of protests against this progressive movement by those opposed
to these policies. The terrorism of hate groups and white supremacists are but the most
clear-cut examples (Ezekiel 1995). The most damaging resistance and push back against
the movement to expand civil rights for people of color have been policy-based and
institutional. As Carmichael and Hamilton (1967) suggested decades ago, institutional
racism is pervasive, assaultive and perhaps more damaging than individual level
prejudice and discrimination. Critical race scholars point out that within the legal system
there are very few spaces where institutional racism is subject to any remediation, and
any discrimination case is difficult to prove in court (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and
Thomas 1995). The colorblind ideology that developed in the US as a response to

86
demands of the civil rights movement largely equates race consciousness with racism,
14

thereby equating Black nationalism, for example, with white supremacy (Peller 1995).
This largely conservative political effort has been powered by liberal ideologies as well,
and has been successful in removing race from much political debate and public
conversation (Peller 1990). In the post-war era characterized by civil rights pressure,
Winant (2001) describes hegemonic racial hierarchies, where concessions in civil rights
and an end to de jure legal racism deflated public pressure to upend the structure of
racism (Bonilla-Silva and Embrick 2001). While legal structures were altered seriously,
the results of racial hierarchies were similar to those under coercive paternalism that
dominated race relations prior to civil rights victories (Oliver and Shapiro 1995).
The era of post-civil rights “color-blind racism” is not devoid of racism—racial
discourses and ideologies have changed and become more subtle (Bonilla-Silva 2003b)—
thus more difficult to measure and quantify (Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi 2001; Pager and
Quillian 2005). Certain terms, phrases and discussions—for example, welfare, poverty
and parenthood—became coded ways to discuss race without actually mentioning it by
name (Collins 2004:131-133; Kaplan 1997; Roberts 1997); this followed the lead of
social scientists and policy leaders who turned discussions of race in the 1960s towards
discussions of culture and maladaption (Lewis 1959; Lewis 1968; Moynihan 1965). A
global framework of race and racism is perhaps more important today than at any time,
and the alterations in US racial etiquette from 1921, when my average interviewee was

14
Waters (1990) explains the tendency for whites to equate white ethnic or nation-origin background to
racial status. She found that whites believe the struggles of European immigrants, and the oppression they
faced is comparable to the discrimination African Americans confront, and whites tend not only to ‘blame
the victim’ of racism for their conditions, but also see a level of injustice and anti-Americanism in
continually claiming a racial identity.

87
born, to 2006 and 2007 when they were interviewed, provides clues about the nature,
direction and significance of changes in racial ideologies. Their comments also provide a
fascinating look at the way contemporary racial ideologies are intertwined with “the past”
as it is reconstructed over time.

Racial Attitudes & Discursive Patterns
The connection between power and language and imagery has been a critical path
of inquiry in the fields of literature and critical studies for decades. Horkheimer and
Adorno's (2002) classic critique of media, especially cinema in the continued passivity of
modern populations illustrated the view that fictional imagery could cloud our view of
reality, as in masking the power dynamics and inequity present in society. Gramsci’s
(1971b; 1985; 2000) writing on culture also sought to identify the power of discourse to
affect the thoughts of people and societies, but much of his focus was on the written word
and the way language and its usage could manipulate the interpretation of an event. For
Gramsci, purposeful communication could sometimes shape ‘common sense’, but more
often these communiqués attached themselves to it so that a message's reception was
compatible with a society’s most core beliefs. Power, then could be reinforced and
maintained by what Gramsci called ‘historic blocs’ or what we might call the ruling class,
through the use of discourses that reinforced the social system and its stratification
through messages and programs that drew on the cultural power of ‘common sense’. A
good contemporary example in the US is the core value of meritocracy, or being judged
and rewarded based on individual gifts and effort. A message that is well-received must

88
draw on ‘common sense’ or it cannot be a effective in advancing a change movement or
altering the very common sense it must acknowledge; Martin Luther King, Jr.’s rhetorical
style, for instance, drew on core American values of liberty and freedom, linking them to
US history (the Constitution or President Abraham Lincoln, for instance) while also
challenging racial ‘common sense’ to change course drastically (Vail 2006).
Certain language and writing patterns have also been tied to power and have
been shown to influence people's perception of responsibility, blame and
victimization. The passive voice is such a pattern, where the subject of a sentence or
statement is hidden, and the object being acted upon becomes highlighted. An
example of a passive voice statement by one of my interview subjects regarded
discrimination against Japanese Americans during WWII in Los Angeles: “the
prejudice against the Japanese was terrible.” Here the object, in this case, “the
Japanese” are victims of prejudice, an action, but there is no subject presented as
having these prejudices. Who expressed prejudice against “the Japanese” goes
unstated and is depersonalized. It could be that prejudice came from many people or
few people, from the state or private worlds, or all of them. In contrast, using an
active voice statement highlights the subject in the events described, for example,
“most whites were terribly prejudiced against the Japanese.” This statement in active
voice spotlights the subject, in this case ‘whites’ where in the passive voice example
“Japanese” was the focus of the sentence in which the subject was missing. The
significance of this difference is subtle but the interpretation of a reader or listener
can be quite different.

89
In the course of a conversation where spoken rather than written words are
exchanged, a passive sentence can sometimes be filled in by a prior or subsequent
statement, or by a conversation partner. For example, if I asked the question, “how
did whites generally view Japanese Americans during the war?” then the passive
voice answer given above could be more clearly interpreted indirectly and is laid in
the context of the question asked, though the absence of a subject may still
marginalize the role they had in the action. Why the passive voice is important can
be seen in experimental studies that present volunteers with written stories in active
and passive voice. Participants tend to be significantly less judgmental against the
unstated subjects of passive voice statements where their activities are clearly
negative (for example, they are rapists or perpetrators of violence) (Henley, Miller,
and Beazley 1995). Some victims or objects in passive voice are judged more harshly
where perpetrators are more leniently evaluated, especially by respondents of the
same social group as the subject in a situation (in this case, men, and this trend has
followed where in-groups are national groups) (Platow and Brodie 1999).
While studies of passive and active voice are well known in gender studies they
are rarely used in analyses where the focus is on race and ethnicity. Yet the focus on race
is a place where paying attention to active and passive voice is useful, especially in my
sociological analysis of memory and my attention to the character of race-related recall
and its attributes. It may be that presenting the past in a passive voice serves different
purposes for respondents reflecting on the past. First, it may feel more comfortable and
less harsh to describe memories in the passive voice if one’s in-group is involved as

90
subjects in a negative action; we know the tendency to cast one's own group in a more
positive light exists (Baumeister and Hastings 1997). Secondly, the colorblind moment
makes discussion of outright racism or discrimination uncomfortable for many people.
Race itself is a topic many people broach only out of the public, and identifying a
depersonalized discriminator may decrease the discomfort people feel in this discussion.
Regardless, passive voice was common in my respondents’ language in discussing
discrimination or prejudice, most notably in declining to state the subject of the prejudice
and identifying only the object.
Many of the discursive methods utilized by my respondents fit into a pattern I
refer to as racial interference, a tactic that seems less like a cognizant strategy and more
of a pattern of positive self-portrayal and self-presentation. Racial interference is a
pattern by which people highlight colorblind, non-racist or anti-racist portions of their
racial ideologies or personal histories. Racial interference alludes to a strategy that
distracts attention away from socially unattractive or undesirable values, ideas or
behaviors. Two categories of racial interference could be extracted from my interviews:
theoretical and experiential. The theoretical type of racial interference directly
incorporates the ideals of social equality as a noble ambition—goals of course cannot
always be achieved or can’t be chased during all situations. Theoretical sorts of
interference then are incorporated by people who either genuinely believe in equality as a
goal, or by those who use equality values to frame their discussion of racial issues so as
to appear more socially appropriate. The second type of racial interference that was
noticeable in the interviews is experiential, based on the experiences and personal

91
accounts rather than value-based. This type of racial interference is inherently tied to a
value for equality, and is made up of a story or recollection from an interviewees’ life
that helps to elucidate a background consistent with race neutrality or anti-racism. Both
patterns of speech ‘interfere’ with establishing a consistent racial narrative and may also
be misleading when analyzed because they are highlighted. While these types of
consistent racial narratives are simplistic, they remain culturally salient nonetheless.
Racial interference is a mechanism by which people can also come to express themselves
and their racial ideologies more freely, as they may feel they have made efforts to be fair
and balanced in their overall racial values. Many examples of racial interference will be
examined below, as this was a common aspect of speech used to describe the complexity
of an individual’s ideas surrounding race. The interviews I have done seem to show that
this value for equality and individual freedom from discrimination is real and deeply
held. I believe each of my interviewees wanted to view racial equality as a good social
principle; this did not translate, however, into equalitarian values regarding race and
ethnicity. This mismatch in values versus behavior or day-to-day views is likely to be
seen among any age group, but its clear divergence here left it apt for illustration, and
allows for an analysis between these apparently contrary opinions.

The Color Bind:
Trying not to “see” race is harder than it sounds

Color-blind ideologies that encouraged a conscious ignoring of race were only in
their infancy during World War II, and my respondents of the “greatest generation” came
of age in an era largely characterized by paternalistic patterns of thought and behavior.

92
As with all ideologies, racial ones change, but the degree to which these changes can
override preexisting ones, in this case how colorblind ideologies interact with those
formed in prior periods of coercive race relations, is a question of theoretical and
practical importance. Quantitative studies have not found resounding significant effects
of generation on racial attitudes (Andolina and Mayer 2003; Steeh and Schuman 1992);
however, these efforts are methodologically limited because appearing non-racist (or
even anti-racist) in public is part and parcel of expressing colorblind attitudes. Interviews
are more appropriate for understanding these generational shifts, as they allow probing,
ambiguity and complexity to exist without forcing research participants into rigidly
predefined response patterns (Briggs 1986). A qualitative method is more apt to find
intricacies or inconsistencies in viewpoints or values (Bonilla-Silva and Forman 2000).
Had the older adults I interviewed been surveyed, many of their racial ideologies would
have appeared colorblind or racially liberal; closer inspection, however, revealed a
significant level of ambiguity and contradiction in their racial attitudes.

“Some are very good…”: Incomplete Uses of Colorblind Ideals
Virtually all of my respondents made comments that painted them in varying
degrees as non-prejudiced or balanced in their opinions of other racial groups. This is a
finding that I’m confident would extend to any social group in the US, whether it be age
cohort, racial group, or any other. My respondents may have done so for many reasons;
from some I sensed genuineness, though I cannot determine this definitively, where
others seemed to be playing a part for the benefit of myself as their audience; this type of

93
impression management is ongoing and especially significant in interview settings
(Broom, Hand, and Tovey forthcoming; Von Baeyer, Sherk, and Zanna 1981). Often
respondents would fit statements into conversation, as cautionary notes, as if to denote: “I
am fair, I am neutral, and I’m not racist;” these statements appeared frequently in the
form of racial interference, which I described above, making judgments about a person’s
racial ideology unclear. Often these techniques reflected an incomplete shell of color-
blind ideology through which more obvious racist ideologies were visible.
David is an 82 year-old white man with an Ivy League degree from a well-off
Midwestern family. He didn’t get out of Naval training in time to see combat during
World War II and is a retired professor who researched and taught Old Testament
archeology, his dreams of Christian missionary work in Asia scuttled due to his wife’s ill
health. Well-spoken and intelligent, he attempts to adopt a complementary tone initially
when asked about comparisons between the treatment of Japanese Americans during
WWII and Arab and Muslims Americans after 9/11:
Most Arab people, they’re from all over, and they're not all Muslims. And, you
know, some are very good businessmen, and workers and so forth. So I don't
know, I think it's a different type of group and I think we just have to have
better—we just have to have better—have to have the best possible intelligence of
our local police and all that type of people to keep an eye on them. But try to
round them all up would be very difficult. I'm thinking, Detroit has a whole
congregation, the whole area has a big population, of uh, where would you put
them [laughs]?

While David tries to introduce his views as fair and not racially biased, a hallmark of
color-blind racism, his actual ideas undermine this. Beginning with a statement of fair-
mindedness, David emphasizes his knowledge about the diversity among Arabs and some
positive attributes of some. This commentary appears to be aimed at supporting his

94
opinions as based on sound reasoning and knowledge, and David in other parts of the
interview discusses his stays in Israel and his understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict. He further expresses his distrust for Arabs in the US this way:
We want to try to placate them in this country, being nicey-nice to them and not
go on a warpath or lock them up or police their mosques. We don't want to have
to do that. We want to try to be nicey-nice to them so that they will be nicey-nice
to us, but it don't work that way in their thinking. They just use this as an
opportunity to get the upper hand, sooner or later. That's my thinking.

Illustrating an ideological divide between colorblindism and vulgar racism, David depicts
Muslims as a dangerous group inside the US that should be heavily distrusted. While
there is an urgency in David’s distrust, he also makes clear that “we don’t want to have to
do that,” yet this collective ‘we’ is seemingly given little choice. David’s initial
statement where he described Arab diversity along with associating some positive
attributes with Arabs can be read as racial interference; these early statements seem to
preface and frame the more critical ideas that came later, obfuscating clarity with regard
to his racial ideas. US society is portrayed as fair and aiming for a colorblind ideal, not
wanting to aggressively police certain groups, but in reality left without an alternative
method for fighting this new type of war. Here David mixes contemporary racial
colorblindism with seemingly incompatible ideas about an essentialized ‘Arab enemy’
that has infiltrated the country. David successfully combines these ideas by presenting a
theoretical value for colorblindism with a view based in perceived reality, as if to say ‘we
would like to treat these suspicious groups the same as everyone else, but their actions
don’t allow us to’. David pays homage to equality while strongly contradicting himself
in the face of what he interprets to be a domestic threat posed by Arab Americans.

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Papps is an 83 year-old man born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish parents, the
product of what he called a broken home. Living in an orphanage part of his childhood,
he developed a strong dependence on his older brother, and after finishing high school
joined the US Navy, serving in the Pacific at the tail end of the war and during the
occupation of Japan. In response to my probing comment, “some people say that Islam is
being distorted by terrorists, that they are extremists,” Papps, solemnly offered this in
agreement: “I think so. I’ve got a feeling they are.” Papps believed that Muslims were
being unfairly criticized, but in the next breath, this is rethought:
Why do these bastards [terrorists] have to walk around with a mask? I figured it
out, because if they’re fighting in the deserts it protects them from the sand. But
there’s no reason why those little Islamic or Muslim [American] kids on TV had
to come out with it. That burned my ass. No way! You’re in America! Be an
American! Like I said, I’m gung ho.

While Papps initially indicated a feeling of sympathy because of the negative distortion
of Islam, this quickly melts into a nationalistic frenzy as he describes a television
encounter that reconfirmed this negative icon. Later Papps mixed in other comments that
seemed to disagree with his initially sympathetic attitude towards Muslims, as when I
asked him about whether he had heard anything about Arab and Muslim Americans after
9/11: “They were probably saving their ass. Staying at home if they were smart. There
was a lot of hatred then, you know. But, America for Americans.” It seems that for
Papps, Arabs or Muslims do not ‘fit’ within America; his statement, “America for
Americans” wouldn’t be comprehensible or needed if he thought of Arab Americans as
part of the American fabric, or one part of a diverse multicultural American blend.

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Papps added some insights into his own thinking when he told a story of his own
confrontations with anti-Semitism immediately after his “America for Americans”
comment. He concluded:
If the guy in Timbuktu does something wrong the guy in the Bronx gets it in the
neck. That's why this, Lieberman, wants to run for president? No way, no way
would I vote for a Jewish politician as president because you know why?
Because if he fucks up, all the Jews in the world get it in the ass. What one Jew
does, we all suffer.

Ironically, the type of targeting Papps feels as a result of being an American Jew appears
to mirror his own views about Muslims. While Papps, does display some sympathy for
the suspicion American Muslims experienced following 9/11, he himself is drawn to the
explanatory power of historical ethnic stereotypes. I also got the distinct impression that
Papps was making a conscious attempt to manage my impression of him as a ‘tough guy’,
which may partly explain his shift away from an empathetic stance (see chapter 4 for
more on this).
After he described his attitudes towards Muslims, Papps added a comment out of
the blue to highlight his personal commitment to racial equality, and highlighting the
contradictions of contemporary racial discourse. He passionately described at many
points the anti-Semitic ways his wartime shipmates in the Navy berated him; in this
comment he brings in a progressive sense of racial justice: “I was known as a nigger-
loving Jew bastard. They called me a nigger-loving Jew bastard because I'd tried to
defend a couple of black kids on my ship.” Papps’s rhetorical use of this account realigns
what may be simplistic notions about individual racism. While his discussion of Blacks
suffering terrible mistreatment at the hands of whites on one hand gives us reason to find

97
him fair-minded, when taken in context with his prior statements about Muslims and
Arabs we begin to view the multilayered structure of racial ideologies, and racial
interference begins to seem more like the rule rather than the exception. Papps
confronted racism even during the war as a young man, going against the grain of his
contemporaries. His initial sense of understanding for Muslims and this latest comment
illustrate the unevenness of racial ideologies and memories mixed with contemporary
expectations about the socially suitable ways to address race. Again, Papps’s mix of
value-laden comments exemplifies the complexity of racial discourse and the ways racial
interference plays out in everyday dialogue.
Just as Papps mixed paternalism with highlights of his adherence to some
semblance of fairness in terms of equality, Jessie, an 87-year-old white woman who
enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle growing up in Los Angeles, similarly reflects race
relations of a different time. Confident and quick-witted, Jessie attended Stanford
University and worked as a civilian military analyst during WWII; she highlighted her
family’s tolerant feelings within a paternalistic framework when she described the racism
Japanese Americans generally faced during the war years. As she told me this, she began
to motion disapprovingly toward her well-manicured back yard, where two Latino men
were working in the midday sun. “We liked the Japanese people. One of my dad’s
friends, for the bird [hobby] was a, I don't know. [Pause] My Japanese gardener was a
jewel; I wish I had him today [laughing].” Jessie reflected positive feelings towards
Japanese Americans, especially her beloved family gardener, deploying imagery that
casts whites and specifically her own family, as overseers and in positions of power

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relative to, in this case, Japanese Americans. While her description of her Japanese
American gardener as a “jewel” was intended by Jessie as a compliment, it’s
condescending and emasculating imagery harkens back to emasculating stereotypes of
Asian and Asian American men (Espiritu 2001), betraying older types of racialized
language now largely out of fashion. These positive attitudes Jessie holds do not betray
dishonesty, only a way of thinking about racial difference that was more apt to appear in
the past and is less present in contemporary colorblind discourses. Jessie’s ideas showed
much consistency and were not characterized by the types of racial interference described
above. While it is difficult to determine where this difference comes from, but her views
generally were the most politically informed of any of my interviewees.
Penny, an 88-year-old white woman, grew up in Massachusetts and has liberal
political views. From a French-Canadian family, she lived and worked at an Arizona
internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. As I conducted the
interview with her, Mr. Ariz, a housing administrator in the senior housing center where
she lives walked by and he and Penny shared a brief exchange, after which Penny told me
in a whispery voice, as if someone might be offended to hear her:
He is the most wonderful man. He really is a Muslim, and he is—and I think it's
almost inspired that he is here because with all the bad publicity we get about the
Muslims, he is probably the kindest man that anybody has ever met, treats us
like… he is wonderful.

While this compliment sounded sincere, Penny’s tone was paternalistic, with Penny in a
position to evaluate and ‘pass’ this man. The complexity of this relationship, and
interaction however shouldn’t be discarded as ‘racist’ and paternalistic; it appears to have

99
made Penny much more careful in her characterization of Muslims; she referenced it
when I asked her what the rationale could have been for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
RH: Do you have any sense of why America was targeted on 9/11, or why the
Pentagon and the World Trade Center were targeted specifically?
Penny: No. I haven't thought that through. What are the responses that you get to
that?

RH: A lot of people aren't sure either.

Penny: Yeah, because if you know Mr. Ariz [the Muslim administrator in her
housing complex] and you know these people, you just cannot imagine that they
came from the same area. What do they want from us? Why are they fighting us
and trying to destroy us? Unless it was something like the Crusades, where they
want the world to become Muslims. But Mr. Ariz takes off every Friday and
goes to the mosque and does his prayers and comes back. And we can imagine.
So I don't know.

RH: Yeah, I think a lot of people have that feeling.

Penny: Yeah, and if they don't know a Muslim then you think, “maybe they all
are [like terrorists].”

My question about 9/11 and terrorist motivations led Penny to describe how she believes
not all Muslims are alike or are unkind. Penny’s belief that if someone did not know a
Muslim personally they likely would think “maybe they are all that way,” meaning like
terrorists, suggests an insight into a subterranean stream of social consciousness and
‘common sense’ that interprets Muslims with a broad stroke that mixes classical
orientalism with the idea that “Muslim” is a terrorists’ primary identity. Here Penny’s
ideas are very much affected by her own personal relationships.
Dolly, age 92, is a white woman who moved from the Midwest to Gardena,
California before World War II to get married when her fiancé began working there while
the Great Depression raged. At fewer than five feet tall, she appears to have shrunk as

100
the years marched on, but her energy still allows her to volunteer making home deliveries
of food to “shut-ins,” seniors who don’t or can’t leave their homes. When asked about
profiling after 9/11, her response echoed Penny’ mixed feelings, a product of paternalistic
racial and ethnic common sense confronting notions of color-blindness and equality.
RH: have you heard about issues with people of Middle Eastern descent riding on
airplanes nowadays? There have been some complaints that they’re being
profiled.

Dolly: Well, they are, and it’s unfair because who knows whether they’re
unsavory or not.

Here Dolly takes a simple, familiar tone, which echoes ideas of fairness, equality and
colorblindness. As she continues, the colorblindness is questioned:
But you look at somebody and you see that profile. But my niece married one of
the Arabs. And so, I can’t feel too bad about seeing them on the airplane myself,
because it’s in the family.

Dolly is at once repudiating prejudice against Arabs, or people of Middle Eastern origin,
when she describes the reality of profiling them as potential terrorists as “unfair because
who knows whether they’re unsavory or not.” This value for evidence prior to judgment
is strongly held, but conflicts with ideas that make terrorism synonymous with Arabs.
Dolly acknowledges this stereotype, based on phenotype, and also comments on how an
Arab man married into her family, and so she has to try to be fair. Dolly also drops the
colorblind language in the latter reply, is up-front about her opinion and avoids dancing
around her own ideas and trying to incorporate language that makes them seem unbiased.
This honesty may be aided by her use of racial interference at the outset, perhaps creating
a safety net for her expression of these later views. In Dolly there is a definite mix of

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colorblind values with an honesty surrounding common sense expectations that terrorists
are associated with Islam, which places Arabs and Muslims particularly at risk of
profiling. What distinguishes her response its forwardness, and the fact that she has
identified that she may feel more skeptical of this stereotype due to her familial
connections.
Mark was a World War II fighter pilot in the European theater, and after showing
me his war memorabilia his grandfatherly stories were a delight. Born in San Diego,
California in 1917, he was 24 when Pearl Harbor occurred and already training to be a
military pilot. Mark had this to say when I asked him about US public feelings towards
the Japanese after Pearl Harbor:
We know what happened there in terms of the official action of putting them in
these various and sundry camps. My reaction was, I had gone to school with a
couple of Japanese fellows, they were classmates and so on. They had been very
sharp in their schooling and everything, they were doing fine. And to me,
personally, I had no animosity towards them, I didn't feel that they had
necessarily gone along with what happened; now of course I wasn't in
conversation with them at this time. But I had no bad feelings about them. I
don’t know whether you can say that's a common reaction or not. There's always
a question, can you trust this element here? We had trusted the Japanese and they
bombed Pearl Harbor. And so what does that mean to this group? It was on that
question, I don't quite know how to react to that.

Mark recalls that he did not have negative personal views about Japanese Americans he
knew when he was in school, likely a decade or more before Pearl Harbor occurred. His
reply at the same time individualizes his “fair” response regarding people he knew, while
at the same time he questions the loyalty of various “elements,” by which he appears to
mean ethnic or racial groups. The experiential form of racial interference Mark has
practiced here provides a personalized sense of his value for equality; such an impression

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then frames any subsequent statements, such as that referring to the “trust this element”
one that followed, as subservient or a complicating add-on to the core ideals of equality.
15

In the end, he concludes he doesn’t quite know how decide whether the “loyalty
question” which was prominent in World War II surrounding Japanese Americans
justifies or prescribes differential treatment based on ethnic or racial background. He
would later bring this concern up again with respect to Muslim immigrants.
My respondents found aspects of colorblind techniques valuable in discussions of
racial politics, and their beliefs in the fundamental fairness of the doctrine were
frequently mentioned and illustrated; however, many of the statements and anecdotes
may also have been conscious attempts to live up to an ideology that was only partially
internalized. Rather then seeming genuinely true, many of their narratives used what I’ve
termed racial interference as strategies, conscious or unconscious, to dissuade an
audience from interpreting them as ‘racist’. What came through in many of the examples
above was a formative reliance on paternalistic patterns that were still common when this
cohort came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, although becoming less common and less
controlling outside of the south (eg. Dollard 1948/1949:632). Paternalistic race relations
are characterized by fairly rigid social locations stratified by race and reinforced through
interpersonal interactions, as well as prejudices that typify members of lower-status racial
groups with some degree of dependency and inferiority (Dollard 1957 [1937]; van den
Berghe 1966). Unlike younger Americans who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s and

15
As mentioned in my above discussion of racial interference, this pattern so often occurs I believe due to
the genuine adherence of people to the ideals of individual equality that should exist in theory. This core
ideology is deeply entrenched in US culture (Bonilla-Silva 2003b), and it is its application if the ideal that
is troublesome and messy.

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are more skilled about their use of racialized language, these respondents, part of the
“Greatest Generation” have added layers of racial ideas and norms over the years.
Different parts of these internalized ideas emerge at various times, many of which allow
us to see more clearly the contradictions of colorblind narratives. Older respondents
reveal their partial internalization and adherence to colorblind mores and at times reveal
glimpses or long stares into their feelings about racial or ethnic hierarchies. Racial
interference techniques seem to grease the wheels of disclosure, where individuals
describe their ideal values of equality even if many of their thoughts, feelings, behaviors
and experiences contradict these ideals that seem still in flux.

Revisionist Memories:
Past becomes present through selective recollection of race-related WWII incidents

Many of the women and men I interviewed held a strong belief in what Bonilla-
Silva (2003a) describes as a key frame of colorblind racism: “abstract liberalism.” In
their statements, they use their own memories, recollections and the historical contexts
they lived through to superimpose a story of racial progress on the US. Largely this
appears to be a reflection of their idealized value for equality. I refer to this as a process
of “revisionist memory,” not in the sense that these recollections are false—I don’t doubt
their legitimacy—but revisionist in the picture that these selective incidents depict of
racial politics during the WWII era. Collective forgetting is a useful concept in analyzing
revisionist memories (Baumeister and Hastings 1997), as the white respondents appear to
systematically ignore or forget incidents of discrimination, especially those that cast
whites negatively (see also Blauner 1989). These older Americans have experiences

104
from which to draw, and their tendency to fit them into stories of greater social justice
illustrates the power of the colorblind shift in racial ideology away from social criticism
of racism and toward a perspective that offers promises of growing equality. In these
interviews, Japanese Americans’ trajectory, from internment to ‘model minority,’
provides a common form of evidence for conclusions about racial progress. Moreover,
respondents pointed towards the Japanese American experience to refute systemic
racism; instead, the model minority image provides a way to discount institutional forms
of discrimination (Cheng and Yang 1996; Osajima 1988). This image is starkly
contrasted to inclinations prior to, during, and after World War II where Japanese, and
Japanese Americans by association, were viewed with contempt (Dower 1986; Koshiro
1999; Takaki 1995).

Attitudes About Foreign Enemies After Pearl Harbor and 9/11
My newspaper analysis showed a distinct change in the character of illustrations
between the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 eras in terms of the treatment of Americans of
Japanese and Arab ancestry respectively. After Pearl Harbor, nearly 54 percent of
articles that discussed Japanese Americans did so in relation to them as targets of
suspicion. After 9/11, this figure was a much lower 29 percent among articles
mentioning Arab or Muslim Americans, while 55 percent of these articles reinforced the
values of racial and ethnic equality.

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Table 4.1: Portrayal of Japanese Americans and Arab/Muslim Americans
Respectively, by Event
Event
No Mention
of
Suspicion
Mention
of
Suspicion
Known
Sabotage/
Spying
Outside
of US
Reinforce
Racial
Equality
Indirect
Suspicion
Pearl Harbor 36.3 % 40.0 % 6.3 % 3.8 % - 13.8 %
Sept 11 12.9 % 29.0 % - 3.2 % 54.8 % -

How did Americans generally feel about the Japanese after Pearl Harbor? “They
hated them!” said Papps, who was 16 when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Differentiation
between Japanese in Japan and Japanese Americans, even citizens,
16
was less than keen
among Americans outside of the west coast, and most had no personal contact or
knowledge of Japanese Americans. Eventually Japanese Americans in west coast states
were forcibly relocated to concentration camps. Wartime caricatures were rarely positive
and continued to be very negative after the war’s end (Koshiro 1999). Hostility towards
Japanese surpassed the dislike Americans had for Germans, as Phil, a National Guard
member well before Pearl Harbor attests; identifying whiteness as important for
belonging in the US, especially for German prisoners of war in the country during World
War II. Phil was soft-spoken and ready to share every detail of his account, at least as
long as it followed the story he was comfortable telling; when my questioning deviated
from his prescribed narrative, he simply moved along with what he wanted to discuss.
Phil reported that “some German prisoners of war, they were blonde headed, and they
came to this country and we trust[ed] them. They were good, and then afterward they

16
American citizens of Japanese ancestry were all born in the US; Japanese nationals were ineligible to
become naturalized US citizens.

106
became citizens, came back here.” At least according to Phil, the fact that Germans were
undeniably white, illustrated by their fair hair color led them to fit right in to American
society, in spite of the fact that they were prisoners of war. In Studs Terkel’s (1984:520)
oral history of World War II one of his sources described the feelings toward the
Japanese in a way that meshes with the sensibility Phil described above:
You must realize we were not a worldly people. We were an isolated big
country. We didn't know much about the Japanese and Japanese culture. They
were yellow, they had squinty eyes, and they all look evil. They were always evil
in the movies, characters slinking around knifing people. You begin to think of
them not as human beings but as little yellow things to be eradicated. They look
different from the Germans. If you were to say to me, you can save only x
number of prisoners and, say, you've got fifty Japanese and fifty Germans, who
would I let live? I would've said the Germans. They had been more civilized, at
least in my knowledge.

Hamilton was 84 when I spoke to him, but looked and had the vigor and energy of
someone much, much younger; only upon close inspection of his eyes did his age really
become believable. When he spoke of the friends and comrades he lost in the war, his
eyes welled with tears, which he apologetically wiped aside as he continued with his
recollections. An eccentric artist living in veteran housing mostly with men much
younger, his small studio room was adorned wall-to-wall from ceiling-to-floor and
sometimes 10-deep with chalk portraits, a great many of them of scantily clad or disrobed
pin-ups like Marilyn Monroe. Hamilton joined the US Marines in response to Pearl
Harbor’s bombing, and he described the public reaction to that event this way: “The first
thing you do in any war is to castigate the enemy and demonize the enemy. The Japs.
There was no Japan, it was the dirty little Jap.” My news media analysis of the New York
Times and Los Angeles Times found that in a one year sample of articles the year after

107
Pearl Harbor, there were 77 stories that discussed Japanese Americans, 62 percent of
those mentioned suspicion surrounding them and their aid to Japan’s war cause, while 38
percent did not—none of the articles were framed in a manner advocating racial equality.
This impression did not bode well for tolerance in the public eye, and Gallup Polls and
other public opinion markers regularly traced the much harsher, negative feelings
Americans had toward Japanese compared to Germans. The contextualization of
common attitudes towards Japan, and Japanese Americans, is needed because very little
of that story came across from my white respondents, though many of them knew of the
internment and treatment of Japanese Americans directly in their communities.
Mary remembers vividly being poor during the Great Depression, her father
coming home, always to the same question from her mother: “did you find work.” Soft-
spoken and thoughtful, she grew up in New York and was a lucid 81 years old when I
interviewed her. Her reflections illustrate a high level of consciousness relative to other
respondents, about her assumptions regarding social justice. Asking her opinion about
the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, Mary said:
Once again I put it in the same category as the McCarthy era. You know, some
of them were American. You know, they were, you know, I don't think it's a very
nice part of our history.

I probed further in an attempt to understand how she understood the incarceration of
Japanese Americans in the context of World War II:
RH: Why do you think—I'm going to ask and maybe it's an obvious question.
Germans were not targeted for that sort of interment yet the Japanese were in the
US. Do you think that was because of Pearl Harbor or do you think…

Mary: I don't know, I don't really know. I don't like to think of it. We read lots
of… [pause] because it's race. You know, we read lots of that. I really, I really

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don't know. I don't know what's behind it but New York City had a large German
population, and there was never anything like that they were confined or anything
like that.

Muriel’s feelings and opinions tell a complex story. She is uncomfortable with the idea
that race played a role in the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Her
suggestion that “we read lots of… [pause] because it’s race,” leaves open the possibilities
that she agrees or does not agree that it was centrally about race. However, her
comparison of the internment of Japanese Americans with 1950s McCarthyism and the
search for communist infiltration in the US suggests that instead of thinking of the
Japanese American internment as racially-motivated, she instead recalls it as an
unfortunate incident in US history where a social group is singled out and assailed.
Whether Muriel believes race was the primary motivator or not, and her comparison to
McCarthyism and scapegoating is not without merit, although this comparison does de-
contextualize the WWII internment to detach its origins from racial and ethnic
antagonism. Her effort to look away from race was also mirrored in Jessie’s response to
my question about ill feelings in the US towards Muslims after 9/11:
I expect [negative feelings about Muslims] not only exists I think they're probably
increasing. I can't substantiate that anywhere, it's just a vague feeling as we get
more frustrated and more stuck [in the war on terrorism], we are going to have to
find somebody to, you know, back in World War II who did we have?
Communism was the big thing we had to be against.

Jessie suggests that Muslims are scapegoats, someone to displace anger and resentment
upon as were communists in the past, and that it may worsen as anxiety regarding the

109
‘war on terrorism’ worsens.
17
This narrative distances itself from the racial ideology that
is underlying ongoing concerns about Arabs and Muslims in the US, and instead places
this greater suspicion towards Muslims to more of a political nature. The importance of
race ideologies as historically significant is not highlighted, but concealed by this
comparison. Jessie and Mary have downplayed the role played by racial “common
sense” regarding Arabs and Muslims after 9/11, and Japanese Americans following Pearl
Harbor, respectively. The effect of their interpretations, tied to the political events in
their lifetimes that made important impacts, is to revise the past and to reduce the role
that racial ‘otherness’ has played in both instances.
Penny, whose ideas about Muslims and how they were shaped by a positive
interpersonal connection was described in the above section, spoke very critically about
the racism Japanese Americans felt during World War II. Her husband was a social
worker in one of the Arizona concentration camps in the 1940s, and her own interactions
with Japanese Americans left a strong impression on her. After describing the details of
how so many Japanese Americans were economically ruined and emotionally damaged
by the internment experience, Penny struck a positive note that located racism not in any
institutional ideology, but in individual people, who were apt to become more
progressive, in this case regarding treatment of Japanese Americans during and after
World War II.
I remember working with a gal who said, when the thing [Japanese American
internment] was kind of over, people must have been so ashamed of what they
did. Then they bent over backwards to give [Japanese Americans] a chance, and

17
The worsening of Americans’ attitudes, at least towards Muslims, appears to be an accurate depiction
based on opinion polling (Pew Research Center for The People & The Press 2006).

110
of course they are very industrious people and they moved way up. And they said
that they were in better shape, I remember one of them telling me, after this had
worked out than they had been before the war all by themselves. They could
work farms and they could do things like that, so.

Penny, through our prior conversation, has acknowledged the vastness of the disruptions
in the lives of Japanese Americans when they were forcibly interned and evacuated from
their homes. Yet she has also provided a counter-discourse suggesting not only the
possibility but the great likelihood that Japanese Americans were better off having lost
everything, and being forced to start anew when the war camps closed. Penny appears
aware that this conclusion is surprising, but sources she knows claim it is true despite the
initial surprised reaction. This view recalls the language of the war years, when the US
government and military often justified the internment as a move to “protect” Japanese
Americans (United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of
Civilians 1997). While Penny accepts that race was the issue, and that it was unjust, she
also suggests that it was a blessing-in-disguise for Japanese Americans and their futures
in the US, or at least provided some positive outcomes. Racial intolerance is once again
de-emphasized and white privilege and superiority as ideological tenets remain intact.
Dorothea is an 88 year old white woman, as sharp as ever, whose parents divorced
when she was young. Growing up in Los Angeles, she found diversity around her at a
young age. Her recollection of Pearl Harbor and its aftermath illustrates her recognition
of colorblind discourse and her faith in progress towards fairness, embodied in her own
biography. Dorothea mentions many times the prejudice directed at Japanese Americans,
but mostly this is an abstracted passive form without a person or a group being cast as
discriminating.

111
Dorothea: Oh, the Japanese they were profiled. Oh God. Like crazy. Oh my
god. And the prejudice against the Japanese was terrible. Remember that? And
then finally somewhere along the line, let's see, we had Japanese people living
here as citizens, that was my recollection... They were citizens. And the
prejudice was terrible and, um, oh, they were determined to show that they were
for this country and there was a, they volunteered. They had a name for them, a
Japanese unit.

RH: The 442
nd
[Regimental Combat Team]

Dorothea: Yeah, something. And they were determined, and they were on our
side, there was no baloney or any pretending to be or not. They really were. And
they were on our side all the way through. And eventually after the war was over
they were a little bit prejudiced against but they gradually won out. And I
remember that my father… he was not prejudiced, how could he be prejudice?
He came here as an immigrant! And people used to say, “oh, I see you are
showing [apartments] to black people” this and that. The color of their money is
exactly the same. It is, and you know Martin Luther King said, “go not by the
color of the skin but by the content of their character.” Well in his own way he
did the same thing and I was brought up that way, too. And I was always very
interested; on the left side of the duplex were black people and I grew up with
them. They were the same as anybody else. On the corner store there was, yes he
did own that, he did rent it out to Japanese people. And to me they were the same
as everybody else. And then he owned a two-story… and that was Mexican. So
we had a variety. So I grew up with no prejudice against anybody and then when
I went to… junior high [it] was almost 100 percent black. And I thought nothing
of it. So, whatever. Who cares? I welcomed them and they welcomed me and I
got by beautifully. So that part was okay. Yeah, yeah.

Dorothea’s values here are in line with the post-civil rights shift in racial ideology in the
US, and she evens mentions Martin Luther King, Jr. in her argument for her own vision
of equality, in fact, her father had incorporated his own brand of this ideology decades
prior. Indeed, if her recollections are accurate, her level of contact with non-whites
would be extraordinary even for the twenty-first century (Feagin and O'Brien 2003), and
her father renting units to people of color is pointed to as evidence of his and her racial
egalitarianism. Dorothea, as proof of her lack of prejudice, offers growing up with
people of color around. She places her father in the position of defender of Black people

112
partly to support this contention. Her memories mention historical prejudice attitudes
and profiling, but they are without specificity and take a low-key backseat to the pattern
of progressive racial politics of Dorothea and her father, portrayed as being on the cusp of
the equal-opportunity movement when she was a child in the 1930s.
Dorothea’s use of the passive voice in her discussion of race is especially
noticeable, but the pattern was frequent. Henley et al (1995) describe how the passive
voice, which obscures the role of the subject in a sentence and highlights the object being
acted upon, serves to lessen the stigma attached to sexual violence. Interestingly, they
found that men but not women they studied attributed less perpetrator responsibility and
victim harm in stories presented in the passive rather than active voice. As in-group
members then, men tended to judge other men less harshly when a story was presented in
the passive voice. Other evidence also suggests that the passive voice leads in-group
members to judge one another less harshly when perpetrating negative behaviors (Platow
and Brodie 1999).
Had it not been for views about Arabs and Muslims, Dorothea would seem
consistently colorblind:
RH: Some people were suspicious about the Muslims who live in the US after
9/11.

Dorothea: Well I am too, I don't know about you but I am too. I think we are
overdoing, see there is another tremendous difference between now and then.
The enemy was the enemy and we profiled the enemy and now it's getting to be,
shall we say, not politically correct to profile. And I think that's the way to go [to
profile]. This is, in certain ways this is a worst war than any other, we knew the
enemy then and now we can't be sure. Could be anybody and everybody. I don't
know, do you have any solution to this crazy dilemma? I am not sure what it is?
The politically correct seems to be the deal.

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In no uncertain terms Dorothea criticizes contemporary colorblind ideals as “overdoing”
it. She jumped quickly from painting a picture of racial progress and a deep personal
commitment to racial equality and racial harmony that was overriding in the postwar
period to a heavy dose of prejudice directed at Arabs and Muslims. Additionally, her
initial description above of the profiling of Japanese Americans during WWII had a
negatively evaluative tone, where her latter statement accepts and even promotes this
program as a way to ‘win’ a war. For Dorothea, common sense is being replaced by
political correctness and overdoing gestures towards non-discrimination. In spite of her
self-described family background of racial progressiveness, Dorothea takes a strong
stance against a group she believes represents a new enemy. Her earlier statements
grounded in experiential racial interference become less significant; Dorothea’s apparent
embrace of colorblindism does not translate to her feelings about Arabs and Muslims
particularly. The slippage in her expressions of the two events and two groups of people
(Japanese Americans and Muslims/Arabs) lends clear insight into the revisionist
recollections that many of the respondents revealed. The Japanese American internment
camps are now seen widely as a mistake, and it is no surprise that my respondents
believed so too. However, criticizing Muslims or Arabs is more socially palatable in this
post-9/11 world, especially as these groups are largely thought of as foreign and not
American.
Dolly lived in a Los Angeles suburb with a sizable Japanese American
community prior to the 1942 internment. This memory of hers is one that seemed solid
and important to her, and frames her family as racially enlightened after the war.

114
I know when the Japanese came back to Gardena, there was two or three families
moved in to the street right away, and a neighbor came across to my husband and
he said, “did you see who is moving in there. What are we going to do about
getting rid of them” and my husband said, “not a damn thing.”

Dolly’s recollection is interesting not especially because of what she said, but because of
what she didn’t say. Earlier I had this exchange with Dolly, who tended to be short and
not elaborate her responses:
RH: How was the mood of the country after the Pearl Harbor incident?

Dolly: I really don't know. I know I felt how unfair it was to take native-born
citizens, even if they was of another race, and put them in camps. It was very
unfair.

RH: So there was a lot of feelings then of blaming…

Dolly: I really didn't know any Japanese because they clustered together in their
own communities, and we was all Caucasian on our street.

RH: Were there a lot of Japanese Americans in Gardena then?

Dolly: Oh yes, there was a lot of them, but they had their own little conclaves. In
fact down on 153rd & Western there was a whole settlement of shacks that the
poor Japanese lived in, and we always wondered what went on there.

RH: So is that a discussion that you had in your own family?

Dolly: Yeah, yeah, we would, just at home with ourselves.

Where Dolly remembered an incident where her husband stood up for Japanese
Americans to a neighbor, and she also directly above recalls her own rejection of the
internment of Japanese Americans, in spite of her not knowing any at the time. Racist
recollections are largely absent, although there are some allusions to their presence: the
way the Japanese “clustered together,” or the “settlement of shacks that the poor Japanese
lived in,” hint that conversations and perhaps incidents of racism were there to be told.

115
The incidents and impressions Dolly shared were made of statements that disembodied
the racist furor that Japanese Americans were caught up in. It is possible that Dolly
consciously withheld these from me, that they entered her mind but never left her lips.
More probable is that Dolly, along with other respondents, have collectively forgotten
these stories or feel they’re not proper material to share, and with them many memories
of the “greatest generation’s” bad-old-days of racial ideology. We may lack many of
these stories, at least from whites themselves, but we can see them clearly in the
reminiscences of people of color, and also largely in the core ideologies that older whites
possess, a relic of a different time in race relations.

Generational Contrasts
It may be unclear whether generational status is the key here or living in diverse
city during the critical period of adolescence and young adulthood. In all likelihood both
of these matter a great deal in terms of racial ideologies and expressions of colorblind
ideologies. [get about 3 quotes that illustrate young adult perspective regarding racial
profiling, for instance in airports].
What these young adults who experienced 9/11 in their formative years have
illustrated is a generational division certainly in terms of language used to describe racial
politics and race-related public issues. Intent was very difficult to dissect among these
young adults. They are adept at colorblind discourse, and much of that seems to reflect
genuineness rather than front-stage posturing.

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Make sure conclusion addresses the split nature of colorblindism—bad due to its contrast
with reality—good in that racist discourse is more likely to be challenged than under
more obvious systems of racist language.

Conclusion
I began this chapter with a curious observation: my white interviewees mixed
what seemed extraordinary life experiences with racial equity along with almost no
mention of racial inequality during World War II. Had a person who was completely
unfamiliar with the history and the progression of racial politics come upon these stories
they would have led to very different interpretations of this era when contrasted with the
conditions described by the people of color I interviewed of the same age cohort. My
respondents all came of age during the era of World War II, and their ideologies reflect a
core understanding of race relations built in an era of structural-legal racial
discrimination, where race was a great predictor of social location and where limited
mobility was possible. Over the decades, as their recollections suggest, much of the
vulgarity of the war era faded, replaced by a more acceptable form of race talk, the
meaning of which is often veiled and uneven. Frequently my white respondents mixed
colorblind ideals with prejudiced beliefs, creating what I termed racial interference, were
mixed signals of racial ideology prevent a clear understanding of what the individual
believes regarding racial politics. These sorts of seemingly contradictory values and
behaviors are reconciled by experiences or theoretical thoughts of equality that seem to
provide a protective bubble within which counter-hegemonic discussions that are not

117
colorblind occur. Yet these respondents, through only a semi-formed shell of
colorblindism, reveal at once the attraction of this mode of thinking about race, especially
for whites (Ditomaso, Parks-Yancy, and Post 2003), and the power of this racial
formation in altering the landscape of whites’ memories of that era. These white
respondents have by and large forgotten, or sharply downplayed racism in the US during
the war years. More importantly, colorblind ideologies that are informing their
interpretations of the past threaten to severely alter our collective understanding of the
past through the passing-on of these incomplete narratives.
There is a distinct difference with my white respondents’ treatment of ‘traditional’
US racial and ethnic minorities, such as African Americans and Japanese Americans
versus Arab and Muslim Americans in this post-9/11 US. Colorblind ideologies which
these older white Americans have taken on seemingly through cultural, common-sensical
osmosis over the past decades seem to be largely ineffective at balancing their views and
attitudes about Arab and Muslim Americans, and Arabs and Muslims generally, a
distinction that is rarely made by these respondents. At their core, many of their values
are racially retrospective, harkened to a point in the past, and these are identifiable to a
much larger extent in the post-9/11 period. The racial formation of Arabs and Muslims
as major groups of social attention in the US has occurred uniquely post-9/11, although
these groups have experienced periods of negative attention previously, such as during
the Iran Hostage Crisis that began in 1979 and the Persian Gulf conflict of the early
1990s. It seems that, not having reached their critical period when colorblind racial
ideologies were dominant reduced that chance these older respondents would apply this

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ideology flexibly. In other words, as the hegemonic racial discourses changed relative to
race relations in the US, from WWII through civil rights and up until colorblindism, these
older Americans adapted piecemeal to the ideological shifts, and fit comfortably in its
mold. After all, the same social texts that began to predominate during this time and that
were there for everybody to see and incorporate, including a neo-conservative backlash,
were on hand for these respondents (Bernardi 1998). The new racialization of Arabs and
Muslims post-9/11 represented an altogether different situation, where in a real sense a
new racial group was being formed in the public mind. Arabs and Muslims were and are
associated with ‘otherness’, as foreigners not Americans, as has been the case with Asian
American groups in the US historically (Ancheta 1998). Yet, they are also stereotyped as
culturally undeveloped. This cultural racism, which has likewise taken the place of
scientific racism for blaming African Americans for their own conditions (Bobo, Kluegel,
and Smith 1997; Bobo and Smith 1998), has a deep history regarding Muslims and Arabs
in the West.
Finally, I want to address the complexity of race in the US context, in part to
make clear the social scientific significance of this study rather than more obvious
individual-level conclusions that a surface-level reading would suggest. Politically the
civil rights movement represented and pushed the advancement of legal and social rights
with incredible success. Some have argued that it was so successful that it’s main
schema and goal—has even been adopted as a generally embraced part of American
common sense (Winant 1998). This idea deserves further unpacking and analysis. While
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s (1963a) “I Have A Dream” speech described the utopian vision

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of a society without racism, the claims of many have turned this hope for the future into a
claim that we are now essentially living in a society that no longer judges people based
on racial characteristics. If it were true it would be an amazing accomplishment to
eliminate racism in the span of a single lifetime, but many social scientists assert that the
reality of “the dream” is still far off. Colorblindism has become a logo more than an
internalized value for many people, sometimes in spite of their own desires. The label
‘racist’ is of limited or no usefulness, and is probably counterproductive—people simply
don’t want to be labeled this by others and don’t want to see themselves through this lens
either. Racism is a bad word, and the civil rights movement’s most profound success
may have been to crystallize this to the US public and equate racism with anti-
Americanism (see Branch 1988; King 1963b). Consider Papps for instance; his situation
is complex and his beliefs seem mottled. As an American Jew who experienced horrible
discrimination in his youth and as a member of the US Navy, Papps seemed to identify in
some way with the insults and threats pointed at Black Navy crewmembers during the
war. Papps beliefs are guided by his personal experiences and witness to these events; in
that particular context they were instrumental to his vision of the circumstances these
Black men were in. Papps also has strong prejudices against Muslims and especially
Arabs that he freely expressed without hesitation. Referring to Papps as a racist is a
simplistic solution to a social question of immense importance. His prejudiced views
regarding Muslims and Arabs came to light after he stated his view that he believed after
9/11 they were being unfairly targeted, a statement that may have made him more
comfortable to continue into a negative direction. Our theoretical and empirical work

120
needs to continue to investigate the linkages between institutional and ideological racism,
and the way these are manifest in everyday life and action (Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, and
Davies 2004). It is clear that in an era where colorblind ideals are conventional, insidious
and unacknowledged racial prejudice works in tandem with a long history of ideological
racism.

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CHAPTER 5

PERFORMANCE ANXIETY:

MASCULINITIES AT WAR & THE ‘CIVILIZATION PARADOX’

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of
a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every
victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the
enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
__________________________
Sun Tzu, The Art of War

In line at my neighborhood supermarket, I was only buying a package of buns
when a man about my age, and in line behind me asked, “you have some corned beef at
home?” motioning with his shoulder at the buns on the checkout counter. I hesitated with
a long “ahhh” as I unconsciously sized up my response. He was my size; about six feet
tall but built on a sturdier frame next to my lanky one. I noticed his smile. It was
common for customers to talk to one another here, much more so than in the suburban
city I was raised in. It still did surprise me when the small talk involved me however,
even though I’d overheard these somehow supportive exchanges for the five years since
we moved in down the street. “Naaaw, I’ve actually got some bratwurst. Buns, cheese
and brats is all I need,” I said coolly, the menu reminding me of typical football-fan fare,

122
leaving off the vegetable that I knew was at home waiting. “That’ll work,” my chatty
partner approved, “a beer in your hand and you’re set.” My head leaned to one side,
shifting to acknowledge his symbolically laced depiction of a Friday night every man in
his early thirties should supposedly covet. “Yup,” I quickly followed up, “I already have
that!” We shared a masculine-charged laugh as I paid the cashier, imagining a six-pack
tucked in the back of my fridge. I had to quietly laugh to myself as I walked out the door.
I hate beer. The last of the beer we had at home ended up in the trash; my partner hadn’t
drunk it and I figured the stuff couldn’t have a shelf life longer than 4 years. To think
that so many people told my partner and I to avoid this neighborhood, that venturing “too
far south” was unsafe. My sociology training wasn’t needed to know that “too far south”
was code for “too many Blacks and Latinos.” Census tract 2315 is not the wealthiest
neighborhood I have lived in, but definitely the most hospitable, communal in a way that
was still unfamiliar to me. I was actually surprised that 12 percent of the tract was non-
Latino white in 2000, as I’ve never seen another white person shopping in the market.
In the process of writing a dissertation that considers cultural constructions of
gender, masculinity included, I thought of my beer and bratwurst exchange more
critically than I might usually. Consuming beer is a quintessentially masculine enterprise
often connected to homosocial bonding, sports and the construction of an enviable
lifestyle (Messner and Montez de Oca 2005). My exchange, I see in retrospect, was a
representation of this bonding. I accepted this hegemonically masculine image as a
badge of validation in the way that masculinity requires constant sustenance and
reassertion. My remark that I already had beer at home carried all sorts of sublevel

123
symbolism and frames of interpretation that described my character, as I portrayed it, to
this stranger. Ultimately my anxiety about my own masculine positionality as a young-
ish white man in an inner city, where symbolic masculinity emphasizes a distinctly non-
wimpy pose (Majors and Billson 1992), powered my self-representation. That this
portrayal was false illustrates how much of a construction gender itself is (West and
Zimmerman 1987), how strategically men manage their masculine images in public
(Messner 1989), and how the front stages of our daily lives are often at odds with
‘reality’ (Goffman 1959).
Widely held is the assumption that gender is a construct of biology rather than a
synthesis of both body and society, an outgrowth of the complex interplay between
bodily ability and experience (Fausto-Sterling 2000). That aggression or passivity are
outgrowths of sex differences is likewise taken for granted in spite of lacking support for
the notion (Connell 1992). As cultural rather than essential creations, gender and its
symbols are values that don’t exist only for individuals, but for groups, organizations and
nations (Rotter 1994). Thus we can discuss the gendered ideologies about certain sports,
hobbies, and groups. I cannot recall how many times I’ve heard a sports team called
‘soft’ for their perceived lack of toughness, or heard jibes directed at men on
cheerleading squads. These social groupings and countless others have characteristics
tied to ideas about femininity and masculinity, women and men. Politics is certainly not
immune from gender, there is a long history of men having exclusive and later de facto
rights to this sphere of public life. Nations in general share characteristics that are often
also culturally associated with either women or men, and publics expect such

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characteristics. Three years after 9/11, the top two important “foreign policy” issues
among Americans were “protect against terrorist attacks” and “protect jobs of American
workers” (Pew Research Center for The People & The Press 2004). The state is entrusted
as a protector and a guardian as its primary responsibilities, especially as a guard against
aggression. The masculine role of protector became emphasized, connecting America as
a symbolic construct to the ‘traditional’ American family (Shepherd 2006). Analyzing
9/11 through a gender lens allows this type of symbolic gender construct to be separated
from men per se, and analyzed as ideology (Young 2003).
Another clear example related to the post-9/11 period was US opinion that
viewed military strength as the best way to ensure peace, shown in Figure 5.1. Going
back to 1987, there was a 15-point gender gap, with men more likely to agree with this
statement. After 9/11 this gap disappeared completely. Where men were more
approving of military strength as the best way of attaining peace, women came up to
men’s levels quickly after 9/11 (Pew Research Center for The People & The Press 2003).
Prioritizing national strength and highlighting it seems to have been a common emphasis
of Americans after the attacks on 9/11. Those attacks struck at the core of national values
which put the US as the pinnacle of global strength and security (Nayak 2006). The
challenge on 9/11 produced a predictable backlash and reemphasis on outward
expressions of strength and aggression, further centering these masculinist characteristics
in the 9/11 narrative and de-emphasizing women (Dowler 2002; Tickner 2002). The
response to 9/11 was partially a form of gender work, an event and site where ideas about
gender found a common sensical application for a great number of people.

125

September 11
th
created real fear for millions of American, evidenced by
television-induced trauma and stress away even far from ground zero (Propper,
Stickgold, Keeley, and Christman 2007). But the attacks of that September morning also
revived deep cultural insecurities associated with military defeat, and for many
reintroduced critiques of increasing cultural feminization common in the post-Vietnam
War era. Many of the people I interview and a major portion of US media portrayed just
this scenario following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US compared to the response to
Pearl Harbor nearly sixty years prior. In those decades it seems the US has become
increasingly vulnerable. The terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001
represented a multi-tiered masculinity challenge to American
18
manhood, and a direct

18
Here I use the term ‘American’ although I believe it is flawed. America is not synonymous with the
United States, however there is a dilemma in using the descriptor ‘US’ in place of ‘American’. As I am
making an argument that is foundationally linked to language and discourse, I believe saying ‘US
manhood’ rather than ‘American manhood’ carries a very different meaning that obscured the power and
sensibility that underlies the phrase. Here I choose what I believe is the better descriptor that is more
Figure 5.1: The Best Way to Ensure Peace
62
56
61
57
61
62
54
47
56
48 48
50
62
52
63
66
52 52
1987 1989 1991 1993 1994 1997 1999 2001 2003
Soure: Pew Research Center for the People & The Press, 2003
Men
Women

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assault on American hegemonic masculinity. Messerschmidt (2000) describes a
masculinity challenge as a confrontational incident intending to degrade a claim to
dominant, valued patterns of masculinity; he used it specifically as a theoretical tool to
bring gender into the analysis of violent crime. This challenge is illustrative and captures
the intonation of attitudes many people I interviewed carried about the 9/11 terrorist
attacks. Gender politics after 9/11 contributed to a wave of support for a response that
would adequately convey the outrage and power of the US and its citizens. The gender
dynamics, although clear, are tied in a complicated nexus that makes up the social milieu
and from which it cannot be exorcized.
Two things were clear following 9/11, the US population was angry, anxious to
find and punish the ultimate planners of this terrorist action, and there was also a deep
outpouring of emotion tied to a shared understanding of a collective vulnerability.
Messner (2007) discusses the shifting character of hegemonic masculinity, noting the
ways that 1980s-style symbolic masculinity, represented in films by Arnold
Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone as characters like as The Terminator and Rambo
were laughable by the 1990s. This muscle masculinity was replaced by what Messner
calls a “hybrid masculinity” where physical and psychical strength remain central but are
supplemented by selected and appropriate displays of compassion or emotion. These
emotions make these symbols of masculinity more realistic, but are not limitless, as
Messner (2007:467) indicates they occur frequently after success, and “not in relation to
their own failures or to the pain of other men.” The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were

clearly intelligible and compatible with everyday conversational discourse, although its accuracy is
acknowledged as flawed.

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characterized by widespread displays of raw emotion on the part of national leaders,
citizens and as a symbolic nation. That this emotion was accompanied by insecurity
about the future, and in response to an attack that highlighted national vulnerability put
these emotionally charged times on unstable ground. In response to this collective wail
of uncertainty, the US again emerged in much of popular media and in the minds of many
Americans as the sort of caricature more prevalent in the post-Vietnam 1980s, namely the
muscle masculinity captured by Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Vulnerability was met
with tough rebuke, sadness with anger and a desire to push back. One author aptly
described these feelings and their complexities, “which included fear, grief, anger,
numbness, ambivalence, and more, often in contradictory and confusing combinations”
(Cvetkovich 2003:60). In the midst of collective uncertainty, re-imagining and recreating
the familiar is safe. Muscle masculinity may have been a joke before 9/11, but it had a
renewed seriousness now that “we were attacked.”
A buildup of post-WWII anxiety about whether the US could fight and win the
Cold War merged with pre-war anxieties that were coming to grips with a nation
alienated from the struggles of survival brought on by the wealth of the postwar era.
September 11
th
was the culmination of cultural anxieties laying-in-wait concerning
masculinity and its relationship to the nation; the event shined a light on American
national vulnerability, particularly gender vulnerability, grounded in the shift of men
away from physical labor toward service and professional work, culminating in fears of
social feminization (Kimmel 1996). In contrast to the bombing years before in Oklahoma
City (Linenthal 2001), 9/11 represented an external threat that was not well understood,

128
with issues of racial, ethnic and cultural heterogeneity clouding its interpretation. A
powerful metaphor emerged to describe 9/11 as a grave masculinity challenge, with
extremists in this paradigm posited as “ass backwards,” in the words of one respondent,
while the collective US had its hands tied by the rules of ‘civilization’. A piece of this is
illustrated by retired US General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkoff in his comments to
NBC news on 9/11/2001:
You know, in the Gulf War—in the Gulf War we—some of the people today
criticized what we did in Iraq. We went to extraordinary, extraordinary ends in
the Gulf War, even endangering our own forces more so to avoid attacking
innocent civilians. And yet, what these bastards have done is deliberately
attacked innocent civilians. And that's the difference between them and us.”

What emerged from my interviews and media analysis was a civilization paradox that
posited US enemies as tougher while Americans were bogged down in wrongheaded
over-thinking and a lack of nerve. Figure 5.2 theoretically illustrates this concept as my

Low High
Advancement of Society
Figure 5.2: Theoretical Model of the "Civilization
Paradox" : Common Sense Notions of Relative
Toughness versus Intellect
Intellect
Toughness

129

participants described its attributes. For many women and men I interviewed, the US
‘war on terrorism’ was at risk for the same reasons Vietnam had been lost decades
before: too little nerve and lack of commitment to the hard work that needed to be done.
This chapter will discuss the key aspects of what I call the civilization paradox, which
highlights common understandings of the international arena in terms laced with
gendered and racial assumptions. The civilization paradox can be described as widely
held perceptions of the toughness of ‘uncivilized enemies’, and their cultural inferiority
compared to Westerners, coupled with an effeminate modern Western state embroiled by
deliberation and inaction.

Prelude to the 9/11 Masculinity Challenge
When the USS Maine exploded and sank off of Cuba’s coast on February 15,
1898, US President William McKinley followed the former path and ordered an
investigation into its cause, personally resisting immediate calls for war until April 19
th
of
that year, following a Naval finding that the explosion was caused by a Spanish mine.
McKinley’s careful approach to war-making earned direct and frequent criticism of his
perceived lack of masculine effervescence following the Maine sinking; Theodore
Roosevelt famously concluded, “McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate
éclair,” and Congressman William Sulzer of New York spoke of the President’s ill-fated
future: “There is nothing the American people despise so much as a weak or impotent
foreign policy. It will wreck any administration” (Hoganson 1998). McKinley could

130
easily have chosen the more aggressive, and more immediately expedient path towards
war after the Maine incident. Figure 5.3 is a political cartoon done months following the
Maine sinking, and shows the type of sentiment prevalent towards Spain in the US. In it
Spain is depicted as a violent, menacing and unthinking ape, with murdered US soldiers’
bodies are strewn beneath palm fronds on a Cuban beach. Figure 5.4 is an illustration
done prior to the outbreak of hostilities, titled “Be Careful! It’s Loaded!” and showing
someone climbing a Spanish ship’s mast, looking down the barrel of a giant US cannon
and shaking his fist. Uncle Sam highlights the US cannon’s label: “PATRIOTISM” (see
Maurice and Cooper 1904 for a contemporary description of these caricatures). A fairly
simple public relations argument could have been made for immediate war with Spain in
1898, as all the public sentiment was there for harnessing. Of course, this path was
chosen following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

131

Figure 5.3: The Spanish Brute Adds Mutilation to Murder, 1898

132

Figure 5.4: Be Careful! Its Loaded!, 1898

The focus of this chapter will be the prevalent aspects of common sense that made
public opinion pliable and deferential in the weeks, months and years following that
horrific September morning. The common sensibilities that will be our focus are those
that blend ideas about gender, masculinity, femininity, and racial and ethnic one as well
that formed an important contour to interpreting these times. Ultimately, 9/11
emphasized the identity of the United States as a personification of liberty, while it’s
adversary was described as a villainous evildoer, lacking a nation and a conscience.
Eerily similar was this personification to others of the past, such as this description of the
Soviet Union in April, 1950 National Security Council Document 68: “unlike previous
aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and
seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world” (cited in Campbell

133
1992:25). That these tropes are effectively understood, replied to and largely go
unchallenged by the public at large suggests that this type of rhetoric, regardless of its
origins, is not questioned (Hunt 1987).
Gender is continually fluid and in need of production and reproduction to
maintain its social significance (West and Zimmerman 1987). Not only are social
expectations and interpretations of social phenomena always adjustable, but the character
of what may constitute a dominant or hegemonic form of masculinity is also changeable
(Connell 1995). It should not be overstated however, that while gender expectations are
not frozen, alterations must be in line with common sense values that are at their core;
even transformative and subversive actions play off of common sense and previously
understood gender customs, even if such efforts attempt to turn them on their heads
(Butler 1999). Additionally, persons and groups with masculine descriptors must
continually restate and reinforce their manly traits—it is not a pay-once proposition.
Masculinity, a vulnerable and uneasy construct, is a lifelong bargain to be struck and re-
struck.
A masculinity status is fragile, and its relationship to biological sex lies in an
assumed natural connection; often these assumptions have been reinforced by social
science over the past half-century (Connell 1994). The insecurity men and boys feel
towards their own masculinity is a direct result of its social construction and the fact that
its foundation is in ideology and not biology (Kaufman 1998). Masculinities are social
constructs that exist as well known and mostly accepted patterns of behaviors that, like
all such patterns, provide a blueprint for people as social beings to interpret the behaviors

134
of other people and entities. Men are mostly the direct targets of masculinity profiles, but
women and forms of femininity are also affected and often defined in opposition to
masculinities (Connell 1987). While masculinities and their different types are often
applied to individuals they are also understood to describe groups of people or
organizations, just as other gender characteristics can be applied to interpreting some
organizations as 'feminine', for example.
In the West, governments, militaries and state apparatuses of power have in the
past been exclusively the residences of men, and have therefore been identified with
masculinity and its historically morphing characters (Enloe 2000; Hooper 2001; Pateman
1989; Yuval-Davis 1997). Globally speaking, and in nations with democratic traditions
women have not generally approached parity with men in government or in their social
status (Höllenbaugh 2006; Inter-Parliamentary Union 1997; Markoff 2003). Nagel
(1998) has outlined the connection between men, masculinity and nationalism clearly,
relating the nationalistic citizen to its masculinist origins not primarily because women
have been overlooked in the writing of history (though they certainly have) but because
this was a sphere until recently composed mostly of men while women were
marginalized by rule and tradition. Figure 5.5 shows the way Nagel’s theoretical work
informs my own view of the relationship between nation and masculinity. Women were
not obliged to be soldiers on the battlefields, or to protect the nation as were men (Kerber
1998).
19
When the US became involved in the Spanish-American war in 1898, as

19
Although there was certainly a ‘patriotic’ role for women to play, as there have always been in war,
whether as mother of soldier(s) or support staff for military operations (Enloe 2000).

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Male States (structurally
limited to men)
Nationalism
Male Militarism
(structurally limited to
men)
Past
States (de facto
masculinist)
Nationalism
Militarism (de facto
masculinist)
Present
Figure 5.5: Theoretical Model of the Links between Men & Masculinity and
Nationalism, adapted from Nagel 1998

136
Hoganson (1998) has shown, the prospect of militarily renewing American manhood
against a backdrop of insecurities about the robustness of men in a newly-tamed society
was simply too tempting to pass up; gender seemed to tie together seeming disparate
interest groups and lobbying efforts pushing the US towards that long-ago war.
Hoganson (1998:8).succinctly describes the condition as follows:
On the one hand, gender served as a cultural motive that easily lent itself to
economic, strategic, and other justifications for war. On the other, gender served
as a coalition-building political method, one that helped jingoes forge their
disparate arguments for war into a simpler, more visceral rationale that had a
broad appeal.

The connection men have with nationalism is powerfully connected to hegemonic
masculinity and what in common sense is thought of as the natural purview of men to
physical strength and aggression, traits boys often emulate defensively (see Canada
1995). Papps, born in 1925, grew up very poor primarily in an orphanage in Bronx, New
York. He depended on his older brother for protection and didn’t shy away from physical
fights as a kid. He described nicely how he thinks of himself as connected to the nation
and to other men in it: “I’m gung ho. If you fuck with America you’re fucking with
me—I’m in with the troops. Maybe it’s because I have a very strong internal instinct, so
every GI is like a child to me, my son.” Papps identified these strong connections to the
nation and to men as originating from a strong instinct, an instinct that has a
characteristically masculine stature. Papps found Pearl Harbor more outrageous than
9/11 “because they were killing our troops,” and on that day in 2001 when the World
Trade Center towers and US Pentagon were attacked, he felt especially angry, telling me
with all seriousness, “it’s a good thing that I’m an old shit. And I’m half blind; not only

137
half blind, half dead. If I could see well I’d go there, I’m a pretty good shot with a rifle.
I’d be there.” His connection with nationalism and the character of the US state is
identifiably intimate, his age is given away only by the tiredness and strain of his voice
rather than a grandfatherly style so often presumed of older men (Thompson 1998).
As Nagel (1998:259) discusses in her own personal queries about why men are so
connected to nationalism and state edifices of power, so too did 83 year-old Mary when I
asked her about more men than women being terrorists.
Mary: Well why have men been more willing to go off to war? What is there
about men willing to go off to war. We just spoke about the ultimate, actually
committing suicide, but you go off to any war and you're going to think that you
might die, and why have men always been willing to do that? I don't know
[laughing].

RH: It's a good question and that's a good point. Most militaries are full of men.

Mary: It's only recently that women have been, and many of the places women
don’t actually get into any of the fighting. They replace people in the office or
something like that, so this is something about the male psyche, you know...
[long pause while she ponders this further]
I have a grandson who has his masters in political science. He just started
training with the California Highway Patrol and I cannot figure this out. He was
a brilliant student, and I cannot figure out why he has chosen this now. So when I
figure that out I'll let you know [laughing]. To me, it's in the same category. You
know, what is there about it that he's willing to risk his life, really?

The premise to Mary’s questions about men, the military, nationalism and national
defense are informed by a basic question: why would anybody risk their life for a
seemingly disembodied ‘nation’. Studies of gender suggest that men find masculinity
challenges not only in their own interpersonal interactions, but that their identification
with the historically masculinist state and its defense informs many men’s conception of
their own masculinity. Indeed, many men not only aren’t disembodied from the symbolic

138
construct of ‘nation’ but personalize it; the state symbolically becomes a fraternity of
men organized to protect its treasures. These links and sensibilities among so many men
provide some of the explanation for the difficult to define concept of nationalism
(Anderson 1991). The appeal of military service or the support of nationalism generally
may emerge from many men’s deep interest but isolation from homosocial intimacy as
well as their desire to celebrate the image of a “male warrior;” these traits helped support
the surge of the mythopoetic men’s movement in the 1990s that celebrated an
essentialized masculinity that was prehistoric yet tainted by modernity and its feminizing
influences (Kimmel 1995; Kupers 1995; Messner 1997). For some men, for example,
defense intellectuals, as Cohn (1987) has described, their linkage of sexuality and
national defense takes on bodily dimensions where symbols of the phallus and its action
and inaction dot their discourses.
Of course not all men are drawn in by the out of reach promises of hegemonic
masculinity. Penny described how her twin brother avoided combat during WWII:
He had it made. He got himself appointed as an altar boy to the chaplain. He was a
corporal, so at least once or twice a week he had to come over to my mother so she
could wash his surplus so he could stay in. So he kept on being offered jobs and
promotions and every time he would get a promotion he would turn it down until they
brought him into the court-martial. And one of the guys said, “What is the matter,
buddy, you yellow?” He said, “I can fight a war just as well in what I'm wearing as
the yellow pants that you're wearing.” Well they finally, they said, “okay, you take
this job now or you're going to be court-martialed.”

Men were not all and assumedly have never universally been keen on giving body
and soul to nation; if the draft itself was not proof enough that all men wouldn’t volunteer
for military service, Penny’s description of her brother depicts how some men sought to
avoid combat for various reasons; ridicule and threats to one’s masculine character are

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not always enough to enforce manly standards. Too often this sort of fracture in the
armor of hegemonic masculinity goes unnoticed, even to those with a critical eye towards
gender systems. Penny then described the war’s impact on her brother, who served as a
spy working for the liberation of France: “he had horrible stories, nightmares that he
never spoke about because it was so devastating that he couldn’t—some of the things he
saw… but he never talked about it. And then he drank afterwards and he would have
horrible, horrible nightmares.”
20
This sort of emotional trauma is customarily accredited
to veterans of Vietnam, where WWII veterans are generally viewed as well adjusted,
largely unphased by the terror of war and confident in its future use (eg, Ehrenreich
1983:105; see Jones 1946 for a counter to this view). Yet the traumas of any war are
devastating on all who are personally involved; the ‘shell shock’ of World War I turned
in to the medically-termed ‘war neurosis’ of World War II (Pols 2006), for instance.
While claiming the status of masculinity boasts many privileges, it also carries horrible
casualties that in part spawned a new critique of masculinity in the context of feminist
critiques of gender inequalities (eg, Pleck and Sawyer 1974).

Masculinity Challenged
The masculinity challenge posed by the 9/11 terrorist attack was not uniquely
informed by gender ideologies. A few important precursors to the challenge posed by
9/11 are notably important in shaping the US response and in framing the public

20
In spite of its secondhand status, I include the story because this type of discussion about war was
unusual in my interviews. The emotional remnants were difficult to find among the veterans (all men with
the exception of one woman) I interviewed of this generation. Additionally, the men I interviewed tended
to have very positive experiences and memories that they shared of their wartime lives; perhaps this is a
partial explanation of their volunteering for the study.

140
discussions of 9/11. Specifically, two deep cultural assumptions in the US were critical
in identifying the 9/11 perpetrators along with how to reply to their attack. These major
discourses served to inform the interpretation of who the 9/11 terrorists were, and what
their actions meant for US society and its status in the world.
Ways of understanding and interpreting events are informed and structured by
what Goffman (1986 [1974]) calls primary frameworks. These frameworks are made up
of blueprints that allow people to quickly and easily identify situations and respond to
them. Goffman identified natural primary frameworks as occurring naturally without
human intervention or design; the natural framework is simply 'the way things are' and
interpretations are unnecessary. For example, a daily weather report falls into this natural
category. These natural frameworks are perhaps the most robust of any social frames due
to their general acceptance as truisms. Social primary frameworks on the other hand,
reveal the role of human actors or a causal mechanism that requires or implies agency.
Goffman refers to these frameworks as revealing “guided doings.” Some aspects of
social life fit into the natural framework, but they are a minority. What is common is a
seemingly blended use of both natural and social primary frameworks to create what I
would call a fusion type. In this case, Goffman’s formal definition of a social framework
would be most appropriate because guided doings are being undertaken at some point in a
causal chain; yet the causal chain either 1) may be unknown, or 2) may be disassociated
from the subject of the situation. An example informing my identification of this
common fusion framework emerged when reviewing and coding newspaper articles from
the Second World War, and a great many short articles revolving around troop

141
movements recurred. These movements clearly are under human direction at some point,
the causal chain is neither revealed nor commonly understood by a layperson, leaving the
declaration of the movement of 5,000 US troops from New Zealand to the Philippines
looking rather disjointed from normal social frameworks. The observational articles did
not highlight any changes to the world other than this one decontextualized detail. It was
a human action but a decidedly natural one.
One of the most common assumptions painted as natural and obvious, and rarely
even elaborated upon in either the media analysis or in my interviews, was what I call the
'civilization paradox'. Simply stated, this paradox is the often unspoken but well-
understood idea that as a society 'advances' economically and socially, life becomes
physically and mentally easier on the people in it. Life in 'underdeveloped' or
'developing' societies is believed to be tougher, requires the sacrifice of one's body and
energy to survive.
21
A good example of this came across when Garen, who was twenty-
five years old when 9/11 occurred, described the internal struggle in his mind when
Afghanistan was identified as the target of US military intervention. A successful
Armenian American, Garnen felt there were generally major misunderstandings on the
part of most Americans relating to the Mideast and Islam which he understood better,
having family and connections to the region. Garen described the US targeting of
Afghanistan after 9/11 with this cautious reminder that illustrates a major pattern in
discussing the challenges of this ‘new war’ for the US:

21
Measuring the accuracy of this type of assertion is impossible, but recent research complicates the related
idea that wealthy, high-technology countries are happier than more modest ones, with Mexico and Nigeria
noticeably high in these areas (Inglehart, Foa, Peterson, and Welzel 2008).

142
I'm still very supportive of it, I'm a little hesitant because I mean, as a student of
history, I know that Alexander the Great went in there, I know the British went in
there, I know the Soviets went in there, and the Afghan people are tough. And
us? You just can't go in there and change Afghanistan. They are tough as nails.

This ‘natural’ state of affairs not only creates more toughness in the people confronting
this condition, but also eliminates many chances to explore or enjoy the full potential of
human thought and ability. In other words, people who live in many underdeveloped
societies are limited in the kinds of thinking they can do because of the difficulties of
everyday life. This civilization paradox elevates wealthy nations and their intellectual
freedom, but this is only viewed as an outgrowth of this ‘natural’ order of things.
Further, the paradox emerges as the counter is emphasized: where wealthier societies are
'freer' they are also spoiled and detached from the hard work required for survival in
poorer societies that instills a resolve and toughness in its people. This was a basic
insecurity described by Montez de Oca (2006, esp. chapter 3) in his description of the
“muscle gap,” a Cold War phobia not only about American men’s physical decline, but
about fears of an enemy prepared to take advantage of this preceived weakness with a
heightened prowess of their own. The contemporary comparison is apt, and as Montez de
Oca points out, this is not simply a fear of American decline, but that this decline leaves
open the possibility that stronger characters can overtake or attack US strategic assets.
Put simply, this fused frame posits wealth leading to weakness where poverty hardens a
society. That this perceived truism essentially posited wealthy nations as containing the
highest form of humanity, where poorer ones are in touch with and more able to survive
struggle is only a byproduct of this natural order, it is assumed.
A second important foundational belief that informed the US interpretation of

143
9/11 picks up where the civilization paradox described above leaves off. Any sort of
aggression or attack begs the obvious question: who has acted against us? The answer to
this question after 9/11 was as clear as it was obtuse; clear in that terrorism was the
culprit (the automatic assumption that proved correct was that Islamic terrorists were
responsible, an assumption that was incorrectly assumed immediately after the Oklahoma
City bombing); and unclear who exactly was at fault. Public questions as to whether a
terrorist organization could alone have carried out such an attack on 9/11 often contained
references to possible state-sponsors, such as Iran, Syria and Iraq. Regardless of the
details, a number of assaults against Americans of Arab, Muslim and South Asian
ancestry represented only the most egregious aspect of racial and ethnic hostility. Many
Americans could not differentiate between the ethnic identities of purportedly Arab
aggressors and ‘others’ who seemed to fit a general preconception of a ‘Muslim’; this
issue also appeared after Pearl Harbor and compelled some Chinese, Korean and Filipino
Americans to wear buttons to distinguish themselves from Japanese Americans targeted
for hostility (Takaki 1989:255, 363-367).
22

As it became evident that terrorists perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, the Middle East
and 'Muslim world' became targets of intense scrutiny. Where the Oklahoma City
bombing terrorists were white Americans, and seen as deviant cases rather than indicators
of a greater threat, after 9/11 these terrorists from the Middle East were more often
viewed as representatives of an amoebic ‘people’ rather than extreme abnormalities, a
pattern typical in the portrait of Muslims in the US as representatives of an entire, fuzzy

22
Apparently as a public service, Life magazine also ran an article “How to tell your friends from the Japs”
which included illustrations of differentiating “Japanese” and “Chinese” facial features (Life 1941).

144
"Muslim" group (Progler 1997). Palestinian protestors celebrating after 9/11 were shown
on US television; numerous stories focused immediately on the Muslim world, especially
on Afghanistan, whose Taliban government and decentralized state offered a rather free
zone for terrorist camps. There was a renewed interest in Samuel Huntington's (1996)
Clash of Civilizations thesis, where he describes how underlying cultural conflicts make
the West and the Muslim world destined for strife. In spite of the heterogeneity of
Muslim societies, both within each and among nations as diverse as Indonesia, Iran and
Morocco, the tendency has been to assume that these populations are relatively similar,
and fairly traditional and orthodox; in reality, this stereotype impedes the vision of
Muslim societies as living and changing, full of dialogue and conversations on such
things as the role of religion and the nature of gender and law in the Koran (Said 2001).
One of the WWII generation women I interviewed thought of “Muslims” not only as
collectively homogeneous, but as static, as if they were transported by a mischievous
time machine. Dorothea’s impression was that “they say the Muslims are from, what, the
15
th
, 14
th
century; and we are into the what?” Not only are Muslims viewed in this
manner as unadvanced intellectually, but also as an entire collectivity whose character is
unchanging, even when confronted with changing times. This image is eerily similar to
stereotypes of Chinese and Japanese immigrants to the US in the late 19
th
and early 20
th

centuries, where their cultural differences were assumed so completely incompatible with
the West that they were incapable of fitting in or assimilating into US society even after
years and generations (Lee 1999; Park 1914). The logical conclusion is that the 9/11
attacks and the aftermath confront the US with a primitive cultural form and tougher

145
enemies willing to sacrifice what Americans are not.
Charles, a veteran of the US Army in WWII, again shows this assumption that
Muslim society is typified by a lesser value for human life and respect for individuals
relative to the West, and that this represents their backward thinking. An avid exerciser,
Charles seemed much, much younger than his 84 years would suggest, and his mind was
as sharp as his physical health. His articulate and thoughtful descriptions of WWII and
the 9/11 situations were politically liberal. When I asked him to characterize the 9/11
attacks, he described it this way:
It's a dangerous kind of attack against the Western, the Western life theory. It's
not countries, you know [attacking us]. So it's a whole different way of fighting,
through these underground, desperate, dangerous type of attacks. The way they
cut heads off, dynamiting, let their own people die, you know. Just, it's a terrible
act of war and the way it's fought, as to how to combat it, it is still unknown in
our system.

Here terrorist extremists are described as antithetical to a Western model that prioritizes
human life and well-being. There is a clear and large cultural divide described here
between the West and Muslim extremism, which Charles later goes on to describe as
different from other, more modern expressions of Muslim or Arab culture:
The thing is they want in place their values not knowing that the other half of the
people in their area has changed because of modern television and computers and
liberation of women. They don’t want that either, they want their type of Islam.
So they want their land and their religious aspect. And they’ll do anything to
keep the power and frighten everybody else. Either there are going to be people
leaving by the millions or they’re going to be butchered. Terrible time for those
people.

Charles recognizes major differences in societies in the Arab and Muslim world, a
heterogeneity that is often overlooked. His emphasis on the importance of technological
innovations from the West in facilitating some of these cultural shifts does de-emphasize

146
the possibility and reality that Islamic societies and those with Muslim pluralities are very
diverse and internally changing.
The context of this interest in Muslim societies is important; a half-century of US
relations with nations of interest, as well as orientalist images that emerged in concert
with European imperialism in the Middle East (Said 1978), set the cultural foundation for
interpreting the 9/11 attacks at the hands of Muslim terrorists. While the US was not an
original colonial power along with Europe, it did come in the colonial picture in the late
1890s and early 1900s when Hawaii and the Philippines became the focal points of the
American presence in the Pacific with annexation. A la Rudyard Kipling, The White
Man's Burden
23
was a well-known force in global colonialism, and fit well with
American visions of Manifest Destiny (Hofstadter 1996; Horsman 1981), which
translated into a self-righteous foreign policy. Racial imaginations were supported by
cultural evidence and informed foreign intervention. Manifest destiny was a
collaboration between white supremacy and the urge for a ‘strong’ approach toward
American foreign policy. Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana illustrated the
connection between these ideas when he advocated American direct control of the
Philippines in January 1900 on the floor of the Senate.
Mr. President, this question is deeper than any question of party politics; deeper
than any question of the isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any
question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been
preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for
nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has

23
While Kipling’s terminology became popularized, the notions of European cultural, social and
technological splendor were certainly preexisting, and can easily be seen in early imperialist interactions
between Europeans and indigenous peoples outside of Europe, especially Asia, Africa and the Americas
(see Zinn 1995 for a discussion of the first interactions between Europeans and indigenous Americans that
is in the same vein as what Kipling's 'Burden' describes centuries later).

147
made us the master organizers of the world to establish a system where chaos
reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction
throughout the earth. He has made us adept in government that we may
administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a
force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race
He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the
regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for
us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are the
trustees of the world's programs, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment
of the Master is upon us: "Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make
you ruler over many things” (Beveridge 1959 [1900]).

Needless to say, these fictions depended on biological racism that was not only
vigorously challenged at the time (eg, Boas 1912), but whose validity has slowly been
eroded. The US is also characterized now by a long history of intervention and foreign
policies towards the Arab and Muslim world accompanied by a cultural construct of
Muslims; the most recent adventure in Iraq is the second war in that nation since the Gulf
War. Prior to that the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 preceded years before by aiding the
1953 overthrow of the nationalist Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in favor
of the shah has long told the story of intervention-by-convenience. Orientalism,
American style, borrowed from the British original, reaching much the same conclusions:
that Arabs were culturally and socially uncivilized and could not functionally manage a
modern state (Little 2002). While colonialism and intervention in the Middle East has
occurred for a myriad of reasons, including to protect precious resources and to further
policy objectives, they have always been backed by a clear reliance on an ideology of
white supremacy. Ideological foundations for these interventions existed and continued
to be clear in my discussions with my interviewees; their contemporary visualization and

148
fear of Muslims is directed at the timely, post-9/11 specter of “Muslim terrorism” and
the culture(s) with which it coexists—presumably traditional, reactionary and static.

Vietnam’s Ghost: a maturation of the civilization paradox and the cultural currency
of defeatism

The Vietnam war and American military defeat there cast a long shadow on US
domestic and global politics (Herring 1991/1992). The US, with the most advanced
military in the world had lost a protracted war with a smaller, materially inferior foe. The
North Vietnamese illustrated one thing clearly: they were much more invested in the
outcome of the conflict than were Americans, and were willing to make more sacrifices
to achieve their ends. The defeat in Vietnam seemed to reinforce a cultural insecurity
within the US that became prominent after the Korean War, namely that American men
were getting physically weaker relative to the heroes of the past, and therefore would be
unable to continue to perpetuate US military power (Montez de Oca 2005). From the
time Vietnam’s quagmire became clear and through the decades that followed, American
men, their masculinity and its link to US global power was a topic of cultural production
in film, television, literature and in the hobbies and pastimes men and boys enjoyed
(Gibson 1994). This was certainly not the first instance of masculine insecurity as it
involved American men; their productive bodies became of greater importance as the
state’s apparatus evolved to include the bureaucratic work of managing populations and
citizens in non-military contexts (Foucault 1991). At the turn of the 20
th
century, the fear
that civilization itself would weaken men’s resolve and pull the plug on their internal
savage as they bathed in decadence, was a major source of anxiety in the US (Bederman

149
1995); fears of homosexuality that were evoked by the Kinsey Reports in the 1950s in
government circles also stoked the cyclical flames of manly insecurity (Segal 1990:141).
From comic books like The Punisher about a vigilante unafraid of the consequences of
his unrestrained violence to the reincarnation of the bitter, heroic Vietnam veteran in John
Rambo, a fictional figure whose assured victory there was disallowed by US policy was
played by Sylvester Stallone, Vietnam became a cautionary cue from which American
prowess should be reinvigorated. Cultural anxiety over Vietnam is also evident in
military policy, where the pressure on politicians not to be perceived as anything but
“manly” limited foreign policy and led to reactionary policies (Enloe 2003).
Following the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War, President GHW Bush claimed
America had thrown off the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ that symbolized the defeat of the US
military in Southeast Asia as well as the domestic divisions and doubts about foreign
intervention which Americans carried forward. My interviews with Americans who
came of age during the World War II era reveal the continued relevance of the Vietnam
War. Hamilton is a WWII veteran whose response turned to Vietnam after I asked about
the US response to the Pearl Harbor bombing:
Hamilton: There [was] no doubt America would win because we’re Americans,
and we haven’t lost any wars until we did so badly, and I can’t even think
of it… [pause]

RH: Vietnam.

Hamilton: I can’t even get the word out. Saigon.

Either through the mystery of memory or the forgettable, ‘bad’ US performance in
Vietnam, Hamilton could not recall the war by name, as if recall was blocked by his own

150
disgust. It is of interest to note that his description of the US in the Vietnam War was,
“we did so badly” rather than an emphasis on the possibility that the war in Southeast
Asia was either misguided or the wrong war at the wrong time. Hamilton’s emphasis on
the performance of the US and its military in the failings of Vietnam reflects a common
discourse highlighting how Vietnam was winnable if not for our failures of performance
and nerve. Conclusions emerging from a project bringing together American and North
Vietnamese war strategists described this belief:
According to this view, more than sufficient U.S. military might and strategy
were available to stop [North Vietnamese] aggression… Had the U.S. military
been allowed to attack at will and without limits, many believe, the U.S. victory
would have come quickly and decisively… [t]he evidence points to the
conclusion that to believe that the U.S. military was denied a victory it could have
and should have won in Vietnam is an illusion—a dangerous illusion if acted
upon in future U.S. conflicts (McNamara and Schandler 1999:318).

Regardless of these conclusions suggesting that US leadership misunderstood the
Vietnam War from the start as primarily a communist spread rather than a civil war of
Vietnamese nationalism, the discussions and common views upheld the civilization
paradox I described previously. As a modern, post-industrial nation, the US collectively
and the populace generally is portrayed in this line of reasoning as unable to do as it
should to defend its interests, unable to cast away its high-mindedness in favor of the
more basic human value of struggle.
Many times in my interviews this post-Vietnam malaise bore directly on the ‘war
on terrorism’ and challenged political leaders, especially the President, while repeating
charges leveled at anti-war politicians in the 1960s, 1970s and afterward. Dorothea was a

151
young working woman during WWII and offered this stark difference as a point of
comparison between the 1940s and the 2000s:
One thing that I noticed was so different [during WWII] from now is that the
whole country, I mean both parties were for the country. Now there is a war
going on seeing which side wins, and the Democrats want, as far as I can see,
they want us to lose this thing.

WWII in her mind was a point of unity and purposefulness where everybody wanted the
same outcome and was willing to fight for it, or at least send soldiers into combat.
Muriel continued by attempting to apply the critique of certain political forces during the
Vietnam War to the current conflict with international terrorism:
Now there was this, oh, and the movie industry now is on the side of the left and
the Democrats. It was more a unit [during WWII]. The whole country was going
in one direction to lead the country. There wasn't this warring going on between
parties and there is no question that the left now and the Democrats want us to
lose our Al Qaeda business, the whole thing that's going on now. We didn't have
anything like that, the whole country pulled together. And the movie, if you look
at the old-time movies they are all for the war to defeat the Germans and the
whole thing. And I don't see—that is one thing that's totally different.

Dorothea also believes the contemporary media, at least the movie industry, is against US
national interests. Her account envisions a state of US affairs where there are major
factions divided not over the best course of action to combat terrorism, but divided in
their patriotism and nationalism. These views are in line with those repeated by President
GW Bush when he often claimed, “you are either with us or with the terrorists.”
Dorothea reveals in other comments more about her assumptions regarding the problems
with the US confronting terrorism when she contrasts it to WWII.
I think we are overdoing [it], see there is another tremendous difference between
now and then. The enemy was the enemy and we profiled the enemy and now it's
getting to be, shall we say, not politically correct to profile. And I think [profiling
is] the way to go.

152

Dorothea captures the common sensibilities that play an important part in interpreting the
civilization paradox; intellect begins to overrule what is perceived as ‘common sense’
and in the best interest of the nation. In Dorothea’s words what seems like over-thinking
is counterintuitive and a “crazy dilemma” that the US faces where there are “politically
correct” rules that do not allow for what she believes are the most appropriate security
measures. In short, too much thought and not enough decisive action means putting the
nation at unnecessary risk, and playing into the hands of those who are unhampered by
the moral influences of modernity. Modern states and the comfort and wealth they create
have a mass effeminizing effect on society.
Mark was a WWII fighter pilot based in England who later served on the staff of
the Secretary of Defense after the US military reorganization in 1947. After staying on
after the war and serving stateside, he went on to attend four universities and received a
Master’s degree and finally a teaching credential from UCLA. His recollections of
bombing raids on Germany, the specifics of his planes and air combat were not only key
elements of his life and identity, but held important emotional strings for him. Mark
revealed through his stories much more than most of the WWII generation about the
emotionality of these memories, and he held them dear. With an attention to detail, he
revealed with the judgment of a military veteran the repeated failures of US operations
after WWII, after I asked him about the US public response to 9/11 versus Pearl Harbor.
RH: On 9/11 there was a lot of talk about Pearl Harbor, people mentioning it,
saying how the public response was sort of reminiscent of that. How did that
sound to you? Is that accurate?

153
Mark: That's an element, that people reacted, “hey, you can’t do that to us” that's
the same thing that took place in Pearl Harbor. The fact that somebody doing
like that, you had the revenge motive comes to fore. And you say, “you know,
wait a minute, we are not going to just be a patsy to this kind of activity. That's
all there is to it.” And you react, you're not going to get away with that. Which
introduces kind of an interesting article I read about the Iraq… this expert on the
far Eastern, Mideastern affairs said, look what's going on, he said “here, you
have Vietnam. The Arabs and so on they noted that we gave up and we didn't
complete the mission; communism did take over. Look what happened in Korea.
We are battling Korea, we only get it half done, and it is still not completely
settled again. Then they said, look what happened at Mogadishu, we backed
away. We didn't do anything. They blew up Marines in Lebanon, killed 200 or
so, what was our reaction? Taking the Marines out and get out of there. That's
all we did, they bombed several of the embassies in places like Kenya and so on
in Africa, what did we do? Nothing.” The argument in this presentation was,
here we are not reacting, and it is noted by these individuals, and they say, “well
we can do this and we can get away with bombing on 9/11 and so on and so
forth. And they won't do anything, they'll say, “tish, tish, now you shouldn't do
that ”[laughing]. And that was the presentation of this article, which is correct.

Mark portrays the 9/11 terrorist attacks as direct outgrowths of a weak US military policy
where a hesitancy to respond invited the attack or at least subsidized it. Beginning with
Vietnam and Korea, through Lebanon, Somalia and the bombing of US embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the story is one of failed intervention due to lack of
commitment. Mark states that “we are not reacting” to these military affronts, and
suggests early in this quotation that this is the natural, common sense response, “And you
react, you're not going to get away with that,” was his thought after 9/11. Mark is a critic
of US military policy because he views it as somewhat unnatural, involving too much
contemplation and not enough gut reaction. His words suggest that US foreign policy,
especially involving military operations, lacks common sense and has not been firm
enough with its adversaries, has not taken a firm enough hand or defended it’s own
honor. Of notable interest is the importance placed on natural versus unnatural responses

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to military challenges; the discussion here emphasized how US policies have diverged
from a natural and logical state to one in which “tish, tish, now you shouldn't do that ”
becomes a straw man representing an overabundance of passive diplomacy and a
shortage of active engagement.
As the above quotations illustrate, Vietnam and the movement away from
perceived common sense military and foreign policy decisions reflects a lack of
confidence in the way US society can respond to a challenge, specifically an event
characterized as a masculinity challenge. If the US is strong, yet undetermined and
divided, as these discussions illustrate, there is reason to believe that a tougher opponent
unrestrained by higher-level intellectual musings about democracy, equality, and so forth
could again be victorious even if they do not have a military in any traditional sense of
the word. As the next section will illustrate, what Glassner (1999) has described as a
“culture of fear,” where an exaggerated sense of danger is fostered by politicians, interest
groups and media hype heightens an already unsteady faith in the ability and commitment
of US policy to successfully engage military challenges. Gender ideologies under
development for decades that challenged modern and postmodern masculinity to cling to
its essential roots became foundational aspects of a new scare; after all, this was not a
time where “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” As President GW Bush said in his
2004 State of the Union address, there was plenty to fear, and failing to recognize it
would result in attacks worse than 9/11: “The terrorists continue to plot against America
and the civilized world. … training and plotting in other nations and drawing up more
ambitious plans.”

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Get Some Balls, Have Guts and Save Face: The Civilization Paradox & the
Inadequacy of Post-Industrial American Toughness

Compared to the Pearl Harbor era, newspaper representations of 9/11 illustrated
serious doubts about the resiliency and ability of the US to respond appropriately to the
attacks. Research illustrates a rather dramatic increase in the fear and anxiety illustrated
by the media after 9/11 rather than following WWII concerning American toughness. As
Table 5.1 shows, 7.5 percent of articles following Pearl Harbor showed concern about the
virulence of American manpower to attain the victories that would be needed to claim
victory, while 30.7 percent of articles offered the same concern after the 9/11 attacks.
Possible explanations include a shift in media coverage style over that time period, as
well as the monumental sea changes in attitudes towards military assertiveness, as
described above. Whatever the reason, there is a large and statistically significant
difference in these media portrayals from one event’s aftermath to the other which is fully
compatible with the solidification of the civilization paradox I have outlined. Perhaps the
more domestic 9/11 attacks and their largely civilian targets account for some of this

Table 5.1: Newspaper Portrayals of Pearl Harbor-era Versus 9/11-era
Number of articles portraying US as either 'soft' or 'tough'

US Portrayal Pearl Harbor 9/11
Number 43 170
Soft
7.50% 30.70%
Number 528 383
Tough
92.50% 69.30%
Number 571 553
Total
100% 100%
* T-Test for Independent Samples Statistically Significant, p>.01

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anxiety; yet that reasoning does not explain why this anxiety would be displaced onto the
virility of American military masculinity. Further, this concern is accompanied by a
portrayal of US enemies largely as determined and formidable. As illustrated in Figure
5.6, fully 28 percent of articles during the first two-week wave of media analysis
following 9/11/2001 showed the US or its citizenry as soft and unable to defend
themselves while the enemy agents of terrorism were fully able to hold firm to their
positions and aggressively pursuing their goals. I refer to this as the ‘soft-hard gap’. The
1950s and 1960s had their “muscle gap,” the fear that men’s physical bodies would be ill-
prepared to defend the nation and its interests from the Soviet threat (Montez de Oca
2005). The contemporary version of this, the soft-hard gap, is not so focused on the
physical bodies as it is on the collective psychic character of the nation as a whole and its

Figure 5.6: Media Describing US as Soft and Enemies as Tough
by 6-Month Wave Intervals
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
1 2 3
Wave
Pearl Harbor
9/11

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leaders particularly. The angst is exacerbated by the common beliefs that ‘terrorists’ and
their supporters have no ‘hangups’ and are not ‘spoiled’ by the ‘easy’ lives of most
Americans, and are willing to do nearly anything to achieve victory. The soft-hard gap is
an obvious outcome of the civilization paradox I’ve outlined earlier. At wave 3, one year
after 9/11/2001, the percentage of articles illuminating this same dynamic decreases to 19
percent, but this is still much higher than the WWII rates of this soft/hard phenomena. In
short, a serious segment of US print media represented the US and its agents as relatively
powerless or crippled compared to their attackers or potential attackers.
My interviews largely concurred with this news portrayal of the status of US
force and toughness. Papps spoke directly about the deflated status of US planning as it
related to military policies when he painted policymakers as lacking “nerve”.
Well on 9/11 I was raging. That these bastards have the nerve to fuck with us. I
don't know; I'm really concerned about our government. Much of it. No balls.
They’re too goddamn educated—they don't got balls. 9/11, we went into Iraq, I
would've flattened out that city, made another runway out of it. Our GIs working,
they're like sitting ducks. Ever go to a shooting gallery? That's bullshit every GI
they kill, they ought to wipe out a mile. Level that fucking place. And even
though I voted for Bush I was really pissed off, don't give these bastards anything.
For what? Sabotage our country, every way, around-the-clock they sabotage.

Papps description draws on gendered common sense positing masculinity not only as
flimsy but modern masculinity as somehow weak. The distinction between ‘us’ and
‘them’ is well understood, with US masculinity suffering from the drawbacks of the
civilization paradox. Papps continues about both the softness of US policy and the
cultural and institutional advancement of US society versus ‘the enemies’ is shown:
No way I would be that easy with these bastards. I repeat again, I would level
that fucking Baghdad into a big landing strip. And here we are to feed these

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bastards and teach them. And then they’ll come to America and they’ll go to
college.

Not only are these enemies terrorists according to Papps, but they are in need of our food
and education for their subsistence. The ones who can will implicitly try to take any
advantage they can, including traveling to the US for a good university education
courtesy of the US’s thought-twisted system that fails to identify the obviousness of a war
and its actors.
Papps’s finally described his disappointment and admiration of US President GW
Bush in terms reminiscent of civilization paradox:
I’m for Bush and I’d vote for him again, he’s too much of a, he’s a gentleman, to
me. His word is, he keeps his word, which is great, to me that’s great. But I got
to be, as I got older I got to be a hardnose and if you fuck with me I’m gonna put
you in the grave. Don’t be a gentleman, in fact you’ve got all these guys from
Princeton and Harvard, and all these other—they’re negotiating. That’s bullshit.
They’ve never been hungry a day in their life.

Papps again distances a sense of reactionary and aggressive toughness, interpreted as
being active, from contemplation and strategy, coded as weakness or decadent. Guys
from Ivy League universities are assumed to be feminized, bookish wimps who never had
to toil for anything. The key to success in this war, as in any other, is stiff determination
to go all the way, to attack with a detached conscience, as Papps alluded to numerous
times when he called for turning Baghdad into a “landing strip”. Getting advice on war
from “gentlemen” is therefore an indictment of the immensity of our shrinking
masculinity. This sense of the primacy of action rather than thought was perhaps
clearer in Justin’s remarks about the nature of a ‘war on terrorism’. Justin was 15 when
9/11 occurred, and though he is not Muslim his Persian background has often translated

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into suspicion in his public interactions with strangers. As we sat in his parents’
comfortable Beverly Hills home he told me about his views about terrorism and how he
felt it could be reduced.
RH: Do you see a way to reduce terrorism? Say the US was interested in
reducing the number of terrorist incidents.

Justin: You've got to be nice to these people and countries, you've got to be like,
“we won't fight the war anymore.” You've got to make concessions to them, but I
don't think that's very smart. Because then you give them the power, then we
look weak and that's not what we want because then other people are going to
start, like, “look how we can attack the United States, we fight unfairly, we hide
in houses, we kill their soldiers, we attacked their country.” And we would never
be able to win anything; I seriously believe that our country will go down if we
make concessions. We've got to keep fighting, I think we've got to get more
hostile, we've got to, you know, the humane people will be like, “no.” I really
feel that we've got to start bombing big-time. Just to send a message, even
though we might kill a lot of innocent people but if not I really feel that our
country could go down because other terrorists will start attacking us the same
way if we can't fight back.

Justin initially indicates that US efforts to reduce terrorism, presumably the goal of the
‘war on terrorism’, would best served through lessening military intervention, specifically
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, Justin considers this a policy that will in the
end cause the US to “look weak” and be targeted in the future for more attacks due to the
lack of a powerful response. Rather, he suggests that the only way to send a strong
message of deterrence is to attack with more force and with lesser concern for so-called
‘collateral damage’ or civilians caught up in military fire.
For those who asked questions or delayed full support for military retaliation after
9/11, there seemed to be lingering questions about their sensibility and nerve. Garen,
Armenian American and a successful young politico, remembered his inclination to
“wait” in responding after 9/11 was met with snickers:

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My brothers, who are far more liberal, passive than I, were all about, “we have to
get these people, whoever did it we have to go after them.” And I remember I
was kind of laughed upon and like, criticized by people when I said, “no, we have
to wait, we have to wait and see who this was, what it was. We can't just blindly
send fighters out and just bomb Libya or something again, if we don't know who
it was.”

Garen’s concern over the validity of a knee-jerk reaction and its ability to justly find and
punish those responsible was not a unique view, people who carried it were in a
precarious position when portraying these feelings. One had to avoid being soft or being
in the position of not responding strongly to 9/11 or they risked their masculine status
being severely challenged. As David, a WWII Navy veteran from a wealthy
Pennsylvania family said clearly:
After it happened we had to do something, obviously. We couldn't have just sat
there and said, [imitating a high voice] “come and do it again folks,” you know,
we had to do something. And whether George Bush, current George Bush, had
more guts to do something than our dear friend, what's his name from Tennessee,
Gore. Al Gore from Tennessee. I don't know what position he would've taken
and the Democrats behind him. I just don't know.

David suggests that guts will be a major part of a victory in the battle against terrorism,
and he makes clear his doubt that many US political leaders have even that. David posits,
in a voice impersonation trying to sound feminine, that some may suggest by their
flinching actions, “come and do it again folks,” meaning another terrorist attack. The
choice of response is often framed this way, to ‘do something’ or to ‘do nothing’. This
rhetorical device is something of a red herring, a distraction from the actual discussion of
‘what should be done’ and an emphasis on what responses will be considered ‘doing’
something.

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The red herring of ‘doing nothing’ serves ultimately to establish distrust for any
perspective that delays action or even appears to resist common sense in responding.
Tomas was 21 years old when 9/11 occurred; a scientist, he described himself as Latino
and as politically independent and attempted to reason his responses to me in a very
logical way. He had this reaction to US political leadership and their approach after the
9/11 attacks:
The initial reaction of, “okay, let's have some sort of war on terror,” was one way
to handle it. And whether it was the right way it's hard to say, whether it's wrong
it's hard to say also because going either way there were positives and negatives.
If he did nothing, that also has its drawbacks, Bush has started this drawn-out war
but you're basically lose face, you have to do something, what do you do if
somebody comes and does something to you and you just sit there and say, "oh
well"?

Tomas’s reasoning is complicated but mentions the strange rhetorical weapon of ‘doing
nothing’ again to highlight its unacceptability. While there are positive and negatives to
any action, inaction in the face of an assault is defined as ‘losing face’ or being
dishonored. The central tenet of a masculinity challenge is that masculinity is breakable,
while such a challenge aims to devalue the object’s claim to respectable manhood. Being
attacked and not responding represents an ultimate loss in respect; even going down with
a fight is worth its weight in respect. That so many of the men I interviewed posited a
potential ‘do nothing’ response while simultaneously dismissing it illustrates a
knowledge that this is not only a counter-hegemonic discourse, but one which they
believe is commonly enough held to mention and refute off hand.

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Conclusion
In this chapter I have discussed the ways ‘common sense’ conceptions about
hegemonic and marginal masculinities have been applied to American foreign policy and
wartime affairs. Bringing conceptions of citizenship, imperialism and cultural racism
into this analysis, I draw connections between ideas about reactionary nationalism, the
interplay between the nation and masculinity as well as how gender ideologies are
incorporated into visions of an enemy (Nayak 2006). The soft/hard gap that is
characteristic of the civilization paradox is a primary means for discussing collective
insecurity about US society and specifically its military apparatuses. Just as mainstream
masculinity is a precarious accomplishment towards which men are socially prescribed
toward, nations are similarly concerned with the honor and accomplishment of the state
in which they are invested. The civilization paradox, as I have described it, relies on
notions of Arabs and Muslims as beyond the fray of modern societies, culturally
maladapted to their functioning and deficient in their value for human well-being. This
backwardness leads to the difficult types of ‘natural’ human lives that Western societies
escaped centuries before, leaving underdeveloped societies and their populations to
perfect a spirit of human toughness borne from everyday struggle. Material well-being
has in a sense created opportunities for advanced societies to prosper technologically and
intellectually, but has to a large degree dropped its emphasis on toughness. The modern
state has become effeminate. The civilization paradox is essentially unchanged from the
days of US President Teddy Roosevelt’s public calls for renewed challenges for men and
boys in the natural environment; it’s only difference is in degree. US men and the

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collective state masculinity have suffered precipitously at least since World War II,
where the common engagement of men in battle and the end victory was accomplished.
Korea, Vietnam and the smaller challenges posed to US military strength was enough to
make many men cringe with disgust.
The masculinity challenge 9/11 represented was fed by the media establishment,
which went along with government calls for a “war”. With fear, insecurity and anger
being at the forefront of American minds after 9/11 there was a ripe public demand for a
path toward protection and payback. Masculinity challenges are described by
Messerschmidt (2000) as confrontations designed to reduce dominant status positions; in
simple terms, to knock someone off their pedestal. Messerschimidt’s use of this term in
gender analysis is appropriate here. It became clear from the language used by many of
my participants that ideas of dominance, power and control were mixed with gendered
frames of reference to describe 9/11 not only as terrible, but as disrespectful and
cowardly. That the attackers that day were from the Middle East added a layer to the
interpretation of the event that did not exist, for instance, at the Oklahoma City Bombing
incident. These facts brought with them visions of backwardness and the assumption of a
cultural barrier dividing the West from the Middle East. Combining this masculinity
challenge with the identities of the perpetrators and their utter foreignness transformed
9/11 from a tragedy into an act of war.

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CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION

In this dissertation, I set out to explore the relationship between race, gender, and
citizenship in times of public disaster. In particular I sought an understanding of how
people make use of widespread, common notions about race and gender to interpret the
meanings of Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Drawing from twenty-eight in-depth individual
interviews with two generations of Americans—those who came of age around Pearl
Harbor and 9/11 respectively—and over one-thousand media stories from 1941-1942 and
2001-2002, I contribute an intersectional approach to understanding the American
reaction to 9/11. Specifically, I find that 1) my greatest generation participants revise
their recollections of the past to fit into a colorblind framework; 2) they don’t apply these
colorblind sensibilities to people of Arab or Muslim descent, revealing instability or
fragility of citizenship for people of color; and 3) depictions from media and interview
sources illustrate a waning confidence in American masculinity contrasted with a
perceived barbaric hyper-masculinized Arab threat.
In March 2002, letters from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
arrived at Huffman Aviation confirming the student visas for Mohamed Atta and Marwan
Al-Shehhi. That these two men flew passenger airliners into the World Trade Center
towers exactly six months prior heightened concerns about how the 9/11 perpetrators
were able to get into the country. Belonging and legality became a major agenda in the
discussions following the 9/11 attacks. While elite and mass media depictions articulated

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a more politically correct tone compared to the highly nativist anti-Japanese discourse
after the 1941 Pearl Harbor attacks, public responses in post-9/11 America evoked the
same type of exclusionary and racial scapegoating tactics that are often called upon in
times of hardship or crisis (Schildkraut 2002). Following the devastating terrorist attacks
on 9/11/2001, people believed to be Muslim, Arab or of Middle Eastern ancestry became
targets of increased racialization, exemplified in the extreme by the explosion of hate
crimes against Muslims in 2001 (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2001). Unlike the
terrorist bombing and destruction of the Oklahoma City Federal building in 1995, the
9/11 hijackers were easily pointed to as outsiders, illegal foreigners, and “others” whose
presence itself was offensive. Times of turmoil have often gone hand-in-hand with the
construction of an “other” and 9/11 specifically led to high anxiety and fear in Muslim
and Middle Eastern American communities as they felt stigmatized and persecuted as this
process unfolded (Naber 2006). While September 11 certainly altered the racial
formation of US society, it was also interpreted and portrayed as a gendered event, from
the language it was described with down to the representations of masculine heroes
(Dowler 2002).
Linking theory, especially in the realms of race/ethnicity and gender and
masculinity studies, by using the language of citizenship provides the relevant historical
context to highlight the interplay between inclusion and exclusion, belonging and
marginalization. Whiteness and hegemonic masculinity have always represented ideal
types or standards of American citizenship and social belonging unthreatened by
changing historical tides. Inherently, 9/11 and Pearl Harbor in themselves have no

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gendered or racialized meanings. Yet, as we collectively and individually try to
understand events such as 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, and even Oklahoma City, we often read
and attach meaning and significance to them through a filter that privileges norms of
whiteness, ethnocentricism and hegemonic masculinity.
Citizenship is the ultimate legal definition of belonging, and in the US this status
has provided the means for exclusion, marginalization and the validation of gender and
racial hierarchies (Glenn 2002). Considering TH Marshall’s (1992 [1950]) description of
social citizenship as full membership in a society, theoretical elaborations of citizenship
illuminate the intersectional character of multiple forms of social hierarchies. Indeed,
separately and together, the legal and social forms of US citizenship has been based on
racial and gender classifications for much the nation’s history. Pearl Harbor and
September 11, 2001 were both shaped by and also informed racial and gender formation,
emphasizing American masculine heroism. Yet after 9/11 there was a simultaneous
concern that the nation and its offensive and defensive tools was unable to address the
external threats posed by Muslim extremists. After 9/11 and Pearl Harbor there were
state efforts to “other” both Muslim extremists and the Japanese in the US by tapping into
pre-existing common sense attitudes. In 1941 this was scarcely difficult, as there was
already a history of exclusion and marginalization that went back decades, especially on
the US West Coast (Daniels 1977). These exclusionary ideas were based largely on the
commonly held assumption that Asians generally were inassimilable, their values and
culture assumed to be too different from the West for coexistence or assimilation (Park

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1950 [1923]; Takaki 1989). After Pearl Harbor then, Japanese were easily fitted into the
mold of the “other.”
Arab and Muslim Americans had more complex stories as the sun rose on
September 11. Their ethnic histories in the US were more mixed than that of Japanese
Americans in 1941. Various ethnic or national groups from the Middle East were
uncertainly categorized under a heading of exclusion relative to East Asians in the US.
As Gualtieri (2001; 2004) has shown, various nationalities from what is commonly called
the “Muslim world” had been legally interpreted as both white and eligible for citizenship
and non-white and therefore ineligible. This uncertain historical and cultural status took
new life after 9/11 when heightened levels of suspicion fueled by public anxiety and
extreme media coverage led to a panic over “Arab” terrorism. Arab Americans and
Muslim Americans as well as those assumed, sometimes incorrectly, to be from the
Middle East often found their communities under scrutiny and under physical attack
(Abdo 2006; Ahmad 2002).
Following December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor became a rallying cry for American
entry into WWII, and media at the time strengthened its war coverage to match the global
stage of the conflict. In our post-9/11 media, the overwhelming coverage of the
American homefront symbolized the fear and anxiety the attacks evoked. The intense
inward focus after 9/11 signifies the way media reporting helped fan a flustered rather
than thoughtful response that also had much to do with the American state’s messaging of
the event. Fears emerging post-9/11 were not matched by Pearl Harbor according to
those I interviewed who were alive during both events; yet doubts about the ability of

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America to collectively respond to an unmanageable and amorphous threat was a primary
issue I found in both my media and interview data.

Race and Colorblind Values: Impressions from Pearl Harbor and 9/11
Specifically in terms of race and ethnicity, my discussions have emphasized the
power of contemporary systems of ideology to impact the memories and emphasis placed
on the past. Whites who came of age during the years of WWII or just prior tended to
paint their symbolic recollections of the war period as largely colorblind. Predictably,
folks represented themselves in positive ways, but their recollections of the war era
followed a pattern where either they themselves or their families exemplified racial
tolerance and in some cases progressive racial justice. My older respondents, though
often tethered by patterns of speech which younger individuals may find dated, were
assimilated into the colorblind era of race relations. Their understanding of what some
termed “political correctness” when discussing race and their values for equality I felt
were sincere to a high degree, even when these outward viewpoints contradicted some of
the intricacies of their race-related discussions. The real breakdown that revealed a
generational division were the racial and ethnic dimensions that emerged after September
11, 2001.
Where my younger interviewees comfortably applied colorblind ideologies to
Arab and Muslims after 9/11, older interviewees had difficulties doing so. While notions
of racial equality translated when applied to more established US racial groups,
especially African Americans, these same ideals did not frame interpretations about

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Arabs and Muslims for my older informants. The reasons for this difference are partially
explained by Mannheim’s (1952) generational cohort hypothesis, where he concluded
that people born around the same time would share similar experiences and therefore
comparable ideas. Yet this position does not fully explain these generational differences,
as my older cohort of interviewees did show some flexibility in line with shifting
hegemonic values they experienced as adults, such as the powerful civil rights movement
prominently led by the fight for equality by African Americans. Arabs and Muslims,
including Americans of Arab or Muslim ancestry, were not included in these hegemonic
shifts of the racial paradigm. For older respondents, their ideological backgrounds did
not bend quite so far as to recognize a more universal notion of racial and ethnic equality
shown by my younger interviewees. Rather, older Americans in my sample relied on
stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims as backwards and inassimilable, notions also applied
historically to other Asian and Asian American groups (Aoki 1996). Pulling their
conceptions of race together, we see that the “revisionist memories” expressed by the
Greatest Generation of a past painted in colorblind ideals supports the notion that these
shifting racial ideas have taken hold to some degree even in older generational groups.
Yet, the ethnocentric attitudes and assumptions that they express toward those of Arab
and Muslim descent, reveal the fragility of belonging and the vulnerability of citizenship
rights for non-whites, especially in times of national crisis. This raises important
questions about the citizenship rights, legal and social, of other racial minorities who also
share in this vulnerability due to the precariousness of their position in the racial
hierarchy. What will happen to Chinese Americans, for instance, if China becomes a

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major US military and economic rival in the coming decades? Perhaps they will remain
untouched or maybe old sentiments of yellow peril will once again re-emerge and replace
current model minority notions. What these shifting, incomplete colorblind views assert
strongly is the ability of race ideologies to be rearticulated with the social tides.

Gender in Conflict
Theorizing gender and applying theories of gender in my data analysis provides
an insightful lens to understand common sense responses to major events. Connell’s
(1987) description of a gender order, or society-wide pattern of institutions that privilege
men over women, is supplemented well by the description of gender regimes. Gender
regimes are akin to more specific patterns of gender relations present in various
institutions. While gender regimes are informed by the overall gender order, there are
intricacies noted and theoretical allowances for divergent ideas and structures within
particular regimes. Connell is explicit regarding both the power of the gender order to be
maintained, and the flexibility of ideologies to shift within it. Hegemonic masculinity is
one byproduct of this theorization I have used as a tool to interpret the meaning
associated with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. My analysis focuses mainly on how public
situations are gendered, and especially how those involving issues of national security
and warfare are viewed in reference to common sense ideas about gender. At the same
time, gendered meanings that are superimposed on these events exist alongside
racial/ethnic views about each events’ “other.”
As Arabs, Muslims and Americans of Arab and Muslim heritage were frequently
lumped with terrorists as antithetical to modernity or postmodernity—clearly infused

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with all sorts of racial meaning—these colonial ideas were also layered with gendered
meanings. Uncontrolled brutality went along with an undeveloped sort of masculinity
that contrasted images of hegemonic masculinity that emerged in the US, where
unbridled toughness was kept in check by some measure of compassion, especially for
children (Messner 2007). While terrorists and those thrown in with them were seen as
brutes, Americans were viewed as ultracivilized to the point of spoiled softness. In what
I referred to as a civilization paradox, the contemporary US, as described by my
interview participants, as a wealthy, developed nation also suffers a disconnect from the
natural world of suffering that teaches toughness and fortitude. This pattern is not unique
to this period of American history (Kimmel 1996), as the social construction of
masculinity is defined by its constant need for valuation and reassurance (Connell 1987).
One of my respondents, a WWII veteran who still looked the part of a tough guy said it to
me rather succinctly: “I'm really concerned about our government. Much of it. No balls.
They’re too goddamn educated—they don't got balls.” While not normally so
illustrative, this view was often portrayed by my respondents, who lacked confidence in
the US state to protect against the perceived untamed aggression of terrorists.

“The Past is Never Dead”
Avery Gordon’s (1997) sociological investigation of haunting, past traumas and
their untold but undeniable impacts, informs my interpretation of the contemporary era
where blindness to notions of inequality is standard. Like the ghosts at the center of
Gordon’s investigation, the past haunts our collective ideals, its values seething through

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our collective cloak of denial and hopes the past will stay buried and untouched.
Ideology is like a haunting presence, if less dramatic and tangible than Gordon’s
impeccably described historical specters. Ideologies are ever-present but often below our
radars and conscious awareness. From where they came has the mysterious feel of an
apparition, at once untouchable yet present. Whatever the impact of the past on the
present the ideological baggage of prior years is transformed by the weight of history—of
people’s movements and presidential proclamations—synthesized into something new.
What is new may be difficult to recognize, but carryovers from the old is inevitable even
when new ideologies contradict them. Dangerously, we tend to visualize the new as
progressive and more freethinking, yet this enlightenment holdover is too often
contradicted by reality. New circumstances meet new cultural rebuttals. As the US came
to embrace equality as a core, daily norm of social interaction and a collective value,
prejudices, rather than being eliminated, migrated to become more difficult to analyze
(Picca and Feagin 2007). Where subtle prejudices are tricky to measure (Bonilla-Silva
and Baiocchi 2001), their systemic presence is critically important, often goes unnoticed
and is a serious barrier to derailing racial hierarchies.
Small levels of bias, even when unconscious, have important systematic effects.
Thus, while there are limits to what the sciences can tell us about causality in the natural
and the social world, we also know clearly that even small and easy to miss social facts
have a profound impact on the outcome of a given circumstance. I borrow loosely here
from Edward Lorenz, (1963) whose mathematical and meteorological theories gave birth
to “chaos theory.” Lorenz’s theoretical idea, put simply, is that small changes in the

173
initial status of a complex system have dramatic and unpredictable consequences. Thus,
the term the “butterfly effect” refers to the theoretical problem that there is a point where
even very careful observation cannot describe or predict reality. We cannot know the
precise impact systems of legalized racial and gender oppression have had on hierarchies
and patterns of behavior we observe. We can be sure that the past has affected the
present, and the small differences in the past can impact later times profoundly, even if
we cannot directly trace its genealogy. This line of reasoning produces multiple
conclusions we must consider as we describe ideology’s impact on people’s lives: If we
accept the most optimistic views that describe a steady progression of racial values
towards greater equality this does not necessitate a declining significance of race, as
alterations in complex systems lead to unpredictable outcomes. If we claim that
prejudice has changed faces we have no reason to believe its more hidden status will lead
to greater quality of life for those still targeted by negative prejudices.
World War II represented an incredible turning point in the expansion of rights in
the US. Domestic and global forces were important in this growth of opportunity and
breaking down of prior boundaries. Domestic pressures applied by the full-throttle war
mobilization allowed racial and ethnic groups as well as women who previously had been
exceedingly limited in many fields of public life and employment to move into some of
these areas. Structural opportunities were created for millions of people in this way,
either directly through military service or through employment and civic voids left by the
bodily absence of large numbers of white men (Moore 1996). Growing pressures
coinciding with a global anti-colonial sentiment were symbolically embraced by the US

174
and Britain through the Atlantic Charter, affirming the right of self-determination and
liberties more broadly (Roosevelt and Churchill 1941). In retrospect it was these war
years and the turmoil that accompanied them that deeply altered the status quo while
unearthing cleavages in the social system where domestic US liberation movements
could flourish, in part supported by American wartime propaganda (Hart 2004).
After 9/11, the home front became the front line for the American ‘war on terror’.
The public wanted both safety at home and attacks against terrorists and their supporters
in the Middle East. The importance of Judith Shklar’s (1984) conception of the
“liberalism of fear,” where the primary function of liberal states more than constructing a
perfect society is relieving citizens’ fear of cruel treatment, became apparent on
September 11, 2001 (Keohane 2002). At airports, long lines were accepted and
heightened security measures tolerated by the vast majority of the public. When I
observed Los Angeles International Airport five months after 9/11/2001, my field notes
illustrated how airports had symbolically and materially become front lines in the new
‘war’ against terrorism:
Cars, vans, trucks and SUVs zoom by constantly outside of the terminal
buildings, and buses are everywhere. In the post September 11th world, military
trucks can also be seen alongside these buses and civilian automobiles, looking
strangely too large for the road, and bulging out of this decidedly congested of
urban spaces. National Guard troops patrol inside the terminals, carrying machine
guns and dressed in their combat regalia, their primary purpose being to provide
“visible security measures” to the nation’s airports, according to US President
GW Bush. The shock value of their presence is apparently working. As I sat
taking notes on one of my initial trips to LAX, a traveler on his way to London
spotted me taking notes. A twenty-something white Australian man who had
lived in Los Angeles for two years, he volunteered the following commentary
regarding the machine-gun armed National Guard patrols: “It’s a little scary
because the only place I’ve seen that before is in Thailand; and there they’ll use

175
them.” The security message, which portrays the seriousness of airport security in
the form of state military authority, is being received.

In this work I set out to explore the importance of ideologies that are often
unconscious but that have a deep impact on collective and individual behavior. It is not a
large leap to state that ideological shifts in the US over the last half of the 20
th
century
altered the landscape of access to institutions across the board, such as in education.
Women outside of the elite were admitted to universities only recently if we are to use the
entirety of US history as a timeline. Systems of racially biased education have legally
been successfully challenged. Yet shortchanging girls in early education is a major and
continuing problem (Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and American
Association of University Women Educational Foundation 1995). Continued de facto
racial and socioeconomic segregation with ongoing issues of systemic educational
inequities that chronically limit mobility are largely ignored as social problems (Kozol
1992). In a nation where legal boundaries of exclusion have been fought against, and
where the rhetoric of equality has been tested time and again by those denied its benefits,
we remain incomplete in the fulfillment of our ideals. Recognizing the important legal-
structural changes that have pried at the doors of opportunity along with the continuing
significance of both race and gender is critical to moving towards greater social equality.
Some thirty years ago Charles Willie (1978), responding to William J. Wilson’s
(1978; 1980) proposition that race was becoming less important in American social
institutions, claimed that race may be in some regard more important. Willie’s reasoning
was that in day-to-day interactions, as Blacks move into social spaces dominated by
whites, race becomes comparably more important and potentially more traumatic. While

176
limits in Black mobility were declining their interactions with whites increased, as did
their daily exposure to prejudice. While institutional rules can change overnight,
people’s hearts, minds and ideological views are much less flexible, a reality Willie
believed would be especially troubling. Meanwhile, new social issues confront our
systems of understanding and interpretation, as did 9/11, and too often the past provides a
simple casing over which new ideas are cast. Thus, the comparison to Pearl Harbor
provided a common frame of reference after 9/11, offering shorthand conclusions to go
along with the unsettled emotions of the American public.

In these moments of fear and insecurity, ideologies of nationalism tinged with
white supremacy haunt our public conceptions. Gender is called upon to delegitimize an
enemy and after 9/11 masculine softness was also an indicator of a decline in public
confidence toward the state and the citizenry. That racial ideas can shift makes
citizenship and belonging fragile for racial and ethnic groups of color. Justin was one of
my youngest respondents and in high school when 9/11 occurred. As a non-Muslim
Persian born in the US, Justin reflected on his perception of how his ethnic status
changed meaning after that deadly September morning:
I think that terrorism really destroy the good [Persian] people, especially in
America. I don't think we were looked down upon but we weren't looked at as
well as we should have been. I just feel that they put us all in one boat. Like, I'm
not Muslim, but when someone sees a Persian or any [Middle Eastern person],
he's Muslim. I feel that everyone looked at us like, for example when you walk
into a market, you look at somebody just walk by. I just feel that people were
looking at us twice, walked by and look at us again. Like, I feel like I was being
targeted in some places and I feel like, I explained how when my parents came [to
the US] people looked up to them, I feel like our class has gone way down. Our
class or our ethnicity has gone way down.

177
While Justin was not bitter, his description of how his “class has gone way down”
after 9/11 symbolizes the struggle for belonging and the linked status of American racial
politics international affairs. In spite of colorblind ideals held onto tightly by so many
Americans, racial and ethnic groups of color walk on unstable ground, their status and
belonging much more insecure relative to whites. Gender can play a role in rearticulating
race and common sensibilities about various racial and ethnic groups, and also in helping
to define popular conceptions of them. In turn, racial fears of ‘others’ can set into motion
a re-articulation of apparently pre-feminist views of masculinity. My work in this
dissertation shows how race and gender, during times of public crises, are not separate
systems of difference. Rather, they are systems of inequality whose dynamic tension
with each other helps to constitute historically shifting race/gender formations.

178
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This study explores interactions between race, gender and citizenship focusing on how race and gender ideologies shape "common sense" understandings and public memories of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. In turn, I examine how these public disasters inform and re-shape "common sense" notions of race and gender. Through an analysis of newspaper coverage of these events, and interviews with two cohorts of people -- those who were young adults in 1941, and 2001 respectively -- I analyze how people incorporate and express common sense discourses about race and gender. I uncover the ways past race and gender ideologies intersect with contemporary ones, with attention to the ways legal and social rights of non-whites remain vulnerable. My media analysis illuminates the importance of race, gender, and collective anxiety in constructing 9/11 and Pearl Harbor as national disasters. Members of the WWII generation often shared "revisionist memories" by applying colorblind ideals to the past, depicting more harmonious racial conditions than actually existed. While they deployed colorblind language when talking about most people of color, members of this older age cohort did not when referring to Muslims or Arabs, thus revealing an incomplete internalization of colorblindness. While both generations adhere differently to a colorblind sensibility, both cohorts equally reveal a masculinist orientation, illustrating what little shift has occurred in gender regimes relating to nationalism and foreign policy. After 9/11, members of both age cohorts drew from a frame I call the "civilization paradox," personifying the US as increasingly feminized while "Muslim extremists" were depicted as exemplars of social backwardness and unchecked masculinity. This illuminates how both raced and gendered sensibilities simultaneously reinforce hierarchies and reframe conflicts.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Hollenbaugh, Robert Aaron (author)

Core Title Pearl harbored: race, gender and public memories of Pearl Harbor and 9/11/2001

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Degree Conferral Date 2009-08

Publication Date 06/15/2009

Defense Date 05/28/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag collective memory,Greatest Generation,masculinity,OAI-PMH Harvest,Pearl Harbor,Race relations,September 11

Place Name harbors: Pearl Harbor (geographic subject), New York (city or populated place), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Messner, Michael A. (committee chair), Saito, Leland T. (committee member), Tickner, J. Ann (committee member)

Creator Email hollenba@gmail.com,hollenba@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2297

Unique identifier UC1498580

Identifier etd-Hollenbaugh-3004 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-250157 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2297 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Hollenbaugh-3004.pdf

Dmrecord 250157

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hollenbaugh, Robert Aaron

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu