The interrelatedness of institutionalized inequalities

While reading the Angela Davis chapters this week, I was thinking about the ways that capitalism sometimes seems to be of secondary concern in order to uphold patriarchy or institutionalized racism. For example, the ways that Davis talks about the likelihood of women being committed to psychiatric institutions as compared to prisons (66) seems to be counter-intuitive to the goals of the prison industrial system, in that mental healthcare necessarily costs money to the state, whereas committing an individual is a means of producing revenue for the state. However, the more I thought about it, the more I was forced to remember that patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy are never exclusive from one another, but are instead necessarily reliant on each other's existence. That is to say, all of these systems are hinged on the reproduction of social inequalities in order to persist as valid within our cultural landscape. Additionally, they require a social acceptance of inherent differences amongst people, and the hierarchies of race, gendered and classed differences. Thus, the continued marginalization of women through the reproduction of patriarchal institutions, and the interrelated marginalization of people of colour via white supremacy, simultaneously result in the reproduction of capitalism. In the specific instance that I addressed above, women were framed as biologically different than men, and women criminals as “having transgressed fundamental moral principals of womanhood,” (70) as opposed to men who were understood to be “public individuals who had simply violated the social contract.” (70) Therefore, establishing and maintaining concepts of fundamental biological inequalities between women and men, and white people and people of colour, in turn enables capitalism to persist via the legitimization of the exploitation and subordination of sexualized and raced bodies.

This is important when considering other instances of inequalities, too, especially when these are enacted within institutions, such as prisons. Davis' depiction of the fact that incarcerated women are routinely sexually assaulted by authorities within the penitentiary system (81), as another example, underscores the interrelatedness and dependance of structural inequalities. Especially when the racialized sexualization of incarcerated women is used to strengthen perceptions of inherent criminality of women of colour. These processes are caught up in weird neoliberal narratives of equal choice and opportunity on which the ongoing legitimacy of capitalism relies. In recognizing the systemic inequalities of racism and sexism, we would also have to relinquish our cultural perceptions of capitalism as an institution which enables social mobility, political recognition, and legal representation, as opposed to a system which necessitates the perpetual marginalization of racialized and sexualized bodies.