accepted and privileged than other orientations. And since notions of success and happiness are intricately tied to income level in contemporary US culture, one can see that working‐class people hold less power than middle‐class people (and that middle‐class people in turn hold less power than do people of the upper classes). One need merely glance at the demographic makeup of Congress or the boardrooms of most major American corporations to see that wealthy heterosexual white men dominate these positions of power. American films over the past century also disproportionately focus on stories of heterosexual white men finding happiness and success.
In everyday conversation, less privileged groups are frequently referred to as minority groups. Such a term positions these groups as marginal to the dominant group that holds greater power. The term also implies that the disempowered groups are smaller numerically than the dominant group – an implication that may not necessarily be true. Census statistics indicate that there are more women living in the United States than men, yet men hold far more social power and privilege than do women. Current population projections are forecasting that, in many states, white citizens will be outnumbered by other racial or ethnic groups some time in the near future. Hence, the term “minority group” more often refers to types of people with less social power than to any group’s actual size.
One common method of keeping minority communities on the margins of power has been to pit their struggles for equality against one another, while the dominant group continues to lead. Another method has been to exclude members of minority groups from being considered “American” in the first place. (The “birther” controversy about Barack Obama circulated by then‐Presidential candidate Donald Trump is one rather obvious example of this tactic.) The creation of a sense of national identity consistently involves social negotiations of who gets included and who gets excluded. Identity in general becomes more fixed when it is able to define what it is not: someone who is white is not black; a man is not a woman; a heterosexual is not a homosexual. America gains a greater sense of itself through such juxtapositions: it is not a British colony, it is not the various nations of Native Americans, and it is not the other countries that make up the American continents (which can also lay claim to the name “America”). Consequently, if certain population groups can be considered “alienable,” then it becomes easier to feel that they are not entitled to those “inalienable rights” that “We the People of the United States of America” have supposedly been granted.
While women, homosexuals, and people of non‐white heritage have made tremendous gains in social power during the last few decades, white heterosexual men still dominate the corridors of power in America. Many people feel that this is “how things ought to be,” that this is simply the “natural order of things.” In theoretical terms, considering white heterosexual males obviously or essentially better (stronger, more intelligent, etc.) is called an ideological assumption. Ideology is a term that refers to a system of beliefs that groups of people share and believe are inherently true and acceptable. Most ideological beliefs are rarely questioned by those who hold them; their beliefs are naturalized because of their constant and unquestioned usage. They are, to use a word made famous in the Declaration of Independence, “self‐evident.” No one needs to explain these ideas, because supposedly everyone knows them.
When an ideology is functioning optimally within a society or civilization, individuals are often incapable of recognizing that these ideas are socially constructed opinions and not objective truths. (In fact, a Pew Research Center study released in June of 2018 found that many Americans – of all political stripes – have trouble distinguishing between facts and opinions in the news.) Cultural theorists call these prevailing opinions and assumptions dominant ideologies, because they tend to structure in pervasive ways how a culture thinks about itself and others, who and what it upholds as worthy, meaningful, true, and valuable. The United States was founded on and still adheres to the dominant ideology of white patriarchal capitalism. This does not mean that wealthy white men gather together in some sort of conspiracy to oppress everyone else in the nation, although such groups have been formed throughout American history in order consolidate and control power. Rather, white patriarchal capitalism is an ideology that permeates the ways most Americans think about themselves and the world around them, regardless of their own race, class, gender, sexuality, or ability. It also permeates most American films.
White patriarchal capitalism entails several distinct aspects. The first – white – refers to the ideology that people of Western and Northern European descent are somehow better than are people whose ancestry is traced to other parts of the world. Patriarchal (its root words mean “rule by the father”) refers to a culture predicated on the belief that men are the most important members of society, and thus entitled to greater opportunity and access to power. As part of American patriarchy, sexuality is only condoned within heterosexual marriage, a situation that considers all other sexualities taboo and reinforces women’s role as the child‐bearing and child‐raising property of men. The third term – capitalism – is also a complex one, which multiple volumes over many years have attempted to dissect and define, both as an economic system and as a set of interlocking ideologies.
For the working purposes of this introduction, capitalism as an ideology can be defined as the belief that success and worth are measured by one’s material wealth. This fundamental aspect of capitalism has been so ingrained in the social imagination that visions of the American Dream almost always invoke financial success: a big house, big car, yacht, closets full of clothes, etc. Capitalism (both as an economic system and as an ideology) works to naturalize the concept of an open market economy, that the competition of various businesses and industries in the marketplace should be unhindered by governmental intrusion. (The US film industry, a strong example of capitalist enterprise, has spent much of its history trying to prevent governmental oversight.) One of the ideological strategies for promoting capitalism within the United States has been in labeling this system a “free” market, thus equating unchecked capitalism with the philosophies of democracy. Capitalism often stands in opposition to the ideology and practice of communism, an economic system wherein the government controls all wealth and industry in order to redistribute that income to the population in an equitable fashion. (The history of the twentieth century showed that human greed usually turns the best communist intentions into crude dictatorships.) Socialism, an economic and ideological system mediating capitalism and communism, seeks to structure a society’s economic system around governmental regulation of industries and the equitable sharing of wealth for certain basic necessities, while still maintaining democratic values and a free market for most consumer goods. Since the United States was founded under capitalism, American culture has largely demonized socialism and communism as evil and unnatural, even though many US government programs can be considered socialist in both intent and practice.
The ideology of white patriarchal capitalism works not only to naturalize the idea that wealthy white men deserve greater social privilege, but to protect those privileges by naturalizing various beliefs that degrade other groups – thus making it seem obvious that those groups should not be afforded the same privileges. Some argue that capitalism can help minority groups gain power. If a group is able to move up the economic ladder through capitalist means, then that group can claim for itself as much power, access, and opportunity as do the most privileged Americans. As persuasive as this argument is (as can be seen by its widespread use), capitalism has often worked against various minority groups throughout US history. The wealthy have used their position to consolidate and insure their power over multiple generations, often at the expense of the rest of the population. Since this wealthy group has almost exclusively been comprised of white men and their families, the dissemination of racist and sexist stereotypes has helped keep people of color and women from moving ahead economically. To use an early example, arguing that individuals of African descent were not fully human allowed slavery to continue to thrive as an economic arrangement that benefited whites. Today, attitudes of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism work to create in corporate culture a glass ceiling, a metaphoric term that describes how everyone but white heterosexual
