Ruth Frankenberg writes: "Yet the challenge has remained that of how to, in Audre Lorde's terms, 'dismantle the master's house' while, not only do we live in it but it, by some architectural trick, lives in us" The author is speaking about race and identity but the analogy works for ideology writ large. This is a great way to think of the operation of hegemony, the internalization of various logics and discourses to the point they constitute consent. In this sense, capitalism "lives in us", and yet the task of dismantling remains.
And the process, the path of disidentification with what appears to be, is often throughout life a traumatic rupture, a process that leaves scars. It would be nice if someone came up with a way to treat these psychosocial maladies on a mass scale and better yet if they did it fast. Like yesterday. I remember discussions back in the day of putting LSD in the water supply and crazy shit like that to "turn everyone on". Of course Religion is a form of this mass effect, if not healing at least palliative care and The Church a site for mass therapy of a sort. But disabusing Homo Economicus of the wonders of Free Enterprise is going to be tricky; folks identify as entrepreneurs, as hard workers, and they believe all the shit about competition and incentives and moral hazard in a simplistic, social Darwinian way.
The Master's House is also wrapped in Whiteness. As James Baldwin wrote: "No one was white before he/she came to America". So now you have two unmarked categories; white Christian, in need of marking. As Frankenberg says: "We need a more complex understanding of the process of "whitening'. And of free market identity.
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