Posted like a week ago that I was working on this, gouging interest for who wants to see it. Apparently a few of you do, and it's done, so I'm posting it here, under a burner gmail and with all metadata stripped, of course. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did furiously typing it.
Talked to three separate admins who all reassured me that if I've already submitted this, which i have, it doesn't violate academic integrity. This is for a class on cultural hegemony which I had to fucking go for lmao.
If you want to peruse the data, I copied over the spreadsheet as well. Semi-rudimentary, semi-subjective, let me know if you disagree with my assessment of these articles: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s1CY-xEkSkF7gW1HQtSn8t1fYpzOzwoN/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108740651352562331357&rtpof=true&sd=true
FOR THOSE WHO DO NOT WANT TO CLICK GOOGLE LINK: uhh ill paste the paper in the comments, i guess?
for the degoogled.
INTRODUCTION
A discrepancy is haunting America — the discrepancy of social mobility overestimation. All the cultural centers of America have entered into an economic alliance to reinforce this discrepancy: Republicans and Democrats, Fox News and CNN, Bible-Belt god-fearing cryptofascists and edgy New Atheist also-cryptofascists. Americans, by and large, drastically overestimate the frequency rate at which social mobility occurs within their own borders. Could this possibly be due to a concept many learn in their middle school social studies class: the American Dream? If one was fortunate enough not to be fed this tidbit, the American Dream is the belief that in America, regardless of where you were born or where you are currently on the socioeconomic ladder, everyone can be economically successful if they just pick themselves up by their bootstraps hard enough. In this analysis, I aim to examine whether the American Dream is a hegemonically reinforced concept, what that means exactly, why it’s important, and if so, is its reinforcement negatively affecting those who challenge the hegemonic narrative.
FRAMEWORK
Cultural hegemony is a concept synthesized by Antonio Gramsci, in which a dominant group (one with access to greater means and therefore more memetic channels due to the ability to secure them with said means) subjugates a subordinate group (one who’s lesser means cut them off from mainstream memetic channels) by propagating ideology (memes [culturally transmitted information, ideas or beliefs] that serve to justify the existence of a structure beneficial to the dominant group as a collective) throughout a culturally diverse society in order to keep the subordinate group docile. It is a kyriarchal (pertaining to a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission) function, cultural hegemony, as there are many individual hegemonic relationships, some which overlap with another, some that come into contradiction with another, and some that comprise multiple hegemonies. Since the latter concept, hegemonic sets which comprise smaller hegemonies, exists, and there is no open civil warfare within the dominant group (it would be rather obvious if tensions boiled over that much) due to conflicting interests, one would be correct to assume that there is an ur-hegemony: a prime hegemony, an original hegemony, a hegemony that encompasses all hegemony. ‘What is this hegemony?’, one may find them asking themselves. It’s rather simple, a remnant of feudalism, the very difference that makes hegemony possible in the first place: Class.
What is class? When people think of the phrase ‘class’ as a group descriptor, the first thing that comes to mind for many of my peers would probably be the classes they have to attend here. However, the class that is relevant to Gramsci’s analysis is economic class disparity. However, class is a much more complicated beast than a wealth gap. Class finds its root in “the Roman classis, a system used to divide the population into groups for taxation purposes” (Allen, 95). Whilst primarily economic, social stratification was a significant function of the classis system. The classis system was a large-scale attempt by the Romans to evaluate one’s worth to society and treat them accordingly. Thus, those who were seen as “other” were cast out. Class has manifested itself throughout history in multiple different hierarchical forms; in feudalism, it was the divine right of the king and their owning nobility over the laboring peasantry, in capitalism, it is the owning bourgeoisie over the laboring proletarians. Class hegemony is the primary function of mainstream societal memetics, in which socioeconomic bourgeoisie dominance is cacophonously drilled into the subordinate proletarian skull. One can be both grateful and mournful that this hierarchy has not shown itself to be fragile enough for phrenological calipers to be measuring said skulls instead, as capitalism seems to not be threatened by America’s class-unconscious proletariat that, for its own preservation, it must backslide into its militant emergency state of fascism as of yet.
REVIEW
For my research, the topic that I chose was evaluating American perception of social mobility within America. The reason that I had believed this topic required examination is that the concept of the American Dream; of the toiling laborer picking themselves up by their bootstraps and becoming a big shot, is a concept that I have found to stand out in hegemonic reinforcement of the current social order. As such, I believe it is necessary to examine vectors of American society that this assumed cultural reinforcement could possibly affect, to examine if there is hegemonic reinforcement of the American Dream, and whether hegemonic reinforcement of the American Dream influences American society and its perception on social class.
The first research article examined was Americans overestimate social class mobility, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This study is about the American perceptions on social mobility within their country. Kraus et al. conducted four studies on four different groups to formulate an initial hypothesis. The first was to measure beliefs about social mobility by distributing an online poll from adults in the US and comparing those to actual research statistics. In the second study, the participants (psychology undergrads at a midwestern public university) were exposed to essentialist articles arguing for the genetic basis of social class and vice versa, and then asked to share opinions regarding it. The third study, polled online, examined how relevant the mobility estimation of their self-evaluation was. Lastly, the fourth study, polled online, examined what social class Americans thought they resided in. The researchers, in their analysis, looked for correlations between age, subjective social class, political orientation, general optimism, education, occupation, and income with their beliefs on social mobility. These studies substantiate the following claims: Americans tend to overestimate the extent and frequency of which one statistically transitions social classes, those exposed to genetic explanations of social class have reduced overestimation of it (yet still tend to overestimate), younger Americans are more likely to overestimate social mobility, and higher-class Americans are more likely to overestimate social mobility. One thing remains constant throughout this study: the repeated finding that Americans, statistically, overestimate class mobility within their country.
The second research article examined was Economic inequality and belief in meritocracy in the United States, published in Research & Politics. The initial study, performed by Newman et al. in 2015, ‘merges four nationally representative surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press’, conducted in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009 respectively, to show correlation between income and belief in American meritocracy. Solt et al. use the national survey data collected by the in-article cited Newman et al. to disprove Newman et al.’s own claims and uses a more representative national polling dataset (US Religious Landscape Survey conducted by Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2007) to discern more concrete levels of analysis. Solt et al. follow Newman et al. on a contextual level in regards to average income, but individually control for age, education, sex, race, citizenship, partisan identification, political ideology, and church attendance. The results of the analysis conclude that lower-income Americans in less economically equal areas tend to further cling to the belief of American meritocracy than other levels. This is logically inconsistent with the perceived assumption, as one would assume that the rougher hand life has dealt someone, the more skeptical one would be of living in a meritocratic system.
Finally, the third research article examined was How should we think about Americans’ beliefs about economic mobility?, published in Judgment and Decision Making. Davidai and Gilovich conducted two surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The first, of two-hundred and four samples, asks the participants to contextualize the American ‘income ladder’ as either a three-rung or five-rung ladder. The second asks, of ninety-four, to describe their standing on the economic ‘ladder’: which rung they are on, how many rungs below, and how many rungs above. Davidai and Gilovich correlate the results of the questions asked in the second study with each other question asked in their analysis to obtain a more comprehensive picture. The researchers found, in the first study, that Americans tend to see income distribution in America as a five-rung ladder, when presented in opposition to a three-rung ladder. The second study reveals that a majority of the participants see American society as a six-or-more-rung ladder of income distribution, and within the five-three dichotomy, ninety-three percent of participants choose to view the economic steps as a five-rung ladder. They conclude that naturally, Americans tend to see more nuance in categorization of income levels within American society, and that forcing them to work within the framework of a three-class analysis (lower, middle, upper) may cause belief discrepancy. This result is particularly interesting. Though it may not initially seem like it correlates with the initial premise of this review, it highlights what could be a component of the hypothetical hegemonic reinforcement of the American Dream: simplification. Simplification is a common tactic of ideology: by simplifying the viewpoint (the constant use of lower-middle-upper class as a framework), one may remove nuance from a situation, allowing one to misrepresent.
Overall, the analyses reviewed appear to substantiate the initial segment of the hypothesis presented in the opener: that hegemonic reinforcement of the American Dream is present within the memetic pipelines of American society. The overestimation of social mobility alongside the general logical discrepancy of those of lower-income, as well as the findings that simplification of class frameworks (which is hegemonically reinforced) cause muddied beliefs about said frameworks illuminate a strong potential that the American Dream is hegemonically reinforced.
METHODS
To delve deeper into how Americans perceive class relations and the cultural reinforcement of class hierarchy, it seemed an imperative to investigate the perception of the true American underclass: the homeless population. The first step to reading into the perception is to investigate the media outlets Americans consume. To find the most common news media outlets, I used eBizMBA’s monthly traffic stats for news media websites for October 2021 Figure 1, with data gathered from Quantcast’s U.S. traffic ranks. I then tossed out news aggregates, such as Yahoo! News and Google News, which topped the list. Then, I took the top 10 under these aggregates (Huffington Post, CNN, New York Times, Fox News, NBC News, Daily Mail, Washington Post, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, and ABCNews), and set out to obtain data from them.
To obtain relevant data, I took to the most popular search engine, Google. Using the built-in narrowing syntax, I searched the specific sites (and if they were international, the US branch links of said sites) with the search query “homeless” tacked on afterwards. Ignoring topic hub links, I copied the links to the first five articles of each site within my query into a document, totaling 50 articles in all. I then started the process of coding.
When coding, I managed to narrow down my parsing to six variables: Is there a mention of the larger problem of the homelessness crisis, does the article frame the problems the homeless face as an individual or societal problem, is the article viewed through the lens of a homeless person or is it from another perspective, is there a mention of crime, is there a mention of drugs, and does the article encourage or discourage individual aid.
The first code is two Boolean checks. To phrase it in an elaborated, yet somewhat pythonic function manner. Does the article mention systemic issues regarding growing homelessness? If mention == true; then does the article specifically use the word “crisis” to describe growing homelessness? If crisis == true, then article = calls crisis, If crisis == false, then article = mentions problem. Else, article = no mention. If it mentions the problem, and calls it a crisis, I mark it as “calls crisis.” I believe this is an important check because the phrase “homelessness crisis” is one that is associated with concrete political positions, whereas one could mention the problem and slip around politics altogether, tricking some readers into not connecting the specific systemic problem with the larger issue of the homelessness crisis. If it mentions the problem but not the word “crisis” in association with it, it’s marked as “mentions problem”. Else, it’s marked as no mention.
For framing, I looked for how the article talks about the larger problem of homelessness as well. Do they use the socioeconomic ladder climb represented by the lucky few who wrest themselves from homelessness as a means of judging those still stuck in it? If so, that’s blame framing. Contrasted is societal framing, which talks about the factors outside of the homeless populations control. If neither apply, I marked it as no framing as to limit my dataset. Though the articles did have framing, anything outside the aforementioned criteria is most likely junk data for what I’m looking into.
For crime and drugs, I was looking for word association. Are crime or drugs mentioned in an article about homeless people? The reason I’m looking for this broad variable is a matter of subconscious association. When phrases appear together often, one’s brain tends to interlink them as related, which means there may be a subconscious association of homelessness and crime/drugs that may be warping the American perspective on homelessness.
Regarding perspective, I looked for interviews with homeless or formerly homeless people within the article. I assigned each of the aforementioned variables different indicators, ‘homeless perspective’ and ‘formerly homeless perspective’ respectively. Otherwise, they were marked as “other perspective.” And for aid, I explain said criteria within the findings themselves, as the process is hard to explain without an example of it.
From there, I got to parsing. I read through each article and ticked off the relevant variables for each. I initially jotted down my findings in a document, then transferred them to a spreadsheet. Then, I tallied up the variables within the specific outlets, and then in the broader whole of the top U.S. media outlets by traffic.
FINDINGS
After reviewing the articles acquired, coding them to the standards set previously, evidence appears to suggest a present underlying narrative aimed at associating negative connotations with the homeless underclass in America.
Of the fifty articles on homelessness reviewed, 14 (28%) mention a crime, 14 (28%) mention drugs, and between those equivalent figures, 6 (12%) mention both crime and drugs. While these statistics may seem low, it is prevalent enough for these negative connotations to form a possible hegemonic narrative. For example, a Daily Mail article in the dataset presents subtitles to one of their articles with highlights amounting to: “A homeless man tried to abduct a little girl walking with her grandmother in the Bronx by wrapping her in a comforter and snatching her from the sidewalk”, “A 16-year-old girl was strangled from behind by a homeless woman while eating sushi in Queens on October 4”, and “A cancer nurse called Maria Ambrocio was killed when a homeless man slammed her headfirst into the pavement while fleeing a robbery in Times Square on October 8” (Stieglitz & Gordon). This presentation of these individual incidents of conveniently unnamed homeless people committing brutal acts in innocuous everyday places exaggerates a systemic problem regarding mental health, homelessness, crime prevention, and rehabilitation into an epidemic of individual instances of homeless people randomly deciding to inflict violence on those around them. Read enough of these isolated incidents, and one’s brain starts to correlate them, an insidious tactic used by outlets who do not regard the much more statistically likely tragic deaths and needless brutality afflicted on the homeless by others with the same regard.
A majority of 35 (70%) articles did not feature interviews or perspectives of homeless (of which comprised 18%) or previously homeless individuals (of which comprised 12%). Concerning the latter figure, a two-thirds majority were social mobility success stories, reinforcing the American Dream. For instance, the CNN article, “How this homeless artist became a viral internet sensation” (Clark, Wilborn & Dalon), describes the individual success story of one Richard Hutchins, said homeless artist who reached stability after he climbed the rungs of the American socioeconomic ladder. ‘Surely, he got there with his own hard work alone,’ one may surmise, ‘pulling himself out of the gutter by his very own bootstraps, as foretold by the American Dream!’ However, as one analyzes the article, that notion quickly dissipates. “Hutchins had been living on Skid Row for six years when, this past Easter Sunday, he encountered Charlie "Rocket" Jabaley, rapper 2Chainz's former manager, at a grocery store in Los Angeles. Since then, Jabaley and his company, the Dream Machine, have helped transform Hutchins' life.” This, as easy to reproduce as conveniently meeting a millionaire’s former manager is for those who do not have stability, truly shows the depth of the American Dream. If only the U.S. Government would arrange a social welfare program where every homeless person in America could meet 2Chainz’s former manager, in a Shark Week-esque farce where whether they die of frostbite on the streets is decided by the vibes they give off to Monsieur Rocket, arbiter of homelessness. This is why the tactic is so insidious. It frames the incredible luck Richard Hutchins had to make a societal connection of that proportion as something others can replicate, which is like telling people to gamble their savings account on the lottery because a friend of yours won the Powerball.
17 (34%) do not encourage aid to the homeless, while 9 (18%) actively malign homelessness or homeless aid to a point of discouraging aid. While this is a minority, it is concerning that this figure is even in the double digits. What does it mean to discourage aid? For starters, the obvious instance of discouraging aid is painting the homeless class in a negative light, or individual homeless people, which usually coincides with individual crime articles as well. Another more subtle way of discouraging aid to the homeless is to highlight cases where those who give aid to the homeless do not have the best intentions. Hypothetically, if one were to read a headline such as “NYC cuts ties with one of the biggest homeless shelters in the city after it was revealed CEO collected more than $1 MILLION a year in salary and steered millions of dollars in business to other companies he controlled” as taken from the Daily Mail, one might subconsciously associate homeless aid with fraud, therefore discouraging aid to the homeless.
17 (34%) don’t even mention the broader problem of the homelessness crisis, with only 16 (48.48%) of those that do directly calling the problem a crisis. Why is mentioning the broader problem important? It’s a matter of subconscious emotional indication. There is a tactic used primarily in news articles of individual philanthropic acts to combat systemic woes, where the focus is shifted away from the systemic issue and towards the individual interaction. For example, when ABCNews publishes a feel-good article about a kind midwestern exchange of boots between a homeless person and a housed couple, such as “The Story of Why a Stranger Traded Shoes With a Homeless Woman”, one may get lost in Kelly McGuire’s saccharine account of her exchange with the homeless woman, with quotes such as "She, who had nothing, offered me these boots. HER boots. I wore them all the way home. Her name was Amy and I just cannot stop thinking about her." (ABCNews), that one may forget that there is absolutely nothing heartwarming about the fact that there are unsheltered homeless people facing winter conditions that could kill them if they don’t all coincidentally have the same experience as Amy did. There is no mention in the article about the other, not-so-fortunate homeless people, nor is there a mention of the fact that if Amy did not have this lucky encounter, there would be a chance that she would freeze to death, unsheltered. By focusing on this Facebook user’s single encounter and not broadening the scope for a single paragraph, ABCNews allows readers to gloss over the harsh reality of homelessness.
Given the ten outlets, some outlets showed significant trends in their portrayal of the American homeless. Regarding negative portrayal, I graphed out three variables: Frequency of crime mentions, frequency of drugs mentions, and rate of aid encouragement. Daily Mail mentioned crime in four of five articles (Figure 4), and actively negatively portrayed aid in all five (Figure 2). Daily Mail went out of their way to highlight the reasons we should potentially fear the homeless, with tabloid-like editorialized headlines such as “Terrifying footage shows homeless man try to abduct three-year-old girl in the Bronx: NYC is hit by homeless crime wave as vagrant population DOUBLES in a decade to 50,000” (Stieglitz & Gordon). FOX mentioned crime in three, drugs in two (Figure 3), and had a rate of aid encouragement of negative 3 within the five articles. Washington Post mentioned drugs in four, and crime in two. Lastly, and least, is NYT, which mentioned drugs in three, and had a rate of aid encouragement clocking in at negative one.
On the side of positive portrayal trends, ABCNews positively portrayed aid in all five articles, and never mentioned drugs nor crime. However, though this was not calculated and does not take away from the metric, they never mentioned the broader problem of homelessness. CNN, right behind them, did almost the same on the metrics, except for a single substance mention. Huffington Post did not mention crime or drugs in any of the five articles, but only encouraged aid at a +1 rate, as shown in figure 2.
Overall, this data shows a present media stigma against the homeless. Even though the statistics may come out to show approximately a half (44%) of the articles mentioning crime (eight articles), drugs (eight articles), or both (six articles), the methods used to obtain these articles weren’t random. They were designed to play off the search engine optimization algorithm that the largest search engine worldwide makes use of, meaning that a quarter of the most prominent articles in the most prominent American news sites attach negative stigma to homeless people. This can account for a warping in American views on class structure. Even when those who were homeless are positively portrayed, their climb from the depths of poverty is used to reinforce the concept of the American Dream, warping the rate at which Americans perceive social mobility to occur.
CONCLUSION
Originally, the goal of this analysis was to discover if the concept of the American Dream being possibly hegemonically enforced is one of the reasons that the average American’s perspective on social class has been proven to be warped. Reviewing past data from other researchers, I formed the hypothesis going into my findings that there is a possibility of the American Dream being culturally reinforced, which could be a cause of the warped viewpoints. Thus, the only logical step was to then peruse media narratives on those who’s very existence challenges the American Dream: the American homeless. Looking through the data, and finding evidence of negative connotations attached to homeless people in nearly half of the articles I obtained off an algorithm specifically designed to feed billions content each and every day, it is safe to say: yes, the American Dream is likely hegemonically reinforced, and it is most likely one of the factors behind the overestimations of class mobility in America, and this reinforcement negatively affects those who are a threat to the narrative.
REFERENCES
Allen, B. J. (2011). Social Class Matters. In Difference matters: Communicating social identity (p. 95). essay, Waveland Press.
Kraus, M. W., & Tan, J. J. X. (2015). Americans overestimate social class mobility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 58, 101–111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2015.01.005
Solt, F., Hu, Y., Hudson, K., Song, J., & Yu, D. “E. (2016). Economic inequality and belief in meritocracy in the United States. Research & Politics, 3(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168016672101
Davidai, S., & Gilovich, T. (2018). How should we think about Americans’ beliefs about economic mobility?. Judgment and Decision Making, 13(3), 297-304.
Pelletiere, N. (2016, January 7). The Story of Why a Stranger Traded Shoes With a Homeless Woman. ABCNews. https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/story-strangers-traded-shoes/story?id=36140813
Thaler, S. (2021, November 23). NYC cuts ties with one of biggest homeless shelters after CEO got more than $1M in salary a year. Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10235463/NYC-cuts-ties-one-biggest-homeless-shelters-CEO-got-1M-salary-year.html
Stieglitz, B., & Gordon, J. (2021, October 12). NYC is hit by homeless crime wave: victims include cancer nurse killed by fleeing mugger. Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10080711/NYC-hit-homeless-crime-wave-victims-include-cancer-nurse-killed-fleeing-mugger.html
Clark, A., Wilborn, I., & Dolan, L. (2021, August 9). How this homeless artist became a viral internet sensation. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/richard-hutchins-homeless-artist/index.html
“If only the U.S. Government would arrange a social welfare program where every homeless person in America could meet 2Chainz’s former manager, in a Shark Week-esque farce where whether they die of frostbite on the streets is decided by the vibes they give off to Monsieur Rocket, arbiter of homelessness.”
Banger line :rosa-salute:
This is excellent shit, great work! 💯