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Ronald Takaki's Iron Cages

1069 Words5 Pages

Race, gender, and class, while commonly thought of as separate, are deeply intertwined with one-another. In his book Iron Cages, Ronald Takaki explores and lays out both the ways in which these three connected the ways they are not and the underlying reasons as to why. Following will be the analysis of the three in pairs, so as to better break down the comparisons among the three in relation to one another, concluded with the intersection of all three. Beginning with race and gender, it goes without says that masculinity was emphasized when referring to peoples of color, and femininity was emphasized when referring to white people. This appears to have been used as a way to paint people of color as threats whilst maintaining the white person …show more content…

Washington (212). He rose up the ranks to become an honored guest and a leader in the Southern communities due to his more palatable ideas on race relations, primarily that black people should be thankful for the chance to earn money working in the factory and to not insist on desegregating social areas of society. His focus on the beauty of Southern culture and the romanticization of the relationship between the black man who built society and the white man benefiting along with the promise that black people would be “faithful”, “patient”, and “unresenting” in relation to white people allowed him to increase his class (213). While people of color have generally been at the bottom of the class hierarchy, people like Washington show that there was the possibility for a few to become exceptions to the rule, as Takaki points …show more content…

Both race and gender influence class, with women and people of color belonging to the lower classes and men and white people taking the higher ones. Through this, it is obvious how the woman of color has historically been the most oppressed and the white man the most privileged. So with Iron Cages Takaki was able to show not only how white men used republicanism to control women or to control people of color, he was able to show how all three systems worked together to create intricate networks of privilege, and to point to their

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