When I first learned about sexism, racism, etc. I learned that they were structured essentially as layer cakes. There were two groups (more or less): a privileged group on top and an oppressed/marginalized/disadvantaged group on the bottom. As my understanding of interlocking axes of identity and the complexity of intersectionality deepened, the layer cakes might have gotten mashed together, crisscrossed, and warped a bit, but they were still recognizably there.
Such a view, however, misses the point of oppressive systems. Functionally, they are pyramid schemes. Their entire purpose is to extract labor and wealth from as many people as possible while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of as few people as can be gotten away with. This is why they are so flexible and hard to dismantle. Group categories and stereotypes that purport to be natural and unchanging are actually constantly adapting, becoming whatever the system needs to keep the wealth flowing upward while preventing so many people from getting fed up that they overthrow the whole thing.
In order to accomplish this, pyramids need at least three tiers, ideally more. Because the tip of the pyramid contains so few people, a sizable percentage of the rest must be convinced to support the status quo despite the fact that labor and wealth is also being extracted from them. This is most easily seen in the antebellum South, where creating a common racial identity for poor and wealthy Whites made it easier for wealthy White plantation owners to exploit basically everyone (albeit to different extents). To this day, most people of all races are worse off in areas where White supremacy took the greatest hold. A similar pattern exists for gender. The traditional role the patriarchy offers to most men (characterized by glorification of violence, denial of vulnerability, and sole responsibility for protecting and providing for the family) is that of cannon fodder, bodies to be used up in wars and mines and other dangerous and dehumanizing jobs in order to create wealth for a small subset of elites. Sure, a man may get to lord his relatively higher status over women and children, but that’s quite different from actually being well off.
The key to an oppressive system’s stability lies in its ability to manipulate the middle tier of people, those who belong to a privileged group, but are not the primary recipients of concentrated wealth. These people are not well off relative to what they would experience in a society that prioritized everyone thriving. They are only well off in comparison to the lowest tier, whose condition has been artificially worsened in order to extract wealth. The privileges given to the middle tier are partly a sop to discourage rebellion, but I would argue that they also function to create precariousness. They are conditional benefits that can be taken away (in whole or in part) from anyone who steps too far out of line. In this sense, their potential loss functions as much as a stick as their gain functions as a carrot. At all costs, an oppressive system must prevent the gap between the lowest tier and middle tier from closing, for if the lowest tier were to be guaranteed safety, treated with dignity, and have their basic needs met, there would be little left for the middle tier to fear.
The strongest oppressive systems are the ones that find a way to put as many people as possible in this middle tier. Letting people sink completely to the bottom is risky, after all, because there are no sticks left to use. Far better to hold out just enough hope of rising to keep people’s eyes fixed on scrambling over one another to get ahead—while simultaneously kicking down against their justified fear of falling. From this perspective, all the different -isms form a coherent whole. Each is yet one more way for a person to have enough privilege to be in that middle tier. The middle is not a solid band, but rather a fractal of struggle as individuals are incentivized to leverage different aspects of their identity against each other. When I as a White woman lean into racism to attempt to outmaneuver someone who is leaning into sexism to outmaneuver me, these are not categorically different things. They are different manifestations of the same corrosive system—one that incentivizes us to justify inhumane treatment of our fellow human beings for the sake of concentrating wealth in the hands of a few.
Those of us who seek to build a more just world need a more nuanced understanding of the system before us. By obscuring how oppressive systems work, the layer cake model makes it harder to build alliance and show people how a more just world will benefit them. It also enables those at the top of the pyramid to evade demands for justice by deflecting the costs downward onto people who are superficially similar to them but functionally very different. As long as they are permitted to do that, the relative positioning of people in the middle tier may shift, but the work of creating a more just system remains undone. A more accurate analysis of what we face is crucial to dismantling it.
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