Master Status

We did not get a lot of time to talk about Master Status in class, but it is a concept we will be revisiting throughout the semester.

When something becomes your Master Status, it is then the first thing about you that people notice. If you are the default--white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender, etc.--those are your master statuses, and because of those, positive or neutral assumptions are made about you. You are given the benefit of the doubt; people get to know you a little better before they label you. When you have something about you that is different--you are a person of color, female, queer, disabled, fat, gender non-conforming, etc.--that/those become your Master Status(es). Everything you do and say gets filtered through our associations we have for those labels. Think about the "My Gay Lifestyle" article, and how he pokes fun of this.

If you are a woman, everything you do and say gets filtered through expectations for how a woman is "supposed to" look and act. Are you saying that because you are a woman? When you act like that, does it fit in with my beliefs about women? Or are you acting against my expectations for you? If you are a woman, and pretty, and blonde...what do people assume about you? That you are dumb. Is that fair?

If you are not white, your race or ethnicity is probably your Master Status, or what people notice about you first. As soon as people notice you are not white, everything you do and say is filtered through the associations we have been socialized to have for your race: you do not just eat breakfast, you eat breakfast as an Asian-American. Or you cross the street as a Latina--in that case you are not white, and you are female, with those interacting assumptions.

As you read in the BBC article, the Master Status can even confer meaning to the people you are around. In that article, they talked about a study in which women were asked to look at a photograph of a man and woman standing together, then rate the man using 50 available words. As you remember, when the man was pictured with an obese woman, they were more likely to rate the man as "miserable, self-indulgent, passive, shapeless, likes food, depressed, weak, unattractive, insignificant and insecure."

When you are interacting with people, you are making associations, positive and negative, with each other and your varying Master Statuses. When people act in ways that conform with our beliefs, and expectations, based on those Master Statuses, that feels comfortable to us. We know how to relate to each other because we know how we fit in with them, and rank compared to them. We still know our place in the world. But when we get evidence to the contrary, that people do not meet our expectations, it is uncomfortable. You don’t know what to expect from that person, and you don't know how you relate to them, or how you rank compared to them.

If you think about the War Prayer story, what happened there? The congregation did not want to have to change the way they thought about themselves, so they demonized the messenger. They discredited him so they would not have to look inward to see they were wrong. Can you see that is how we hold on to some of our socially constructed beliefs? It is hard for us to see past those labels, that Master Status, so we hold on to them. We rely on Confirmation Bias to provide evidence for our beliefs, and we ignore evidence to the contrary.

Some people actively ask us to see past the Master Status they have been given, like Ben Mattlin asks us to see he is not defined by Spinal Muscular Atrophy. In November 2011, ABC's 20/20 aired a program called "Children of the Plains" in which they showed the Lakota Indian Reservation in South Dakota. They showed how the reservation is struggling with issues of crime, unemployment, alcoholism and crumbling schools. The students of one of those schools got together and made a video response saying they were more than just those images--they were more than just poverty and struggles. This was a conscious effort on their part to say they did not want to be boiled down to a negative Master Status based on those associations. Below is the video they made. What do you think?