Structural Leveraging: The Case of Race and America’s World War II Military

Does leveraging necessarily have to be intentional, conscious, explicit, and occur primarily at the individual level?  Or can it also be habitual, unconscious, taken-for-granted, even systemic or structural?  In its early and promising life as a concept, leveraging – whether called ethnic, socio-ethnic, sociocultural, or something else – often seems to stem from individuals’ clear and conscious calculations – to make political positions more palatable, to gain votes, to maintain power, and so forth.  But must it always be so? This paper will attempt to address this question through a close analysis of race and America’s World War II military.  Drawing on extensive archival research and the theoretical work of William Sewell and others, I will argue that the military’s entire structure – from its segregated units and camps to the cultural logic that sought to explain, justify, and naturalize these policies – was a massive leveraging scheme that promoted some minorities and demoted others.  For example, all blacks faced segregation while many Asians, Native Americans, and Mexicans did not.  If demotion was conscious, promotion seems to have been much less so.  Indeed, military and political leaders crafted race policies with African Americans very much in mind and often – not always, but often – with little sense or concern about how they might impact or “elevate” other so-called nonwhites.  This paper will suggest, then, the need to broaden the leveraging concept to include a structural dimension.