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The BPP’s heyday was extraordinarily short. In less than 10 years, the party fell apart under repressive pressure from the government and ethical inconsistency from its leadership, which centralized authority and became increasingly punitive and masculinist. Considering what the state put this group of people through, it’s no surprise that some Panthers turned on one another: They were infiltrated by government agents planning to imprison and kill them. The RAM milieu was right about that (and it had a much higher survival rate), but it’s objectively mistaken to see the Black Panther Party as a failure. It synthesized political currents from the Civil War and the Cold War, and the model it produced took the world by fire. In the Panthers’ analysis, they combined the psychological heat of anticolonial struggle with an ice-cold understanding of capitalism as a worldwide impersonal system. That’s what allowed them to uphold the seemingly contradictory truths of Black Power and Marxist universalism at the same time. Strategically, it allowed them to understand that changing hearts and minds could never abolish global capitalism. The Panthers showed that the war was always already here at home. The question was how to fight and win.

— Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris

These were bad days for working people. You could tell because the stock market was going up.

— Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris

Based on an extensive study of law and business (MBA) students in an American university in which she used the concept of habitus developed by Pierre Bourdieu, Debra J. Schleef (2006: 21) showed that the key motivational factor for attending professional schools was students’ desire for “maintaining a possibly precarious class status.” As they internalized the tastes, values, context, and world view of their immediate family, they did not aspire to be professionals because of “an ardent interest or perceived aptitude in these fields,” but because of “a deep-seated economic source—the need for the credentials that provide the salary, prestige, and lifestyle attendant on the upper-middle class” (Schleef, 2006: 20). Things really had not changed that much from the late 1970s, when Richard P. Coleman and Lee Rainwater (1978) wrote that earning a substantial income was the principal determinant of career choice : “[t]he status attached to given schooling levels is a function of the realistic observations people make of how much money those in different educational categories actually earn” (qtd. in Brint, 1994: 42).

Professionalism amounted to “[t]he process of reproducing a class position” across generations; students “did not consider the advantages of a given occupation separate from its social class position” (Schleef, 2006: 20, 45, 202, 203). And once at their respective schools, they allowed themselves not only to be convinced to take career paths that were presented as “appropriate to their elite status,” but also to see such choices “as inevitable.” Students “modif[ied] [any] earlier entrepreneurial and anti-corporate attitudes to value more traditional big business goals,” easily moving “from the amorphous careers they were considering at entry to careers in investment banking, consulting, or corporate law in large firms.” Professionalism became a “remarkable” form of “class continuity,” where individuals, as they progressed in their chosen occupation, learned to embrace the logic, attitudes, choices, and procedures of that occupation so as to ensure that they remained within the social-class level to which they had become accustomed and to which they now had an even stronger personal allegiance.

— The politics of professionalism by Juris Dilevko

Though white women continue to be hindered by gender inequity in academic libraries, whiteness still enables them to access and wield hegemonic privilege and power. Such access, paired with the belief that professional success is the result of individual hard work and merit, lends itself to white feminist neoliberal thinking. As Deborah Hollis noted  nearly two decades ago, “the ‘good old boys’ are turning into the ‘good old girls,’” and this continued concentration of whiteness at the top solidifies an institutional structure predicated on marginalizing, assimilating, and/or silencing the “other.” White feminist leaders, for whom a commitment to social justice is an integral component of their cultivated progressive identity, use their authority to reinforce a professional culture that avoids or elides explicit discussions of race and racism.

— Topographies of Whiteness by Gina Schlesselman-Tarango (Series on Critical Race Studies and Multiculturalism in LIS, #2)