Dominants sustain privilege through subordinate compliance that coercion alone would not secure

Evidence

Sustenance of the dominant group’s privileged standing in an unequal social relationship depends critically on the continued presence of subordinates and their compliance with the institutionalized transfer of resources to dominants. Recalcitrant subordinates who must have resources dragged from them through clenched fingers are more costly to control and must be guarded more vigilantly. Subordinates, for their part, are cognizant of their weaker resource base and their subsequent vulnerability. In a world in which uncertainty hovers menacingly, these realities make compliance less risky than resistance, but at the same time subordinates bear the everyday costs of compliance in their foreshortened opportunities and quality of life. The task for dominants is to tip these delicately posed alternatives in the direction of ready compliance. In this context, incendiary hostility is counterproductive. Dominants prefer to befriend, love, or reason with the subordinates on whose cooperation they depend. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 668

Categorization

• QUESTION: Contrast this claim with Allport’s contact hypothesis: if dominants prefer warmth as a control strategy, what distinguishes genuine attitude change from managed compliance?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 668
• XREF: connects to: The willing self-exploiter is an absolute slave without a master — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 14