Interpretive Frame
This essay examines how public rituals of leadership—especially presidential speech and responses to dissent—function as mechanisms through which social order is symbolically produced and maintained. By comparing the leadership of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, it explores how “law and order” operates as a racialized organizing principle, how White supremacy persists through institutional signaling rather than individual prejudice, and how health inequity emerges as a visible outcome of these processes.
In democratic societies, social order is often imagined as neutral: a set of laws, procedures, and norms designed to ensure stability and fairness. When invoked rhetorically, “law and order” is typically framed as a universal good, detached from history and power. Yet sociologically, law and order is never merely procedural. It is symbolic. It communicates whose lives are valued, whose behaviors are monitored, and whose suffering is rendered tolerable.
Public rituals—especially those enacted by political leaders—play a central role in sustaining this order. Through speech, tone, and response to dissent, leaders do more than govern; they signal the moral boundaries of the social world. These signals matter profoundly for how rights are interpreted, how health is protected or neglected, and how inequality is normalized.
Law and Order as a Racialized Symbolic Frame
“Law and order” does not function simply as a commitment to rules. It operates as a racialized organizing principle that distinguishes between bodies that are presumed threatening and those presumed deserving of protection. This distinction is not usually articulated explicitly. It is communicated through emphasis, omission, and repetition.
The language of law and order becomes especially potent during moments of social unrest. Protests demanding racial justice, for example, are often reframed as threats to stability rather than expressions of democratic grievance. In these moments, the invocation of order works to reassert hierarchy: some claims are deemed legitimate, others disruptive; some lives grievable, others expendable.
Importantly, this process does not depend on overt expressions of racial animus. It is sustained through institutional signaling—through what leaders choose to condemn, what they choose to defend, and whose pain is acknowledged as real.
Leadership as Public Ritual: Contrasting Symbolic Performances
Barack Obama and Donald Trump occupied the same office, but their leadership styles functioned very differently as public rituals.
Obama’s rhetoric was marked by appeals to unity, civility, and shared democratic values. His speeches often emphasized restraint, mutual responsibility, and the moral promise of inclusion. Symbolically, this tone worked to stabilize institutions during moments of crisis. Yet stability should not be confused with transformation. Appeals to unity can coexist with profound structural inequality. The language of inclusion may soften conflict without dismantling the conditions that produce it.
In contrast, Trump’s leadership relied heavily on provocation, norm violation, and antagonistic framing. His public speech frequently divided the social world into insiders and outsiders, patriots and enemies. Responses to protest and dissent were often framed in explicitly punitive terms, reinforcing the association between order and coercion. These performances did not introduce White supremacy into American governance, but they did activate and normalize its more overt expressions.
The contrast is instructive. One leadership style emphasized symbolic repair; the other symbolic rupture. Yet both operated within a social order already structured by racial hierarchy. Neither approach, on its own, fundamentally altered the racialized distribution of vulnerability.
Protest, Policing, and the Management of Dissent
Responses to protest provide a particularly clear window into how social order is maintained. Protests against racialized violence are not only challenges to specific policies; they are challenges to the legitimacy of the existing order.
Under Obama, protests were often acknowledged as expressions of legitimate grievance, but calls for calm and order remained central. Under Trump, similar protests were frequently framed as criminal, dangerous, or un-American. In both cases, the state’s response revealed an underlying tension: dissent is tolerated only insofar as it does not threaten the symbolic foundations of order.
From a conflict perspective, this is unsurprising. Social order is not maintained by consensus alone, but by managing challenges to power. From a feminist perspective, it is also clear that whose bodies are protected and whose are exposed to harm is never random. Policing practices, protest responses, and public rhetoric all encode assumptions about vulnerability, worth, and control.
Health Inequity as an Outcome of Social Order
Health inequities make visible what symbolic rituals often obscure. Patterns of illness, mortality, and access to care reveal how social order distributes risk and protection.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed these dynamics starkly. Communities already marginalized by race and class experienced disproportionate illness and death. These outcomes were not accidental. They reflected longstanding inequalities in housing, employment, healthcare access, and environmental exposure. Leadership responses—what was emphasized, minimized, or dismissed—signaled whose lives were prioritized.
Health inequity, then, is not merely a technical failure. It is a moral and political indicator. It shows how deeply social order is structured by racialized valuations of life.
Public Rituals and the Stabilization of Injustice
One of the most difficult sociological insights is this: public rituals can stabilize injustice as easily as they can challenge it. Ceremonies, speeches, and symbolic gestures may create a sense of moral progress while leaving material conditions unchanged. Appeals to unity may reduce visible conflict while allowing inequality to persist.
White supremacy, understood as a structural and cultural force, thrives in this space. It does not require explicit endorsement. It endures through normalized practices, institutional inertia, and the quiet reassurance that existing arrangements are necessary or inevitable.
An Unsettled Question
If public rituals shape social order, and if social order shapes whose health and rights are protected, then leadership cannot be evaluated solely by policy outcomes or personal intentions. It must be understood symbolically and relationally.
The comparison between Obama and Trump reveals different modes of ritual performance, but it also raises a deeper question—one that cannot be resolved here: How deeply is White supremacy embedded in the everyday practices of governance that appear normal, lawful, and even benevolent?
To ask this question is not to deny progress or agency. It is to recognize that social order is continually made and remade through symbols, responses, and silences. Becoming ethically attentive to these processes is not a matter of ideology. It is a matter of seeing—clearly—how power operates in plain sight.
How to cite this article
Green, R. K. (2025). Examining White supremacy as a force in maintaining social order. The Emergent Self. https://theemergentself.com/examining-white-supremacy-as-a-force-in-maintaining-social-order/
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