there may be more later, in the book, but so far I'm not getting the sense that robin actually asks much about what the "lower orders" are actually thinking or doing. his focus really is on the reactionary and conservative thinkers - their writing - and not on what their opposition is doing, thinking, writing.
but he does rely on the assumption that we know what has happened, that some of them join up with the conservative cause, rally around reactionary ideas. for his purposes, we don't need to know a whole lot about the details of this interaction, only that it happens.
iow, he's not actually interested in the details of how white privilege works, psychologically. he doesn't want to explore writings on the part of these folks, for example, that might demonstrate that they get pleasure out of lording it over blacks. that's not the goal of his book. he's just willing to assume that the reader agrees with the basic premise.
that's partly why I have a problem with his book. Robin's writing style reveals an author who is only abstractly and intellectually interested in liberation. Which is fine in academia - expected even. It is sort of like Justin's admission, long ago, that although he'd written a lengthy paper about something to do with women's oppression , he'd never actually read feminists on the topic. That's about the same way "husbands/wives" as the pair bond representing gender oppression is being used here. It's merely an intellectual interest, an academic issue, only leveraged to have an argument over "what's a conservative?"
but still, if gender subordination is a general operation, then presumably, being a married man, he and his wife can now explain how she's lorded over by him and he can explain how he gets pleasure in lording it over her. He can explain how he makes her toil much, for little reward. etc. This would be imperative on his account of systems of subordiantion as being highly personal, about interpersonal relations.
But this is unlikely since most academics writing books aren't going to see their own lives as illustrative of the issues they are talking about. Oppression - the relations of subordination in a marriage - happen over there, someplace else, with other kinds of people.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)