The American political and media classes have a unity fetish.

Every anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, every election, every Fourth of July, and every time a high-profile politician dies, public discourse is awash in calls for unity and misty-eyed remembrances of times when the country was allegedly unified.

The death of President George HW Bush provides the latest example. USA Today gushed over Bush’s supposed commitment to unity. The Hill celebrated Bush and his son, President George W Bush, for apparently uniting the nation following the patriarch’s death. Fox urged members of Congress “to hold on to this feeling of unity ignited by our 41st president when tempted to return to business as usual in the swamp”.

It’s far from clear that unity is inherently desirable. It can be useful, for example, during a strike or a struggle against oppression or when rallying around a broadly beneficial social goal. Yet pleas for unity can just as easily be ways of advocating silent acquiescence to a brutal status quo.

Consider the New York Times’ claim that Bush’s funeral provided “fleeting unity” for the nation as “many of the thousands” present were “looking forward to unity and cohesion”. Pairing “unity” with “cohesion” arguably suggests a military-style hierarchy that swallows up difference. What the unity sermons coming from politicians and the media fail to offer is an account of the varied, context-specific messages underlying appeals for unity.

Ever-broadening chasms exist. In 1980, the wealthiest 1% had a 10% share of income; this grew to 20% by 2016

But assume for the sake of argument that some degree of unity is necessary for a society to function. America’s unity shibboleth is marred by a fixation on ruling class pageantry and discourse. For instance, CNN claimed that Bush was able to “perform one last, posthumous service to his country this week by orchestrating a rare moment of unity and a short-term truce in the rancorous politics swirling around the crisis-stricken Trump presidency” by ensuring that the invitees to his funeral included President Trump. Locating unity in elite spectacles and rhetoric overlooks the structures that guarantee Americans are materially divided, namely capitalism and institutionalized racism and patriarchy.

Ever-broadening chasms exist between Americans’ economic standing. In 1980, the wealthiest 1% had approximately a 10% share of income and this grew to 20% by 2016 while the bottom 50% income share fell from more than 20% in 1980 to 13% in 2016. Between 1965 and 2016, CEO pay went from about 20 times that of workers’ to 271 times greater. As financial inequality has grown, so has the life expectancy gap between people at the top and people at the bottom, with the richest 1% now expected to live 10 to 15 years longer than the poorest 1%. Social programs could close these divides but since 2001 America has spent $5.9tn on devastating wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria.

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Economic gaps persist along racial lines as well. The rate of poverty among Native Americans is almost double the national average. Latinx people are poorer now relative to white people than in 1970. While black people have slightly narrowed the schism in that period, they remain poorer than whites in every income group: at the high end, black people’s earnings are 68% of those of whites, at the median level it’s 65%, and at the lowest stratum African Americans earn 54% of what their white counterparts do.

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Racial divisions find expression at other, related sites such as the prison system, where black and Latinx people are overrepresented. Profound racial and ethnic inequalities characterize housing, employment and health.

Nor is there much gender unity. Women earn 82% of what men earn. It’s legal to fire someone for being LGBTQ+ in 30 states and 32 states do not have a law that clearly prohibits discrimination against transgender people.

The function of describing America as unified is to obscure all of this disunity. Calls for Americans to engage in the performative unity of the sort that followed Bush’s death are calls for obedient submission: their subtext is that Americans are all in it together and that agitators who might disrupt the supposed harmony – by, say, fighting to challenge the ruling class that benefits from the inequality and oppression – should be seen as disreputable troublemakers.

That’s why it’s necessary to press the mute button on the unity talk.