crt: key writings that informed the movement (pt. 2)

an ignoble (and ignorable) anecdote

I need to set the stage.

WOST 100, Introduction to Women's Studies. This is my first women's studies class. We are one-third of the way through the semester. I am just coming to the realization that it is possible to study things that matter in college. The time is 7:50 p.m., Tuesday night, the beginning of October, and this is what we are discussing.

1848.

Seneca Falls.

The Declaration of Sentiments.

Abolition.

Women's rights.

I am engaged, fascinated, involved, intrigued, and above all, angry. I didn't know there even was a fight for women's right to vote.

(My history books had always said things like, "The 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote." As though it had always been intended that women should vote, and it was some baffling and somewhat embarrassing oversight that had prevented them from voting until that point, when someone noticed the error and corrected it. Kind of like a Community Chest card in Monopoly: The bank error was in men's favor, but don't worry, we fixed it.)

(Slavery was similar: Oops, it was the South, they just didn't understand, but the North came in and freed the slaves and gave them the right to vote [well, not all of them, not the women] and then things would have been good, except those darned Southerners couldn't get their heads around the idea that we're all equal now, so we had Brown v. Board of Education and then the Civil Rights Act, but now, now everything is good.)

We are talking about the conflict between those who wanted to push for abolition and those who wanted to push for women's emancipation. I raise my hand. (I'm a hand-raiser, inherently; others generally speak when they have something to say, but I always want to be recognized before I begin speaking. This is a detriment in many circumstances.) I am about to say that the conflict is engineered, a product of society, because as long as you can convince people that oppressions are discrete, you can hope that they will battle each other rather than the system.

My professor ignores my hand-raising (as I said, this trait of mine is not a helpful one) and says: "In the end, the mistake the First Wave women made was allowing concerns about abolition and African-Americans' rights to interfere with their commitment to getting the vote."

Several people nod in agreement. I look around the classroom, and I realize something. Every person in that room is a white woman. Every one of them. Except me.

Usually I'm aware of the fact that I am the only non-white person in a room. It happens all the time. For many of the classes for my MA, I was not only the only person in the room who wasn't white, I was the only person in the room who didn't have blue eyes. Indiana, you know? But that time, I'd almost forgotten, because we were supportive. We were raising each others' consciousnesses. We were sisters.

You know what screws up sisterly relationships? Pointing out that the system favors your sisters and ignores you.

You see, as my professor explained to me later (years later, actually, when I had to take a class with her again to complete my women's studies minor), you have to make a choice. It's the same choice that they had to make at Seneca Falls: You make the choice between rights for "minorities" (she said it like that, with the finger quotes and all) or rights for women.

"But both of those ways screw me," I pointed out.

She looked at me, and in that moment, I could feel my grade dropping. Then she said, "That's the problem with some people. They always want their problems to be special."

You remember what I said back there at the beginning? How, above all else, my women's studies classes made me angry?

That's still true.

---

In "A Critique of 'Our Constitution Is Color-Blind,'" Neil Gotanda categorizes the ways that Constitutional law has interpreted race, arguing that primarily, the Supreme Court has tended toward what he labels "the formal-race approach," which means that "strict scrutiny" is required "to evaluate any racial classification" (268). Anything related to race is regarded with extreme suspicion without any consideration of the actual history of race in the United States; from the "strict scrutiny" perspective, affirmative-action programs and Jim Crow are all in the same category, and, as Gotanda points out, this stance actively supports the continuation of white supremacy. Cheryl Harris makes a related argument in "Whiteness as Property," suggesting that whiteness not only leads to property ownership but is itself a form of property: As the law legitimated the categorization of black people as property, it simultaneously created the category of whiteness as property as something that free human beings had.

The basis for both Gotanda and Harris's arguments lies in the racial history of the United States; Harris explicitly states, "The construction of white identity and the ideology of racial hierarchy were intimately tied to the evolution and expansion of the system of chattel slavery" (278). This—the idea that racialization in the United States is an exceptional and unique process—is a claim that I have encountered on multiple occasions and in various articles and books.

The thing is, I am unsure about this on two levels. I am not convinced that the evidence fully supports this claim; while the British Empire (to my knowledge) generally skirted the bounds of engaging in full-fledged chattel slavery, travel and adventure narratives of the 18th century clearly indicate the racialization of the Other, both in the form of the "noble savage" and of the "wild beast." The other, more significant concern that I have about that analysis of racialization is that it over-simplifies the issue of race, ignores the issue of gender, and glosses over the fundamental bases of hierarchy, thereby promoting conflicts among non-dominant groups. Harris argues that whiteness-as-property "functioned…to stifle class tensions among whites" (284), but I would argue that each "dominant attribute" (whiteness, maleness, citizenship, and so forth) functions, among those who possess it, to smother possibilities of collusion among or between non-dominant groups.

In her exploration of how intersectionality creates a fundamentally different experience for women of color from the experience of white women or men of color, Kimberle Crenshaw addresses the frequent silencing of discussion about rape or abuse of women of color, both from white feminism and from anti-racist activists. Crenshaw argues that the singular focus, either on "women" as a monolithic entity that uses white women as its baseline, or on "people of color" as a monolithic entity that uses black men as its baseline, makes invisible the experiences of women of color. It is the engagement with anti-sexist or anti-racist work itself that directly causes this silencing, as white feminists, in an effort to draw mainstream concern, try to avoid the implication that domestic violence is a problem that only happens to women of color, while anti-racism activists, in an effort to resist stereotyping of men of color as violent, also try to avoid the implication that domestic violence is a problem that happens to women of color.

Those approaches, as well as the focus on slavery alone as the creator and legitimization of white supremacy in the United States, all reinforce the idea that a choice must be made, wherein either gender or race must be the organizing principle of domination and thus the primary battle. However, none of the axes of domination are discrete; each relies upon the others to keep it in place, and all maintain each other. Harris, in discussing whiteness as property, remarks that "it does not mean that all whites will win, but simply that they will not lose, if losing is defined as being on the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy" (287). It is this that gives each person in the system a vested interest in maintaining systems of oppression—while many people may give up on reaching the top, they can ensure that they are not at the bottom.

This is not to say that all hierarchies are equal in power and effect. I am not arguing that gender, race, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and so forth are identical; indeed, I would say that they have different significance and impact for eras and individuals. However, I am suggesting that a focus solely and entirely upon one results in an incomplete analysis of hierarchy. Thus, while Gotanda and Harris both provide a number of valuable and thought-provoking points, both analyses feel slightly lacking, not least because it is difficult to see how we can fit people of color who are not black into them. Crenshaw's inclusion of gender (and other groups, including those who do not speak English) as an area of analysis provides a more complete picture, but Crenshaw uses domestic violence and rape to illustrate her point, where Gotanda and Harris seem to be attempting more universally applicable arguments.

I would have liked to see a theoretical argument in the nature of Gotanda's or Harris's that included gender as one of the lenses for perspective. Although detailed examples often (as in Crenshaw's article, for instance) brilliantly illustrate exactly how oppression plays out in society, there seems to be something of a vacancy in the realm of theoretical discussion of the roles that gender and race play in the overall systems of hierarchical oppression.