"Race," Writing, and Difference

"Race," Writing, and Difference
Edited by Henry Louis Gates

This book is a hot mess.

And yet, like the protagonists described in every song I know of with that title…it still kind of works.

The book consists of a collection of essays by various people, with an introduction by Gates. Those parts? They're the mess. At the end, though, there are responses to the collection. Those responses are the hot, in more ways than one; every one of them, from Tzvetan Todorov's denouncement of the entire project as falling short of its goal to Gates's response to the responses, has undertones (and sometimes overtones and midtones) of outrage, as they argue over what the goals of the project and individual essays within it were—and debate the actual outcomes of it.

I'm going to try to briefly summarize the primary points each writer makes in her or his response, then discuss how accurate I feel these criticisms of the volume to have been.

Todorov: Argues that the essays are reifying the construct of race and fall into the trap of portraying contemporary critical theory as infallible or at least not in need of deconstruction. Also, people are too mean to Enlightenment philosophy when they accuse it of creating racialism. Writers didn’t do their homework, as evidenced by their failure to refer to "the critical school of thought which long attempted to explain literary differences by racial differences" (375).Accuses Gates of racialism. Criticizes essays as a whole for academic language and inaccessibility. Says there's too much focus on the Other in European literature in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Notable remark:

"In proudly describing ourselves as antiracist, we can give ourselves a good conscience at almost no expense. What else, then, do I recommend that we do? Certainly not endorse the racist credo just for the sake of making a more unconventional choice, but, at the very least, become aware of the problem and carefully question the commonplaces of contemporary good conscience." (378)

Houston A. Baker, Jr.: Suggests that Gates is confused in his goals and desires, having stated a desire for the vernacular but then editing a volume which has almost none of that present. Annoyed that Appiah dismisses physical features as "mere" physical differences in his reliance on genetic science to show that race is not a biological construct, because those physical features are what others react to. Argues that this "we're all the same" insistence ignores reality and obscures racism. Charges several writers with having created a "whitemale confessional" (388). Says that the base argument of many writers and activists is the "we're just as good as" model, which is a fundamentally losing model. Extremely lengthy consideration of Caliban and how if we see Caliban as not a defective version of Prospero but his own individual, he has value in that.

Notable remark:

"[The] signal shortcoming of 'Race,' Writing, and Difference is the paucity of Caliban's sound. The issue chooses instead to repeatedly sound (perhaps, of academic necessity) 'subtle' phonics of academic discourse." (389)

Harold Fromm: Pretty much says that Gates can bite him, then reams Pratt for committing the same error she criticizes in colonial literature. Claims she is using academic discourse as a colonizing mechanism to further her own individual aims and ends by urging that "'Physician, heal thyself'…be the first moral exhortation of the day" (398).

Notable remark:

"[Here] I was, daring to use words without quotation marks, actually believing that I referred to something identifiable when I spoke of black people, Americans, musicians, and whatnot, and being told that it was all just my own narcissistic and preemptive fantasy." (396)

Pratt's response to Fromm: Okay, fine, Fromm has some points about academic discourse, but why's he picking on me? What did I do differently? Who am I colonizing, anyhow? How is it better to have stable categories? Going well till the baffling "can't we all just get along/let's do something completely different" ending which fails to suggest what the different might be.

Notable remark:

"[The] name for such interventions is not colonialism, it is critique—or, ,if you like, critical inquiry. They are attempts to change the culture one lives in." (400)

Gates: Primarily responds to Todorov and somewhat Fromm. Argues for necessity of undermining essentialism. Calls Todorov out on his definition of racism as "the display of contempt or aggressiveness toward other people on account of physical differences," pointing out that that definition is limited and specious (403). Accuses Todorov of creating a straw-man argument in opposition to Gates as a way of attempting to re-legitimatize literature canon. Refutes pretty much all of Todorov's claims about racialism and racism.

Notable remark:

"Todorov can't even hear us, Houston, when we talk his academic talk; how he gonna hear us if we 'talk that talk,' the talk of the black idiom?" (409)

Whew. All right. Now that we have that all out there, let's take a look at some of the claims. I think Gates does a pretty good job of responding to Todorov's claims about what he says in the introduction; Todorov seems to be working from some definition of racism where not being racist equates to "well it's not like I've lynched anybody today," and I'm too tired to play racism bingo today, so we'll just let that one lie. I couldn't resist giving you his baffling discussion of how being antiracist is popular and easy, and the resultant solution that is not, you know, actually acting against racism but is instead to…what? Reconsider whether racism might be a good idea after all? But that's enough of that.

So. I'm going to limit this to considering two particular points that were brought up by Todorov, Fromm, and Houston (because otherwise we'd be here all day, especially if I started talking about essentialism, cause that is a whole lot of complicated—a hot mess, you might say, or at least, I might).

First, there is the discussion of language and accessibility. This, I think, is particularly interesting in a volume entitled "Race," Writing, and Difference that has a surprisingly narrow discussion of writing, more discussion of colonialism than race, and barely a nod to difference. It might seem like that's a brutal criticism; it's not. The book may well be mis-titled, but so are many others. What I was expecting, though, was some discussion of how literacy, forced education, and formal education interplay with ideas of race and difference. I probably would have liked that more, but, you know, judging a book by its cover is ill-advised and all that.

While I'm all for writing in the vernacular (you've probably noticed that by now), or at least the approachable…sometimes that's not possible. And for the subject matter of most of these essays, that simply wasn't possible. So that might be an accurate critique on the part of the responders, but it should be phrased as an initial critique of the subject matter, rather than treating terminology, phrasing, and topic as separable items.

This brings us to the second point, which is indeed about subject matter. Todorov points out that the contributors focus extremely heavily on colonial texts of the 19th and 20th centuries, a criticism that Houston echoes when he discusses whitemale confessionals, and an accusation that (I think) lies at the base of Fromm's finger-pointing at Pratt (but I could be wrong about this; Fromm's contentions are difficult to discern).

To this criticism, I say: Word, y'all.

See, I have a confession to make. It's this: I never read Heart of Darkness. I didn't even watch Apocalypse Now, which I'm told is based on Conrad's novel. Back in senior year of high school, I was supposed to do both, but instead I stared out the window, read the copy of Brave New World that was on the bookshelf behind me, and wrote a story about aliens. I tried reading it, but got to the point where I was told that Marlow "resembled an idol," and was annoyed. Then I read Marlow's interminable speech and got to the point where he referred to Africa as previously having been a "blank space" and put the book down and never picked it back up. Moby Dick was after that, and I never read that one, either.

This might make more sense if I summarize the plot of nearly every book on our reading list in A.P. high school English: White guy is sad. Life ain't all it was cracked up to be. Disillusionment. But wait! Conflict with women/people of color/creature-as-stand-in-for-women-or-people-of-color/nature-as-stand-in-for-women-or-people-of-color. OMG. What to do? Oh! I know! Reestablish dominance! There we go. Whew. That was close for a moment there. Anyways, back to business as usual.

By that point in high school, I was seriously tired of reading whitemale confessionals (this is a fantastic term and one that I wish I'd had before). Hemingway. Conrad. Hawthorne. Steinbeck. Eliot. Twain. Fitzgerald. Melville. Thoreau.

The thing is…how many essays do we really, truly need that rehash the same content without providing us anything new? Conrad is mentioned in at least four, perhaps more, of the essays in this book. Conrad shows the colonialist mindset! Conrad shows the postcolonial mindset! Conrad fetishes black people! Conrad highlights the flaws of racialism! Conrad...blah blah blah. While I don't think that Fromm's insistence that Pratt in particular was "colonizing" was supported by sufficient evidence or argument, the fact remains that education, and particularly the literary and art canons, are used to further hegemonic dominance and as paintbrushes for the whitening of history. And so I have to ask: How much is that furthered when every time we talk about race and literature, we talk about the same authors, and oftentimes the same ideas about those authors?

Pratt says that these "interventions" are "attempts to change the culture one lives in." But in academic culture, reinterpreting Twain, Conrad, et al., is part of the standard, the norm, not a change. Some (most) years, Twain and Conrad are in favor. Sometimes, they're out. But they keep coming back, and panning them isn't academically dangerous or risky. In fact, it's about one of the safest things there is. So yeah, as Todorov noted, it's easy to say you're antiracist. I'm going to go ahead and differ on him on the solution, though.

How about we try doing what Gates initially suggested, and look at literature created by black folks? How about we try engaging in an actual critique of some of these books, where instead of constantly revolving around the question of how the Other is portrayed, we question how white maleness is constructed? How about instead of talking about white men, white women as property of white men, black men as threats to white men, and black women as existing only in terms of sexuality, we look at the entire context and see what else is there? Cause y'all, if that's all that's there, why the hell are we still talking about it? We already know. Done and done, checkmate, end game, finis.

Gates edited this volume in 1986. Since then, some people have done it different. But not a whole lot.

How the Irish Became White

How the Irish Became White
Noel Ignatiev

"The Irish who emigrated to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were fleeing caste oppression and a system of landlordism that made the material conditions of the Irish peasant comparable to those of an American slave" (2).

"To Irish laborers, to become white meant at first that they could sell themselves piecemeal instead of being sold for life, and later that they could compete for jobs in all spheres instead of being confined to certain work; to Irish entrepreneurs, it meant that they could function outside of a segregated market. To both of these groups it meant that they were citizens of a democratic republic, with the right to elect and be elected, to be tried by a jury of their peers, to live wherever they could afford, and to spend, without racially imposed restrictions, whatever money they managed to acquire" (3).

These are the assertions that Ignatiev makes in the introduction to his historical study of Irish immigrants to America, primarily focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While he provides a solid historical grounding for his study of laborers and their intra- and interethnic relationships and hostilities, if one a little too heavily focused on Boston and Philadelphia, Ignatiev provides a less clear theoretical grounding for his claim that the Irish became white. I generally tend to feel that Amazon reviews, particularly one-star reviews, are of dubious worth, I do feel at least some sense of sympathy with the reviewer who suggested that the title was chosen more for its value in catching the eye than for its connection to the topic of the book.

This might seem like an accusation of deliberate misdirection on the part of Ignatiev, but I would suggest that it is instead a possible, and difficult to avoid, pitfall of attempts to remedy the pre-existing blindness to race in the bulk of labor studies. The problem, as I (possibly incoherently) attempted to suggest in my discussion of Are Italians White?, is that whiteness and citizenship are conflated while blackness, oppression, slavery, and poverty are tied together. Thus, the story of how the Irish "became white" is really the story of how the Irish became American, at a point in time when "American" absolutely meant "white." Perhaps this seems like a minor quibble with an otherwise worthwhile, interesting, and thought-provoking study.

It's not.

Consider the first quotation above, the one that suggests that the conditions for Irish Catholic peasants were comparable to those of an American slave. Comparable: similar, equivalent, proportionate, commensurate, equivalent.

What is equivalent to slavery?

This is a serious question.

It is the corollary to the question I would ask of every white person who makes a declaration about "reverse racism": If you think that white people really have it worse, then why don't you switch? You don't need proof to be black. You just need to say you are. Nobody goes around double-checking to make sure that black folks are really black. You know why? Because people don't pretend to be black. For all the claims that suburban white kids are "acting black," not a one of those claims suggests that anyone is actually claiming to be black. I can assure you from personal experience that if you say you're black and people didn't think you were, they will say things like, "Oh, looks like you got lucky in the gene lottery!"

So, in this case, let's look at slavery in America versus Catholicism in Ireland under British Protestant rule; which of them wins in an oppression death match? Well, Catholics couldn't "open or teach in a school…take part in the manufacture or sale of arms, newspapers, or books…own a horse worth more than five pounds," and suffered beneath myriad other laws—laws which were undoubtedly oppressive, no question about that (40). But they were not bought and sold. They were not chattel. I see nothing indicating that Catholic women were regularly raped by Protestant landlords so as to produce more property to sell, or anything suggesting that families were forced apart by the sale of some of their members, or anything showing that literacy was a crime in and of itself.

Please note: by and large, I don't think that oppression Olympics are helpful. When it comes down to it, that's the very reason I object to phrases like "comparable to slavery." Oppression appears in many forms, and it is terribly unlikely that many of them are comparable except insofar as they are all oppression, and as Andrea Smith points out so eloquently, attempts to "rank" oppressions generally silence at least one group and usually more. Each of us is placed differently within the set of hierarchical structures that frame American society and culture, and attempting to compare everything to slavery is about as useful as accusing all possessors of privilege of being like Hitler.

Leaving the issue of comparable/equivalent aside, I'd like to consider what Ignatiev is really saying in the second quotation I began this post with. There, he equates whiteness with privilege, self-ownership, and citizenship, without ever questioning the connection there. It's not that I'm arguing whiteness and citizenship are not confluent and dependent; in America, by the end of the eighteenth century, they were, and to a large extent, still are. The problem is that if what we are studying is the creation of the conditions that helped institute and continue to support the connection between whiteness and citizenship, then we have an obligation to examine our language and assumptions.

In this instance, and throughout the book, Ignatiev uses whiteness as a shorthand for citizenship, as when he conflates nativism and racism, concluding that "strong tendencies existed in antebellum America to consign the Irish, if not to the black race, then to an intermediate race located socially between black and white" (89). However, there is very little to support this claim. Were the Irish perceived as lesser than "Americans"? Yes. Were they perceived as better suited for dirty, unpleasant, back-breaking (in some cases literally) jobs than "Americans"? Yes. Does this mean that they were not white?

Only if you see "white" and "American" as synonymous. And that's the idea that Ignatiev's unexamined choice of language perpetuates (while also, at many points, presuming that the history of labor is the history of men).

how race survived U.S. history

How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon
David Roediger


The title of Roediger's work, How Race Survived U.S. History, implies that the central point of the book is to address the question of how something as divisive as the idea of race could have survived throughout the years. This could also be phrased as he puts it in his introduction: how the United States has handled the "American dilemma" of how to reconcile "the nation's commitments to freedom and equality…with the enduring practices of slavery and segregation" (xii). What Roediger truly ends up arguing, however, is that rather than being a confusing and contradictory aspect of American culture, the construction of race and racism "was a response to sharp social divisions among settlers and sought to create an ersatz unity among whites" (3). In other words, racial constructions were instrumental, not coincidental.

In support of this argument, he provides a discussion of how race has been central to ideas of citizenship and nationalism throughout history. Overall, Roediger provides a valuable and comprehensive discussion of the significance of race in U.S. history, validating his eventual argument that the eradication of racism requires active effort rather than being something that will just happen on its own.

Among the points that I would have liked to see explored in more detail, however, are the connections that Roediger makes between Christianity, whiteness, and the right to freedom early on in the book, as he discusses colonial Virginia. At this point, Roediger argues, lines of racial division were not yet in place, with class distinctions more fundamental than racial ones. In 1676, during Bacon's rebellion, "Negroes and servants" were "offered freedom 'from their slavery'" by authorities if they opposed the rebellion, while "rebels…feared that they would all be made into 'slaves, man, woman & child.'" Roediger's analysis of this phrasing is that "the promise of liberation" shows "how imperfectly class predicaments aligned with any firm sense of racial division" (5).

To some extent, I question this analysis, and would have appreciated more primary-source wording to support Roediger's interpretation. The phrasing he quotes seems to me to suggest more that "Negroes" were fundamentally considered to be of a different category; after all, if there were truly no racial divisions, but the authorities wanted to make clear that their offer of freedom extended to all, it seems as though it would have been phrased as "servants, Negroes and others," or something similar. The actual wording instead seems to imply that "Negroes" are inherently unfree. I also would not put as much emphasis on the promise of liberation as Roediger seems to, given that terms like "slavery" and "freedom" still are tossed around today without consideration of their history.

Roediger goes on to address the ways that "Christian" became synonymous with "white," e.g., with the passage of laws that dictated whippings for "any 'negroe or other [Indian] slave' attacking 'any Christian'" (6). Particularly as Roediger goes on to discuss settlers' concerns about the "laziness" of Indians or Africans—and their fear that Englishmen might be similarly "lazy," if provided the chance—more exploration of how Christianity appeared as a marker and separator meaning whiteness would have been both interesting and valuable.

For instance, was this focus on Christianity as the defining factor because the colonists were already separating themselves from England? Was it because of the lingering legacy of the Crusades, where the primary distinction was between Christians and "heathen"? Did it relate to the colonists' identification of themselves as fleeing from religious persecution, thereby creating religion as their primary aspect of identity?

While these may seem to be idle or insignificant questions, the answers to them are relevant, because they would explain more about the creation of concepts of what "an American" was and is. For instance, if the reason for the initial differentiation between Christian/not-Christian was due to the colonists' self-identification on the basis of religion, then this would play into the construction of white womanhood that Roediger addresses, albeit briefly, later. If Christianity is the determining factor of whiteness and later citizenship, then accusing a woman of being unchaste simultaneously divests her of whiteness, citizenship, and religion all at once—an application of heteropatriarchal white supremacy.

Roediger states that his goal in the book is to provide "a spare, vigorous, and accessible account of the ways white supremacy has lurked, morphed, and survived" because such an account "is most likely to reach large numbers of busy and perhaps skeptical readers" (xiv). He does provide that, but in some areas, his efforts to provide a "spare" account result in eliding significant ways that raciality has affected and affects women. The skeleton of that information is within the book, and he repeatedly references "white maleness" as the power structure being created, but I have concerns about an account that reinforces the historical invisibility of women, whether black, white, Indian, or Asian; in many ways, they exist in Roediger's narrative only to indicate racial differentiation between men.

This is particularly apparent in the afterword, when Roediger discusses the events of the 2008 primaries in regard to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The book was published prior to the results of all the primaries and the presidential election, although Roediger did make a statement two days post-election. His commentary is relatively vague, but he does state that "insistent efforts to brand Obama 'not one of us'—playing on his name and his alleged sympathy for Islam—fell equally flat," an assertion I'm not sure I agree with. Would the question of Obama's citizenship ever have been raised if he were white? Would claims that he is not Christian have been made if he were white? Would Sarah Palin have the support she does if she weren't presenting herself as a "real American," in contrast to Obama's presumably dubious Americanness?

The issues of gender, race, and religion should be as present in any discussion of the 2008 election or current reactions to Obama as they should have been in any discussion of pre-Revolutionary-War Virginia. Roediger points out that Obama "portrays today's issues as simply cutting across racial lines," an accusation that is accurate—and perhaps the only reason he was able to be elected (228). But we cannot portray racial issues as cutting across gender lines, either. The history that Roediger provides is more a history of race and men's labor than a universal U.S. history, and as such, it is extremely valuable in identifying and explaining many aspects of the creation, reinforcement, and persistence of white male supremacy over men of color, but not in providing a full consideration of the ways that other factors have also furthered that hierarchy (e.g., how care work reinforces the structure of capitalist white supremacy).

handbook of public pedagogy

List One
A non-exhaustive list of books I vividly remember from childhood:
Anne of Green Gables. Bridge to Terabithia. Little Women. The Narnia Chronicles. The Secret Garden. The Lorax. A Wrinkle in Time. The Lord of the Rings. A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Where the Red Fern Grows. A Little Princess. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Yearling. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank. Little House on the Prairie.

List Two
The ones out of those I haven't ever reread as an adult because even thinking about them makes me sniffle quietly to myself and need a bowl of ice cream as cold but yummy comfort:
Bridge to Terabithia. Where the Red Fern Grows. The Yearling.

List Three
The ones that I reread as an adult and didn't get angry at:
The Lorax. A Wrinkle in Time.

As you can see, that's a short list. Especially when you consider that if I made List One longer, List Three wouldn't change much. It's sort of mind-boggling that as a mixed-race kid living in a suburb of Pittsburgh and going to inner-city schools, I managed to identify with Anne and Jo and Alice and Lucy and Sara and Laura, but somehow I did it.

In "Problematizing 'Public Pedagogy' in Educational Research," Glenn C. Savage critiques the way that others, particularly Henry Giroux, theorize in what Savage labels an "enveloping negativity," where they perceive popular culture/public pedagogy as an overwhelming, universalizing, all-encompassing force that act to maintain and perpetuate dominant ideological discourses (109). Savage argues that this stance ignores the existence of resistance to those discourses and posits power as an above-down force which must be opposed, rather than something possessed in varying measures by many that ebbs and flows.

Although Savage does not directly reference Freire at any point, some of the critique he levels against Giroux is similar to part of my contention with Freire: There is an implication that within formal education lies the potential for bringing its students to the "right" way of thinking so that they can resist the dominant discourse.

The primary thrust of Savage's piece seems to be that both literally the term "public pedagogy" and the concepts that some theorists have tied to that term are not helpful for authentic analysis, nor are ideas of emancipating "individuals from the repressive pangs of 'public pedagogy' and everyday life" (113). This argument is taken up and expanded by Carmen Luke in "Introduction: Feminisms and Pedagogies of Everyday Life," as well as by Robin Redmon Wright in "Unmasking Hegemony with The Avengers." Both Luke and Wright emphasize the importance of avoiding the search for a unifying principle, an idea that Elisabeth Hayes and James Paul Gee also address in their discussion of "Public Pedagogy Through Video Games," where they consider what critical thinking really means. Hayes and Gee go on to define it as "gaining the tools to analyze what they are learning in terms of 'interests' and the distribution of 'social goods" (191). My attempt here is to try to mediate between these views, and that attempt is still in progress.

While the idea that there is a "right way" of thinking that I am to disseminate unto my students so that they may see the light and thereby become free is one I withdraw from, I'm not sure that I can fully agree with these critiques, either. Savage's argument seems to be one of semantics, to a significant degree; "public pedagogy," as indicated by this very volume, has been defined in a number of ways by a number of people, and not all of those definitions presume the existence of the powerful oppressor and the impotent oppressed. What terms he would prefer to use is not made entirely apparent by his essay, and it would have benefited from a clearer distinction between his objection to terms versus his objection to concepts.

Luke, Wright, and Hayes/Gee all seem to posit the presence of fundamentally resistant texts within popular culture and resistive acts by people with regard to such texts, however, and this I think is questionable in much the same way that Savage problematizes Giroux. Just as the idea of mass culture as a monolithic entity experienced by all in the same coercive way is too simplistic, so too is the presumption that it is possible for something created within and as part of popular culture to be wholly free from dominant ideology. For example, Wright notes in passing "the indisputable fact that Honor Blackman," who played Cathy Gale on The Avengers, "is a very beautiful woman," and seems to feel that this relates to the impact of presenting a character who refused to conform to gender roles (140). However, Wright never goes on to explore what it means if these shows that are texts of resistance nonetheless maintain a demand for feminine beauty.

On a related note, if we consider Hayes and Gee's definition, that seems to leave very open the possibility that critical thinking may well lead to the continued-but-now-deliberate support of hegemony. To clarify what I mean by this: I absolutely believe that it is in the best interests of nearly all members of society to oppose oppression and destroy hegemony. However, if this were an easy conclusion to come to, then more people would come to it. What makes it difficult is that our entire social structure and society is built around maintaining hegemonic dominance, so it requires significant effort for people to see such dominance as anything other than normal and acceptable. Thus, while Hayes and Gee may be correct in that becoming a producer puts a person in a position to consider the distribution of social goods, if being a producer necessarily led to a critical consciousness, capitalism would make resistance to domination less likely, in contrast to most theories of social justice.

Perhaps the real issue is with our desire to find the answer. According to Savage, Giroux paints all corporate activity and mass culture as the wrong, while Wright and others are very willing to see any resistance as wholly opposed to hegemonic dominance, and both views seem to be questing for a solid answer as to how we can define dominance versus resistance, as though they are two mutually exclusive items and cannot exist in the same places—an odd approach for any work in a volume titled The Handbook of Public Pedagogy, which implies a number of contradictions and consistently-debated territories in its very premise.

CRT: the cutting edge

"One of the most characteristic and ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed people is the double bind – situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation…One can only choose to risk one’s preferred form and rate of annihilation.

"Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would gave trouble going past the wires to get anywhere…It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon."

- from "Oppression" by Marilyn Frye

When I first encountered Frye's birdcage analogy, it was presented to me as an analogy for patriarchy. It wasn't until I reread it a couple of years ago in preparation for teaching an Intro to Gender Studies class that I realized, whether Frye intended it to be or not, that it is in fact both an analogy for the way that multiple hierarchies interact, and an explanation for much of the reasoning behind legal and governmental policy decisions that further hierarchical structures. The introduction to Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge notes that one of the premises of CRT is that "racism is normal, not aberrant, in American society." If we expand this premise to argue that oppression overall is normal in American society, and thus any form of oppression "looks ordinary and natural to persons in the culture," then the birdcage treatment of oppression is understandable (xvi). When all forms of oppression are treated as aberrant, then the idea of an interlocking system of oppressive hierarchies is simply inconceivable.

This becomes apparent in "A Hair Piece: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Gender," in which Paulette M. Caldwell discusses the case of Rogers v. American Airlines, where the courts upheld employers' bans on braided hairstyles in the workplace. As she analyzes the decision, Caldwell points out that the court assumed that racism and sexism "are fundamentally unrelated phenomena" (279). Similarly, Darren Lenard Hutchinson argues in "A Racial Critique of Gay and Lesbian Legal Theory" that police treatment of the Rivera case as a drug-related death, rather than a hate-crime murder based on both homophobia and racism, despite the fact that the perpetrators were white supremacists, one of whom directly stated that they "killed Rivera because he was gay," was due to the "broader social context of racial, class, and sexual subordination" (327).

If we consider Juan F. Perea's discussion of paradigms in "The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race," it becomes clear that the primary paradigm is that American society is perceived as fundamentally equal, with a few aberrant situations in which people are treated on unfairly on the basis of race or gender. This paradigm includes the assumption that race and gender are both binary and essential categories: In any case of racial discrimination, it is perpetrated by a white person upon a person of color (and is largely only recognized when reminiscent of Jim Crow), while in any case of sexism, it is perpetrated by a man upon a woman (and is largely only recognized when reminiscent of coverture).

As Perea notes, "Paradigms define relevancy" (344). Thus, with the above two paradigms for understanding racism and sexism, it is irrelevant if a rule, ordinance, or custom such as banning braided hairstyles specifically negatively affects black women, because there is no clear "racism" in the way that racism is recognized in that paradigm—it's not "no blacks allowed." Nor is there "sexism," because women are not being told "you can't work here" or "you must look pretty." Teachers who ignore children of Asian descent in classes because of the stereotype that "Asians girls are quiet by nature" are not engaging in racism, because they are not banning children from the classroom, and many (white) people might well see such stereotyping as "positive."

Another element lies within these paradigms, however. Returning to the idea of the binary and essential categories, the courts have only consistently ruled against discrimination when it was based on immutable, essential characteristics. Skin color and gender are presumed to be immutable, determined at birth, and essential. A person is female or male, and everyone is able to identify what "male" and what "female" mean. A person is black or white, and everyone is able to identify what "black" and "white" look like. One effect of this is that ambiguity is neither acknowledged nor tolerated, because it is irrelevant to the paradigm. Transgendered or bisexual people are not part of the male/female gay/straight binaries. Latina/o or American Indian people are difficult to fit into the black/white binary. The solution is that Latino/as are instead placed into the American/foreign binary, while American Indians are made invisible. To make an argument against oppression, it is necessary to find a binary to place oneself in—and a clear parallel to Jim-Crow-type policies.

The other significant effect of these paradigms requires returning to the part of the paradigm that characterizes oppression as unnatural and infrequent in American society. Because "society as usual" consists of a series of methods for perpetuating oppression, it is difficult for anyone who views oppression as an aberration to identify it when it is not a clear case of segregation. In many cases, however, oppression takes the form of forcing people to conform to the norms of dominant culture and painting any nonconformity as a question of "choice." By this rationale, non-English speakers are not discriminated against, because they "choose" not to learn English. People who are beaten to death for not conforming to gender roles are not victims of hate crimes because they "choose" to be "different." Black women who are labeled "unprofessional" for wearing their hair naturally or in braids are not victims of discrimination because they "choose" how to style their hair. Immigrants who live in poverty are not worth worrying about because they "choose" to be in the United States, and if they don't like it, they can "choose" to go home. Those who are different from the norm are the ones who are at fault if they receive different treatment.

What this paradigm never asks is: Who sets the standards? Why do the standards exist? What function do they serve? Instead, it says: If you want to be treated like everyone else, you have to be like everyone else—and thus makes invisible the entire system of oppression which simultaneously creates the standards for what "people" are like. One wire of the birdcage seems innocuous, so the paradigm acts to ensure that only one wire is focused on at a time, while those who have the power of the oppressors say, "Why can't you just walk around the wire?" But buying into the paradigm is not a solution, even if it were both possible and desirable to change integral aspects of identity, because attempting to conform does not result in equality, just as passing does not result in ending racism. The best this paradigm allows for is getting a nicer birdcage.

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.