White Feminism

Feminism has been widely controversial in America and abroad. The narratives of feminism are constantly changing. The image of white hippie woman with overgrown hair on her legs and armpits yelling how much she hates men, is one visual that has been tied to feminism for so long. Within the discourse of feminism there are far too many issues and not enough leaders. We see in the Civil Rights Movement, the revolution meant taking back all of the rights and respects of one’s own personhood. We can point to leaders like Dr. King, Malcolm X, etc. and say they knew what they were talking about. Feminism has not gotten to that point because white feminism has acted exclusionary to the other social revolutions.

Hillary Clinton is a great example of white feminism. White feminism does not look at other social stratifications are parts within feminism. Issues among women change within their identities and environments. Figures like Roxane Gay, bell hooks, Beyonce, etc. discuss the multifaceted queering of feminism outside of critical whiteness. Feminism has to be intersectional if equality among gender lines is possible. Race relations completely devoid many people of opportunities that perpetuate the subordination of all women. Shattering the glass ceiling was one of the big things HIllary Clinton raved about. A large percentage of women of color exist in impoverished conditions so there’s no way the can the break glass ceiling if they can not even access the building. White feminism continues to perpetuate estranged race relations because it denies the impact of being being a person of color and a women at the same time.

Accommodating the outliers

Thinking about the Census data and any other form gathering demographic information, often the choices of ethnicity or race are limited to large groups that don’t account for smaller populations. Even as a Latinx person, on numerous occasions I have to mark myself as ‘other’. Grouping people into pretty little boxes serves a few different persons. One use is just knowing the kind of people in a setting and accommodating for some specific needs. For example, if there is a large percentage of people that identify as Jewish in a college or university, the college, or the students, can use this information to provide those religious services. Statistical significance in research is needed so it is easier to have large groupings. Worrying about accommodating others is not considered as much. Another use of demographic information is accounting for representation. In a school, having teachers of different identifiers can be incredibly beneficial to supporting students in an array of ways.

As we have discussed in class, people of multiple ethnicities are considered a problem. Interracial families show that people of different ethnicities can exist and reproduce in a civil manner. The lynching of innocent black males is one example of the efforts to keep blood lines clean. Whiteness is treasured in the United States. Today, we have come to the point where interracial couples are reasonably socially accepted. There’s more push back on having mixed race children. Unless that child has a white complexion, that child is seen as primarily a person of color. White Americans do not like ambiguity. Mixed race people are continuously questioned of where they belong. Race is a social construct. Today, there is not a dominant ideology in every space so there is ambiguity in where people outside of the binary will wonder their inclusion. We currently occupy a time where social ideologies are being questioned so it is not always obvious the qualifications of personhood in different spaces.

MLK Holiday

Through my research I found Avoice Online, an online library on African American voices in politics throughout history. The website was made through the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Inc (CBC). Avoice works toward providing resources to educators, and all people, on an organic take of the legislative contribution of Black people. I came across the history of making Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday a national holiday.

On January 20, 1986, King’s birthday was first celebrated as a national holiday. I have not spent much time looking at the ways in which national holidays are created.  Just four days after the assassination of King a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, John Conyers, called for a national holiday honor Dr. King’s contribution. From 1968 to 1983, the bill was presented and amended consecutively to Congress. The bill was seen as a bipartisan issue. Commemorating the life of a radical civil rights leader can be malicious toward the white supremacist ideology in the United States. In 1983, the North Carolina Republican senator Jesse Helms called out King as a communist enemy. Petitions were carried out nationwide among communities and public support was crucial to the bill. Throughout the United States, states were passing bills to make Dr. Martin King’s birthday a statewide holiday. This pressured for the federal government to acknowledge the bill as something the public wants.

The United States has invested in white supremacist, patriarchal ideology for so long that passing this bill was huge would be a national appraisal to King and his radicalism. In some ways, I find this pushback against the bill parallel to the work of treatment of King in his life. Dr. King was in jail calling out to his white clergymen in “Letter From Birmingham Jail” and this bill calls for a cluster of white men to acknowledge his worth and effort. No matter what the members of Congress personal believed they were voted onto those seats to listen to their constituents. November of 1983 President Ronald Reagan enacts the bill into law.

http://www.avoiceonline.org/mlk/timeline.html

"Walk With Me Jesus"

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had an audio snippet of Fannie Lou Hamer singing a spiritual from their 1960s protests. The SNCC was founded by a group of African American College students that were refused service in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were the leaders of lunch counter sit-ins. They reminded me of the exhibition in the Civil Rights Museum here in Memphis, Tennessee where it shows clips of people preparing for the sit-ins. White allies would spew derogatory remarks to black activist to prepare for the real demonstrations. This connect brings out the national crisis of segregation against people of color and the White allies.

Spirituals can be very similar within the melody and typical flow of the song. Spirituals work within activism because they are trying to connect people. Hamer sings “I want Jesus to walk with me” and calls to a collective ‘me’. The SNCC does not give the context of the audio clip, but you can hear other voices within moments of the audio clip. The lyrics focus around Jesus Christ supporting and ‘walking’ for a cause. The spiritual calls for Jesus Christ to ‘walk’ with the singer and audience. Spirituals serve many functions to connect communities with religion in a common direction. “Be my friend” calls Christ to be on the side of revolution. When working against the normalcy of the status quo, it can be so isolating. The term friend works well here.  These voice lead me to believe that the audio is from a rally or demonstration of nonviolent protest. “Make way for me” fits well with the intentions of nonviolent acts of civil disobedience. Faith can be motivation to people to work towards a goal, and Hamer relies on it to get her message. Spirituals change within different spaces and different usage. Hamer relies on her identity and mission to transform the spiritual to focus on the resistance of the Civil Rights Movement.

http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/realaudio/walk_with_me.mp3

"Architecture of Segregation"

In a 2015 report by the Century Foundation entitled “Architecture of Segregation,” they conclude, based on an analysis US census data and various other objective meaures, that racial segregation has in fact increased since 2000, and without intervention will continue to do so, as the logical outcome of intentional policy decisions. They conclude that concentrated poverty (defined in the study as a census tract where more that forty percent of residents live below the poverty line) has been steadily increasing for years, but one factor in this trend has gone unnoticed—the return to raically determined areas of concentrated poverty. After the national conern about poverty and crime in urban “ghettos” and barrios of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, federal policy and improvement in the economy lifted many people out of poverty and concern faded and was thought by some to be largely a thing of the past. However, as concern faded interest dropped, and in the next decade concentrated povery gradually crept back. This was prompted in part by white flight to outer suburbs, a reaction to the breaking up of large public housing developments in the inner city and their residents’ move to the inner suburbs, that took their tax dollars with them. But more blatatnt forms of racism prevented African Americans from following them to the outer suburbs. Many wealthy subdivisions passed zoning ordinances that prevented the construction of public housing, or even apartments at all, while others mandated a minimum house size to prevent lower income people from moving in. Other factors, such as low-income housing tax credits discrimatorily applied to majority minority neighborhoods and Section 8 vouchers that restrict the poor to concentrated neighboorhoods where landlords will accept them, also add to the again increasing problem of race-based segregation. This is the predictable and inevitable result of policies that effectively framed racially-correlated issues in financial terms and allow for the de facto preservation of segregation long after it was eradicated in the law. This is entirely consistent with America’s long history of framing the subjugation of black people in slightly more positive and less offensive terms than is the reality at the time, allowing them to inflict all the abuse they want to without ever having to come to terms with themsleves for it—like framing chattle slavery as a benevolent necessity, casting racial segregation in thinly-veiled economic terms, is the nation’s means of justifying, to ourselves and to the world, the ultimately unjustifiable.

Whitewashing Marble

Dr. Sarah Bond, a professor of the classics at the University of Iowa, has recently written on the “whitewashing” (literally) of classical art and, consequently, our perceptions of the ancient world. Though classical sculpture is almost universally associated with white marble, over the last few decades researhers have employed increasingly complex methods to detect traces of the orginial paint and gold leaf; they have determined that, rather than the pristine marble that has come down to us over centuries of Eurocentric scholarship as the ideal of classical beauty, the statues were brightly polychromed, allowing classical artists to depict the wide range of ethnicities and skin tones that were, we now realize, present in the ancient Medeterranian. However, the study of classical sculptures and our conception of the makeup of the ancient world has not changed much, if at all, with the discovery of this would-be revolutionary information. This is attribtuable largely to the West’s collective prejudices and worldview, even within the academic community, that continue to hold the whiteness of Greek and Roman sculpture (long regarded as the foundation of European art) as the ideal, and percieving colorful ancient statue as somehow “barbaric.” We have long had evidence of this coloring of classical sculpture (even Pliny referenced it, so this willful ignorance has a long history in European art historical scholarship) but it didn’t fit our narrative of who we were, as ideal European creatures descended from the great classical cultures, and so it was for centuries if not denied then simply overlooked—ruled as having no bearing on our narrative. It is interesting to see how the ideas informing exceptionalsim and the epistimology of ignorance manifest themselves in much smaller and more obscure ways, seemingly unrelated to the history of the treatment of Africans in the West. This is a testament to the all-pervasive nature of a white-centric mindset in all aspects of traditional Western culture, and serves as an admonition to people who think we live in a post-racial society: even in the 21^st century, white culture can’t let go of the belief, almost humerously inconsequential, that it isn’t the exclusive focus of ancient sculpture.

Lynchings in a Functioning System

“AN ACT To assure to persons within the jurisdiction of every State the equal protection of the laws, and to punish the crime of lynching. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the phrase ‘mob or riotous assemblage,” when used in this act, shall mean an assemblage composed of three or more persons acting in concert for the purpose of depriving any person of his life without authority of law as a punishment for or to prevent the commission of some actual or supposed public offense.

Sec. 2. That if any State or governmental subdivision thereof fails, neglects, or refuses to provide and maintain protection to the life of any person within its jurisdiction against a mob or riotous assemblage, such State shall by reason of such failure, neglect, or refusal he deemed to have denied to such person the equal protection of the laws of the State.

Sec. 3. That any State or municipal officer charged with the duty or who possesses the power or authority as such officer to protect the life of any person that may be put to death by any mob or riotous assemblage, or who has any such person in his charge as a prisoner, who fails, neglects, or refuses to make all reasonable efforts to prevent such person from being so put to death, or any State or municipal officer charged with the duty of apprehending or prosecuting any person participating in such mob or riotous assemblage who fails, neglects, or refuses to make all reasonable efforts to perform his duty in apprehending or prosecuting to final judgment under the laws of such State all persons so participating except such, if any, as are or have been held to answer for such participation in any district court of the United States, as herein provided, shall he guilty of a felony, and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by imprisonment not exceeding five years or by a fine of not exceeding $5,000, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

Sec. 4. That the district court of the judicial district wherein a person is put to death by a mob or riotous assemblage shall have jurisdiction to try and punish, in accordance with the laws of the State where the homicide is committed, those who participate therein: Provided, That it shall be charged in the indictment that by reason of the failure, neglect, or refusal of the officers of the State charged with the duty of prosecuting such offense under the laws of the State to proceed with due diligence to apprehend and prosecute such participants the State has denied to its citizens the equal protection of the laws. It shall not be necessary that the jurisdictional allegations herein required shall be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and it shall be sufficient if such allegations are sustained by a preponderance of the evidence.”

Above is part of an antilynching bill proposed to Congress in 1922 by a senator from Missouri, which—like all others after it—ultimately failed, another casulty of its longstanding outright refusal to denounce murder.I have been thinking since attending the lunch conversation with Doria Johnson, whose efforts led to the passage in 2005 of a Senate resoultion condemning lynching, about the efforts of the many previous activists whose appeals to Congress to speak on lynching, or to make it a federal crime, that were unsuccessful. I was really struck with the fact that, though the federal govnment professed uninvolvement with segregation and the racism for which it stands, it was just as complicit as local and state governments in the santioning of racial violence. It’s good to remember that governments aren’t their own entities, but are composed of people—and the federal government composed partly of representatives of Southern states whose convictions remianed unaltered and even strengthened when they entered Congress. This bill provides an interesting reflection on the complitcity of local and state governments in enabling and even encouaging lynching at all stages, as it includes provisions for the imprisonment (“for life or not less than five years”) of state or municipal officers who allowed people to be taken out of their custody to be lynched, and penalites for state and local judiciaries who fail to sufficiently prosecute the perpetrators. This, again, points to the “open secret” of lynching in America—though we denied it on the world stage, it was universally understood within the nation that government-sanctioned murder was taking place, and that moreover many elements of the justice system, if it can be called that, were designed to faciliate it. This really drove home the point for me that we’ve discussed throughout the semester, that the disenfranchisement and murder of African Americans represents not a failure of the justice system, but a success of the American injustice system explicitly designed to subjugate black bodies “today, tomorrow, and forever.”

Lynching In America

In “Lynching in America,” a recently released study making extensive use of local newspaper records, historical archives, as well as interviews with witnesses and victims’ descendents, the Equal Justice Commission has concluded that there were over 800 lynching victims, of the over 4,000 known, that had been previously unaccounted for, whether because of the covering up of the crime, a lack of documentation caused by municipal support of the murders, or by the more insidious systematic erasure of memory of the incident—at least among whites, at least in public conversation. In the English photographer Oliver Clasper’s project documenting various locations throughout the South that were lynching sites but now stand unmarked, with their history forgotten. These photos—eerie in their daytime mundaneness—highlight the degree to which lynching has passed the way of slavery and indigenous genocide into the nation’s “epistomology of ignorance,” its open secrets.  Though many survivors of these murdered men, women, and children are alive today—Emmett Till’s mother was alive until 2003—their grief goes largely untalked about, in many ways sacrificed at the altar of American comfort with our own history. And it is telling that these are the stories that have been erased, because as everything we’ve seen with African American activism, so much of what is emphasized and what is excluded in the construction of a narrative is a question of control, with the most powerful shaping the narrative to their benefit. I was struck by the profound injustice of the fact that mothers of murdered little boys have to see their child's life erased again every day, with each day that passes in which the nation forgets them again, simply becuase murdering little boys isn't part of how the nation wants to think of itself. It never was, in fact--while lynchings were still occuring they were excluded from the larger American narrative as unfortunate but unrepresentative isolated  incidents, and we do the victims and their families the same injustice and indiginty today when we refuse to fully acknowledge, atone for, and mourn them. The same when we refuse to learn from their deaths, which we now claim to abhor--when we hear of the extrajudicial killing of 14 year old boys today and think "they must have done something to deserve it."

Thoughts on Sexism within White Supremacy

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of sexism and its attendant understanding of women in the structures of white supremacy. This has been an issue nagging me sinceour first discussions of lynching justified on the basis of “protecting our women” (the possessive phrasing is really important here, I think) from the mythical spectre of the marauding, fiendish black man. Something about the idea that these murders were motivated in large part by a genuine desire to protect wives and sisters and daughters from the pain of sexual violence, particclarly that inflicted at the hands of black men, just didn’t ring true to me—there seemed to me to be an element of the dehumization fo white women as well, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I realized, however, that this professed motivation seems hollow precisely because white women often weren’t protected from sexual violence—as long as it was by a white man. I wondered how many members of lynch mobs or witnesses of spectacle killings had themsleves raped a white woman and whether this contradiction would have ever given them pause or even occurred to them. But I realized that if you view it through this lens, that the fundamental issue wasn’t the rape of a white woman, but the rape of a white woman by a black man—something of a theft of what rightfully belongs to white men—it casts the structures of white supremacy as a struggle between black and white men, with women (both black and white) as merely objects to be weilded as pawns. It becomes an issue of ownership—ownership, I think, of birthright, in which women functioned merely as incubators of that birthright, objects themselves. The rape of a white woman, then, is a usurpation of the white male right to white offspring—the theft of an object to be put to use by the “other side” (this seems consistent with the complete social acceptibilty of sexual violence toward black women and girls, because white men “owned” them as well). This dynamic is best illusitrated for me in the scene in To Kill A Mockingbird in where, rather than having been raped by Tom Robinson as was alleged, it became clear that Mayella Ewell had instead made sexual advances toward Tom and her father, catching her, had severely beaten her. It was never about Mayella’s protection from violence—her advances were entirely consensual, and it was her father who responded by beating her. Rather, this (at least in the mind of Bob Ewell) was a struggle between Bob Ewell and Tom, by white man against black men, played out on the bodies of women.