Race, Gender, and Identity

A Social Science Comparative Analysis of Africana Culture

Georgia A. Persons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351495004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This volume examines race, gender, and identity in African American culture. As with previous volumes in the series, these collected essays provide a social science and interdisciplinary framework for the exploration of Africana cultural and social phenomena. The contributors have adopted mixed methods and meta-theory tools of analysis to describe and evaluate these issues from an African-centered perspective.Kameelah Martin examines the role of women in the films of Julie Dash and Kasi Lemmons. Toya Roberts offers an experimental study of African American males at predominantly white institutions of higher education. Rochelle Brocks digs into the transition, transformation, and transcendence of civil rights to the Black Arts/Black Power movements for social change. Portia K. Maultsby provides an ethnographic study, inspecting the genre of funk music in the United States. James L. Conyers, Jr. analyzes the doctoral dissertation of W. E. B. Du Bois, which cataloged the impact of colonialism on Africana culture. Kesha Morant Williams and Ronald L. Jackson II examine the impact of lupus on the identity of African American women. Ronald Turner's essay examines black workers challenging racist practices by their union representatives. Lisbeth Gant-Britton renders a conceptual history of the hip-hop community, with emphasis on international issues. This volume is an invaluable sourcebook for those studying African American affairs, history, and cultural studies.

1

Introduction:
Race, Gender, and Identity

James L. Conyers

Reflexive of the climate and culture of race in contemporary times, Africana phenomena is faced with a vexing and perplexed outcome assessment of social inequality. Progressively, this idea extends query concerning, acquisition of: autonomy, equity, agency, and sovereignty of African continental and disaporic communities. Equally important, Richard T. Schaefer exerts effort, outlining a systematic analysis of the creation and consequence of subordinate group status, in four ways: 1. Colonialism; 2. Annexation; 3. Voluntary Migration; and 4. Involuntary Migration.¹ Indeed, this structural perspective provides a base, for the context and clarification of this volume.

Withal from a cursory range, I will offer operating descriptions of the terms: race, gender, and identity. First, the term race will encumber the concept, idea, formation, and structure of the aforementioned. Secondly, the term Gender, will be defined and then contextualized, with reference to a deep cultural analysis of Africana Womanism. Lastly, the term identity is cited, to describe and evaluate a categorical and etymological variable, which is contextualized within the cultural paradigm of Africana Philosophy.

Truly, one can experiment, requisite, and develop structural expressions of the concept of race. All the same, there are few scholars, who have attempted to examine phenomena of difference from a cultural perspective of continuity, retention, and creative aspect. Essentially, volume five is a composition, which attempts to examine Race, Gender, and Identity. The essays aggregated muse a social science, humanistic, and interdisciplinary overture to Africana phenomena. Furthermore, the contributors have adopted mixed methods and meta-theory tools of analysis, to describe and evaluate events, issues, and occurrences from an African centered perspective.

Affirmatively, Schaefer, tenders a comprehensive definition of race, which can be assorted in two-fold manner of: 1. Biological and 2. Social Significance.² Furthermore, Allen Jonson outlines the concept and social construction of race, as: Race can be interpreted as: grouping or classification based on genetic variations in physical appearance, most notably in skin color.³ Accessorially, I proffer, Consequently, race is fixed contemporary times as a category of literature, repeatedly employing assimilations’ theories.⁴ Ensuant, Oscar Gandy yields an assessment of race composing: Race is a theoretical construct. It is a product of the realm of ideas, thought, reflection, and perhaps even imagination. Its meaning is negotiated or, as many prefer, contested because of the ways in which that meaning has been linked historically to the distribution of life chances.⁵ For a cultivating assessment, with regard to a composition of racism and culture, Frantz Fanon writes:

The unilaterally decreed normative value of certain cultures deserves our careful attention. One of the paradoxes immediately encountered is the rebound of egocentric, sociocentric definitions. There is first affirmed the existence of human groups having not culture, then of a hierarchy of cultures, and finally, the concept of cultural relativity.

We have here the whole range from overall negation to singular and specific recognition. It is precisely this fragmented and bloody history that we must sketch on the level of cultural anthropology.⁶

Still, the use of the term Gender pertains to a differential between men and women. Notwithstanding, the source is referential to examining the consequences of creating subordinate group status. Advancing onward to describing the term Gender, Schaefer, posits the following:

Gender roles are society’s expectations regarding the proper behavior, attitudes, and activities of males and females. Toughness has traditionally been seen in the United States as masculine—and desirable only in men—while tenderness has been viewed a feminine. A society may require that one sex or the other take the primary responsibility for the socialization of the children, economic support of the family, or religious leadership.⁷

With emphasis on Africana Womanism, the term has been adjusted to reference and resource, the study of Africana communities to define gender and the specificity as related to the Black community. Substantively, the discussion of disparity, with emphasis on gender, requires alternative query and sources, extended outside the binary analysis of gender types.

Shirley Moody-Turner and James B. Stewart vignette Anna Julia Cooper, as a cultural motif, compiling:

In 1886, at the age of twenty-eight, Anna Julia Cooper stood before the black male clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church and argued that the issues affecting black women and poor and working-class African Americans needed to be placed at the center of racial uplift efforts. The image of the young but resolute Cooper standing at the center of a male-dominated space, representing the needs and perspectives of black women and the working poor, creates an apt metaphor for illustrating the importance of Cooper’s place in the development of Africana studies.⁸

Likewise, Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd and Evelyn M. Simien supplement this discussion further, by mentioning:

Although Africana womanism is a growing academic and political identification, scholars have yet to adequately explore its relationship to Black feminism. Current interest in whether various types of Black women’s intellectual production should be named womanism or Black feminism mirrors the pre-occupation with questions of individual versus group identity and crosscutting versus consensus issues that take place within Black civil society today. While some scholars conflate womanism and Black feminism, others insist the two are inherently incompatible.⁹

Adjacently, the term identity, with emphasis on Africana phenomena designates world view and culture. Indeed, cosmology lends discussion to interpretation, context, and defining reality, based on historical and cultural experiences. Finely, Lucius Outlaw provides a working analysis of the term Africana Philosophy:

“Africana philosophy” is the phrase I use as a “gathering” notion under which to situate the articulations (writings, speeches, etc.), and traditions of the same, of Africans and peoples of African descent collectively, as well as the sub-discipline- or field-forming, tradition-defining, tradition organizing reconstructive efforts which are (to be) regarded as philosophy. Use of the qualifier “Africana” is consistent with the practice of grouping and identifying intellectual traditions and practices by the national, geo graphic, cultural, racial, and/or ethnic name for the persons who initiated and were or are the primary practitioners - and/or are the subjects and objects - of the practices and traditions in question (e.g., “American,” “British,” “French,” “German,” or “continental” philosophy).¹⁰

Furthermore, Maulana Karenga extends this discussion by writing:

Kawaida critically examines various contributions to Black and human history, and makes a selective analysis of what is real and relevant, extracts it, integrates it into its system and then, puts it in the service of Black liberation. It is a process historically established. Nothing comes into being by itself; every person and thought draws and rises from the social-historical context to which they owe their existence.¹¹

Additionally, Kwame Nkrumah remarks about this phenomena, with reference to Consciencism, in the following:

According to philosophical consciencism, ethical rules are not permanent but depend on the stage reached in the historical evolution of a society, so however, that cardinal principles of egalitarianism are conserved. A society does not change its ethics by merely changing its rules. To alter its ethics its princisples must be different. Thus, if a capitalist society can become a socialist society, then a capitalist society will have changed its ethics. Any change of ethics constitutes a revolutionary change.¹²

Hence, the survey descriptors examine thematic emphasis of this volume which center on race, gender, and identity. Moreover, the emphasis on the subtitle of a social science analysis, lends itself, for providing an interdisciplinary matrix of examining phenomena from an alternative lens. Equally important, Ruth Reviere provides an interesting analysis which is noted as,

New orientations to the acquisition and use of data are necessary because the pertinent literature are virtually silent on the views of African and other non-European communities, dealing almost exclusively with Eurocentric scholars whose interpretations are inevitably colored by European views of the phenomena being studied. These new Afrocentric methodologies are intended to be used to investigate pertinent research questions legitimately and effectively (that is, truthfully and inclusively), especially those that possess embedded assumptions about race and culture.¹³

The aforementioned points of reference, regarding race can be referred to as, the study of doctrines, which address the physical and cultural differential of a people. Moreover, race is primarily a socially constructed variable. On the other hand, there is coding and interpreting of this biological determinant, from a cultural or structural analysis.

Ensuant, in the editing and preparation of this volume, emphasis was drawn on the ascription, aggregation, and research cluster of essays, with emphasis on Race, Gender, and Identity. Indeed, the topic is familiar, however, the approach and context of each essay provides a fresh analysis of variables, with description and evaluation of the aforementioned phenomena. First, Kameelah Martin extends a critical study, probing Julie Dash and Kasi Lemmons film work, through a literary gridiron of African American literature, in the way of the Healing Woman. Martin’s appraisal relinquishes an alternative interpretation of Africana retention and traditions.

Toya Roberts offers an empirical ethnographic study of African American males at predominantly white institutions of higher education. Grounded within a structural format, the author deposits query and variables, regarding the frequency of: stress, attrition, retention, and performance. Her use of qualitative research tools, provide an alternate lens to review the phenomena. Additionally, Rochelle Brocks survey analysis of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in nexus to the Civil Rights movement, usurps the transition, transformation, and transcendence of the Black Arts/Black Power movements, and the lasting contributions of the Post Civil Rights era.

Portia Maultsby engages an ethnographic study, inspecting the genre of Funk Music in the United States. In an historical perspective, Maultsby gathers threads of the intellectual precedents of Black music, reflected within the cultural comforter of Africana identity. James L. Conyers, Jr., offers a reflexive analysis centered on structural functionalism and cultural relevance, with emphasis on using W.E.B. DuBois study of the Suppression of the African Slave Trade, as a rubric for a descriptive and evaluative study, regarding Africana pheno...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Race, Gender, and Identity
• 2 Conjurin’ Up an Image: African American Healing Women in the Films of Julie Dash and Kasi Lemmons
• 3 African American Males’ Maladaptive Coping Strategies to Racism at Predominately White Postsecondary Institutions
• 4 They Fought a Good Fight: SNCC and Civil Rights in Mississippi
• 5 Dayton Funk Music: The Layering of Multiple Identities
• 6 The Suppression of the African Slave Trade: A Reflexive Analysis of Structural Functionalism and Cultural Relevance
• 7 The Big Bad Wolf: Lupus, Identity, and African American Women
• 8 Steele and the Supreme Court’s Creation of the Union’s Duty of Fair Representation
• 9 Our Fate or Our Future: The Hip Hop Nation and Alternative Intentional Communities for Social Justice
• Contributors
• Index