Seeking the Beloved Community

A Feminist Race Reader

Joy James

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438446349
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Written over the course of twenty years, the essays brought together here highlight and analyze tensions confronted by writers, scholars, activists, politicians, and political prisoners fighting racism and sexism. Focusing on the experiences of black women calling attention to and resisting social injustice, the astonishing scale of mass and politically driven imprisonment in the United States, and issues relating to government and civic powers in American democracy, Joy James gives voice to people and ideas persistently left outside mainstream progressive discourse—those advocating for the radical steps necessary to acknowledge and remedy structural injustice and violence, rather than merely reforming those existing structures.

Part 1.

FEMINIST RACE THEORY

1

Teaching Theory, Talking Community

[P]eople of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic … our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create … [in] dynamic rather than fixed ideas…. How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity? And women, at least the women I grew up around, continuously speculated about the nature of life through pithy language that unmasked the power relations of their world…. My folk, in other words, have always been a race for theory—though more in the form of the hieroglyph, a written figure which is both sensual and abstract, both beautiful and communicative.

—Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory”

ERASURE IN ACADEMIC THEORY

Contemporary African American theorists such as Barbara Christian, who writes that theory not rooted in practice is elitist, think within a community-centered tradition in which the creativity of a people in the race for theory sustains humanity. However, teaching theory as nonelitist, and intending the liberation and development of all of humanity, specifically Africana communities, contradicts much of academic theory, which is Eurocentric.¹

All philosophy and theory, Eurocentric or Afrocentric, is political. Academic “disciplines,” when sexualized and racialized, tend to reproduce themselves in hierarchically segregated forms. To confront segregation means recognizing that current academic or educational standards have never worked, and were never intended to for us as a people. Our paltry presence in (white) universities and colleges speaks to the fact that individuals, but not the community, may attain some success in an educational process centered on the marginalization of all but the “European” (socially constructed as white, male, propertied, and heterosexual).

Philosophy or theory courses may emphasize logic and memorizing the history of “Western” philosophy rather than the activity of creating philosophies or theorizing. When the logic of propositions is the primary object of study, how one argues becomes more important than for what one argues. The exercise of reason may take place within an illogical context—in which academic canons absurdly claim universal supremacy derived from the hierarchical splintering of humanity into greater and lesser beings, or the European Enlightenment's deification of scientific rationalism as the truly “valid” approach to “Truth.”

Some thinkers have argued that theory and philosophy are open to the “everyday” person and intend the good of humanity. However, few identify Africana people, women of color, women in general, and black women in particular, or poor people or prisoners as both equal partners in that humanity and important theorists in its behalf. Fewer still connect the “life of the mind” to the understanding that “black people have to a disproportionate extent supplied the labor which has made possible the cultivation of philosophical inquiry.”² They, along with female labor in the “private realm” or the “household,” have disproportionately cultivated philosophies that provide nonabstract meanings of freedom and justice. Surviving genocidal oppression allows insights into (in)humanity and (in)justice that transcend the abstractions of academic philosophy and theory, infused in Western democracies by patriarchies and Eurocentrism; theory is not synonymous with European.³

In a society and culture where the white European represents both the ideal and universal manifestation of civilization, racist iconography infuses worldviews and misshapens European philosophy, with destructive effects on the material lives of the majority of the world's people.⁴

Adhering to the tastes of white supremacy, “white solipsism” masquerades as universal philosophy within the myth of racial superiority.⁵ If legitimizing a world order of domination becomes an intellectual mandate, like the carnival house of mirrors, theory projects what it distorts in solipsistic reflections.

Playing by academic house rules sets standards for theory that few will meet.⁶ The thoughts of “outsiders” are reduced to descriptions of a part (of humanity or subhumanity) rather than analyses of a whole (humanity). When teaching about the lives of black activist women, for example, is viewed as a descent to the particular from the “universal norm” (white, male, monied), biology becomes the destiny theory (privileged biology becomes manifest destiny). Recognition as “theorists” or “intellectuals” because of their adherence or loyalty to house rules is the equal opportunity moment for former outsiders to play inside; technique is not inherently theory. (Self)Objectification through the “expert” voices of “trained” speakers could be interference.⁷ Stripped of context in community may mean forced relocation to some mental or academic ghetto.⁸ Extreme locations offer the vantage point of view: if the axis of the universe remains the same in reform, what would it mean to revolutionize theory?

TALKING THEORY

Theoretical traditions in service to community challenge the authoritative or authoritarian narratives about theory and philosophy. Outside the academic or popular worldviews of “scientific” materialism and “objective” rationalism, exist the nonduality of the sacred and secular, spiritual and political, the individual and communal. Discredited indigenous cosmologies, and political rebellions, offer concepts of not just nonlinear time, or shared spatial commitments to community, but they gesture toward the holy grail of the “beloved community.” Toni Morrison sketches transcendent theory in her observations on writing:

If anything I do in the way of writing … isn't about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams, which is to say, yes, the work must be political. It must have that as its thrust. That's a pejorative term in critical circles now: if a work of art has any political influence in it, somehow it's tainted. My feeling is just the opposite: if it has none, it is tainted.⁹

A tradition of labor for liberated communities evokes worldviews where ethical concerns and liberatory acts move the community closer to political thought. Activism is a great and difficult learning experience, particularly if connected to communities in crisis.¹⁰

Concretizing ethical ideals in action supports an unfamiliar form of thinking—theorizing in the face of political violence.¹¹ For centuries, Indigenous and African peoples in the Americas have theorized for their lives and so collectively crafted a revolutionary praxis. Fiercely struggling for collective freedom, ancestors Harriet Tubman, Ida. B. Wells, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, along with countless others theorized with the weight of legacies not fully comprehended and rarely engaged.

NOTES

1. Samir Amin writes: “Eurocentrism is a specifically modern phenomenon, the roots of which go back only to the Renaissance, a phenomenon that did not flourish until the nineteenth century. In this sense, it constitutes one dimension of the culture and ideology of the modern capitalist world.” Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), vii.

2. Elizabeth Spelman cites this quote from a journal on African Americans and philosophy in Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), n. 26.

3. Samir Amin argues that Eurocentrism “assumes the existence of irreducibly distinct cultural invariants that shape the historical paths of different peoples.” According to Amin, it is “anti-universalist” because instead of searching for “general laws of human evolution” it represents itself as universalist by claiming that “imitation of the Western model by all peoples is the only solution to the challenges of our time.” See Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, vii.

4. The academic mind-set mirrors white supremacy: “the idea of white supremacy emerges partly because of the powers within the structure of modern discourse—powers to produce and prohibit, develop and delimit, forms of rationality, scientificity, and objectivity which set perimeters and draw boundaries for the intelligibility, availability, and legitimacy of certain ideas.” See Cornel West, “A Genealogy of Modern Racism,” Prophesy Deliverance (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982).

5. See Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman for a discussion of “white solipsism.”

6. For theologian Bernard Lonergan, epistemology is based on a four-part process of: experience, reflection, judgment, and action; ethical action expands experience, self-reflection, and judging to promote consciousness of one's own political practice. See Bernard Lonergan, INSIGHT: An Understanding of Human Knowing (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).

7. Patricia Hill Collins describes academic research methods rejecting emotions and communal ethics. See Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33, no. 6 (1986).

8. See Henry and Margaret Drewal, eds., Gelede: Art and Female Power Among the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 74.

9. Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984).

10. Bernice Johnson Reagon argues this point about plagiarism in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dissertation. See Bernice Johnson Reagon, “ ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I See’; or ‘By and By I'm Gonna Lay Down My Heavy Load,’ ” The Journal of American History 78, no. 1 (June 1991).

11. In the 1990s, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) traveled from its headquarters in Indiana to rally in the local campus town where I spent a semester as a visiting scholar. After viewing William Greaves's documentary, A Passion for Justice, on the life of antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells, students formed a coalition, led by black women, to organize a countereducational event critiquing racism, (hetero)sexism, and anti-Semitism. At one meeting, a senior recalled being dragged off a catwalk into the bushes as her white male assailant repeatedly punched her, yelling “nigger bitch.” As she struggled to get away, she noticed white student spectators who offered no aid and later equally nonresponsive university investigators and administrators. White and black university employees and students would dismiss the anti-Klan organizers as “radical” and as “overreacting.”

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This is an edited version of “Teaching Theory, Talking Community,” in Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex, ed. Anthony J. Nocella II, et al. (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010); the original appears in Spirit, Space and Survival: African American Women in (White) Academe, eds. Joy James and Ruth Farmer (New York: Routledge, 1993).

2

Politicizing the Spirit: Toni Morrison

Within her nonfiction essays, Toni Morrison's dissection of racist paradigms is framed by a worldview that testifies to African American ancestral spirits, the centrality of transcendent community, as well as her faith in the abilities of black intellectuals to critique and “civilize” a racist society. This reading of Morrison quotes extensively from her nonfiction to sketch a framework for her observations on racist stereotypes and black resistance. Even a partial sketch reveals clues for deciphering how the author uncovers and recovers ground for “discredited knowledge” in order to reconnect “traditional” and contemporary cultural beliefs to political struggles. This is not an argument for black “essentialism.” Black cultural views manifest and mutate through time and space; and are neither quintessential nor universal to everyone of African descent. Likewise, a passionate interest in African American intellectual and political resistance to antiblack racism is not a synonym for indifference to nonblacks and the varied accommodations to Eurocentrism and white supremacy.

“AMERICAN-AFRICANISMS”

My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society.¹

Writers working in a highly racialized society often express an overt and covert fascination with blackness. For Morrison, European Americans “choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence.”² This practice and its arsenal, which she labels “American Africanisms,” mirror (if not stem from) European Africanisms. The term Africanism represents:

the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people…. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability.³

A literary and political tool and vehicle, the Africanism “provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.”⁴ The distinctive difference of the New World, writes Morrison, is that its claim to freedom coexisted with “the presence of the unfree within the heart of the democratic experiment.”⁵ It is arguably still the same. Morrison advises that we investigate “the Africanist character as surrogate and enabler” and the use of the “Africanist idiom” to mark difference or the “hip, sophisticated, ultra-urbane.” Her own investigations inform us that within the “construction of blackness and enslavement” existed:

not only the not-free, but also with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an [European] American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American.⁶

Newly constructed beings and inhumanities, such as the white male as both exalted demigod and brutish enslaver, were sanctioned by literature. Morrison emphasizes the cultural aspects of dominance to critique the Euro-American literary imagination: “cultural identities are formed and informed by a nation's literature … what seemed to be on the ‘mind’ of the literature of the United States was the self-conscious but highly problematic construction of the American as a new white man.”⁷

In the formation of this “new American” identity, blackness embodied in the African was indispensable to elevating whiteness. In this elevation of whiteness, the Africanist other became the device for “thinking about body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; [and] provided the occasion for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom and of aggression.”⁸ Within this framework, the boundaries of the ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. Feminist Race Theory
• Part II. Democracy and Captivity
• Part III. Sovereign Political Subjects