A reading response paper I found from 2008 on Whiteness, Marxism, and Angela Davis

       I am reading about whiteness this week for a class and I was trying to find my old notes on the article "Whiteness as Property" which I read in my Feminist Theory undergrad class.  When I re-read my reading response on the 2 weeks worth of reading I thought wow, this sounds kind of like my previous post, so I decided to post it.  I realize that if you have not read these articles (listed below) the response might not make as much sense as I did not go into much detail on any one article, but maybe the response will inspire you to seek out the readings as they are all very poignant and important.

Cheryl Harris                “Whiteness as Property”
Linda Martín Alcoff      “What Should White People Do?”
bell hooks                      “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination”
Friedrich Engels            “Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State”
Heidi Hartmann            “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism”
Angela Davis               “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation”

Whiteness, Marxism and Angela Davis

    The last readings were interesting, thought provoking, angering and very smart.  There are several themes that manage to interweave their way throughout each of these topics, namely the law, humanity, Marxism, race, property, coalition building, male/female relations including marriage, confinement and liberation. 

    In Harris’s article for example, she speaks about the construction of race as property, and describes the relationship between whiteness as property and black slaves as “subjugated and treated as property” by whites. (77)  The idea that black slaves were considered property to white slaveholders was not new to me, but the idea of whiteness actually being property blew my mind.  It makes sense, whiteness as something that can gain in interest, as something of fiscal import; it is just not something that would have otherwise occurred to me.  It really is a great way to articulate something I have been feeling recently. 

       A couple weeks ago in my US Women of Color class, my professor asked us to share with her a little about growing up looked like to us in relation to Nellie Wong’s poem “When I Was Growing Up.”  I am usually very careful to speak last and not too often in that class since I am the only women’s studies major and I am also one of the few white students-I like to provide room for the women of color to learn from one another.  Well there is another white female student in the class who is a self identified anarcha-feminist who speaks a lot and takes up a lot of space.  When we were sharing about growing up, she decided to say that she doesn’t identify as white because race is a social construction.  I had a lot of complicated feelings about this remark and made sure that when I shared I spoke about my complicated struggle with my whiteness. 

       I felt and feel that not identifying as white is part of white privilege because only white people have the opportunity/choice to ignore race.  People of color can refuse their color all they want, but will constantly be reminded that they are not white.  What I am trying to get across I think is that this revelation about whiteness as property helped me to pinpoint even more how whiteness functions, whether purposefully or not.  Martin Alcoff also specifically spoke to this on page 264 when she said, “[r]ace may be a social construction…yet it is real and powerful enough to alter the fundamental shape of all our lives.”

       Going back to Harris’s article about property-whiteness as and slaves treated as-leads me to Engels’ discussion of how black slave women belonged “unreservedly to the man.” (167)  The implications of this are that “their” (white men) white wives were oppressed by one sided “monogamy” and “their” black slave women were oppressed through slavery including forcible sexual slavery.  So white men essentially owned all property including whiteness, land, their monogamous wives and their slaves, all of which were at their disposal for any form of exploitation they decided to employ. 

      Lastly, Davis spoke about how in the present day the US prison system parallels with and is impacted by slavery due to its (continued) oppression of black women and men.  Though she mentions that the number of black women prisoners is rising rapidly, she speaks mainly about young black men being under the direct control of the criminal justice system. (98)  Being “under the control of” and “being the property of” are two separate ways of explaining away human beings as being in the state of non-freedom also known as slavery or incarceration depending on the historical context. 

        Davis’s radical stance of prison abolitionism and decarceration as well as her view of black slave women as the “caretakers of the house of resistance” were very new and inspiring ideas to me.  I have always heard criticism of the mushrooming prison system in the United States, but until reading Davis’s articles, I have never heard anyone advocate to completely do away with them.  Her argument is very convincing however, and I am officially recruited as a prison abolitionist.  As I said in class, crime is a social construction and it is created with a white supremacist bias implemented by white supremacist institutions and by racist law enforcement, attorneys, and judges. 

        Davis’s socialism informs her abolitionism since were we to be a socialist government, ideally there would be no need for many of the so-called crimes we have now such as theft, vagrancy, and urinating in public which is rumored to soon be considered as a sexual offense.  These crimes, were poverty to cease to exist, would look very different and would hold different meaning.

       The law also holds a large part in each group of readings: Harris speaks of race as legally defined as blood-borne (82), Haartman and Engels speak of marriage as a legal form of oppression, and Davis speaks extensively about the role of the law in the continued oppression of people of color especially in relation to the prison system.  These acknowledgements of the importance of the law allude to the ideas that even with a Marxist analysis, legal reform is still looked to as an immediate goal perhaps on the way to the real revolutions that would take down the “patriarchal capitalism” as Haartman called it.  This I am sure is debatable, but since the theorists speak of the law’s progression, the implication is that as it becomes less institutionally racist, there has been some measurability of success in the struggle to end oppression.

      These articles call for a recognition of the humanity and necessity for equal rights among all peoples, and the need for coalition building in order to attain the ultimate goal of liberation.

Some Thoughts on Reading Capitalism and Slavery in a Grad School classroom

Do you ever sit in a class and think about how happy you are to have finished all the piles of reading, like you understand the concepts and are ready to discuss and then there is no intellectual space to do so?  Cultural Studies has differed in many ways from Women's Studies (my undergraduate degree) and one of the main differences is pedagogical.  My Women's Studies classes necessitated engaged crtitcal dialogue originating and perpetuated as much as possible by the students but facilitated when necessary by the professors.  This forced us to not only have done the readings but to have understood them enough to drive a conversation about them.  My classes were usually all women and there were enough brief silences that it felt right when I spoke, as if we were giving eachother space to take turns.  I didn't fear I would be interrupted or that my thoughts wouldn't be heard.  I realize this sounds utopian; of course not all my classes were like this, but the ones for W/St majors only really were.  My experiences here in private graduate school as opposed to public undergraduate school differ greatly.  Here in private school the students and professors are from different economic backgrounds whereas at state we were basically poor and working class.  Here the students and professors are mixed genders whereas in Women's Studies my classes and professors were almost all women.  And here in private graduate school competition seems to be emphasized as students seem to leap over eachother to top one another in regards to book critiques, reputation, and experience.  Though I have now been here almost a year I am still getting used to the alien concepts of competition in and outside of the classroom and feeling the unease and stress at not being quick and loud enough to say my thoughts before topics change.

Eric Williams

So I decided to write my thoughts on the reading this week for my Introduction to Cultural Studies class in my blog, though they are now influenced by the class lecture and discussion.  Today a classmate presented briefly on Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery and in their presentation they brought up immigrant labor today and asked several questions about the connections between William's argument and today's economic dependency on sweatshops and migrant workers.  The weird thing though, at least different for me from Women's Studies again, was that for this class we are assigned to present briefly on the reading and then come up with questions for the class.  In W/St we did this as well and would basically facilitate discussion based on questions we created.  However, today after the student asked the questions the professor facilitated the rest of the class not based on the student's questions but on their own and we never came back to the presenter.  I had thoughts on the student's presentation and as the discussion didn't focus on it and the space in the class was not open I thought I would share some brief thoughts here.  As a side note I worry sometimes that I am just a whiny student who needs to learn to shout things out in class and stop being shy.  But I know I'm not shy and that in classes where the professor expects the students to drive the discussion I still thrive.  I am not the quickest thinker maybe as I like to formulate my thoughts in my head neatly before saying them, but in cases of many Cultural Studies classes by that time the discussion has quickly moved on or someone has said a similar thought more quickly.

So here is my piece.  Eric Williams's arguments were basically that the beginning of slavery in the so-called New World by England and its abolition as spearheaded by England were not based on race.  He says that it began because it was economically beneficial to England and that it ended because it was no longer economically beneficial to England.  He argued that race was used after slavery was already in place to justify it, but that it was not the reason for slavery.  He also argued against the sentimentality of abolitionism and the idea that England was so heroic/brave/selfless and symbolic of hope and humanitarianism for abolishing slavery first as this was not the reason they did so.  I am down with Williams though I think he downplayed race a lot because his argument was primarily economic and he wanted to differentiate his argument from others.  I think that slavery was both based on economic need and the idea that people from other lands with different customs and languages and who look "different" from English hegemonic "man" were underdeveloped mentally because they had a whole different paradigm of value, intelligence, labor, family, etc.

Rosie the Riveter

In thinking about the connections between hatred of African Americans and slavery as an economic system, this brings me to my classmates connection with immigrant labor.  Williams's argument that hatred came later makes sense when you think about other situations including labor by anyone but white men.  Today there is this liberal feminist idea that Rosie the Riveter is a symbol of women's strength, women's inclusion, and women's rights.  Rosie symbolizes women moving toward equality in the labor force.  But really Rosie is also sentimentalized under the auspices of humanitarianism when in reality she was war propaganda which, once the war ended, changed her tune.  As men returned home, women was practically forced out of their jobs and the common sentiment was that women were taking mens jobs away.  Just as they were first called patriotic for working, they were then demonized and called unpatrotic if they did not immediately stop working.  Rosie's image in propaganda began to look like a huge buff giant stepping on industries like Godzilla to make clear that paid labor was once again a man's job.  Then take the bracero program in which Mexicans were lured to the United States to work and were then deported and sent back to Mexico regardless that they had started families in the US.  "Americans" began to show hatred toward them for "taking their jobs" and blamed them for their own bad economy.  In both of these cases the empowerement of the laborers were followed by hateful discrimiation based on the threat that women or immigrants would/could one day have access to the same privileges as white men.  This for many people is scary because to some equality is a zero-sum game.

Anti sweatshop poster calling it slave labor

Women and migrant laborers are not slaves.  Some people liken maquiladoras and migrant workers to slave labor but there is a difference.  I do think there are modern day slaves and that these are people who are trafficked whether by kidnapping or trickery into another location so as to be isolated and then forced to work without pay.  Undocumented laborers in the US and sweatshop workers outside of the US are often exploited in that they are underpaid for their work and sometimes not paid at all, forced to work in hazardous and unhealthy conditions and they are working without job security.  There are also issues such as sexual harrassment and assault, and all of these conditions and effects occur with impunity.  But as bad as the work conditions are, as overtly exploitative, this is still not slavery because slaves are the property of their masters and exploited and underserved workers are not.  To use the term slavery, even when paired such as in the case of "wage slavery" is to change the meaning of the term such as when the term "rape" is paired with other words like "raped my wallet."  The inherent meaning of rape is about the use of sexual means to gain power just as slavery is about owning a human being for personal use.  When used to describe situations other than these they are being misused and misappropriated to bring the weight of their own meaning to another issue.  Comparing and discussing slavery, servitude, and underpaid and exploited labor is fine, but a word with as specific and important a word as slavery should only be used to describe situations that are in fact slavery.

I hope that all made sense.