Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  The view that racism is the sole cause of black female subordination in America today exhibits a very simplistic view of the black female condition. The economic processes of the society subordinate different groups of workers in different ways, but always for the same end. Because white supremacy and male chauvinism are merely symptoms of the same economic imperatives, it is facile to argue that white pigmentation is the sine qua non for the attainment of power in America, that white women share the same objective interests as white men, and that white women thus have nothing in common with black women. Although whiteness may be a contributory condition for the attainment of social privilege, sex and socio-economic status are contingent conditions. Because color, gender, and wealth are at the present time collective determinants of power and privilege in America, it is almost impossible to disentangle their individual effects. Thus, those who would assert that the elimination of one type of social discrimination should have priority over all others display a naive conceptualization of the nature of power in American society and the multifaceted character of social oppression.

  ENDNOTES

  1 Examples of literature supporting this perspective are Mae King, “Oppression and Power: The Unique Status of the Black Woman in the American Political System,” Social Science Quarterly 56 (1975): 116—28; Linda La Rue, “The Black Movement and Women’s Liberation,” Black Scholar 1 (May 1970): 36—42; and Julia Mayo, “The New Black Feminism: A Minority Report,” in Contemporary Sexual Behavior: Critical Issues in the 1970s, ed. Joseph Zubin and John Money (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 175—86.

  2 Notable exceptions are Barbara Sizemore, “Sexism and the Black Male,” Black Scholar 4 (March/April 1973): 2—11; Aileen Hernandez, “Small Change for Black Women,” Ms. 3 (August 1974): 16—18; Elizabeth Almquist, “Untangling the Effects of Race and Sex: The Disadvantaged Status of Black Women,” Social Science Quarterly 56 (1975): 129—42; Charmeyne D. Nelson, “Myths about Black Women Workers in Modern America,” Black Scholar 6 (March 1975): 11—15; and William A. Blakey, “Everybody Makes the Revolution: Some Thoughts on Racism and Sexism,” Civil Rights Digest 6 (Spring 1974): 11—19.

  3 Margaret Bentsen, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” Monthly Review 21 (September 1970); Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate (New York: Random House, 1971), 99—158; Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966); Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 3; Jean Gardiner, “Women’s Domestic Labor,” New Left Review 89 (January/February 1975): 47—59; and Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974).

  4 See, among others, Harold Baron, “The Demand for Black Labor: Historical Notes on the Political Economy of Racism,” Radical America 5 (March/April 1971): 1—46.

  5 For further discussion of black sex-role socialization see, among others, Diane K. Lewis, “The Black Family: Socialization and Sex Roles,” Phylon 34 (Fall 1975): 221—37; Carlfred Broderick, “Social Heterosexual Development among Urban Negroes and Whites,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 27 (May 1965): 200—3; Alice R. Gold and M. Carol St. Ange, “Development of Sex-Role Stereotypes in Black and White Elementary Girls,” Developmental Psychology 10 (May 1974): 461; and Boone E. Hammond and Joyce Ladner, “Socialization into Sexual Behavior in a Negro Slum Ghetto,”in The Individual, Sex, and Society, ed. Carlfred B. Broderick and Jesse Bernard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 41—52.

  6 See Almquist’s article for more data on this point.

  7 See Blau and Winkler.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Edward A. Nicholson and Roger D. Roderick, Correlates of Job Attitudes among Young Women (Columbus: Ohio State University Research Foundation, 1973), 10.

  10 Employment and Earnings, January 1988, 180.

  11 Stuart H. Garfinkle, “Occupation of Women and Black Workers, 1962—74,” Monthly Labor Review 98 (November 1975): 25—35.

  12 Almquist, “Untangling the Effects of Race and Sex;” Marion Kilson, “Black Women in the Professions, 1890—1970.” Monthly Labor Review 100 (May 1977): 38—41: and Diane Nilsen Westcott, “Blacks in the 1970s: Did They Scale the Job Ladder?” Monthly Labor Review 105 (June 1982): 29—38.

  13 Women are 54.7 percent of all black college graduates. Bureau of Labor Statistics, unpublished data from the March 1987 Current Population Survey. Part of the reason for this is that until recently blacks were basically a rural people, and it is generally the case for farmer families to withdraw males from school to work the farm, but not females, since farming is considered to be a male occupation. For further discussion of how this has contributed to present-day disparities in black male and female occupational status, see E. Wilbur Bock, “Farmer’s Daughter Effect: The Case of the Negro Female Professionals,” Phylon (Spring 1969): 17—26.

  14 Andrew Billingsley, Black Families in White America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 79—82.

  15 Bureau of Labor Statistics, unpublished data from the March 1987 Current Population Survey.

  16 Patricia Gurin and Carolyn Gaylord, “Educational and Occupational Goals of Men and Women at Black Colleges,” Monthly Labor Review 99 (June 1976): 13—14.

  17 Patricia Cayo Sexton, Women and Work, Employment and Training Administration, R. & D. Monograph no. 46 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Labor, 1977). 15; and Joyce O. Beckett, “Working Wives: A Racial Comparison,” Social Work 21 (November 1976): 463—71.

  18 Janice Porter Gump and L. Wendell Rivers, The Consideration of Race in Efforts to End Sex Bias (Washington, D.C.: Department of Health, Education and Welfare, National Institute of Education 1973), 24—25.

  19 Joyce A. Ladner, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 284; Robert Staples, The Black Woman in America (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1975), 174—76; Janice Gump, “Comparative Analysis of Black Women’s and White Women’s Sex Role Attitudes,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 43 (1975), 862—63; and Cellestine Ware, Woman Power: The Movement for Women’s Liberation (New York: Tower Publications, 1970), 75—99.

  20 S. Parker and R. J. Kleiner, “Social and Psychological Dimensions of Family Role Performance of the Negro Male,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 31 (1969): 500—6; John H. Scanzoni, The Black Family in Modern Society (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1971); Katheryn Thomas Dietrich, “A Re-examination of the Myth of Black Matriarchy,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 37 (May 1975): 367—74; H. H. Hyman and J. S. Reed, “Black Matriarchy Reconsidered: Evidence from Secondary Analysis of Sample Surveys,” Public Opinion Quarterly 33 (1969): 346—54; Robert Staples, “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy,” in The Black Family, ed. Robert Staples (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1971), 149—59; Alan Berger and William Simon, “Black Families and the Moynihan Report: A Research Evaluation,” Social Problems 33 (December 1974): 145—61.

  21 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1974); Susan Bell, Women, from the Greeks to the French Revolution (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1973); and Alan Cuming, “Women in Greek and Pauline Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (December 1973): 517—28.

  22 Notable exceptions are Rosemary Reuther, “Crisis in Sex and Race: Black vs. Feminist Theology,” Christianity and Crisis 34 (15 April 1974): 67-73; and Reuther, “Continuing the Discussion: A Further Look at Feminist Theology,” Christianity and Crisis 34 (24 June 1974): 139—43.

  23 Barbara Sizemore, “Sexism and the Black Male,” Black Scholar 4 (March/April 1973): 2—11; and Harry Edwards, “Black Muslim and Negro Christian Family Relationships,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 30 (November 1968): 604—11.

  E. Frances White

  E. Frances White’s “Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and African American Nationalism” appeared in the Spring 1990 issue of Journal of Women’s History and is one of the first essays written from a black
feminist perspective that analyzes in a comprehensive manner black nationalist discourse. White is associate professor of history and black studies at Hampshire College. Her essay “Listening to the Voices of Black Feminism” (Radical America, 1984) discusses the evolution of her own “incipient feminism” which was fanned by her frustration with black nationalist movements in the 1960s. The essay also critiques several contemporary black feminists.

  AFRICA ON MY MIND: GENDER, COUNTERDISCOURSE, AND AFRICAN AMERICAN NATIONALISM

  Equality is false; it’s the devil’s concept. Our concept is complementarity. Complementarity means you complete or make perfect that which is imperfect.

  The man has the right that does not destroy the collective needs of his family.

  The woman has the two rights of consultation and then separation if she isn’t getting what she should be getting.

  —M. RON KARENGA, The Quotable Karenga

  The African past lies camouflaged in the collective African American memory, transformed by the middle passage, sharecropping, industrialization, urbanization. Few material goods from Africa survived this difficult history, but Africans brought with them a memory of how social relations should be constructed that has affected African American culture to the present. Although the impact of these African roots are difficult to assess, few historians today deny the importance of this past to African American culture.

  But the memories I seek to interrogate in this essay have little to do with “real” memories or actual traditions that African Americans have passed along through blood or even practices. Rather, I am concerned with the way African Americans in the late twentieth century construct and reconstruct collective political memories of African culture to build a cohesive group that can shield them from racist ideology and oppression. In particular it is the political memories of African gender relations and sexuality that act as models for African American social relations that will serve as this paper’s focus.

  Below I will focus on black nationalism as an oppositional strategy that both counters racism and constructs conservative utopian images of African American life. I will pay close attention to the intertwined discussions on the relationship of the African past to present-day culture and to attempts to construct utopian and repressive gender relations. After situating my work theoretically in the next section, I return to an examination of Afrocentric paradigms that support nationalist discourse on gender and the African past. Finally I look at the emergence of a black feminist discourse that attempts to combine nationalist and feminist insights in a way that counters racism but tries to avoid sexist pitfalls.

  Throughout the essay, I choose examples from across the range of nationalist thinking. Some of this writing is obviously narrow and sexist. Other works have influenced my thinking deeply and have made significant contributions to understanding African American women’s lives. I argue, however, that all fail to confront the sexist models that ground an important part of their work. I imagine that my criticisms will be read by some as a dismissal of all Afrocentric thinking. Nothing could be further from my intentions. It is because I value the contributions of nationalists that I want to engage them seriously. Yet it is the kind of feminism that demands attention to internal community relations that leads me to interrogate this discourse even while acknowledging its ability to undermine racist paradigms. This kind of black feminism recognizes the dangers of criticizing internal relations in the face of racist attacks but also argues that we will fail to transform ourselves into a liberated community if we do not engage in dialogue on the difficult issues that confronts us.1

  African American nationalists have taken the lead in resurrecting and inventing African models for the African diaspora in the United States. They recognize that dominant, negative images of Africa have justified black enslavement, segregation, and continuing impoverishment.2 Accordingly, nationalists have always argued persuasively that African Americans deny their connections to Africa at the peril of allowing a racist subtext to circulate without serious challenge. At the same time, nationalists have recognized that counterattacks on negative portrayals of Africa stimulate political mobilization against racism in the United States. The consciously identified connections between African independence and the United States Civil Rights movements and, more recently, between youth rebellion in South Africa and campus unrest in the United States stand out as successful attempts to build a Pan-African consciousness.

  The construction of Pan-African connections can have its problems, however. At times it depends on the search for a glorious African past while accepting dominant European notions of what that past should look like. As I have argued elsewhere,3 proving that Africans created “civilizations” as sophisticated as those in Europe and the Near East has concerned nationalists too much.4 In the process of elevating Egypt, for example, they have often accepted as uncivilized and even savage primitives the majority of Africans who lived in stateless societies, but whose past deserves respect for its complex relationship to the world around it.5

  Perhaps more importantly, the nationalist or Afrocentric construction of a political memory attempts to set up standards of social relations that can be both liberating and confining. The quotation at the beginning of this essay by the “inventor” of Kwanza traditions, Ron Karenga, illustrates this point. Building off conservative concepts of “traditional” African gender relations before colonial rule, he argues that the collective needs of black families depend on women’s complementary and unequal roles. As I shall make clear below, Karenga has significantly modified his sexist ideas about gender relations, but the ideology of complementarity and collective family needs continues to work against the liberation of black women.

  In addition, many nationalists, both male and female, remain openly hostile to any feminist agenda. In a paper arguing that black people should turn to African polygamous and extended family forms to solve the “problem” of female-headed households, Larry Delano Coleman concludes:The “hyperliberated” black woman is in fact so much a man that she has no need for men, however wimpish they may be; and the “hyperemasculated” black man is so much a woman, that he has no need for women. May each group of these hyper-distorted persons find homosexual heaven among the whites, for the black race would be better served without them.6

  Coleman defines “the race” in a way that excludes feminists, lesbians, and gay men from community support—a terrifying proposition in this age of resurgent racism.7

  In advocating polygamous families, Nathan and Julia Hare, the influential editors of Black Male/Female Relationships, link homosexuality with betrayal of the race:Just as those black persons who disidentify with their race and long to alter their skin color and facial features to approximate that of the white race may be found to suffer a racial identity crisis, the homosexual individual who disidentifies with his/her biological body to the point of subjecting to the surgery of sex-change operations similarly suffers a gender identity confusion, to say the least.8

  Both the Hares’ and Coleman’s standards of appropriate gender relations depends on a misguided notion of African culture in the era before “the fall”—that is, before European domination distorted African traditions. These nationalists have idealized polygamous and extended families in a way that stresses both cooperation among women and male support of wives but ignores cross-generational conflict and intrafamily rivalry also common in extended, polygamous families. They have invented an African past to suit their conservative agenda on gender and sexuality.

  In making appeals to conservative notions of appropriate gender behavior, African American nationalists reveal their ideological ties to other nationalist movements, including European and Euro-American bourgeois nationalists over the past 200 years. These parallels exist despite the different class and power bases of these movements. European and Euro-American nationalists turned to the ideology of respectability to help them impose the bourgeois manners and morals that attempted to control sexual behavior and gend
er relations. This ideology helped the bourgeoisie create a “private sphere” that included family life, sexual relations, and leisure time. Respectability set standards of proper behavior at the same time that it constructed the very notion of private life. Nationalism and respectability intertwined as the middle class used the nation-state to impose its notions of the private sphere’s proper order on the upper and lower classes. Through state-run institutions, such as schools, prisons, and census bureaus, the bourgeoisie disciplined people and collected the necessary information to identify and control them.9

  Often African Americans have served as a model of abnormality against which nationalism in the United States was constructed. White bourgeois nationalism has often portrayed African Americans as if they threatened respectability. Specifically, white nationalists have described both black men and women as hypersexual. Moreover, black family life has consistently served as a model of abnormality for the construction of the ideal family life. Black families were matriarchal when white families should have been male-dominated. Now they are said to be female-headed when the ideal has become an equal heterosexual pair.10

  As I have suggested, black people have developed African American nationalism as an oppositional discourse to counter such racist images. Ironically, though not surprisingly, this nationalism draws on the ideology of respectability to develop a cohesive political movement. The African American ideology of respectability does not always share the same moral code with western nationalism. Some Afrocentric thinkers, such as Larry Coleman, turn to Africa for models of gender relations and call for polygamy as an appropriate form of marriage between black men and women. More crucially, black nationalists did not and cannot call on state power to enforce their norms. Their opposition to abortion carries very different weight from the campaign of the Christian right, whose agenda includes making a bid for control of state institutions.