Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics)

by Hooks, Bell

  Malcolm X would still be an important political thinker and activist whose life and work should be studied and learned from, even if he had never confronted and altered his sexist thinking. However, the point that has to be made again and again is that he did begin to critique and change that sexism, he did transform his consciousness.

  When I hear Malcolm urging us to seize our freedom “by any means necessary,” I do not think of a call to masculinist violence but rather of a call that urges us to think, to decolonize our minds, and strategize so that we can use various tools and weapons in our efforts at emancipation. I like to remember him speaking about our choosing to work for freedom “by any means necessary” in his response to the words of Fannie Lou Hamer. I like to evoke Malcolm’s name and his words when writing to a black male lover about how we treat one another, using his evocation of redemptive love between black people, remembering that he told us:

  It is not necessary to change the white man’s mind. We have to change our own mind … We’ve got to change our own minds about each other. We have to see each other with new eyes. We have to see each other as brothers and sisters. We have to come together with warmth …

  The harmony Malcolm evokes here can only emerge in a context where renewed black liberation struggle has a feminist component, where the eradication of sexism is seen as essential to our struggle, to our efforts to build a beloved community, a space of harmony and connection where black women and men can face each other not as enemies but as comrades, our hearts rejoicing in a communion that is about shared struggle and mutual victory.

  18

  COLUMBUS

  Gone but not forgotten

  Late last night a strange white man came to my door. Walking towards him through the dark shadows of the corridor, I felt fear surface, uncertainty about whether I should open the door. After hesitating, I did. He was a messenger bringing a letter from a female colleague. As I took the letter from him, he told me that he was reading my book, Black Looks, that he liked it, but that he just wanted to say that there was just too much emphasis on “Oh,” he insisted, “you know the phrase.” I finished the sentence for him, “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” After a moment’s pause I said, “Well, it’s good to know you are reading this book.”

  From the onset when I began to use the phrase “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe my understanding of the “new world order,” folks reacted. I witnessed the myriad ways this phrase disturbed, angered, and provoked. The response reinforced my awareness that it is very difficult for most Americans, irrespective of race, class, gender, sexual preference or political allegiance, to really accept that this society is white supremacist. Many white feminists were using the phrase “capitalist patriarchy” without questioning its appropriateness. Evidently it was easier for folks to see truth in referring to the economic system as capitalist and the institutionalized system of male gender domination as patriarchal than for them to consider the way white supremacy as a foundational ideology continually informs and shapes the direction of these two systems of domination. The nation’s collective refusal to acknowledge institutionalized white supremacy is given deep and profound expression in the contemporary zeal to reclaim the myth of Christopher Columbus as patriotic icon.

  Despite all the contemporary fuss, I do not believe that masses of Americans spend much time thinking about Columbus. Or at least we didn’t until now. Embedded in the nation’s insistence that its citizens celebrate Columbus’s “discovery” of America is a hidden challenge, a call for the patriotic among us to reaffirm a national commitment to imperialism and white supremacy. This is why many of us feel it is politically necessary for all Americans who believe in a democratic vision of the “just and free society,” one that precludes all support of imperialism and white supremacy, to “contest” this romanticization of Columbus, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

  Columbus’s legacy is an inheritance handed down through generations. It has provided the cultural capital that underlies and sustains modern-day white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Those of us who oppose all forms of domination long ago debunked the Columbus myth and reclaimed histories that allow us a broader, more realistic vision of the Americas. Hence, we resist and oppose the national call to celebrate Columbus. What we celebrate is our subversion of this moment, the way many folks have made it a space for radical intervention. Indeed, the invitation to celebrate Columbus was for some of us a compelling call to educate the nation for critical consciousness—to seize the moment to transform everyone’s understanding of our nation’s history. What we acknowledge is that this moment allows us a public space to mourn, an occasion to grieve for what this world was like before the coming of the white man and to recall and reclaim the cultural values of that world. What we acknowledge is the burgeoning spirit of resistance that will undoubtedly rock this nation so that the earth, the ground on which we stand and live, will be fundamentally changed—turned over as we turn back to a concern for the collective harmony and life of the planet.

  Thinking about the Columbus legacy and the foundations of white supremacy in the United States, I am drawn most immediately to Ivan Van Sertima and to his ground-breaking book, They Came Before Columbus. Documenting the presence of Africans in this land before Columbus, his work calls us to rethink issues of origin and beginnings. Often the profound political implications of Van Sertima’s work is ignored. Yet in a revolutionary way, this work calls us to recognize the existence in American history of a social reality where individuals met one another within the location of ethnic, national, and cultural difference and who did not make of that difference a site of imperialist/cultural domination. When I recall learning about Columbus from grade school on, what stands out is the way we were taught to believe that the will to dominate and conquer folks who are different from ourselves is natural, not culturally specific. We were taught that the Indians would have conquered and dominated white explorers if they could have but they were simply not strong or smart enough. Embedded in all these teachings was the assumption that it was the whiteness of these explorers in the “New World” that gave them greater power. The word “whiteness” was never used. The key word, the one that was synonymous with whiteness, was “civilization.” Hence, we were made to understand at a young age that whatever cruelties were done to the indigenous peoples of this country, the “Indians,” was necessary to bring the great gift of civilization. Domination, it became clear in our young minds, was central to the project of civilization. And if civilization was good and necessary despite the costs, then that had to mean domination was equally good.

  The idea that it was natural for people who were different to meet and struggle for power merged with the idea that it was natural for whites to travel around the world civilizing non-whites. Despite progressive interventions in education that call for a rethinking of the way history is taught and culturally remembered, there is still little focus on the presence of Africans in the “New World” before Columbus. As long as this fact of history is ignored, it is possible to name Columbus as an imperialist, a colonizer, while still holding on to the assumption that the will to conquer is innate, natural, and that it is ludicrous to imagine that people who are different nationally, culturally, could meet each other and not have conflict be the major point of connection. The assumption that domination is not only natural but central to the civilizing process is deeply rooted in our cultural mind-set. As a nation we have made little transformative progress to eradicate sexism and racism precisely because most citizens of the United States believe in their heart of hearts that it is natural for a group or an individual to dominate over others. Most folks do not believe that it is wrong to dominate, oppress, and exploit other people. Even though marginalized groups have greater access to civil rights in this society than in many societies in the world, our exercise of these rights has done little to change the overall cultural assumption that domination is essential to the progress
of civilization, to the making of social order.

  Despite so much evidence in daily life that suggests otherwise, masses of white Americans continue to believe that black people are genetically inferior—that it is natural for them to be dominated. And even though women have proved to be the equals of men in every way, masses still believe that there can be no sustained social and family order if males do not dominate females, whether by means of benevolent or brutal patriarchies. Given this cultural mind-set, it is so crucial that progressives who seek to educate for critical consciousness remind our nation and its citizens that there are paradigms for the building of human community that do not privilege domination. And what better example do we have as a culture than the meeting of Africans and native peoples in the Americas? Studying this historical example we can learn much about the politics of solidarity. In the essay “Revolutionary Renegades” published in Black Looks, I emphasize the importance of ties between the Africans who came here before Columbus and Native American communities:

  The Africans who journeyed to the “New World” before Columbus recognized their common destiny with the Native peoples who gave them shelter and a place to rest. They did not come to command, to take over, to dominate, or to colonize. They were not eager to sever their ties with memory; they had not forgotten their ancestors. These African explorers returned home peaceably after a time of communion with Native Americans. Contrary to colonial white imperialist insistence that it was natural for groups who are different to engage in conflict and power struggle, the first meetings of Africans and Native Americans offer a counter-perspective, a vision of cross-cultural contact where reciprocity and recognition of the primacy of community are affirmed, where the will to conquer and dominate was not seen as the only way to confront the Other who is not ourselves.

  Clearly the Africans and Native peoples who greeted them on these shores offered each other a way of meeting across difference that highlighted the notion of sharing resources, of exploring differences and discovering similarities. And even though there may not remain a boundless number of documents that would affirm these bonds, we must call attention to them if we would dispel the cultural assumption that domination is natural.

  Colonizing white imperialists documented the reality that the indigenous people they met did not greet them with the will to conquer, dominate, oppress, or destroy. In his journals and letters to Spanish patrons, Columbus described the gentle, peace-loving nature of Native Americans. In a letter to a Spanish patron, Columbus wrote (quoted in Howard Zinn’s essay “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress”):

  They are very simple and honest and exceedingly liberal with all they have, none of them refusing anything he may possess when he is asked. They exhibit great love toward all others in preference to themselves.

  Though he seemed in awe of the politics of community and personal relations that he witnessed among the indigenous people, Columbus did not empathize with or respect the new cultural values he was observing and allow himself to be transformed, born again with a new habit of being. Instead he saw these positive cultural values as weaknesses that made the indigenous people vulnerable, nations that could be easily conquered, exploited, and destroyed. This cultural arrogance was expressed in his journal when he boasted, “They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” At the core of the new cultural values Columbus observed was a subordination of materiality to collective welfare, the good of the community. From all accounts, there was no indigenous community formed on the basis of excluding outsiders so it was possible for those who were different—in appearance, nationality, and culture—to be embraced by the communal ethos.

  It is the memory of this embrace that we must reinvoke as we critically interrogate the past and rethink the meaning of the Columbus legacy. Fundamentally, we are called to choose between a memory that justifies and privileges domination, oppression, and exploitation and one that exalts and affirms reciprocity, community, and mutuality. Given the crisis the planet is facing—rampant destruction of nature, famine, threats of nuclear attack, ongoing patriarchal wars—and the way these tragedies are made manifest in our daily life and the lives of folks everywhere in the world, it can only be a cause for rejoicing that we can remember and reshape paradigms of human bonding that emphasize the increased capacity of folks to care for the earth and for one another. That memory can restore our faith and renew our hope.

  Whether we are evoking memories of Columbus or the Africans who journeyed before him, the legacy they both represent, though different, is masculine. One semester, I began my course on African American women writers speaking about this journey. For the first time, I talked about the fact that initial contact between Africans and Native Americans was first and foremost a meeting between men. Later, Columbus arrives—also with men. While the African and Native American men who greeted one another did not embody the characteristics of an imperialist misogynistic masculine ideal, they shared with white colonizers a belief in gender systems that privilege maleness. This means that even though there were communities to be found in Africa and the Americas where women did have great privilege, they were always seen as fundamentally different from and in some ways always less than men. Zinn’s essay emphasizes both “widespread rape of native women” by white colonizers as well as the degree to which the imperialist venture in the Americas was seen as a “masculine conquest.” What contemporary speculative discussion do we have about the way indigenous men responded to the assaults on native women? Zinn emphasizes the way gendered metaphors were used to celebrate the colonizers’ victory. He quotes Samuel Eliot Morison’s patriarchal romanticization of this conquest: “Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492, when the new world gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.” Indigenous men had no relationship to the land, to the world of their ancestors, to the earth that would have allowed them to evoke metaphors of rape and violation. To imagine the earth as a woman to be taken over, consumed, dominated was a way of thinking about life peculiar to the colonizer. My point is not that Native Americans and Africans did not hold sexist values, but that they held them differently from white colonizers; that there were among these diverse men of color and communities of color limits to masculine power. It is a tragic consequence of colonization that contemporary men of color seek to affirm nationhood and male power in specific cultural contexts by asserting a masculinity informed by the very worst of the white patriarchal legacy.

  In our cultural retelling of history we must connect the Columbus legacy with the institutionalization of patriarchy and the culture of sexist masculinity that upholds male domination of females in daily life. The cultural romanticization of Columbus’s imperialist legacy includes a romanticization of rape. White colonizers who raped and physically brutalized native women yet who recorded these deeds as the perks of victory acted as though women of color were objects, not the subjects of history. If there was conflict, it was between men. Females were perceived as though they and their bodies existed apart from the struggle between males for land and territory. From that historical moment on, women of color have had to grapple with a legacy of stereotypes that suggest we are betrayers, all too willing to consent when the colonizer demands our bodies. Any critical interrogation of the Columbus legacy that does not call attention to the white supremacist patriarchal mind-set that condoned the rape and brutalization of native females is only a partial analysis. For contemporary critics to condemn the imperialism of the white colonizer without critiquing patriarchy is a tactic that seeks to minimize the particular ways gender determines the specific forms oppression may take within a specific group. It subsumes the rape and exploitation of native women by placing such acts solely within the framework of military conquest, the spoils of war, a gesture which mystifies the way in which patriarchal thinking works both apart from, and in conjunction with, imperialism to supp
ort and affirm sexual violence against females—particularly women of color. Why is it many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?

  Are contemporary people of color not wedding ourselves to the Columbus legacy when we construct a cultural politics of tribal or national identity that perpetuates the subordination of women? If contemporary notions of ethnic subcultural nationhood and identity condone and celebrate female subordination by males via the perpetuation of sexist thinking and behavior, then progressive demands for a rethinking of history will never be fundamentally linked with a politics of solidarity that fully repudiates domination. No transformative interventions can take place to end oppression and exploitation as long as we critique one form of domination and embrace another.

  The Columbus legacy is clearly one that silences and eradicates the voices—the lives—of women of color. In part to repair the damage of this history, the way it has been taught to us, the way it has shaped how we live our lives, we must seize this moment of historical remembering to challenge patriarchy. No amount of progressive rethinking of history makes me want to call to mind the fate of native women during the imperialist conquest of the Americas. Or the extent to which their fate determined the destiny of enslaved African Americans. There is only sorrow to be found in evoking the intensity of violence and brutalization that was part of the Western colonization of the minds and bodies of native women and men. We can, however, call that legacy to mind in a spirit of collective mourning, making our grief a catalyst for resistance. Naming our grief empowers it and us. Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan [in her essay “Columbus Debate” from the October 1992 issue of Elle] reminds us of the depth of this sorrow.