African-American critique of white feminism

The particularities of the critical scholarship on whiteness emerging out of the US are based on a threefold vision of otherness connected to Native Americans, slavery, and recent migration, such as from South America and Asia. Most prominently featured is scholarship on African-American experience – and this is also where my emphasis lies. In what follows I will present some of the US feminist theorists on the topic of race and gender in order to discuss the theories’ relation to experience and knowledge production. I will explore the theoretical tensions that are found in the US in the binaries and in the persistent hierarchy of white and black experience as well as in the emphasis placed on gender or race. Moreover, I want to argue that identity politics in the sense of identity as a point of enunciation is prevalent in the US-based theories, though not absolute.

African Americans have a long history of theorising and imagining whiteness in the US. The author bell hooks recalls how whiteness in black imaginary has been connected to ‘the mysterious, the strange and the terrible’ (hooks 1998: 39), and how whiteness and white cultural domination has left a notion of whiteness as terror in all black people. In Black Looks (1998), hooks recaptures the look of African American to the European (or Anglo)¹⁰ American, and uses memory to name whiteness in the black imagination. It is a representation of terror, and white people are terrorists, killers, rapists, ghosts, and death.¹¹ Exploring this representation, hooks argues that the socially and politically enforced white projection of the image of the terrorist other onto black people makes an awareness of the representation of white as terror impossible to whites. However, it is this representation which all black people in the US experience, indifferently of their status, class and other background, hooks asserts, and as such it functions as a collective memory. The aim of hooks is to understand blackness through the deconstruction of the imagination of white as terror, and in order for white people to become part of this exercise, white people have to shift positions, raise their levels of consciousness and develop the skills needed to be able to see themselves and their culture as terrorising.

Contemporary with hooks’ important work, Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison, in her bestselling book, Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), analyses the repeated occurrences of whiteness in American literature.

Morrison also finds whiteness to have deep roots in the American identity. ‘American means white’, she states (Morrison 1993: 47), and this pervasive but unacknowledged and therefore structurally invisible racialisation may be something the American self-image cannot do without. That is, American whiteness is constructed upon and simultaneously denies its other in order to sustain a cultural, political and economical

10 I will return to the problematic of labelling white Americans ‘European Americans’.

11 This is a representation which Dyer (1997) also elaborates on equating white with death through analysis of Hollywood movie productions. White people not only look dead by virtue of their (lack of) colour, they also bring death (Dyer 1997: 209). Dyer then uses the example of the vampire, which is the living dead feeding on others’ life force: blood. Vampires, like white people, are living through the consumption of others. Death is moreover glorified and yearned after in much nineteenth-century literature and art. Thus, the white death is represented as being decadently European, but white death is also claimed in the name of rationality and pseudo-scientific race-selection in, for example, the Nazi death camps because: ‘Who else could put all those people into ovens scientifically’ (Lorraine Hansberry, quoted in hooks (1998:44)).

power structure privileging white skin and culture. Moreover, as an American phenomenon, whiteness is founded on the historical subjugation of black people, which lays the groundwork for a continued social, political and economical inequality between white and black. Whiteness is as such a power tool to impose on – originally – African slaves in order to establish and stay in power, but sustained through, among other things, cultural and political products and discourses in literary productions, Morrison asserts.

To Morrison and hooks, white women play an equal part in this subjugation and continue to do so through cultural reproductions (hooks 1998) and through their literary work (Morrison 1993). When the representation of whiteness intersects with the representation of gender, Morrison’s analyses of literary representations focus mainly on the white masculinity embedded in the metaphors and narrative structures of classic novels. Morrison lets the gendered female experience fall in the background when the issue of race enters the stage. On the other hand, hooks analyses the pop singer Madonna as a white female icon constructed as a ‘bad girl’ because of her affiliation with blackness. On Madonna’s music video ‘Like a Prayer’, hooks writes:

No article [about the video] called attention to the fact that Madonna flaunts her sexual agency by suggesting that she is breaking the ties that bind her as a white girl to white patriarchy, and establishing ties with black men. She, however, and not the black men, does the choosing. The message is directed at white men. It suggests that they only labelled black men rapists in fear that white girls would choose black partners over them. (hooks 1998: 312).

Madonna is described by hooks as a parasite on the symbolism of blackness and in that constellation the fact that she is a woman matters little. Whereas Madonna’s gender situates her in a particular hierarchical relation to black people, it is primarily her whiteness that gives her agency over black men – as well as women. Here, hooks is arguing that Madonna is merely reproducing and playing with the old stereotype and power structure of white men and white women respectively placed above black men and black women in the racist/sexist hierarchy.

In Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought. Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990), gender and feminism are made explicit and held in a more balanced relation. Hill Collins argues for a particular black feminist standpoint supported by lived experiences particular to black women. The grounding of the theory in the body of black women makes clear the value of self-definition and identity politics. Hill Collins tries to break down the hierarchy by ignoring it. Black women should not be defined through or as opposed to white women or black and white men, because black female experience and black feminist thought and knowledge production is different from the mainstream white feminism, Hill Collins argues.

Though studies and politics of African-American culture have been around as long as women’s studies and feminism¹², it was not until the 1980s and early 1990s that black feminism was defined as such. Primarily African-American scholarship, attempting to analyse several layers of experience simultaneously, was developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1995) as intersectionality. This approach looks at the levels of experience of gender, race, class as well as their convergences and intersections. ‘Black feminism’ or ‘womanism’ is seen to have developed in relation to African- Americanist criticism and Anglo-American or European American feminist criticism (Andemar, Lowell, Wolkowitz 1997), so the field has been intersectional from the beginning. But ‘Black feminism’ or ‘womanism’ is also founded on an opposition to white hegemony and power of definition, i.e., encompassing ‘white feminism’. It is a form of resistance towards the hegemonic white, masculine (way of) thinking: a way of putting the African-American person in the personal when speaking about the personal being the political in the feminist tradition.

Hill Collins’ strategy positions black intellectuals in opposition to other groups of intellectuals. Internalising certain common ‘black, female’ experiences, she can be said to feed into a black/white symbolism – a ‘them’ and ‘us’ dichotomy, which constructs undiversified and stereotyped groups. Hill Collins’ approach can be compared to that which Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist

12 If not longer; both the struggle for racial equal rights and women’s rights started in the US with the abolitionist struggle – which came first is hard to determine, though, and perhaps slightly irrelevant in this context.

Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ (1991) calls the western feminist academics’

construction of discursive ‘third world women’, which is achieved by maintaining that there is one patriarchal power, which suppresses all women in all countries. White feminists hereby force women from so-called third world countries into the hegemonic monolithic and homogenising discourse, which furthermore produces a static image of the ‘the third world woman’. This way the category ‘woman’ is always already placed as one fixed and uniform group upholding the simplistic opposition of men and women. This ‘third world woman’ exists within a stereotype which forms a mirror to the western woman’s self-image. This is done to clarify the western woman’s perception of herself as being modern, liberated etc.¹³, Mohanty argues. In the case of Hill Collins’ African-American female experience and knowledge production, the stereotype is taken up and developed in an African-American scope, which accentuates the black female experience in a kind of ‘strategic essentialism’

(Spivak). However, the binary position of black versus white (Hill Collins) or ‘third world’ versus ‘first world’ (Mohanty) remains unchanged.

Obviously, neither Morrison, hooks, Mohanty nor Hill Collins choose arbitrarily the opposition of black and white. It is a longstanding ‘western’, white and to some extent masculine tradition to define oneself in opposition to the other, the ‘blackened’ and the ‘backwards’. It is a well-established dichotomy, which Hill Collins plays on in reverse, arguing that uncontrollability and blackness equals good, and control and whiteness equals bad in epistemological as well as moral terms. Whereas whiteness is represented as a symbolic power position – little to do with the actual colour of people, the experience of blackness shared by African Americans seem to create a common knowledge and culture as theorised by Hill Collins, for instance. But the colour-line discourse does not necessarily have to end up in antagonistic positions and hierarchies. Angela Davis (2005) has shown that within the history of education a cross-racial sisterhood has emerged, though it remains an under-examined topic.

Recent scholarship (Shohat 2003, Alcoff 2006) has diversified the debates considerably in ways that question the concept of ‘blackness’ and its many shades in the US context. Often US theorists refrain from dealing with the power structures

13 This structure of opposition and self identification will be discussed further below when I present the debates on Islam and feminism.

within the group of black feminists, within the group of African Americans in general, or between groups of different ethnic origins such as South American, Asian or Native American. This means that the theories tend to reproduce a rather dichotomous way of thinking in black-white, as well as maintaining the notion of whiteness as simultaneously nothing and invisibly everything (Dyer 1997). It has even led white feminist Catherine MacKinnon (1997) to argue that positioning white and black women as opposites is to buy into the white male stereotype constructed around white femininity as being innocent and available to men at all times. That is, ‘whiteness’ as a power structure should not imply white women, because such an argument neglects to acknowledge the oppression of white women. MacKinnon believes that feminism in general – and here she encompasses African-American feminists’ engagement in the feminist movement – is based on diversity between and within women and female experiences. Her strong opinion nevertheless assumes a given priority to anti-sexism rather than anti-racism. The intervention thus calls for a questioning of the ability of MacKinnon’s brand of feminism to critique its own ranks and Mohanty’s (1991) critique of white feminism seems apt here. So though much feminist and intersectional work aims at dissolving the binaries it is not always easily achieved.

Still other US theorists challenge the black-white binary in order to make room for a

‘third voice’. Blanche Radford Curry is one of these voices and in her essay,

‘Whiteness and Feminism: Déjà Vu Discourses, What’s Next?’ (2003), Curry takes as a starting point the criticism laid at white feminists’ door for mirroring and repeating the structures of white men in, for instance, academia and in the workplace. In order for feminists/womanists (Curry divides white and black theorists thus) to develop a new and better epistemology, difference has to be taken seriously as part of a humanistic project. However, while arguing for a democratised standpoint of epistemology, Curry seems to argue that some standpoints are better than others and some should be abolished altogether. Curry envisions a ‘third womanist/feminist voice, which is comprehensive in insight and possesses a moral ethos to do the right thing, [and] will be able to effect the goal of a better world order for everyone’ (Curry 2003: 258). To accomplish this third voice, more theorising and more praxis, interaction and contact is needed, she argues. However, Curry re-enacts the binary positions, which she seeks to undo by referring to ‘white feminists’ versus ‘black

womanists’. Like Hill Collins, she re-establishes the binary only with the hierarchy turned upside-down.

Another attempt to destabilise this binary comes from US Latino/a theories and scholarship on Asian-American experience. Here I will return to the work of Linda Martín Alcoff to illustrate this part of the US scholarship. I will focus on Alcoff’s latest work, Visible Identities (2006), and in particular her work on ‘the whiteness question’ (1998, 2006).

Linda Martín Alcoff makes clear early in her chapter on whiteness and visible identities that ‘some of the time, in some respects, whites emphasise and identify with nonwhites, abhor social injustice of white supremacy, and are willing to make significant sacrifices towards the eradication of white privilege’ (Alcoff 2004: 206, italics in the original). Significantly Alcoff uses the term ‘white privileges’ rather than

‘whiteness’ to describe – I think more accurately – the condition of white racism and supremacy. Thus Alcoff seems to see whiteness in a more complex light than, for instance, Curry. Whereas Curry describes whiteness in terms of power relations only, Alcoff acknowledges the multiplicity at stake: whiteness needs to be analysed in terms of class, gender and anti-racist struggles as well as an identity politics of white people, which needs to be taken into account when talking about abolition or rehabilitation – transformation – of whiteness. Alcoff poses the question which seems to escape many theorists about whiteness: what should white people do? To answer this question, Alcoff rehearses three US-based exercises and political strategies, which may serve as examples of white subversive behaviour. Finally, as mentioned above, drawing on the work by amongst others Paul Gilroy, Alcoff suggests a white double consciousness, which will remember both the racist and anti-racist legacy of the European past: ‘The Michelangelos stand beside the Christopher Columbus, and Michael Moores next to Pat Buchanans’ (Alcoff 2006: 223). Both Curry and Alcoff base their thoughts of change in the individual’s racial identity. With a certain location of birth and a certain set of parents come certain qualities – or these qualities are imposed on the subject from a society acknowledging the importance of birthplace and parents. However, I want to argue that identity politics such as this limit the ideas of change as well as ideas of subjectivity by over-categorising and fixing identities and options of actions.

In a call for a new way of thinking about experience, Alcoff distinguishes between biologically determined identities and historico-economics determined identities.

Gender, age and bodily disabilities belong to the first category, which is defined by a

‘material infra-structure’ (Alcoff 2006: 164-6), whereas race, ethnicity, culture and religion belong to the latter, culturally contextual category. This distinction is based on the fact that reproduction after all is a quality of the physical basis, which women possess and which is valued in society. In contrast, the category to which ‘race’

belongs has no such quality – and racism is therefore founded in historical and political structures alone. Alcoff denies that this division holds an argument for a hierarchy of oppressions. She finds that the identity categories are intersecting and mediated through each other – i.e., changing one category will change others as well.

But the distinction may prove slightly synthetic as other lines of division easily prove just as manageable. Alcoff’s own emphasis on the visibility of identities (Alcoff 2006) especially may serve as a division separating gender, race, age and disability from less visible identities, such as religion and ethnicity. Moreover, it becomes hard to conceive of a place that fits black women, who by Alcoff’s rationale, both possess potential agency by virtue of being female and are without potential agency by virtue of being black.

The categories suggested by Alcoff illustrate the tension between gender as a potential agency and race as an always already subjugated position needing resolving. The division also explains Alcoff’s theory of change based on identity politics referred to earlier in this chapter. And finally Alcoff’s problematic categorisation shows that it is very challenging indeed to find a diversified and inclusive approach to critical race and whiteness studies and feminism using identity-based theories.