black liberation

Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur

alicia — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Before I begin reviewing Ron Christie’s Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur I want to acknowledge my identity politics as they are crucial in my take on this book. First off I will never know what it’s like to be accused of acting white because I am white. Moreover, I am an anti-racist feminist who believes that institutional racism and structural inequalities exist and are held in place by those in power.

Understanding one’s subjectivity is crucial when reading Acting White, given that Christie, a Republican from an affluent family, interweaves his personal reflections into the book alongside a historical analysis of the slur. Furthermore, Christie’s impetus for writing the book stems from his own experiences as an outcast within Black communities and his need to unpack his own perceived marginalization. He opens Acting White with one such example, an anecdote involving Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California who reportedly chastised Christie, then serving as a junior legislative assistant to Craig T. James, a Republican from Florida, for selling out his race and being “nothing but an Uncle Tom!”

Christie traces the implications of the slur of acting white back to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, arguing that a link exists between black men denigrated as Uncle Toms and the notion of acting white. He examines the ideological conflicts between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois as well as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and the election of Barack Obama through the lens of what it means when Black men are accused of acting white or betraying their race. It’s important to note that Christie fails to discuss how being seen as acting white affects women of color and LGBTQ people of color—for what it’s worth, two groups who are also generally absent from or marginalized within the Republican Party and platform.

Overall, Christie blames Black communities for their own socioeconomic marginalization, asserting that Blacks underperform academically because they are afraid to be viewed as acting white—never mind issues of a lack of resources for teachers and/or underfunding within the public school system. In Christie’s opinion, if this racial slur could be dismantled then young working-class Black men and women would feel free to excel in school and would be able to pull themselves up out of their impoverished communities. Acting White makes it sound that simple as Christie repeatedly touts the importance of education, dressing well, and speaking well.

What hinders this goal, according to Christie, is a myriad of factors including Black leaders (he is particularly vocal about his dislike for Jesse Jackson) who point out institutional racism, which he argues sets up African Americans as victims with no agency or self empowerment. Christie also finds fault with legislation such as affirmative action arguing that these policies taint the achievements of African Americans whose hard work and dedication will be viewed with skepticism by racist whites.

Christie even goes as far as to castigate parents who give their children “black-sounding” names, as studies have shown that employers are less likely to hire applicants who do not have white mainstream names on their applications. Rather than calling for an overhaul of the racist system that ignores discrimination, Christie asks why such parents would set their children up for failure in the first place.

Ultimately, Christie preaches respectability in which Black youth (preferably those given white mainstream names) need to ditch hip-hop, dress nice, abandon slang, and hit the books without a fear of being called out for acting white. However, I cannot accept Christie’s arguments that sheer will and determination (alongside a certain dress code) separate the haves from the have-nots. As Melissa Harris Lacewell noted in her keynote address at the 2010 Facing Race Conference, referring to when Henry Louis Gates Jr. (whom Christie admires) was arrested for breaking and entering his own home, “your respectability will not save you when the issue is structural inequality.”

In the end, Acting White should be viewed more as a memoir and less as a treaty on the racial slur given that Christie’s subjectivity and politics color every word on the page—from which historical figures he discusses (why Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois but not Ida B. Wells?) to the rugged individualism he touts as the solution.

Written by: Kristen Lambert, January 10th 2011

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

payal — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Christina Sharpe

Duke University Press

Christina Sharpe’s work Monstrous Intimacies is concerned with reading how the Euro-American and African-American post-slavery subjects are constructed. An academic text, and at times quite dense with analysis, this work will be of interest mostly to academics working in the fields of critical race theory, post-colonial theory, or literary and cultural theory. Through compelling and intricate readings of visual and written texts, Sharpe is concerned with unpacking the intersection between violence, sex, and subjectivity in post-slavery subjects. Sharpe’s work is a poignant reflection on historical time and convincingly deals with the ways that the horrors of the past continue to structure the present. In this, Sharpe turns away from ‘freedom’ to consider the “unfreedom in freedom”—or in other words, the way that the “desire to be free requires one to be witness to, participant in, and be silent about scenes of subjection that we rewrite as freedom.”

In the first chapter, Sharpe considers Gayl Jones’ neo-slave narrative Corregidora as a text that deals with the demands of generational witnessing to the horrors of slavery. She considers how the scenes of rape and impregnation at the hands of the slave owner Corregidora become a means of survival for the Corregidora women—the continuation of their family ensures witnesses to their trauma. Sharpe reads this as one way in which the ‘space of enslavement post-enslavement’ is reproduced.

In the second chapter, Sharpe turns to consider Saartjie Baartman or the ‘Hottentot Venus,’ a Khoisan woman who was exhibited around Britain and France in the 19th Century as a sexual oddity, and then dissected upon her death. Sharpe contests that the pleas for the return of Baartman’s remains to South Africa itself continue to objectify Baartman, as she is “once again overwritten with multiple histories and used in the service of a number of national and political agendas that involve not the emergence of history but its repression.” Thus, Sharpe examines how what is ostensibly an act to ‘right’ history, is in fact intimately connected to the monstrous treatment of Baartman under colonialism.

Her third chapter on Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant serves her purposes particularly well and gives her space to continue to flesh out how practices of historical remembrance and display interact with everyday violences of black life. Finally, in perhaps her most engaging chapter, Sharpe looks at Kara Walker’s silhouette art work and its reception to continue to read how the violence of slavery manifests itself in post-slavery subjectivity—particularly concerned with how critics have been reluctant to read Walker’s invocation of whiteness in her work.

Sharpe’s book is an eloquent and at times challenging analysis of the construction of post-slavery subjects as subjects who are by no means ‘post’ but continue to be structured by the past that is not quite past.

Written by: Sam McBean, December 27th 2010

Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard

New York University Press

Can African American liberation be understood without easy binaries: nonviolent civil disobedience vs. armed self-defense, integration vs. Black nationalism, MLK vs. Malcolm X? Can the history of feminism be written without effacing the contributions of Black feminists and other people of color? As Want to Start a Revolution? shows, foregrounding the work of women in Black liberation immediately problematizes these simple classifications. The cover photo of Rosa Parks admiring a poster of Malcolm X is, as the editors write, "an essay in and of itself." Although commonly associated with the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King, Jr., Parks supported both King and Malcolm, and her activism spanned decades before and after Montgomery.

By profiling several different activists in a series of fourteen essays, Want to Start a Revolution? builds a complex and fluid picture of Black women's activism. These women stood at the intersection of racial, sexual, and class oppression, and often devoted themselves to working on all three fronts. A chapter on Johnnie Tillmon and the welfare rights movement explores this theme of poor Black women's triple exploitation, and Esther Cooper Jackson, the subject of the first chapter, directly addressed this triad in her 1940 thesis, "The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism."

The editors set the goal of avoiding "dominance through mentioning," historiography that acknowledges the contributions of women and the relevance of feminism without offering serious consideration. On that goal, this book must be judged a success. We get history from the Black female point of view, and encounter famous Black men only through their associations with women of color, such as Cooper Jackson, Parks, and Yuri Kochiyama.

The editors arranged the essays to build off one another. A chapter on the Black Panthers' Oakland Community School, for instance, is followed by a chapter on Bambara's The Black Woman, an anthology that responded to the conceptualization of Black power as the re-masculation of Black men. Women within the Black power movement struggled with the sexism of fellow male activists, and the second half of the book is dominated by female activists' fraught relationship to Black nationalism.

Want to Start a Revolution? challenge gendered notions of what male and female activists do. The book demonstrates that plenty of women played roles typically occupied by men—charismatic leader, theorist, party official, politician, lawyer, revolutionary, and political prisoner—and the book questions a narrative of social change that privileges fiery speeches and flashy demonstrations over day-to-day educating, social service, and relationship nurturing done by both men and women.

Kochiyama, a Japanese American who organized for the Panthers, and Denise Oliver, an African American who rose to leadership positions among Puerto Rican militants, also complicate the supposed racial exclusivity of the movements, and further cross-pollination existed in the militancy and use of direct action tactics by Black nationalists and radical feminists. Fears of genocide and forced sterilization racialized debates around reproductive rights, and feminist ideals of self-love, self-determination, and self-sufficiency resonated with Black women.

As in any collection, the book's chapters are somewhat uneven. A few of the essays are more celebratory than analytic while others are too academic for a general audience or take on too much material for a twenty-page essay. All in all, the editors accomplish their goals to inform, inspire, and reconsider what we thought we knew about Black liberation and feminism.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, March 29th 2010