Introduction:
Recently a friend of mine, a highly admired New York lawyer of Barbadian extraction, sent me a newspaper clipping about Anita Hill, the woman who accused Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, of sexual harassment. This month is also Women’s History Month in the UK and today the United Nations held its 58th Commission on the Status of Women, at which new development goals for women were discussed. So this is timely.
The reason for the newspaper report on Professor Hill was a documentary film recently made about the now Brandeis University law professor and reflecting on her worldwide public humiliation during the US Senate hearing following her allegations against the top judge. I remember quite clearly the allegations and the way they split the black British community broadly in two camps: those for Ms Hill and those for Justice Thomas. But there were, among them myself, those who felt a plague on both your houses. I believed the truth of her allegations, but felt that the immorality alleged should have been dealt with in other ways. The greater evil, to my mind, was Mr Thomas’ conservatism, which I felt was a betrayal of the collective politics of the 1960s and decades of political struggle, for which so many people had suffered. Further, I felt his conservatism was not at root ideological or cultural, unlike that of Professor Thomas Sowell and others of the black conservative movement or even of the typical Barbadian, but rather was contrived out of personal bitterness and resentment.
I believed then, and still do now, that Mr Thomas felt that despite his academic and professional achievements he was still denied the ‘respect’ he felt he deserved by the |African-American community. The newspaper cut also reminded of a seminar I presented in Barbados on behalf of the Commonwealth Secretariat on the economic progress of women.
Politics:
One of the issues that fail to demand more of our collective conversational times as a community is the gender relations between black men and black women. For any number of what are construed to be more pressing issues, that vital and historically important discussion which we must have if we are to move forward as a community, must move higher up our social agenda. It is not enough to restrict the conversation to one of domestic abuse, although that is very important. The casual, and often sexist, nature of the way many black men relate to black women – professionals and the unskilled – can often cause offence, particularly with young, professional, middle class women. Quite often there is a cultural assumption that sexual innuendo should be tolerated, even if not accepted, as the price of social and cultural identification between the genders. Of course, the gender question between black men and women goes far beyond bad behaviour and sexist language. It goes right to the heart of how, as majority communities and as minorities in Europe and North America, we are treated and treat each other. It is also important when it comes to the casual denigration of African-Caribbean people, such as the masculinisation of black female offenders when it comes to sentencing policy. It is also part of the journalistic and policy gender-reassignment when it comes to the reporting of so-called gang activity. It is only by clarifying the fog of these social, cultural and political issues that we will eventually come to a proper understanding of what they represent.
I am a big supporter of what Professor Patricia Hill Collins calls intersectionality, the discourse of intersecting oppressions, which tells us that we cannot consider ‘feminism’ without also looking at issues of class, ethnicity, religion and wider identity politics. Without privileging the experiences of black women over those of men, nevertheless it is important to draw those experiences to the centre of the African conversation. In this way, we may come to understand some of the powerful, and flawed, analyse that seek to explain black female achievement. Take academic performance. Is the success of young black women the world over due to biology, or the type of exams used to test academic ability?
Our politics: do biological sentiments encourage women to be more ‘conservative’ and caring in their attitudes or is it cultural?
I remember, vividly, the large number of Caribbean women who rushed to vote for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 on the grounds that Britain needed a woman prime minister. The rest is history. I also remember a contact of mine in what used to be Scotland Yard’s Yardie Squad telling me that one trick they often used to get hold of suspects was to allege to the ‘baby mother’ that the man had gone off to Jamaica with a lover, which he said never failed to bring out all the anger that had built up in the ‘baby mother’ over the years. Although there is a basic lesson there about male promiscuity and commitment, the point is that the authorities knew the buttons to press. The issue is also one of political and moral equivalence and the complexity of choice: one decision calls for rational thinking, the other is emotional. The choice is yours. Another of the many brutal truths we must face as a people is that black men and women do not always sing from the same song sheet. The way society treats black men and women, and the way we perceive ourselves, may be one explanation for the obvious professional success of the women. Black women not only achieve better academic success that their male counterparts, as has been pointed out, but they go on to establish more outstanding professional careers. In fact, this is the truth across all ethnic and cultural barriers and regions, even in Saudi Arabia; with a minority or disadvantaged group, the differences become much more obvious.
On the domestic front the situation is very much the same with women having a better handle on the budget than the men, who in the old days were the breadwinners. It is this that has led to the view that had women been running the global economy in 2007/8 the world would not have faced the banking crisis. This may be an exaggeration, but is worth considering. Sometimes the truth is that even within the same family it is noticeable that the girls and young women are generally more successful in terms of education and careers than their brothers and male cousins.
Conclusion:
For too long we have been drifting along assuming that as black men, facing a number of enormous everyday social and economic pressures, we have had the unconditional support of our female halves. But, to my mind, it is an assumption too far. We must urgently renegotiate the ground rules of our relations, which should include questions of self-definition. Is ethnicity or nationality more important than gender or profession or class affiliation? A more than casual understanding of black feminism, or Womanism, must be part of a wider social epistemology which embraces ideas of economic and political empowerment and other contestations in public space, such as work, college and civic organisations – and in the home. We must re-contest the idea of the personal being political and the magnification of slights and perceived insults as reflective of a deeper more culturally embedded disparity in power relations. On the other hand, if the views of women are to be central to the broader discussion of our social awareness, then it is important that men – the main offenders – show this in their expressions and actions. Women are capable of leading and this reality must be admitted by more men, no matter where they are situated in the social strata. It is the conflicting pressures on black women – in terms of ethnic consciousness and being part of the sisterhood – that make for interesting challenges. It is also the gap in feminist theory, be it of the French variety, Australian, British or American, where the black contribution ought to be. It was this that also gave rise to Alice Walker’s concept of womanism. The fundamental principle is one of playing the man and not the ball, which is more important historically?
A middle-aged man making a fool of himself is an irritant and should be slapped down, but allowing personal pride and anger to get in the way of how we as a group are perceived and interact with each other, in so doing, limit our opportunities even if for a short period; it may be putting too high a price on personal pride. I still believe the group comes first, whatever our personal disappointments and frustrations, and Anita Hill was wrong when she made her allegations against Justice Thomas, and she is still wrong now. His offence, is even graver since it goes against the grain of our history. On balance, the obnoxious political stance that Justice Thomas has taken has been more damaging to Black Americans than any Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima.
• Further reading: “Black Feminist Thought in the Mixing of Domination,” Patricia Hill Collins; and, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism, Patricia Hill Collins
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