Gendered Races
This week I’m drafting my third and final essay on critical race theory for Faithfully Magazine. The previous two essays are here and here.
My concluding essay outlines what critical race theorists teach about gender, sexuality, and racism. I refuse to write for a white gaze that “encourages” me to begin by presenting (and quickly denouncing) intersectionality. Instead, I’m implicitly showing that much of today’s “gender” rhetoric from folks like Rod Dreher is inadequate, because it fails to account for the history of gender-discourse. Indeed, such authors demonstrate little awareness of the fact that lay-folks and scholars have gendered races.
Now, I should add that many people fail to account for this fact. What Tommy Curry writes about black philosophers, for example, generalizes across academic disciplines and racial communities:
It is common practice for black philosophers to simply assert that the idea of nineteenth-century thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois (sic), Martin R. Delany, or Anna Julia Cooper, who wrote about racism, manhood, womanhood, and labor can be expressed within our configurations of race, class, and gender in the twenty-first century.
This common practice is profoundly flawed, for it obscures the beliefs Du Bois, Delany, and Cooper held. Each endorsed the widely-held nineteenth-century idea that gender only existed among civilized races.
Go ahead and re-read that last sentence.
Now read Curry:
Under ethnological systems of thought, races were gendered as proof of their evolutionary development above other races. This meant that there were no shared categories of manhood and womanhood across racial groups . . . Under nineteenth-century ethnological thinking, races were gendered, rather than those bodies biologically designated male or female by sex.
Since Curry’s claim is news to most, I’ll conclude by offering a list of quotations scattered throughout his writings that confirm it.
Quotation One: Anne McClintock
Racial stigmata were systematically, if often contradictorily, drawn on to elaborate minute shadings of difference in which social hierarchies of race, class, and gender overlapped each other in a three-dimensional graph of comparison. The rhetoric of race was used to invent distinctions between what we would now call classes. At the same time, the rhetoric of gender was used to make increasingly refined distinctions among the different races. The white race was figured as the male of the species, the black race as the female. Similarly, the rhetoric of class was used to inscribe minute and subtle distinctions between other races. The Zulu male was regarded as the “gentleman” of the black race, but was seen to display features typical of females of the white race.
Quotation Two: Arthur De Gobineau
[E]very human activity, moral or intellectual has its original source in one or other of these currents, “male” or “female”; and only races which have one of these elements in abundance (without, of course, being quite destitute of the other) can reach, in their social life, a satisfactory stage of culture, and so attain civilization . . .The male nations look principally for material well-being, the female nations are more taken up with the needs of the imagination.
Quotation Three: Arthur De Gobineau
If degraded people, at the lowest rung of the racial ladder, with as little significance for the “male” as for the “female” progress of mankind, could possibly have invented a language of philosophic depth, of aesthetic beauty and flexibility, rich in characteristic forms and precise idioms, fitted alike to express the sublimities of religion, the graces of poetry, the accuracy of physical and political science—such a people would certainly possess an utterly useless talent, that of inventing and perfecting an instrument which their mental capacity would be too weak to turn to any account.
Quotation Four: Gail Bederman
Savage (that is nonwhite) races, had not yet evolved pronounced sexual differences—and, to some extent, this was precisely what made them savage. Savage men had never evolved the chivalrous instinct to protect their women and children but instead forced their women into exhausting drudgery, cultivating the fields, tending the fires, carrying heavy burdens. Overworked savage women had never evolved the refined delicacy of civilized women.
Quotation Five: Robert F. Park
Everywhere and always the Negro has been interested rather in expression than in action; interested in life itself rather than in its reconstruction or reformation. The Negro is, by natural disposition, neither an intellectual nor an idealist like the Jew, nor a brooding introspective like the East Indian, nor a pioneer and frontiersman like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake. His métier is expression rather than action. The Negro is, so to speak, the lady among the races.
Quotation Six: Jules Michelet
Africa is a woman; her races are feminine.
Quotation Seven: Franz I. Pruner-Bey
[T]he black man is to white man what woman is to man in general, a loving being and being of pleasure.
Quotation Eight: Carl Vogt
The grown-up Negro partakes, as regards his intellectual faculties, of the nature of the female child, and the senile white. He manifests a propensity for pleasure, music, dancing, physical enjoyments, and conversation, while his inconsistency of impression and of all the feelings are those of a child.
Quotation Nine: Sylvia Wynter
[Europeans reconceived gender after encountering non-Europeans such that] the primary code of difference now became that between “men” and “natives,” with the traditional “male” and “female” distinctions now coming to play a secondary—if none the less powerful—reinforcing role within the system of symbolic representations.
Quotation Ten: Van Evrie
[As the only bearded race, a Caucasian male’s beard] symbolizes our highest conception of manhood—it is the outward evidence of mature development—of complete growth, mental as well as physical—of strength, wisdom and manly grace.
