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On Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
How do these pernicious forces interact? bell hooks (aka Gloria Watkins) describes black women as having been excluded both from mainstream historical feminism (which was led by white women who didn't want to alienate Southern whites) and black civil rights struggles (which were permeated with patriarchy), and this "silencing," this removal of them from narratives of liberation, puts them in a challenging position when it comes to achieving self-actualization and social justice.
Black Looks is one of many books in which hooks engages in the cultural critique that she thinks is part of the solution: Marginalized groups need to reclaim the narrative about themselves so that they aren't cast as "Other" in their own minds, and this in part involves criticizing media representations that reinforce stereotypes. These limiting images need to be replaced in people's psyches by a story rooted in the historical struggle for liberation.
Mark, Seth, and Dylan are joined by Myisha Cherry, host of the UnMute Podcast to reflect on how hooks's prescriptions address today's social problems and how they relate to philosophical views of human nature and freedom.
Related episodes: We first covered race back in ep. 52 and feminism in ep. 42. hooks praises Erich Fromm (ep. 133), and Mark makes some attempt to attach this to Hegel's master-slave dynamic (ep. 36). Ideology in media is discussed in ep. 136 on Adorno.
End song: "Stories" by Mark Lint and Steve Petrinko (2011).
bell hooks picture by Solomon Grundy.
You guys always surprise me. Keep up the good work!
In this podcast she said something along the lines of “people are conditioned to see black traits as inferior to white traits” but she hasn’t justified about how she comes about this knowledge. Lets take the 3 claims:
1. black traits and white traits are only different but people have been conditioned to see black traits as inferior to white traits. By portraying black traits positively (or other such strategies), we can get rid of this illusion of black trait inferiority and see them as different rather than as one inferior to the other.
2. white traits are inferior to black traits but people have been conditioned to see black traits as inferior to white traits. By portraying black traits positively, etc., we can produce the illusion of black trait non-inferiority and the illusion of white trait non-superiority and see them as different rather than as one inferior to the other.
3. black traits are inferior to white traits and the media (to some arbitrary degree of accuracy) reflects this. By portraying black traits positively, etc., we can produce the illusion of black trait non-inferiority and see them as different rather than as one inferior to the other.
In other words, I’m interested in how she is able to determine illusions from non-illusions because these 3 claims are all functionally identical to each-other to somebody still stuck in illusions. What’s the x-factor that she sees that can distinguish these claims because the end result of seeing black traits and white traits as merely different rather than one as inferior to the other is still stuck in the position of inability of ruling any claim out (other than by wish fulfillment).
Moral equality is a postulate. Do you really not think that everyone (or rather every group) deserves self-respect? What “traits” do you have in mind here, because all the ones we bring up are aesthetic and cultural ones that no sane person would at this point in history bother doing an evaluation of whether they were “inferior” or “superior.” Those terms simply don’t apply; it’s a category mistake. Thinking in these terms, looking for reasons to deny the legitimacy of some group, is what being a racist is.
Practices are what we can legitimately evaluate, but what is a “black practice?” Can you specify something without calling on stereotypes, i.e. illegitimate essentialism?
I don’t think you’ve understood my point so I’ll take a concrete example from the podcast. She says that certain people view non-white features as less desirable than white features and some non-whites do various things (e.g. skin lightening, hair straightening, hair bleaching, plastic surgery, colored contacts, etc.) in an attempt to appear less undesirable. She hypothesizes that the reason people see non-white features as less desirable and white features as desirable is due to unfamiliarity + societal structures in place of forcing various races to adopt certain behaviors + media uses certain vocabulary/framing when talking about people ultimately resulting in white features being currently associated with positivity and non-white features being currently associated with negativity.
So lets say that you’re white, buy her argument, and experience black features as less desirable and you embark on a personal program to rectify this in your own mind and in the minds of others.
But why are you even going about doing this in the first place? Are you doing it to make the lives of non-whites less uncomfortable or are you doing it to free yourself from illusion? Presumably you’re doing it to free yourself from illusion.
Lets say that you go about this program and are successful at it. How do you know if you’re now free of illusion or merely altered your illusion to make the lives of non-whites less uncomfortable? Both are functionally the same to you. So what is the x-factor that enables you to make headway on that question?
The argument that white supremacy (which is a matter of cultural imperialism and not just actual political power) is a result of culture is given in recounting the history of slavery and subsequent cultural positioning of blacks (and women). The claim that what remains of racism in our culture is the cultural/aesthetic detritus of past overt racism is a hermenutic one. There’s no way to establish a hermeneutic claim by a definitive deductive argument. You just tell the story and say “doesn’t this make sense?” If you think that it doesn’t, then you tell a different story to replace it.
Do you really think it’s a live possibility that really, those black traits deemed undesirable are really intrinsically undesirable and not merely deemed so as a result of cultural history? That skin hue and hair texture are somehow naturally less desirable? That’s part of the story you want to tell? What could possibly motivate that?
Consider, by contrast, arguments that people should get over their distaste for an overweight appearance. Yes, there are cultures and cultural periods in parts of the west where big is beautiful, but there’s more room for a social Darwinist argument that there’s a reason why truly obese is not aesthetically appreciated. (Though likewise, there’s no apparent health reason why impossibly skinny should be seen as attractive either despite the magazine trends.)
> Do you really think it’s a live possibility that really, those black traits deemed undesirable are really intrinsically undesirable and not merely deemed so as a result of cultural history? That skin hue and hair texture are somehow naturally less desirable?
It sounds like your argument is something along the lines of “either trait X is intrinsically undesirable or trait X is conditioned to be undesirable. X trait can’t be intrinsically undesirable because a. there is long history of societal pressure to see X to be undesirable b. it sounds silly for X to be intrinsically undesirable and c. we can alter our experience of seeing X as undesirable. Therefore trait X is conditioned to be undesirable”.
I don’t buy that argument though because “Assume trait X is intrinsically undesirable. Also assume that you are deluded and have been conditioned to view trait X as intrinsically undesirable within your delusion. You can alter your delusion so that you no longer view trait X as undesirable”. Can you now conclude “X isn’t intrinsically undesirable” from your ability to alter how you experience X?
In other words I see “X is intrinsically undesirable exclusive-or X is conditioned” as a false dichotomy. I don’t see how the ability to alter what your experience as desirable/undesirable is able to settle the question of whether “X is intrinsically undesirable” without something else being brought to the table.
> That’s part of the story you want to tell? What could possibly motivate that?
I’m bitter about the general pattern after falling for it for 20 – 30 years. The general pattern is somebody starts to suspect X (e.g. race supremacy, intolerance for certain sex practices, class hierarchies, morality, selfishness, altruism, non-veganism, etc.) is a conditioned response and then works to try to remove those patterns. If they succeed they reason “see X was just a conditioned response, it wasn’t something intrinsic” but that doesn’t follow because of the delusion argument above.
You eventually start to suspect that the reason people are doing it is to make the lives of themselves or others easier (or they’re doing it as a make work project for themselves) rather than because they’re actually interested in freeing themselves from delusion.
Is your point something to the effect of “just because someone’s aversion to trait X can be conditioned/unconditioned doesn’t mean trait X isn’t objectively bad”?
Thanks for an interesting episode! As a non-American though, I find it odd that so much of the discussion of the plight of black women end up centering on ethnicity, rather than differences in cultural and economic background.
I say this because, from an outside perspective, the terms seem generally to be conflated to an unhelpful degree; whether you’re talking about ‘the urban crime problem’ or ‘niggas acting white’, there appears to be a constant need to implicitly tie ethnicity and individual agency tightly together.
In this way the suffering of the individual black woman gets subsumed under the general black problem, and her plight therefore becomes part of the black problematic, qua her ethnicity.
Conversely, any black person seeking a different lifestyle runs the risk of being branded as ‘acting white’, that is, performing culturally in such a way as to be incompatible with their ethnicity.
Long story short, would you be able to shed some light on why this strong conflation of ethnicity and cultural spheres of action persist? It somewhat baffles me since in my country the efficacy of social norms are the battleground, while ethnicity is seen as irrelevant be the vast majority of people.
bell hooks at least argues against the “black essentialism” you seem to be objecting to. There are certain kinds of “acting white” she objects to, e.g. hair straightening or becoming completely divorced from the struggles of the oppressed (i.e. becoming Republican per the Anita Hill example), but if some of the cultural accusations of “acting white” include use of educational capital or particular speech patterns typically associated with white intellectuals, then she’s not going to have a problem with that.
I recall when I was young and went to a diverse day camp associated with the factory that my father was in sales for… I had of course been raised to be color-blind, that I would never look down on anyone for their skin color. But yet I didn’t much like how the actual black kids (kids of factory workers, for the most part) I was dealing with talked and how they acted. No one told me at the time that yes, my attitude was still racist. When Biden described Obama as “articulate,” he didn’t get that he was slamming a whole culture, that he was saying “Obama talks clearly but most of those people don’t.” (For the record, most people of any group are totally fricking inarticulate.)
So I think the conflation persists because the cultural demand/challenge is not just that white culture embrace blacks who go to ivy league schools and/or make above a certain income or come from families that did, but that white culture accept all blacks. Interestingly, white culture also has a serious “redneck” problem, i.e. a systematic disdain for lower income whites (whether or not these whites are themselves racist), and though this has generated a lot of hostility, there’s been little systematic effort to eliminate that. In short, America suffers from class blindness. Most of our actual, live biases (police profiling being a notable exception) are based on class (and the cultural features typically associated with class), yet we think of ourselves as a classless society.
Do you have a transcript for this (and other) podcasts? I’d like to share it with my sociology students but it wouldn’t be accessible to my students who have issues with hearing. I look forward to your feedback! Great work!
I don’t think they do it anymore but not sure. If not you can check out Rev which is a human who does it but it’s $1/min – so it’s pricey for this long format. Sonix is a nonhuman transcription. You can see if it works using the free trial. Good luck!