Woman Gender Study Reading Reflections

Unequal Freedom

H o w R a c e a n d G e n d e r S h a p e d A m e r i c a n C i t i z e n s h i p

a n d L a b o r

• •

Evelyn Nakano Glenn

H A RVA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2004

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Unequal freedom : how race and gender shaped American citizenship and

labor / Evelyn Nakano Glenn. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-00732-8 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-01372-7 (pbk.) 1. Alien labor—United States—History. 2. Women alien labor—United

States—History. 3. Minorities—Employment—United States—History. 4. Citizenship—United States—History. 5. Immigrants—Economic conditions—United States. 6. Immigrants—Social conditions—United States. I. Title: How race and gender shaped American citizenship and labor. II. Title.

HD8081 .A5 G57 2002 323.6!0973—dc21 2002020531

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Integrating Race and Gender 6

2 Citizenship: Universalism and Exclusion 18

3 Labor: Freedom and Coercion 56

4 Blacks and Whites in the South 93

5 Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest 144

6 Japanese and Haoles in Hawaii 190

7 Understanding American Inequality 236

Notes 267

Index 301

• 1 • Integrating Race

and Gender

To e x a m i n e h o w labor and citizenship constitute—and are consti- tuted by—race and gender, we must conceptualize race and gender as interacting, interlocking structures and then consider how they are in- corporated into and shaped by various social institutions.1 Thus the first challenge is to bring race and gender within the same analytic plane.

In the past, gender and race have constituted separate fields of schol- arly inquiry. By studying each in isolation, however, these fields have marginalized major segments of the communities they claimed to rep- resent. In studies of “race,” men of color stood as the universal racial subject, while in studies of “gender,” white women were positioned as the universal gendered subject. Women of color were left out of both narratives, rendered invisible both as racial and as gendered subjects.2

In the 1980s women of color began to address their omission through detailed historical and ethnographic studies of African Ameri- can, Latina, and Asian American women in relation to work, family, and community.3 These scholars not only uncovered overlooked di- mensions of experience, they also exposed the flaws in theorizing from a narrow social base. For example, explanations of gender inequality based on middle-class white women’s experience focused on women’s encapsulation in the domestic sphere and economic dependence on men. These concepts by and large did not apply to black women, who historically had to work outside the home.

6

Initial attempts to bring race into the same frame as gender treated the two as independent axes. The bracketing of gender was in some sense deliberate because one concern of early feminism was to un- cover commonalities that could unite women politically. However, if we begin with gender separated out, we have to “add” race in order to account for the situation of women of color. This leads to an additive model in which women of color are described as suffering from “double” jeopardy (or “triple” oppression if class is included). Women scholars of color expressed dissatisfaction with this model. Af- rican American, Latina, Asian American, and Native American women, they said, did not experience race and gender as separate or additive, but as simultaneous and linked. They offered concepts such as “inter- sectionality,” “multiple consciousness,” “interlocking systems of op- pression,” and “racialized gender” to express this simultaneity.4 Yet, de- spite increased recognition of the interconnectedness of gender and race, race remained undertheorized. In the absence of a “theory” of race comparable to a “theory” of gender, a comprehensive theory of both has proven elusive. Especially needed is a theory that neither sub- ordinates race and gender to some broader (presumably more primary) set of relations such as class nor substantially flattens the complexity of these concepts.5 Building on the valuable work of such scholars as Tessie Liu, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Amy Kaminsky, and Ann Stoler, I argue that a synthesis of social constructionist streams within critical race and feminist studies offers a framework for integrated anal- ysis.6 Social constructionism provides a common vocabulary and set of concepts with which to look at how gender and race are mutually con- stituted—that is, at the ways in which gender is racialized and race is gendered.

Gender

Social constructionist theory has had somewhat different trajectories with respect to gender and to race. In both fields social constructionism arose as an alternative to biological and essentialist conceptions that rendered gender and race static and ahistorical, but it achieved central- ity earlier and has been elaborated in greater detail in feminist schol- arship on women and gender than in race studies. This is so even though—or perhaps because—gender seems to be rooted more firmly than race in biology: in bodies, reproduction, and sexuality. Indeed,

Integrating Race and Gender 7

feminist scholars adopted the term “gender” precisely to free our thinking from the constrictions of naturalness and biological inevitabil- ity attached to the concept of sex. In the mid-1970s Gayle Rubin pro- posed the term “sex-gender system” to capture the idea of societal ar- rangements by which biological sexuality was transformed into socially significant gender.7

Since then, gender has emerged as the closest thing we have to a uni- fying concept in feminist studies, cutting across the various disciplines and theoretical schools that make up the field. Many feminist histori- ans and sociologists use gender as an analytic concept to refer to so- cially created meanings, relationships, and identities organized around reproductive differences.8 Others focus on gender as a social status and organizing principle of social institutions detached from and going far beyond reproductive differences,9 and still others focus on gender as a product of everyday social practice.10 The concept of gender thus pro- vides an overarching framework from which to view historical, cultural, and situational variability in definitions of womanhood and manhood, in meanings of masculinity and femininity, in relationships between men and women, and in their relative power and political status. If one accepts gender as variable, then one must acknowledge that it is never fixed but is continually constituted and reconstituted.

By loosening the connection to the body, the notion of socially con- structed gender freed us from thinking of sex/gender as solely, or even primarily, a characteristic of individuals. By examining gender as a con- stitutive feature and organizing principle of collectivities, social institu- tions, historical processes, and social practices, feminist scholars have shown that major areas of life, including sexuality, family, education, economy, and state, are shot through with conflicting interests and hi- erarchies of power and privilege along gender lines. As an organizing principle, gender involves both cultural meanings and material rela- tions. That is, gender is constituted simultaneously through deploy- ment of gendered rhetoric, symbols, and images and through alloca- tion of resources along gender lines. Thus an adequate account of any particular phenomenon from the perspective of gender requires look- ing at both representation and material arrangements. For example, understanding the persistent gender gap in wages involves analyzing cultural evaluations of gendered work, such as caring, and gendered meanings of concepts, such as “skill,” as well as divisions of labor in

8 Unequal Freedom

the home, occupational segregation, and labor market stratification. Recent theoretical work is moving toward imploding the distinction between sex and gender. The distinction assumes the prior existence of “something real” out of which social relationships and cultural meanings are elaborated. Poststructuralist feminist critics have problematized the distinction by pointing out that sex and sexual meanings are themselves culturally constructed. The sociologist Judith Lorber carefully unpacks three concepts and shows that they are all so- cially constructed: biological sex, which refers to either genetic or mor- phological characteristics; sexuality, which refers to desire and orienta- tion; and gender, which refers to social status and identity. One result of this kind of work is to undermine categoricalism, the idea that there are “really” two sexes or two genders or two sexual orientations. At present, the conceptual distinctions among sex, sexuality, and gender are still being debated, and new work on the body is revealing the in- tertwining and complexity of these concepts.11

Race

Scholars have been slower to abandon the idea of race as rooted in biological markers, even though they recognize that social attitudes and arrangements, not biology, maintain white dominance. As Barbara Fields points out, historians were reluctant to accept the conclusion, reached by biologists by early in the twentieth century, that race did not correspond to any biological referent and that racial categories were so arbitrary as to be meaningless. Race was exposed as a social creation—a fiction that divided and categorized individuals by pheno- typic markers, such as skin color, which supposedly signified underly- ing differences. Nonetheless, as Peggy Pascoe notes, historians contin- ued well into the 1980s to study “races” as immutable categories, to speak of race as a force in history, and to view racism as a psychological product rather than as a product of social history. Pascoe suggests that the lack of a separate term, like “gender,” to refer to “socially sig- nificant race” may have retarded full recognition of race as a social con- struct. In sociology, liberal scholarship took the form of studying “race relations”—that is, examining relations among groups that were al- ready constituted as distinct entities. Quantitative researchers treated race as a preexisting “fact” of social life, an independent variable to be

Integrating Race and Gender 9

correlated with or regressed against other variables. How categories such as black and white were historically created and maintained was not investigated.12

Only in the late 1980s did historians and social scientists begin to systematically study variation and change in the drawing of racial cate- gories and boundaries. The greatest attention has been paid to the con- struction of blackness. In an influential pair of essays, Fields examined shifts in the definition and concept of blackness over the course of slav- ery, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. Slaveowners created the category “black” from disparate African groups, and then maintained the category by incorporating growing numbers of those of “mixed” parentage. Concerned with maximizing the number of slaves, slave- owners settled on the principle that a child’s status followed that of the mother, in violation of the customary patriarchal principle of inher- itance. Exploring the “one-drop rule” for defining blackness in the United States, James Davis shows it to be peculiar in light of the wide variation among Latin American, Caribbean, and North American so- cieties in the status of people of mixed ancestry. Competing under- standings of racial categories may even coexist in the same society. In Louisiana, Virginia Dominguez found that the “Creole” designation was claimed both by people of mixed black-white ancestry (to distin- guish themselves from darker “blacks”) and by white descendants of original French settlers (to distinguish themselves from later Anglo in- migrants). By the 1970s, however, white “Creoles” had ceded the label to the mixed population and relabeled themselves as “French.”13

Whiteness has also been problematized. Historians have looked at the shift from an emphasis on “Anglo-Saxon” identity to a more inclu- sive “white” identity and the assimilation into the white category of groups that had been considered separate races, such as the Irish, Jews, and Italians.14 These groups achieved “whiteness” through a combi- nation of external circumstances and their own agency. State and so- cial policies organized along a black-white binary required individuals and groups to be placed in one category or the other. Individuals and groups also actively claimed whiteness in order to attain the rights and privileges enjoyed by already established white Americans. Because of the association of whiteness with full legal rights, scholars in the field of critical legal studies have scrutinized the concept of whiteness in the law. Cheryl Harris, for example, argues that courts have protected ra-

10 Unequal Freedom

cial privilege by interpreting whiteness as property, including the right to exclude others deemed to be nonwhite.15

Only a few scholars have looked beyond the black-white binary that dominates conceptions of race. Yen Espiritu examined the forging of a pan–Asian American identity in the late 1960s when Chinese, Japa- nese, and Filipino student activists came together to organize in “third world” solidarity with African American and Latino students. Activ- ists asserted both essentialist grounds (similarities in culture and ap- pearance) and instrumental grounds (a common history of discrimina- tion and stereotyping) as the basis for the new identity. Yet scholars have pointed to tensions and divisions among Asian American groups along ethnic, class, generational, and political lines, for example be- tween longer-settled Japanese and Chinese and more recently arrived Filipinos, South Asians, and Southeast Asians. Also, Aihwa Ong argues that among new Asian immigrants, rich and poor groups are being dif- ferentially “racialized” within the black-white binary in the United States: Well-educated professional and managerial Chinese immi- grants are “whitened” and assimilated into the American middle class, while poor Khmer, dependent on welfare, are “blackened.”16

Many of these studies on shifting racial categories and meanings have been influenced by the pathbreaking theoretical work of the so- ciologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Their model of racial formation is rooted in neomarxist conceptions of class formation, but they specifically position themselves against existing models that sub- sume race under some presumably broader category such as class or na- tion. They assert that in the United States “race is a fundamental axis of social organization,” not an epiphenomenon of some other category. At the same time, they see race not as fixed but as “an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meaning constantly being transformed by political struggle.” The terrain on which struggle is waged has var- ied historically. Just as social constructionism arose as an alternative to biologism or essentialism in the twentieth century, the concept of bio- logical race arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to replace religious paradigms for viewing differences between Europeans (Chris- tians) and “others” (non-Christians) encountered in the age of con- quest. With the waning of religious belief in a god-given social order, race differences and the superiority of white Europeans to “others” came to be justified and legitimated by “science.” Omi and Winant

Integrating Race and Gender 11

note that the “invocation of scientific criteria to demonstrate the natu- ral basis of racial hierarchy was both a logical consequence of the rise of [scientific] knowledge and an attempt to provide a subtle and more nuanced account of human complexity in the new ‘enlightened’ age.”17

After World War II, liberal politics emphasized equality under the law and an assumption of sameness in daily encounters. In the 1960s and 1970s identity politics among civil rights activists emphasized dif- ferences but valorized them with such ideas as Black Power and “La Raza.” The 1980s and 1990s saw a questioning of the essentialism and solidity of racial and sex/gender categories and a focus on structural concepts of racial and patriarchal social orders. Paralleling the struc- tural approach to gender, Omi and Winant assert that race is a central organizing principle of social institutions, focusing especially on the “racial state” as an arena for creating, maintaining, and contesting ra- cial boundaries and meanings. Their concept of the racial state is akin to feminist conceptions of the state as patriarchal.18

An Integrated Framework

There are important points of congruence between the concept of ra- cial formation and the concept of socially constructed gender. These convergences point the way toward a framework in which race and gender are defined as mutually constituted systems of relationships— including norms, symbols, and practices—organized around perceived differences. This definition focuses attention on the processes by which racialization and engendering occur, rather than on characteristics of fixed race or gender categories. These processes take place at multiple levels, including

representation—the deployment of symbols, language, and images to express and convey race/gender meanings;

micro-interaction—the application of race/gender norms, etiquette, and spatial rules to orchestrate interaction within and across race/ gender boundaries; and

social structure—rules regulating the allocation of power and re- sources along race/gender lines.

Within this integrated framework, race and gender share three key features as analytic concepts: (1) they are relational concepts whose

12 Unequal Freedom

construction involves (2) representation and material relations and (3) in which power is a constitutive element. Each of these features is im- portant in terms of building a framework that both analyzes inequality and incorporates a politics of change.

Relationality

By relational I mean that race and gender categories (such as black/ white, woman/man) are positioned and therefore gain meaning in re- lation to each other. According to post-structural analysis, meaning within Western epistemology is constructed in terms of dichotomous oppositions or contrasts. Oppositional categories require suppressing variability within each category and exaggerating differences between categories. Moreover, since the dichotomy is imposed over a complex “reality,” it is inherently unstable. Stability is achieved by making the dichotomy hierarchical, that is, by according one term primacy over the other. In race and gender dichotomies, the dominant category is rendered “normal” and therefore “transparent” while the other is the variant and therefore “problematic.” Thus white appears to be race- less19 and man appears to be genderless. The opposition also disguises the extent to which the categories are actually interdependent.

One can accept the notion of meaning being constructed through contrast without assuming that such contrasts take the form of fixed dichotomies. In the United States “white” has been primarily con- structed against “black,” but it has also been positioned in relation to various “others.” For example, the category “Anglo” in the South- west, which is constructed in contrast to “Mexican,” and the category “haole” in Hawaii, which is constructed in contrast to both Native Ha- waiians and Asian plantation workers, are not identical in meaning to the category “white” in the South and the Northeast. Similarly, the meaning of dominant masculinity has varied as it has been contrasted to historically and regionally differing subordinate masculinities and femininities.

The concept of relationality is important for several reasons. First, as in the above examples, it helps problematize the dominant categories of whiteness and masculinity, which depend on contrast. The impor- tance of contrast is illustrated by the formation of “linked identities” in the cases of housewives and their domestic employees, reformers and

Integrating Race and Gender 13

the targets of reform, and colonizers and colonized peoples.20 In each of these cases the dominant group’s self-identity (for example, as moral, rational, and benevolent) depends on casting complementary qualities (such as immoral, irrational, and needy) onto the subordinate “other.”

Second, relationality helps point out the ways in which “differences” among groups are systematically related. Too often “difference” is un- derstood simply as experiential diversity, as in some versions of multi- culturalism.21 The concept of relationality suggests that the lives of dif- ferent groups are interconnected, even without face-to-face relations. Thus, for example, a white person in America enjoys privileges and a higher standard of living by virtue of the subordination and lower stan- dard of living of people of color, even if that particular white person is not exploiting or taking advantage of a person of color.

Third, relationality helps address the critique that social construc- tionism, by rejecting the fixity of categories, fosters the postmodern notion that race and gender categories and meanings are free-floating and can mean anything we want them to mean. Viewing race and gen- der categories and meanings as relational partly addresses this critique by providing “anchor” points—though these points are not static.

Representation and Material Relations

The social construction of race and gender is a matter of both material relations and cultural representation. This point is important because a social constructionist approach, which eschews biology and essen- tialism, could be interpreted as concerned solely with language and im- ages. This is particularly tempting in the case of race, where it can be argued that there is no objective referent. Indeed, Barbara Fields has argued that race is a category without content, unrooted in material re- ality; race is pure ideology, a lens through which people view and make sense of their experiences.22 However, Fields seems to be conflating bi- ology and material reality. It is one thing to say that race and gender are not biological givens, but quite another to say that they exist only in the realm of representation or signification. Race and gender are organiz- ing principles of social institutions. Social arrangements, such as labor market segmentation, residential segregation, and stratification of gov- ernment benefits along race and gender lines, produce and reproduce

14 Unequal Freedom

real-life differences that cannot be understood purely in representa- tional terms.

Conversely, other theorists view meaning systems as epiphenom- ena and maintain that race and gender inequality can be understood through structural analysis alone. But historical evidence suggests that a materialist approach alone is not sufficient either. As historians of working-class formation have pointed out, one cannot make a direct connection between concrete material conditions and specific forms of consciousness, identity, and political activity. Rather, race, gender, and class consciousness draw on the available rhetoric of race, gender, and class. In nineteenth-century England skilled male artisans threatened by industrialization were able to organize and articulate their class rights by drawing on available concepts of manhood: the dignity of skilled labor and family headship. Symbols of masculinity were thus constitutive of class identity. Their counterparts in the United States drew on symbols of race, claiming rights on the basis of their status as “free” labor, in contrast to black slaves, Chinese contract workers, and other figures symbolizing “unfree labor.”23 Class formation in the United States was then and continues to be infused with racial as well as gender meanings.

In the contemporary United States, the paucity of culturally avail- able class discourse seems to play a role in damping down class con- sciousness. Lillian Rubin found that white working-class men and women whose incomes were stagnating or declining were strikingly silent about class. Instead they drew on a long tradition of racial rheto- ric, blaming immigrants and blacks, not corporations or capitalists, for their economic anxieties. By constructing immigrants and blacks as un- worthy beneficiaries of welfare and affirmative action, they articulated their own identities as whites, rather than as members of an economic class.24

The preceding examples suggest a dialogical relation between mate- rial conditions and cultural representation. The language of race, gen- der, and class formation draws on historical legacy but also grows out of political struggle. Omi and Winant’s concept of rearticulation—the investment of already present ideas and knowledge with new mean- ings—is relevant here. For example, the black civil rights and women’s liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s drew on existing symbols

Integrating Race and Gender 15

and language about human rights, but combined them in new ways and gave them new meanings (“the personal is political,” “Black Power”) that fostered mass political organizing.

Power

The organization and signification of power are central to the con- structionist framework, despite the frequent charge that this approach elides issues of power and inequality. For Joan Scott, gender is a pri- mary way of signifying relations of power; for R. W. Connell, gender is constituted by power, labor, and cathexis. Power and politics are also integral to Omi and Winant’s definitions of race and racism, when they describe race as constantly being transformed by political struggle and racism as aimed at creating and maintaining structures of domination based on essentialist conceptions of race.25

The concept of power as constitutive of race and gender draws on an expanded notion of politics coming from several sources. One is the feminist movement, where activists and scholars have exposed the power and domination, conflict and struggle that saturate areas of so- cial life thought to be private or personal: sexuality, family, love, dress, art. Another is Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, the taken-for- granted practices and assumptions that make domination seem natural and inevitable to both the dominant and the subordinate. Social rela- tions outside the realm of formal politics—art, literature, ritual, cus- tom, and everyday interaction—establish and reinforce power; for this reason, oppositional struggle also takes place outside the realm of for- mal politics, in forms such as artistic and cultural production. A third is Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality and scientific knowledge. Power in these loci is often not recognized because it is exercised not through formal domination but through disciplinary complexes and modes of knowledge.26

In all of these formulations, power is seen as simultaneously perva- sive and dispersed in social relations of all kinds, not just those con- ventionally thought of as political. This point is particularly relevant to race and gender, where power is lodged in taken-for-granted as- sumptions and practices, takes forms that do not involve force or threat of force, and occurs in dispersed locations. Thus contesting race and gender hierarchies may involve challenging everyday assumptions and

16 Unequal Freedom

practices, take forms that do not involve direct confrontation, and oc- cur in locations not considered political.

T h e f r a m e wo r k I have laid out makes race and gender amenable to historical analysis so that they can be seen as mutually constitutive. If race and gender are socially constructed, they must arise at specific mo- ments under particular circumstances and will change as these circum- stances change. One can examine how gender and race differences arise, change over time, and vary across social and geographic locations and institutional domains. Race and gender are not predetermined but are the product of men’s and women’s actions in specific historical con- texts. To understand race and gender we must examine not only how dominant groups and institutions attempt to impose particular mean- ings but also how subordinate groups contest dominant conceptions and construct alternative meanings.

Integrating Race and Gender 17