Racism and Sexism Questions

Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the

Community of Slaves,” The Black Scholar, Vol. 12, No. 6 (Nov./Dec.

1981)

Week 3: AFAM 100 Black Freedom Struggles

Angela Davis: political activist, black feminist, abolitionist, and university professor. • She was a founding member of the

Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism;

• Notable Affiliations with George Jackson and the Black Panther Party;

• Fired as a professor at UCLA for her activist and communist affiliations;

• Professor of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz;

• Has dedicated her life’s work to prison abolition.

“Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves”

• For whom and what does Black female resistance serve? This is an underlying point of question in Davis’ essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.” In this essay, Davis examines the role of the black female in several ways including, but not limited to, her function in the imagination of the master and the state (e.g. who produces the myth of the black female matriarch), the political economy of slavery and the state (the slave as a “natural” and “naturalized” condition for this economy), and the deviant yet strategical maneuvers spearheaded by Black women in countering these forms of domination, racial subjection, inferiority, and commodification.

• She is writing this essay from Marin County Jail in San Rafael, CA where she faced three capital charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy to commit both. She has denied any involved in the attempted escape of black prisoners in the Marin County Court house.

KEY TERMS AND

CONCEPTS

Moynihan Report

• Davis notes the strategy by the master/ the state to separate the Black family/ community to prevent collective resistance.

• “The black matriarchate, according to Moynihan et. Al. defines the roots of our oppression as a people.”

• Masks over the historical and structural fact that Black women were positioned to have no power, autonomy, and were relegated as property.

• An accurate portrait of the African woman in bondage must debunk the myth of the matriarchate.

The Moynihan Report: On New Year’s Eve, 1964, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan assembled his staff in his office to announce that they were going to help him write a report on African American families. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, completed in March, 1965, became one of the most controversial documents of the twentieth century.

The Moynihan Report

• The report’s ambiguities and contradictions as well as Moynihan’s decision to discuss racial inequality primarily in terms of family structure produced confusion over its aims. Many liberals understood the report to advocate new policies to alleviate race-based economic inequalities. But conservatives found in the report a convenient rationalization for inequality; they argued that only racial self-help could produce the necessary changes in family structure. Some even used the report to reinforce racist stereotypes about loose family morality among African Americans. Meanwhile, left-wing critics attacked Moynihan for distracting attention from ongoing systemic racism by focusing on African Americans’ family characteristics: Moynihan’s leading critic, William Ryan, famously charged him with “blaming the victim.”

• The Moynihan Report is a historical artifact best understood in the context of its time. Yet it remains relevant today amidst current discussion of why racial inequality persists despite the passage of civil- rights legislation.

(https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-moynihan-report-an-annotated-edition/404632/)

A passage from the Moynihan Report:

• “The effort, no matter how savage and brutal, of some State and local governments to thwart the exercise of those rights is doomed. The nation will not put up with it—least of all the Negroes. The present moment will pass. In the meantime, a new period is beginning. In this new period the expectations of the Negro Americans will go beyond civil rights. Being Americans, they will now expect that in the near future equal opportunities for them as a group will produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups. This is not going to happen. Nor will it happen for generations to come unless a new and special effort is made.”

• Consequences of the report: • Reinforcement of racialized

gender roles of Black social identities and notions of a gendered household and heteronormative relations of the family (the nuclear family);

• Perpetuations of racial stereotypes (e.g. the Black welfare queen, Black criminal, Black drug addict) which stabilized the myth that Black poverty is a result of individual irresponsibility and moral failure,

• As opposed to the structural anti-Black racism (mechanisms within political structures, policies, and agendas) that maintain racial inequalities and Black dispossession.

• “Lingering beneath the notion of the black matriarch is an unspoken indictment of our female forebears as having actively assented to slavery. The notorious cliché, the “emasculating female,” has its roots in the fallacious interference that in playing a central part in the slave “family,” the black woman related to the slaveholding class as collaborator. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the most fundamental sense, the slave system did not– and could not– engender and recognize a matriarchal family structure. Inherent in the very concept of the matriarchy is “power.””

• “It would have been exceedlingly risky for slaveholding class to openly acknowledge symbols of authority—female symbols no less than male. Such legitimized concentrations of authority might eventually unleash their ‘power’ against the slave system itself.”

Myth of the Black female Matriarch as an extension of racial stereotypes of the Black Family

Racial Myth of the Black Matriarch • Racial myth of the black matriarch is a stereotype and ruse insofar as it is not true that: • Enslaved women/ Black women were given any degree of power; • They consented to slavery; • They had choice to concede as a disciplinary figure in the community of slaves.

• The racial myth is essential in maintaining the operations and status quo produced by slavery because: • The social construction of racial and sexual difference in the disaggregation of filial

life on the plantation affords the reproduction of racial slavery and the production of commodities;

• The violation of family separation/ community of the enslaved, therefore, goes unquestioned and is presented as a kind of natural life to uphold plantation life;

• Racial myths also produce a pathology of racialized and gendered stereotypes where the structure of authority and power, part and parcel with the plantation, can police Black social identities through sexuality and desire.

Political Economy of

the Slave

Political Economy of the Slave (continued)

• It is important to note here why Davis is raising the characterization of “free wage labor” in addition to the ways she flags how Africans “had been uprooted from their natural environment, their social relations, their culture.”

• Free wage labor operates as an ideology to political economy of the slave—but also namely a political economy that justifies anti- blackness.

The myth of the Black matriarch + ideology of “free” wage- labor = a slave labor system

• “based almost exclusively on race and the drive to strip black people of all their social and cultural bonds would create a fateful rupture at the heart of the slave system itself”.

• Why then is the myth of the Black matriarch/ the myth of black female authority so important? Because without the Black woman who signifies a surplus of labor a system and a supposed willfulness and consent to this system (which is, again, part of the myth), there would be no ideology, reason, semblance of this system. In short, the entire economy of production would collapse.

Resistance

• In this sense, the Black family was a social unit that had to be “disaggregated” systematically by the master and the state to prevent slave uprisings, revolts, and resistance. For a unified slave social unit posed the most monumental of threats. Furthermore, when resistance was initiated by and among slaves, the social organization of this resistance had to be improvised in the most radical and covert ways.

• The myth of “the black matriarch” was also instrumentalized as a screen to deflect the operations of (white) male supremacist/ patriarchal ideology. If all the responsibilities fell on the Black female, who family was separated yet violently positioned to be made responsible for the reproduction (to provide offspring for the plantation), then the master (and state) could wield a position of inferiority, hierarchy, and again economy.

• At the same time, the centrality of the Black female slave, as Davis points out, was “essential to the survival of the community. Not all people have survived enslavement; hence her survival-oriented activities were themselves a form of resistance. Survival, moreover, was the prerequisite of all higher levels of struggle.”

• “She was in no sense an authoritarian figure; neither her domestic role nor her acts of resistance could relegate the man to the shadows. On the contrary, she herself had just been forced to leave behind the shadowy realm of female passivity in order to assume her rightful place beside the insurgent male.”

Deformed Equality of Equal Oppression

• “The unbridled cruelty of this leveling process whereby the black woman was forced in equality with the black man requires no further explanation. She shared in the deformed equality of equal oppression.”

• ”But out of this deformed equality was forged quite undeliberately, yet inexorably, a state of affairs which could unharness an immense potential in the black woman. Expending indispensable labor for the “enrichment of her oppressor, she could attain a practical awareness of the oppressor’s utter dependence on her– for the master needs the slave far more than the slave needs the master. At the same time, she could realize that while her productive activity was wholly subordinated to the will of the master, it was nevertheless proof of her ability to transform things.”

• “She would be prepared to ascend to the same levels of resistance which were accessible to her men. Even as she performed her housework, the black woman’s role in the slave community could not be identical to the historically evolved female role… She was now uniquely capable of weaving into the warp and woof of domestic life a profound consciousness of resistance.”

Resistance and Consciousness • The enslaved woman brings attention to the reinforcement of racialized,

gender, and sexual disparities that were necessary in maintaining the slave plantation, the disaggregation of collective Black life (the enforced distancing among community and family members), and the mutual relationship between slave plantation and state; • Angela Davis draws these connections to the role of racial capitalism, “the

process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person… as a systemic phenomenon.” (Harvard Law Review) • From racial capitalism to carceral structures and practices of punishment,

the exclusion of Black women were necessary to the foundations of power; • But in turn, Davis makes clear the potential and searing consciousness of

enslaved women in resistance to structures of power.

Link to the documentary, Free Angela: https://digitalcampus-swankmp- net.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/psu279437/play/e53cf231c1 992053?referrer=details