Which “We” Are We?

Published by vegankid | Filed under Intersecting Identities

I just wanted to print the following essay from Barbara Smith in full (without references, sorry). I know that intersections of identity as well as the hierarchy of identity have come up from time to time on this blog, and i felt that this was an inciteful essay on the topic.

Which “We” Are We?
The Politics of Identity in Women’s Narratives
Barbara Ellen Smith

Which “we” are we? Within the trio of key social inequalities, which provides the firmest ground for a sense of self? Class? Gender? Race? How do those who are multiply oppressed by these relationships make choices regarding their social allegiances? Which evokes their most fervent political commitment?

The perspective that race, class, and gender are inseperable, interactive, equally significant features of the stratification system in the United States has become commonplace (albeit not unanimously endorsed) among social scientists. These identities are inseperable in part because they are omnipresent elements of individual biography; we are all multiply positioned by and define ourselves through our race, gender, and class. More subtly, they cannot be seperated because they interact in ways that are mutually transformative: so, for example, the meaning and experience of gender are different for a black middle-class woman and a white working-class woman. At a structural level, race, class, and gender are equally significant because they are all constituted in and determinant of key features of the social system: power relations, life chances, historical possibilities.

The broadening of stratification scholarship to encompass race and gender, in addition to its traditional focus on class, was occasioned by the great social upheavals of the 1960s, particularly the civil rights and women’s movements. Ironically, however, these movements did not define race, class, and gender as inseperable and equally significant, but as discrete and hierarchical. Each movement tended to focus on a singular aspect of social inequality and identity, race, or gender. To this day, African-American women and, more generally, women of color, are faced with an impossible choice between loyalty to their race and to their gender. (Does one support the Million Man March? Anita Hill? The NOW?) Although it has received less contemporary attention, white working-class women face an analogous political dilemna: Does one support class-based organizations that seem intransigently sexist, for instance trade unions, or pursue feminist demands that might weaken such organization when they are already embattled?

Therein lies the contradiction that this article seeks to explore: race, class, and gender are inseparable, but they are also “incommensurable”. They intertwine in the heart of individuals’ social identity, yet - for those who are oppressed, not privileged, by these relationships - they split apart in mutually exclusive allegiances. How do women, particularly those who are working class and/or of color, construct a coherent sense of self out of such fragmentation? How do politically active women make choices of which battles to fight?

This article examines these questions in the life stories of three women, each of whom has been active in community-based organization in the Southeastern United States for at least the past fifteen years. Cynthia Brown is African-American, Connie White and Chris Weiss are of European descent. All are between the ages of 35 and 55. They self-identify as working class in origin, and have been involved as staff or leaders in organizations with primarily working-class constituencies. Following the protocols of oral history, the identity of each woman, by her own choice, is not disguised. Each has read this article and, with only minor changes, approved its representation of her life.

The interviews with these women are part of a larger study of contemporary women’s activism in the South. To date, ten interviews with seven women have been conducted and transcribed. (Cynthia Brown was interviewed in three separate sessions and Chris Weiss in two.) The interviews combine the formats of life history and oral history: they begin with open-ended questions designed to elicit a biographical narrative with minimal intervention from the interviewer; then they move to more focused questions about political motivations, commitments, and priorities. The resulting narratives reflect in part my intentions and presuppositions as a researcher inerested in the connection between social experiences and political sensibility, individual biography, and collective action.

In the three interviews selected for examination in this article, each woman grounds her social identity in and directs her politics to a singular inequality: race (Cynthia), class (Connie), or gender (Chris). This enables us to disentangle and compare the distinct ways that each form of oppression impinges on and is constituted through each woman’s life story. Most striking is the contrast between the community solidarity born of race and class in the stories of Cynthia and Connie, respectively, and the tale of gendered exile told by Chris. Their narratives suggest that, although race, class, and gender may be equivalent in ultimate theoretical or political significance, they are certainly fested in and shaped by these three women’s social experiences and political resistance.

Solidarities of Race and Class
Cynthia Brown, like several recent analysts of race, turns earlier historiography on its head by depicting the segregated South as a golden age, a time and place where African-Americans could enjoy the social cohesion and material resources of stable, intact communities. She grew up in a small town in North Carolina, where strong familial and community ties wove together in a dense web of support and accountability:

To me, it was significant that all of us were in school together. All your relatives are there in the same school with you, and they provide you the kind of support you needed, emotional or otherwise…. I remember that all of my teachers were black. All of the people who were in leadership roles in the school were people that I went to church with, too. They were people who knew my family, and they would look out for you.

Connie White describes her rural, white working-class community in east Tennessee in familial terms that are similar to Cynthia’s:

Right where I grew up, my grandmother and grandfather lived next door; and I had an aunt and cousins lived up on the hill from them and then another aunt and uncle and cousins lived down the hill from them. And my great-aunt and great-uncle lived on down the creek a little ways and so, mostly just kin right there where I grew up.

Race implicitly dovetails with class and kin to reinforce the bonds of commonality within this rural community. Connie’s images are of homogeneity and social equality among people who make their livings from small farms and working-class jobs in local factories and utilities. Her connectedness to this community is not articulated in the language of class solidarity, with its undertones of exploitation, division, and antagonism, but in metaphors of seamless unity with the land:

It feels like a way to be connected with everything that’s gone before you; your people have been right there on that spot, on that piece of dirt, for so long….[Y]ou grow up walking in those same woods…. It’s just sort of like things that are forever and stay the same, and you feel - I feel real connected to the land, and feel like it’s a very great privilege to live right there in that spot.

In Cynthia’s community, by contrast, class distinctions complicate relationships within her extended family and preclude an undifferentiated solidarity based on race. Cynthia’s own class disadvantage alienates her, especially from the more privileged members of her family:

All these folk [her mother's siblings] graduated from college, all these folk had a certain standing in the community, all these folk owned their homes,… and all them had jobs that they dressed up to go to. Whereas my mother worked in a plant. We had real relaxed kinds of standards. We weren’t real proper about a whole lot of things.

Class divisions notwithstanding, Cynthia locates her self and her childhood in the supportive bonds of a racial collectively. Similarly, Connie narrates a life story of continuous personal and familial rootedness in a specific social and physical place. For both women, individual identity emerges in the crucible of a primary collectivity that continues to orient them as adults. Their stories of community cohesion and nurture contrast dramaticaly with the tale of estrangement and racism told by Chris.

Gender and Exile
Chris Weiss unifies her entire narrative, her childhood and adulthood, her episodes of political activism, and her periods of more conventional activity as a mother and wife, around the theme of gender. She recounts her life as a series of confrontations with adversaries who seek to dominate and confine her. They are invariably male and their motives are at least partially sexist. For example, Chris centers her accounts of childhood on the dynamics of power within her immediate family, which is dominated by her patriarchal father:

My family was very hierarchical. My father was very domineering; my mother was also very feisty and still is very much her own person. We witnessed through all the years of their 53-year marriage lots of struggle. My mothers’s insistence on keeping herself as a person and my father’s dominations - it was a very rocky and volatile marriage.

Chris describes a showdown between herself and her father as a “turning point” in her life. During her first year of college he wanted her to join a sorority and she refused:

So we had this enormous horrible discussion and it was, you know, “You either do as I say or I’m not paying for your dormitory any more.” And the way I solved that problem was to get pregnant and get married.

The tension between conventional expectations of upwardly mobile white women and her own rebellious behavior from childhood informs the structure of Chris’s narrative, which breaks into three pieces: childhood, which ends with the confrontation with her father and subsequent marriage; the interregnum of her first marriage, which ends in divorce; and her present adulthood, which begins with her second marriage and subsequent feminist activism. Each period is framed by her changing relationship with a man. The first two are subverted by her drive to define herself more autonomously, that is, not in relationship to a man, but accomplishing this requires her to seperate from her family of origin and, later, from her first husband.

In Cynthia’s and Connie’s narratives, by contrast, gender exists as a largely unrecognized but influential subtext. Neither woman spontaneously and explicitly mentions gender in her stories of childhood; neither presents herself as a girl, but as a child of a specific race (Cynthia) or place (Connie). When asked directly about gender at the end of their interviews, both women argue that egalitarian treatment rendered sexism and gender consciousness insignificant in their early lives.

For example, Connie asserts:

I never felt like that less was expected of me, from my father, because I was a girl. Now, I did feel that way from my mother some. But my father always talked to all of us about being able to be independent, to be financially independent, to be able to support ourselves. And talked to me and my sister just as hard about that as he did my brother…. And he never let me out of stuff because I was a girl either. We all worked the tobacco, we all fed the cows.

Similarly, when Cynthia was asked about sexism in her childhood during a follow-up interview, she responded:

See, the thing about it is - it may have, but I don’t, I can’t say that I can like put a finger on it. Because there have been so many other things that made up who I was, that may have had a greater impression.

She went on to attribute the relative insignificance of sexism to the role models of her mother and grandmother, and to the exigencies of race and class oppression, which required women to earn wages and men to take on domestic responsibilities.

My mother was a single mother. She did what she had to do, you know what I’m saying?… You know, my mother turned over the washing machine and fixed it. My mother would take the light switch down and work on the wires and stuff, scared me to death…

All the women in my family worked…. There was never that influence of a man who sat down at the table and waited for somebody to wait on him. That was just never the case. My grandfather combed heads, my grandfather worked three jobs outside of the home and came home and helped clean house.

Despite these disavowals, gender marks each woman’s narrative in distinct but indirect ways. Connie, for example, deploys gendered symbols of domestic ordinariness to convey her modest self-assessment, her lack of entitlement or responsibility “to say my opinion somewhere beyond the supper table.” However, she attributes this self-effacement primarily to class: “work…is just physical work; you can’t conceive that you’d be valued for intellectual contributions.”

In a similarly paradoxical manner, Cynthia uses her mother’s example to demonstrate the irrelevance of sexism, yet her mother’s downward mobility, precarious financial circumstances, and responsibility for all domestic tasks had much to do with gendered inequality. As a working-class black woman, her earning power was at the time (1960s and 1970s) far lower than that of black men, and her gendered responsibilities for children far greater. In other words, the childhood povery that Cynthia attributes to class disadvantage also derived from gender (and, of course, race). That gender is not labeled as such may be due to the factors Cynthia identifies: the absence of sexist proscriptions on her activities and aspirations, and the flexible division of labor between women and men in her extended family. It may also be due, in her case as well as Connie’s, to the unfortunate hegemony of middle-class white women’s experiences as definitive sexism.

In Chris’s narrative, by contrast, stories of race and class turn back to and cannot be seperated from gender. So, for example, the showdown with her father over joining a sorority (cited above) is the climax to a story that starts out on the subject of class differences. Similarly, a story about racial awareness turns back to her father and his insistence that she break off a relationship with a Latino boyfriend: “…[A]t that moment I really understood in a very clear way that there were boundaries for me as a white woman that I could not, should not, go beyond.”

Each of these three women, then, coheres her life around a primary inequality and subordinates others to that central source of identity. Their childhood stories of racial and class collectivities (Cynthia and Connie) and patriarchal punishments (Chris) function as explanatory anchors for their later political involvements. At the same time, each woman’s experience with multiple forms of inequality - however much her narrative mutes or submerges their recognition - ultimately leads her to reject identity politics in favor of a more universal political sensibility.

Social Experience and Political Resistance
Political activism, focused on the collectivity with which she most identifies, is central to each woman’s adult life. Cynthia Brown works with a predominantly African-American constituency as the director of a Southern economic justice organization. Connie White works with a grassroots, working-class environmental organization in east Tennessee. Chris Weiss is the founder of a statewide women’s organization in West Virginia.

The stories they tell of the evolution of their activism diverge, but remain consistent with their overall self-representations. Cynthia Brown, for example, relates her own coming of age as a story of increased exposure and resistance to white racism. She suggests that her youthful activism derives from the potent blend of race and class oppression, a familial tradition of union and community organizing, and her own sense of responsibility as the oldest child in her family. She embodies these contributing factors in her mother, with whom she immediately aligns herself at the beginning of the interview: “I was born in New York. But before that, let me say a little bit about my mother. My mother is the oldest of six children…. And I’m the oldest of six children in my family.” In this revealing opening, Cynthia conveys familial, biological, and political continuity by posing her mother as the initial subject of Cynthia’s own history, speaking of her mother in the present tense (she is deceased), and aligning herself with her mother through the comparison in birth order. Cynthia further suggests her mother’s influence in her own activism by telling or alluding on three occasions to a pivotal story about her mother’s defiant interaction with the white principal of Cynthia’s grade school, who was reputed to be a member of the Ku Klax Klan. Consecutively, she relates parallel stories of her own activism in high school.

In Connie White’s stable nest of kin and community, by contrast, there is no legacy of political activism or class antagonism. As an adult, professionally trained for social service work, she aligns herself with poor and working-class people not so much out of political conviction as from a sense of identity and belonging:

The first real job I had out of school was at the Department of Human Services… But I never felt like I fit there because I felt like I fit more with the people I was working with…. I guess I’ve always felt like I fit with people who were just sort of what I would think of as ordinary:…people that didn’t talk proper, had voices sounding like yours, didn’t pay that much attention to grammer, didn’t live in fancy houses….

Although this identity with “ordinary” people functions to cohere her entire life story and justify her politics, Connie relates the beginning of her activism as a conversion experience that divides the ongoing narrative of her life:

When I moved to Morgan County, strip mining was all around…. And so I went to a SOCM [Save Our Cumberland Mountains] meeting because a friend asked me to go, and it was a really good, wonderful experience. Even though I didn’t know anything, they made me feel like I did have something to contribute…. And so there’s just been this whole wonderful lifetime, this twenty years of learning, and these experiences that have just totally changed my life, and changed my idea of what I could do and of what I have to contribute.

Chris’s story of the evolution of her activism combines elements of the other two. Despite her self-presentation as a fighter from an early age, and despite a history of involvement in the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements, she dates her mature political activism from 1979. In Charleston, West Virginia, where she had moved with her second husband in 1972, another group of powerful male adversaries - local politicians and officials in the building trades union - conspired to defund a nontraditional jobs for women program that she directed. Her story of the epiphany that ensued displays the same thematic contrasts between the pliant and uppity woman, conventionality and rebellion, that unify her entire life history. On this occasion, however, she inverts the imagery to suggest that, even when playing by the rules, she can not insulate herself from the depredations of sexism:

I just remembered going home and for about three weeks, just crying and crying and crying. And then I just got really angry. How can they do this to us? And understanding in some sort of a gut way, some very basic things about oppression. This was just little Chris Weiss, this nice by daytime middle-class, white woman with kids, who was just trying to do good. They could do that to me, too.

Despite these differences in the evolution and focus of each woman’s activism, their current political philosophies are remarkably similar. In all three cases, class awareness functions to undercut a unilateral politics of identity. So, for example, class appears in Cynthia’s narrative and sounds a note of dissonance in her otherwise harmonious community. This theme of division appears repeatedly through comments about political differences, skin color discrimination, and the disparity between those who resist versus those who capitulate to racism - all distinctions that she associates in part with class. She observes that race “will get you killed faster and make you more worthless” than any other inequality, and believes that nationalism has been an important and effective strategy in certain contexts; however, for herself, no single identity ultimately suffices as the source of political orientation. The confluence of racial and class oppression radicalizes and universalizes her outlook, leading her to a politics that seeks to transcend all unjust hierarchies: “I identify with folk who are not valued, who are not respected, who are not empowered, who are not given the tools they need to do for themselves. I identify with that place.”

Connie constructs links between the egalitarian class structure and ethos of the community in which she grew up and her populist, democratic, political sensibility. As noted previously, she utilizes gendered domestic imagery to convey the modesty and “ordinariness” of her life. She then deploys similar symbols to legitimate egalitarian political participation, even leadership, by all: “leadership… is just like taking your turn; just like you wash the dishes at home, you take your turn.”

Chris Weiss dryly suggests that the heavily working-class context of the coalfields where she lives influences her politics. Equality with men, the seemingly self-evident goal of the more mainstream, middle-class wing of the women’s movement, is not the point. “One of the things that I think we instinctively knew here in the mountains is that to be equal to an unemployed coal miner was just no big deal. We could do better than that.” When pressed to elaborate what “better than that” means, Chris commented:

I guess that means safer jobs, well-paid jobs, stable communities. We could have communities which we controlled, in which we, men and women, could control our own destiny and not be reliant on a coal company, a mega-employer, who would basically call the shots.

Despite these similarities in their current political philosophies, the context and consequences of their individual resistance to oppression diverge in ways that suggest important distinctions in the social construction of race, class, and gender. For Chris, challenging the constraints of gender required her to seperate herself from her father, her family of origin, and the community in which she came of age - to go “into exile” as she put it. Her resistance is a story of estrangement, divorce. Feminist activism eventually brought her into a network of allies, friends, and mentors, but set her apart from the rural community in which she settled with her second husband. Cynthia’s and Connie’s resistance, by contrast, are stories of solidarity with affirmation of the living collectivities into which they were born.

This link to a people, an ethnos, and through it to collective memory and myth, undergirds the final, profound contrast in the course of each woman’s political resistance. Although Chris refers to numerous contemporary women who have influenced and supported her, they do not form a collective memory or tradition in her narrative. Their history is too young and their ties to earlier women’s movements (suffragism, for example) too distant and abstract. Historical sensibility is not absent from her narrative, however: she implicitly positions herself at the beginning of a new era, as a founder of new traditions. This is evident, for example, in her references to working-class women who endured the risks and insults of nontraditional, blue-collar work as “pioneers.”

Connie, by contrast, echoes her earlier references to the continuity of rural place when positioning herself in a larger populist tradition:

It’s a real treasure and a gift to feel like you’ve done something that might live on past you somehow, that you’ve made a difference somehow, so that it mattered that you lived. And I really feel like being a member of a democratic, long-term, citizens’ group gives people an opportunity to do that.

For Cynthia, race provides a storehouse of rich cultural traditions involving identity, collective memory, and a mythic, inspirational view of the past. It is a past that judges and calls the present to accountability. Note that her account is about gender as well as race: it implicitly recalls her opening statement of alignment with her mother, but expands the relationship to all African-American women who ensure both biological survival and historical continuity.

I heard this woman talking about the bones that scatter the Atlantic Ocean, bones of people that none of us knows. And I starting thinking about what was required for people to survive…. They talk about mothers being sold from children, when children were left on plantations, mothers who had like their own breast milk for their own children, sharing their breast milk with other children, so that they could survive. And you just think about that kind of commitment to help you be here. And it’s like - that’s about something, and you cannot ignore that. If you do, you have to pay for it. And I ain’t never been one to pay for shit I didn’t have to (laughs).

Conclusion: The Construction of Race, Gender, and Class
Each of these women constructs a life story that derives coherence from a primary collectivity that grounds her identity and explains her politics. These collectivities are not identical, however, in their lived experience nor the story that is told of that experience. Especially striking in these narratives is the contrast between, on the one hand, race and class as narrated by Cynthia and Connie, and, on the other hand, gender as narrated by Chris.

Race and class, in these accounts, involve deeply felt, horizontal relationships of community and kin. Resisting the injustices of race and class oppression involves taking a stand on the firm ground of a collective history, ethos, group life. At a structural level, this collectivity may be explained by historical patterns of land ownership, racial segregation, and the proscriptions against certain social relationships, especially interracial marriage; these and other factors continue to generate relatively homogeneous, race- or class-defined communities and cultures in some locations. The depth and persistence of such ties stand as a caution to those who would render social identity entirely fluid and situational.

Obviously, gender is not constituted or resisted in the same manner. The emphasis on intimate heterosexual relationships within race-class groups lends gender less homogeneity and cultural determinance. The embeddedness of gender within race and class may partly explain the implicit (embedded) presence of gender in Cynthia and Connie’s narratives. The rules and dynamics of gender relations are among the most significant features of group life; they become naturalized, inextricable from the meaning and identity of the group itself.

To transgress or to challenge gender means to risk, as did Chris, exile from the larger group. Her experience suggests that the individualism so often associated with mainstream feminism may not be due simply to the cultural ethos and upward mobility of its largely white, middle-class constituency. For women of all races and clases, challenging sexism may result in being forced out of the group (however defined), required to live as an isolated individual or to form an intentional community with others similarly ostracized. Some feminists have, of course, done precisely that.

Even as each woman grounds her identity in a different collectivity, however, her politics do not reflect a singular, exclusionary affirmation of that group. The “politics of identity,” today so often associated with a strident claim to the legitimacy and significance of a specific group experience, does not adequately describe their activism . Rather, Cynthia, Connie, and Chris all ultimately refer to a complex configuration of gender, class, and race to explain and justify their political activities and beliefs. It is the intersection of these oppressions that becomes central: Cynthia cannot exclusively embrace nationalism because her class experience complicates and transcends her apprehension of race; similarly, Chris can not be satisfied with the limited goals of mainstream feminism. Precisely because their social experience of oppression is mulitply defined, no single identity suffices as the basis of their politics. The larger “we” that their multiple identites ultimately require is a human collectivity that their politics seeks to construct.

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