Women of Color and Feminism

“All little black boys want white girls. They are all the same.” As a Latina professor of women’s studies, I understood what the mother meant. Although Fernando’s ethnic origin was unclear, he was dark skinned. Annika is not. The terms “negra/o”and “güera/o”are frequently used among Latina/os to emphasize differences in skin hues, with preference usually given to those who are lighter. These racialized attitudes about skin tone often determine concepts of beauty and acceptance within the culture. When coupled with the historical prohibitions against interactions between black (and other dark-skinned) men and white women, Fernando’s interest in my light-skinned niece likely appeared suspicious to his mother. Viewing her son’s intention through the prism of racialized desire, she probably assumed her son would not escape its legacy. Intellectually, I understood all of this. However, emotionally, her words left me pained. Why couldn’t Fernando’s interest just be childhood curiosity? What about the fact that Annika isLatina?

A short time later, the park started to clear out and my niece and I made our way back to our car. Next to us, another Latino family was packing up, and their young son sat waiting in his stroller. I pointed at him and spoke to my niece in Spanish. His father stared at us for a moment and then hesitantly asked if she were my daughter. After I explained she was actually my niece, his facial expression left me feeling that he was unconvinced, so I reassuringly added that I recognized how güeritashe looked. He nodded with a quick smile and turned back to his family. However, as I drove away, I became upset. Within one brief outing, both my niece and I had been misread and our relationship misconstrued. Moreover, I was partially to blame.

My niece is the product of my sister, an olive-toned, dark-featured American of Costa Rican descent, and her husband, a blond, green-eyed American of mixed European descent. Most agree that Annika is a good combination of the two; however, I regularly see my sister in her, especially given Annika’s dark eyes. It had never crossed my mind that we might not look related. I also never considered that others might assume she was not Latina. Regularly surrounded by our side of the family, she hears Spanish as frequently as English (her first word was “gracias”). However, these two encounters, with those I like to think of as my own gente(i.e., other Latina/os), reminded me that we often fail to see people’s individuality because of the social expectations that we place on them.

During our brief excursion, my niece’s particularly light skin and hair color succeeded in darkening my own decisively “ethnic” features in the eyes of those observing us and recast our aunt/niece relationship into the common Latina nanny/white child one that pervades much of Los Angeles. This was why the father in the parking lot seemed confused when I claimed we were related. And this kind of assumption is also what makes the mother’s discomfort at her son’s interest understandable. The race and gender dimensions that Annika and Fernando likely faced as playmates are ones long ago established by histories of patriarchy and conquest, both within and outside the United States. These histories shape interactions not only between different ethnic groups, but also between men and women and between different classes. The mother’s resentment revealed her understanding (conscious or not) of a set of dialectics, or oppositional power relationships, frequently formed by the intersecting politics of race, class, and gender. In addition, her words underscored the sexual politics that lay trapped in between.

Did I make a point of speaking to my niece in Spanish as we were leaving the park in order to emphasize her ethnicity because I was still smarting from the assumption that she was not Latina? At the same time, why did I take up the very same oppressive language that set her apart by calling her a güerita? My own responses, as well as those we received, make me wonder what will happen when Annika, born from an ethnically mixed relationship, finds herself drawn to people from other ethnic communities, perhaps also mixed like her. How do we begin to form new conversations?

Examining the women of color whose histories, issues, and individual experiences are central to this book could offer a means of addressing some of these concerns. However, their stories also raise new ones. I teach a course on U.S. women of color and, on the first day of each semester, I routinely ask my students to consider the difficulty of learning about groups as diverse as Asian Americans or Native Americans in the span of one semester. How do we avoid generalizing within and between communities—of race, of class, of gender, and of sexuality? What moves us to identify one group as being “of color” and another not? Where do we start?

In response to these questions, my students often debate the purpose of our class. Some go as far as to claim that they are “over race” and wonder why we have not moved on. We are individuals, not categories, they argue. Besides, they insist, people in the United States no longer care about race. Questions and comments such as these get us talking about the construction of categories, specifically those surrounding race, class, gender, and sexuality. They also get us thinking about how, in our society, we create social hierarchies by ranking according to identity, which then leads to stereotypes and assumptions. Similarly, stereotypes and assumptions generally serve as tools for silencing and oppression. In turn, silence and oppression give way to mechanisms of inequality such as racism and sexism that become entrenched in our daily lives.

Once our conversations take this direction, my students tend to back off from their earlier statements. They remember incidents in which they were affected by what others assumed about them. They admit that they do not know much about other groups’ histories, or sometimes their own. They realize that they have lacked words to explain their experiences, and in some cases, were made to believe that they should not matter. Less willing then to uphold the belief that we are past the need for self-examination or that race does not matter, they begin to acknowledge the actual power that naming and identity markers hold and to understand why a class on the topic of women of color is a necessary step to discussing these integral issues. In this case, Smith’s observation that “identity is the bane of subjectivity’s existence” takes on a more nuanced meaning because recognizing and naming collective experiences can also provide the crucial steps needed to identify key factors of oppression. In other words, to gain autonomy, we often need to first identify struggles in our lives that are actually not about who we are as individuals, but about who we are assumed to be based on our race or class or our gender or sexuality.

Here is one example. In 1975, a class-action civil suit (Madrigal v. Quilligan)was filed against the University of Southern California-Los Angeles County Medical Center (LACMC) by a number of women of Mexican origin who had been coercively sterilized while they were patients at the hospital. During a period of at least three years, doctors routinely performed tubal ligations on countless Mexican female patients who were there to give birth. The procedures were done without their consent or the women were forced to sign their approval while they were still in labor. None of the women were fluent in English, and many lacked a thorough understanding of what “tying their tubes” meant.

The issue evolved into a legal matter because Chicana/o activists, hospital employees who recognized the misuse of power, and the women themselves were able to trace how the medical staff systematically treated pregnant female patients of Mexican origin. The common threads were the patients’ race, gender, and perceived economic status. The hospital’s unethical medical practices might have gone unchecked for much longer if no one had critically analyzed how the bodies and identities of Mexican women were being framed within the greater social context of female reproduction. Court evidence showed that some doctors believed Mexican women were “hyperfertile” and consequently had too many children. Others assumed these women were too poor to afford more children. Acting from their own gender and class status as economically well-to-do men, the doctors justified their abuse by stereotyping their patients. If these women’s medical histories had been reviewed solely on an individual basis, they might not have revealed the social factors that contributed to their sterilization. However, their common experience as poor women of color allowed critics to name the oppressive framework that violated them and, in turn, devise a plan of resistance.

While they vary widely in effect, both this grave example and the more innocuous one I experienced in the park illustrate the power of body politics. Bodily differences make identity a two-sided coin: Assumptions based on our physical features or appearances invariably work against our attempts at self-actualization; however, because we are subject to oppressions based on these assumptions, politically claiming certain identities can be our only means to gaining control over our lives.

In her essay “Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference,” filmmaker and essayist Trinh T. Minh-ha describes identity as a dividing line that is created between those who have the power to define a person’s or group’s characteristics and those who are pressured into upholding the dominant group’s features despite being expected to embody the opposite of them. She refers to this type of dysfunctional relationship as the “I and not-I.” Take, for instance, how men and women are situated in oppositional terms. The pronoun “he” becomes defined and legitimized against everything that “she” is not. This traps men and women in a dualistic relationship and forces those in the “not” category into the position of the Other. If you are not a man, you are other than a man. Neither party fares well in this kind of relationship. Men become fixed to an essence that presumably represents them (e.g., you are a man so you must be tough) and women are either subjected to exist in the shadow of this essence (e.g., you are not a man, so you cannot be tough, but you want to be legitimized so you keep trying to act tough) or they are altogether erased by it (e.g., you are not a man and not tough, so you are destined to invisibility). For those who cannot comfortably or willingly take up either gendered position (e.g., you are queer or transgendered, so popular logic would dictate that there is no way you can ever be tough or, instead, that your toughness makes your gender identity suspect), there is no choice, just erasure. Unless you take a different approach to the concept of difference, that is.

Hegemony, the monster mechanism that holds most forms of oppression in place, works to ensure that we accept binary relationships and buy into the concept of sameness. As feminist theorist Audre Lorde suggests, our many social and state institutions support hegemony by teaching us to strive for uniformity, to see difference as a threat, and to demean or ignore what the majority does not support. In school, that can mean giving preference to one form of writing, one group’s history, one type of speech, and one set of ideas. Throughout our legal system, hegemony can make certain inequalities seem just, such as punishing street crimes such as burglary and drug abuse more severely than white-collar crimes such as insider trading or encouraging special tax breaks for corporations but not the average taxpayer. Likewise, cultural outlets such as the media, religion, and even sports can all gear us toward specific notions about what is considered normal or acceptable.

Ever listen to the radio and count how many songs in a row are about heterosexual love? Wonder why there are references to a Christian God in our currency system, our pledge of allegiance, and our Constitution? Why is it usually easier to name ten African American male athletes than it is five politicians? These are just a few examples of how we are socialized to imagine others and ourselves in specific ways. Hegemony operates at both the macrostructural level and the everyday commonplace to support a dominant set of ideologies and practices. Moreover, those who are the most disempowered by hegemonic norms are often the same ones who unknowingly promote them in an attempt to belong. Consider, for instance, the amount of money spent every year to support hegemonic standards of beauty (for example, hair dye, colored contacts, surgical implants, fake tanning) that clearly do not reflect how the majority of people naturally look. Nevertheless, people buy these items in an attempt to transform themselves into who they believe represent ideals of beauty and success. Hegemony convinces them that what they are not is what they should become.

Yet subverting hegemony is not a hopeless prospect. For DuBois, a double consciousness meant forcibly adopting a perspective that left him less than whole. His divided identity kept the hope of being recognized as a fully actualized individual out of reach. He could learn to function within the dominant system, but he was kept from ever escaping its control. However, having a “second sight” also stands to be useful in subverting oppression. The key lies in an active awareness of one’s situation and a strategic employment of what makes one different. In Sister Outsider, Lorde calls individuals who possess this ability “watchers,” those who are “familiar with the language and