Identifications
In the 1960's, I read my first Chicano novel. It was City of Night by John Rechy, a gay Texan, son of a Scottish father an da Mexican mother. For days, I walked around in stunned amazement that a Chicano could write and get published. When I read I Am Joaquín, I was surprised to see a bilingual book by a Chicano in print. When I saw poetry written in Tex-Mex for the first time, a feeling of pure joy flashed through me. I felt like we existed as a people.
Anzaldúa, 1987
“In the United States, minorities have been excluded from government decision- making and must now develop an original system of self- government and the means of actualizing them. Black and Brown people have become the vanguard of social change because they constitute the most oppressed sector of American society. It is within this framework that Black and Brown people must thoroughly comprehend the theory and practice of the successful as well as unsuccessful revolutlons around the world. Reading material in this area will include such authors as Lenin, Nkrumah, Marx, Malcolm, Fanon, Padmore, Che Guevara, and Mariano Azuela.”
(B.S.U-M.A.Y.A, 1969, pp. 5)
Racial Project
And is it supposed that the wandering savage has a stronger attachment to his home than the settled, civilized Christian? Is it more afflicting to him to leave the graves of his fathers than it is to our brothers and children? Rightly considered, the policy of the General Government toward the red man is not only liberal, but generous. He is unwilling to submit to the laws of the States and mingle with their population. To save him from this alternative, or perhaps utter annihilation, the General Government kindly offers him a new home, and proposes to pay the whole expense of his removal and settlement.
Jackson
Here is the real modern labor problem. Here is the kernel of the problem of Religion and Democracy, of Humanity. Words and futile gestures avail nothing. Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.
De Bois, 2012
Second, racial dictatorship organized (albeit sometimes in an incoherent and contradictory fashion) the "color line" rendering it the fundamental division in U.S. society. The dictatorship elaborated, articulated, and drove racial divisions not only through institutions, but also through psyches, extending up to our own time the racial obsessions of the conquest and slavery periods.
Omi and Winant
Racialization:
To the English colonizers, the Irish lacked “knowledge of God or good manners.” They had no sense of private property and did not “plant any Gardens or Orchards, Inclose or improve their lands, live together in setled Villages or Townes.” The Irish were described as lazy, “naturally” given to “idleness,” and unwilling to work for “their own bread.” Dominated by “innate sloth,” “loose, barbarous and most wicked,” and living “like beasts,” they were also thought to be criminals inclined to steal from the English. The colonizers complained that the Irish were not satisfied with the “fruit of the natural unlaboured earth” and therefore continually “invaded the fertile possessions” of the “English Pale.”
Takaki
The first English colonizers in the New World found that the Indians reminded them of the Irish. In Virginia, Captain John Smith observed that the deerskin robes worn by the Indians did not differ much ‘in fashion from the Irish mantels.’ Thomas Morton noticed that the ‘Natives of New England [were] accustomed to build themselves houses much like the wild Irish.’ Roger Williams reported that the thick woods and swamps of New England gave refuge to the Indians engaged in warfare, ‘like the bogs to the wild Irish.’ Thus, in their early encounters, the English projected the familiar onto the strange, their images of the Irish onto the native people of America. Initially, ‘savagery’ was defined in relationship to the Irish, and the Indians were incorporated into this definition.
Takaki, 2023, p 31
“An intricate and savage web of oppression intruded at every moment into the black woman’s life during slavery. Yet a single theme appears at every juncture: the woman transcending, refusing, fighting back, asserting herself over and against terrifying obstacles, It was not her comrade brother against whom her incredible strength was directed. She fought alongside her man, accepting or providing guidance according to her talents and the nature of her tasks. 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
Davis
Hegemony: But there’s far more to it than individual cruelty. At the level of our society and culture, Christian privilege is structural. It has afforded the Christian majority the historic and contemporary power to shape social norms. This Christian normativity makes Christian values intrinsic to our national identity, conveys the status of truth and rightness on Christian culture, and makes Christian language and metaphors and their underlying theology the national standard. Christian normativity imbues Christianity with a unique power, situating it as ordinary and expected.
Joshi
Like Oyewumi, Gunn Allen is interested in the collaboration between some Indian men and whites in undermining the power of women. It is important for us to think about these collaborations as we think of the question of indifference to the struggles of women in racialized communities against multiple forms of violence against them and the communities. The white colonizer constructed a powerful inside force as colonized men were coopted into patriarchal roles. Gunn Allen details the transformations of the Iroquois and Cherokee gynecracies and the role of Indian men in the passage to patriarchy. The British took Cherokee men to England and gave them an education in the ways of the English. These men participated during the time of the Removal Act.
Lugones, 2008
May I say a few words? I want to say a few words about this matter.
I am a woman’s rights.
(a) I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man.
(b) I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?
I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can (c) eat as much too, if (d) I can get it.
I am as strong as any man that is now.
As for intellect, all I can say is, (e) if women have a pint and man a quart - why can’t she have her little pint full?
Sojurner Truth
Hegemony:
The scarcity of African narratives of captivity and enslavement exacerbates the pressure and gravity of such questions. There is not one extant autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage. This silence in the archive in combination with the robustness of the fort or barracoon, not as a holding cell or space of confinement but as an episteme, has for the most part focused the historiography of the slave trade on quantitative matters and on issues of markets and trade relations. Loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive”
Hartman