Race, Class, Gender and Oppression

Every now and then Unitarian Universalists engage in a hairsplitting argument, is it classism, or is it racism?  This is related to that other non productive distinction making argument, does the oppression of poor women stem from class or patriarchy?  Round and round the argument goes, and the liberals can't decide which oppression is more oppressing for y'all poor folks.

In the United States, race oppression has always been part of the domination system and related to class oppression.  The social system that gave rise to both class oppression and race oppression was and is patriarchal.  That social system has historically privileged heterosexuals, and institutionalized a double standard relative to propertied class male conduct and female conduct, as a result it sexualized the relation of propertied classes to the oppressed non-propertied classes.

Class oppression and gender  oppression are both pillars of the dominant power elite within the social system.  It is absurd to reduce one to the other, or to separate one from the other.  Attempts of feminists of the dominant and aspiring classes to combat "sexism" without dealing with class has trivialized feminism, so that today we have privileged women who actually believe the slogan "you have come a long way baby" - and act on such  narcissism in a society where African American and Native American women see their men humiliated and their families destroyed -and rationalize this betrayal by the claim that such racialized class violence are not "women's issues."

So what about race and class?  The form of racial oppression that has become institutionalized in the United States arose out of the breakdown of the old system of class oppression in the British North American colonies in the seventeenth century.  To make a long, and complex story short and simple, the English arrived with a laws about servitude that had served them well across the pond.  The English considered themselves to be a race, different and hostile to the Irish race (and other Europeans as well.)  The psychological and cultural differences between the English and other peoples were explained by "blood" rather than enculturation.

Concepts of race as applied by the English elites to the Irish was to consider the Irish to be "savage" and incapable of civilization, but when the English encountered the Africans and the indigenous Americans these people were considered even more savage than the Irish.  In Virginia in the 1670s, the "excluded" of the colony (including African and Irish) formed alliance (against the Indians in the case of Bacon's Rebellion) and engaged in resistance and revolt against the plantation owners.  The revolt was suppressed by violence and the elite began to create a new system of rule to prevent this alliance from ever happening again.  The concept of Whiteness was invented and institualized in the decades that followed.  In the new racist order the Irish (and poor English) were still poor and oppressed, but now they were "racially" the same as the planters.  They were to consider themselves superior to the African descended peoples and to be enemies of the indigenous peoples as well.  Subsequent immigrations of Europeans reveal the same patterns, the Swedes were called "honkies" by the Anglos, but they learned English and became white.  The peoples from southern and eastern Europe were racially oppressed and then made white through assimilation as well.  Whiteness in contemporary America means "not colored" and "not racially oppressed" but for many people of European descent that has come at the price of forgetting ones distinct heritage.

(As a side note. In recent years Jews have become white, and white folks now talk about Judaism being a religion and not a race!  Since "race" is an invention of oppression, what that means is that the Jews are no longer to be racially oppressed (but they are to be religiously discriminated against!))

Race and class in the United States have functioned together to oppress the majority of the people.  The Irish were victims of racial oppression when they were oppressed as another race, and another form of racial oppression continued when they were seduced into giving up being Irish for "whiteness." The oppression of ancestor denial!  The Africans were turned into slaves (a form of class oppression) and after the end of slavery a caste system was established that perpetuated a division between "white" and "colored" working people.  Sharecropping was a class oppression but the white sharecroppers were lynchers and the Black sharecroppers were lychees.  In a twentieth century steel mill, the workers were all oppressed as "proletarians," but "Blacks" were janitors and laborers, and "Whites" operated the machines.

It can be argued that the Native American peoples were victims of race oppression but not class oppression.  That is true as long as "Natives" remained in their own distinct communities and those communities were self sufficient.  But most  people who identify as "Native" live outside of the surviving "Indian communities" today,  and they experience racism and class oppression and are victims of patriarchy as well.*  "Natives" not living in "Indian communities" are not counted by the administrators of the conquest (the Bureau of Indian Affairs) as not being "Native" at all, and yet they are subject to impoverishment and violence by racist institutions.

It does not make sense to a person of color who has experienced oppression to participate in arguments with "white identified"  liberals about whether a particular incident was a result of race, class, culture or patriarchy.  Incidents happen, and they happen within a context of a racialized class society that is patriarchal.  The idea that one can distinguish a classist incident from a racist incident from a sexist incident is to reduce these oppressions to bad attitudes, rather than to see them as interrelated forms of the same domination system.

Now my answer to the "white identified" liberal is not the one the UUA approved anti racist training program has taught us.  Make a conscious choice to overcome the formation process that has taught you to be white!   Become a human being of European heritage if you will.  Whiteness was and is a racist identity.ˆš  Your skin color, mortgage and diploma do not make you part of the elite, despite your illusions.  Join the human race and join with the struggle to  help end all forms of oppression, since they diminish all who would be human. If you have some relative privilege, use that power for the benefit of all.  Don't engage in narcissistic guilt about your "whiteness," or denial about your power.  It is our way of relating to each other that perpetuates both the elites and their ways of dividing us.  Each of us are either part of the solution, or we are part of the problem.

*For example.  I cannot live life as a Cherokee, without living as a gendered person in gender equality and interrelationship.  To live in a patriarchal society is to experience oppression racially, culturally and as a man, because the demands of patriarchy are foreign to my ancestors ways of being men and women.  Thus given the linked nature of oppressions, I am oppressed by this culture's "sexism" and cultural racism.    Now that is not feminist orthodoxy, but that is why people of color reject feminist orthodoxy as being more about privileged white women than it is about being liberated yet gendered human beings.

ˆš I am an anti racist activist and was before the UUA training programs were invented.  I have never figured out this question: what is an white ally?

Doesn't the notion of "ally" imply that anti racism is something people of color do and "white" people help them do it?  Ten years of the UUA anti racism program and forty years of anti racist activism, and I still think that everyone must struggle to overcome this destructive and divisive social construction together.  But the rhetoric of anti racism in my religious community has been shaped by an analysis that sees no link between class and race, and seems to think the category "white people" designates an objective reality rather than a social construction with a history.

I continue to strive toward clarity.

What is a white anti racist?  Doesn't a commitment and years of activism to realize that commitment to anti racism undermine one's whiteness?  Just asking.

Before Bill Sinkford said no to orthodoxy,  just asking such a question was to invite stonewalling  with formulas from a trainer.  Privilege = class, and Power + prejudice = racism.  That was supposed to be an analysis!  And what do you say about the Latino housekeeper who is rapped by her African American corporate manager macho guy employer? Is she a victim of race, class, or sexism?  My answer, she is victim of all the above and so is he.