Danielle Bowler says that
multiple identities have multiple, concomitant sites of oppression. Eyewitness News
There is a passage from
Staceyann Chin’s essay Falling for Bob Marley that will always stay with me. It
is indelibly marked on my consciousness, read at a time when I was a university
student trying to understand the world and my place in it. That issue of place
is fundamentally important, as contemplating your fit (or ill fit, more
precisely) in a world designed for certain people will inevitably turn to
questions of identity. This question is the through-line in Chin’s essay, as
she contemplates the factors that led to her sitting a Brooklyn bar on a rainy,
autumn day, instead of in the place of her birth. She writes:
“If I were heterosexual,
I would still be in Kingston, eating jerk fish from Island Grill, and drinking
a cold Red Stripe Light. But I am an out lesbian, so reality pounds icy on the
windows of my New York City. Mixed green salad, chamomile tea, salmon and cream
cheese on everything-bagel. I am in political exile. Self-imposed, necessary,
difficult.”
Unravelling the way her
new life in the United States has played out, Chin remarks upon the fact that
it comes with its own exiles that are attached to being black, female, Asian, a
writer, an immigrant and homosexual. She learns a painful lesson – as many of
us have – that multiple identities have multiple, concomitant sites of
oppression. That the repetition of “everywhere is war” in her beloved Bob
Marley’s song, War, has resonance in the daily battles that we fight because of
our inescapable multiplicity.
Last week, public
intellectual Andile Mngxitama posted multiple tweets that raised questions
about the sites of our identity and oppression. He argued that “black women are
BLACK FIRST”, defending the idea that other sites of identity are secondary to
blackness, which should be the primary site of identification. Mngxitama could
not understand the anger and rage coming from those who disagreed with his view
and counter-argued that black women’s experience of the world is fundamentally
and inextricably linked to their gender, race and sexuality, which interact in
complex ways.
For the dissenting
voices, the violence experienced as a woman is just as important as the
violence experienced as part of the black race. Responding to people who
pointed out how a patriarchal blind spot permitted Mngxitama to ignore the way
blackness and femaleness simultaneously structures the lives of black women, he
simply argued that “the new strategy to silence blacks from speaking against
white supremacy is to call them sexist and misogynists”. A ‘strawpersoning’
strategy.
Showing a complete
disregard for male privilege, for Mngxitama, these arguments could be
problematically reduced to “white strategies that seek to ‘defocus’ us from
speaking about the BLACK CONDITION”.
The trouble with
Mngxitama’s calibration of oppression is that it emanates from a skewed logic
that allows black men to eschew responsibility for their actions. As writer TO
Molefe pointed out on Twitter: “@Mngxitama to deny BM [black men] agency in
interactions with BW [black women] because of white supremacist-capitalism is
to give patriarchy a pass. unacceptable.” [sic].
To argue that black women
are black first is to endorse a misguided hierarchy of oppression that is blind
to the way patriarchy is an overarching narrative that structures women’s
lives. Calling for all the complexities of our existence to be erased in the
face of race, therefore, is a simplistic reduction of the complex lives we
live. The multiple signifiers of our identity, be they race, gender, sexual
orientation, class or any other, are not mutually exclusive categories that we
can neatly organise. We do not inhabit selves that can be easily
compartmentalised, neither can we carefully police our identities. We cannot
step out of our bodies and inhabit a singular identity because identities do
not afford such neatness. They are messy. They are complex. And they are
unrelenting in their simultaneity.
To argue this is not to
be caught up in the system, nor to attempt to take up “the master’s tools”, but
to call for a recognition that we exist at multiple intersections that see
different kinds of oppression connected. We are oppressed because we are black.
Because we are female. Because we are homosexual. Because we are poor. Because
we are disabled. Because we are everything, all at once, ceaselessly.
Mngxitama argues that
“BlackConsciousness101 feminism 4 white women liberation, Marxism 4 white
worker liberation, LGBTI 4 sexuality liberation. BC 4 BLACKS!”, but for many of
us, all these struggles are connected as we live life at the intersections of
all these identities. The kind of solidarity Mngxitama calls for requires us to
disarm and suspend those identities that would challenge our involvement in the
struggle for black liberation – even when we suffer and are oppressed within
this, when we are raped, when we are beaten, when we find our womanhood as
equally oppressive as our blackness. The frontiers are everywhere, and we fight
on multiple battlegrounds every single day as we rage against the limits
imposed on our bodies. We cannot escape our skin. We cannot inhabit separate
bodies. Everywhere is war.
You cannot endorse
patriarchy and be my brother. Solidarity cannot be one-sided and obstinately
ignore the narratives of other bodies that do not experience oppression
differently. The true ask of solidarity is for men like Mngxitama to recognise
that he does violence when he asserts that the struggles of black women are
less valid when they pertain to female identity, that when a black man violates
a black woman it cannot be attributed to racism, but is an incidence of
patriarchy.
Patriarchy and white
supremacist-capitalism intersect, a fact that black feminists have pointed out
multiple times, but oppression on the latter does not cancel out the former.
Likewise, black feminists have raised their voices on the blind spots of
mainstream feminism, pointing out how white privilege results in black women’s
unique struggles being ignored. Additionally, black feminists have fought the
unique place that black men occupy, showing solidarity in their struggles and
recognising how they too are concurrently affected by patriarchy and racial
oppression.
