Patricia Hill Collins
posits a thesis in her essay, “
It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation” (
Hypatia, Vol. 13, No. 3, Summer, 1998), that
the aspects of gender, race, class and nation are not separate social
hierarchies, but integrated or intersecting lines that, as she puts it, “mutually
construct one another.”
We are all, in
other words, profoundly influenced by our life experiences, and most of those influential
moments happen within the structure of a family, which is a microcosm of
society.
She begins her essay
by discussing the concept of family values.
For several decades now, and over the course of many election cycles,
family values has been the hot button issue of the Republican Party.
In 1992, former Vice-President Dan Quayle used his bully pulpit to attack a fictional television character named Murphy Brown who had become pregnant, gave birth, and decided to raise her child on
her own as a single parent.
Quayle used
this character and her struggles with whether or not to have the child as an
example of liberal, anti-family values in the entertainment industry and the
Democratic Party.
Of course, the
character should have been celebrated for not having an abortion, a
particularly important family value among conservatives.
She put her child above the needs of her
demanding career in journalism.
The
father did not want any part in the raising of the child, so the character
decided to go it alone as a single parent.
Yes, family values are often embodied in the structure of a husband and
wife and children, the so-called nuclear family, but the character was
courageous to take on the parenting alone.
For these things, Quayle gave her no credit.
Now, in a new age, we
see the Republican frontrunner for the 2016 nomination to be president spit in
the face of those family values.
Donald
Trump has been married several times.
He
has denigrated Latinos, women, and a host of other people in our society, yet
he is winning.
Why he has not been
attacked by those on the right who profess to advocate for traditional family
values, I do not know.
This is a guy who
announced on the television program,
The View (ABC, March 6, 2006) that if Ivanka Trump were not his daughter he’d “probably
be dating her.”
Collins identifies
family as the “fundamental principle of social organization,” but this seems like
family, then, is an artificial construct rather than a fully formed system with
all its foibles and problems into which we are born. To discuss social issues within “family
rhetoric,” as she puts it, postulates a structure that in many cases is deeply
flawed and often dysfunctional. Blood
does not draw people together, necessarily.
Friends often can be more of a family than blood relations. In addition, family could also be a source of
oppression. Therefore, I disagree with
her statement that “The traditional family ideal projects a model of equality.” We hope for this, but the actuality is far
from perfect. Collins writes that “Individuals
typically learn their assigned place in hierarchies of race, gender, ethnicity,
sexuality, nation, and social class in their families of origin.” Yes, they do, but they also learn racism,
prejudice, and discriminatory behaviors from family authority figures like
parents and older siblings. Many
children are encouraged to continue the ignorance of their parents. Here, Collins seems a bit idealistic because
she presents people in a family working in concert, and in support of, one
another. Within families, members are
preprogrammed for patriarchal power structures embodied by the father
figure. Collins says this “naturalizes
masculinity as a source of authority.”
Also, racist behavior is often justified using these family hierarchies—whites
become the “parents” in the greater family of society and blacks become “the
children,” for example—and this is again fostering and perpetuating ignorance.
The danger in this is the
we-were-here-first mentality so apparent in white, Anglo-Saxon views of the
world. The history of immigration in
this country discounts those indigenous cultures who were, in fact, here first,
and makes them subservient to Europeans while asserting the fiction that whites
have power because they brought civilization and culture to these allegedly godless
pagans. The prevalent notion in the racist
paradigm is that those native cultures were lost animals until the refined and
cultured whites arrived when in fact, they had a vibrant culture of their own
which was, in many cases, wiped out by the arriving white-skins.
Collins asks the
readers to examine the concepts of black-on-black violence as a way to “permit
patterns of Black male violence targeted toward Black women,” in the form of
abuse and sexual harassment, “to remain hidden and condoned.”
Really?
If anything, the endless news footage in the media of violence in black
communities seems magnified to diminish the humanity of those involved.
For example,
the Central Park rape allegedly
committed by a group of young black men who were, as they put it, wilding, in
the park that long ago spring evening in 1989, only served to reinforce the
ignorant stereotype of the black man as predatory animal out to violate the
white woman, in this case a jogger out for an evening run.
After spending anywhere from six to thirteen
years in prison for the crime, new evidence surfaced that exonerated the now no
longer young men and their convictions were vacated in 2002.
The atrocity, however, had already been
committed, doubly so if we count the victim of the original rape and the
victims of prejudicial law enforcement and the legal system that prosecuted the
young men.
In many ways, America
is the grand experiment when it comes to race, mainly because almost every
culture represented in American society comes from somewhere else.
We lack the homogenous racial congruity of a
China or North Korea where the face of the Other would stand out significantly.
American society is a heterogeneous and
multicultural melting pot or salad bowl (choose your metaphor).
As each wave of immigrants reach our shores,
they forget, as the generations mature and assimilate, that they were once the
new arrivals.
When Collins argues that
people of a given nation find a commonality in blood ties, America lacks those
ties and therefore, we have a country still roiled by racism and
discrimination.
To go a step further,
money influences the criminal justice system and the opportunities offered to
those in this democracy.
People with
deep financial resources often have more favorable outcomes in legal issues
because they can afford the best representation.
The Constitution may “promise equality for
all American citizens,” Collins writes, and “all citizens stand equal before
the law,” but the number of incarcerated blacks and Latinos in this country,
the sheer totality of our prison population tells a different story.
The classic example is the way powdered cocaine—used
predominantly by whites—once had a different sentencing guideline than crack cocaine—used
predominantly by blacks and poorer segments of society.
This disparity was reduced with the
Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.
It is also
significant, as Collins points out, how race affects entitlement and other
programs prevalent in American society.
In the 1930s when Social Security was developed, there were certain
occupations that were excluded from receiving benefits. For example, those working in the agriculture
or domestic assistance industries were left out. Collins identifies African-American women as
the demographic most affected by this, but today, many Latinos working in
agriculture are not eligible to receive Social Security, either because they
work only seasonally or because they are undocumented. The greater realization is that the American
dream, so mythologized in our culture, is largely out of reach for most middle
class and poor people. So-called “Old
Money” is passed from generation to generation whereas many poor people in this
country cannot free themselves from economic oppression to amass enough
resources to pass on to future generations.
The greatest lie of the Reagan administration was that wealth would “trickle
down” to poorer people in American society.
This was all empty rhetoric to justify cutting taxes for the wealthy
while the poor languished in their poverty.
It is also why the property bust and recession of 2008 was so
devastating for middle class and poor people.
Just when the economically oppressed found a way to purchase their own
homes, the market crashed. Many people
found themselves underwater on their mortgage and either walked away from the
property, or faced foreclosure proceedings.
This assault on the
poor and marginalized is clear in the Supreme Court case of Buck vs. Bell in 1927. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority
opinion that “society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from
continuing their kind.” This decision “held
that sterilization fell within the police power of the state” and that the “principle
that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the
Fallopian tubes…Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” This forced birth control could be utilized to
prevent the mentally challenged, those carrying genetic defects, and even
welfare recipients from procreating. The
debate has raged in this country and in Britain for years leading to charges of
eugenic thinking in public policy.
This constitutes the
intersection of a number of cultural areas into a scaffolding that constructs a
cultural milieu. As Collins points out
at the end of her essay, this white domination is not the only discussion. Even in the African-American community, there
has been “a yearning for a homeland for the Black racial family,” a desire for
a way to return to a “mythical Africa.”
We are all a product of our experiences, our cultures, our traditions,
our faiths, and yes, our families. No
one cultural influence can be taken on its own.
Where we meet up, the intersections of our worlds, that makes us who we
are. And for those of us searching to
understand the Other, the intersections are the keys to comprehending and surviving
in our multicultural world.