PD Wednesday, 8/26---Ch. 12. 13. 14 Class, Space, Gender

Ch. 12-14

August 26, 2020 9-11 am

Facilitator: Stephen Brent

From Stephen Brent:

Hi everyone -

For tomorrow’s meeting please have read the chapters 12-14 and also have a sentence or paragraph from each chapter that resonates with you or that spoke to you. 

I will do an overview of each chapter from my reading and then we will,  for each chapter,  breakout to discuss your sentences, implications, thoughts, etc. 

From BookRags (summary and analysis):

In Chapter 12, “Class” (151), Kendi recalls moving to Philadelphia to attend graduate school at Temple University. He moved into the Hunting Park neighborhood, a poor region of the city with a high crime rate. He admits he felt living in the “ghetto” (151) would be an authenticating experience. He goes on to explain that race and class are distinct but connected concepts, and that poor Black people are more likely to be viewed as a monolithic group and viewed as lazy or unambitious. Historically, he explains, capitalism and racism are “conjoined twins” (156), intertwined through slavery. Capitalism began with the transatlantic slave trade and continues to operate as a system defined by racial inequities and heavily exploitative. In pursuing authenticity by living in Hunting Park, Kendi was validating the class racist idea that poor Black people are inherently more Black than their middle or upper class counterparts.

In Chapter 13, “Space” (166), Kendi introduces the idea of Black space, such as the one he inhabited in the African American studies graduate department at Temple. Black spaces are devalued in America, he explains, even by Black people, while White and integrated spaces are esteemed. This is in part because of a threatening stigma associated with these places: “Whenever Black people voluntarily gather among themselves,” Kendi explains, “integrationists do not see spaces of Black solidarity created to separate Black people from racism. They see spaces of White hate” (175). He traces the history of segregation and integration in the school systems, stating that, were resources to be allocated evenly, segregated schools might be preferable to busing Black students into White neighborhoods where they might rarely encounter teachers that look like themselves. We should be integrating “resources rather than bodies” (180).

In Chapter 14, “Gender” (181), Kendi explains that he arrived at Temple “a racist, sexist homophobe” (182) because these were the ideologies he had absorbed from the world, but he overcame these biases by making friends with women and gay people and by educating himself. He explains race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality, which explores the ways in which different aspects of a person's identity intersect, and how these different aspects result in different forms of judgment or discrimination from society. For example, black women may be (and often are) oppressed because of both their gender and their race, meaning they face a form of discrimination that black men do not.

Analysis

In Chapter 12, Kendi explores the connections between racism and capitalism that fuels the global economy, while focusing on how this connection affects Black people living in the United States specifically. The history of the notion of the Black “ghetto” begins with the Great Migration, when African Americans living in the South moved North in the mid-20th century, hoping for better job opportunities and less overt racism from their neighbors. Over time, the particular neighborhoods that became predominantly Black due to “White flight” (152) became overcrowded, were denied government resources, and came to be identified with poverty because fewer wealth-generating jobs were granted to African Americans.

Since then, Black people have been unfairly blamed for their own misfortune, with politicians and racist Whites positing that a reliance on welfare (or, again, sheer laziness) has prevented African Americans from prospering. Kendi quotes former House Speaker Paul Ryan who stated, “We have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular of men not even thinking about working, and not learning the value and the culture of work” (154). Even President Obama claimed that Black people are suffering from a “legacy of defeat” (155) that is holding them back from pursuing success, despite the fact that research indicates “poor Blacks are more optimistic about their prospects than poor Whites are” (155). Presently, the Black poverty rate stands at 20%, three times the White poverty rate, and “The wage gap between Blacks and Whites is the largest in forty years” (157). These statistics indicate a systemic problem, rather than a lack of ambition or culture of laziness.

As Kendi's principle thesis is that racism and capitalism are intrinsically linked, his position is that capitalism must be dismantled, or at least drastically altered, in order for the playing field between Black people and White people to become level. “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism,” he explains, “To love racism is to end up loving capitalism” (163).

In describing his time in the African American studies graduate program at Temple, Kendi champions the positive elements of Black-only spaces, which allow Black people to learn their own history, establish solidarity, and be nurtured and guided by peers and instructors with whom they share a common experience. He refutes the argument made by critics of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) who claim that African Americans attending these schools are not being adequately prepared to live and work in a society that is majority White. To say this, Kendi declares, is to create a hierarchy in which White and integrated spaces are at the top (and declared the so-called “real world”) while Black spaces are at the bottom. In Kendi's view, “there is no such thing as the 'real world,' only real worlds, multiple worldviews” (171). He goes on to note that HBCUs have higher Black graduation rates than their integrated counterparts. He further makes the point that African Americans have been fighting for their own spaces since the end of slavery. When asked by U.S. secretary of war whether the freed slaves would prefer to live among Whites or in their own segregated communities, a spokesperson from a Black caucus declared they would choose to live among themselves, “for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over” (174). Furthermore, Martin Luther King Jr. declared his opposition to the integration of schools in 1959, stating, “White people view black people as inferior...People with such a low view of the black race cannot be given free rein and put in charge of the intellectual care and development of our boys and girls” (177). Yet, Kendi argues, this is exactly what we are potentially doing when Black students from predominantly Black neighborhoods are bused into majority White schools. Why not level the resources playing field instead so these students can attend school closer to home?

In the chapters on gender and sexuality, Kendi explores concepts and ideologies he had not been aware of prior to coming to Temple, demonstrating the importance of maintaining an open mind and being willing to learn from one's peers. Kendi's parents were relatively progressive in the sense that they had been black liberationists, and Kendi's mother had attended 1970s “consciousness-raising conferences” (186). They did not abide entirely by traditional gender roles in their family, as Kendi recalls his father normally being the one to comfort him when he was hurt or upset. Yet his father was still the “head of the household” (183), an attitude that Kendi accepted unquestioningly. In the 1970s-80s, Kendi's parents, like the rest of society, were “aghast at the growing percentage of Black children being born into single-parent households” (184). To take part in this cultural panic is to state that there is something inherently wrong with a Black single mother—that she was morally wrong for having children out of wedlock, but also that she could not possibly be a good enough parent on her own. This is, once again, a continuation of stereotypes asserted during slavery, when Black women were viewed as hypersexual. Kendi points out that “the opposite of the unvirtuous hypersexual Black woman is the virtuous asexual White woman, a racial construct that has constrained and controlled the White woman's sexuality” (190). In other words, White feminists would be wise to make more of an effort to include Black women in the movement, because gendered stereotypes are something all women contend with (and because of intersectionality, Black women are doubly oppressed).

Just as Kendi's parents sewed the seeds of a traditional view of male/female relations in their son, they failed to provide him with the tools to understand LGBTQ+ people. They “did not talk about gay and lesbian people,” he explains, and “Their silence erased queer existence as thoroughly as integrationists erased the reality of integrated White spaces” (182). However, Kendi's assumptions were challenged at Temple, where he learned that Black queer people were not hypersexual, as the stereotype implies, and that lesbians and feminists did not hate men, as he previously thought, but only wanted to challenge patriarchal structures. He further invokes Crenshaw's idea of intersectionality to explain that queer Black people are discriminated against for multiple different aspects of their identities, and perhaps none more than Black transgender women, who have a life expectancy of just 35 years old in the U.S.