Fascinasians

Andrea Smith

Scenario #1
A group of women of color come together to organize. An argu- ment ensues about whether or not Arab women should be included. Some argue that Arab women are “white” since they have been classified as such in the US census. Another argument erupts over whether or not Latinas qualify as “women of color,” since some may be classified as “white” in their Latin American countries of origin and/or “pass” as white in the United States.

Scenario #2
In a discussion on racism, some people argue that Native peoples suffer from less racism than other people of color because they gen- erally do not reside in segregated neighborhoods within the United States. In addition, some argue that since tribes now have gaming, Native peoples are no longer “oppressed.”

Scenario #3
A multiracial campaign develops involving diverse conpunities of color in which some participants charge that we must stop the blacklwhite binary, and end Black hegemony over people of color politics to develop a more “multicultural” framework. However, this campaign continues to rely on strategies and cultural motifs developed by the Black Civil Rights struggle in the United States.

These incidents, which happen quite frequently in “women of color” or “people of color” political organizing struggles, are often explained as a consequence. “oppression olympics.” That is to say, one problem we have is that we are too busy fighting over who is more oppressed. In this essay, I want to argue that the precedents are not so much the result of “oppression olympics” but are more about, we have inadequately framed “women of color” or “people of color” politics. Truth is, the premise behind much “women of color” organizing is that women of color communities victimized by white supremacy should unite together around shared oppression. This framework might be represented by a diagram of five overapping circles, each marked Native women, Black women, Arab/Muslim, Latinas, and Asian American women, overlapping like a Venn diagram.

Genocide/Colonialism

A second pillar of white supremacy is the logic of genocide. This logic holds that indigenous peoples must disappear. In fact, they must always be disappearing, in order to allow non-indigenous peoples rightful claim over this land. Through this logic of genocide, non-Native peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous-land, resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture. As Kate Shanley notes, Native peoples are a permanent “present absence” in the US colonial imagination, an “absence” that reinforces, at every turn, the conviction that Native peoples are iiideed vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justified. Ella Shoat and Robert Stam describe this absence as “an ambivalently repressive mechanism [which] dispels the anxiety in the face of the Indian, whose very presence is a reminder of the initially precarious grounding of the American nation-state itself.. .. In a temporal paradox, living Indians were induced to ‘play dead,’ as it were, in order to perform a narrative of manifest destiny in which their role, ultimately, was to di~appear.”~

Rayna Green further elaborates that the current Indian “wannabe” phenom- enon is based on a logic of genocide: non-Native peoples imagine themselves as the rightful inheritors of all that previously belonged to “vanished” Indians, thus enti- tling them to ownership of this land. “The living performance of ‘playing Indian’ by non-Indian peoples depends upon the physical and psychological removal, even the death, of real Indians. In that sense, the performance, purportedly often done out of a stated and implicit love for Indians, is really the obverse of another well- known cultural phenomenon, ‘Indian hating,’ as most often expressed in another, deadly performance genre called ‘gen~cide.”’~After all, why would non-Native peoples need to play Indian- which often includes acts of spiritual appropriation and land theft-if they thought Indians were still alive and perfectly capable of being Indian themselves? The pillar of genocide serves askhe anchor for colonial- ism-it is what allows non-Native peoples to feel they can rightfully own indig enous peoples’ land. It is okay to take land from indigenous peoples, because indigenous peoples have disappeared.

Orientalism and War

A third pillar of white supremacy is the logic of Orientalism. Orient;
defined by Edward Said as the process of the West defining itself as a supt.llur civilization by constructing itself in opposition to an “exotic” but inferior “Ori- ent.” (Here I am using the term “Orientalism” more broadly than to solely signify what has been historically named as the Orient or Asia.) The logic of Orientalism marks certain peoples or nations as inferior and as posing a constant threat to the well-being of empire. These peoples are still seen as “civilizations”-they are not property or “disappeared”-however, they will always be imaged as permanent foreign threats to empire. This logic is evident in the anti-immigration movemenrs within the United States that target immigrants of color. It does not matter holy long immigrants of color reside in the United States, they generally become tar- geted as foreign threats, particularly during war time. Consequently, Orientalism serves as the anchor for war, because it allows the United States to justify being in Ia constant state of war to protect itself from its enemies.

The United States could not exist without it. In the United States, democracy is actually the alibi for genocide it is the practice that covers up United States colonial control over indigenous lands.

Our organizing can also reflect anti-Black racism. Recently, with the out- growth of “multiculturalism” there have been calls to “go beyond the blacklwhite binary” and include other communities of color in our analysis, as presented in the third scenario. There are a number of flaws with this analysis. First, it replaces an analysis of white supremacy with a politics of multicultural representation; if we just include more people, then our practice will be less racist. Not true. This model does not address the nuanced structure of white supremacy, such as through these distinct logics of slavery, genocide, and Orientalism. Second, it obscures the cen- trality of the slavery logic in the system of white supremacy, which is based on a black/white binary. The blacklwhite binary is not the only binary which character- izes white supremacy, but it is still a central one that we cannot “go beyond” in our racial justice organizing efforts.

If we do not look at how the logic of slaveability inflects our society and our thinking, it will be evident in our work as well. For example, other cordnunities of color often appropriate the cultural work and organizing strategies of African American civil rights or Black Power movements without corresponding assump- tions that we should also be in solidarity with Black communities. We assume that this work is the common “propertyn of all oppressed groups, and we can appopriate it without being accountable.

Angela P. Harris and Juan Perea debate the usefulness of the black/white binary in the book, Critical Race Theory. Perea complains that the blacklwhite binary fails to include the experiences of other people of color. However, he fails to identify alternative racializing logics to the black/white paradigm. Meanwhile, Angela P. Harris argues that “the story of ‘race’ itself is that of the construction of Blackness and whiteness. In this story, Indians, Asian Americans, and Latinostas do exist. But their roles are subsidiary to the fundamental binary national drama. As a political claim, Black exceptionalism exposes the deep mistrust and tensions among Ameri- can ethnic groups racialized as nonwhite.”

Let’s examine these statements in conversation with each other. Simply say- ing we need to move beyond the blacklwhite binary (or perhaps, the “blacklnon- black” binary) in US racism obfuscates the racializing logic of slavery, and prevents us from seeing that this binary constitutes Blackness as the bottom of a color hier- archy. However, this is not the only binary that fundamentally constitutes white supremacy.There is also an indigenouslsettler binary, where Native genocideis central to the logic of white supremacy and other non-indigenous people of color also confirm”a subsidiary” role. We also face another Orientalist logic that fundamentally ;onsritutes Asians, Arabs, and Latinolas as foreign threats, requiring the United Sr~testo be at permanent war with these peoples. In this construction, Black and Narive peoples play subsidiary roles.

Colson is linking the well-being of US empire to the well-being of the heteropatri- archal family. He continues:

When radical Islamists see American women abusing Muslim men, as they did in the Abu Ghraib prison, and when they see news cov- erage of same-sex couples being “married” in US towns, we make this kind of freedom abhorrent-the kind they see as a blot on Allah’s creation. We must preserve traditional marriage in order to protect the United States from those who would use our depravity to destroy us?

As A n n Burlein argues in Lift High the Cross, it may be a mistake to argue thac the goal of Christian Right politics is to create a theocracy in the United States. Rather, Christian Right politics work through the private family (which is coded as white, patriarchal, and middle class) to create a “Christian America.” She notes that the investment in the private family makes it difficult for people to invest in more public forms of social connection. In addition, investment in the suburban pri- vate family serves to mask the public disinvestment in urban areas thac makes the suburban lifestyle possible. The social decay in urban areas that results from this disinvestment is then construed as the result of deviance from the Christian family ideal rather than as the result of political and economic forces. As former head of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, states: “‘The only true solution to crime is to restore the family,”10 and “Family break-up causes poverty.”” Concludes Burlein, “‘The family’ is no mere metaphor but a crucial technology by which modern power is produced and exercised.”’*

As I have argued elsewhere, in order to colonize peoples whose societies are nor based on social hierarchy, colonizers must first naturalize hierarchy through insri- tuting patriarchy.13 In turn, patriarchy rests on a gender binary system in which only two genders exist, one dominating the other. Consequently, Charles Colson is correct when he says that the colonial world order depends on heteronormativ- ity. Just as the patriarchs rule the family, the elites of the nation-state rule their citizens. Any liberation struggle that does not challenge heteronormativity canlior substantially challenge colonialism or white supremacy. Rather, as Cathy Cohen contends, such struggles will maintain colonialism based on a politics of second- ary marginalization where the most elite class of these groups will further their aspirations on the backs of those most marginalized within the community. Through this process of secondary marginalization, the national or racial justice struggle takes on either implicitly or explicitly a nation-state model as them!

point of its struggle-a model of governance in which the elites govern the rest through violence and domination, as well as exclude those who are not members of “the nation.” Thus, national liberation politics become less vulnerable to being coopted by the Right when we base them on a model of liberation that fundamen-

Itally challenges right-wing conceptions of t h e w . We need a model based on community relationships and on mutual respect.

Conclusion

Women of color-centered organizing points to the centrality of gender politics within antiracist, anticolonial struggles. Unfortunately, in our efforts to orga- nize against white, Christian America, racial justice struggles often articulate
an equally heteropatriarchal racial nationalism. This model of organizing either hopes to assimilate into white America, or to replicate it within an equally hierar- chical and oppressive racial nationalism in which the elites of the community rule everyone else. Such struggles often call on the importance of preserving the “Black family” or the “Native family” as the bulwark of this nationalist project, the f a d
ily being conceived of in capitalist and heteropatriarchal terms. The response is often increased homophobia, with lesbian and gay community members con- strued as “threats” to the family. But, perhaps we should challenge the “concept” of the family itself. Perhaps, instead, we can reconstitute alternative ways of living together in which “families” are not seen as islands on their own. Certainly, indig- enous communities were not ordered on the basis of a nuclear family structure-is the result of colonialism, not the antidote to it.

In proposing this model, I am speaking from my particular position in indigenous struggles. .Other peoples might flesh out these logics more fully from different vantage points. Others might also argue that there are other logics of white supremacy are missing. Still others might complicate how they relate to each other. But I see this as a starting point for women of color organizers that will allow us to reenvision a politics of solidarity that goes beyond multiculturalism, and develop more complicated strategies that can really transform the political and economic status quo.?