Power, Philosophy and Egalitarianism

Women, the Family and African Americans

Robert C. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367545352
• eBook ISBN: 9781000193671
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Robert C. Smith presents a philosophical and empirical examination on the subordination of women and blacks in the United States.

Comparing liberalism—specifically the major social contract philosophies—and Marxism on the nature of the subordination of blacks and women and their proposals, if any, for women's and black liberation, Smith argues that sexual and racial equalitarianism in the United States is about politics and power. He begins with a discussion of the multiple meanings of politics and its relationship to power, and an analysis of nine power bases blacks and women should acquire and manipulate in order to advance a moral and substantive equalitarianism. These power bases include money, knowledge (including technology and information), religion, morality, authority, size/solidarity, charisma, violence and status. Smith concludes by making a moral case for racial and sexual equalitarianism and advocates for black leadership to use the power bases available to it to make reparations for the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

Power, Philosophy and Egalitarianism is an essential read for all those interested in race, women and politics today.

1
INTRODUCTION

In this book I wish to explain philosophically and empirically the subordination of women and blacks and make a case for gender and racial equality in the United States. I do this by comparing liberalism—specifically the major social contract philosophies—and Marxism on the nature of the subordination of blacks and women and their proposals, if any, for women’s and black liberation. My main argument is that sexual and racial egalitarianism in the United States is about politics and power. I begin with a discussion of the multiple meanings of politics and its relationship to power, and an analysis of nine power bases blacks and women should acquire and manipulate in order to advance a moral and substantive egalitarianism in the United States.

Why focus concern for egalitarianism on women and blacks? For blacks the reason is rather obvious. As a male African American scholar of racial politics, I have devoted my career of the last half century, beginning with the Black Studies Movement, to research and writing to contribute to the liberation of black people.¹ In this sense, racial egalitarianism is a personal as well as a professional concern. In a sense also, I suppose my interest in gender equality is also personal. I was raised by a single mother, nurtured by four older sisters, married a woman and I have three daughters and a granddaughter. How then could I not be interested in the liberation of women?

My professional interest in gender equality derives from reading feminist literature. Specifically, this book is influenced by the social contract scholarship of Carole Pateman and Charles Mill. In 1988 Pateman published The Sexual Contract, which demonstrated that the classic social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau were male supremacist and sexist.² In 1997 Charles Mill in The Racial Contract argued the theories were also white supremacist and racist.³ In 2007 Pateman and Mill co-authored Contracts and Domination, which blended their separate studies into what Mill calls the “Domination Contract”.⁴ In spite of the nominally moral egalitarianism of the classic contract theories, Mill’s domination contract reinforces the view that insofar as Africans and women are concerned they were from the beginning until today used for purposes of inferiorization and subordination. This is the theoretical reason for focusing on gender and racial equality in the United States.

Second, as Mill points out, once one adds women of all races and men of color, “One is actually talking about the majority of the population being excluded in one way or another from the historical contract, and its present descendant.”⁵ Thus, when one refers to ending the domination in the United States of blacks and women one is actually referring to a theory of democracy.⁶

From the Abolitionist Movement to the Civil Rights Movement there has been a symbolic although often conflictual relationship between the black liberation and the women’s liberation movements. In 1860 Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke to the intersection between race and sex oppression:

The prejudice of color, which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause and manifested very much in the same way. The Negro’s skin and the women’s sex are both prima facie evidence that we were intended to be in subjection to white Saxon men.⁷

The feminist theorist Catherine Mackinnon suggests “comprehension and change in sex inequality are essential to comprehension and change in racial inequality, with implications that link comprehending and changing sexism to comprehending and changing racism”.⁸

MacKinnon is probably correct about the relationship between racial and sexual egalitarianism in the United States. Her suggestion is a major theme of this book. But we could perhaps be wrong, because women are “subcontractors” in the oppression of blacks (as black men are subcontractors in the subordination of black women). Quoting Pauline Schloesser Mill writes, “White women are doubly positioned, as subordinate others with respect to white men and as superior subjects with respect to nonwhite persons of both sexes.”⁹ For sure as Pateman writes:

The sexual and racial contracts have been intimately connected since modern States (civil society) began to be created in the seventeenth century and the three dimensions of the original contract—social, sexual and racial—have cut across and reinforced each other. The state has upheld laws and policies that have consolidated structures of racial and sexual power, the sexual contract has been refracted through race, and the racial contract has shaped sexual relations, and both contracts have structured citizenship.¹⁰

But at least in the black community race has and probably should trump sex, because the racial contract has always been more tyrannical and murderous than the sexual contract. First, as the black feminist theorist Linda Larue wrote at the outset of the second wave feminist movement:

Any attempt to analogize black oppression with the plight of the American white woman has the validity of comparing the neck of a hanging man with the hands of a mountain climber with rope burns… . The depth, extent and importance—indeed the suffering and depravity of the real oppression blacks have experienced—can only be minimized in an alliance with white women who have heretofore suffered little more than boredom, genteel repression and dishpan hands.¹¹

Second, women, both black and white, have tended to show more solidarity with their race than their sex. As Dubois wrote of white women: “The Negro race has suffered more from the antipathy and narrowness of women both North and South than from any other single source.”¹² Third, the ideology of white supremacy and black inferiorization is more deeply rooted, tenacious and widespread in both elite and popular culture in the US than the ideology of male supremacy and female inferiorization. This means, as I conclude in this book, that gender equality is likely to be achieved before—perhaps long before—racial equality. Nevertheless, while gender equality is not a prerequisite to race equality, it is likely it will facilitate equality for the blacks by partially liberating more than half the people.

The primary focus of this book is on gender and racial equality in the society and polity. But it also has the family as focus because it is possible that gender equality cannot be achieved in society until there is egalitarianism in the family, more specifically in marital politics or the power relationships between intimate partners.

The family and the state are two of the most important and powerful institutions of any society. Many classical theorists view the family and the state as historically connected. That is, they think states evolved out of families and that families are the essential building blocks of modern societies and states. Aristotle in his Politics said the family was the primary unit of society, out which evolved villages and then states.¹³ Hobbes referred to families as “little kingdoms”, “little cities”, as “leviathans writ small”.¹⁴ Like Aristotle, he too believed that states developed initially out of families. Locke writes, “The first society was between man and wife, which gave beginning to that between parent and children.”¹⁵ And for Rousseau, “The oldest of societies, and the only society that is in any sense natural is the family … the earliest model of political societies.”¹⁶

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau for somewhat different reasons argue that men as husbands should exercise power or dominance in the family. Marxism views this male dominance as the beginning of oppression and exploitation in society. Engels describes the family as the “cellular form of civilized society”, and pointing toward Marxism’s radical egalitarianism compared with liberalism Engels writes, “The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female by the male.”¹⁷ Chapter 3 is devoted to comparison of liberal and Marxist views on the origins of the family, and the role of sexism and patriarchy in each tradition.

This is fundamentally a book about power, the power exercised by white men to subordinate women and blacks. Politics may be defined in a variety of ways—the allocation of values and resources, the pursuit of one’s interest, the creation of the good and just society, authoritative decision making, the regulation of conflict or the manipulation of others to achieve one’s purposes-however; all of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Power and Politics
• 3 On the Origin of the Family
• 4 On the Origin of the State
• 5 The Changing Bases of Sexual Politics, 1960–2020
• 6 Wives and Husbands: The Marital Power Struggle
• 7 The Bourgeoisie and the Blacks
• 8 Conclusion
• Index