Wounds of the Spirit
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Wounds of the Spirit

Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics

Traci C. West

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Wounds of the Spirit

Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics

Traci C. West

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About This Book

In Wounds of the Spirit, Traci West employs first person accounts-from slave narratives to contemporary interviews to Tina Turner's autobiography-to document a historical legacy of violence against black women in the United States. West, a black feminist Christian ethicist, situates spiritual matters within a discussion of the psycho-social impact of intimate assault against African American women.

Distinctive for its treatment of the role of the church in response to violence against African American women, the book identifies specific social mechanisms which contribute to the reproduction of intimate violence. West insists that cultural beliefs as well as institutional practices must be altered if we are to combat the reproduction of violence, and suggests methods of resistance which can be utilized by victim-survivors, those in the helping professions, and the church.

Interrogating the dynamics of black women's experiences of emotional and spiritual trauma through the diverse disciplines of psychology, sociology, and theology, this important work will be of interest and practical use to those in women's studies, African American studies, Christian ethics, feminist and womanist theology, women's health, family counseling, and pastoral care.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
1999
ISBN
9780814795101

PART III
Deciphering the Role of Society

4
Theoretical Resources

Male violence and the accompanying terror and agony that women victim-survivors must cope with is neither an inexplicable nor an aberrant phenomenon. It is a problem that society has helped to create and sustain. In order to both adequately account for and develop a morally nuanced response to it, we need to use an analytical method that goes beyond the isolation of specific acts and focuses on the motivations of, and effects on, individual women. The task of sorting out the intricate ways our society invents and perpetuates the anguish of black women victim-survivors represents another key step in the process of recognizing the violence that besieges them.
It is therefore important to critically interrogate macrolevel, theoretical understandings of how male violence against women is socially instigated, sanctioned, and reinforced. In this chapter, several arguments about this process will be presented within a series of thematic groupings. Collectively they will enrich our insight about the social origins of male violence. Moreover, these conceptual approaches offer differing interpretations of the racial and gender dynamics that define the impact of male violence on black women. I examine these varying interpretations in order to identify those which are theoretically helpful for the development of our analysis. We need a nuanced, feminist, and antiracist understanding of how and why particular cultural norms reproduce the women’s trauma.

Tracing Recent Theoretical History

Mediated Visibility in Violence against Women Literature
Accounting for the root causes of violence against women in our society is one of the most difficult tasks initially undertaken by “second wave” feminists. Unlike other women of color, black women have been included in some of the early theoretical literature on violence against women generated by the 1970s women’s movement. Many writers sought to conceptually identify the existence and prevalence of systemic instigators of male violence. One of the earliest feminist approaches describes black women’s victimization in the context of white male patriarchy. In her pioneering 1971 article, “Rape: The All-American Crime,” Susan Griffin argues that rape is beneficial to the ruling class of white males. Griffin equates the rape of women with the rape of Viet Nam, the raping of black people, and the rape of the earth. “The white male ethos” consists of combined sexist and racist elements and creates fictive presuppositions which intensify the trauma of women of color. Griffin notes that “if white women are subjected to unnecessary and often hostile questioning after having been raped, third-world women are often not believed at all. . . . Third world women are defined from birth as impure. Thus, the white male is provided with a pool of women who are fair game”.1 As an example of this, she mentions Billie Holiday’s mistreatment by legal authorities after she was raped. Hence white patriarchy generates conditions conducive to the sexual violation of “third-world women” as well as the state apparatus that legally legitimates those acts of violation. As a result, sexual assaults are rendered morally neutral, and black women’s objections to this victimization are discounted.
What is a feminist framework for understanding the black male rape of black females? Is the problem still related to white male patriarchy? Lynn Curtis addresses this issue when she discusses “forcible rape” in her 1975 study, Violence, Race, and Culture. She focuses primarily upon male offenders. But she offers a perspective that avoids the silencing of what she terms “black-black patterns of rape.” Curtis argues that the rape of black women by black men is a symbolic expression of the white male hierarchy.2 In a later study of women rape victims, Joyce Williams and Karen Holmes articulate a similar notion about the reproduction of violence by black males against black women. They argue that “in raping minority women, minority males frequently are doing no more than imitating the White males.”3
Feminist authors such as these see violence against women as the patriarchal terrorism of white male elites being waged either directly against black women or by proxy by black men. Black women are the victims of white male elites, and/or the victims of the victims of white male elites. Locating the genesis of violence against women within this hierarchy of oppression is a common formulation in early, second wave, women’s movement literature. It provides a condensed evaluation of the plight of black women. It simply points to their pitiable position below multiple layers of subjugation. In this schema, the weight of the social hierarchy perpetuates and compounds the trauma of black women victims. The nature of their victimization and its attendant anguish are made visible only in relation to the primary reference point of the white male.
In Susan Brownmiller’s landmark study of rape, Against Our Will, the voices and experiences of black women are given more detailed attention.4 She documents the legacy of the sexual exploitation of black women in antebellum times by slave masters and in the postbellum period by the Ku Klux Klan.5 Brownmiller also gathers the contemporary testimony of several black women from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and ages. Their testimony demonstrates the racial/gender dilemmas that black women confront when treated despicably by the police. For instance, two of the women’s stories illustrate the contrasting emotional consequences of sexual assault by a stranger. One reflects a woman’s pride in fighting off an attacker and another gives evidence of a woman’s resultant fears of all black men.
Brownmiller’s racial analysis in this volume is deeply flawed. In her discussion of the Emmett Till case, Brownmiller equates the patriarchal power of the 1950s south, white male legal authorities, and lynch mob participants with black male teenagers who were the potential and actual victims of lynching. She collectively interprets their motives as “groupmale antagonisms over access to women.”6 Similarly, in her discussion of the southern 1930s case of the Scottsboro boys, she compares the subjugated status of the white women accusers with that of the black men accused of assaulting them. Brownmiller describes both groups as “the movable pawns” of white men.7 These preposterous claims are made with regard to two of the most celebrated and egregious examples of white supremacist assaults on black men carried out in the name of protecting white womanhood.8
The subtlety of Brownmiller’s overall analysis in Against Our Will obviates any accusation that she envisions a simplistic social hierarchy, such as those espoused in other early theoretical discussions of the origins of sexual violence against women (e.g., Curtis 1975; Williams and Holmes 1981). However, in her discussion of the Till case she places black men and white men on par in the patriarchal hierarchy. And her examination of the Scottsboro case places white women and black men on the same rung of the social ladder. These formulations may serve a feminist theoretical agenda that concentrates on maintaining the understanding of white women as victims of white male patriarchy, but they belie the potent realities of white supremacy that also grant white women privileged social status over black men. This privileged status is particularly potent when black male sexual violation of white women is the contested issue. Brownmiller does lambaste the pernicious terrorizing of black men in the south. Yet she makes an equivocating bid for a sympathetic understanding of the vulnerability of white women. Perhaps unwittingly, she adds to the legacy of defending white womanhood at the cost of minimizing both the importance of white supremacist attacks on black males and of white female collusion in those attacks.
At one point in her book, Brownmiller extrapolates from her own feelings of vulnerability and rage at being whistled at by men on the street. She describes her gradual emancipation from smiling and accepting insults on the street from black men. Apparently she had been reacting in this way because of her own feelings of white guilt. The process of being liberated from this response to street harassment gives her a new sense of empowerment:
And did not white women in particular have to bear the white man’s burden of making amends for Southern racism? It took fifteen years for me to resolve these questions in my own mind, and to understand the insult implicit in Emmett Till’s whistle, the depersonalized challenge of “I can have you” with or without racial respect. Today a sexual remark on the street causes within me a fleeting but murderous rage.9
Here Brownmiller describes her own negotiation of the burdens that white women must bear with regard to southern racism. This analysis presents a thoroughly individualized and acontextual interpretation of the social significance of sexual harassment. The argument entices the reader to view Susan Brownmiller’s feelings when she walks down the street as ubiquitous and representative of all (white?) women. Within the logic of the narrative, the reader is compelled to understand that if it feels the same (to Susan Brownmiller) to be whistled at by a black man as it does by a white man, it is the same. Brownmiller has become liberated from the white woman’s burden of having to recognize the legacy of white supremacist violence leveled at black men on behalf of white women. She can now ignore this reality that often clouds confrontations between white women and black men. She can feel free to express her legitimate rage at being whistled at by black men. She transports this “liberated” viewpoint back to 1950s Alabama, to boldly unearth the insulting nature of Till’s behavior. Via Brownmiller’s ubiquity, we are led to understand that the sociopolitical and individual significance attached to Brownmiller’s plight when whistled at, applies to (white?) women anywhere, in any time period.
White-woman centered analysis about violence against women, like Brownmiller’s discussion of Emmett Till, creates an ideological tradition that affects subsequent dialogue when the topics of feminism, rape, and race are broached. It inadvertently helps to set up conditions that invite the subversion of black women’s experiences of male violence, even the ones highlighted in Brownmiller’s book. Their testimony can now too easily be hidden behind the urgent task of battling racist white feminist disregard for the plight of black men.10 To be associated with any feminist analysis of rape is to be tainted by the assumption that Emmett Till’s whistle is an exercise in patriarchal privilege tantamount to any white man’s. Equating the status of black and white males in this manner makes Emmett Till, in the words of Angela Davis, “almost as guilty as his white racist murderers.”11
Brownmiller’s theorizing has yet other implications for interpreting the specific experience of the women victim-survivors of sexual violence. Under this notion of patriarchy as equally upheld by and rewarding of black and white males, black and white women may be seen as wholly analogous victims of male violence. This notion allows their experiences to be viewed as different in form, but basically the same in substance. Thus, the white privilege of white women who are sexually assaulted, is absurdly deemed inconsequential. Even though Brownmiller helped to identify the historical legacy and contemporary incidence of violence against black women, she also contributed to the erasure of their experiences. She did so by promoting a theory of male dominance that discounts the salience of racial stratification.
Black Consciousness Literature and Shameful Black Women
How does the centering of internal black community dynamics in discussions of intimate violence shape the analytical recognition of black women’s trauma? Black women’s experiences of male violence have been included within studies that reflect the black consciousness movement and the burgeoning feminist movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Sociologists Calvin Hernton, Robert Staples, and Joyce Ladner provide some of the first examples of scholarship representative of this period, attempting to focus on the sociocultural conditions affecting black women. These authors have widely differing approaches. Hernton concentrates on sexuality; Staples offers a comprehensive description of social conditions that are distinct in black women’s lives; and Ladner restores a humanized and wholesome portrait of poor black femaleness. Like the white feminists considered above, they focus on sexual violence.
The concerns of the women who are victimized by violence do not fare well when sexual violence is analyzed as merely an aspect of the way sexuality can be politicized. For instance, Hernton is particularly concerned with untangling some of the interlocking dynamics of sexuality and race. In his volume Sex and Racism in America,12 he examines “the sexualization of the race problem.” In Coming Together,13 Hernton analyzes the dynamics of black sexuality, emphasizing the distortions inflicted by white supremacy. He acknowledges the brutal atrocities of sexual assault by white men that black women have suffered historically. Due to this history, he theorizes that the personality of the “Negro woman” has been permanently distorted.
In a curious combination, Hernton condemns the sexual exploitation of black women, but then also assigns black women a pathological unconscious desire to be exploited. He postulates that despite the cruelty and humiliation involved, black women may be waiting and hoping for the sexual advances of white men.14 He describes a similar unconscious need that black women have toward black men. He writes: “[M]aybe the women yearn to be raped, to be made by fierce black men, literally assaulted with a big black weapon, to within inches of their lives.”15 In the religious arena, Hernton declares that the sexual exploitation of women parishioners by black preachers is a rampant problem in the black church. Yet black women are depicted as willingly submitting to sexual exploitation (consciously seeking it), because they worship and love the black preacher. According to Hernton, women are sexually and financially generous, giving “not only their good loving but their hard-earned money, even the money that their husbands and boyfriends have slaved long hours to earn.”16 Hernton argues in a decidedly sexist fashion that derides women and nullifies consideration of them as the subjects of (clergy) exploitation. In instances of sexual assault, although he acknowledges the authenticity of women’s victimization, he attributes to women a masochistic desire for it which effectively undermines their victim status.17 This viewpoint presents the emotional life of women as significant, yet intrinsically distorted. It seems as if the paradigm of sexuality and race which frames these arguments dictates the portrayal of black women as entirely driven by desire, including the desire to be sexually assaulted and exploited.
Attributing a causal connection between the psychological distortions women supposedly exhibit and the violence committed against them may be part of a larger pattern in the diagnosis of gender issues in black life. Black female culpability in the alleged dysfunctionality of black communal and family life is a long-standing theme in sociological analysis as well as national politics (which will be discussed further in the next chapter). In The Black Woman in America, Staples inserts his views on the subject by providing a general report on the status and role of black women in America.18 In this text, he seems sympathetic to the dual burden of racism and sexism confronting black women. Staples identifies sexual violence as a significant part of the black woman’s reality, but he treats it as primarily a problem of lower class life that may sometimes be enjoyed. As illustrative of the supposed sexual culture of lower-class girls, he presents the following interview with a seventeen-year-old unwed mother.
Q: How old were you when you had your first experience?
A: I think 14 years.
Q: Were you satisfied?
A: I was pissed off.
Q: Describe it in detail.
A: He was about 22 years. It was at his house. I was just talking to him (visiting). He just decided he wanted to screw. And he kissed me which was O.K. but he forced himself on me.
Q: Did you enjoy it after he started?
A: I didn’t enjoy it at all. It bothered me for sometime. I get scared of dudes sometimes. Plus when I was 10 years old my uncle tried to rape me.
Q: What about birth control?
A: I don’t use birth control.19
The insensitivity of the interviewer in failing to offer any validation of the unwanted, undeserved nature of the violence she had endured, undoubtedly caused further anguish for this young woman. The experience of the sexual assaults evidently ...

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