A Wider Type of Freedom

How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone

Daniel Martinez HoSang

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520974197
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Storia
• Thema: Storia sociale

A sweeping history of transformative, radical, and abolitionist movements in the United States that places the struggle for racial justice at the center of universal liberation. In Where Do We Go From Here? (1967), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., described racism as "a philosophy based on a contempt for life, " a totalizing social theory that could only be confronted with an equally massive response, by "restructuring the whole of American society." A Wider Type of Freedom provides a survey of the truly transformative visions of racial justice in the United States, an often-hidden history that has produced conceptions of freedom and interdependence never envisioned in the nation's dominant political framework.

A Wider Type of Freedom brings together stories of the social movements, intellectuals, artists, and cultural formations that have centered racial justice and the abolition of white supremacy as the foundation for a universal liberation. Daniel Martinez HoSang taps into moments across time and place to reveal the longstanding drive toward a vision of universal emancipation. From the nineteenth century's abolition democracy and the struggle to end forced sterilizations, to the twentieth century's domestic worker organizing campaigns, to the twenty-first century's environmental justice movement, he reveals a bold, shared desire to realize the antithesis of "a philosophy based on a contempt for life, "as articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. Rather than seeking "equal rights"within failed systems, these efforts generated new visions that embraced human difference, vulnerability, and interdependence as core productive facets of our collective experience.

1

The Body

“A WORLD WHERE ALL HUMAN LIFE IS VALUED”

“I feel that I am a prisoner and have been mistreated.” So explained Chris Thompson in an interview with renowned trans organizer Sylvia Rivera of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and Arthur Bell of the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) that appeared in November 1970 in Gay Flames, a self-described “Bulletin of the Homofire Movement.” Rivera and Bell interviewed Thompson in the psychiatric wing at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, where he was being involuntarily detained and “kept under control” after coming to the hospital to seek treatment for his asthma. Thompson described the humiliating treatment he received from the medical staff, who forced him to sleep in the hall and to remove his makeup and hair curlers during his detention.¹

The connection Thompson made between incarceration and biomedical care, between the cage and the hospital ward, was not mere hyperbole. He experienced these overlapping forms of domination in the hospital’s assertion of control over his body. Thompson described a continuum of violence carried out by police, medical institutions, and the legal system against trans people of color, a legacy that continues to this day. The interview, part of a broad archive of trans history, politics, and social movements compiled by the writer, organizer and filmmaker Reina Gossett, details the very distinct forms of violence and control experienced by Black trans people, as well as the collective responses and communities of power and care groups like STAR that arose in response.

Rivera later explained that “STAR was for the street gay people, the street homeless people, and anybody that needed help at that time.” Rivera visited jails, hospitals, shelters, piers, and street corners to connect with trans youth who had been kicked out or had run away from their homes and were hustling to make their living on the street. It was their lives, safety, and survival that Rivera and cofounder Marsha Johnson always placed at the center of their work. STAR emphasized that survival and freedom meant both meeting people’s immediate needs and transforming the regimes—of health care, policing, housing, food, interpersonal violence—that jeopardized their lives. Personal trauma required collective responses. Bodies become particularly vulnerable to violence and control when they are isolated and atomized, divorced from larger collectives of protection and care. As Rivera’s visit to Thompson demonstrated, such transformations were rooted in a deep-seated commitment to mutual avowal and interdependence. Much of her political labor forged such ties; she was influenced by Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party and became a member of the Young Lords Party, a group of revolutionary Puerto Rican youth based in East Harlem. And she continually challenged the mainstream gay rights movement for its failures to avow, recognize, and claim trans people and other queer subjects who bore the worst impacts of state violence and control.²

While these stories and their political genealogy remain very specific to trans as well as queer of color organizing, the insights and demands they produced have wide-ranging resonance and relevance. They can be situated within an expansive history across time and place to produce new social conditions and structures that protect the autonomy and collective value of the body for everyone, and to reject the hierarchies of degradation and control that justified Thompson’s detention in the first place.³

In this way, Thompson’s observations about the violation of his body can be connected to an 1893 speech by the writer, educator, and political activist Anna Julia Cooper at the World’s Congress of Representative Women. Cooper described a “heroic struggle, a struggle against fearful and overwhelming odds” against what she described as “colored women’s oppression.” At the center of this struggle was “the despairing fight, as of an entrapped tigress, to keep hallowed their own persons.” For Cooper the body represented a central location of struggle and possibility that had stakes for all people. She described Black women “as toilers for the universal triumph of justice and human rights” who demanded “an entrance not through a gateway for ourselves, our race, our sex, or our sect, but a grand highway for humanity.”⁴

Following Cooper and Rivera, this chapter explores a set of episodes across time and place—from the dusty outskirts of Albuquerque to Ciudad Juárez to a small courthouse in rural North Carolina to a maternity ward in Los Angeles—in which particular struggles against the control, violation, and domination of the bodies of women and queer people have invoked expansive and liberatory visions. These stories do not yield a fully coherent or unified conception of the body beyond the regulation of race. They point instead to a series of understandings, practices, and demands generated in response to such regulation. Through vigils, legal campaigns, public art, lawsuits, and other means, women of color have found multiple ways to reject the oppressions that threaten their survival. Their resistance in these cases was provoked by murder, rape, labor exploitation, and coerced sterilization. The fragmentation, mutilation, and destruction of bodies through physical violence are integral to the enforcement of race as a system of power and a hierarchy of human value.

RACE AND DEGRADATION

The ideology of race itself had its origin in bodily fragments. In 1775, as the Second Continental Congress was preparing to assemble in Philadelphia in the name of liberty and Captain James Cook was laying claim to the islands of the South Pacific for the Queen, 23-year-old Johann Friedrich Blumenbach published his doctoral dissertation, “On the Natural Variety of Mankind,” at the University of Göttingen. Considered one of the first works of modern anthropology, Blumenbach’s research was based on a collection of skulls sent to him by military officers and merchants gathered during expeditions across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.⁵ Violence haunted this work from the beginning; Blumenbach’s specimens were heads severed from bodies, acquired by agents of colonial expansion, and divorced entirely from the fabric of relationships that constituted their lives and beings. The research methodology was itself a site of race-making that transformed bodies into things.

Like his contemporaries in the emerging academic fields of zoology, geography, and biology, Blumenbach developed a taxonomy to classify and differentiate the variation he perceived. He carefully measured and described hundreds of skulls—the position of the jaw, forehead, chin, and cheeks—and based on accounts passed to him by others, the color and appearance of the skin, hair, and lips. Over the next twenty years, Blumenbach would refine his classificatory observations, and in 1795 he announced he had identified “the most beautiful race of men,” which he identified as the “Caucasian variety.” He explained that skin “white in color” was “the primitive color of mankind”—skin color free from any degradation. He described the Caucasian variety as belonging to “the inhabitants of Europe (except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns) and those of Eastern Asia, as far as the river Obi, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; and lastly, those of Northern Africa.”⁶

From this “most beautiful form of the skull,” he described four other types that “diverge by most easy gradations” to inferior forms: the “Mongolian variety,” the “Ethiopian variety,” the “Malay variety,” and the “American variety.” While Blumenbach reasoned that all these varieties belonged to the human species (other taxonomies of race would later contest this claim), these other types had gone through various processes of “degeneration” and “divergence” from the Caucasian ideal. Scrutinize the body for enough time, Blumenbach insisted, and the degraded nature of different groups of humanity will be revealed.⁷

To be sure, the division of human life into those worthy of life and those worthy of death long preceded Blumenbach’s scholarship. Well before 1775, the ancestors of the people who now call themselves European found many creative ways to enslave, slaughter, and exploit one another. The feudal system itself was premised on the tradition of permanent, naturally ordained human hierarchies. Spanish conquistadors did not need to meditate on gradations of skull sizes before massacring the Arawak people of the Caribbean; the Church and Queen announced that it was their duty. The merchants and investors of Liverpool could calculate the profit to be earned from each child extracted from West Africa without the bright minds of the Enlightenment.⁸

But Blumenbach’s classification of the “Caucasian variety” still circulates as a legal, demographic, and commonsense category. Its endurance and penetration into diverse spheres of contemporary life reveals nothing about its scientific accuracy. Blumenbach selected a single skull (likely that of young woman from the Georgia region of the Caucuses enslaved by an invading army) to stand in for a uniform and biologically fixed category of human variation. His “Caucasian variety” is as real as the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy. Like those figures, the Caucasian is best understood as an artifact of mythology, a shared cultural story that performs critical social, political, and ideological work.⁹

The myth of the Caucasian has endured across more than two centuries not because of Blumenbach’s scientific acumen but because of the ideological labor it performs and the relations of power it legitimates. The worldview Blumenbach helped narrate and make legible, in which certain signifiers of human difference are understood as expressions of degradation, is an optic on human life itself. Amid the high age of European colonialism, Indigenous genocide, and chattel slavery, the account of humanity divided into various conditions of degradation and value performed essential work. Through this lens, barbarous acts of torture on the plains of the Dakotas were rendered as necessary rites of civilization. Heroes could rape and remain heroes. Civilizations could be extinguished in the name of saving humanity. Workers could toil in garment factories, cotton fields, and kitchens without protection. It was not simply that people who called themselves Caucasian visited atrocities upon those they perceived to be different. Instead, the view of human life proposed by Blumenbach required such violence.¹⁰ It produced a legacy that the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates describes in this way: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”¹¹

Race operates here, in the account of the historian Barbara Fields, as an ideology, a worldview generative of wide-ranging social meanings, issues, and identities.¹² It is an ideology that is productive of particular conceptions of human hierarchy, vulnerability, and autonomy that are always dependent upon violence and the possibility of elimination to secure and justify their reproduction. For Blumenbach and the many other academics, political elites, writers, artists, and others working within this framework, the body serves as a preeminent site of power and the production of social meaning. Particular forms of physical difference signify the body’s place within a broader human order, functioning as the alibi for acts of exploitation, appropriation, and domination. As the Caucasian ideal migrated from the halls of the university into the legislative chambers of the newly independent states and the mainsprings of popular culture, it took on diverse forms and articulations. But at its core, the idea of the Caucasian was premised on the assumption that the body was characterized by natural patterns of degradation. Thus a central task of any modern society was to ensure that the government, economy, and culture were organized in ways that accurately reflected and reproduced these innate differences.

Writing some 130 years after Blumenbach, W. E. B. Du Bois laid bare the grip that the mythology of race held on the dominant political consciousness of the United States. Surveying the two decades following the Civil War, he explained the end of abolition democracy and the South’s return to despotism and planter rule as premised on a “phantasmagoria” that “has been built on the most miserable of human fictions.” It was a worldview, he explained, that presumed “in addition to manifest differences between men there is a deep, awful and ineradicable cleft which condemns most men to eternal degradation.” It is this belief in the inevitability of “eternal degradation” that constitutes race as an ideology, one Du Bois described as “a cheap inheritance of the world’s infancy, unworthy of grown folk.”¹³ With Du Bois, Audre Lorde has famously described the ways in which a “profit economy” necessitates the production of “surplus people” and requires the “destruction” of those differences regarded as subordinate.¹⁴

Du Bois invoked an alternative political vision in which perceived differences in the body did not become fatally linked to power. Here, the body is not understood as an object or a “thing”...