Many great POC bloggers recently received a shout-out in the Boston Globe for their phenomenal anti-oppression coverage, specifically in the area of race relations:

These intellectual challenges to mainstream and other viewpoints are some of the opinions Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander-American, and black bloggers are exposing on a growing number of sites focused on social, political, and cultural issues. The sometimes facetiously named blogs range from Angry Asian Man to The Angry Black Woman. Readers can find Latino viewpoints at Guanabee, The Unapologetic Mexican, or Latino Pundit. Those interested in information from an Asian angle head to Ultrabrown, Zuky, or Sepia Mutiny. Sites created by blacks include The Field Negro, Too Sense, and Resist Racism.

The article also gives extensive coverage to Baratunde Thurston, also known as Jack Turner of Jack and Jill Politics, and Carmen Van Kerckhove, who runs the anti-racism training company New Demographic and heads up the pop culture blog Racialicious. I’m proud of all of them, and when Nezua of The Unapologetic Mexican shared the shout-out on his blog, commenter Will noted the compliment the author of this article extended:

But often these bloggers discard the handcuffs of their ethnic origins to tackle subjects affecting a range of racial or ethnic groups.

There was a brief pause in the congratulatory air after reading that sentence. (But trust me, the celebration continues!) However, what exactly does this statement imply about critical race analysis of media exposure and social phenomena? Specifically, is there a danger in choosing to focus on one’s own race rather than taking a more racially inclusive approach to fighting oppression? Can a person be handcuffed by their ethnic origins, resulting in a limited view of that person’s social environment? 

I toyed around with my response to the notes of concern about the idea of being shackled to race in conducting critical analysis. For one thing, I confused the two terms in this post title as I responded to Nezua:

Yeah, the handcuffs of your origins — very bad metaphor for saying the bloggers listed here are not ethnocentric. (I’m assuming that’s the conclusion they’re trying to reach, but that metaphor raises so many questions and ghosts when referring to POC.)

I wrote that response and then I stepped back, thinking I concluded the situation properly until I realized I fell into a linguistic trap. The undercurrent of negativity surrounding a focus on one’s ethnicity in social, economic, and political analyses led me to my conclusion. There is an ongoing effort to paint all agencies intended to empower people of color to pursue their social rights, their economic rights, their political rights, and their privileges and entitlements as negative or counterproductive to ending racism. Ethnocentrism as racial empowerment also opposes the active political and social forces advocating “colorblindness.” Ethnocentric organizations (specifically those by and for people of color) are expected to evolve into full-scale threats of racial supremacy and violence — to follow the examples aptly laid by our white supremacists from years past and present. Theoretically, from there we conclude that the best way to prevent supremacist development is to stamp out noticeable racial and/or ethnic interest and education — or dare I say pride? — for everyone; we work to smear all ethnocentrism rather than that ethnocentrism which is harmful. We fail to recognize that while ethnocentrism may correlate with violence and supremacist viewpoints — as our history with America’s colonization and evolution constantly reinforces — ethnocentrism does notcause the violence. Meanwhile, the histories by and for people of color fall to the demands of white entitlement to remain included into every facet of cultural awareness and a general atmosphere of latent white supremacist fear mongering.

These tropes are more common and more ridiculous than most people think. When people of color receive questions about whether they value their own lives and experiences being covered more than another person’s values or experiences being covered, for example. Over at Black Amazon’s haunts, there was a discussion in one of her comment threads that manifested this race supremacist fear: would asking white feminist bloggers to engage with the racial dynamics of the “theft of services” case be the same as claiming the rape of a black woman is worse than the rape of a white woman? Because of this fear of valuing one human life over another, we absolutely cannot allow such a question to guide our reasoning. Our finer human sensibilities will not permit it!

But let’s back up for a minute.

Historically, the rape of black women and other women of color has been undervalued by society. To balk at the phraseology Deni used to characterize this young woman’s rape — “theft of services” — is to ignore a historical precedent where during slavery and colonization, rape of women of color was not rape, not assault; rape was barely a theft. For example, Patricia J. Williams spoke about her knowledge of her family history informing her interpretation of the law, the market, race and gender:

The original vehicle for my interest in the intersection of commerce and the Constitution was my family history. A few years ago, I came into the possession of what may have been the contract of sale for my great-great-grandmother. It is a very simple but lawyerly document, describing her as “one female” and revealing her age as eleven; no price is specified, merely “value exchanged.” My sister also found a county census record taken two years later; on a list of one Austin Miller’s personal assets she appears again, as “slave, female” — thirteen years old now with an eight-month infant.

Since then I have tried to piece together what it must have been like to be my great-great-grandmother. She was purchased according to matrilineal recounting, by a man who was extremely temperamental and quite wealthy. I try to imagine what it would have been like to have a discontented white man buy me, after a fight with his mother about prolonged bachelorhood. I wonder what it would have been like to have a thirty-five-year-old man own the secrets of my puberty, which he bought to prove himself sexually as well as increase his livestock of slaves. I imagine trying to please, with the yearning of adolescence, a man who truly did not know I was human, whose entire belief system resolutely defined me as animal, chattel, talking cow. I wonder what it would have been like to have his child, pale-faced but also animal, before I turned thirteen. I try to envision being casually threatened with sale from time to time, teeth and buttocks bared to interested visitors. [1]

The redefinition of sexual relationships for women of color was a systematic strategy to facilitate the supremacy of white colonists, imperialists, masters, and explorers — regardless of how lackadasically fond some writers choose to describe the historical phenomenon of establishing white supremacy through sexual manipulation and violence today. So, historically, is it really surprising or scandalous?

Historically, the rape of white women (or even the specter of it!) has inspired racist violence on the bodies of people of color — lynching, anyone? Remember Ida B. Wells? She’s a black woman; you may have never heard of her. But do you know why she was famous? Considered a muckraker? It was because of her relentless chronicling of white supremacist mob rule, chronicling of lynching from the threats of sexual (or “criminal”) assaults upon white people — women and law enforcement. The specter of harm to either group resulted in wanton sadistic and torturous practices upon the bodies of brown “dangerous suspects”:

In 1891 Ed Coy was burned to death in Texarkana, Ark. He was charged with assaulting a white woman, and after the mob had securely tied him to a tree, the men and boys amused themselves for some time sticking knives into Coy’s body and slicing off pieces, of flesh. When they had amused themselves sufficiently, they poured coal oil over him and the women in the case set fire to him. It is said that fifteen thousand people stood by and saw him burned. This was on a Sunday night, and press reports told how the people looked on while the Negro burned to death.

Feb. 1, 1893, Henry Smith was burned to death in Paris, Texas. The entire county joined in that exhibition. The district attorney himself went for the prisoner and turned him over to the mob. He was placed upon a float and drawn by four white horses through the principal streets of the city. Men, women and children stood at their doors and waved their handkerchiefs and cheered the echoes. They knew that the man was to be burned to death because the newspaper had declared for three days previous that this would be so. Excursions were run by all the railroads, and the mayor of the town gave the children a holiday so that they might see the sight.

Henry Smith was charged with having assaulted and murdered a little white girl. He was an imbecile, and while he had killed the child, there was no proof that he had criminally assaulted her. He was tied to a stake on a platform which had been built ten feet high, so that everybody might see the sight. The father and brother and uncle of the little white girl that had been murdered was upon that platform about fifty minutes entertaining the crowd of ten thousand persons by burning the victim’s flesh with red-hot irons. Their own newspapers told how they burned his eyes out and, ran the red-hot iron down his throat, cooking his tongue, and how the crowd cheered wild delight. At last, having declared themselves satisfied, coal oil was poured over him and he was burned to death, and the mob fought over the ashes for bones and pieces of his clothes. [2]

But we understand this history, right? The history of white supremacy, and the insistence of white ethnocentric demands, backed by this ongoing supremacy, that we do not question actively our rights to identify as American? We think we do, but we don’t realize that white supremacy has not ended. We do not grapple with the fact the white supremacist framework of thought still permeates our discussions of racism, our rage against “political correctness,” our perceptions of humanity — think of the constant tropes that affirmative action symbolizes handouts to brown faces with little education, that any organization or media effort meant to correct the systematic negative portrayals of people of color for YEARS is racist because the equivalent white effort is not specifically labeled The White Organization/Media Equivalent.

I think the statement from that article speaks to a narrative of fear within the white institution of racial empowerment among people of color through ethnocentrism. What motivates this call to culture and history? How about the urge to be perceived as human, as expressed by Frantz Fanon?

“Look, a Negro!” It was an extemal stimulus that flicked over me fleetingly. I gave the ghost of a smile.

“Look, a Negro!” It was true. I was amused.

“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing tighter. I was openly amused.

“Mommy, look at the Negro, I’m afraid!” Afraid! Afraid! Here they were starting to fear me. I wanted to laugh until I choked, but I had become unable to.

I could not be amused anymore because I already knew of the legends, the stories, history, and especially, the historicity I learned from Jaspers. Then the corporeal schema collapsed, assailed at various points, yielding to a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was not a matter of knowing my body in the third-person mode anymore, but as a threefold person. In the train, instead of one seat, I was granted two, three seats. Already I was not being amused anymore. It was not that I was discovering feverish coordinates in the world. I existed in triplicate: I was occupying space. I moved towards the other … And the evanescent other, hostile but not yet opaque, transparent, absent, disappeared. Nausea. . .

I was all at once responsible for my body, responsible for my race, for my ancestors. I ran an objective gaze over myself, discovering my blackness, my ethnic characteristics, and then I was deafened by cannibalism, intellectual deficiency. fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all, above all else, “Sho’ good Banania.”

On that day, disoriented and incapable of being outside with the other, the White who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far away, very far away indeed from my being-there, thus making myself an object. What else could it be for me but an excision, an amputation, a hemorrhage that congealed black blood all over my body? However, I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I had wanted to arrive smooth and young in a world of ours, that together we would have erected.

But I rejected all emotional tetanization. I wanted to be a man, only a man. [3]

Since we as people of color can empathize with each other in the face of racism, we will not be blinded or bound by focusing on our own struggles to the point of…what? Disbelief? Fanaticism? Whose perception of validity guides this analysis? What is the evil of remaining restrained in these so-called “handcuffs of ethnic origins?” I find this trope most condescending and problematic to the sensibilities of people of color — there are other implications of the statement that point to stereotypes about racial consciousness and anti-racist advocacy.

With the muscle of studying and valuing history and culture, people of color’s investment in our current bigotry-laced cohabitation with implied and overt white supremacy will lessen as we peacefully demand the absence of qualifiers to our existence and respect for our histories. There are already slow movements to bring people of all races on the same page with history — to raise conscious generations of people who can work towards peace, solidarity, and vigilance against oppression. Current American history — a white supremacist vanguard and defender — demands this form of ethnocentric empowerment.

[1] Excerpted from Williams, Patricia J. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. 17-18.

[2] Excerpted from Wells, Ida B. Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, The Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics. Dist. by Project Gutenberg, release date February 8, 2005; E-book #14976.

[3] Excerpted from Fanon, Frantz. “The Lived Experience of the Black.” 185-186. (I don’t have all the publishing information on hand; apologies!)