Dear Dr. Higginbotham,

For my class, Racial Identity in the American Imaginary, I was asked to read your article “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race” and to then consider what intersectionality means.  Previous to reading your article, I considered intersectionality to be the compound effects of identities such as gender, sexuality, race, and class.  However, I had not thought consciously about the dominance of the consequences of one of these identities over the consequences of other identities.  In your article, you show how race has influenced understandings of gender, sexuality, and class.  For example, “the exclusion of black women from the dominant society’s definition of ‘lady’” shows how belonging to a certain racial category can dramatically change a woman’s lived reality.  This is also true of people’s class identity, as shown through your example of Arthur Mitchell who was denied the privileges of his class because of his race, as well as people’s sexual identity.  You have helped to further solidify my belief that categories such as race and gender often can not, and should not, be separated and studied individually.  While your article focused on race’s intersection with other forms of identity, I appreciated that you went further and connected more than two categories of identity in many of your examples.

In your conclusion you recognize “race as an unstable, shifting, and strategic reconstruction” and the challenges this presents to those interested in studying race or the intersectionality of other forms of identity with race.  This suggests to me that race may not always be as strongly influential as it has been or at least not so automatically dominant as your article suggests it has been historically.  Ultimately, I was left with the understanding that race is the overriding category that shapes all other forms of identity, or at leas that race did so during slavery and later periods at least up to the end of segregation.  Is this a correct analysis of your conclusions?  Do you think this is still true today?  In your conclusion you also acknowledge that certain scholars have chosen to assert “the inseparable unity of race and gender in their thought.” Do you think that this unity is equally as significant for people of all races?  What implications does this have for mixed-raced individuals?  

Sincerely,

Sophia Villarreal