Dear Ms. Higginbotham,
First, I would
like to thank you very much for your article “African-American Women’s History
and the Metalanguage of Race”. Reading it in 2013 I found it to be an amazingly
relevant and useful look at intersectionality (particularly the cross-sections
of race, class, gender, and sexual identities), and I can only imagine what a
radical importance it had when it was published. As you have rightly
highlighted, it is absolutely necessary to attempt to understand identity as an
amalgam of the multiple identity categories that have come to exist. It is also
vital that we recognize why they exist, and their truths as social
constructions. I enjoyed your invocation of Foucault as evidence of this when
you tell us that “societies engage in ‘a perpetual process of strategic
elaboration’ or a constant shifting and reforming of the apparatus of power in
response to their particular cultural or economic needs” (254).
I would like to
take writing this letter to you as an opportunity to, as graciously as
possible, solicit further thoughts from you on some of the issues you raised in
your article, especially through the lens of my personal experiences and the
current context of these intersectional identities. Specifically, I am wondering
about the further applications and implications of the following passage: “Until
the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, race effectively served as a metaphor for
class, albeit a metaphor rife with complications (259).” My question would be: Is
it not still now? I mean this both as a sincere question that begs your point
of view and as an indication of my belief that class and race still play a
tag-team game of sorts, where one can often stand in for the other.
Harry Elam’s has
an interesting article, “We wear the
mask: Performance, social dramas, and race”, that describes the performative
aspects of race and how they effect perceptions of racial minorities and
identity formation. In the article, he discusses the (white) rapper Eminem’s
ability to successfully co-opt components of performative black culture because
of his lower/working-class upbringing. In this way, his audience, including his
black audience, is able to accept his authentic ability to represent himself in
ways that other white men would not be able to. Through this example, and many
in my own life, I get the sense that race and class have become somewhat
inextricable. While they constitute separate categories, with separate
definitions and constituents that may fit into “dissimilar” racial and class
groupings, I see a significant and correlation between, for example, disproportionately
low socio-economic status with Black and Latino Americans.
My question for
you, then, is how do you map the change between the metaphor of race for class in
the 60s to today? I’d be very curious to understand your views on how race and
class overlap and are, in many situations, today, especially given the talks of
a “post-racial” America.
Thank you very much for your time.
Sincerely,
Lena Potts
Very well done! I particularly like your questions about whether or not race remains a metaphor for class. Examining the interconnectedness of race and class also allows, as you explain, a deeper understanding of the ways that race can be performed (as in the example of Eminem).
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