[DEBATE] : Re: Harvey and racism

Sun May 28 17:40:39 BST 2006

The tennor and content of this response says a lot more about Charlene than Ebrahim and is, really, appalling. Ebrahim makes the entirely reasonable (and in fact urgently important) point that gender analysis needs to be linked to race and class and that the dominant feminist discourse is weak in this respect because it is dominated by white feminists who are reluctant to do this. This does not make him a racist. On the contrary it makes him a critical and dialectical thinker concerned with looking at the inter-relationships between different social forces and phenomena. It makes him some one asking for more sophistication in our analysis. It makes him someone asking for a feminism that can actually work - not in the sense of a discourse that works for the people trading in it but one that has some prospect of becoming part of the common sense of society.

There is a very long and widely attested to history of white feminisms being used to justify colonial and post-colonial modes of imperialism. And it is not just the World Bank that does this now. Feminist discourses are also misused by NGOs and, at times, left activists, to reinscribe white and northern modes of domination. I have experienced a number of instances where highly privileged white women from the North have misused feminist discourses to demand and defend a casually assumed right to a position of privilege with regard to oppressed communities here. This works not only by rejecting the agency of poor African men as inherently and neccessarity tainted by sexism but by also assuming that the poor African women who work with those men are culturally blind to their sexism. Thus the Northern missionary returns as the Northern radical. Of course feminism is not the only discourse that can be used to reinscribe white and Northern dominance - there are many others, that include technicism, the assumed priority of 'global' solidarity over 'local' struggles and so on. And of course it is very true that anti-racist and anti-capitalist discourses have very often been used to sideline anti-sexism. But Harvey was not doing this. He was asking for a sophisticated and integrated view. To say that anti-racism needs to be linked to a class and gender project is not to be racist. To say that anti-sexism needs to be linked to a class and gender project is not to be sexist. To say that all liberatory discourses can, deliberately or inadvertently, be misused is not to be against liberatory discourses. It is to be for serious thought about them and how they can be productively connected.

Ran is quite right to point to the fact that our Manichean impasse with regards to AIDS is (and I am paraphrasing from memory here because I had to delete his email) because Mbeki has read the AIDS discourse as racist. Mandisa Mbali's work in the history of AIDS has convincingly demonstrated that this is correct. It is a fact that much of the early scientific AIDS discourse included in amongst its good science a whole lot of crude racist thinking about African sexuality. Of course Mbeki is wrong to reject the whole discourse along with its early racist elements but people who fail to understand the long history of how African sexuality has been racialised and pathologised by the West are also, seriously at fault. In the case of AIDS we will only transcend the Manicheanism that has produced this disasterous impasse when the good science is very firmly seperated from the racism that is often associated with it. And, I am afraid, we are a long way from that. At UKZN the largest requests for my time from academics are from white North Americans and Europeans who are here to study African sexuality and who move from the premise that is is pathological (and that the AIDS pandemic is solely due to this rather than structural factors like poverty, migrant labour, poor health care etc). This is the same premise that has been central to European racism and colonialism for hundreds of years now. One of the most neglected insights of Fanon (often reduced by racist white thinkers to a mere theorist of violence) is about how Manicheanism can be over come with regard to colonial medicine. He writes that this will only happen when the Doctor becomes 'our Doctor' ...'living the drama of the people'. i.e. when medicine is not opposed from above via the colonial state but becomes part of the cultures of resistance. This why TAC have been so important in overcoming this Manicheanism. They have rooted their struggles for reason with regard to AIDS within the matrix of popular struggle and in the lifeworld of the people in whose name they do their work. This is so much better than another condescening lecture from a European NGO or academic. Something similar needs to be achieved with feminism. 

I would guess that the impass with regard to gender on this list is because the feminism here is overwhelmingly of the white middle variety that pathologises African men without taking anti-racist and anti-bourgeois thinking seriously enough. Given the history of complicity between white feminisms with class and race oppression there are times when such feminism can and should be read as an attack by African and working class/poor men. See my critique of the World Bank's book Voices of the Poor for a concrete anaylsis of an instance of this: http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?10,24,10,851 We urgently, very, very urgently need to develop feminist analysis that are indisputably part of the anti-racist and pro-working class/culture struggles. And, speaking about this list, we need to ask, and very seriously, why it is that so few African people have stuck around here. 

The oldest and most enduring racist stereotype is of the black man as rapist. Today in South Africa many black men in white (or Indian) dominated institutions labour under the weight of this every day. Any feminism that, consciously or not, repeats this most common and enduing of racist stereotypes is racist. Charlene herself has sailed close to being an agent for this kind racism in the past. Consider her comment in the Washington Post, repeated in her Wolpe lecture, that made Mbeki so angry: "In Africa, even if we develop a vaccine or distribute billions of condoms and the continent is already awash in latex, unless we begin working on male attitudes towards women - and that requires looking at the role of culture, tradition and religion - we will get nowhere*" Now of course all culture and tradition and religion needs to be interrogated with regard to all modes of domination (race, class, gender, xeneophobia, sexual orientation etc). But when African culture is singled out for the critical gaze (and European culture is implicitly normalised - this was, after all, an appeal to the readers of the Washington Post - an appeal which did not put America culture and traditions under a critical gaze) in the context of hundreds of years of racialised pathologisation of African people, culture and traditon, often in the service of imperialism, it is easy to see why anti-racist hackles rise. This is not to say that we must side with everyone who opposes Charlene's very important polemicising around the high instances of rape and gender based violence in our society. But we do need to transcend the Manicheanism that leaves some people reading anti-sexism as racism and other reading anti-racism as sexim. They way to do this is to, as Harvey has suggested, try and think about these modes of domination, and the liberatory discourses and practices that have arisen to challenge them, together.

Harvey was merely asking for more nuance. Smith's astonishing labelling of him as racist is a deeply problematic response that, unfortunately, stands as one more confirmation of what Harvey was complaining about in the first place.

Richard

http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs

>>> clsmith at global.co.za 05/27/06 12:06 PM >>>
You're a racist Harvey, pure and simple.  You know about as much as what 
black women want as the man in the moon knows about cooking.

This list requires intelligent thinking - CLEAR writing - and not the 
muddled obsenities you write.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "eharvey" <eharvey10 at telkomsa.net>
To: "'debate: SA discussion list '" <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 27, 2006 9:00 AM
Subject: [DEBATE] : Re: Demise of this list?

I said before, there are various shades of feminist thought, as there are of
Marxism. But a quick one about the kind of feminism I am a follower of. You
wiseacres on feminism should surely have read two books that will tell you
where more or less I come from on this matter and where I am going to.
Unfortunately, like with Marxism, white feminists are not keen on these
perspectives simply because it makes them uncomfortable about where they
come from and race-class-gender dimensions of their own lives. Lets face it,

ALL truths are hard to face. I cannot and refuse to talk about feminism
without talking simultaneously about race and class and it is in relation to
the latter respects that the discourse is weakest, but this is not seen
because the discourse is dominated by white middle and upper class
feminists! Black working class women have not had half their say, let alone
their full say in these matters, for the same material-social reasons that
disadvantages them in the first place in relation to white feminists.

1. Jouve, Nicole (1991) 'White Woman speaks with forked tongue': criticism
   as autobiography'. Good for appreciating the race/class/gender dimensions
   of the discourse and not get carried away with gender at the expense of
   class and particularly race dimensions and how the latter very much
   shapes the former.

2. Donaldson, Laura (1992) 'Decolonizing feminisms: race, gender &
   empire-building'. The blurb of this one reads: " Perhaps the greatest
   challenge to feminism in recent decades has emerged from African American
   and 'Third World" women, who charge that white middle- and upper-class
   feminists are (often unwittingly)complicitous with the agendas of white
   supremacy and Anglo-European imperialism."

   Enjoy the reading, then let us talk feminism!

-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas Henwood [mailto:dhenwood at panix.com] 
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 2:32 PM
To: debate: SA discussion list
Subject: [DEBATE] : Re: Demise of this list?

On May 25, 2006, at 2:00 AM, eharvey wrote:

> knee-jerk feminist zealots

Why is it that feminists are the only ones subject to this sort of
criticism? You'd never see anyone but a yahoo type "knee-jerk anti-
racist zealots," would you?

Doug

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