Race, Class, and Gender in the United States An Integrated Study

580    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

My mother is a seamstress in a factory. I’m trying to go to college. I don’t need to sew
to go to college. My mother sews. I hoped for something else.”

“What would you rather take?” I asked.
“I wanted to take an AP class,” she answered.
Mireya’s sudden tears elicited a strong reaction from one of the boys who had been
silent up till now: a thin, dark-eyed student named Fortino, who had long hair down
to his shoulders. He suddenly turned directly to Mireya and spoke into the silence
that followed her last words.
“Listen to me,” he said. “The owners of the sewing factories need laborers. Correct?”
“I guess they do,” Mireya said.
“It’s not going to be their own kids. Right?” “Why not?” another student said.
“So they can grow beyond themselves,” Mireya answered quietly. “But we remain
the same.”
“You’re ghetto,” said Fortino, “so we send you to the factory.” He sat low in his
desk chair, leaning on one elbow, his voice and dark eyes loaded with a cynical intel-
ligence. “You’re ghetto—so you sew!”
“There are higher positions than these,” said a student named Samantha.
“You’re ghetto,” said Fortino unrelentingly. “So sew!”
Admittedly, the economic needs of a society are bound to be reflected to some
rational degree within the policies and purposes of public schools. But, even so, there
must be something more to life as it is lived by six-year-olds or by teenagers, for that
matter, than concerns about “successful global competition.” Childhood is not merely
basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy,
not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its
present value as a perishable piece of life itself.
Very few people who are not involved with inner-city schools have any real idea of
the extremes to which the mercantile distortion of the purposes and character of edu-
cation have been taken or how unabashedly proponents of these practices are willing
to defend them. The head of a Chicago school, for instance, who was criticized by
some for emphasizing rote instruction that, his critics said, was turning children into
“robots,” found no reason to dispute the charge. “Did you ever stop to think that
these robots will never burglarize your home?” he asked, and “will never snatch your
pocketbooks. . . . These robots are going to be producing taxes.”
Corporate leaders, when they speak of education, sometimes pay lip-service to the
notion of “good critical and analytic skills,” but it is reasonable to ask whether they have
in mind the critical analysis of their priorities. In principle, perhaps some do; but, if so,
this is not a principle that seems to have been honored widely in the schools I have been
visiting. In all the various business-driven inner-city classrooms that I have observed in
the past five years, plastered as they are with corporation brand names and managerial
vocabularies, I have yet to see the two words “labor unions.” Is this an oversight? How
is that possible? Teachers and principals themselves, who are almost always members
of a union, seem to be so beaten down that they rarely even question this omission.
It is not at all unusual these days to come into an urban school in which the princi-
pal prefers to call himself or herself “building CEO” or “building manager.” In some of

5 Kozol / Still Separate, Still Unequal  581

the same schools teachers are described as “classroom managers.”2 I have never been
in a suburban district in which principals were asked to view themselves or teachers
in this way. These terminologies remind us of how wide the distance has become
between two very separate worlds of education.

It has been more than a decade now since drill-based literacy methods like Success
For All began to proliferate in our urban schools. It has been three and a half years
since the systems of assessment that determine the effectiveness of these and similar
practices were codified in the federal legislation, No Child Left Behind, that President
Bush signed into law in 2002. Since the enactment of this bill, the number of stan-
dardized exams children must take has more than doubled. It will probably increase
again after the year 2006, when standardized tests, which are now required in grades
three through eight, may be required in Head Start programs and, as President Bush
has now proposed, in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades as well.

The elements of strict accountability, in short, are solidly in place; and in many
states where the present federal policies are simply reinforcements of accountability
requirements that were established long before the passage of the federal law, the
same regimen has been in place since 1995 or even earlier. The “tests-and-standards”
partisans have had things very much their way for an extended period of time, and
those who were convinced that they had ascertained “what works” in schools that
serve minorities and children of the poor have had ample opportunity to prove that
they were right.

What, then, it is reasonable to ask, are the results?
The achievement gap between black and white children, which narrowed for
three decades up until the late years of the 1980s—the period in which school seg-
regation steadily decreased—started to widen once more in the early 1990s when
the federal courts began the process of resegregation by dismantling the mandates
of the Brown decision. From that point on, the gap continued to widen or remained
essentially unchanged; and while recently there has been a modest narrowing of the
gap in reading scores for fourth-grade children, the gap in secondary school remains
as wide as ever.
The media inevitably celebrate the periodic upticks that a set of scores may seem
to indicate in one year or another in achievement levels of black and Hispanic chil-
dren in their elementary schools. But if these upticks were not merely temporary
“testing gains” achieved by test-prep regimens and were instead authentic education
gains, they would carry over into middle school and high school. Children who know
how to read—and read with comprehension—do not suddenly become nonread-
ers and hopelessly disabled writers when they enter secondary school. False gains
evaporate; real gains endure. Yet hundreds of thousands of the inner-city children
who have made what many districts claim to be dramatic gains in elementary school,
and whose principals and teachers have adjusted almost every aspect of their school
days and school calendars, forfeiting recess, canceling or cutting back on all the so-
called frills (art, music, even social sciences) in order to comply with state demands,
those students, now in secondary school, are sitting in subject-matter classes where
they cannot comprehend the texts and cannot set down their ideas in the kind of

582    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

sentences expected of most fourth- and fifth-grade students in the suburbs. Students
in this painful situation, not surprisingly, tend to be most likely to drop out of school.

In 48 percent of high schools in the nation’s 100 largest districts, which are those
in which the highest concentrations of black and Hispanic students tend to be en-
rolled, less than half the entering ninth-graders graduate in four years. Nationwide,
from 1993 to 2002, the number of high schools graduating less than half their ninth-
grade class in four years has increased by 75 percent. In the 94 percent of districts
in New York State where white children make up the majority, nearly 80 percent
of students graduate from high school in four years. In the 6 percent of districts
where black and Hispanic students make up the majority, only 40 percent do so.
There are 120 high schools in New York, enrolling nearly 200,000 minority students,
where less than 60 percent of entering ninth-graders even make it to twelfth grade.

The promulgation of new and expanded inventories of “what works,” no matter
the enthusiasm with which they’re elaborated, is not going to change this. The use
of hortatory slogans chanted by the students in our segregated schools is not going
to change this. Desperate historical revisionism that romanticizes the segregation of
an older order (this is a common theme of many separatists today) is not going to
change this. Skinnerian instructional approaches, which decapitate a child’s capability
for critical reflection, are not going to change this. Posters about “global competition”
will certainly not change this. Turning six-year-olds into examination soldiers and
denying eight-year-olds their time for play at recess will not change this.

“I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations,” said
President Bush in his campaign for reelection in September 2004. “It’s working. It’s
making a difference.” Here we have one of those deadly lies that by sheer repetition is
at length accepted by surprisingly large numbers of Americans. But it is not the truth;
and it is not an innocent misstatement of the facts. It is a devious appeasement of the
heartache of the parents of the black and brown and poor, and if it is not forcefully
resisted it will lead us further in a very dangerous direction.

Whether the issue is inequity alone or deepening resegregation or the labyrinthine
intertwining of the two, it is well past the time for us to start the work that it will take
to change this. If it takes people marching in the streets and other forms of adamant
disruption of the governing civilities, if it takes more than litigation, more than leg-
islation, and much more than resolutions introduced by members of Congress, these
are prices we should be prepared to pay. “We do not have the things you have,” Al-
liyah told me when she wrote to ask if I would come and visit her school in the South
Bronx. “Can you help us?” America owes that little girl and millions like her a more
honorable answer than they have received.

Notes

 1.  SFA has since been discontinued in the New York City public schools, though it is
still being used in 1,300 U.S. schools, serving as many as 650,000 children. Similar scripted
systems are used in schools (overwhelmingly minority in population) serving several million
children.

5 Kozol / Still Separate, Still Unequal  583

 2.  A school I visited three years ago in Columbus, Ohio, was littered with “Help
Wanted” signs. Starting in kindergarten, children in the school were being asked to think
about the jobs that they might choose when they grew up. In one classroom there was a
poster that displayed the names of several retail stores: J. C. Penney, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Sears,
and a few others. “It’s like working in a store,” a classroom aide explained. “The children
are learning to pretend they’re cashiers.” At another school in the same district, children
were encouraged to apply for jobs in their classrooms. Among the job positions open to the
children in this school, there was an “Absence Manager” and a “Behavior Chart Manager,” a
“Form Collector Manager,” a “Paper Passer Outer Manager,” a “Paper Collecting Manager,” a
“Paper Returning Manager,” an “Exit Ticket Manager,” even a “Learning Manager,” a “Reading
Corner Manager,” and a “Score Keeper Manager.” I asked the principal if there was a special
reason why those two words “management” and “manager” kept popping up throughout the
school. “We want every child to be working as a manager while he or she is in this school,”
the principal explained. “We want to make them understand that, in this country, companies
will give you opportunities to work, to prove yourself, no matter what you’ve done.” I wasn’t
sure what she meant by “no matter what you’ve done,” and asked her if she could explain it.
“Even if you have a felony arrest,” she said, “we want you to understand that you can be a
manager someday.”

6  Masked Racism

Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex

Angela Davis

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of the social
problems that burden people who are ensconced in poverty. These problems often
are veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category “crime” and
by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color. Homelessness,
unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the
problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with
them are relegated to cages.

Prisons thus perform a feat of magic. Or rather the people who continually vote
in new prison bonds and tacitly assent to a proliferating network of prisons and jails
have been tricked into believing in the magic of imprisonment. But prisons do not
disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing
vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities
has literally become big business.

The seeming effortlessness of magic always conceals an enormous amount of
behind-the-scenes work. When prisons disappear human beings in order to con-
vey the illusion of solving social problems, penal infrastructures must be created
to accommodate a rapidly swelling population of caged people. Goods and ser-
vices must be provided to keep imprisoned populations alive. Sometimes these
populations must be kept busy and at other times—particularly in repressive
super-maximum prisons and in INS detention centers—they must be deprived of
virtually all meaningful activity. Vast numbers of handcuffed and shackled people
are moved across state borders as they are transferred from one state or federal
prison to another.

All this work, which used to be the primary province of government, is now
also performed by private corporations, whose links to government in the field of
what is euphemistically called “corrections” resonate dangerously with the mili-
tary industrial complex. The dividends that accrue from investment in the punish-
ment ­industry, like those that accrue from investment in weapons production, only
amount to social destruction. Taking into account the structural similarities and
profitability of business–government linkages in the realms of military production
and public punishment, the expanding penal system can now be characterized as a
“prison industrial complex.”

This article was first published in ColorLines magazine (now Colorlines.com), Fall 1998. Reprinted
by permission of the author.

584

6 Davis / Masked Racism  585

The Color of Imprisonment

Almost two million people are currently locked up in the immense network of U.S.
prisons and jails. More than 70 percent of the imprisoned population are people
of color. It is rarely acknowledged that the fastest growing group of prisoners are
black women and that Native American prisoners are the largest group per capita.
Approximately five million people—including those on probation and parole—
are directly under the surveillance of the criminal justice system.

Three decades ago, the imprisoned population was approximately one-eighth its
current size. While women still constitute a relatively small percentage of people
behind bars, today the number of incarcerated women in California alone is almost
twice what the nationwide women’s prison population was in 1970. According to El-
liott Currie, “[t]he prison has become a looming presence in our society to an extent
unparalleled in our history—or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major
wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government
social program of our time.”

To deliver up bodies destined for profitable punishment, the political economy
of prisons relies on racialized assumptions of criminality—such as images of black
welfare mothers reproducing criminal children—and on racist practices in arrest,
conviction, and sentencing patterns. Colored bodies constitute the main human raw
material in this vast experiment to disappear the major social problems of our time.
Once the aura of magic is stripped away from the imprisonment solution, what is re-
vealed is racism, class bias, and the parasitic seduction of capitalist profit. The prison
industrial system materially and morally impoverishes its inhabitants and devours the
social wealth needed to address the very problems that have led to spiraling numbers
of prisoners.

As prisons take up more and more space on the social landscape, other govern-
ment programs that have previously sought to respond to social needs—such as
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families—are being squeezed out of existence. The
deterioration of public education, including prioritizing discipline and security over
learning in public schools located in poor communities, is directly related to the
prison “solution.”

Profiting from Prisoners

As prisons proliferate in U.S. society, private capital has become enmeshed in the
punishment industry. And precisely because of their profit potential, prisons are
becoming increasingly important to the U.S. economy. If the notion of punishment
as a source of potentially stupendous profits is disturbing by itself, then the strategic
dependence on racist structures and ideologies to render mass punishment palatable
and profitable is even more troubling.

Prison privatization is the most obvious instance of capital’s current movement
toward the prison industry. While government-run prisons are often in gross violation

586    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

of international human rights standards, private prisons are even less accountable. In
March of this year, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest U.S.
private prison company, claimed 54,944 beds in 68 facilities under contract or devel-
opment in the U.S., Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Following the
global trend of subjecting more women to public punishment, CCA recently opened
a women’s prison outside Melbourne. The company recently identified California as
its “new frontier.”

Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (WCC), the second largest U.S. prison com-
pany, claimed contracts and awards to manage 46 facilities in North America, the
United Kingdom, and Australia. It boasts a total of 30,424 beds as well as contracts
for prisoner health care services, transportation, and security.

Currently, the stocks of both CCA and WCC are doing extremely well. Between
1996 and 1997, CCA’s revenues increased by 58 percent, from $293 million to $462
million. Its net profit grew from $30.9 million to $53.9 million. WCC raised its
revenues from $138 million in 1996 to $210 million in 1997. Unlike public cor-
rectional facilities, the vast profits of these private facilities rely on the employment
of non-union labor.

The Prison Industrial Complex

But private prison companies are only the most visible component of the increasing
corporatization of punishment. Government contracts to build prisons have bolstered
the construction industry. The architectural community has identified prison design
as a major new niche. Technology developed for the military by companies like West-
inghouse are being marketed for use in law enforcement and punishment.

Moreover, corporations that appear to be far removed from the business of pun-
ishment are intimately involved in the expansion of the prison industrial complex.
Prison construction bonds are one of the many sources of profitable investment for
leading financiers such as Merrill Lynch. MCI charges prisoners and their families
outrageous prices for the precious telephone calls which are often the only contact
prisoners have with the free world.

Many corporations whose products we consume on a daily basis have learned that
prison labor power can be as profitable as third world labor power exploited by U.S.-
based global corporations. Both relegate formerly unionized workers to joblessness
and many even wind up in prison. Some of the companies that use prison labor are
IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, and Boeing. But
it is not only the hi-tech industries that reap the profits of prison labor. Nordstrom
department stores sell jeans that are marketed as “Prison Blues,” as well as t-shirts and
jackets made in Oregon prisons. The advertising slogan for these clothes is “made on
the inside to be worn on the outside.” Maryland prisoners inspect glass bottles and
jars used by Revlon and Pierre Cardin, and schools throughout the world buy gradu-
ation caps and gowns made by South Carolina prisoners.

“For private business,” write Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans (a political prisoner
inside the Federal Correctional Institution at Dublin, California) “prison labor is like

6 Davis / Masked Racism  587

a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment
insurance, or workers’ compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign coun-
tries. New leviathan prisons are being built on thousands of eerie acres of factories
inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations
for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and
lingerie for Victoria’s Secret—all at a fraction of the cost of ‘free labor.’ ”

Devouring the Social Wealth

Although prison labor—which ultimately is compensated at a rate far below the
minimum wage—is hugely profitable for the private companies that use it, the penal
system as a whole does not produce wealth. It devours the social wealth that could be
used to subsidize housing for the homeless, to ameliorate public education for poor
and racially marginalized communities, to open free drug rehabilitation programs
for people who wish to kick their habits, to create a national health care system, to
expand programs to combat HIV, to eradicate domestic abuse—and, in the process,
to create well-paying jobs for the unemployed.

Since 1984 more than twenty new prisons have opened in California, while only
one new campus was added to the California State University system and none to the
University of California system. In 1996–97, higher education received only 8.7 per-
cent of the State’s General Fund while corrections received 9.6 percent. Now that
affirmative action has been declared illegal in California, it is obvious that education
is increasingly reserved for certain people, while prisons are reserved for others. Five
times as many black men are presently in prison as in four year colleges and universi-
ties. This new segregation has dangerous implications for the entire country.

By segregating people labeled as criminals, prison simultaneously fortifies and
conceals the structural racism of the U.S. economy. Claims of low unemployment
rates—even in black communities—make sense only if one assumes that the vast
numbers of people in prison have really disappeared and thus have no legitimate
claims to jobs. The numbers of black and Latino men currently incarcerated amount
to two percent of the male labor force. According to criminologist David Downes,
“[t]reating incarceration as a type of hidden unemployment may raise the jobless rate
for men by about one-third, to 8 percent. The effect on the black labor force is greater
still, raising the [black] male unemployment rate from 11 percent to 19 percent.”

Hidden Agenda

Mass incarceration is not a solution to unemployment, nor is it a solution to the vast
array of social problems that are hidden away in a rapidly growing network of prisons
and jails. However, the great majority of people have been tricked into believing in
the efficacy of imprisonment, even though the historical record clearly demonstrates
that prisons do not work. Racism has undermined our ability to create a popular
critical discourse to contest the ideological trickery that posits imprisonment as key

588    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

to public safety. The focus of state policy is rapidly shifting from social welfare to
social control.

Black, Latino, Native American, and many Asian youth are portrayed as the pur-
veyors of violence, traffickers of drugs, and as envious of commodities that they
have no right to possess. Young black and Latina women are represented as sexually
promiscuous and as indiscriminately propagating babies and poverty. Criminality and
deviance are racialized. Surveillance is thus focused on communities of color, immi-
grants, the unemployed, the undereducated, the homeless, and in general on those
who have a diminishing claim to social resources. Their claim to social resources
continues to diminish in large part because law enforcement and penal measures
increasingly devour these resources. The prison industrial complex has thus created
a vicious cycle of punishment which only further impoverishes those whose impov-
erishment is supposedly “solved” by imprisonment.

Therefore, as the emphasis of government policy shifts from social welfare to crime
control, racism sinks more deeply into the economic and ideological structures of
U.S. society. Meanwhile, conservative crusaders against affirmative action and bi-
lingual education proclaim the end of racism, while their opponents suggest that
racism’s remnants can be dispelled through dialogue and conversation. But conver-
sations about “race relations” will hardly dismantle a prison industrial complex that
thrives on and nourishes the racism hidden within the deep structures of our society.

The emergence of a U.S. prison industrial complex within a context of cas-
cading conservatism marks a new historical moment, whose dangers are un-
precedented. But so are its opportunities. Considering the impressive number of
grassroots projects that continue to resist the expansion of the punishment in-
dustry, it ought to be possible to bring these efforts together to create radical and
nationally visible movements that can legitimize anti-capitalist critiques of the prison
industrial complex. It ought to be possible to build movements in defense of prison-
ers’ human rights and movements that persuasively argue that what we need is not
new prisons, but new health care, housing, education, drug programs, jobs, and
education. To safeguard a democratic future, it is possible and necessary to weave to-
gether the many and increasing strands of resistance to the prison industrial complex
into a powerful movement for social transformation.

7  You May Know Me from Such

Roles as Terrorist #4

Jon Ronson

The right-wing action hero gave Maz Jobrani hope. This was 2001. Maz had been try-
ing to make it as an actor in Hollywood for three years, but things were going badly
for him. He was earning peanuts as an assistant at an advertising agency. But then his
agent telephoned: Did Maz want to play a terrorist in a Chuck Norris movie? So Maz
read the screenplay for The President’s Man: A Line in the Sand, and he found within it
a moment of promising subtlety.

“Chuck Norris plays a professor of Middle Eastern studies,” Maz tells me. We’re
sitting in a coffee shop in Westwood, Los Angeles. Maz is a goateed man in his early
forties who was born in Tehran but moved with his family to the San Francisco
Bay Area when he was 6. “There’s a scene where he’s talking to his students about
Afghanistan. One of the students raises his hand and says something like, ‘Uh, pro-
fessor, they’re all fanatics, so why don’t we just kill them all?’ And the Chuck Norris
character goes, ‘Now, now. They’re not all bad.’ And I thought, ‘Wow! A nuance!’”

The nuance gave Maz hope. Did this mean they’d allow him to make his character
nuanced? Maz was aware that fixating on this one line might have been self-deluding,
like a drowning man clutching driftwood in a hurricane. But he agreed to take the
part. Then, at the wardrobe fitting, they handed him his turban.

“I said, ‘Whoa, whoa! No! Afghans in America don’t wear turbans. Plus, this guy’s
a terrorist. He’s not going to draw attention to himself. You tell the producers I want
to bring authenticity to this character.’ The wardrobe supervisor replied, ‘All right,
all right, I’ll talk to them.’”

The message came back from Chuck Norris’s people that the turban was mandatory.
And then came Maz’s death. It was the one thing he’d been excited about, because
the script alluded to a short fight immediately preceding it. Hand-to-hand combat
with Chuck Norris!
“But on the day of the scene,” Maz says, “Chuck Norris told his son, who was the
director, ‘Oh, I’ll just take a gun and I’ll shoot him.’ Oh, great! I don’t even get a fight!”
“So how exactly did you get shot?” I ask Maz.
“Okay, so I’m about to set off a bomb at a refinery,” he replies. “Chuck Norris runs
in. I run away, because I’m scared. He gets behind the computer and starts disman-
tling the bomb, because he’s a genius. I come running back in carrying an Uzi. And I
try to shoot him. But he takes out his gun and shoots me.” Maz shrugs. “I start to yell,
‘Allah—’ Bang! I’m down. I don’t even get ‘Allahu Akbar!’ out. It was horrible, man.”

Republished with permission of Jon Ronson/GQ.

589

590    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

Maz shakes his head at the memory. It was humiliating. Actually, it was worse than
humiliating—it was a harbinger. Maz understood, as he lay dead in that refinery, that
Hollywood didn’t want him to be an actor. Hollywood wanted him to be a caricature.
“I started acting in junior high,” he says. “I was in Guys and Dolls. I was Stanley Kow-
alski. In my head, before coming to Hollywood, I thought, ‘I can play anything.’” But
instead he’d become the latest iteration in Hollywood’s long history of racist casting,
reducing his religion and culture to a bunch of villainous, cartoonish psychopaths.
He knew he had to get out.

I glance at my phone. It’s 1 p.m. We’re running late to meet three of Maz’s friends
at a nearby Lebanese restaurant. We jump into Maz’s car.

Maz refuses to take terrorist parts nowadays. He’s primarily a stand-up comedian
instead, a very funny and successful one. In fact, he’s just published a memoir, I’m
Not a Terrorist, But I’ve Played One on TV. But Maz’s friends at the restaurant haven’t
been so lucky. They still make their livings as actors, which means they still play ter-
rorists all the time.

Maz and I hurry into the restaurant, apologizing for being late. We order a
mezze plate for five. These men have been killed while committing acts of terror-
ism on Homeland and 24, in The Kingdom and Three Kings and True Lies, and in too
many other films and shows to list. We’ve barely sat down when Waleed Zuaiter, a
­Palestinian-American actor in his early forties, recounts for me his death scene on
Law & Order: Criminal Intent. This was about a year after September 11. “I play a guy
from a sleeper cell,” Waleed says. “I’m checking my e-mails. I hear the cops come in,
and the first thing I go for is my box cutter. There’s literally a box cutter in the scene.”

“Was this in an office?” I ask Waleed.
“It was in my home!” he replies. “I just happened to have a box cutter lying around.”
Waleed shakes his head, bemused. “The cops burst in, and next thing you know I’ve
got the box cutter to some guy’s neck. And then one of the cops shoots me.”
“I die in Iron Man,” says Sayed Badreya, an Egyptian man with a salt-and-pepper
beard. “I die in Executive Decision. I get shot at by—what’s his name?—Kurt Russell.
I get shot by everyone. George Clooney kills me in Three Kings. Arnold blows me up
in True Lies . . .”
As Sayed and Waleed and the others describe their various demises, it strikes me
that the key to making a living in Hollywood if you’re Muslim is to be good at dying.
If you’re a Middle Eastern actor and you can die with charisma, there is no shortage
of work for you.
Here’s another irony in the lives of these men: While they profoundly wish they
didn’t have to play terrorists, much of our lunch is taken up with them swapping tips
on clever ways to stand out at terrorist auditions.
“If I’m going in for the role of a nice father, I’ll talk to everybody,” Sayed tells the
table. “But if you’re going for a terrorist role, don’t fucking smile at all those white peo-
ple sitting there. Treat them like shit. The minute you say hello, you break character.”
“But it’s smart at the end of the audition to break it,” adds Hrach Titizian, who at
36 is the youngest actor here. “ ‘Oh, thanks, guys.’ So they know it’s okay to have you
on set for a couple of weeks.”

7 Ronson / You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4  591

Then Waleed says something you don’t often hear actors say, because most actors
regard their competition with dread: “Whenever it’s that kind of role and we see each
other at the auditions, it’s so comforting. We’re not in this alone. We’re in this together.”

We’re in this together. By this Waleed is referring to a uniquely demeaning set of cir-
cumstances. I’m sure practically all actors, Muslim or otherwise, feel degraded. Most
have no power over their careers—what roles they can play, how their performances
are edited. But Muslim actors are powerless in unusually hideous ways. The last time
one became a big star in America was back in 1962—Omar Sharif in Lawrence of
Arabia. These days they get offered terrorist roles and little else. And we—the paying
public—barely even notice, much less worry about it. Where’s the outrage? There is
none, except from the actors themselves. These roles are ethically nightmarish for
them, and the stress can wreak havoc on their lives. Waleed’s father, for instance,
threatened never to talk to him again if he ever played a terrorist. I thought that was
bad enough. But then I meet another actor who had it much worse.

•••

Ahmed Ahmed was raised a strict Muslim in Riverside, California, by his Egyptian-
immigrant parents—a mother who learned English from watching soap operas, and
a gas-station-attendant father who ended up buying an automotive shop. The day
Ahmed told them he was quitting college to try his luck in Hollywood, his father
asked if he was gay and didn’t speak to him for seven years.

When I meet Ahmed at the French Roast Café in downtown New York City, he
echoes Waleed’s thoughts about the camaraderie among these actors. “It’s always the
same guys at every audition. Waleed, Sayed Badreya . . . You’re all sitting in a row in
the waiting room. Oftentimes the casting offce is right next to you. The door’s shut,
but you can hear what’s going on.”

“What do you hear?” I ask him.
“Oh, you know,” he says. “‘ALLAHU AKBAR!’ And then . . .” Ahmed switches to
the voice of a bubbly casting director. “‘Thank you! That was great!’ And the guy walks
out, sweating. And you walk in and they’re, ‘Hey! Thanks for coming in! Whenever
you’re ready!’ And you’re thinking, ‘How do I do it differently from the guy before
me? Do I go louder?’”
When he auditioned for Executive Decision, he went louder. Executive Decision is,
I realize as I talk to people from this world, considered the ground zero (as it were)
of ludicrous portrayals of Islamic terrorists. This was 1996, and Ahmed was in his
mid-twenties. “My agent had called me. ‘There’s this film. It’s a $55 million action
suspense thriller starring Kurt Russell, Halle Berry, and Steven Seagal. They want to
bring you in to read for one of the parts.’ I said, ‘What’s the part?’ She said, ‘Terror-
ist Number Four.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to do it.’ She said, ‘It’s three weeks of work. It
pays $30,000.’”
And so Ahmed read for the part. “My lines were ‘Sit down and obey or I will kill
you in the name of Allah.’ And the director goes, ‘Brilliant! Do it again. But this time,
can you give me more of that Middle Eastern, you know . . .’ I go, ‘Anger?’ He goes,
‘Yes! Yes! Angry!’”

592    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

Feeling a flash of actual anger, Ahmed decided to ridicule the process by going
stupidly over-the-top.

“And the next day,” he says, “my agent calls me up: ‘You booked it.’”
By the time Executive Decision came out later that year, Ahmed says, his life had
“become dark. Boozing on the Sunset Strip. After-hours parties. I’d wake up at 2 P.M.
and do it all over again. It’s the same people in the clubs every night. Everyone’s try-
ing to fill a void.”
“Were you doing all that boozing because you felt guilty for playing terrorists?” I
ask him.
“There was an element of that,” he replies. “There was an element of not working
between those parts. And then I had an epiphany. I called my agent: ‘Hey! Don’t send
me out on these terrorist parts anymore. I’ll be open for anything else, but not the
terrorist stuff.’” Ahmed pauses. “After that, she never called.”
“How often did she call before then?” I ask him.
“Oh, three or four times a week.”
And so Ahmed made a decision: “Get the fuck out of Hollywood.” He went
to Mecca. And what he saw there were “four and a half million people dressed in
white—rich, poor, walking side by side, asking for blessings from God.”
For ten solid years after his trip to Mecca, Ahmed quit acting and became a stand-
up comedian. He still performs regularly, but he says he’ll take a terrorist role from
time to time if a good one comes along. After all, he notes, nobody accuses Robert De
Niro of betraying other Italian-Americans when he plays a mobster.

•••

The evening after our lunch in Westwood, I visit Sayed Badreya, the older Egyptian
actor, at his Santa Monica apartment. When I arrive, he’s online, looking at photo-
graphs of Arabian horses.

”I’m involved in breeding them,” he says, “because I don’t know if I can keep play-
ing these same parts.” He says his daughter was once asked at school what her father
did for a living and she replied, “He hijacks airplanes.”

Sayed takes his work seriously and has always gone to great lengths to research
his roles. In 1991, he started attending a mosque in Culver City, one that was known
to attract some militant worshippers, so he could study Islamic radicalism up close.
A few years later, some of the mosque’s worshippers went to a movie and recognized
Sayed. Back at the mosque after Friday prayers, they surrounded him. “They were
yelling, right in my face: ‘You’re helping the Zionist Jews of Hollywood in their agenda
to make Islam look bad. For money, you’re giving up your heritage.’”

“How were you responding?” I ask.
“I felt guilty,” he says. “I knew they were sort of right. But I yelled back at them,
‘We have to take their money to make our own movie and tell our own story!’ We
were yelling so hard we were showering each other with spit.”
“What was the movie of yours they saw?” I ask him.
“Executive fucking Decision,” he says.
Sayed says he does all he can to intersperse his terrorist roles with more helpful
portrayals of Muslims. He wrote and starred in a well-regarded film, AmericanEast,

7 Ronson / You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4  593

charting the struggles of Muslims in America post-9/11. But he has to play terror-
ists to pay the bills, so he at least tries to be a realistic one. He does side work as a
technical consultant, advising directors on the accuracy of their films. He worked in
this capacity on Executive Decision. “We had a really beautiful moment in an Arabic
wedding scene,” Sayed says. “And the producer, Joel Silver, saw it and said, ‘No, no.
This is nice. I want a fucking bad Arab. We don’t want a good Arab.’”

Almost all of the wedding scene was cut from the film, Sayed says. But here’s a
scene that wasn’t cut: One of the terrorists takes a quick break from killing people
to read the Koran. “If I’m playing a guy chosen to hijack a plane, that means I’m one
of the top soldiers. I’m going on a mission. I’m not going to Mecca. He might recite
something in his head if he’s religious, but he’s not going to open the Bible. But pro-
ducers get really sensitive if you say, ‘No, that’s not accurate.’”

In an e-mailed statement, Joel Silver denied the “bad Arab” incident, adding, “Any
editorial decisions, made twenty years ago, were strictly creative, and not to perpetu-
ate any stereotypes.” I didn’t hear back from any of the other producers or directors
I approached. Not Peter Berg (The Kingdom, another film that has a bad reputation
with Muslim actors for its portrayal of the Islamic world), nor Stephen McEveety
(Mel Gibson’s collaborator on The Passion of the Christ and the producer of the The
Stoning of Soraya M., in which an Iranian husband has his wife stoned to death), nor
Joel Surnow, the co-creator of 24. Maz told me that his most offensive acting offer
ever was for a Joel Surnow production—Fox’s short-lived comedy The 1/2 Hour News
Hour. Maz says he was asked to audition for a sketch about a Middle Eastern architect
pitching to rebuild the Twin Towers. The joke was that his design included a bull’s-
eye right on the building. Howard Gordon, the man behind Homeland and 24, is the
only producer I persuade to talk to me. He calls me from his car.

“I came to this issue when I was accused of having Islamophobia in 24,” he says.
“We had a family, essentially, of terrorists on the show. The Muslim Public Affairs
Council provided an education for me on the power of images.”

“What did they say?”
“They asked me to imagine what it might be like to be a Muslim, to have people
fear my faith,” he replies. “I felt very sympathetic. I didn’t want to be a midwife to
xenophobia.”
Since then, he says, he has done his best. And people have noticed. When I was
having lunch with Maz and the other actors at the Lebanese restaurant in Westwood,
Howard was one of the only mainstream producers they praised. (Three Kings’ David
O. Russell was another.)
“Anyone with a conscience has to take this seriously,” Howard tells me. “I’d often
hidden behind the defense that 24 was a counterterrorism show. We rationalized
to ourselves that our primary task was to tell a compelling story.” But the truth, he
knew, was darker than that: “We all have our personal biases and fears—I suspect
we’re wired to feel threatened by the ‘other.’ And I include myself in that category.”

•••

In the lobby of a chichi old hotel in Midtown Manhattan, Anthony Azizi warns
me that this interview might get heated. And indeed it does. If you want to know the

594    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

impact that a lifetime of doing these movies can have on a man, spend some time
with Anthony Azizi.

Anthony is a veteran of various CSIs and NCISs and 24. His death scene in 24, he
says, made it onto a Yahoo list of best deaths ever. (His throat gets slit with a credit
card.) He’s a big, handsome, intense man who is not, by the way, a Muslim. He’s a
member of the Iranian spiritualist faith the Bahá’í.

“Hollywood has the power to snap its fingers and make whoever it wants a star,”
he begins. “It specifically and purposefully doesn’t want to see an Arab or a Middle
Eastern star. There’s too much prejudice and racism—and the people running it, I
don’t need to go into the specifics of their backgrounds. . . .”

I think I know what he’s getting at. But all sorts of producers—not just Jews—are
behind insensitive movie portrayals of Muslims. There’s Chuck Norris. There’s John
Musker, director of 1992’s Aladdin, in which all the “good Arabs” have American ac-
cents and all the “bad Arabs” have pseudo-Middle Eastern accents. Stephen McEveety
(The Stoning of Soraya M.) is Catholic.

Anthony carries on, turning his anger toward Jon Stewart’s Rosewater, in which the
Mexican actor Gael García Bernal plays the Iranian-Canadian reporter Maziar Bahari.
“Man, if I saw Jon Stewart, you’d have to hold me back. How dare you hire a Mexican-
American to play an Iranian-American, with all these amazing Iranian-American art-
ists. I can’t stand it. I’m sick of it. I speak Spanish fluently. . . .”

He effortlessly slides into perfect Spanish for a few seconds, then returns to being
Anthony. “Why am I not being hired for Mexican or Latino roles?” he says. “You play
my roles, but I can’t play yours, and I speak Spanish just as well? Go fuck yourself.”
Anthony picks up my recorder. “Go fuck yourself, Jon Stewart!” he yells. “Have me
on your show if you have the balls! You don’t have the balls!”

He’s really shouting now. The hotel receptionists keep glancing nervously over
at us, wondering whether to intervene. “Hollywood people are pussies!” he rants.
“They’re racist! They don’t want to say, ‘I just built a Middle Eastern star!’ Here’s how I
see it—and this is probably the most controversial thing I’ll ever say: The only Middle
Eastern star was Omar Sharif. The minute he had a relationship with a Jewish-Amer-
ican woman named Barbra Streisand was the death knell for any other Arab-American
actor’s career. Hear it again! The minute he had a sexual relationship with a Jewish . . .”

“I don’t underst—” I start to say.
“How dare you make that an incident where no Arab-American actor can ever get
a career again!”
Finally I get my question out, or at least some of it: “But what’s the connection
between Omar Sharif purportedly having an affair with Barbra Streisand and—”
“I think there’s a certain type of producer that doesn’t want to see that happen,” he
says. “They don’t want their gem—Barbra Streisand was the gem of the Jewish com-
munity—sleeping with the Arab heathen! It caused huge riots in Egypt, too. I’d say
the same thing to the Egyptian community. . . .”
Sure, Anthony’s Barbra Streisand outburst is crazy. If there is a racist conspiracy
in Hollywood to rob Middle Eastern actors of roles, it’s not a great idea to rail against
it with a racist-conspiracy theory of one’s own. But think about what Anthony has

7 Ronson / You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4  595

been subjected to in his career. He and the other men in this story are going through
something that future generations will regard as outrageous. They’re the bloodthirsty
Red Indians surrounding the settlers’ wagons in Stagecoach. They’re the black savages
in The Birth of a Nation (who were played by white actors in blackface). They are the
people Hollywood will be apologizing to tomorrow.

“Don’t question my talent,” Anthony says. “I should be a star by now. But I’m not.
So you explain why.”

Perhaps the closest this community has to a star is Navid Negahban. He played,
most famously, Abu Nazir in Homeland and also the Iraqi in American Sniper who helps
the U.S. military locate “the butcher.” He was Ali, the stoner in The Stoning of Soraya M.

“Everyone I’ve met seems really talented,” I tell Anthony. “So why do you think
Navid, of all of you . . .?”

“He’s hot right now, playing bad guys,” Anthony replies. “He loves to play those
roles. I love Navid. He’s my brother. But there’s no longevity in those roles. You always
get whacked. Everybody who’s still alive in Homeland is white! Where is Abu Nazir?
He got whacked, ‘cause he’s brown.”

•••

Getting to meet Navid isn’t easy. One minute he’s filming in upstate New York, the
next he’s doing motion capture as a video-game character in Los Angeles before fly-
ing off to shoot a movie in Morocco. But I manage to catch him for an hour at a
coffee shop near Columbus Circle in New York City. He’s already there, chatting
with another on-screen terrorist, Herzl Tobey (The Shield, 24, Homeland).They’ve been
working on a movie together upstate, so Navid has brought him along to meet me.
Navid is very dashing, with an old-fashioned matinee-idol air to him.

“I’m sure you’ve had a few of the others say, ‘I won’t do terrorists anymore,’” he
says as I sit down.

“Yes,” I say.
“I’ve told them that’s the biggest mistake,” says Navid. “If we don’t play those roles,
the character becomes a caricature. [The producers] might get some actor from a
different background who looks Middle Eastern.” Herzl nods, adding, “The writer is
sitting here in America, writing about a world he’s completely unfamiliar with. So of
course he won’t be able to write it with the full depth and sensuality that comes with
that world. It’s up to us to bring that depth.”
I tell Navid that I’ve noticed that the more prominent the Middle Eastern actor, the
more awesome the death. Back when Maz was just starting out, he barely got ‘Allah’
out before Chuck Norris shot him. But Navid is at the top of the pecking order, the
closest thing we have to the late Omar Sharif. I ask him to remind me how Abu Nazir
died on Homeland.
“Oh, he was graceful,” Navid replies. “It was so . . .” He smacks his lips. “He’s
sitting very gracefully on the floor. On his knees. He’s ready. The soldiers run in.
Everybody’s yelling. But he’s calm. He’s just looking at all of them very, very calmly.
And then he reaches into his pocket and they shoot him. And there’s a Koran in his
pocket.” Navid smiles wistfully. “That was beautiful,” he says. “I die well.”

8  The Florida State Seminoles:  

The Champions of Racist Mascots

Dave Zirin

It’s easy to oppose the name of the Washington Redskins and call for owner Dan
Snyder to change his beloved bigoted brand. After all, it’s a dictionary-defined slur
bestowed on the NFL franchise by their arch-segregationist, minstrel-loving founder.1
When you have Native American organizations, leading sportswriters, Republicans
as well as Democrats in Congress and even the president say the time has come to
change the name, it is not exactly difficult to get on board.

But what about the Florida State Seminoles, whose football team on Monday
night won the Vizio/Dow Chemical/Blackwater/Vivid Video BCS National Cham-
pionship Game? The NCAA, since 2005, has had formal restrictions against nam-
ing teams after Native American tribes, and yet there were the Seminole faithful:
thousands of overwhelmingly Caucasian fans with feathers in their hair, doing the
Tomahawk chop and whooping war chants on national television. Their passions
were stirred into a frenzy by a white person, face smeared with war paint, dressed
as the legendary chief Osceola riding out on a horse. As Stewart Mandel of Sports
Illustrated gushed, “Chief Osceola plants the flaming spear in the Rose Bowl. Awe-
some.” (Osceola was adopted after the school quietly retired their previous Native
American mascot “Sammy Seminole.”)

I have been to dozens of Redskins game and have never seen anything close to this
kind of mass interactive minstrelsy. Yet there are no protests against this spectacle, no
angry editorials and no politicians jumping on the issue. Why is that? Because as any
Florida State fanatic will shout at you, the university has “a formal agreement with
Seminole Nation” and that makes everything all right. Fans treat this much-touted
agreement like they have a “racism amnesty card” in their back pocket. The approval
of the Seminole Nation, they will tell you makes it all A-okay. Actually it doesn’t. It
doesn’t first and foremost because the existence of this “agreement with the Seminole
Nation” is a myth.

The agreement is with the Florida Seminole Tribal Council and not the Seminole
Nation. The majority of Seminoles don’t even live in Florida. They live in Oklahoma,
one of the fruits of the Seminole Wars, the Indian Removal Act and The Trail of
Tears. These Oklahoma Seminoles—who, remember, are the majority—oppose the
name. On October 26, 2013, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma’s governing body
passed a resolution that read in part, “The Seminole Nation condemns the use of all
American Indian sports team mascots in the public school system, by college and
university level and by professional teams.”

From The Nation, January 7, 2014. © 2014 The Nation Company, LLC. All rights reserved. Used
by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying,
r­edistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

596

8 Zirin / The Florida State Seminoles: The Champions of Racist Mascots   597

As for the Florida Seminole Tribal Council, it is the owner of a series of luxury
casino hotels throughout the state where the Seminole “brand” is prominently on
display. The Tribal Council also bought the Hard Rock Cafe for $965 million in cash
in 2006, which thanks to the Seminoles’ “first-nation status” now also offers gambling
in its Florida locales. Hard Rock corporate called this “the perfect marriage of two
kindred spirits.” Seminole Nation Hard Rock Hotel and Casino T-shirts are available
for purchase.

For the wealthy and powerful Florida Seminole tribal leaders, the cultural eleva-
tion of the football program is a part of their extremely lucrative gaming operation.
Defending the school’s use of the name is about defending its brand. That is why the
chairman of the Florida Seminole Tribe of Florida, James Billie, said, “Anybody come
here into Florida trying to tell us to change the name, they better go someplace else,
because we’re not changing the name.”

Some might say that this is fine with them. After all, given the incalculable wealth
stolen from Native American tribes over the centuries, what is wrong with them get-
ting some of it back? That would be fine, except for the stubborn fact that gambling
wealth flows into very few hands. The majority of Native Americans languish in dire
poverty, with reservation poverty listed at 50 percent in the last census.

Another argument for the Florida State Seminoles’ keeping their name is that it
actually educates people and keeps the history from being eradicated. This is self-
serving codswallop, like saying a Muhammad Ali mousepad teaches people about his
resistance to the war in Vietnam. Branding and cultural appropriation is not history.
It’s anti-history. Take school mascot Chief Osceola as an example. If people in the
stands and at home actually knew who Osceola was, the ritual of his riding a horse
and throwing a spear before games would be an outrage, and not just because the
Seminoles, who lived and fought in swampy everglades, tended not to ride horses.
Chief Osceola was a great resistance fighter and leader of the Second Seminole War
in Florida.

As written in the terrific book 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed
US History, “Osceola became an international symbol of the Seminole ­Nation’s refusal
to surrender. He was a renowned public speaker and a fierce fighter who was also
an opponent of the US slave system. One of his two wives was a woman of African
descent and it was not uncommon for escaped slaves to become a part of Seminole
Nation. Osceola’s army frustrated the entire US Government, five separate Army gen-
erals, at a cost to the US Treasury of more than 20 million dollars. . . . On October
21, 1837, Osceola met with US government officials to discuss a peace treaty. When
he arrived, he was captured and imprisoned. Osceola’s respect was so widespread that
this maneuver was widely condemned and viewed as a dishonorable way to bring
down the great warrior.”2

Osceola was nothing less than the American Mandela, but a Nelson Mandela who
did not survive Robben Island. Imagine before a South African soccer game, a white
person in black face, dressed like Mandela, running out to midfield to psyche up
the crowd. Not even Rick Reilly would say that this was somehow educating people
about African resistance to apartheid.3 No one is getting educated about Osceola or

598    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

the Seminole Wars. Instead their heroic resistance has been translated for football
purposes to being “tough.” This “respect” for their toughness not only reduces a rich
and varied Seminole culture to a savage culture of war, it is also an unspoken way to
to praise our own ability to engineer their conquest.

The last argument, which is perhaps the most common, is, “Changing the name
of the Redskins or the Seminoles . . . where does the politically correct madness end?
Do we stop using ‘Giants’ because it offends tall people? Or ‘Cowboys’ because it of-
fends cowboys?” This kind of witticism is actually profoundly insulting because there
was this thing called “history” that happened, and in this “history” giants were not
subject to mass displacement and genocide. Once 100 percent of this country, Native
Americans are now 0.9 percent, and we play sports on their graves. Their rituals and
dress are our own commercialized entertainment. We turn our eyes to the field and
away from the way institutionalized racism continues to define the lives of the over-
whelming majority to Native Americans who do not own a stake in the Hard Rock
Cafe. That gets us to the final problem with Seminole nation and all Native American
mascoting. It makes us more ignorant about our own collective history. I’m not sure
we can afford it.

NOTES

 1.  Tomasky, Michael. (2011, November 10). “The Racist Redskins” [Review of the book
Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins by Thomas G. Smith]. The New
York Review of Books.
 2.  Michelle Bollinger and Dao X. Tran (eds.), 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radical Who
Changed US History. Haymarket Books © 2012.
 3.  Zirin, D. (2013, September 18). “Rick Reilly and the Most Irredeemably Stupid
­Defense of the Redskins Name You Will Ever Read.” The Nation.

9  M ichael Brown’s Unremarkable

Humanity

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The New York Times has a feature1 today looking at the brief life of Michael Brown,
informing us that he was “no angel.” The reasons for this are many. Brown smoked
marijuana. He lived in a community that “had rough patches.” He wrote rap songs
that were “by turns contemplative and vulgar.” He shoplifted and pushed a store
clerk who tried to stop him. These details certainly paint a portrait of a young
man who failed to be angelic. That is because no person is angelic—least of all
­teenagers—and there is very little in this piece that distinguishes Brown from any
other kid his age.

What horrifies a lot of us beholding the spectacle of Ferguson, beholding the
spectacle of Sanford,2 of Jacksonville,3 is how easily we could see ourselves in these
kids. I shudder to think of my reaction, at 17, to some strange dude following me
through my own housing development. I shudder to think of my reaction, at 17,
to some other strange dude pulling up next to me and telling me to turn down
my music.

And if Michael Brown was not angelic, I was practically demonic. I had my first
drink when I was 11. I once brawled in the cafeteria after getting hit in the head
with a steel trash can. In my junior year I failed five out of seven classes. By the time
I graduated from high school, I had been arrested for assaulting a teacher and been
kicked out of school (twice). And yet no one who knew me thought I had the least
bit of thug in me. That is because I also read a lot of books, loved my Commodore
64, and ghostwrote love notes for my friends. In other words, I was a human being.
A large number of American teenagers live exactly like Michael Brown. Very few of
them are shot in the head and left to bake on the pavement.

The “angelic” standard was not one created by the reporter. It was created by a
society that cannot face itself, and thus must employ a dubious “morality” to hide
its sins. It is reinforced by people who have embraced the notion of “twice as good”
while avoiding the circumstances which gave that notion birth. Consider how easily
living in a community “with rough patches” becomes part of a list of ostensible sins.
Consider how easily “black-on-black crime” becomes not a marker of a shameful
legacy of segregation but a moral failing.

We’ve been through this before.4 We will almost certainly go through it again.

© 2014 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic Magazine. All rights reserved.
D­ istributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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600    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

NOTES

1.  Eligon, J. (2014, August 24). Michael Brown Spent Last Weeks Grappling With Prob-
lems and Promise. The New York Times.
2.  Coates, T. (2013, July 13). On the Killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman.
The Atlantic.
3.  Coates, T. (2014, February 17). Black Boy Interrupted. The Atlantic.
4.  Touré. (2014). Black America and the burden of the perfect victim. The Washington
Post.

10  W hen You Forget to Whistle

Vivaldi

Tressie McMillan Cottom

Last week Johnathan Ferrell had a horrible car crash. He broke out the back window
to escape and walked, injured, to the nearest home hoping for help. Ferrell may have
been too hurt, too in shock to remember to whistle Vivaldi. Ferrell is dead.1

Social psychologist Claude Steele revolutionized our understanding of the daily
context and cognitive effects of stereotypes and bias. The title of his book alludes to a
story his friend, New York Times writer Brent Staples, once shared.2 An African Ameri-
can man, Staples, recounts how his physical presence terrified whites as he moved
about Chicago as a free citizen and graduate student. To counter the negative effects
of white fear he took to whistling a classical music piece by Italian composer Vivaldi.
It was a signal to the victimless victims of his blackness that he was safe. Dangerous
black men do not listen to classical music, or so the hope goes. The incongruence
between Staples’ musical choices and the stereotype of him as a predator were meant
to disrupt the implicit, unexamined racist assumptions of him. It seems trite perhaps,
an attempt to make whites feel at ease unless we recall the potential consequences of
white disease for black lives.

I do not know many black people who do not have a similar coping mechanism.
I have been known to wear university branded clothing when I am shopping for real
estate. A friend straightens her hair when she is job seeking. Another friend, a His-
panic male, told me that he shaves all his facial hair when entertaining white clients to
signal that he is respectable. While stereotype threat can occur to any member of any
group, it occurs most frequently and with more dangerous consequences for groups
for whom there are more and stronger negative beliefs.

Of course, the oft-quoted idiom that respectability politics will not save you is
true. Just as wearing long johns is not a preventative measure against rape for women,
affecting middle class white behaviors is not a protective measure but a talisman. In
exerting any measure of control over signaling that we are not dangerous or violent
or criminal we are mostly assuaging the cognitive stress that constant management
of social situations causes.

That stress has real consequences. Steele inspired an entire body of research on
those effects. When the object of a stereotype is aware of the negative perception of
her, that awareness constrains all manner of ability and performance. From testing
scores of women who know the others in the room believe women cannot do math
to missing a sports play when one is reminded that Asians don’t have hops, the effects
of stereotype threat are real.

Republished with permission of Tressie McMillan Cottom.

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602    PART VIII Maintaining Race, Class, and Gender Hierarchies: Reproducing “Reality”

Perhaps more interesting to me is what Steele described as the constant back-
ground processing that stereotyped people engage. It’s like running too many pro-
grams in the background of your computer as you try to play a YouTube video. Just
as the extra processing, invisible to the naked eye, impacts the video experience the
cognitive version compromises the functioning of our most sophisticated machines:
human bodies.

I mentioned just today to a colleague that for all we social scientists like to talk
about structural privilege it might be this social-psychological privilege that is the
most valuable. Imagine the productivity of your laptop when all background pro-
grams are closed. Now imagine your life when those background processes are rarely,
if ever, activated because of the social position your genetic characteristics afford you.

Of course, privilege is sometimes structural. But the murder of Johnathan Ferrell
reminds us that activation of stereotype threat in daily interactions can be aided and
abetted by organizational processes like the characterization of a police call to 911
and structural legitimacy like the authority of the police to shoot first and ask ques-
tions later. I am choosing to ignore how that process was set in motion. Perhaps better
feminist scholars than myself can explore the historical, cultural gendered fear that
legitimizes the unconscious bias of black men as sexual and criminal predators. I find
I do not have the stomach for it today.

I just read an article that quotes Ferrell’s family at length. His family’s attorney did
not just want us to know that Ferrell was a friend and son but that: “He’s engaged to
be married, he has a dog and a cat, he was driving a Toyota Camry, he survived an
accident, had 3.7 GPA, a chemistry major. This is not someone who posed a threat to
the officers or anyone else, this is an everyday American.”

A 3.7 GPA.
They want us to know that their murdered friend, son, brother and cousin had a
3.7 GPA.
Ferrell may have been too injured, too shocked to whistle Vivaldi to all he en-
countered the night he was shot. It may not have helped if he had through slammed
doors, over police sirens, and gunfire. But even in death his family cannot help but
signal to us all that he was a student and, by extension, a human being whose death
should matter.
Whistling Vivaldi in tribute, a talisman and hope that justice will hear what its
executor’s did not.

NOTES

1.  Lee, T. (2013, September 25). The 911 call that led to Jonathan Ferrell’s death.
2.  Pronin, E. (2010, May 1). Not Just Whistling Vivaldi.

Suggestions for Further Reading  603

Suggestions for Further Reading

Cole, David. No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System. New York: The New
Press, 2000.

Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle. Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy. C­ ambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Goings, Kenneth W. Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping. B­ loomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1994.

Harding, Sandra, and Merrill B. Hintikka. Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology,
M­ etaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, 2nd ed. New York: Springer, 2007.

Harvey, David. Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. New York:
Verso, 2006.

Holtzman, Linda. Media Messages: What Film, Television, and Popular Music Teach Us About Race, Class,
G­ ender, and Sexual Orientation. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharp, 2000.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Jhalley, Sut. The Spectacle of Accumulation: Essays in Culture, Media and Politics. New York: Peter Lang

­International Academic Publishers, 2011.
Kimmel, Michael. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. New York: Harper, 2009.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo: 10th Anniversary Edition. New York: Picador, 2009.
Lewis, Amanda E. Race in the Schoolyard. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
Loewen, James. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Rev. ed.

New York: New Press, 2008.
Madrick, Jeff. The Case for Big Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Mazzocco, Dennis W. Networks of Power: Corporate TV’s Threat to Democracy. Boston: South End Press, 1999.
Orenstein, Peggy. Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl C­ ulture.

New York: Harper, 2012.
———. Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap. New York: Anchor, 1995.
Parenti, Michael. Inventing Reality, 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Sadker, David, Myra Sadker, and Karen Zittleman. Still Failing at Fairness: How Gender Bias Cheats Boys and

Girls in School and What We Can Do About It. New York: Scribner, 2009.
Schor, Juliet B. Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture. New York:

­Scribner, 2004.
Steele, Claude. Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. New York: Norton, 2011.
Thompson, Becky W. A Hunger So Wide and So Deep, 2nd ed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota

Press, 1996.
Valenti, Jessica. The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women. B­ erkeley,

CA: Seal Press, 2009.
Yates, Michael D., ed. More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States. New York: Monthly Review

Press, 2007.

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PA R T IXSelectionTitle  605

Social Change: Revisioning
the Future and Making a
Difference

An adequate understanding of the nature and causes of race, class, and gender
oppression is a critical first step toward moving beyond these issues. Solutions to
problems are generated, at least in part, by the way we pose them. That is why
so much of this book is devoted to defining and analyzing the nature of these
systems of oppression. Only when we appreciate the subtle and complex factors
that combine to create a society in which wealth, privilege, and opportunity are
unequally apportioned will we be able to formulate viable proposals for bringing
about social change.

What, then, have the selections in this book told us about racism, sexism, het-
erosexism, and class divisions? First, that there is no single cause. Eliminating
these forms of oppression will involve changes at the personal, social, political,
and economic level. It will require us to think differently about ourselves and oth-
ers and to see the world through new lenses and using new categories. We will
have to learn to pay close attention to our attitudes and behavior and ask what
values and what kinds of relationship they create and maintain, both consciously
and unconsciously. We will have to reevaluate virtually every institution in soci-
ety and critically appraise the ways in which those institutions, intentionally or
unintentionally, privilege some and disadvantage others in what we take to be
their ­normal course of operations. As we identify the ways in which our society
reproduces the forms of inequality and privilege that we have been studying,
we will have to act to change them. In short, we must scrutinize every aspect of

605

606    PART IX Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference

e­ conomic, political, and social life with a view to asking whose interests are served
and whose are denied when the world is organized in this way.

In Selection 1, poet and writer Audre Lorde suggests that we will need to begin
by redefining and rethinking the meaning of difference. While acknowledging
that real differences of race, age, and sexuality exist, Lorde argues that it is not
these differences in themselves that separate us as much as it is our refusal to
acknowledge them and the role they play in shaping our relationships and social
institutions. Denying or distorting those differences keeps us apart; embracing
them can provide a new starting point from which to work together to reconstruct
our world.

In Selection 2, bell hooks joins Audre Lorde in urging us to rethink difference.
At the same time, she continues another of the major themes of this book: under-
standing the ways in which sex, race, and class function as interlocking, mutually
supportive, systems of domination. While acknowledging past failures of much
feminist theory to adequately address issues of race, racism, and class, hooks
argues that a revisioned feminism can provide the most comprehensive per-
spective from which to challenge all forms of oppression and domination. This is
true, she maintains, because sexism is the form of oppression we confront daily:
“Sexism directly shapes and determines relations of power in our private lives,
in familiar social spaces, in that most intimate context ‘home’ and in that most
intimate sphere of relations ‘family.’ ” hooks envisions a process of education and
consciousness raising whereby women from diverse backgrounds come together
in small groups to talk about feminism and to learn from one another, and she calls
on men as well to commit themselves to overthrowing patriarchal domination.

Cooper Thompson picks up the challenge in Selection 3. A new vision of
society will require new choices and options for men as well as women. In his
essay, Thompson is profoundly critical of the ways in which boys are socialized
to believe that violence is an acceptable, “even desirable” way to establish their
manhood and to negotiate difference. He believes that this socialization leads
to both misogyny and homophobia and makes it difficult for men to form warm
and loving friendships with members of both sexes. Because the social costs of
prevailing conceptions of masculinity are so high, Thompson urges us to develop
a new vision of the word “man,” one that allows boys to claim many of the qual-
ities previously defined as “feminine.” Thompson concludes with a warning: “The
survival of our society may rest on the degree to which we are able to teach men
to cherish life.”

Confronted by the enormous scale of the work to be done, many of us feel
overwhelmed and disheartened. But significant and lasting change in our society
will only come about when each of us assumes responsibility for making a differ-
ence. In Selection 4, Andrea Ayvazian suggests that one way to overcome a sense
of immobilization and despair is to become an ally of those who are oppressed.
According to Ayvazian, “An ally is a member of a dominant group in our society
who works to dismantle any form of oppression from which she or he receives the
benefit.” By acting consciously and deliberately to challenge oppression and to

PART IX Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference  607

make privilege visible, allies provide role models for us all and demonstrate ways
in which each of us can act as a powerful agent of change. Several of the articles
that follow provide concrete examples of what this might mean.

Selection 4 is by Matthew Rothschild, former editor of The Progressive, and
like many of the other authors in this section, he makes no pretense of neutrality.
The stakes are too high and the possibilities of disaster are ever more severe. The
time is now, and we must fight for equality and justice for all people everywhere.
Rothschild makes clear that to see the social change we want, we must “demand
the ­impossible”—the title of his piece.

In Selection 6, Tasbeeh Hewees writes about the black feminist founders of the
Black Lives Matter movement, which began in response to the police violence in
black communities. This movement against state-authorized discrimination and
brutality emerges from a history of organizing among women of color and queer
people that takes the intersectionality of oppression as a starting point. This piece
demonstrates how in “addressing the specific struggles of black queer women . . . ​
they [the founders of Black Lives Matter] are confronting a system that subju-
gates everyone.”

Scot Nakagawa’s piece, Selection 7, expands the discussion of what it means to
be an ally by asking how Asian Americans can put a challenge to anti-blackness at
the center of their work for racial justice. Nakagawa argues that the role of Asian
Americans in this political moment is to acknowledge the leadership of the Black
Lives Matter movement and to connect to organized resistance to the varied
forms of oppression that are produced by an ideology of white supremacy. For
Nakagawa, this is a time to tell complex stories that can lead to greater under-
standing of the ways in which racial injustice is created, sustained, and disrupted,
and that centering black liberation in activist work requires us to make connec-
tions and see intersections, not ignore them for the sake of simplicity.

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1    Age, Race, Class, and Sex

Women Redefining Difference

Audre Lorde

Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplis-
tic oppression to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/
inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms
of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through system-
atized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehuman-
ized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World
people, working-class people, older people, and women.

As a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including
one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself a part of some
group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong. Traditionally, in ameri-
can society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to
stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the conscious-
ness of our oppressor. For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as
american as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the
language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some
i­llusion of protection. Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises,
those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them.
In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their
mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my children’s culture
in school. Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as
to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are
expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position
and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy
which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios
for altering the present and constructing the future.

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy
which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have
all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and
loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not
possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate.
But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a
result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separa-
tion and confusion.

Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it
is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to

From Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde, published by Crossing Press. Copyright © 1984, 2007 by
Audre Lorde. Used herein by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.

609

610    PART IX Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference

recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our
misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.

Racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the
right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other
and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism, Classism.

It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these distortions from our living
at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define those differences upon which
they are imposed. For we have all been raised in a society where those distortions
were endemic within our living. Too often, we pour the energy needed for recogniz-
ing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable
barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false
and treacherous connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human
difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives. We speak not of
human difference, but of human deviance.

Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm,
which each one of us within our hearts knows “that is not me.” In america, this norm
is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially
secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within society.
Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are
different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting
other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practicing.
By and large within the women’s movement today, white women focus upon their
oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age.
There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood
that does not in fact exist.

Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each others’ energy and creative
insight. Recently a women’s magazine collective made the decision for one issue to
print only prose, saying poetry was a less “rigorous” or “serious” art form. Yet even the
form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most
economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical
labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hos-
pital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years,
writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in
the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry
has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s
own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and
plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help deter-
mine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated prices for material,
who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? When we speak of broadly
based women’s culture, we need to be aware of the effect of class and economic dif-
ferences on the supplies available for producing art.

As we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish, ageism
is another distortion of relationship which interferes with our vision. By ignoring the
past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap” is an important

1 Lorde / Age, Race, Class, and Sex  611

social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the
older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join
hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important
question, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to
invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.

We find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons over and over
that our mothers did because we do not pass on what we have learned, or because we
are unable to listen. For instance, how many times has this all been said before? For
another, who would have believed that once again our daughters are allowing their
bodies to be hampered and purgatoried by girdles and high heels and hobble skirts?

Ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of those dif-
ferences presents the most serious threat to the mobilization of women’s joint power.

As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in
terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become “other,” the out-
sider whose experience and tradition is too “alien” to comprehend. An example of this
is the signal absence of the experience of women of Color as a resource for women’s
studies courses. The literature of women of Color is seldom included in women’s lit-
erature courses and almost never in other literature courses, nor in women’s studies
as a whole. All too often, the excuse given is that the literatures of women of Color
can only be taught by Colored women, or that they are too difficult to understand, or
that classes cannot “get into” them because they come out of experiences that are “too
different.” I have heard this argument presented by white women of otherwise quite
clear intelligence, women who seem to have no trouble at all teaching and review-
ing work that comes out of the vastly different experiences of Shakespeare, Molière,
Dostoyefsky, and Aristophanes. Surely there must be some other explanation.

This is a very complex question, but I believe one of the reasons white women
have such difficulty reading Black women’s work is because of their reluctance
to see Black women as women and different from themselves. To examine Black
women’s literature effectively requires that we be seen as whole people in our actual
­complexities—as individuals, as women, as human—rather than as one of those
problematic but familiar stereotypes provided in this society in place of genuine im-
ages of Black women. And I believe this holds true for the literatures of other women
of Color who are not Black.

The literatures of all women of Color recreate the textures of our lives, and many
white women are heavily invested in ignoring the real differences. For as long as
any difference between us means one of us must be inferior, then the recognition of
any difference must be fraught with guilt. To allow women of Color to step out of
stereotypes is too guilt provoking, for it threatens the complacency of those women
who view oppression only in terms of sex.

Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems
and pitfalls facing us as women.

Thus, in a patriarchal power system where whiteskin privilege is a major prop,
the entrapments used to neutralize Black women and white women are not the same.
For example, it is easy for Black women to be used by the power structure against

612    PART IX Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference

Black men, not because they are men, but because they are Black. Therefore, for
Black women, it is necessary at all times to separate the needs of the oppressor from
our own legitimate conflicts within our communities. This same problem does not
exist for white women. Black women and men have shared racist oppression and still
share it, although in different ways. Out of that shared oppression we have developed
joint defenses and joint vulnerabilities to each other that are not duplicated in the
white community, with the exception of the relationship between Jewish women and
Jewish men.

On the other hand, white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the
oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the
same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not
an invitation to join power; our racial “otherness” is a visible reality that makes that
quite clear. For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards
for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools.

Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism,
it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you
are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to
behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to
co-exist with patriarchy in the relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or
the neighborhood rapist happens along. And true, unless one lives and loves in the
trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

But Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is stitched with
violence and with hatred, that there is no rest. We do not deal with it only on the
picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the places where we dare to verbalize
our resistance. For us, increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our
living—in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the
schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank
teller, the waitress who does not serve us.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will
grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be
dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon
the reasons they are dying.

The threat of difference has been no less blinding to people of Color. Those of us
who are Black must see that the reality of our lives and our struggle does not make
us immune to the errors of ignoring and misnaming difference. Within Black com-
munities where racism is a living reality, differences among us often seem dangerous
and suspect. The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity, and
a Black feminist vision mistaken for betrayal of our common interests as a people.
Because of the continuous battle against racial erasure that Black women and Black
men share, some Black women still refuse to recognize that we are also oppressed as
women, and that sexual hostility against Black women is practiced not only by the
white racist society, but implemented within our Black communities as well. It is a
disease striking the heart of Black nationhood, and silence will not make it disappear.
Exacerbated by racism and the pressures of powerlessness, violence against Black

1 Lorde / Age, Race, Class, and Sex  613

women and children often becomes a standard within tour communities, one by
which manliness can be measured. But these woman-hating acts are rarely discussed
as crimes against Black women.

As a group, women of Color are the lowest paid wage earners in america. We are
the primary targets of abortion and sterilization abuse, here and abroad. In certain
parts of Africa, small girls are still being sewed shut between their legs to keep them
docile and for men’s pleasure. This is known as female circumcision, and it is not a
cultural affair as the late Jomo Kenyatta insisted, it is a crime against Black women.

Black women’s literature is full of the pain of frequent assault, not only by a rac-
ist patriarchy, but also by Black men. Yet the necessity for and history of shared
battle have made us, Black women, particularly vulnerable to the false accusation
that anti-sexist is anti-Black. Meanwhile, womanhating as a recourse of the power-
less is sapping strength from Black communities, and our very lives. Rape is on the
increase, reported and unreported, and rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized
aggression. As Kalamu ya Salaam, a Black male writer, points out, “As long as male
domination exists, rape will exist. Only women revolting and men made conscious
of their responsibility to fight sexism can collectively stop rape.”1

Differences between ourselves as Black women are also being misnamed and used
to separate us from one another. As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the
many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and
sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck
out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or
denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live.
My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts
of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back
and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally
imposed definition. Only then can I bring myself and my energies as a whole to the
service of those struggles which I embrace as part of my living.

A fear of lesbians, or of being accused of being a lesbian, has led many Black
women into testifying against themselves. It has led some of us into destructive al-
liances, and others into despair and isolation. In the white women’s communities,
heterosexism is sometimes a result of identifying with the white patriarchy, a rejection
of that interdependence between women-identified women which allows the self to
be, rather than to be used in the service of men. Sometimes it reflects a diehard belief
in the protective coloration of heterosexual relationships, sometimes a self-hate which
all women have to fight against, taught us from birth.

Although elements of these attitudes exist for all women, there are particular
resonances of heterosexism and homophobia among Black women. Despite the fact
that woman-bonding has a long and honorable history in the African and African-
american communities, and despite the knowledge and accomplishments of many
strong and creative women-identified Black women in the political, social and cul-
tural fields, heterosexual Black women often tend to ignore or discount the existence
and work of Black lesbians. Part of this attitude has come from an understandable
terror of Black male attack within the close confines of Black society, where the

614    PART IX Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference

punishment for any female self-assertion is still to be accused of being a lesbian and
therefore unworthy of the attention or support of the scarce Black male. But part
of this need to misname and ignore Black lesbians comes from a very real fear that
openly women-identified Black women who are no longer dependent upon men
for their self-definition may well reorder our whole concept of social relationships.

Black women who once insisted that lesbianism was a white woman’s problem
now insist that Black lesbians are a threat to Black nationhood, are consorting with
the enemy, are basically un-Black. These accusations, coming from the very women
to whom we look for deep and real understanding, have served to keep many Black
lesbians in hiding, caught between the racism of white women and the homophobia
of their sisters. Often, their work has been ignored, trivialized, or misnamed, as with
the work of Angelina Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lorraine Hansberry. Yet women-
bonded women have always been some part of the power of Black communities, from
our unmarried aunts to the amazons of Dahomey.

And it is certainly not Black lesbians who are assaulting women and raping chil-
dren and grandmothers on the streets of our communities.

Across this country, as in Boston during the spring of 1979 following the unsolved
murders of twelve Black women, Black lesbians are spearheading movements against
violence against Black women.

What are the particular details within each of our lives that can be scrutinized and
altered to help bring about change? How do we redefine difference for all women? It
is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those
differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the
ignoring and misnaming of those differences.

As a tool of social control, women have been encouraged to recognize only one
area of human difference as legitimate, those differences which exist between women
and men. And we have learned to deal across those differences with the urgency of
all oppressed subordinates. All of us have had to learn to live or work or coexist with
men, from our fathers on. We have recognized and negotiated these differences, even
when this recognition only continued the old dominant/subordinate mode of human
relationship, where the oppressed must recognize the masters’ difference in order to
survive.

But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As
women, we must root our internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we
are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must rec-
ognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior,
and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint
struggles.

The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and
develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The
old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns,
no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmeti-
cally altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, re-
crimination, lamentation, and suspicion.

1 Lorde / Age, Race, Class, and Sex  615

For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old
structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the
living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will
never dismantle the master’s house.

As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,2 the true focus
of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to
escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and
which knows only the oppressor’s tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.

Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition
by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as
different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white,
old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths
to our survival.

We have chosen each other
and the edge of each others battles
the war is the same
if we lose
someday women’s blood will congeal
upon a dead planet
if we win
there is no telling
we seek beyond history
for a new and more possible meaning.3

NOTES

 1.  From “Rape: A Radical Analysis, An African-American Perspective” by Kalamu ya
Salaam in Black Books Bulletin, vol. 6, no. 4 (1980).
 2.  Seabury Press, New York, 1970.
 3.  From “Outlines,” unpublished poem.

2  Feminism

A Transformational Politic

bell hooks

We live in a world in crisis—a world governed by politics of domination, one in which
the belief in a notion of superior and inferior, and its concomitant ideology—that
the superior should rule over the inferior—affects the lives of all people everywhere,
whether poor or privileged, literate or illiterate. Systematic dehumanization, world-
wide famine, ecological devastation, industrial contamination, and the possibility
of nuclear destruction are realities which remind us daily that we are in crisis. Con-
temporary feminist thinkers often cite sexual politics as the origin of this crisis. They
point to the insistence on difference as that factor which becomes the occasion for
separation and domination and suggest that differentiation of status between females
and males globally is an indication that patriarchal domination of the planet is the
root of the problem. Such an assumption has fostered the notion that elimination of
sexist oppression would necessarily lead to the eradication of all forms of domination.
It is an argument that has led influential Western white women to feel that femi-
nist movement should be the central political agenda for females globally. Ideologi-
cally, thinking in this direction enables Western women, especially privileged white
women, to suggest that racism and class exploitation are merely the offspring of the
parent system: patriarchy. Within feminist movement in the West, this has led to the
assumption that resisting patriarchal domination is a more legitimate feminist action
than resisting racism and other forms of domination. Such thinking prevails despite
radical critiques made by black women and other women of color who question this
proposition. To speculate that an oppositional division between men and women
existed in early human communities is to impose on the past, on these non-white
groups, a world view that fits all too neatly within contemporary feminist paradigms
that name man as the enemy and woman as the victim.

Clearly, differentiation between strong and weak, powerful and powerless, has
been a central defining aspect of gender globally, carrying with it the assumption
that men should have greater authority than women, and should rule over them. As
significant and important as this fact is, it should not obscure the reality that women
can and do participate in politics of domination, as perpetrators as well as victims—
that we dominate, that we are dominated. If focus on patriarchal domination masks
this reality or becomes the means by which women deflect attention from the real
conditions and circumstances of our lives, then women cooperate in suppressing and
promoting false consciousness, inhibiting our capacity to assume responsibility for
transforming ourselves and society.

Copyright 2014 from Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, by bell hooks. Reproduced by
permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.

616

2 hooks / Feminism  617

Thinking speculatively about early human social arrangement, about women
and men struggling to survive in small communities, it is likely that the parent–
child relationship with its very real imposed survival structure of dependency, of
strong and weak, of powerful and powerless, was a site for the construction of a para-
digm of domination. While this circumstance of dependency is not necessarily one
that leads to domination, it lends itself to the enactment of a social drama wherein
domination could easily occur as a means of exercising and maintaining control. This
speculation does not place women outside the practice of domination, in the exclu-
sive role of victim. It centrally names women as agents of domination, as potential
theoreticians, and creators of a paradigm for social relationships wherein those groups
of individuals designated as “strong” exercise power both benevolently and coercively
over those designated as “weak.”

Emphasizing paradigms of domination that call attention to woman’s capacity to
dominate is one way to deconstruct and challenge the simplistic notion that man
is the enemy, woman the victim; the notion that men have always been the op-
pressors. Such thinking enables us to examine our role as women in the perpetu-
ation and maintenance of systems of domination. To understand domination, we
must understand that our capacity as women and men to be either dominated or
dominating is a point of connection, of commonality. Even though I speak from
the particular experience of living as a black woman in the United States, a white-
supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal society, where small numbers of white men (and
honorary “white men”) constitute ruling groups, I understand that in many places
in the world oppressed and oppressor share the same color. I understand that
right here in this room, oppressed and oppressor share the same gender. Right now
as I speak, a man who is himself victimized, wounded, hurt by racism and class
exploitation is actively dominating a woman in his life—that even as I speak, women
who are ourselves exploited, victimized, are dominating children. It is necessary for
us to remember, as we think critically about domination, that we all have the capacity
to act in ways that oppress, dominate, wound (whether or not that power is institu-
tionalized). It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within
that we must resist—the potential victim within that we must rescue—otherwise we
cannot hope for an end to domination, for liberation.

This knowledge seems especially important at this historical moment when black
women and other women of color have worked to create awareness of the ways in
which racism empowers white women to act as exploiters and oppressors. Increas-
ingly this fact is considered a reason we should not support feminist struggle even
though sexism and sexist oppression is a real issue in our lives as black women (see,
for example, Vivian Gordon’s Black Women, Feminism, Black Liberation: Which Way?).
It becomes necessary for us to speak continually about the convictions that inform
our continued advocacy of feminist struggle. By calling attention to interlocking sys-
tems of domination—sex, race, and class—black women and many other groups
of women acknowledge the diversity and complexity of female experience, of our
relationship to power and domination. The intent is not to dissuade people of color
from becoming engaged in feminist movement. Feminist struggle to end patriarchal

618    PART IX Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference

domination should be of primary importance to women and men globally not be-
cause it is the foundation of all other oppressive structure but because it is that form
of domination we are most likely to encounter in an ongoing way in everyday life.

Unlike other forms of domination, sexism directly shapes and determines relations
of power in our private lives, in familiar social spaces, in that most intimate context—
home—and in that most intimate sphere of relations—family. Usually, it is within
the family that we witness coercive domination and learn to accept it, whether it be
domination of parent over child, or male over female. Even though family relations
may be, and most often are, informed by acceptance of a politic of domination, they
are simultaneously relations of care and connection. It is this convergence of two con-
tradictory impulses—the urge to promote growth and the urge to inhibit growth—
that provides a practical setting for feminist critique, resis­tance, and transformation.

Growing up in a black, working-class, father-dominated household, I experienced
coercive adult male authority as more immediately threatening, as more likely to
cause immediate pain than racist oppression or class exploitation. It was equally clear
that experiencing exploitation and oppression in the home made one feel all the more
powerless when encountering dominating forces outside the home. This is true for
many people. If we are unable to resist and end domination in relations where there
is care, it seems totally unimaginable that we can resist and end it in other institu-
tionalized relations of power. If we cannot convince the mothers and/or fathers who
care not to humiliate and degrade us, how can we imagine convincing or resisting an
employer, a lover, a stranger who systematically humiliates and degrades?

Feminist effort to end patriarchal domination should be of primary concern pre-
cisely because it insists on the eradication of exploitation and oppression in the family
context and in all other intimate relationships. It is that political movement which
most radically addresses the person—the personal—citing the need for transforma-
tion of self, of relationships, so that we might be better able to act in a revolutionary
manner, challenging and resisting domination, transforming the world outside the
self. Strategically, feminist movement should be a central component of all other
liberation struggles because it challenges each of us to alter our person, our personal
engagement (either as victims or perpetrators or both) in a system of domination.

Feminism, as liberation struggle, must exist apart from and as a part of the larger
struggle to eradicate domination in all its forms. We must understand that patriarchal
domination shares an ideological foundation with racism and other forms of group
oppression, that there is no hope that it can be eradicated while these systems remain
intact. This knowledge should consistently inform the direction of feminist theory and
practice. Unfortunately, racism and class elitism among women has frequently led to
the suppression and distortion of this connection so that it is now necessary for femi-
nist thinkers to critique and revise much feminist theory and the direction of feminist
movement. This effort at revision is perhaps most evident in the current widespread
acknowledgement that sexism, racism, and class exploitation constitute interlocking
systems of domination—that sex, race, and class, and not sex alone, determine the
nature of any female’s identity, status, and circumstance, the degree to which she will
or will not be dominated, the extent to which she will have the power to dominate.

2 hooks / Feminism  619

While acknowledgement of the complex nature of woman’s status (which has
been most impressed upon everyone’s consciousness by radical women of color) is
a significant corrective, it is only a starting point. It provides a frame of reference
which must serve as the basis for thoroughly altering and revising feminist theory
and practice. It challenges and calls us to re-think popular assumptions about the
nature of feminism that have had the deepest impact on a large majority of women,
on mass consciousness. It radically calls into question the notion of a fundamentally
common female experience which has been seen as the prerequisite for our coming
together, for political unity. Recognition of the inter-connectedness of sex, race, and
class highlights the diversity of experience, compelling redefinition of the terms of
unity. If women do not share “common oppression,” what then can serve as a basis
for our coming together?

Unlike many feminist comrades, I believe women and men must share a common
understanding—a basic knowledge of what feminism is—if it is ever to be a powerful
mass-based political movement. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, I suggest
that defining feminism broadly as “a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression”
would enable us to have a common political goal. We would then have a basis on
which to build solidarity. Multiple and contradictory definitions of feminism create
confusion and undermine the effort to construct feminist movement so that it ad-
dresses everyone. Sharing a common goal does not imply that women and men will
not have radically divergent perspectives on how that goal might be reached. Because
each individual starts the process of engagement in feminist struggle at a unique level
of awareness, very real differences in experience, perspective, and knowledge make
developing varied strategies for participation and transformation a necessary agenda.

Feminist thinkers engaged in radically revisioning central tenets of feminist
thought must continually emphasize the importance of sex, race, and class as fac-
tors which together determine the social construction of femaleness, as it has been so
deeply ingrained in the consciousness of many women active in feminist movement
that gender is the sole factor determining destiny. However, the work of education
for critical consciousness (usually called consciousness-raising) cannot end there.
Much feminist consciousness-raising has in the past focused on identifying the par-
ticular ways men oppress and exploit women. Using the paradigm of sex, race, and
class means that the focus does not begin with men and what they do to women, but
rather with women working to identify both individually and collectively the specific
character of our social identity.

Imagine a group of women from diverse backgrounds coming together to talk
about feminism. First they concentrate on working out their status in terms of sex,
race, and class using this as the standpoint from which they begin discussing pa-
triarchy or their particular relations with individual men. Within the old frame of
reference, a discussion might consist solely of talk about their experiences as vic-
tims in relationship to male oppressors. Two women—one poor, the other quite
wealthy—might describe the process by which they have suffered physical abuse by
male partners and find certain commonalities which might serve as a basis for bond-
ing. Yet if these same two women engaged in a discussion of class, not only would

620    PART IX Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference

the social construction and expression of femaleness differ, so too would their ideas
about how to confront and change their circumstances. Broadening the discussion to
include an analysis of race and class would expose many additional differences even
as commonalities emerged.

Clearly the process of bonding would be more complex, yet this broader discus-
sion might enable the sharing of perspectives and strategies for change that would
enrich rather than diminish our understanding of gender. While feminists have in-
creasingly given “lip service” to the idea of diversity, we have not developed strate-
gies of communication and inclusion that allow for the successful enactment of this
feminist vision.

Small groups are no longer the central place for feminist consciousness-raising.
Much feminist education for critical consciousness takes place in Women’s Studies
classes or at conferences which focus on gender. Books are a primary source of educa-
tion, which means that already masses of people who do not read have no access. The
separation of grassroots ways of sharing feminist thinking across kitchen tables from
the spheres where much of that thinking is generated, the academy, undermines femi-
nist movement. It would further feminist movement if new feminist thinking could be
once again shared in small group contexts, integrating critical analysis with discussion
of personal experience. It would be useful to promote anew the small group setting as
an arena for education for critical consciousness, so that women and men might come
together in neighborhoods and communities to discuss feminist concerns.

Small groups remain an important place for education for critical consciousness
for several reasons. An especially important aspect of the small group setting is the
emphasis on communicating feminist thinking, feminist theory, in a manner that can
be easily understood. In small groups, individuals do not need to be equally literate
or literate at all because the information is primarily shared through conversation,
in dialogue which is necessarily a liberatory expression. (Literacy should be a goal
for feminists even as we ensure that it not become a requirement for participation
in feminist education.) Reforming small groups would subvert the appropriation of
feminist thinking by a select group of academic women and men, usually white, usu-
ally from privileged class backgrounds.

Small groups of people coming together to engage in feminist discussion, in dia-
lectical struggle make a space where the “personal is political” as a starting point for
education for critical consciousness can be extended to include politicization of the
self that focusses on creating understanding of the ways sex, race, and class together
determine our individual lot and our collective experience. It would further feminist
movement if many well known feminist thinkers would participate in small groups,
critically re-examining ways their works might be changed by incorporating broader
perspectives. All efforts at self-transformation challenge us to engage in ongoing,
critical self-examination and reflection about feminist practice, about how we live in
the world. This individual commitment, when coupled with engagement in collec-
tive discussion, provides a space for critical feedback which strengthens our efforts
to change and make ourselves new. It is in this commitment to feminist principles in
our words and deeds that the hope of feminist revolution lies.

2 hooks / Feminism  621

Working collectively to confront difference, to expand our awareness of sex, race,
and class as interlocking systems of domination, of the ways we reinforce and per-
petuate these structures, is the context to which we learn the true meaning of soli-
darity. It is this work that must be the foundation of feminist movement. Without it,
we cannot effectively resist patriarchal domination; without it, we remain estranged
and alienated from one another. Fear of painful confrontation often leads women
and men active in feminist movement to avoid rigorous critical encounter, yet if we
cannot engage dialectically in a committed, rigorous, humanizing manner, we cannot
hope to change the world. True politicization—coming to critical consciousness—is
a difficult, “trying” process, one that demands that we give up set ways of thinking
and being, that we shift our paradigms, that we open ourselves to the unknown, the
unfamiliar. Undergoing this process, we learn what it means to struggle and in this
effort we experience the dignity and integrity of being that comes with revolutionary
change. If we do not change our consciousness, we cannot change our actions or
demand change from others.

Our renewed commitment to a rigorous process of education for critical con-
sciousness will determine the shape and direction of future feminist movement.
Until new perspectives are created, we cannot be living symbols of the power of
feminist thinking. Given the privileged lot of many leading feminist thinkers, both
in terms of status, class, and race, it is harder these days to convince women of the
primacy of this process of politicization. More and more, we seem to form select
interest groups composed of individuals who share similar perspectives. This limits
our capacity to engage in critical discussion. It is difficult to involve women in new
processes of feminist politicization because so many of us think that identifying
men as the enemy, resisting male domination, gaining equal access to power and
privilege is the end of feminist movement. Not only is it not the end, it is not even
the place we want revitalized feminist movement to begin. We want to begin as
women seriously addressing ourselves, not solely in relation to men, but in rela-
tion to an entire structure of domination of which patriarchy is one part. While
the struggle to eradicate sexism and sexist oppression is and should be the primary
thrust of feminist movement, to prepare ourselves politically for this effort we must
first learn how to be in solidarity, how to struggle with one another.

Only when we confront the realities of sex, race, and class, the ways they divide
us, make us different, stand us in opposition, and work to reconcile and resolve
these issues will we be able to participate in the making of feminist revolution, in the
transformation of the world. Feminism, as Charlotte Bunch emphasizes again and
again in Passionate Politics, is a transformational politics, a struggle against domina-
tion wherein the effort is to change ourselves as well as structures. Speaking about
the struggle to confront difference, Bunch asserts:

A crucial point of the process is understanding that reality does not look the same
from different people’s perspective. It is not surprising that one way feminists
have come to understand about differences has been through the love of a person
from another culture or race. It takes persistence and motivation—which love often
engenders—to get beyond one’s ethnocentric assumptions and really learn about other

622    PART IX Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference

perspectives. In this process and while seeking to eliminate oppression, we also dis-
cover new possibilities and insights that come from the experience and survival of
other peoples.

Embedded in the commitment to feminist revolution is the challenge to love. Love
can be and is an important source of empowerment when we struggle to confront
issues of sex, race, and class. Working together to identify and face our differences—
to face the ways we dominate and are dominated—to change our actions, we need a
mediating force that can sustain us so that we are not broken in this process, so that
we do not despair.

Not enough feminist work has focussed on documenting and sharing ways indi-
viduals confront differences constructively and successfully. Women and men need
to know what is on the other side of the pain experienced in politicization. We need
detailed accounts of the ways our lives are fuller and richer as we change and grow
politically, as we learn to live each moment as committed feminists, as comrades
working to end domination. In reconceptualizing and reformulating strategies for
future feminist movement, we need to concentrate on the politicization of love, not
just in the context of talking about victimization in intimate relationships, but in a
critical discussion where love can be understood as a powerful force that challenges
and resists domination. As we work to be loving, to create a culture that celebrates
life, that makes love possible, we move against dehumanization, against domination. In
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire evokes this power of love, declaring:

I am more and more convinced that true revolutionaries must perceive the
­revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love. For me,
the revolution, which is not possible without a theory of revolution—and therefore
s­ cience—is not irreconcilable with love . . . The distortion imposed on the word “love”
by the capitalist world cannot prevent the revolution from being essentially loving in
character, nor can it prevent the revolutionaries from affirming their love of life.

That aspect of feminist revolution that calls women to love womanness, that calls men
to resist dehumanizing concepts of masculinity, is an essential part of our struggle.
It is the process by which we move from seeing ourselves as objects to acting as
subjects. When women and men understand that working to eradicate patriarchal
domination is a struggle rooted in the longing to make a world where everyone can
live fully and freely, then we know our work to be a gesture of love. Let us draw upon
that love to heighten our awareness, deepen our compassion, intensify our courage,
and strengthen our commitment.

3  A New Vision of Masculinity

Cooper Thompson

I was once asked by a teacher in a suburban high school to give a guest presentation
on male roles. She hoped that I might help her deal with four boys who exercised
extraordinary control over the other boys in the class. Using ridicule and their sta-
tus as physically imposing athletes, these four wrestlers had succeeded in stifling
the participation of the other boys, who were reluctant to make comments in class
discussions.

As a class we talked about the ways in which boys got status in that school and how
they got put down by others. I was told that the most humiliating put-down was being
called a “fag.” The list of behaviors which could elicit ridicule filled two large chalk-
boards, and it was detailed and comprehensive; I got the sense that a boy in this school
had to conform to rigid, narrow standards of masculinity to avoid being called a fag.
I, too, felt this pressure and became very conscious of my mannerisms in front of the
group. Partly from exasperation, I decided to test the seriousness of these assertions.
Since one of the four boys had some streaks of pink in his shirt, and since he had told
me that wearing pink was grounds for being called a fag, I told him that I thought he
was a fag. Instead of laughing, he said, “I’m going to kill you.”

Such is the stereotypic definition of strength that is associated with masculinity.
But it is a very limited definition of strength, one based on dominance and control
and acquired through the humiliation and degradation of others.

Contrast this with a view of strength offered by Pam McAllister in her introduction
to Reweaving the Web of Life:

The “Strength” card in my Tarot deck depicts, not a warrior going off to battle with
his armor and his mighty sword, but a woman stroking a lion. The woman has not
slain the lion nor maced it, not netted it, nor has she put on it a muzzle or a leash.
And though the lion clearly has teeth and long sharp claws, the woman is not hiding,
nor has she sought a protector, nor has she grown muscles. She doesn’t appear to be
talking to the lion nor flattering it, nor tossing it fresh meat to distract its hungry jaws.
The woman on the “Strength” card wears a flowing white dress and a garland of flow-
ers. With one hand she cups the lion’s jaws, with the other she caresses its nose. The
lion on the card has big yellow eyes and a long red tongue curling out of its mouth.
One paw is lifted and the mane falls in thick red curls across its broad torso. The
woman. The lion. Together they depict strength.

This image of strength stands in direct contrast to the strength embodied in the actions
of the four wrestlers. The collective strength of the woman and the lion is a strength
unknown in a system of traditional male values. Other human qualities are equally

From Franklin Abbot and Cooper Thompson, New Men, New Minds. Copyright © 1987 by Cooper
Thompson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

623

624    PART IX Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference

foreign to a traditional conception of masculinity. In workshops I’ve offered on the male
role stereotype, teachers and other school personnel easily generate lists of attitudes
and behaviors which boys typically seem to not learn. Included in this list are being
supportive and nurturant, accepting one’s vulnerability and being able to ask for help,
valuing women and “women’s work,” understanding and expressing emotions (except
for anger), the ability to empathize with and empower other people, and learning to
resolve conflict in nonagressive, noncompetitive ways.

Learning Violence

All of this should come as no surprise. Traditional definitions of masculinity include
attributes such as independence, pride, resiliency, self-control, and physical strength.
This is precisely the image of the Marlboro man, and to some extent, these are desir-
able attributes for boys and girls. But masculinity goes beyond these qualities to stress
competitiveness, toughness, aggressiveness, and power. In this context, threats to
one’s status, however small, cannot be avoided or taken lightly. If a boy is called a fag,
it means that he is perceived as weak or timid—and therefore not masculine enough
for his peers. There is enormous pressure for him to fight back. Not being tough at
these moments only proves the allegation.

Violence is learned not just as a way for boys to defend allegations that they are
feminized, but as an effective, appropriate way for them to normally behave. In “The
Civic Advocacy of Violence” [M., Spring 1982] Wayne Ewing clearly states:

I used to think that we simply tolerated and permitted male abusiveness in our society.
I have now come to understand rather, that we advocate physical violence. Violence
is presented as effective. Violence is taught as the normal, appropriate and necessary
behavior of power and control. Analyses which interweave advocacy of male violence
with “SuperBowl Culture” have never been refuted. Civic expectations—translated into
professionalism, financial commitments, city planning for recreational space, the raising
of male children for competitive sport, the corporate ethics of business ownership of
athletic teams, profiteering on entertainment—all result in the monument of the National
Football League, symbol and reality at once of the advocacy of violence.

Ultimately, violence is the tool which maintains what I believe are the two most
critical socializing forces in a boy’s life: homophobia, the hatred of gay men (who are
stereotyped as feminine) or those men believed to be gay, as well as the fear of being
perceived as gay; and misognyn, the hatred of women. The two forces are targeted
at different classes of victims, but they are really just the flip sides of the same coin.
Homophobia is the hatred of feminine qualities in men while misogyny is the hatred
of feminine qualities in women. The boy who is called a fag is the target of other boys’
homophobia as well as the victim of his own homophobia. While the overt message
is the absolute need to avoid being feminized, the implication is that females—and all
that they traditionally represent—are contemptible. The United States Marines have
a philosophy which conveniently combines homophobia and misogyny in the belief
that “When you want to create a group of male killers, you kill ‘the woman’ in them.”

3 Thompson / A New Vision of Masculinity  625

The pressures of homophobia and misogyny in boys’ lives have been poignantly
demonstrated to me each time that I have repeated a simple yet provocative activ-
ity with students. I ask them to answer the question, “If you woke up tomorrow and
discovered that you were the opposite sex from the one you are now, how would you
and your life be different?” Girls consistently indicate that there are clear advantages to
being a boy—from increased independence and career opportunities to decreased risks
of physical and sexual assault—and eagerly answer the question. But boys often express
disgust at this possibility and even refuse sometimes to answer the question. In her
reports of a broad-based survey using this question, Alice Baumgartner reports the fol-
lowing responses are typical of boys: “If I were a girl, I’d be stupid and weak as a string”;
“I would have to wear makeup, cook, be a mother, and yuckky stuff like that”; “I would
have to hate snakes. Everything would be miserable”; “If I were a girl, I’d kill myself.”

The Costs of Masculinity

The costs associated with a traditional view of masculinity are enormous, and the
damage occurs at both personal and societal levels. The belief that a boy should be
tough (aggressive, competitive, and daring) can create emotional pain for him. While
a few boys experience short-term success for their toughness, there is little security
in the long run. Instead, it leads to a series of challenges which few, if any, boys ulti-
mately win. There is no security in being at the top when so many other boys are
competing for the same status. Toughness also leads to increased chances of stress,
physical injury, and even early death. It is considered manly to take extreme physical
risks and voluntarily engage in combative, hostile activities.

The flip side of toughness—nurturance—is not a quality perceived as masculine
and thus not valued. Because of this boys and men experience a greater emotional
distance from other people and few opportunities to participate in meaningful in-
terpersonal relationships. Studies consistently show that fathers spend very small
amounts of time interacting with their children. In addition, men report that they
seldom have intimate relationships with other men, reflecting their homophobia.
They are afraid of getting too close and don’t know how to take down the walls that
they have built between themselves.

As boys grow older and accept adult roles, the larger social costs of masculinity
clearly emerge. Most women experience male resistance to an expansion of women’s
roles; one of the assumptions of traditional masculinity is the belief that women
should be subordinate to men. The consequence is that men are often not willing to
accept females as equal, competent partners in personal and professional settings.
Whether the setting is a sexual relationship, the family, the streets, or the battle-
field, men are continuously engaged in efforts to dominate. Statistics on child abuse
consistently indicate that the vast majority of abusers are men, and that there is no
“typical” abuser. Rape may be the fastest growing crime in the United States. And it
is men, regardless of nationality, who provoke and sustain war. In short, traditional
masculinity is life threatening.

626    PART IX Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference

New Socialization for Boys

Masculinity, like many other human traits, is determined by both biological and
environmental factors. While some believe that biological factors are significant in
shaping some masculine behavior, there is undeniable evidence that cultural and
environmental factors are strong enough to override biological impulses. What is it,
then, that we should be teaching boys about being a man in a modern world?

■  Boys must learn to accept their vulnerability, learn to express a range of emo-
tions such as fear and sadness, and learn to ask for help and support in ap-
propriate situations.

■  Boys must learn to be gentle, nurturant, cooperative and communicative,
and in particular, learn nonviolent means of resolving conflicts.

■  Boys must learn to accept those attitudes and behaviors which have tradi-
tionally been labeled feminine as necessary for full human development—
thereby reducing homophobia and misogyny. This is tantamount to teaching
boys to love other boys and girls.

Certain qualities like courage, physical strength, and independence, which are
traditionally associated with masculinity, are indeed positive qualities for males, pro-
vided that they are not manifested in obsessive ways nor used to exploit or dominate
others. It is not necessary to completely disregard or unlearn what is traditionally
called masculine. I believe, however, that the three areas above are crucial for devel-
oping a broader view of masculinity, one which is healthier for all life.

These three areas are equally crucial for reducing aggressive, violent behavior
among boys and men. Males must learn to cherish life for the sake of their own whole-
ness as human beings, not just for their children, friends, and lovers. If males were
more nurturant, they would be less likely to hurt those they love.

Leonard Eron, writing in the American Psychologist, puts the issue of unlearning
aggression and learning nurturance in clear-cut terms:

Socialization is crucial in determining levels of aggression. No matter how aggression
is measured or observed, as a group males always score higher than females. But this
is not true for all girls. There are some girls who seem to have been socialized like boys
who are just as aggressive as boys. Just as some females can learn to be aggressive,
so males can learn not to be aggressive. If we want to reduce the level of aggression
in society, we should also discourage boys from aggression very early on in life and
reward them too for others’ behaviors; in other words, we should socialize boys more
like girls, and they should be encouraged to develop socially positive qualities such as
tenderness, cooperation, and aesthetic appreciation. The level of individual aggression
in society will be reduced only when male adolescents and young adults, as a result of
socialization, subscribe to the same standards of behavior as have been traditionally
encouraged for women.

Where will this change in socialization occur? In his first few years, most of a boy’s
learning about masculinity comes from the influences of parents, siblings and images
of masculinity such as those found on television. Massive efforts will be needed to

3 Thompson / A New Vision of Masculinity  627

make changes here. But at older ages, school curriculum and the school environment
provide powerful reinforcing images of traditional masculinity. This reinforcement
occurs through a variety of channels, including curriculum content, role modeling,
and extracurricular activities, especially competitive sports.

School athletics are a microcosm of the socialization of male values. While
participation in competitive activities can be enjoyable and healthy, it too easily be-
comes a lesson in the need for toughness, invulnerability, and dominance. Athletes
learn to ignore their own injuries and pain and instead try to injure and inflict pain
on others in their attempts to win, regardless of the cost to themselves or their oppo-
nents. Yet the lessons learned in athletics are believed to be vital for full and complete
masculine development, and as a model for problem-solving in other areas of life.

In addition to encouraging traditional male values, schools provide too few ex-
periences in nurturance, cooperation, negotiation, nonviolent conflict resolution,
and strategies for empathizing with and empowering others. Schools should become
places where boys have the opportunity to learn these skills; clearly, they won’t learn
them on the street, from peers, or on television.

Setting New Examples

Despite the pressures on men to display their masculinity in traditional ways, there
are examples of men and boys who are changing. “Fathering” is one example of a
positive change. In recent years, there has been a popular emphasis on child-care
activities, with men becoming more involved in providing care to children, both pro-
fessionally and as fathers. This is a clear shift from the more traditional view that child
rearing should be delegated to women and is not an appropriate activity for men.

For all of the male resistance it has generated, the Women’s Liberation Movement
has at least provided a stimulus for some men to accept women as equal partners
in most areas of life. These are the men who have chosen to learn and grow from
women’s experiences and together with women are creating new norms for relation-
ships. Popular literature and research on male sex roles is expanding, reflecting a
wider interest in masculinity. Weekly news magazines such as Time and Newsweek
have run major stories on the “new masculinity,” suggesting that positive changes are
taking place in the home and in the workplace. Small groups of men scattered around
the country have organized against pornography, battering, and sexual assault. Finally
there is the National Organization for Changing Men which has a pro-feminist, pro-
gay, pro–“new man” agenda, and its ranks are slowly growing.

In schools where I have worked with teachers, they report that years of efforts to
enhance educational opportunities for girls have also had some positive effects on
boys. The boys seem more tolerant of girls’ participation in coed sports activities and
in traditionally male shops and courses. They seem to have a greater respect for the
accomplishments of women through women’s contributions to literature and history.
Among elementary school aged males, the expression of vulnerable feelings is gaining
acceptance. In general, however, there has been far too little attention paid to redirect-
ing male role development.

628    PART IX Social Change: Revisioning the Future and Making a Difference

Boys Will Be Boys

I think back to the four wrestlers and the stifling culture of masculinity in which they
live. If schools were to radically alter this culture and substitute for it a new vision
of masculinity, what would that look like? In this environment, boys would express
a full range of behaviors and emotions without fear of being chastised. They would
be permitted and encouraged to cry, to be afraid, to show joy, and to express love in
a gentle fashion. Extreme concern for career goals would be replaced by a consider-
ation of one’s need for recreation, health, and meaningful work. Older boys would be
encouraged to tutor and play with younger students. Moreover, boys would receive
as much recognition for artistic talents as they do for athletics, and, in general, they
would value leisure-time, recreational activities as highly as competitive sports.

In a system where maleness and femaleness were equally valued, boys might no
longer feel that they have to “prove” themselves to other boys; they would simply ac-
cept the worth of each person and value those differences. Boys would realize that it
is permissible to admit failure. In addition, they would seek out opportunities to learn
from girls and women. Emotional support would be commonplace, and it would no
longer be seen as just the role of the female to provide the support. Relationships
between boys and girls would no longer be based on limited roles, but instead would
become expressions of two individuals learning from and supporting one another.
Relationships between boys would reflect their care for one another rather than their
mutual fear and distrust.

Aggressive styles of resolving conflicts would be the exception rather than the
norm. Girls would feel welcome in activities dominated by boys, knowing that they
were safe from the threat of being sexually harassed. Boys would no longer boast of
beating up another boy or of how much they “got off” of a girl the night before. In
fact, the boys would be as outraged as the girls at rape or other violent crimes in the
community. Finally, boys would become active in efforts to stop nuclear proliferation
and all other forms of military violence, following the examples set by activist women.

The development of a new conception of masculinity based on this vision is an
ambitious task, but one which is essential for the health and safety of both men and
women. The survival of our society may rest on the degree to which we are able to
teach men to cherish life.

4   I nterrupting the Cycle  

of Oppression

The Role of Allies as Agents of Change

Andrea Ayvazian

Many of us feel overwhelmed when we consider the many forms of systemic oppres-
sion that are so pervasive in American society today. We become immobilized, uncer-
tain about what actions we can take to interrupt the cycles of oppression and violence
that intrude on our everyday lives. One way to overcome this sense of immobilization
is to assume the role of an ally. Learning about this role—one that each and every one
of us is capable of assuming—can offer us new ways of behaving and a new source
of hope.

Through the years, experience has taught us that isolated and episodic actions—
even dramatic, media-grabbing events—rarely produce more than a temporary blip
on the screen. What does seem to create real and lasting change is highly-motivated
individuals—usually only a handful at first—who are so clear and consistent on an
issue that they serve as a heartbeat in a community, steadily sending out waves that
touch and change those in their path. These change agents or allies have such a pow-
erful impact because their actions embody the values they profess: their behavior and
beliefs are congruent.

What Is an Ally?

An ally is a member of a dominant group in our society who works to dismantle any
form of oppression from which she or he receives the benefit. Allied behavior means
taking personal responsibility for the changes we know are needed in our society, and
so often ignore or leave to others to deal with. Allied behavior is intentional, overt,
consistent activity that challenges prevailing patterns of oppression, makes privileges
that are so often invisible visible, and facilitates the empowerment of persons targeted
by oppression.

I use the term“oppression” to describe the combination of prejudice plus access to
social, political, and economic power on the part of a dominant group. Racism, a core
component of oppression, has been defined by David Wellman as a system of advan-
tage based on race. Wellman’s definition can be altered slightly to describe every other
form of oppression. Hence we can say that sexism is a system of advantage based on
gender, that heterosexism is a system of advantage based on sexual orientation, and
so on. In each form of oppression there is a dominant group—the one that receives

From Fellowship (January/February 1995). Reprinted by permission of Rev. Dr. Andrea Ayvazian,
Pastor of the Haydenville Congregational Church.

629