Statue unveiled at the site where Sojourner Truth gave her 1851 ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ speech

A pillar at one entrance of the Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza depicts the Universalist Stone Church that once sat on the grounds of the United Way of Summit and Medina in Akron, Ohio on Wednesday, May 29, 2024. Hundreds gathered in an Ohio city Wednesday to unveil the plaza and statue dedicated to women's rights pioneer Sojourner Truth at the very spot she gave a speech now known as "Ain't I a Woman?" 173 years earlier. (AP Photo/Patrick Orsagos)

By Patrick Orsagos, The Associated Press

Posted May 30, 2024 11:42:23 AM.

 

Last Updated May 30, 2024 01:56:56 PM.

AKRON, Ohio (AP) — Hundreds gathered in an Ohio city on Wednesday to unveil a plaza and statue dedicated to abolitionist Sojourner Truth at the very spot where the women’s rights pioneer gave an iconic 1851 speech now known as “Ain’t I a Woman?”

Truth, a formerly enslaved person, delivered the speech to a crowd gathered at the Universalist Old Stone Church in Akron for the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention. In the speech, Truth drew upon the hardships she faced while she was enslaved and asked the audience why her humanity and the humanity of other enslaved African Americans was not seen in the same light as white Americans.

Though the church no longer exists, the Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza and the United Way of Summit and Medina Counties now stand in its place.

Towanda Mullins, chairperson of the Sojourner Truth Project-Akron, said the plaza will honor a piece of the country’s past and help to shape its future.

“It’s going to remind others to be the first one to speak up, to speak up for all, not just for some,” she said.

Before taking the name Sojourner Truth, Isabella Bomfree was born into slavery in or around 1797 in the Hudson Valley. She walked away from the home of her final owner in 1826 with her infant daughter after he reneged on a promise to free her. She went to work for the Van Wagenen family, and took their surname.

Truth is believed to be the first Black woman to successfully sue white men to get her son released from slavery, though it’s possible there were other cases researchers are unaware of.

The statue, created by artist and Akron native Woodrow Nash, shows Truth standing tall, holding a book. The monument sits on top of an impala lily, the national flower of Ghana, where Truth’s father traced his heritage.

“It was an opportunity to embed within the design of the memorial to uplift the overlooked contribution of Black women civic leaders that have sojourned in Truth’s footsteps,” said Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and senior vice president at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Large, stone pillars stand guard around the plaza with words like “faith” and “activism” engraved at the top, with a quote from Truth below it.

One of Truth’s quotes on a pillar reads, “I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.”

Dion Harris, the landscape architect who designed the plaza said he wanted to use natural materials from the northeast Ohio area that would have been used to construct the former church, including sandstone and stone.

“I wanted to show the industrial side of Akron,” Harris said. “I wanted to show every side of her and capture some of the time of the 1850s when she came.”

Akron’s statue and plaza isn’t the only place Truth is honored. A bronze statue depicting her and women’s rights pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony was unveiled in New York’s Central Park in 2020, becoming the park’s first monument honoring historical heroines. Another statue of Truth was unveiled in Angola, Indiana, in 2021, at the same place she gave a speech in June 1861, according to the city’s website.

The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund opened the plaza. The project was funded by the Knight Foundation, United Way of Summit and Medina, the Sojourner Truth Project-Akron and the Akron Community Foundation, according to a release.

“This is not an African American story. This is an American story. History at its best for all people,” Mullins said.

___

This story has been corrected to show that Brent Leggs is a senior vice president at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, not the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

Patrick Orsagos, The Associated Press

Sojourner raised herself to her full height.

"Look at me! Look at my arm." She bared her right arm and flexed her powerful muscles. "I have plowed, I have planted and I have gathered into barns. And no man could head me. And ain't I a woman? I could work as much, and eat as much as man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain't I a woman?

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Whose Family Values? 

ACTUAL CULTURAL MARXISM




Feminism, Intersectionality, and Marxism


Josefina L. Martínez

July 11, 2023

Debates on gender, race, and class: How can the working class become hegemonic in struggles against oppression?


Intersectionality is a word that is frequently used in academia, among feminist activists, and in social movements. “Class, race and gender” are, as Terry Eagleton pointed out, the “contemporary holy trinity.”1 There is a lot of discourse about intersectionality, but the definition of the term is often unclear. Is it a theory or an empirical description? Does it operate in the realm of individual subjectivity or does it analyze systems of domination? And finally, what does it say about the causes of intersecting oppressions and, above all, about the paths toward emancipation?

Although reflections on the relationship between gender, race, and class had long existed in Marxist debates and among the left, the concept of intersectionality was defined for the first time as such in a 1989 article by Black lawyer and feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw2 that aimed to answer these questions in the context of U.S. anti-discrimination law. That origin undoubtedly marked the concept, as we will see later. However, its most important precedent is in the work of Black feminists of the 1970s, such as those of the Combahee River Collective, who offered an “intersectional” critique of liberation movements in the context of Second Wave feminism and the political radicalization of the time.

In this article, I briefly summarize the historical background of the concept, its first formulations, how it shifted with the rise of postmodernism, and the ongoing debate on the concept within today’s social movements. I also critically contrast the theories of intersectionality with Marxism.
1. The Combahee River Collective and Black Feminists

The Combahee River Collective Statement, published in 1977, took its name as a tribute to the brave military actions led by former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman in 1863, which led 750 enslaved people to liberation through enemy fire. She was the only woman to run an army operation during the U.S. Civil War.

Black feminists in the 1970s saw themselves as part of a historical tradition of Black women’s struggles dating back to the 19th century. In her book Women, Race and Class,3, Angela Davis referred to their role in the U.S. abolitionist movement. Sojourner Truth’s speech at the Ohio Women’s Convention for women’s suffrage in 1851 went down in history. One man had argued that women couldn’t vote because they were the “weaker sex,” to which Sojourner Truth gave a powerful response:


I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery … And ain’t I a woman?

Her response was a rebuttal of the patriarchal narrative that constructed “femininity” based on the idea that women are weak, “naturally” inferior beings incapable of exercising political citizenship. But it also challenged the many white suffragettes who neglected the demands of Black and working women.

In the mid-1970s, a number of Black women, having had negative experiences in the white feminist movement and in organizations for Black liberation, decided to revive that tradition and form their own militant groups. With the publication of the Combahee River Collective Statement, Black feminists simultaneously questioned white feminism, the Black movement, and the bourgeois Black feminism of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO).

Their starting point was the shared experience of simultaneous oppressions rooted in the trilogy of class, race, and gender, to which they added sexual oppression. From there, they aimed their critique against the feminist movement that was hegemonized by radical feminism. This current of feminism interpreted social contradictions through the opposition between “sexual classes”4 and prioritized one system of domination — the patriarchy — over all others5. While questioning the preeminence of sexual or gender oppression over that of race and class, Black feminists also debated against the openly separatist tendencies that promoted a “war of the sexes,” which had gained strength in the feminist movement of the late 1970s. The Black feminists defined this type of feminism as a movement guided by the interests of white, middle-class women. They also maintained that any kind of biological determination of identity could lead to reactionary positions.


Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand.

In her book Feminism Is for Everybody, Black feminist bell hooks argues that, in those years, “utopian visions of sisterhood” and the ahistorical definition of patriarchy were challenged by debates around race and class. Taking stock of this period, she asserts that “white women who had attempted to organize the movement around the banner of common oppression evoking the notion that women constituted a sexual class/caste were the most reluctant to acknowledge differences among women.” She also highlights the debate with the separatist currents within the movement:


They portrayed all men as the enemy in order to represent all women as victims. This focus on men deflected attention from the class privilege of individual feminist activists as well as their desire to increase their class power.6

The Combahee River Collective Statement characterized the struggle for the emancipation of Black women and Black people as inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist system. That is why its authors explicitly supported the fight for socialism:


We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products … We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.

In relation to Marxism, they asserted a fundamental agreement with Marx’s theory regarding “specific economic relations,” but they believed that the analysis had to be “extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.” It should be noted that although they expressed the need for a socialist revolution, the practical tasks they proposed as a group were limited above all to self-awareness workshops and the struggle for the specific rights of Black women in their neighborhoods.

The notion of identity politics appears in the Statement as a response to the specific way in which Black women experience oppression. Recognition of one’s own identity is considered necessary for converging, a posteriori, with other liberation movements. There is tension between the constitution of a differentiated identity and convergence with other oppressed people to fight against a system that combines forms of economic, sexual, and racial domination.

A few years later, however, as the social, political, and ideological context drastically changed with the rise of neoliberalism and postmodernism, the concept of intersectionality would take on new meaning. With the radical transformation of society no longer on the horizon, the moment for collective action tended to dissipate, and differentiated “identities” and the demand for policies of recognition within capitalist society began to increase.
2. Intersectionality as a Category of Discrimination

Kimberlé Crenshaw first defined the concept of intersectionality in 1989. She highlighted that the separate treatment of race and gender discriminations as “mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” had problematic consequences for legal doctrine, feminist theory, and anti-racist politics. She thus proposed that a contrast should be drawn between “the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience [and] the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences.”

She pointed out that any conceptualization based on a single axis of discrimination (whether it be race, gender, sexuality, or class) erases Black women from identification and the possibility of ending discrimination, limiting the analysis to the experiences of privileged members of each group. Racial discrimination tends to be viewed from the perspective of Black people with gender or class privileges, while with gender discrimination the focus is on white women with economic resources. Since “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”

In her analysis, Crenshaw examines how several lawsuits brought by Black women were simply dismissed by the judiciary. In one case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, five women sued the multinational, alleging employment discrimination because as Black women they were denied promotions to better positions. The court dismissed the lawsuit, claiming that it was not possible to establish the existence of discrimination because they were “Black women,” as they did not constitute a group subject to special discrimination. Instead, the court agreed to an investigation of whether racial or gender segregation had occurred, but “not a combination of both.” Finally, it determined that since GM had hired women – white women – there was no gender discrimination involved. And since the company had also hired Black people – Black men – there was no racial discrimination involved either.

The Black women’s lawsuit was unsuccessful. The court claimed that its admission would open up a “Pandora’s box.”

Crenshaw points out that the objective of intersectionality is to recognize that Black women may experience discrimination that has complex forms, which the single-axis conceptual framework fails to address. In the late 1980s, the concept of intersectionality emerged as a category for addressing the complexity of experiences of “discrimination,” with the aim of establishing new case law that would allow “diversity policies” to be regulated by the state.

Later, U.S. sociologist and scholar of Black feminism Patricia Hill Collins defined intersectionality as “being constructed within an historically specific matrix of domination characterized by intersecting oppressions.”7 In her view, intersectionality defines a “social justice” project that seeks a convergence or coalitions with other “social justice projects.”

The concept of intersectionality was subsequently developed by many other Black, Latina, and Asian feminist intellectuals within the expanding framework of “Women Studies” in academia. Intersectionality became a buzzword at conferences and symposia, and in research departments. NGOs were created to develop intersectional studies in the fields of economics, law, sociology, culture, and public policy. Other vectors of oppression were added to the trilogy of gender, race, and class, such as sexuality, nationality, age, and functional diversity. But while this increased the visibility of the specific oppression faced by multiple groups and communities, it paradoxically developed in a climate of resignation to capitalist social structures, which had come to be perceived as impossible to challenge.
3. Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Multiple Differences

The rise of intersectionality studies in academia coincided with the beginning of a new historical phase that completely transformed the intellectual and political climate under neoliberalism. The period of “Bourgeois Restoration”8 or neoliberal boom saw generalized attacks on workers’ gains worldwide, with privatization and deregulation policies running rampant given the defection of the trade union and political leaderships of the working class. This led to an increase in the internal fragmentation of the working class and a huge loss of class subjectivity.

In this new context, the radicalism of the Black feminists and socialists of the Combahee River Collective gave way to a formulation of intersectionality in the framework of an increased fragmentation of subjects, from a postmodern perspective. The idea of ​​intersectionality became more akin to that of “diversity” and “identity politics.” Such a formulation shifts the focus from the collective to the individual, from the material to the subjective, in a process of “culturalization” of the relations of domination. It generalizes the idea that the struggle of oppressed groups fundamentally involves acquiring self-awareness of their own identity — a “situated knowledge” — to ensure that privileged groups (men, white women, heterosexual women, etc.) “deconstruct” their privileges and recognize diversity. In the framework of the postmodern “cultural shift,” identities are presented as exclusively constructed in discourse, so the possibilities of resisting are restricted to the establishment of a counter-narrative.

This perspective, however, cannot be applied to class exploitation: Can we expect those who own the means of production — bankers and capitalists — to “deconstruct” their power through self-reflection? In reality, the proposition is also useless as a strategy for ending racism, heterosexism, and sexism, unless these “axes of domination” are considered to be separate entities that operate exclusively in the cultural or ideological sphere, rather than being intertwined with the material and structural relations of capitalism.

Conversely, the multiplication of an increasingly extensive series of oppressed identities, without considering the possibility of radically transforming the capitalist social relations on which these oppressions are based, gave rise to practices of “ghettoization” and separation in activism. Pratibha Parmar warned of this problem in her work:


There has been an emphasis on accumulating a collection of oppressed identities which in turn have given rise to hierarchy of oppression. Such scaling has not only been destructive, but divisive and immobilising. … [M]any women have retreated into ghettoised “lifestyle politics” and find themselves unable to move beyond personal and individual experience.9

As the counterpart to this impotence, the capitalist system appropriated the explosion of “diversity” as a market of identities, which it could assimilate as long as they did not challenge the social system as a whole. Terry Eagleton noted with regard to postmodernism:


One would be forced to claim that [given] its single most enduring achievement, the fact that it has helped to place questions of sexuality, gender and ethnicity so firmly on the political agenda, that it is impossible to imagine them being erased without an almighty struggle was nothing more than a substitute for more classical forms of radical politics which dealt in class, state, ideology, revolution, material modes of production.10

In a footnote, however, Eagleton clarified that it had not been postmodern intellectuals who had placed those issues on the political agenda, but the previous action of social movements through struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. Once that wave of political radicalization was defeated, the visibility of issues of race, gender and sexuality grew, while class became increasingly invisible (to the point that some authors have written about the disappearance of the working class as such).
4. The Retreat from Class Politics

In the class/race/gender trilogy, class tended to be diluted, or became just another identity, as if it were a category of social stratification (by income) or type of occupation. Citing Collins, Marta E. Giménez11 notes that one of the characteristic elements of intersectionality theories is the assumption that “in order to theorise these connections it is necessary ‘to support a working hypothesis of equivalency between oppressions’,” but that this leads to the elimination of the specificity of class relations.

Against this view, it is necessary to point out that race, gender, and class are not directly comparable categories. This does not mean that we must establish a hierarchy of grievances, or determine which is most important to people’s subjective experience; the goal is to achieve a greater understanding of the relationship between oppression and exploitation in capitalist society.

For example, class, race, and gender operate very differently in relation to “equality” and “difference.” Historically, the bourgeoisie has tried to camouflage class “social differences” as much as possible behind an “egalitarian” ideology of “free contract.” But it uses racism and sexism to establish “differences” that are attributed to biological or “natural” conditions to justify inequality in the distribution of resources and access to rights and to defend the persistence of a certain division of labor or, simply put, the enslavement of millions of people, dehumanizing them.

From an emancipatory perspective, the objective is to ensure that no difference in skin color, birthplace, biological sex, or sexual choice can be used as a basis for oppression, grievances, or inequality, while recognizing diversity and promoting the development of the creative potential of all individuals within the framework of social cooperation. But in the case of class differences, the aim is to eliminate them completely, as such. Through its struggle against capitalist social relations, the working class seeks to eliminate the private ownership of the means of production, which entails the elimination of the bourgeoisie as a class and the possibility of ending all class society.

What structures capitalist society is the social difference between the owners of the means of production and those who are forced to sell their labor power in exchange for wages, beyond all attempts to render this contradiction invisible. Patriarchal relations — which emerged thousands of years before capitalism — and racism are not ahistorical entities, but have taken on new forms and a specific social content in the framework of capitalist social relations.

Capitalism uses patriarchal prejudices to establish an unprecedented differentiation between the “public” and the “private,” between the sphere of production and the sphere of the home, where women sustain — through invisible work — a large part of the tasks of social reproduction of the labor power needed for the reproduction of capital. Institutions such as the family, marriage, and heterosexual normativity, reformulated under new social relations, socialize and naturalize this role for women. The multiple manifestations of gender oppression and the painful grievances that they imply for millions of women through violence and femicide are not “reducible” to class relations, but they cannot be explained without connecting the categories of oppression and exploitation.

Racism was used to provide an ideological justification for enslaving millions of human beings, while at the same time the Enlightenment elevated the ideas of “freedom,” “equality,” and “fraternity” as a basis for the “rights of man.” Racism accompanied and reinforced the massive colonialist endeavors of imperialist states, as well as internal genocides such that carried out in the United States against indigenous peoples. Since the U.S. Civil War and the abolition of slavery, racism has continued to be used to exclude of a large part of the country’s population, which is treated as “second-class citizens” and “second-class workers.” This promotes internal division within the U.S. working class. In turn, as Black feminists have pointed out, racial oppression and gender oppression are masterfully combined to maximize capitalist profits: it is a fact that there is a larger wage gap for Black and Latina women workers in the United States, just as there is disproportionate institutional and police violence against Black youth. It is also used to support racist and xenophobic policies against migrants in Europe, where they are treated as second-class workers and lack basic social and democratic rights.
5. Marxism and Intersectionality

In Capital, Marx wrote, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” In an earlier work, he and Friedrich Engels had pointed out that “social progress, changes of historical periods, take place in direct proportion to the progress of women towards freedom; and the decline of a social order occurs in proportion to the reduction of women’s freedom”, paraphrasing the utopian socialist Fourier. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels had specifically analyzed the reality of working women who were entering the sphere of capitalist production in large numbers and experiencing the twofold grievances of oppression and exploitation. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels continued the incomplete ethnological studies carried out by his friend to develop an analysis of the family institution in history and the oppression of women.

Revolutionary Marxism has analyzed the relationship between exploitation and oppression in other ways as well. For example, Marx and Engels maintained that the English proletariat could not be free if its rights were based on the oppression of Irish workers. Later, Lenin argued that a people that oppresses another people cannot be free, and defended the right to national self-determination as well as the fight against colonial oppression.

In her critique of intersectionality theories, Lise Vogel correctly argues that socialist feminists of the 1960s and 1970s had already highlighted the intersection between patriarchy, racism, and capitalism before the term intersectionality became popular. It is important to note, however, that a long tradition of socialist feminist thought had developed long before that period, from Flora Tristán to Engels and Clara Zetkin, the Russian revolutionaries, and many others. This led to important international socialist women’s conferences and programs and organizations of peasant and working women. The Transitional Program written by Leon Trotsky and adopted by the Fourth International in 1938, includes among its slogans the need to “Open the road to the Woman Worker! Open the Road to the Youth!” and to seek “support among the most exploited layers of the working class.”

Intersectionality theorists often criticize Marxism for what they consider to be “class reductionism.” But defending the centrality of a “class analysis” does not mean limiting it to the activity of unions in wage struggles. That is a corporatist, economist, or narrowly syndicalist perspective of class. It is true that the 20th-century practices of many of the Stalinized Communist parties, as well as the trade union bureaucracies, were based on these narrow corporate politics, thus deepening the divide between “class politics” and the struggle of movements against oppression. But only by falsely equating Stalinism with Marxism is it possible to assert that Marxism has not considered the “intersection” of class exploitation with gender oppression, racism, colonial oppression, and heterosexism.

A class analysis aims to reveal the relationships that structure capitalist society, based not only on the generalized expropriation of surplus value for the accumulation of capital, but also on the appropriation of women’s reproductive work in the home, as well as on the concentration of capital in large monopolies, the expansion of financial capital, and the competition between imperialist states that lead to global wars and plunder. It also examines how capital uses and establishes “differences,” fueling racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic ideologies to maximize exploitation and provoke divisions within the ranks of the working class. This class analysis, far from expressing an “economic reductionist” view, includes the interaction of political and social elements and allows a deeper understanding of the connection between class relations and racism, patriarchy, and heterosexism.

At the same time, it recognizes that if the working class — which in the 21st century is more diverse, racialized, and feminized than ever before — manages to overcome its internal divisions and fragmentation, it has the unique capacity to destroy capitalism and place the entire economy, industry, transport and communications system under its control as the basis for organizing a new society of free producers. The retreat from “class politics” actually means abandoning the struggle against the capitalist system, without which it is impossible to put an end to the terrible injustices caused by exploitation and oppression based on race, gender or sexuality.

Since the capitalist crisis of 2008, with the emergence of new resistance movements against neoliberal policies, some sectors of feminist activists, anti-racist, and the youth movements have been defending the idea of “intersectionality” in a new sense to form coalitions among various oppressed groups. The women’s movement that organized the March 8, 2018, strikes in the Spanish State, for example, has itself as an “anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-fascist” movement. This was undoubtedly a very important step forward toward the convergence of struggles and a countertrend to the logic of fragmentation. However, the sum or “intersection” of resistance movements is insufficient if they are not connected with a common strategy to defeat capitalism, without which it is impossible to end racism or patriarchal oppression.

It is not about counterposing “movements” or “identities” to an abstract and genderless working class. Never before in history has the working class been so diverse in terms of gender and race. Women already make up 50 percent of the working class, and of that Black, Latin, and Asian women are the majority. The key to a hegemonic strategy, then, is to return to the centrality of class politics that decisively incorporates the fight against all oppression based on gender, race, and sexuality. This means seeking to unite what capitalism divides, strengthening the internal unity of the working class, as well as adopting a policy of alliances with movements that fight against specific oppression. This perspective, along with the fight to expropriate the expropriators, is the only one that will allow progress toward a truly free society.

First published in Spanish on February 24, 2019, in Contrapunto.

Translation by Marisela Trevin


Notes

Notes↑1 Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London, UK: Verso, 1986).
↑2 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” in Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, ed. by Katharine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991).
↑3 Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York, NY: Knopf, 1981).
↑4 Whether in terms of the radical feminism of Shulamith Firestone in a 1970 essay or the materialist feminism of Cristine Delphy from 1980. See Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex,” in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, ed. by Barbara A. Crow (New York, NY, New York University Press, 2000); Christine Delphy, “The Main Enemy,” Feminist Issues 1, no. 1 (1980): 23–40.
↑5 As formulated by Kate Millet in Sexual Politics: A Surprising Examination of Society’s Most Arbitrary Folly (New York: Doubleday, 1970).
↑6 bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000).
↑7 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990), 127.
↑8 Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, “At the Limits of the ‘Bourgeois Restoration,’” Left Voice, December 24, 2019. First published in Spanish in 2011.
↑9 Pratibha Parmar, “Black Feminism: The Politics of Articulation,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 107.
↑10 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 22.
↑11 Marta E. Giménez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays: (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2019.


Josefina L. Martínez
Josefina is a historian from Madrid and an editor of our sister site in the Spanish State, IzquierdaDiario.es.

C.R.T.

Black History Has the Power to Ignite Movements. That’s Why the Right Fears It.

The administration’s pre-emptive assault on history is a desperate attempt to stop new social movements from starting.

By Nicholas Powers ,

Truthout

November 29, 2025

A visitor browses an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on August 28, 2025, in Washington, D.C.Alex Wong / Getty Images

Ilooked at the slave shackles in the exhibit. My ancestors wore chains like this one. A bone-deep sorrow hit. When I researched my family history, names began to vanish as I traced it to Indigenous and African slavery. Here, right in front of me was material proof of the horror they survived. What is my responsibility to them?

The Slavery and Freedom exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C. is a soul-shaking experience. Going from the bottom level to the higher exhibits, visitors take the journey from slavery to freedom. I went years ago, and decided to go again with family and friends. During the government shutdown, the closed museum doors were symbolic of a larger right-wing attack. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have censored Black history, pulled Black books, removed Black Lives Matters icons, and led to a mass firing of Black federal employees.

The right wing suppresses Black history because it ignites social movements. Black history transforms rage into activism by putting racist events into a larger story of struggle against oppression. It shines a light on a hidden past. It exposes the hypocrisy of MAGA.

The right-wing attack on Black history is stupid, cruel, and futile. The logical end of censoring Black history is national suicide. Black history is a legacy with lessons that can heal the divides in the U.S. and repair our relationship to the world. Black history can free us from the right-wing image of the U.S. as a white Christian nationalist utopia, which never existed, and lead us to a clear-eyed radical realism. Black history bears a truth that makes it possible, finally, to create a future we can live in as liberated beings.


Trump’s War on Black America



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Black History Testifies to the Impossible Creative Power of Black Resistance
Literary scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin discusses how Black yearning keeps surviving in the face of racist violence. By George Yancy , Truthout  February 23, 2025

Trump and MAGA are waging war on Black America. They have attacked it on three fronts; Black culture, Black economics, and voting rights. The attack on history is the most dangerous, because history gives birth to new protests.

Black history bears a truth that makes it possible, finally, to create a future we can live in as liberated beings.

In March, federal workers aimed jackhammers at the Black Lives Matter mural — blocks from the White House — and destroyed it. Less than a mile away, the African American Museum of D.C. was closed during the shutdown and has only recently reopened.

Trump came out the gate of his second presidency with a barrage of executive orders. One executive order titled “Ending Racial Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” led to Black-authored books being yanked from school libraries run by the Department of Defense. Trump shut down diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. He terrified business leaders with possible DEI investigations. Black history month celebrations were cancelled at federal agencies.

In a perverse kind of trickle-down racism, Trump’s attack on Black Lives Matter became a permission structure for increased on-the-ground bigotry. White influencers proudly wore blackface for Halloween. Politico exposed a Young Republicans’ chat where they gleefully traded racist comments. Black comedian W. Kamau Bell has painted a portrait of a right-wing shift in standup performances in which anti-trans jokes and anti-Black slurs have become commonplace. This is not a series of isolated events: FBI statistics on anti-Black hate crime, consistently the most common form of hate crime, spiked during Trump’s two terms.

Side by side with the cultural attack is an economic one. Remember Elon Musk proudly waving a chainsaw at CPAC? Well, it worked. Black women’s unemployment leapt from 5.9 percent in February to 7.5 percent in September. Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce and attacks on “DEI” forced 300,000 Black women out of their jobs. Put that number next to the 2003 statistic that 64 percent of Black families are led by a single parent, most of whom are single mothers, and the effects are devastating. Women are now trying to hold families together without work or health care.

When seen in that light, a closed history museum may seem to be at the bottom of the list of things to worry about. Yet a living relationship to history has the power to create a political consciousness for resistance. The ripping up of Black Lives Matter’s art, the censoring of Black books, the effort to whitewash Black history — all are part of a desperate attempt to stop a new social movement before it starts.

The Past Transforms Us

Emmett Till’s casket was right there, and no one could speak. I stood with visitors to the African American Museum in D.C., and the “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom” exhibit that highlights the Civil Rights Era weighed on us. To be in the presence of history, to be inches away from the casket that Emmett Till lay in, was dizzying.

The ripping up of Black Lives Matter’s art, the censoring of Black books, the effort to whitewash Black history — all are part of a desperate attempt to stop a new social movement before it starts.

Trump actually visited the museum in 2017 and in a somber tone, said, “This museum is a beautiful tribute to so many American heroes, heroes like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass.” Eight years later, in August 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was…” Well, that’s a 180-degree turn.

Why the change? Two events upset Trump’s first term: COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. Protests against police brutality have been ocean tides in the Black Freedom Struggle, of which BLM is the most recent wave.

Black protests against police brutality go far back. We see it in Abolitionists fighting the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and we see resistance in the Red Summer of 1919. Racist brutality sparked the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943. In 1991, the police beating of Rodney King led to the L.A. riots. In 1999 the police murder of Amadou Diallo and the 2006 killing of Sean Bell launched marches. Wave after wave reached higher and higher. In 2020, BLM became a tsunami of protest, the largest in U.S. history — and it was also strong enough to carry voters to the polls and throw Trump out of office.

The Black Freedom Movement has more power than any president or any system. Trump knows this. MAGA knows this. This is why they erase Black history. The past transforms us, it fires up dormant desires. It realigns us with our ancestors. Black artists and intellectuals always documented the dramatic effect of learning about Black history.

Assata Shakur wrote in her 1988 autobiography, Assata, “I didn’t know what a fool they made of me until I grew up and started reading real history.”

Malcolm X wrote in his 1965 classic, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, “History had been ‘whitened’ in the white man’s history books and the black man had been brainwashed for hundreds of years.”

From Frederick Douglass to Dead Prez, Ida B. Wells to Alicia Garza, knowing one’s history has always been the key ingredient to activating Black consciousness.

The Black thinker who systemized this transformation is Dr. William E. Cross in his 1971 essay, “The Negro-to-Black Conversion Experience.” Cross had a front-row seat to the 1968 climax of rebellion. He repeatedly saw apolitical brothers and sisters sparked by the revolution; they shed old lives, old fashions, and old ideas, and re-emerged in the street, wearing afros and bright pan-African colors. They went through stages like a butterfly molting in a cocoon, flying out, free as themselves.

Black history is the cocoon; it is the stories and imagery, the feeling of ancestors, it is the site of transformation. When millions upon millions undergo that change, like during the George Floyd protests, it becomes a historical force. A meteorologist, trying to show how interconnected all things are, once said that a flap of a butterfly’s wings can set off a tornado. It’s true. Why? The more that racists try to repress our history, the more we use it to explain what is happening, and how to fight back. The next social movement is already beginning, like a tornado.

As Pressure Builds, More Will Find Our History

When I finished my tour of the African American Museum, I was at the top floor. Sunlight came through the windows. The building is designed to recreate the journey from slavery to freedom. Standing at the top, I felt deeply moved.

Black history is the cocoon; it is the stories and imagery, the feeling of ancestors, it is the site of transformation.

The power of history, especially at a museum, is that right there under glass is evidence of our past. Flesh fades to dust. Bones crumble. Yet here are real things touched by real people. This is why the African American Museum in D.C. is the crown jewel of a large network of Pan-African historical sites. In New York, there’s the African Burial Ground. In Boston, there’s the Black Heritage Trail. In Tennessee, there’s the National Civil Rights Museum. In Ghana, there are slave castles and the heart-wrenching Door of No Return. The interconnected network of sites creates multiple transformation zones, where people enter and come out changed. When we leave, we take this history with us.

The tragedy of this moment is that Trump and MAGA have succumbed to a juvenile, cartoon version of history. If they turn back time, they believe, the joy of unlimited power will be at their fingertips. The harder they push for total control, the more pressure they place on masses of people. The government shutdown worsened hunger. People in the U.S. are facing even more unpayable health insurance. Rage at ICE builds in neighborhoods as masked agents separate families.

Under this pressure, many are forced to ask questions. When they do, they will find answers waiting for them. They will find our history.

Expect more tornados to come.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Nicholas Powers
Nicholas Powers is the author of Thirst, a political vampire novel; The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street; and most recently, Black Psychedelic Revolution. He has been writing for Truthout since 2011. His article, “Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life” in the Truthout anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? coalesces his years of reporting on police brutality.

Was Emerson Pointing to Indigenousness?

Kim C. Domenico

 July 25, 2025

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[Achille] Mbembe said that his project was ‘to look into ways in which we can render politically fruitful the critique of religion while taking very seriously religion itself as critique – especially a critique of ‘the political’.

–Kevin Okoth, reviewing Brutalism by Achille Mbembe, in London Review of Books (LRB) 7/10/25

What your heart thinks great, is great.  The soul’s emphasis is always right. 

–RW Emerson, Spiritual Laws

This was the power Plath had discovered – towering, revolving, in brass feathers and fire.  It was not that she really flew.  It was that she had gone underground but did not stay there. 

–Patricia Lockwood, Arrayed In Shining Scales, LRB7/10/25

As I understand it,   this “going underground” and not staying there,  the power Sylvia Plath discovered,  is the mythic – or soul –  journey, that entered popular consciousness a few decades ago via the mythologist Joseph Campbell’s PBS series, poet and mythopoetic men’s movement leader Robert Bly, and a flock of writers and psychoanalysts influenced by depth psychology.  Again, in my understanding, to do it “right,” you go there, collect the reward, and you come back and try to figure out how to bring the “new life” you discovered  underground, through tests and trials,  into your real life, into the community that without new life is stagnant and conforming (dying). If we think of aliveness as creativity, connected somehow with the hero’s honesty and courage, this makes art essential if communities are to be other than beggars at the trough of large corporations, chains, and state funding, to be instead independently fertile cultural soil for living with abundance for all.   

If I may be so bold as to put myself into the same sentence with her, like Plath, whose poetry I read many years ago but not recently, I was an underground sojourner who did not stay there.  Differently from her, in relation to that underground experience, I learned to understand it (the Unconscious) in modern psychotherapeutic terms as spiritual transformation; a downward path that had the promise of an upturn.  The idea, as I learned it,  is you can avoid getting stuck there in what is essentially the terrain of madness if you keep walking, like, in The Lord of the Rings (which I’m currently reading at long last) Frodo and Company fulfilling their responsibility to the Ring.  

By now there must be a significant number of people around who share this transformational understanding of “soul recovery” and  ‘soul journey,” including many who know a lot more about it than I do from my singular experience.  But my “return” took a heretical direction.  Equipped now with a “2-fold” vision,  it stayed within the limitations in my given circumstances: living in Utica, remote  from cultural “hubs,” precarious financially, married with family.   Had I had imbibed Emerson-like wisdom?: “What we call obscure condition or vulgar society is that condition and society whose poetry is not yet written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and renowned as any.”  Or this: ‘The pretense that [a man] has another call, a summons by name and personal election and “outward signs that mark him extraordinary and not in the roll of common men” is fanaticism…’ 

These limitations were self-imposed in the land of boundless freedom and opportunity; that is what made them always suspect.  After all, acceptance of these limitations was a complete departure from received wisdom; I could have, perhaps should have, said yes at least to some way that would have brought me a more respectable income even if it would have felt like compromise to my William Blake-inspired soul.   Had I shot myself in the foot? Did the fact I was not drawn to any career option disprove Emerson?  The coffeeshop, that we started in 2002, said no!  Vision, outsiderhood, anti-establishment, counterculture, art, beauty, fine coffee from a conscientious coffee roaster and jazz, all good! Couldn’t get no better.  Get thee behind me thou Father of Lies!  For 20 years the Cafe held back the avalanche of self-hate still potential in me.  

Living within these limitations I relied on my own imaginative interpretation of inward events;  I was forced  into radical self-trust.  I learned, firsthand,  to appreciate the fact that, Emerson-like, this trust in imagination – which importantly, was the basis for the Cafe – is the basis of all religion. Thus I’d been initiated into what came to be called “New Age Spirituality.”  I was part of a trend that, as I see it now, was simply recapitulating Emerson but without crediting him.  Too old-fashioned.  Too much talk about God and virtue.

The new age seemed to confirm for modern post-religious westerners that religion per se is unnecessary to spiritual life. For now, with the aid of knowledgeable guides, it’s possible to make the underground voyage and avoid falling into the madness that overcame Sylvia Plath.  In other words, those following Emersonian advice – trust thyself – all the way –  can be granted the chance to interpret the experience as union with the divine, as surely Emerson did;  it is salvific.   But is the new freedom really all win-win?  Mustn’t the things lost along the way be accounted for?   

Emerson never considered separating spirituality from religion (“O my brothers, God exists!”), while today, in my experience, the New Age spiritual adepts are generally unsupportive of self-limitation.  Spirituality is about expansion, not to lead to the life ways of contraction in a society that teaches no limits to growth.   Religion, on the other hand, has specific “application:” the building and maintaining of face-to-face embodied families and community, local, stable over time, ways of life that, arguably, in some way or other reflect the interdependence of creation by putting limits on human freedom.   Application of the truth of necessary self-limitation  is arguably the basis for the kind of interconnected life that draws its life from the perennial utopian dream. Religion thus cannot be stepped out of like an old pair of shoes without a certain amount of hypocrisy as long as we still talk about and profess to long for peace and justice.  

What if  religion were to be honored as an act of honestly owning our real history?  For all its abuses and hypocrisies, “the church” has kept a protected separate space in which that One Truth experienced in the “underground” reality of psychospiritual transformation –  is preserved.  While making no apologies for the Church’s becoming a political animal, its egocentric mission to Christianize the world, surely it must now be apparent:  at the same time as some of us are freed from the need for “organized religion,” all of our collective way of life depends this day and every day upon conformity at the expense of new life.  (“the man who fits himself to the customary work or trade he falls into ..is part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.”) It depends upon tacit complicity with the exploitation of the vast majority of the earth’s human beings and the earth itself.   Not a win-win.  

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Emerson, who is mistakenly thought to have been congratulating us on being Americans,  free and independent and  non-conformist, was actually telling us not that we had the key to the kingdom of freedom already, but how to find it within. What has happened instead, with the exception of some artists and poets and prophetic individuals who will defy the general rule established by corporate capitalist economy – Americans have largely conformed, including ones with the education and the means supposedly not to conform.  Obviously, conformity is simply not, as we like to think, the observable kind: allegiance to brands, the worship of celebrity and wealth, the trends, gadgets and fashions.   Its not all those sheep trooping off to sabbath services. 

Conformity – the “soul of it” –  is the absence of soul.  The most famous call to conformity is to a temporary condition – when in Rome, etc.  It assumes one has beliefs, customs or sense of purpose one sets aside temporarily in order to  meet another standard of acceptability that otherwise one would not do.  Thus conformity depends upon avoidance of a truth existent prior to conforming  – a truth that is such that, when you hear it, or see it in practice in a fellow human being in any degree, you immediately recognize.  Reading Emerson’s words, one knows, even 175 years later, he spoke truth.  Ditto for Thoreau – or for Jesus, Buddha, MLK, jr., and edgier ones like William Blake and Allen Ginsburg, etc. and many others by means of whose words and art  one feels the revivifying power of truth spoken.   Although most of us, lacking the talent perhaps, will only realize it partially, upon everyone it makes its claim for goodness or, what Emerson called “virtue.”   Kindness, doing unto others, greater blessedness in giving than in receiving, all simply subpoints under the larger truth. The larger cannot be met by simple, conforming obedience to a rule of “be nice.”  It is all-inclusive, a privilege of imagination.  The rule is, rather, “All connects.  Behave accordingly.”

+++

As anyone can see who reads my essays, I believe in the truth of myth.  And, further, advocating for the practice of art and the soul journey as I do,  that  mythic narrative is not spectacle! These days,  still in post-Cafe crisis mode, I cling to these hardwon truths as to a piece of flotsam after the ship has sunk. My crisis is with “the facts of life.”    Having given over so much of my consciousness to the expansion of meaning via imagination, many days I seem to have lost the capacity to deal with the naked lunch at the end of my own fork.  That “lunch” threatens  up close with chaos, with which it seems every day I must grapple.  It seems often as if I cannot think beyond the thinking required to tackle my current struggles and to attain tiny victories essentially at survival level, with some, yes, aimed higher – “goods” of family and friendships; the surplus”good” of The Other Side, and of course, my writing.  The constant, plaguing fear has opened the door to my old terror and its original “solution” in obsessive, self-negating thoughts, threatening to paralyze my capacity for thinking.  Only in writing can I keep them at bay. 

I know, I know, I defy new age wisdom in saying what I  said about thinking.  We’re supposed to be coming down into our body, not seeking the escape into “head stuff.”  But I  like head stuff, I respond! It seems to have a claim on me, not against my embodiment, but as a way of hanging in in embodiment – not perfectly, but making sense to myself.   Bodies are housing for the soul in a context within which the soul’s anarchistic perspective is not just “freeing,” but to which it is anathema. If this were not so, why would Emerson make such a big deal of conformity? If the “thinking” work of critique is demeaned,  freedoms are worthless.    

The crisis is real; because of it I’m back in therapy for the first time in over 25 years! And already I antisipate I will have to explain myself.  Will even she get it that for me thinking is not a head thing, but a necessary head-heart thing?  My life has lost the “power head” – that is, the social identity and a kind of status that could hold its own with the hoi polloi of Utica  the Cafe gave me. I’m seeing how that Cafe and  the identity that came with it and the enchanting aura with which it imbued all who were part of it, kept me out of this personal chaos.  Or, rather, did its holding pattern allow me to interrupt the journey to identity that is never encapsulated,  leaving it somehow unfinished?  This, I figure now,  is the bottom line life challenge and why I’ve returned to Emerson in my need.  And he says unequivocally: “Whatever he knows and thinks, whatever in his apprehension is worth doing, that let him communicate or men will never know and honor him aright.”

I do not know for sure how other people navigate without seemingly touching down into this grimmest, starkest  layer of the self, but as I write about it I suspect the avoidance has to do heavily with denial, for the basic facts are grim.   Maybe it’s best to “not go there,” to leave that whole dimension, the awfulness, somewhere out there with all the nasties, but I can’t see how mass denial, or unconsciousness has actually worked out well in the long run.  No, I think the nastiness is precisely there so we don’t miss the lifesaver that’s tossed to us in  imagination. And we’re not supposed to miss it.  Religion at least recognized the reality of evil,  and was supposed to point to the lifesaver.  But life for us white middle class people is so comfortable, once we conform to it, it’s easy to forget the reality  – the contrariness and unacceptability of life’s given terms.

Will she make it?  Lord knows.  But at times I suspect there is something coming to meet me from “the other side” (and coincidentally or not, from The Other Side, our non-profit arts space)  Last night, the young teacher, Luigi, taught the first of  his “Peoples’ Classrooms” in our space.  He began in a way that was emphatically not “gradualist,” with a “peoples’ history” of Palestine!  In so doing, and in a very short space of time, he took the 40 or so people who showed up through the history up to and into the current genocide.  He spared us very little of unbearable awareness.  At the same time, the event lifted me. It feels to me like a certain flowering of the original purpose that has been so difficult to consistently realize here in Utica – that is, to be a connection with “the global,” the whole truth.  

This talk was made possible by The Other Side’s newest and youngest members, all under 40, all local.  We who are“stuck” in Utica- that is, those of us who are always wondering if we should have”reached for the stars,”  have a need to know something that is denied practically everywhere, no place more so than in Utica that’s trying to be as good as instead of simply being what we are – not a brand, but something innate to ourselves.  The Other Side’s saying “here is the center here is the holy here is what’s worth defending.”  Was Emerson urging us to become indigenous?   

Kim C. Domenico, reside in Utica, New York, co-owner of Cafe Domenico (a coffee shop and community space),  and administrator of the small nonprofit independent art space, The Other Side.  Seminary trained and ordained,  but independently religious. She can be reached at: kodomenico@verizon.net.