Victory at the intersection: gender, race and class

Glenda Simms, Contributor

On Tuesday, November 6, 2012, millions of people across the world were glued to their televisions to witness the landslide Electoral College victory of President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party of the United States of America. When the last ballot was counted, there was the flowing of tears of joy and the gnashing of teeth, depending on the side of the political landscape on which one sat.

As the pundits on CNN and Fox tried to rewrite history, it became clear that Obama and his team had succeeded in capturing the imagination of a wide cross section of black folks (both African American and immigrants), women (both feminists and reactionaries), Latinos (the religious brigade and the ordinary folk), young people (college students, tattooed wanderers and those who seek to find a sense of decency in today's world), gay men and lesbians (black, white and other ethnicities), white folks (those who decided to break ranks with racists, obstructionists and the religious Right), and significant sectors of those who can be described as marginalised.

It is all these American citizens who shared Obama's vision which he expounded in his book titled The Audacity of Hope, which was published in 2006 while he served as a senator of Illinois.

CHALLENGING PATRIARCHY

This historic coming together of such diverse sectors of the American population must not be taken for granted.

Many of us who challenged and continue to challenge the prerogative of men to rule the world will remember that it was not so long ago that black women had to clearly carry the struggle for women's equality into the African-American communities of the United States and the black societies in the African diaspora.

Writers such as Johnnetta Betsch Cole, former president of Spelman College, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, a professor at Spelman College, used their insights to author, in 2003, a book titled Gender Talk. In this book, these strong and highly qualified black women pointed out to the world how race and gender intersect in the lives of women and men, girls and boys.

In this matrix, black women recognised that white women were struggling to leave their kitchens and to differentiate between themselves and the doormat, while many black women had to remain thankful for the little jobs that they could find in these kitchens. In the same vein, black women realised that they had to struggle against black men who were determined to find their footing in a racist society without losing their patriarchal mindset.

It is within this volatile and often hostile debate that Cole and Guy-Sheftall used their personal experiences and looked at the issue of gender-based violence and concluded, "At the end of the day, their lived experiences were not fundamentally different from what is experienced all over the world by countless women, despite their racial, class, and cultural differences. Indeed, gender-related traumas lead to a blurring of boundaries that might otherwise separate a middle-class suburban 'housewife' from a poor woman in an inner-city neighbourhood."

Also, they argued that "when violent acts are committed against a woman or a girl, differences in the religious beliefs, nationality, age or sexual orientation of the individuals do not disappear, but they clearly lose much of the weight they exert in the daily lives of the victimised".

It was, therefore, not difficult for 50 per cent of American women to cast their votes for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, especially when the choice was a Republican Party whose facescape was that of old, pot-bellied white men in cowboy boots and red suspenders which match their necks. This sector of the population was represented by the discordant and insulting messages of Representative Todd Akin (Missouri) and Richard Mourdock (Indiana), who argued: "Pregnancy resulting from rape is something that God intended to happen." Both of these men represented the Neanderthals who are constantly trying to find some justification for the rape of women and girls. It is men like these who galvanised young people, minorities and women of all classes, castes, and ethnicities to shout, "Hell, no," as they entered the voting booths on that historic November day in 2012.

KEEP UP THE FIGHT

The lessons learnt from the second-term election of Barack Obama are not lost on the wide cross section of people across the globe. Here, in Jamaica, women must be committed to ensure that their concerns and issues are not swept under the carpet. They must continue to fight for justice, equality and peace.

In particular, women in the Anglican Church must show their outrage at the fact that the Neanderthals in the voting laity of the Church of England are still determined to keep us out of the highest level of decision-making and power brokering with God in this historical institution.

In the political sphere, Jamaican women must regain the momentum that they had established in the 1970s and fight to put in place the many pieces of outstanding legislation that are important to sustaining their rightful place, not only in political parties but in the boardrooms of the nations, in all institutions, and in the byways and on the sidewalks of both rural and urban Jamaica. They must demand justice without apologising and must ensure that we build a society that is safe for our children, for the disabled, the elderly, and all those who might display that differentness that we find challenging.

It is within this framework that we welcome the news out of London that the British society is on a path to giving equal rights to royal girls. Both the Church of England and the royal patriarchs are intimately linked historically, so it is not unexpected that it has taken such a long time for the girl child to be seen as equal to the boy child in the right to sit on the throne.

Perhaps the time will come when, if we continue to keep the King or Queen of England as head of state, a Jamaican woman might yet become governor general. However, I personally would prefer to see the day when we are no longer the subjects of either a foreign king or queen.

In short, we in this land we love must seek the opportunities at the intersection of gender, class, caste and race to state our truths and demand our human rights. This must be our legacy to the generations to come over the next 50 years.

Glenda P. Simms, PhD, is a gender expert and consultant. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and glendasimms@gmail.com.