Tom Grey's Reading Response

The Higginbotham, Brown and Fong pieces share in common their interest in the historiography of African American women but they all choose to address distinct aspects of this field of study. These documents are all directly relevant to one another, though they attack a similar issue from different perspectives. Higginbotham addresses the issue of race in feminist studies, Brown addresses the underappreciated interrelatedness of black and white racial history, and Fong describes the effect and significance of a key figure in African American women’s history.
Higginbotham, more specifically, takes issue with feminist scholars’ ambivalence toward the distinction between African American women and White Women. In academic discourse regarding the role of women in society, Higginbotham argues, scholars tend to group all women under the canopy of “womanhood” while ignoring the significant power dynamics among women. These power dynamics, however, should not be overlooked because they are imperative to an understanding of the role of African American women in society. Higginbotham spends much of her argument describing the vital role that race plays in American society, detailing its effect upon gender, class, sexuality and national identity. Her conclusion is that Black-White racial relations divide African Americans and Whites across gender lines (“’womanhood’ did not rest on a common female essence, shared culture, or mere physical appearance.”), class lines (“an entire system disregarded…complexities and tensions by grouping all blacks into a normative well of inferiority and subserviency.”), lines of sexuality (“division between black people and white people on the ‘scale of humanity’: carnality as opposed to intellect”) and national lines (“[African Americans] spoke of a collective identity in the colonial terms of a ‘nation within a nation’”).
In justifying these arguments Higginbotham draws upon the work of African American historians ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to E. Frances White. These sources provide compelling evidence for the unavoidable effect of race upon the female role in society and on this point, Elsa Barkley Brown would be in complete agreement.
Brown, in a similar vein as Higginbotham argues that modern historiography fails to adequately address the interrelation between African American women’s history and White women’s history. Often, she argues, the histories are separated as a means of simplifying and processing the roles of individual groups within society, but by separating these histories the impact that different societal groups have on each other is lost. The example she cites to illustrate this point is the impact of African American women’s role in the home and how their role in the home allowed White women to take on greater responsibilities outside the home. The underlying point of this argument is similar to the underlying argument made by Higginbotham: we cannot study one identity in history in isolation of other identities because in doing so we lose the relevant effect of those other identities. With this point in mind we can analyze Atha Fong’s depiction of Ma Rainey and her effect upon the identity of African American women.
Fong argues that Ma Rainey’s charisma, perceived honesty, and subject choice allowed her to influentially shape African American identity and create a voice for African American women. Fong spends a great portion of her essay describing what it was about Rainey’s musical style that differentiated her from her contemporaries. Fong’s argument depends on her assertion that Rainey was influential because she personally was exemplary and was able to achieve something that no one before her could. In this regard Fong fails to acknowledge a multitude of highly relevant external factors. As Higginbotham and Brown both argue, not only is context relevant, the context is vital to accurately represent the past.