Reading Response

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Elsa Barkley Brown both tackle the meaning of race in the context of gender and class relationships. In both essays, African Americans are the specific focus of these relationships, and while some of what both authors write can be applied to other racial situations, much of it is quite specific. Higginbotham examines the way that language and attitudes have built up to reinforce stereotypes or the treatment of others: categorizations that sweep across demographics, racial, sex-based, or class-based, can all be dangerous; "perceived as "natural" and "appropriate," such racial categories are strategically necessary for the functioning of power" (Higginbotham). However, Higginbotham makes many assumptions about her subject and her reader, both. While she writes that "welfare immediately conjures up images of black female-headed families," I was puzzled; given the context in which I've grown up, which while probably not that of an average American might well be that of an average journal-reader, I had no such stereotype in my mind before reading it here. This made me pause to consider the source of multiple examples in Higginbotham's article, such as her conclusion that "race came to life primarily as the signifier of the master/slave relation." I think this statement needs to be better qualified in order for me to follow her argument. In another class today, discussion of the slave trade in early American colonies came up, and Dr. Winterer commented that the debate about race relations before or after the slave trade was volatile among scholars, which made me feel better about questioning what I felt were assumptions within the Higginbotham article. While I disagreed with some of them, I did agree with what I took away as the main point of the article, which was that "a monolithic 'black community,' 'black experience,' and 'voice of the Negro' was non-existent, just as a monolithic feminist or class-based voice does not exist. While I found the beginning of her article difficult to follow in terms of background sources, one she brought in case studies such as those made by Jacqueline Jones, who points out that  "larger society deemed it 'unnatural,' in fact an 'evil,' for black married women 'to play the lady,'", and later the example of Congressman Mitchell and his being removed from his train car, I was able to better understand, and agree with, her argument. I also found it very interesting to read about how physicians "reinforced the image of syphilis as a 'black problem,'" something that seems both horrible and terribly relevant to our modern society, which is still trying to break free of the assumptions of judgment and intolerance surrounding the rise of AIDS and its long-popular and just as prejudice-founded association with homosexual activity.

While Higginbotham warns against sweeping conclusions about a demographic, I think one of Brown's most important arguments is her warning against the normalization of history around the basis of the white male, or in her specific examples focusing on women, the white female. This tendency to look at white women as an example of the norm, the rest as a minority, Brown argues, "tends to forestall resolution of problems of gender, class, and sexual orientation internal to black communities." Being an archaeology student, I also appreciated her warning that historians must not isolate their examinations, tempting as it may be, but rather consider as much as we can of their contexts, the things to with which others are bound. Brown points out that "White women and women of color not only live different lives but white women live the lives they do in large part because women of color live the ones they do." I had never considered this paradox before; I myself had an African American housekeeper who would look after me for short periods of time, as well as a nanny who would take are of me while my mom worked (my nanny, as it happens, was elderly, white, and Scottish . . .). However, the basis of my mother being able to work so much even while at home was that our house was regularly cleaned by our African American housekeeper, and thus my mom's high paying job was in part maintained by the probably more menial work done by our housekeeper . . . all of a sudden, given something to relate to personally, I was much more inclined to buy Brown's article than I was Higginbotham's, but is that fair? I'm looking forward to discussion shortly.

The claim that Ma Rainey explored and illuminated so many aspects of African American women's experiences—"discrimination, racism, newfound personal and sexual freedoms, migration, self-pride and assertion, and sorrow,"—seems as if it would be a tall order. However, this paper does a good job supporting its thesis. Beginning with examples of more "normal" blues singers, who "perpetuated and played into Hine’s 'culture of dissemblance' by keeping silent about the struggles of black women," the author contrasts some fairly mundane lyrics with some particularly powerful ones from Ma Rainey. Ma Rainey's lyrics are, indeed, far more gritty and difficult than those used by the other early women blues singers in the examples given by the author. I'm unfamiliar with the content, with blues in general, so I must judge the unusual quality of Ma Rainey's lyrics based solely on the paper, but the author is convincing. Despite some examples of her difficult themes, such as alcoholism and adultery, the author successfully introduces Ma Rainey's talents as an empowered woman and the representation she garnered for black women in general through her appearance traveling with Paramount. While I found the content both new and convincing, my critique would focus on the writing style: for serious papers such as this, I would be inclined to use a shorter introduction on the focus of the paper, and a greater amount of background on Ma Rainey herself. This style could have been used due to the author and the expected reader's previous knowledge of a subject I don’t have a background in, but I think the paper would be more accessible, and less blocky at the beginning, were this change in style made. I also think that re-ordering some of the paragraphs would have strengthened the author's argument: while I found the content of the essay fascinating and well composed, I found myself wondering, until close to the end, why Ma Rainey had been considered important in her own time; if the paragraph that begins "Why so popular?" had been moved closer to the beginning, I wouldn't have been kept wondering. Overall, I enjoyed, and admire, the paper.