Week 2: Barkley Brown and Higginbotham
Dear Prof. Barkley Brown,
Thank you for the knowledge and mode of thinking you share in your essay, “‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics.” Just one aspect of your essay I deeply appreciate is the brief but vital glimpse at the global scale at which structures of race and power operate. You mention how the growth of opportunities for white middle class women in the U.S. labor force is connected to “the export of capital to other parts of the world, where primarily people of color—many of them female—face overwhelming exploitation.” This is a necessary reminder of our positioning in the U.S. within global systems of racism and capitalism, as we deeply critique such systems within a U.S. context. The void you fill with this analysis of the way whiteness shapes the lives of white women is an astute complement to Prof. Higginbotham’s conceptualization of race as a “metalanguage” that seeps into the construction of other social relations, like gender and class as in your example.
Your further discussion of racialized dynamics of labor around the domestic sphere also complements Prof. Higginbotham’s writing on the “racialized meaning of class” in the difference in labor roles for white and black women. Prof. Higginbotham highlights this difference in the “domestic ideal” of white women “playing the lady” at home, a role denied to black women who had to take on “the role of menial worker outside their homes” in the postwar South. You continue this history with the movement of white women into the labor force in jobs with higher status and pay, illuminating the way racialized constructs continually reinvent themselves with the same forces of power behind them. In one century, white women are “the lady,” refined overseers of the domestic sphere, while black women would be “unnatural” and “evil” in doing so; in another century, white women move seamlessly into middle-class jobs as modern working women, only able to do so because of the women of color filling the labor needs at home.
In even this small portion of your and Prof. Higginbotham’s essays, you throw a stark light onto the parts of history and identity that often go unacknowledged and unaddressed, with real consequence and harm. As someone learning how to recognize and address such issues, I’m grateful for both of your critical analyses and the frameworks you provide.
Sincerely,
Yeji
Thank you for the knowledge and mode of thinking you share in your essay, “‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics.” Just one aspect of your essay I deeply appreciate is the brief but vital glimpse at the global scale at which structures of race and power operate. You mention how the growth of opportunities for white middle class women in the U.S. labor force is connected to “the export of capital to other parts of the world, where primarily people of color—many of them female—face overwhelming exploitation.” This is a necessary reminder of our positioning in the U.S. within global systems of racism and capitalism, as we deeply critique such systems within a U.S. context. The void you fill with this analysis of the way whiteness shapes the lives of white women is an astute complement to Prof. Higginbotham’s conceptualization of race as a “metalanguage” that seeps into the construction of other social relations, like gender and class as in your example.
Your further discussion of racialized dynamics of labor around the domestic sphere also complements Prof. Higginbotham’s writing on the “racialized meaning of class” in the difference in labor roles for white and black women. Prof. Higginbotham highlights this difference in the “domestic ideal” of white women “playing the lady” at home, a role denied to black women who had to take on “the role of menial worker outside their homes” in the postwar South. You continue this history with the movement of white women into the labor force in jobs with higher status and pay, illuminating the way racialized constructs continually reinvent themselves with the same forces of power behind them. In one century, white women are “the lady,” refined overseers of the domestic sphere, while black women would be “unnatural” and “evil” in doing so; in another century, white women move seamlessly into middle-class jobs as modern working women, only able to do so because of the women of color filling the labor needs at home.
In even this small portion of your and Prof. Higginbotham’s essays, you throw a stark light onto the parts of history and identity that often go unacknowledged and unaddressed, with real consequence and harm. As someone learning how to recognize and address such issues, I’m grateful for both of your critical analyses and the frameworks you provide.
Sincerely,
Yeji
Thank you for taking note of the global implications of race. I also really like the way that you've put Barkley Brown and Higginbotham into conversation. Looking forward to discussing this in class.
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