Week 2: Higginbotham to Brown


Dear Ms. Esla Brown,

I recently read your piece, “What Has Happened Here,” and I want to congratulate you on your excellent and through-provoking analysis. I think the work you’ve done here has significant implications for my own work: you highlight how the use of race as a metalanguage prevents our ascertaining the ways in which we are connected by class, employment, and countless other facets of life. One point you made stood out to me as especially capturing this argument. It was when you wrote that:

Middle-class white women's lives are not just different from working-class white, Black, and Latina women's lives. It is important to recognize that middle-class women live the lives they do precisely because working-class women live the lives they do. 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. 

Race as a metalanguage not only informs our understandings of class, sexuality, and more, but it seems to incase these identities such that we’re discouraged from exploring the intimate conversations happening between and within these identities. For instance, as you suggested in the above quote, the black-white dichotomy through which we are so used to understanding racial relations impairs our ability to understand the interconnectedness of our class identities. As your piece really brings to light, race not only informs or misshapes our understandings of other identities, but often obscures, and discourages our investigating other identities in their fullness and intricacy.

I look forward to reading more of your work.

Kindly,
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

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