A Critical Perspective on Race - Research Paper Example

?Ruth Frankenberg This paper will discuss Ruth Frankenberg’s life, works and contributions to an important in American studies. The central thesis of this paper is that Ruth Frankenberg’s work and writings on gender and race is largely motivated by her personal narrative because of her own identity as a white woman. I. Early life A. Biography According to her biography in “Contemporary Authors Online” , Frankenberg, who was an American Studies professor and sociologist, was born in 1958 and received her education at the University of California. As a young student, she was already an activist and worked with feminist groups and student organizations. We begin to get a glimpse of Frankenberg’s life in her first book and perhaps the book which she is known the most for, “White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness”, which was published in 1993. It is telling that Frankenberg begins with the admission that she had at first considered race far removed from her work as a Marxist Feminist. To quote her, “I saw racism as entirely external to me, a characteristic of extremists or of the British State, but not a part of what made me or what shaped my activism.” (1993: 53). Her race consciousness was triggered by the observation that unlike those she campaigned in the All-Cambridge campaigns who were whites like her, those she worked alongside in the feminist movement in the United States were “lesbian women of color and white working class women” (1993: 54) – bringing forth a heterogeneity that demonstrated the unities and linked experiences of women from all over. Black writers like Patricia Collins (1995) saw the import and contribution of this kind of literature. B. Choosing Career From this early experience, Frankenberg developed a critical perspective towards race and saw whiteness as a category that bestows “structural advantage” and “privilege” (55) and as a “place from which to look at oneself, others and society.” In her work at looking at white women’s childhoods, Frankenberg saw how race was used as an organizing device to bestow or deny privilege; to include or exclude. In a way, therefore, it becomes inextricable with class – particularly when race becomes the determinant of conferring economic benefit. The criticism that "'whites' in the United States historically have been extraordinarily good at not looking inward” (Durso, 2002) appears to be a valid one. C. First Book Ruth Frankenberg then takes off her discourse in her first book, “White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness” where she began with the provocative observation that “any system of differentiation shapes those upon whom it bestows privilege as well as those it oppresses.” (Frankenberg: 1993: 131). This is a critical starting point in beginning to understand the complex ways with which the color of one’s skin – whiteness – impacts on race, gender, and class. It can therefore be seen that Frankenberg is critical of, rather than apologetic for, white racism and her work in fact is a scathing indictment of the structures of dominance that have resulted from skin color differentiations. Looking deeper and unpacking her work more, Frankenberg explores the themes of race, gender and class vis a vis whiteness not as independent from each other, but as overlapping structures of oppression and exploitation that must be addressed and resisted together. She surfaces, to paraphrase May (1999:4) the hegemonic processes that lead to the universalization and normalization of whiteness and the “othering” of non-whiteness. Frankenberg’s critical – as opposed to apologetic – perspective on race and whiteness becomes even more apparent when she reveals how the subjects of her study, the white middle-class women who she had asked to describe their childhoods, had managed to render invisible the black people who they had lived with or encountered within their communities. And when these black people are summoned to memory, it is always in the context of class-asymmetrical relationships. To quote: But whether or not it is race per se that creates the form in which the domestic worker of color appears in the interviews, it is primarily through employer-employee class-imbalanced relationships that women from ‘apparently all-white’ homes encounter women of color. (61) In the other accounts and interviews that dot the text of Frankenberg, other methods of differentiation are explored – some overt, some covert – but always with the result of creating distinctions and setting boundaries using racial markers. II. Literary Career Another book that she did was entitled “Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism” (1997) where Frankenberg went deeper into the themes of race and explored the meanings attached to whiteness by looking at socioeconomic, sociocultural and economic interrelations. Quoting Contemporary Authors Online, “The book's essays focus on a wide range of subjects, among them American fiction by white writers who have recognized the social constructs involved in whiteness, and a discussion of how black girls who grow up in white suburbs feel themselves to be "white" socially and internally until they expand their horizons, usually at college, and find their black consciousness.” An essay she wrote was “Cracks in the Facade: Whiteness and the Construction of 9/11” which showed how the race discourse helped frame the narrative on 9/11. She wanted the essay to be part of a book that she was in the process of writing and compiling, but she passed away before it could be published. In these essay, which runs across themes similar to her previous books, one could sense her self-criticism and her self-investigation over her own identity as a white woman, prodded by a sense of responsibility to correct or ameliorate inequities between white and black women produced and reproduced over time. This of course does not come without any challenges. As she wrote herself in an essay entitled The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness, (2001: 73) “One challenge in the critical examination of whiteness is thus to hold on to the unreality of race while adhering tenaciously to the recognition of its all-too-real effects. The critical examination of race, racism and whiteness requires a particular kind of vigilance, breadth of vision and refusal of ‘either or’ thinking.” Aside from that, Frankenberg was also greatly interested in religion and spiritual practices and this was the driving force behind the book entitled “Living Spirit, Living Practice: Poetics, Politics, Epistemology”. She was interested in the intersections between religion and the body, spirituality and sexuality, activism, and the role of geography in religious practices. She conducted interviews with around fifty individuals from various races, nationalities and socioeconomic classes in order to ferret out her findings on the nature of religion in the United States. III. Critical Reviews In a sense, race and class and gender are similar in that it triggers the process of differentiation, and these differentials are legitimized and ratified in order to support existing power structures or arrangements. What Frankenberg appear to tell us is that race and gender and class differentials therefore, operate to strengthen one another and create filtering mechanisms that determine what people can get, and how, as well as the relationships between the group that gets and the group that does not. The article written about her in Contemporary Authors Online reveal what her peers thought of her work and her contribution. According to that article, Patricia Hill Collins commented, "Responding to long-standing complaints by people of color that White feminists fail to understand the significance of race for gender politics, Frankenberg presents a long overdue effort to develop a politic of responsibility among White people for the benefits and privileges they accrue from being White." She also said, "Frankenberg's discourse of responsibility about race and her . . . overlapping paradigms of race." When asked to give an opinion on Frankenberg’s predisposition to highlight race rather than be blind to it, Collins defended Frankenberg by saying, "identifying racial difference is not an indication of 'racism.' Instead, attending to racial difference becomes an antiracist strategy."  Peter Wade from the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute was also quoted as commenting, "I found it hard at times to get a good sense of the various women involved and they never took shape in my mind as individuals, but there is no doubt that Frankenberg's analysis of their discourse makes fascinating reading for much of the time." IV. Later Life Frankenberg moved to India with her partner in her later years and spent time immersing herself in spirituality, but still doing scholarly work on gender and race issues. When Frankenberg died in 2007, it can be said that she left a lasting legacy to the American people by virtue of her pioneering work on issues of race, identity, whiteness, gender and class – forcing white people of her own class to remove their blinders and rethink the paradigms that they had been so used to and taken for granted. Her sense of critical self-awareness over being white at a period where whiteness conferred benefits had clearly manifested in her works and her writings. Also, apart from being a race activist, Frankenberg was also a feminist and a lesbian, and so her works writings to a certain extent surfaced that kind of contradiction – privileged because of her whiteness and class background, but “othered” because of her being a lesbian. V. Personal Reflections My personal reflections on Frankenberg is that hers is a very authentic voice on the issue of whiteness because of her own identity as a white woman. And her conflicted identity is very much present in the depth and breadth of her work. I find that race and whiteness are themes that need to be talked about more frequently, especially in relation to other categories of difference. Indeed, the classifications brought on by race, gender and class create monolithic homogenous aggrupations that highlights only similarities and obscures valid differences that need to be investigated. Vertical differences are craftily concealed, and inequalities are tidied up and swept under the rug. Thus, it makes it more difficult to address festering issues of unequal access to resources and uneven development between various groups (class, gender, ethnicity, etc.). Identity is more often than not, defined by those that held political and economic power. Indeed, what it ultimately creates is structural violence, and the only form of development it can lead to is one that reinforces existing power arrangements and privileges the political and economic elite. Historically, the superiority of white culture, emanating from racism (which in turn is an arbitrary marker used to ratify existing power arrangements), was used as a justification for colonization. What therefore takes place is that ethnicity or race, which is not a bundle of attributes but is contextual and is produced and reproduced through social interactions, becomes used as a subterfuge to justify pillage and destruction of indigenous cultures to replace with the Western culture. Race, which is a social construction and not a biological reality, becomes the basis of consigning whole populations to servitude and slavery, and using up resources in destructive and non-sustainable ways that would impact even on future generations. This complex relationships between culture, racism and colonization are manifest even to this day, with developed countries seeking to negate the culture of the other country by insisting that its way of life and cultural beliefs are more superior and should therefore be imposed. The incursions of the United States in the name of American-style democracy and under the blanket of the “Global War on Terror” is a succinct example that colonizer mentality persists even in contemporary times. We need therefore to be grateful to scholars like Ruth Frankenberg for getting these issues out. Painful as it might be, it is a step forward in acknowledging the historical wounds that have been wrought and making things better for the future generations. Ruth Frankenberg remains to be an important voice in the literature on race and gender studies in the United States. Her critical perspective on whiteness and her feminist frame of analysis have helped shaped the discourse on intersectionality and helped people understand that oppression is the result not of a single cause, but of multiple layers of discrimination brought on by the various categories of discrimination in our society. Works Cited "Ruth Frankenberg." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Oct. 2011. Collins, Patricia Hill. "White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness." Signs20.3 (1995): 728. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Oct. 2011. Durso, Patricia Keefe. "Bringing Whiteness 'Home': Exploring the Social Geography of Race in Mary Gordon's The Other Side." Modern Language Studies 32.1 (Spring 2002): 85-102. Rpt. inContemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 216. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Oct. 2011. May, S. (1999). Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinkin Multicultural and Antiracist Education. London: Falmer Press. Frankenberg, R. (1993) “Growing Up White: Feminism, Racism and the Social Geography of Childhood.” Feminist Review. Vol. 45. 51-84. Frankenberg, R. (1993). White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolist: University of Minnesota Press. Frankenberg, R. (1997). Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, Durham: Duke University Press. Frankenberg, R. (2004). Living Spirit, Living Practice: Poetics, Politics, Epistemology, Durham: Duke University Press Read More