#Cantb(l)ackdown

 This was not a new tactic, for the same had occurred vis-a-vis opium and Chinese immigrants decades earlier. “The demonization of the cannabis plant was an extension of the demonization of the Mexican immigrants. In an effort to control and keep tabs on these new citizens, El Paso, TX borrowed a play from San Francisco’s playbook, which had outlawed opium decades earlier in an effort to control Chinese immigrants. The idea was to have an excuse to search, detain and deport Mexican immigrants...That excuse became marijuana.” (2014, October 9, Drug Policy Alliance). Americans had been familiar with cannabis, which was quite widely available in the US, and bore significance in medicines. “Marijuana,” however, though it was the same plant, bore a more “Mexican sounding name,” and at a time when an immigration flux following the 1900 Mexican Revolution had occurred, racial fears were, fortuitously for those who opposed the usage of the drug, available for manipulation. Thus, claims were made that marijuana had capabilities of making men of color violent, driven to solicit sexual acts from white women forcibly. “This imagery became the backdrop for the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 which effectively banned its use and sales,” according to Dr. Malik Burnett and Amanda Reiman.

Race functions as a “central axis” in social structure (Omi and Winant) and ideas around race involve unequal power relationships. These “power relationships” operate on a systemic scale. Thus, racism is a system of dominance or power using race to create a social hierarchy. The determiners of this hierarchy take control of resources at the expense of the “out group(s),” that is the groups which are “stigmatized or less powerful” (You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like A Sociologist, Dalton Conley). The ideas created around race by this in-group are used to justify/rationalize inequality. For example, the meanings around the racial markers “White” and “Black” have been subject to certain changes throughout history, both to limit access to resources for those not racialized “White”, but also to explain away inequalities plaguing communities racialized “Black” or in connection to “Blackness.”

Ideas around race are always changing. From the fact that “race” was not the basis of indentured servitude in the early colonial years before chattel slavery was implemented, to the fact that some European ethnicities who we consider White today were not considered White at some point, the meanings around race and why it matters are not static, but always in a state of flux. We need people to realize that these changes are always brought about because of socio-historical context. And we must see that, today, economic conflict and racial ideology are not separate issues, but intimately connected.

Racialization: The Historical Development of Race 

“In the United States, the racial category of "black" evolved with the consolidation of racial slavery. By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans whose specific identity was Ibo, Yoruba, Fulani, etc., were rendered "black" by an ideology of exploitation based on racial logic—the establishment and maintenance of a "color line." This of course did not occur overnight. A period of indentured servitude which was not rooted in racial logic preceded the consolidation of racial slavery. With slavery, however, a racially based understanding of society was set in motion which resulted in the shaping of a specific racial identity not only for the slaves but for the European settlers as well. Winthrop Jordan has observed: "From the initially common term Christian, at mid-century there was a marked shift toward the terms English and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term of self-identification appeared—white."19

We must understand that the ideas we currently hold around race are not stable or static, but are always changing. Race has always taken on new meanings and been shaped by socio-historical context. 

....Particularly during the nineteenth century, the category of "white" was subject to challenges brought about by the influx of diverse groups who were not of the same Anglo-Saxon stock as the founding immigrants. In the nineteenth century, political and ideological struggles emerged over the classification of Southern Europeans, the Irish and Jews, among other "nonwhite" categories.21 Nativism was only effectively curbed by the institutionalization of a racial order that drew the color line around, rather than within, Europe. By stopping short of racializing immigrants from Europe after the Civil War, and by subsequently allowing their assimilation, the American racial order was reconsolidated in the wake of the tremendous challenge placed before it by the abolition of racial slavery.22 With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, an effective program for limiting the emergent class struggles of the later nineteenth century was forged: the definition of the working class in racial terms—as "white." This was not accomplished by any legislative decree or capitalist maneuvering to divide the working class, but rather by white workers themselves. Many of them were recent immigrants, who organized on racial lines as much as on traditionally defined class lines.23 The Irish on the West Coast, for example, engaged in vicious anti-Chinese race-baiting and committed many pogrom-type assaults on Chinese in the course of consolidating the trade union movement in California. Thus the very political organization of the working class was in important ways a racial project. The legacy of racial conflicts and arrangements shaped the definition of interests and in turn led to the consolidation of institutional patterns (e.g., segregated unions, dual labor markets, exclusionary legislation) which perpetuated the color line within the working class. Selig Perlman, whose study of the development of the labor movement is fairly sympathetic to this process, notes that: The political issue after 1877 was racial, not financial, and the weapon was not merely the ballot, but also "direct action"-violence. The anti-Chinese agitation in California, culminating as it did in the Exclusion Law passed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most important single factor in the history of American labor, for without it the entire country might have been overrun by Mongolian [sic] labor and the labor movement might have become a conflict of races instead of one of classes.24 More recent economic transformations in the US have also altered interpretations of racial identities and meanings. The automation of southern agriculture and the augmented labor demand of the postwar boom transformed blacks from a largely rural, impoverished labor force to a largely urban, working-class group by 1970.25 When boom became bust and liberal welfare statism moved rightwards, the majority of blacks came to be seen, increasingly, as part of the "underclass," as state "dependents." Thus the particularly deleterious effects on blacks of global and national economic shifts (generally rising unemployment rates, changes in the employment structure away from reliance on labor intensive work, etc.) were explained once again in the late 1970s and 1980s (as they had been in the 1940s and mid-1960s) as the result of defective black cultural norms, of familial disorganization, etc.26 In this way new racial attributions, new racial myths, are affixed to “blacks.”27 Similar changes in racial identity are presently affecting Asians and Latinos, as such economic forces as increasing Third World impoverishment and indebtedness fuel immigration and high interest rates, Japanese competition spurs resentments, and US jobs seem to fly away to Korea and Singapore.28 . . . “

Next time someone pinpoints economic issues in communities of color as a cultural deficiency (blaming it on hip-hop music, for example) show them this.

Curious? Skeptical? Want to read more? Follow the link below: 

NATALIE LOVELL “The term ‘intersectionality’ was originally coined by Crenshaw (1989; 1993) in her seminal critique of US antidiscrimination laws against black women and the ‘difference-blindness’ of identity politics. Crenshaw argued that a single-axis framework maintained focus on either race or gender, thereby distorting and erasing the experiences of black women by failing to address the “multidimensionality” (1989: 139) that underscores the lives of marginalized subjects. The narrow and limited focus on one identity at the expense of another, Crenshaw (1991: 1242) argued,  “works to exclude or marginalize those who are different”, and consequently, “contemporary feminist and anti-racist discourses have failed to consider intersectional identities such as women of colour” (Crenshaw, 1991: 1243). Treating gender and race as mutually exclusive analytical categories renders invisible “the simultaneous experience of gendered racism” (Carastathis, 2014: 306). Crenshaw’s metaphor of crossroads thus served to describe the double, triple, multiple and many-layered blanket of oppression that marginalized groups experience at the intersections of patriarchy, racism and colonialism, to name a few (cited in Yuval-Davis, 2006: 196; Dhamoon, 2010: 2).

It is worth noting that, whilst Crenshaw’s (1989; 1993) formulation has been hugely significant for the development of intersectionality; the concept has a long history in black feminism. Late 19th Century black activists such as Sojourner  Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida Well Barnett and Fannie Lou Hamer (Hill Collins, 1989: 745) have been well documented in their struggles and contestation regarding the interrelationships between racism, gender, sexuality and social class (Brah and Phoenix, 2004: 76). Further, political coalitions such as the Combahee River Collective (1977), a black lesbian feminist organisation in the US, and Organisation for Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD, 1978) in the UK, were instrumental in highlighting how white feminist movements were both exclusionary and inadequate in addressing the particular needs of women of colour. The Combahee River Collective (1977: online) advocated “the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppressions are interlocking” whilst OWAAD (cited in Brah and Phoenix, 2004: 79) emphasized the need to “take into account our cultural differences”, calling to attention the necessity in acknowledging the heterogeneity inherent both within groups and amongst women. Nevertheless, Crenshaw’s (1989; 1993) articulation provided a much needed frame of reference that further opened up conceptual space to study the previously under-examined particularities of marginalized subjects, and the various interlocking oppressions (Hill Collins, 1989: 2000)at the point of intersection (Walby et al. 2012; Dhamoon, 2010; Sigle-Rushton et al. 2013)”

- NATALIE LOVELL

 Culture involves intersubjective understandings and meanings. Individuals in particular people groups share, create, and agree upon the meanings and values ideas and norms of the given culture. Through the daily interactions of these individuals, over time, all of these things in a culture are produced, reproduced, and even modified. In this way, culture involves agency--human action or volition. However, no one individual is free to reshape and redefine culture on their own. This is why some assume that focus on cultural structure “removes agency.” Structure refers to the way the constructs of culture, shape, inhibit, or limit the way individuals act in society.

The idea of “race,” is a cultural construct. Because race involves agency, structure, and culture, it can be a difficult concept to come to terms with. Agency, societal structure, and culture all work together, which nuances and complicates any discussion about how these three impact human society.

It is important that people understand the following however:

"They observe that the pool of unemployed black workers is likely to be seen as less skilled because of more consistent or prolonged unemployment. That can make companies less likely to hire them, and more skeptical once they do. This leads employers to invest more heavily in monitoring black employees. That could be everything from instructing supervisors to closely watch a new hire, or more directly monitoring job performance—for instance how many boxes a worker correctly packs at a shipping center. Because black workers are more closely scrutinized, it increases the chances that errors—large or small—will be caught. According to the researchers it’s more likely that a black employee would be let go for these errors than a white one. Thus another way of looking at the findings, Lang says, is that blacks simply don’t get a second chance."

"The idea of America was a bright and shining lie, and a very appealing one, but the architects of that lie encountered a number of impediments. There were human obstructions, for example, whose annihilation had to be woven into a cultural identity that celebrated the idea that all men were created equal. Thus, a narrative of righteous conquest was written, the extermination of Indigenous peoples continued and a dehumanized Black workforce was shackled to the task of building a new empire...

Even in social justice circles, I have encountered few Black people who are familiar with the role that the so-called Buffalo Soldiers played in Native displacement during westward expansion. However, in Native communities, stories of the Black soldiers who fought for the North during the Civil War, being turned toward the West in the war's aftermath have not been forgotten. The role of Black soldiers in the subjugation of Native peoples was viewed by some as a point of pride. "We made the West," Tenth Cavalry Pvt. Henry McCombs, a Black Buffalo soldier, declared in 1895. "[We] defeated the hostile tribes of Indians; and made the country safe to live in." And while stories of the bravery exhibited by Black soldiers during the Civil War are well known, stories of Black soldiers participating in campaigns of violence against Native people, including the government's 1890-91 Wounded Knee campaign, are far less discussed outside of Native communities.

Similarly, one will rarely hear discussion, in Native circles, of the sad reality that some Native people owned Black slaves until the practice was ended by treaty at the close of the Civil War. While the institution was rare among Native people - with less than 3 percent of Natives owning slaves at the height of the practice - it is nonetheless a dark stain in Native history, and one that most are not eager to revisit. With Black people in the United States attempting to build forward in the afterlife of slavery, living with the cultural re-memory of its horrors, a failure to fully speak to this entanglement of Native culture with one of this country's darkest realities has no doubt created a barrier to dialogue, and contributed to various rifts between Native and Black populations.

While many Native people question the collective blame heaped upon over 500 nations for the actions of the small fraction of the Native population that owned slaves, it is important to remember that Blackness is likewise not a monolith. Native people, like Black people, are often understood collectively. This is a reality that is also experienced by Black Americans, despite their varied origins, and any dismantling of these socially constructed ideas can only occur through dialogue.

While Native and Black people have at times fought alongside each other, recognition of the ways in which both groups have replicated the harms of colonialism is clearly necessary if the two groups are to build forward in solidarity."

Read the full article by Kelly Hayes at: