1: Dusty baggage + first encounters
Imagine yourself waking up in a crowded and dusty room — you do not know where you are. The light is dim, peeking through dirty windows that are blocked by stacks of furniture and luggage. You are in a house full of such rooms. You stand on your tip toes, looking for light, for a point of reference outside. The house feels familiar but you do not know where you are.
Now imagine that you are at a restaurant in your neighborhood — you know exactly where you are. You make eye contact with someone who you’ve never seen before. One of you will speak, but even before you do, you scan each other and come to one hundred conclusions. You exchange a few words and come to a hundred more. You are in your own neighborhood — you know exactly where you are.
The second scenario, or something similar, you would probably say happens to you all the time. The first scenario I’ll guess you would say never does. I want to make the case that, in fact, they are happening at the same time, but you aren’t noticing the first one. You meet someone new, in your neighborhood, from inside a dimly lit room, and you do not know where you are.
2: There’s no escaping perspective
We accumulate bits and pieces of ethos and worldview everywhere we go, piling them up like furniture, from childhood through adulthood. It would be impossible to pinpoint what each of these preconceptions are, let alone how they got into our heads in the first place. Still, we process everything we encounter through such habits of pattern-making and categorization, using them to turn our experiences into narratives. At a moment of first meeting, we draw on these particularly, immediately categorizing and cataloguing a new face based on our preconceived notions. What we think we know about this person largely reflects what is already in our own minds.
Social constructivism is an attempt to call these narratives what they are: stories we tell to make sense of the world, not at all fundamental to reality. Deconstructing these stories gives us the chance to build narratives that serve us better. This is an urgent task, when our current narratives include too many legacies of white, colonial, and patriarchal projects. Black feminism has a unique alacrity to recognize, deconstruct, and rebuild these narratives, which are at play from scale of interpersonal relationships to the scale of global politics. Here, I will offer some brief points on the social construction of race and gender, two crucial narratives that frame how we understand ourselves and one another.
The social construction of race. The concept of race as way to classify people is about 500 years old, about the length of twenty generations. People do not have natural or intrinsic races based on their physical characteristics; rather, we have racial identities that, for the past five centuries, have been projected upon us by the social contexts in which we live. The early construction of race was a colonial project. As such, racial reasoning has been a driving force in creating and maintaining global inequality, justifying the forceful extraction of resources and labor from the third world and its diaspora and from indigenous people in occupied lands. The construction of race accompanied colonial expansion, slavery, and genocide; there has never been race without racism. The way race functions changes over time and varies from place to place, often depending on what is politically expedient for dominant groups. A fundamental and relatively stable aspect of race is an imagined black/white binary, in which whiteness is privileged and its paranoias and fantasies are projected onto blackness.1
The social construction of gender. Gender is more easily understood as a social construct once it is broken down into component parts. Here, let’s consider these to be gender identity (internal self-identification), gender expression (presentation to the world), sex (physical characteristics), and sexuality (romantic and/or sexual attraction).2 We define and experience each of these aspects of gender based on the prevailing gender ideology of our time and place. Gender essentialism and misogyny are two enduring aspects of Western gender ideology. Gender essentialism deems only two genders (cis-male and cis-female) as legitimate, and holds that there are innate and fundamental differences between these two genders beyond physical differences. Misogyny is the belief that these essential differences make women inferior, irrational, and/or dangerous, and that women need to be controlled and subdued by men. These ideological tenets dictate that gender identity, gender expressions, and sexualities should match strict and arbitrary expectations based on sex; aberrations from these expectations are considered deviant and threatening to the fabric of society.3
Social construction at the intersection of race and gender. The construction of race and gender are deeply entwined both in their histories and their current forms. Essentialist and misogynistic notions of gender were foundational in constructing race in Western thought in the colonial era. During this time, non-white races were characterized as feminine and weak, and therefore in need of white dominance to control their bodies and their lands. These discourses of domination, control, and conquest, then, cannot be considered separately. Racism continues to be enacted in terms of gender in a myriad of ways; the pathologizing of black sexuality and parenthood serve as clear examples. These intersecting and oppressive constructions have the power to form a deadlock on our collective liberation.4
3: Bigger than the both of us
Beginning to see race and gender as unstable social constructions, rather than as natural categories, can be unsettling and disorienting. I’d like to point to a poignant moment on Geraldo on 17 April 1990 to bring all of this home. RuPaul, in drag, sits on stage with a panel of New York City “Club Kids”. The show’s host, Geraldo Rivera, welcomes the audience to “what very well may be the most unusual edition of this program [they] will ever see”. One audience member asks: “Do you people dress like this during the day, or just at night?” RuPaul responds:
“I wanna make the point that you’re born naked and the rest is drag. Those guys in the three piece suits over there — I look terrible in a three piece suit but it’s drag, I mean, everything you wear. This body you have is a vessel, and you’re bigger, its bigger than the both of us, Geraldo.”5
RuPaul subversively states that the identities that we hold tightly are not fundamental to our true selves. We are all performing these identities, whether we are doing so within or outside of the expectations of society. Only once we acknowledge and deconstruct these can begin to see each other, love each other, and lift each other up in radical new ways.
1 For more on the social construction of race, check out the article Racial Formations by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, or the book Racial Formation in the United States by the same authors.
2 Check out this easy infographic by Sam Killerman that breaks down gender in a way that is accessible to young and old.
3 For more on the social construction of gender, check out the book Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hills Collins.
4 For more on social construction at the intersection of race and gender, check out the book the Specter of Sex by Sally Kitch for a long historical perspective. Check out this TED Talk, this Washington Post article, or this scholarly article by Kimberle Crenshaw Williams (with the TED Talk is with Abby Dobson) for a contemporary perspective.
5 Check out this episode of Geraldo with RuPaul’s moment of zen starting at 20:25.