The Merits and Confines of Unity

To Elsa Barkley Brown,

There are women who wish to emphasize the one-ness of the female experience. It is not difficult to see, however, that members of a movement are first individuals, and that the varying, conflicting, and incongruous stories of the individual cannot be condensed into preassigned constructs and long-held generalizations. As an African-American woman, no single group--whether it be black, female, or otherwise-- will have the capacity to define us. Even within the category of "African-American woman" our individual experiences vary by a myriad of factors. Thus the unities we forge are based on assumptions made from years of existing under the constructs of race and gender.

You may ask, then, how I feel we can achieve black cohesiveness, and in a larger sense, feminine and cross-racial unity. In truth, I feel that race, in many cases, has been adopted as a term unique to minorities who are forced in some ways to be defined by it. Unity, however, cannot be built through race alone, as race itself is a construct independent of class, environment, religion, and history. While you seem to believe that race is neutralized and removed from feminine history where it should be embraced and accounted for, I believe that even its implementation is an affirmation of the primary role that race plays in the human experience. Race is as much a reality for white individuals as it is for individuals of color, just as gender defines both male and female experiences. So too are socioeconomic and religious factors, and insisting that historical perspectives adopt a more racialized viewpoint may lead to the devaluing of these factors and thus work against itself by presenting a more singular viewpoint of the lives of black women.

In this country, the law seemed to define us both in our womanhood and our race; we waited patiently for the Court to award us with the social implications of one and release us from the social confines of the other. To utterly emphasize or utterly neutralize the role race plays in our individual experiences conflicts wholly with the defining concepts of intersectionality. For African-American women, it seems unclear whether the compromise between strengthening unity and reducing singularity can be made.

Sincerely,
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham