Ida B. Wells,
I am in awe of the work you did throughout your life and
the resistance you invoked. You inverted the existing
paradigm through your writing, and for this I am hopeful that
notions of masculinity continue to be susceptible to change.
However, during your work did you ever wonder if redefining
masculinity was enough?
Did you ever feel that notions of masculinity and femininity
should be disposed of in general? Is there a way to shift
people’s actions outside of emasculating them into doing
so? In reading about your travels to England, I wondered
if you ever pondered the manifold ways it too contributed
to global oppression of people of color. As you understood
the way gender ties to race, have you also thought of how
to frame global and national oppression?
You discussed Afro-American labor as the backbone of the
Southern economy. White supremacy is then a means to
ensure black labor is exploited for white capital gain. Yet I
also wonder if there is also psychological gain to be won
from this system, which solidifies the white identity.
You wrote of the “methods by which religion, science,
law, and political power may be employed to excuse
injustice.” In knowing that institutions of supposed objectivity
can be swayed by racial animus, is there a reason to believe
that any semblance of equality can be achieved within them?
If lynching can be considered pornographic rituals of white
anxiety, I doubt there is any way to disentangle perverted
desire and lust from the current legal system. Is there a way to
leave these frameworks and binaries or are we resigned to
live within them?
Sefa,
ReplyDeleteI also was conflicted with the ways in which Wells' critique of masculinity and femininity fails to leave the very framework that white patriarchy abuses. Wells' rhetorical strategies are undoubtedly brilliant and effective, yet they are short lived. This may be attributed to how redefining masculinity was an inversion of existing expectations, but nevertheless was still an emphasis on the validity of masculinity as an ideal. The lack of analysis on both white and black femininity reinforces this. Though her revelation of the white women desiring for black men holds some truth and inverts the power structure that assumes the latter to be sexually primitive, it relies on a patriarchal rhetoric of victim-blaming that exists to this day. There is a certain lack of consent and more of a tone of seductiveness applied there. Furthermore, the mention of black women that are sexually exploited and abused by white men is radical especially of its time, but as modern readers we cannot ignore her use of this fact as a strategy rather than an abomination of its own. Regardless, her focus was on the protest against lynching, which primarily targeted black men upon the justification of them as rapists, so I understand this is a lot for her to cover that would derail her point of argument. I do wonder what Wells would say now to these thoughts.