How does identity affect ideas (and what to do if it doesn't)?

This is going to seem like an obvious question, but I ask that you go with me, and approach it as a seemingly simple question that has deep resonance.


I had a long-distance conversation with a colleague about Mabel Byrd. In the article I sent him for comments, I argued that Byrd was not a feminist because she never talked about women in any of her extant letters or essays (which are more than for many black women, but still only a handful). My colleague suggested that because she associated with feminist women and went to women-only events (like a Women's International League for Peace and Freedom meeting), she should be called a feminist. I still think it is significant that she never spoke about the particular difficulties faced by women, but I will concede that it is also significant that she operated in a women's sphere in so many ways. In my book, I have a whole chapter about the women's community in Harlem in the 1920s, which supported Harlem Renaissance authors and artists, but was also interested in the politics of respectability and which did things on their own, apart from the famous HR folks. But evidently I haven't transmitted the importance of that community into my thinking on Byrd's life (and Derricotte's, Yolande Du Bois', and Eslanda Robeson's). Was it possible to be an intelligent woman in the 1920s, associating with progressive groups, and not be a feminist? Is it ahistorical to use Alice Walker's term "womanist"? "Womanists" are women 

who behave in a bold, courageous, responsible way as agents of social change for the wholeness and liberation of black people and the rest of humanity. As self-described womanist Geneva Smitherman has noted, a womanist is rooted in the black community and is committed to the development of herself and the entire community. These women are thus linked to earlier generations of 'race women' who worked on behalf of black civil society. They celebrate the culture and beauty of black women. (from here).

Or perhaps the term I'm looking for is "race women."  Pauli Murray describes her aunts as "race women"

They took pride in every achievement of “the race” and agonized over every lynching, every black boy convicted and ‘sent to the roads,’ every insult to ‘the race.’ I would hear: “The race is moving forward!’ ‘You simply can’t keep the race down!’ ‘The race of colored people is going to show the world yet!’"

But I associate "race women" with the generation before Byrd--Mary Church Terrell and the founders of the  National Association of Colored Women's generation.

To reiterate the question in my title--to what extent does identity affect ideas? To what extent does Byrd think the way she does because she is a woman, or a black person, or a Oregonian, or an economist, or a Marxist, etc. And how do I answer the first part of that if there's no evidence for her speaking about herself as a woman or about women in general?

In the same vein, a couple of websites describe Pauli Murry as a "same-gender-loving-woman," (including one that announces she has been named an Episcopal Saint) but she doesn't mention that anywhere in her 437 page autobiography from 1987. I'm teaching her autobiography for the next couple of weeks (her life parallels so many interesting trends of the 20th century), interspersed with textbook chapters. I'm trying to decide when I mention that Murray was a "same-gender-loving-woman" and how I frame that. I think it matters to the extent that gay people shouldn't be invisible in history, but I don't know to what extent it influenced her thinking, particularly since most of my knowledge of her life comes from her autobiography.

A 2011 biography describes Murray thus

Pauli Murray (1910-1985) was a poet, lawyer, activist, and priest, as well as a significant figure in the civil rights and women's movements. Throughout her careers and activism, Murray espoused faith in an American democracy that is partially present and yet to come. In the 1940s Murray was in the vanguard of black activists to use nonviolent direct action. A decade before the Montgomery bus boycott, Murray organized sit-ins of segregated restaurants in Washington DC and was arrested for sitting in the front section of a bus in Virginia. Murray pioneered the category Jane Crow to describe discrimination she experienced as a result of racism and sexism. She used Jane Crow in the 1960s to expand equal protection provisions for African American women. A co-founder of the National Organization of Women, Murray insisted on the interrelation of all human rights. Her professional and personal relationships included major figures in the ongoing struggle for civil rights for all Americans, including Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt. In seminary in the 1970s, Murray developed a black feminist critique of emerging black male and white feminist theologies. After becoming the first African American woman Episcopal priest in 1977, Murray emphasized the particularity of African American women's experiences, while proclaiming a universal message of salvation. The Dream Is Freedom examines Murray's substantial body of published writings as well personal letters, journals, and unpublished manuscripts. Azaransky traces the development of Murray's thought over fifty years, ranging from Murray's theologically rich democratic criticism of the 1930s to her democratically inflected sermons of the 1980s. Pauli Murray was an innovative democratic thinker, who addressed how Americans can recognize differences, signaled the role of history and memory in shaping democratic character, and called for strategic coalition building to make more justice available for more Americans.

No mention of being "Same-gender-loving."

There are people who want to be known as a ____ (human, profession) before an identity category. There are others, like Langston Hughes, who want to be known as a black poet rather than a poet who happens to be black, because that normalized category of "poet" really means "white poet."

Is that the issue here? But as Hughes argues in the essay I linked to above, how do you talk about someone who "just happens to be" black/woman/gay without using normalizing categories of white/male/straight?

What is the significance of identity beyond adding in, especially for people who don't discuss that identity?

Hmmmmm, as I think about my Mabel Byrd article and teaching Murray, maybe I should actually work on answering that question here, rather than just posing it, like I usually do with my blog posts.

I think that it is possible for some people, but not all, to want to transcend their identity. Perhaps the most famous quote along that lines is Du Bois:

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. 

While these are all Europeans, they are not all white Europeans, so I don't think this is a declaration of rising above the veil by becoming white. Du Bois is certainly not one who would have shied away from being called a black intellectual, instead of an intellectual who happens to be black. And yet, The Souls of Black Folk is tentative in the area of declaring an identity. He writes

In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,--darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself and not another. 

Sombre, Darkly, Faint, Dim. These are not the statements of a black power activist. 

I think it comes down to that delicate balance that historians must walk between writing about what our subjects cared about and what we care about. Today we care that Murray was on the gay spectrum, but we must acknowledge that she did not want to be seen primarily through that gaze. Byrd was a woman and engaged in a woman-only sphere, but she seemed to care more deeply about race-based issues than about gender issues (how would this change if there were extant letters between her and other women, instead of only the letters between her and Du Bois, her and Locke, and her and Cullen?)

Much to ponder.

Tim's Light Reading (4/26/2012): A New Blog, "Secular Humanism," LGBT History, Chuck Colson, And The Problems Of Peer Review

1. A New Blog Of Interest

Two names familiar to USIH readers---Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn and Michael Fisher, both of whom attended last year's USIH conference---now share space on a three-person blog originating in the Syracuse-Rochester corridor. The blog's title is Longing For The Real, and it has been in existence since January 2012. Thus far the content ranges far and wide, but I expect USIH topics to appear.


2. What Is "Secular Humanism," And How Is It Used And Abused?

Rick Perlstein tackles these questions in his latest Rolling Stone installment that serves as a shot across the bow, for Democrats, in relation to the upcoming election season. Some of us have had a lively discussion on Andrew Hartman's Facebook page about Perlstein's article. We've been trying to think through the Culture Wars to figure out which part of the Christian right benefits the most by trumping up fears about "Secular Humanism." By the end of the article one is left wondering about the difference between "deeply held beliefs" and the "invention[s] of hucksters with right-wing agendas."


3. USIH, Chicago's LGBT Community, And Public History

This article explores recent leadership problems with Chicago's famous Gerber/Hart Library. Before reading this piece (today), I would have recommended the Gerber/Hart Library to any intellectual historian with ambitions of understanding the recent history of Chicago's non-hetero community. Now I wonder whether that recommendation can be made, due to disarray in the organization and in relation to potentially supporting a renegade leader who appears to be thwarting the LGBT community's wishes in relation to holdings. It sounds like a public history nightmare. And it's complicated by the fact the public history (in a different sense of the phrase) of this community is new---still evolving. My heart goes out to those involved because, as a former resident of the area who lived steps away from the Library, I was proud on behalf of the LGBT community that they had created a public space for holdings and gatherings. In addition, one of my good friends spent YEARS volunteering at Gerber/Hart, helping them organize their collections. I fear for my friend's hard work.


4. Chuck Colson: Delivered Or Disguised?

Our own LD Burnett wrote on Colson's passing last weekend. She noted that "Colson's conversion to charity -- and by 'charity' I mean both 'philanthropy' and 'Christian love' -- did not seem to dull his political instincts." This theme was echoed and expanded upon in polemical-historical pieces by Francis Schaeffer, Jr. and S-USIH member David Greenberg. Schaeffer's entry is more autobiographical, but his message is clear: Colson used his redemption for nefarious ends. Greenberg seconds that point, and argues further (not precisely in these words) that (a) Colson's conversion seems to be at least partially a sham, (b) Colson should've removed himself from politics, and (c) Colson simply continued his pre-Watergate/pre-Nixon political initiatives, particularly with regard to faith-based org-gov't partnerships, but with a post-prison Christian conversion stamp of approval. Colson used his deliverance to disguise a latent thuggishness, so says Greenberg, and continued his ongoing concerns. So who is the real Chuck Colson?

5. What Are The Goods Of Peer Review?

The deceased historian, Princeton graduate (under Dan Rodgers, I believe), and former Chicago Reader contributor Cliff Doerksen asked this question in a September 2010 Reader piece. Here are some salient passages:

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In the eyes of its critics, anonymous peer review sucks because it's slow, undemocratic, and hostile to new and potentially game-changing ideas and arguments. Advocates of the new approach [open review] discussed in the Times propose "using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience." It's an interesting and attractive idea, and one rife with potential for unintended consequences. There's no question that the existing review process is slow: an article can take years to reach publication. But it's not clear, at least not to me, that it really disfavors innovation by empowering unaccountable gatekeepers who select against new and threatening ideas. That's because academics are fundamentally creatures of consensus. ...  

It's hard to pick a fight around an academic conference table because every step of the industry's socialization process after admission to graduate school stresses playing well with others. When newly minted PhDs totter off to their first job interviews, they'll be lucky if a single person in the department to which they are applying has read so much as the title page of their dissertations. "On-campus" interviews, during which the candidate is typically entertained by his prospective employers for 48 hours, are simply protracted exercises in mutual butt-sniffing, designed to determine whether the prospective hire will fit harmoniously into the polyamorous marriage that is an academic department. 

The field of academic book reviewing is likewise a pillow fight. Few reviewers care to freely speak their minds when they know that an uncensored takedown might do real injury to the reviewed author's prospects for tenure or other advancement—and might piss off the author's friends and allies in the bargain. (Fun facts: Amid the thousands of academic book reviews accessible through Project Muse, a gargantuan database of 393 peer-reviewed journals, only nine books were deemed "poorly researched" by their reviewers. On the other hand, 374 were found to be "magisterial"—pretty much the warmest plaudit in the humanistic vocabulary.) 

On the odd occasion when scholars do get out their flick knives, it tends to happen outside of class and out by the bike racks....

Getting back to the issue of double-blind peer review: Theoretically the anonymity of the process creates conditions in which an academic referee can vote his or her conscience. In practice I question whether double-blinding really makes much difference, any more than the acquisition of tenure reliably turns your average prudent career academic into a fearless speaker of truth to power after years of careful self-censorship. ...By and large I have to agree with Professor Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, when he asserts that "there seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print." And keep in mind Dr. Rennie is referring here to the scientific precincts of scholarship, where especially robust standards of proof and argumentation supposedly prevail. 

So what then might we anticipate from a brave new protocol of scholarly review premised on the idea that anyone with access to the Web is entitled to an opinion? Probably something pretty interesting, and at least as dysfunctional as the mess we have now.
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 Comments, praise, and disparagement are welcome! - TL

Gay life in Rural America

I went to a talk last Friday by Mary Gray in the Speaker Series "Place Matters" called "There are No Gay People Here: Expounding the Boundaries of Queer Youth Visibility in Rural Kentucky." I gave extra credit to my USIH class to go because I said that it was about ideas in action.

The talk was advertised by this paragraph:

Drawing on her experiences working in rural parts of Kentucky, Gray will map out how lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and questioning (LGBTQ) youth and their allies make use of digital media and local resources to combat the marginalization they contend with in their own communities as well as the erasure they face in popular representations of gay and lesbian life and the agendas of national gay and lesbian advocacy groups. This talk will explore how youth suture together high schools, public libraries, Wal-Mart, and the web to construct spaces for fashioning their emerging LGBTQ identities.

Her argument was that queer senses of self aren't (just) discovered--they work through boundaries: places, times, politics--and are always mediated.


In rural Kentucky, queer youth use "boundary publics" to express themselves. Nationally, in media and in activist groups, "the good gay life" is seen as only urban. Moreover, according to this narrative, discovery of one's queer self requires things unavailable to a rural youth--" provacy to explore one's queer differences beyond the watchful eyes of those who presume to know everything about one; a visible community able to recognize and return one's queer gaze; and the safe space to express queer difference without fear of retribution" (from Gray's introduction to her book, Out in the Country:Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America).

In this "metro-centric" narrative, rural gays must be biding their time before they can escape to an urban space. But what Gray discovered is that gay youth stay in rural places. Their obsession is not how to leave, but who is the next gay person in the next county over. Gray's idea of "boundary publics" blur offline and online spaces, transform the narrative about what it means to be gay and rural, and establish a chance for social interaction. They express strategies for social recognition and a dialectic between iterative, ephemeral performances of the self and material conditions (rather than having permanent places to be themselves, they take over public spaces and then let them go).

The three examples she gave of "boundary publics" are
1. A church skatepark that was taken over by queer youth, particularly in order to hear bands play. One of the bands then collected email addresses and emailed mp3s with gay lyrics (mostly about heart break between girls) to the listserve.
2. Drag at Walmart (it functions as a fantastic defacto public space because it is a private space with nationally set guidelines for how "guests" can be treated, and is also often the only place open 24 hours in dry counties).
3. A transyouth blog, where his family left supportive messages in the guest book, while emphatically not discussing his transition in real life.

These rural gay youth teach us:
1. Identities are a process of collective action, not a condition waiting for discovery
2. Multiple visibility strategies in play
3. We need to stop moralizing about who does queerness right.

The commentator afterwards, Carol Mason, appreciated several aspects of the talk, but explained that her University of Oklahoma students resisted Gray's idea of "Boundary publics" as seeming to neglect protest.  She gave an example of an art history prof at the University of Kentucky in the 40s who was found by the cops in a car with a young man and arrested for disturbing the peace and on a moralism charge. The disurbing the peace charge was because he tussled with the police. He quit his job and went to Oklahoma. Mason suggested that the "boundary public" of the parked car was not in fact a liberating alternative zone, but instead a sad fact of gay life--that he was forced there when no where else was possible (I'm extrapolating a bit here--that's the sense I got).

This point of disagreement between Gray and Mason reminded me a bit of my own work. I understand Gray to be exploring the alternative spaces that gay youth in rural places create, not because they are protest, but because they are the way that these youth have found to live and breathe and have their being. Whereas Mason wants to find the points of protest and oppression. I see my own work more in line with Gray's--trying to see and validate how African Americans lived during the years of Jim Crow, without having to divide up their choices between protest or accommodation. (Which is ironic because my book is entitled "A Spirit of Compromise and Protest." This suggests, as someone pointed out after a talk of mine recently, that I am exactly about looking at the eternal choice between compromise--a word which is related to, but different than accommodation--and protest.)

I checked in with Gray to see if my sense accorded with her own response to Mason. She wrote back, "I don't know if Carol and I disagree so much as I'm interested in those moments of liberation that do also grapple with limits because they reckon with something beyond LGBT identities or desires. I'm thinking of any person who has to negotiate multiple social positions, including their LGBT-ness, and how that necessarily leads to give and take." Give and take = compromise? And in my formulation, which does not suggest that compromise is the antithesis of protest, perhaps bringing an aunt into a virtual conversation about one's trans-ness by being both visible and kind is a compromise (by not talking about it at the dinner table) and a form of protest (as simple visibility can be in a homophobic world).