Delbello - Andrea Smith

This week’s readings deal with methodologies connected to women of color and problems related to the creation of common shared epistemology.

Andrea Smith criticizes the concept of “shared victimization” and “oppression olympics.” She argues that the notion of “women of color” is too broad and doesn’t take into consideration conflicts, tension, and complicity in the oppression of other people.

She discusses how three different “pillars” of white supremacy can be helpful for a framework under which women of color can organize. The first one is slavery/capitalism. In this pillar of white supremacy blackness is equated with ‘slaveability’. Whether through slavery, share-cropping or the prison industrial complex, capitalism commodifies people. This system encourages the complacency of all non-black bodies because it offers a vertical opportunity for them. There is, as such, a tendency to “escape” one’s potential oppression by involuntarily or voluntarily be part of the oppression of others. The black US population that is currently enslaved in the prison complex was white before slavery was abolished, now black bodies are part of a mixture of state/private organization that acts as slave masters.

In the discussion around the genocide/colonialism pillar Smith states that the of indigenous people has to be a disappearing one. To “play dead” is the way in which “Native people become a permanent ‘present absence’ in the US colonial imagination, an ‘absence’ that reinforces, at every turn, the conviction that Native peoples are indeed vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justified.” So “playing Indian” and “Indian hating” become the active manifestation of this psychological anxiety. For Smith, one involves cultural appropriation and the other includes genocide. As such, she explains the “playing Indian” part is a result of the image of the disappearing native because “if they thought Indians were still alive and perfectly capable of being Indian themselves” why would they need to play Indian?

The Orientalism/war pillar sets the “west” as superior by labeling the “east” as it’s exotic counterpoint. In this process, non-western “civilizations” are imagined as a looming outside threat to the empire. Orientalism serves as the “anchor for war” because it allows the U.S. to justify protecting itself from enemies through deep militarism. This mentality also justifies genocide and slavery because the U.S. can create a narration around the fighting of external enemies. This pillar allows us to examine things like the unique positions of Latinos or Arab people inside the U.S. construction of identities.

We have to think about it in ways theoretically and intellectually in the sense that not everybody benefits from or is oppressed by intersecting structures.

In this sense Smith’s theoretical approach is useful as it connects at a deeper level more than one dimension in a way that is rare to find, at least in US sociology. It’s not enough, she argues, to be part of a so-called “minority” group to make claims of oppression if one is complacent to the oppression of others which are in other social locations.

My questions are around the interconnection of white supremacy and capitalism, more precisely about exploitation. Can we have a theory of exploitation of resources and labor force from the richest countries to the poorest ones that involves a dimension of opportunities in terms of citizenship?