Gender and Race: Together at Last?


	Gender and Race Introduction	9:47
	The Slavery Experience	10:04
	The Idea of Race as Nation	13:44
	The Future of Black Women's History	17:32
	Black Women Historians	16:25
	Black Women's Academic Experience	10:40
	Interaction Among Panelists	13:20
	Audience Question and Answer: Part One	21:13
	Audience Question and Answer: Part Two	18:30

	Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham: The Idea of Race as Nation
	Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, professor of history and African American studies at Harvard, discusses the interconnection between the social and the spatial, exploring racialized meanings and space, drawing specifically from works about black women and from broader studies of gender inspired by calls to denaturalize race. "While nations are imagined communities, as the often quoted Benedict Anderson has remarked, 'nations are also bounded territories—of spatial areas, of cities and farmlands, of forests and mountains and waterways, of residential neighborhoods and commercial districts—and all of these places are imbued with social meanings. The idea of race as nation is evident in discourses of miscegenation.' I'd just like to talk a little bit about this idea of America being the white man's country."<br> <br> "The intertwined representation of race and nation developed during the Revolutionary era, giving birth to an iconography of America as 'fair Columbia,' thus white and female." Higginbotham states that "America was understood as 'virgin land,' emerged from the conceptual specialization of the specific racial and gendered meanings. Such meanings are gleaned, for example, from Ulrich Phillips's famous article on the central theme of southern history, where Phillips talks sympathetically about linking the ideology of white supremacy with a determination to 'save a white man's country.'" The staying power of this rhetoric in American history fascinates Higginbotham, as it is far older than "red baiting" and older than other claims of un-Americanism. <br> <br> Higginbotham provides examples of how race provides meanings, such as a coalition between the Garvey movement and an anti-misogynist group in 1920s Virginia who unified to produce anti-misogynist leglislation. Other examples of racialized images of space cited by Higginbotham include appeals to gender consciousness by Malcolm X and by women activists during the civil rights movement. "The new scholarship has just begun to explore the racial and gender implications for women of African descent who migrate from one culture where there is a fluid conception of race to the United States, where racial consciousness and ideology are informed, even dictated, by a black/white binary. Such African-descended migrants from the Spanish-, French-, and English-speaking Caribbean and South America have for centuries come to the United States with linguistic, cultural, and social understandings different from those held by those of longer heritage in the United States." In conclusion, Professor Higginbotham addresses the idea of place and class identity and cites the important research that looks at public housing as centers of activism between the 1940s and 1970s.<br> <br>