“If rethinking the historical contours of Western racial [and feminist] discourse matters as a political project, it is not as a manifestation of an other truth that has previously been denied, but as a vehicle for shifting the frame of reference in such a way that the present can emerge as somehow less familiar, less natural in its categories, its political delineations and its epistemological foundations” (Robyn Wiegman quoted by Grabham, et al, 2009) Kimberlé Crenshaw
Intersectionalities and
the Politics of Identity
The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite – that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference in identity politics is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring difference within groups contributes to tension among groups. Kimberlé Crenshaw Emily Grabham, Didi Herman, Davina Cooper and Jane Krishnadas, Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power and the Politics of Location intersectionality is… a method for interrogating the institutional reproduction of inequality, whether at the level of the state, the family, or of legal structures more generally Western Expansion, Race Ideology, and American Nation Formation Pictorial of Western
Expansion
•  Manifest Destiny!
Depiction of Arawak Delegation
•  Western and Territorial Expansion!
•  American settlement!
Chief Medicine Crow
Crow Delegation
Apache peoples, prisoners of war
Geronimo, Lozen, Dahteste
“The Social Contract” •  Enlightenment Period – about 186 years between the 17th
and 18th !
•  Considered by some to be a “cultural revolution” during
which several questions were asked and answered about: 1)
What constituted the human and “Man”; 2) What were the
needs of “Man”; and, 3) How should “Man” be governed
and by whom?!
•  Philosophers, political figures, doctors and natural scientists
weighed in – fundamentally, that “Man” should be
governed by logic and reason and cast off “tradition”!
•  Lead to the development, in “Western” governmental
systems, what is known today as “scientific racism”!
Spain’s Vallodolid Debate (1550), the Nature of Indigenous Peoples, and Modern Race Ideology According to Western European thought the status of full human and civilized were defined by a person’s and whole peoples’ capacity for property ownership, land management, Christian conformity, Puritan work ethic, self-­‐governance, and proof that the person(s) has a soul. In more complex articulations of the “civilized,” judgement was weighed on one’s potential capacity to participate in the arts and letters and to express romantic and platonic love. “For the first time, and probably for the last, a colonizing nation organized a formal inquiry into the justice of the methods used to extend its empire. For the first time, too, in the modern world, we see an attempt to stigmatize an entire race as inferior, as born slaves according to the theory elaborated centuries before by Aristotle” (Hanke 1974: xi). [Aristotle claimed, “some beings are inferior by nature (and) it is only just and natural that prudent and wise men have dominion over them for their own welfare as well as for the service of their superiors.” Hanke continues, “If the Indians failed to recognize this relationship and resisted the Spaniards, just war could be waged against them and their persons and property would pass to the conquerors” (Hanke 1965: 122). It was an ideology or set of ideologies that formed a stream of consciousness about race and matters of human rights that would transcend its historical period and continue to arise in modern thought, politically and socially.] Core Arguments Bartolemé de Las Casas promoted the argument that “Indians” were all children of the Christian God,
“not beasts, not slaves by nature, not childlike creatures with a limited or static understanding, but men
capable of becoming Christians, who had every right to enjoy their property, political liberty, and human
dignity, who should be incorporated into the Spanish and Christian civilization rather than enslaved or
destroyed. Las Casas stood firmly in his belief that “Indians,” with whom he had engaged with and lived
among in Guatemala, were “‘prudent and rational beings, of as good ability and judgment as other men
and more able, discreet, and of better understanding than the people of many other nations’” (Hanke
1965: 121). Thus, he claimed, “All the peoples of the world are men” (Hanke 1965: 125).
Juan Ginés de Sepulveda “chose to regard all these new peoples as an inferior type of humanity which should be submitted to
the rule of the Spaniards. Without having seen them or observed their lands and civilization, he felt no hesitation in condemning
them all as not quite men, above monkeys to be sure, but unworthy of being considered in the same class with the
Spaniards” (Hanke 1965: 126 –127). Sepúlveda proclaimed that, “…Indians are as inferior… as children are to adults, as
women are to men. Indians are as different from Spaniards as cruel people are from mild people, as monkeys from
men” (Sepulveda quoted by Hanke 1965: 122).
Rethinking the Politics of Nationhood: Race & Gender Normativities and “Scientific Racism” • 
Johannes Blumenbach (1752 – 1840), a zoologist and naturalist. asserted that five races of “man” exist: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malay. Though later contested as part of a long history of scientific racism Blumenbach s categories contributed to a racial hierarchy . It s coding remains in American popular thought today. The five categories were associated with colors: • 
Caucasian = white; Mongolian = yellow; Malayan = brown; Ethiopian = black; American = red • 
Caucasians, related to the Caucasoid Mountains in Russia, Blumenbach stated, were seated in the highest category of man because they represented the most beautiful and capable. The physical features associated with race, Blumenbach believed, was due to environment, diet, and exposure to natural elements, which degenerated peoples physical appearance. • 
Questions about human social interaction and whether non-­‐”white” peoples could be “westernized/civilized was a question drove many scientists to study the cultures, bodies, brains, internal organs, and sexual organs and cultural/social practices of non-­‐western peoples worldwide to assess whether they had the potential for Western civil society and culture. • 
Utilizing scientific methods and figureheads of medicine, psychology, anthropology, politics, religion and philosophy, arguments were made to establish the legal differentiation and recognition of people, whose political and social rights were associated with their designated race and the sex. The former comes to be fundamentally understood as scientific racism, and the latter, sexism . Despite scientific and moral arguments to the contrary, scientific racism and sexism came to bear in law and the practice of it. • 
Racism, and “institutional racism,” can be understood to consist of biases that employ beliefs in human “racial” differences and that racial differences afford people, among other things, particular characteristics, abilities, and deficiencies. Historically, race was studied as a phenomenon of nature and religious piety that biological and cultural determinants advanced one to a unique position on the scale of humankind. • 
This notion of racial differences set the stage for the creation of a racial hierarchy that associated racialized groups with particular categories: civilized, barbaric, savage, and subhuman. For some scientists, these categories represent an “evolution” of human social organizing, beginning with primitives and advancing towards civilized status as people learned to “progress” along the human evolutionary chain. •  “Scientific racism” was widely accepted by government officials and society alike. The institutional adoption of “racial categories” allowed “racial difference” to be used in the establishment of the laws as well as judicial and governmental institutional regulations. This approach to justice facilitated the construction of “differential justice” and “differential injustice”. !
Scientific Racism: The Power of the Idea of Race • 
Immanuel Kant, founded the study of Anthropology, the preeminent study of human socio-cultural organization, in 1772!
• 
Kant occupied himself with questions about the nature of Native and Negro races and the problems they presented for
Western expansionists, the planners of white settlement, and race mixing
• 
Kant advised government officials to avoid race mixing was merely to act in conformity with nature (Kant quoted by Bernasconi
2002: 157). He contended that the threat of social intimacy would lead to the degradation or pollution of Whites. Rather, Native
and African indigenous peoples should at best remain imitators, dependent on European discipline (Kant quoted by Bernasconi
2002: 158 – 159). Bernasconi points out: Kant s note shows that as soon as the idea of race is juxtaposed with the new discipline
of a philosophy of history, it invites solutions that involve wholesale extermination. !
• 
One would expect both philosophical problems to arise from a view in which all human beings are divided into discrete
groups, but where the members of one of the groups alone is in possession of all the qualities and talents necessary to
flourish, so that the members of the other groups have no genuine contribution to make (Bernasconi 2002: 160).!
“Whites ‘contain all the impulses of
nature in affects and passions, all
talents, all dispositions to culture and
civilization and can as readily obey as
govern’” (Kant quoted by Bernasconi
2002:145 – 147).
Native Americans and African
indigenous peoples, on the other hand,
were “unfit for any culture … despite
the proximity of example and ample
encouragement” (Kant quoted by
Bernasconi 2002: 148).
Hegel argued that African peoples could and would readily succumb to a dominant culture, but “Native Americans,” he said, who were “like
unenlightened children, living from one day to the next, and untouched by higher thoughts or aspirations’” (Hegel quoted by Vest 2000: 15).
1885 Proctor & Gamble Ad for Ivory Soap: We were once factious, fierce and wild, In peaceful arts unreconciled Our blankets smeared with grease and stains From buffalo meat and settlers' veins. Through summer's dust and heat content From moon to moon unwashed we went, But IVORY SOAP came like a ray Of light across our darkened way And now we're civil, kind and good And keep the laws as people should, We wear our linen, lawn and lace As well as folks with paler face And now I take, where'er we go This cake of IVORY SOAP to show What civilized my squaw and me And made us clean and fair to see. Andrea Smith, Not an Indian Tradition, Pg. 72-­‐73, Hypatia, Spring 2003. [After seeing] man in his primitive state… a perfect type of brutality and heathenizm [sic]... it occurs to you-­‐ why-­‐ you are the only race not “on exhibition -­‐” & the whole exhibition is evidently for you -­‐ & you are the crowning glory of it all. You are [aware] how vastly superior is the light of our Christian civilization to the dark and semi-­‐
darkness of other lands, how our race in intellect stands towering above the other races, & how grateful one feels that their [sic] lot has been cast in such an enlightened clime -­‐ & not in the lands that have got it all yet to go through before they catch up” (anonymous white woman quoted by Newman, 1999: 7). “The Racial Contract”
and
“The Sexual Cotnract”
•  Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract!
•  The Social Contract and “white
supremacy”!
•  Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract!
•  The Social Contract and “abject sexism”!
•  What are the relationships between
these arguments and their assessments
of U.S. Constitutional Law?!
Indigenizing the U.S. Constitution Before the ideas of inalienable rights, liberty, and democracy were strung together in words, they were strung together in beads made of shells. In this Iroquois Confederacy Wampum Belt. We shared our belief that leaders should represent It represents 1,000 years of democratic Even, We The People began as an and serve the people. Which was a startling belief in principles that we Indians shared with our newer ancient Indian phrase. a world of kings and queens. brothers and sisters. (Including Thomas Jefferson and And it’s important to the pursuit of all We shared what we call, The Great Law. Which is Benjamin Franklin who openly acknowledged in our happiness that We The People the natural law of human dignity that precedes and speeches and in writing that our contributions now means, and continues to mean, underlies all other laws. formed the basis of The Constitution.) We, All Of Us, Who Are Americans. (Statement of the American Indian Institute, New York, New York) Awenheeyoh Powless
Haudenosaunee
Water Thanksgiving Ceremony
2009
Thomas Jefferson, American Democracy, Race
and Patriarchy
Thomas Jefferson
Notes on the State of Virginia
(1785)