From Combahee resistance to the Confederate : Black feminist temporalities and white supremacy

Introduction

For me, the summer of 2017 was marked by three headline making events that occurred in July and August. In addition to their proximity in time, it is how time itself emerged as the subject of their struggles that made them seem to cohere into a meaningful narrative about contemporary conditions in the United States.

The first event is the cable channel HBO’s 19 July announcement of its intention to produce a new series Confederate with Game of Thrones’ creators/showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. This new series was widely believed to be in response to viewer complaints about Game of Thrones’ whiteness. The announcement states:

The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone — freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall. (Petski, 2017)

The third event is the 12 August white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, VA that started the evening before on the University of Virginia, Charlottesville campus and resulted in the death of counter-protestor Heather Heyer and injury to 19 others, leading the Virginia governor to declare a “state of emergency.” The riot, called the “Unite the Right” rally by its organizers, was ostensibly to protest the removal of a statue of Civil War confederate General Robert E. Lee, but was driven by chants of “You will not replace us!” (Wallace-Wells, 2017).

These events share some features: they are proximate in their occurrence, happening in a rapid succession within the summer of 2017; they all appear to be a consequence of the 2016 election of white supremacists to the White House. Each of these events proceeds from the assumption of whiteness as a priori in time, clearly articulated in the chant, “you will not replace us.” All of them make claims on the past but on the surface they may seem unrelated, only seeming to cohere because they emerge as events in a chain signifying a “state of emergency” in the United States. Examining these events through the temporal frame of crisis, however, raises more questions than it answers: what that crisis is—its causes, its effects, its demographic—is constitutively part of the crisis itself, as crisis calls into question the legibility of temporality, its everyday coherence and assumptions. And, it is the pre-election crisis frame—the need to “Make America Great Again”—that engineered these events. “Make America Great Again” claims a disruption in the linear narrative of American exceptionalism and the imperative of renewing this teleological narrative of identity. While the Charlottesville white nationalist chant of “you will not replace us” suggests a more overt threat to the unity of American identity, similar to the election slogan, it implies a crisis as a foundational identity (“us”) is buttressed against any substantive difference in identity over time.

Counter to this narrative, many U.S. feminists have identified the national crisis as the 2016 election, because it disrupts the expectations of progress symbolically represented by the election of the first female president and is a threat to the security of the U.S. political and social structure. At the same time, it is conventional in the United States to argue that we are experiencing a feminist resurgence beginning in the years prior to the election with the anticipation of the first female President and culminating in the largest demonstration ever organized by women in the U.S. in January 2017 when those expectations were breached. If crisis narratives signal a break in the coherence and legibility of time, then the feminist impulse has been to recreate that legibility in the form of unity or solidarity of women, visible in the overwhelming presence of women together in the 2017 march, and to use historical symbols, such as white clothing symbolic of the suffragists, to signify feminist identity across time. This crisis narrative, founded as it is in the violation of expectation and a commitment to the normative structures of U.S. political systems that seemed to secure those expectations, reflects the kind of “amazement” that Walter Benjamin rejects as a basis for philosophical knowledge in the struggle against oppression. Benjamin (1968) argues:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism … The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge–unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. (257)

I use temporality as Sarah Sharma (2014) defines it in In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics “as power relations as they play out in time,” meaning that while we occupy the same social space and may have an experience of a common time, different groups are calibrated to different “temporal itineraries” enmeshed in power relations (4). Sharma (2014) explains,

I mean for the temporal to denote lived time … a specific experience of time that is structured in specific political and economic contexts. The temporal operates as a form of social power and a type of social difference … (9)

White time: 1977 and 2017

Both MAGA and feminist crisis narratives operate within what Charles Mills (2014) identifies as a “white racial temporal regime,” the dominant temporality through which life is lived and imagined within the United States, through which time itself is imagined. Thus, structurally, the chant “you will not replace us” heard in Charlottesville describes an effect of temporality that is symbolically institutionalized in the Confederate statue around which the protest gathers. The monuments normalize white time in social life throughout the United States; the ubiquitous presence of these Civil War statues marks the intersection of white temporal frames of history with white performativity and the white mapping of social space within the white imaginary (Mills, 2014).

In “Charlottesville and the Trouble with Civil War Hypotheticals,” Jelani Cobb articulates the connection between this white temporal framing and the white imaginary by showing the similar temporal frames at work in the Charlottesville riots and HBO’s Confederate. Cobb (2017) argues

The truth, though, is that there has never been a time when what we saw in Charlottesville has not been us. The present is bequeathed to us by the past, and seldom was that relationship more apparent than it was at the base of the Robert E. Lee statue that was at the center of the violent clashes in Charlottesville. (my italics)

The memorials normalize the temporal codes of white supremacy, demonstrating how the prior bond of the social contract of racial domination theorized by Charles Mills (1997) is maintained in lived time. This social contract of racial domination implicitly structures the white temporal imaginary that makes it possible for Game of Thrones’ creators to see the “alternative timeline” as one in which the Confederacy evolves into a modern slave state as fantasy. In her discussion of American memorials, Joy James (1999) argues that black icons that represent resistance to this imaginary are incorporated into the white temporal regime as a form of symbolic management:

… These icons [of enslavers in public parks] evince complex relationships often obscured by facile representations of white Americans’ freedom and ‘civilization’ that fail to acknowledge its dependency on enslaved or exploited African Americans. Since the civil rights movements mainstreamed black icons, national American culture has jumbled the contradictory values of ancestors who promoted oppositional world-views: holidays, coins, and postage stamps pay tribute to presidents who were enslavers, such as Washington and Jefferson … as well as antiracist activists Ida B. Wells, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (33)

Although James does not explore mainstreaming as a temporal concept, I read this process as a form of calibration that perpetuates and obfuscates domination through assimilation into the historical imaginary of the “white temporal regime.” James (1999) argues that black feminist revolutionaries have historically been mainstreamed into U.S. narratives of progressivism:

A few have been gradually–marginally–accepted into an American society that claims their resistance by incorporating or ‘forgiving’ their past revolutionary tactics for humanitarian goals. [Harriet] Tubman’s antebellum criminalized resistance to slavery … typifies a rebellion that later became legitimized through American reclamation acts. The contradiction is that the nation’s racial progressivism seeks to reclaim black women who bore arms to defend themselves and other African Americans and females against racial-sexual violence in a culture that continues to condemn black physical resistance to political dominance and violence while it supports at the same time the use of weapons in the defense or expansion of the nation-state, individual and family, home and private property. (76)

One account of this historical framing can be found in the words of those who organized the “Unite the Right” riots. Charlottesville Republican, Corey Stewart, who ran his primary campaign for Governor on the issue of preserving the Confederate monuments was interviewed in The New Yorker about the Charlottesville riots and had this to say (Wallace-Wells, 2017),

Look … I can go up and down Virginia, I can talk pro-life, and every conservative Republican is going to say, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that, been there, done that'… When I went around Virginia and talked about preserving the historical monuments, and the lunacy of taking them down, that generated the same amount of guttural reaction and concern that the pro-life movement generated forty years ago.

How is preserving Civil War monuments as part of the socio-temporal performativity of dominance of public space aligned with the anti-abortion politics of 1977? How to understand this coding of the relation between then and now as one defined by a similar affective orientation of national crisis? The organizer of the Charlottesville riots smoothly produces an exact temporal frame for the ruling passions of American politics—from the anti-feminist politics of the pro-life movement to the white supremacy of the riots in Charlottesville. In doing so, he helps name gender politics as a structuring absence of the riots, a structuring absence of Confederate, and a structuring absence of Maxine Waters’ meme-generating desire to “reclaim my time.” Understanding how gendered political time functions as a structuring mechanism of the “Make America Great Again” crisis narrative requires an excavation of how 1977 has figured as a significant temporal frame in histories of the U.S. women’s movement.

In 1977, during the same four days, two women’s conferences convened in Houston, TX to discuss the future of women in the United States. The National Women’s Conference included organizations such as the National Organization for Women and The League of Women Voters, First Ladies Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson, and well-known activists such as Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou, and Coretta Scott King. In opposition to this conference, Phyllis Schlafly organized the Pro-Life, Pro-Family Rally, denouncing feminism and key parts of the convention’s platform—gay and lesbian rights, abortion, and the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. 1977 is also the year when “only by the most specific, immediate definition” (Cobb, 2017) can pro-lifers be said to have lost their battle to control women’s bodies as the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendment allowing the Federal government to deny the use of Medicaid funds for abortion. Thus, when the organizer of the “Unite the Right” rally speaks of the “guttural reactions” of 1977 as anti-feminist reactions, he offers a version of U.S. political history that many feminists share, as 1977 is a year that acts as a significant temporal frame for the historicizing of the contemporary women’s movement. Then, the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, now the election of the first female U.S. president is deferred.

Moreover, while the wave metaphor as a model for understanding feminist history in the United States has been increasingly interrogated, the idea of 1977 representing the year that the anti-feminist “backlash” began continues to be used as an organizing model in histories of the movement, including the popular documentary Makers: Women Who Make America (2013) and Marjorie J. Spruill’s (2017) more recent Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics, a history of the events leading to the conferences in 1977 and the subsequent refusal of the states to ratify the ERA. According to this dominant historical model, argued most extensively in Susan Faludi’s (1991) canonical bestseller Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, the Houston conferences were followed by an oppositional backlash that the feminist movement has never recovered from.

This story of “backlash” gets told in the popular Makers documentary that constructs the historical trajectory of the movement moving inexorably toward the “dueling rallies” of the women’s conferences in 1977. Makers has been touted as an inclusionary and authoritative history of the women’s movement in the late 20th century. U.M. Pruchniewaska (2017) argues, “the documentary includes the voices of diverse women in terms of race, class, and sexual orientation, presenting a corrective to the claims that the movement was only about middle-class, white, straight women” (232).

However, as Pruchniewaska notes, the film focuses disproportionately on famous liberal feminists who are often introduced precisely because of their unifying gestures. Gloria Steinem is introduced in voiceover, “With Betty Friedan unable to bridge the widening rifts in the movement, there was suddenly room for a new leader to emerge.” Similarly, Eleanor Holmes Norton, civil rights and feminist activist, and Delegate to the House of Representatives for the District of Columbia, tells viewers that feminism’s “first face was a white face.” Instead of taking an intersectional approach to the feminisms emerging during the era, the film uses race and gender analogically, introducing Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman in Congress, with the statement that she “helped bridge an old divide between African American women and the women’s movement.” The film, then, shows Chisholm giving a political speech, in which she says, “in the field of politics I have met much more discrimination as a woman than being black.” In case viewers miss the significance of this statement, Letty Cottin Pogrebin follows up by stating, “She said I have been discriminated against more often as a woman than as an African American, that was a very big admission. It helped the women’s movement integrate in ways that seemed organic.” In these stories, the women’s movement is originally, but implicitly white, the divide is not within the women’s movement, but between the movement and black women. Moreover, it is a “divide” black women must “bridge” by focusing on gender politics as already understood in the movement. The story of an integrated women’s movement is thus predicated on the disappearance of race and the subordination of black women in the movement.

Instead it is Roe v Wade in 1972 that is seen as a “watershed moment that compels the movement toward the Equal Rights Amendment” and the “dueling rallies” in Houston and the backlash that is represented by the ERA’s defeat: “Coming out of Houston, it was the anti-ERA forces that had captured the momentum,” as “the pendulum of public opinion had swung back against the women’s movement,” “it was a decisive turning point for the women’s movement,” and the “end of an era,” “leading to a twenty five year slide off the pinnacle of our power.” Race is never mentioned as part of this “backlash” as abortion and lesbian and gay rights are the focus of this temporal frame. While the New York Times in 1977 noted that the pro-family rally was mostly white and well-dressed, none of these subsequent histories argue that white supremacy was at stake in the two conventions because it was not. White time was the a priori condition of this feminist temporality’s unfolding.

In The Nation, a recent review of Marjorie Spruill’s book, which covers the Houston conferences in depth, notes that

Yet what stands out most in Spruill’s account is just how different feminism and its opponents were in the 1970s, contrasted with the feminism and antifeminism of our moment. Feminism was then a new mobilization, one replete with ideas, many of which were in conflict with one another, but all of which sought to advance a deep transformation of American society … This was light-years away from what passes for feminism in mainstream politics today, embodied most clearly in Hillary Clinton. It was a movement with a grassroots base, one that reached deep into the culture, and one that often took a forthright, confrontational stance toward the existing distribution of power and resources –a stance very different from a vision of empowerment conceived mostly in terms of integration into a corporate meritocracy. (Phillips-Fein, 2017)

The white supremacist organizers’ crisis narrative and the feminist crisis narrative share this temporal orientation which begins in the “guttural reaction” of 1977 and ends in the “state of emergency” in 2017. Both timelines, these temporal frames for organizing events in time, occur within Mills’ “white time.” While participants struggle over the meaning of these events, they do not divest themselves of the white temporal frame for narrating how these events are the events of historical import to the “state of emergency” now. The focus on this battle in popular conceptions of feminist history as the “passionate” battle of 1977 that was the apex and downfall of feminism in the United States, thus, perpetuates the temporal codes of racial dominance by mainstreaming black feminism into the “backlash” frame.

In her analysis of Faludi’s Backlash and the model of feminist progress the book represents, Victoria Browne rejects this “backlash” frame, but not because of its elision of racial domination. Browne (2013) concludes,

“Backlash,” it must be affirmed, is an important feminist concept, which not only has powerful rhetorical value, but is also a useful critical tool for helping make sense of feminist struggles and historical oscillations, and for keeping sight of the wider institutional and attitudinal contexts within which different feminisms emerge and are practiced. I have argued, however, that Faludi’s ideal model of historical change as a linear, teleological progression fosters an unproductive approach toward the interrupted, repetitive trajectories of feminist histories, making it impossible to view repetition as anything but a sign of failure. (918)

These scholars theorize the archive to demarcate how the artifacts of the past and their organization into lived time—like the Civil War memorials—perpetuate the affective and social dominance of the agents of white time and to excavate those “disjunctive temporalities” that “haunt” the teleology of the normative archive (Bhabha, 1994: 204–207; Felski, 2000: 25; Huebener, 2015: 252). In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe calls this shift in temporal perspective an attempt to recuperate the future in the tense of the past conditional “what could have been,” a way of thinking about the past–present–future as conditionally recursive and necessarily so—as Lowe (2015) states, “That is, in what ways can ‘what could have been’ speak to ‘what might yet be’?” (137). ⁴ Similarly, Chandan Reddy (2014) argues that the

archive is not simply an institutional site for the recording of the past and of historical and social difference. Rather, it is a framework that, ironically, promises its reader agency only through the perpetual subjugation of differences, a subjugation, then, that targets not only the past but also the future. Indeed the law as an archive addressed to the citizen or potential subject of ‘civility’ seeks, above all, to be an archive of the future. (29) ⁵

Reddy and James focus on the past conditional as a relation of domination, whereas Browne views possibilities for the future in the strategy of “recollecting forwards,” seeing this as a way to open up possibilities in the past that have been foreclosed by the “backlash” temporal frame. Yet, the focus on domination in the work of James and Reddy suggests that “recollecting forward” can function similarly to mainstreaming when it subjugates radical alterity into the future as part of the “normative archive” (Huebener, 2015: 252). “Recollecting forwards” is a valuable means of retrieving past possibilities that have been marginalized in feminist political frameworks, but it does not generate a history of the present that would excavate how that act of “recollecting forward” is in itself an effect of white time as it is constructed through assumptions of whiteness as a priori.

In her treatment of U.S. women’s movement history, James focuses on what is erased in the archives of Makers, the mainstreaming of black radical feminism in U.S. culture. She argues that,

In the late 1960s, liberal bourgeois feminism among white women gradually expanded to include black women. This emergent multiracial ‘sisterhood’ transferred the nineteenth-century white missionary mandate–promote elite leadership to serve as interpreters of representatives for racialized and marginalized nonelites–to white bourgeois feminists. The result was a political paradox. Black feminisms pushed white feminisms (in their various ideologies) to repudiate ethnocentrism and racism and so to some degree ‘radicalized’ America’s dominant feminisms. The more financially endowed white cultural feminism supported and “mainstreamed” black feminisms by rewarding liberal politics within it; thus, to some degree black feminist politics was deradicalized by normalizing its liberalism. (James, 1999: 86–87)

Looking to this black feminist temporality requires following those black feminist activists initially interviewed in Makers who slowly recede from the frame once “integration” of the women’s movement has been declared and race is no longer imagined—within the white temporal frame—as central to feminism’s herstory.

From Combahee to Black Lives Matter

Rather than searching for a hypothetical “alternative timeline” about the Civil War, I “reclaim time” by examining a stream of feminism, a black feminist radical temporality that is neither belated nor mainstreamed into the women’s movement in 1977 or 2017. In the process, I want to argue for turning away from the dominant temporality as narrated in the story of 1977–2017 and to look to other historical frames that show Waters’ statements as evolving from this radical black feminist temporality.

When examining the events of 2017 as emerging from the “backlash” frame, we can see how feminists in order to transform the future must challenge the temporal architecture of the past that has drawn feminisms’ radical difference into the mainstream as a process of subjugation to the “guttural reactions” of white supremacy and into the nation-time of racial capitalism. In order to work toward undoing some of this temporal architecture, I want to show how these events and the “crisis” they seem to represent signify differently when returning to 1977 and placing black radical feminism at the center of the temporal feminist frame, by following as it were, the black radical feminist Barbara Smith out of the frame of Makers, instead of staying with its “backlash” trajectory.

1977 was the year that the radical black feminist organization the Combahee River Collective, of which Smith was a founding member, issued its statement, including for the first time a coining and definition of identity politics. Recently a good deal of “belated” interest has been afforded the Collective, including a collaborative set of interviews and essays discussing the formation of the group collected in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (2017), but theorists of black feminist politics have been studying the Collective and its political significance for decades (James, 1999). The Combahee River Collective Statement theorizes identity politics as follows:

We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. (Taylor, 2017: 19)

What strikes me, always, about the group is its choice in “naming after action” and not after an icon of earlier black feminism. On 2 June 1863, Harriet Tubman led an armed raid against Confederate forces along the Combahee River in South Carolina, freeing 700 enslaved black people in the Combahee River Raid. In their choice to name the collective after an action and not an icon, the group connotes their purpose and draws on the term “collective” in its active sense—to join together, to collect, and as an adjective, a group of people acting as a group and making themselves a group. Smith argues about the name,

So we all agreed we wanted to be the Combahee River Collective. My perspective, and I think it was shared, was let’s not name ourselves after a person. Let’s name ourselves after an action. A political action. And that’s what we did. And not only a political action, but a political action for liberation. (Taylor, 2017: 31)

In returning to this 1977, this movement of drawing on and withdrawing from the mainstream feminist movement, they reorient our own understandings of contemporary events and their social significance. They prefigure Angela Peoples at the January 2017 Women’s March who was photographed with a sign that read, “Don’t Forget, White women voted for Trump.” Peoples (2017) states,

My message stood in stark contrast to the theme of togetherness that dominated the Women’s March—the pink “pussy hats” and “girl power” placards, and chants about how women would lead the resistance. This was exactly the point. I made the sign to communicate that in a world where 53 percent of white women voters chose a racist, elitist sexual predator for president, the idea that we all want the same thing is a myth … I wanted to highlight that on a national level, white women are not unified in opposition to Trumpism and can’t be counted on to fight it. Instead, it’s the identity, experience and leadership of black women that we must look to.

I end, not with an event, but with the traces of insurgent acts in the tradition of Tubman that demonstrate the recursive palimpsestic nature of this black feminist temporality that resists calibration to the white time of the monument and its appropriations of social life. In the winter of 2018, I came across an article about the rededication of a Baltimore park which had been a memorial for the Confederacy (The Grio, 2018). It was being renamed for Harriet Tubman. In the accompanying photo, the Confederate statue at its center has been recalibrated by two different acts of graffiti: in bold black letters across the base of the monument has been written “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” claiming both a queer black feminist collective and black subjectivity in the continuous present, prior to the 2016 election and Clinton’s candidacy, prior to the white temporal narrative of crisis. Underneath it in much smaller brown lettering was scrawled, “PS FUCK TRUMP.”