Marcyliena Morgan

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In “Finding Oprah’s Roots” (2007), featuring Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s search for answers to questions about Black genealogy, Gates explains that one of Oprah’s grandfathers stopped his formal schooling at an early age to work on a plantation so that he could help provide an education and opportunity for his sister instead. The grandfather did this in an attempt to protect his sister so that she could escape rape and other forms of gender oppression from both White men and women. Gates’s explanation reflects both the way that gender, sexuality, and race defined life in the old South and their consequences for Black life, Black relationships, and Black destinies. This personal sacrifice, in defense of Black women, was commonplace—not at all particular to Oprah Winfrey’s family. In fact, John Gwaltney collected several essays of Black men and women describing similar actions in his book Drylongso (1981). Similarly, when Marcyliena Morgan (2002, 2003) interviewed some thirty adult women in Mississippi in 1990, their stories were overflowing with instances of brothers and fathers, uncles and male cousins who worked and stayed at home so that their sisters could have “respectable” jobs and escape unwanted White-male advances. Morgan spoke to one woman—a teacher and later a proud community leader—who said, “You have to know about my brother” (Morgan 2002). The brother was a laborer, and the woman thought him to be the most brilliant and respectable man in the world. She explained that he gave up his dreams of an education for her. When we consider a young man choosing to sacrifice his life ambitions for a female relative as a common occurrence and shared experience among many African American families, it puts the discussion of sexual relations and race, class, and gender into a distinctive cultural and historical perspective.From Du Bois Review, 3.2:1-18.

Abstract
This article concerns the place of race and social class in establishing norms of usage in the study of language and gender. It argues for descriptions of women’s language that incorporate their multilayered race and class realities. In particular, it argues that notions of ‘normal women’s speech’ are often unmarked regarding race and class. These norms contribute to stereotypes of the speech of black and working class women. It asks the questions: How do we develop a method of analysis that represents social and cultural context, includes most women’s experience and desire, does not favor the
western middle class woman, and critiques patriarchy and social class biases? Can we address intersectionality, where race, class, sexuality and gender interrelate for some women and do not act as independent forms of oppression? Is it possible to do language and gender research that does not privilege one group of women?

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keywords: race; intersectionality; social class; african american

South Atlantic Quarterly 104.3

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Until the late 1950s, one of America’s worst kept secrets was its repression of blacks, other nonwhites, the working class, and women. African American communities lived behind a veil that hid their complex and personal struggle to define manhood and womanhood within an ideological system that denied them social, cultural, and moral citizenship.1 One result of this veiling has been contempt toward African American women in the United States and the world. If W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness represents two voices, two worlds, and the ‘‘real’’ black soul, then black women live in a state of schizophrenia where there are multiple voices and messages about what it means to be a woman and what it means to be black in relation to men. Nearly a century ago, Du Bois foresaw this complex state of affairs when he wrote: ‘‘So some few women are born free, and some within insult and scarlet letters achieve freedom; but our women in black had freedom thrust contemptuously upon them. With that freedom they are buying an untrammeled independence and dear as the price they pay for it, it in the end will be worth every taunt and groan.’’

Final commentary in Derrick Darby and Tommie Shelby (eds.) Hip Hop & Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason. Chicago: Open Court.

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