When any given person walks through a door, another will perceive them based on their gender, race, and style. Whether implicit or explicit, people often associate others with the patriarchal gender norms passed down from generation to generation. In Patriarchy, the System, Allan G. Johnson explains how patriarchy is a system made up of roles and societal expectations for the supposed two genders. That it’s not something we are, but something we all participate in. He elaborates that men’s roles are dominant leaders, who are tough and protective, while women are caring mothers who are vulnerable and submissive. While the reading itself has amazing points, it fell short in recognizing the intersectionality of race and gender.
Johnson does a great job describing how the system works and the stereotypes that apply to each gender, but mentions race only twice. Firstly, he provides an example of a common, ill-conceived perception about oppression.
The flip side of this individualistic model of guilt and blame is that race, gender, and class oppression are actually not oppression at all, but merely the sum of individual failings on the part of blacks, women, and the poor, who lack the right stuff to compete successfully with whites, men, and others who know how to make something of themselves.
He later discusses how race may impact the way a person participates within the patriarchy.
Societies don’t exist without people participating in them, which means that we can’t understand patriarchy unless we also ask how people are connected to it and how this connection varies, depending on social characteristics such as race, gender, ethnicity, age, and class.
It’s important to refrain from ignorance, as we are all a part of this system and are complicit in it every day. While these are indeed significant topics to discuss, we cannot begin to do so until we understand how the roles are twisted for people of color. Instead of a black woman being traditionally viewed as soft and virtuous, racism, in combination with the patriarchy, changes the narrative to promiscuous and immoral. Black men are also framed as overly aggressive and sexually deviant criminals. Aside from the gender roles, we can see how patriarchal dominance controls and divides people of color by imposing different forms of oppression from race to race, effectively maintaining dominion under white supremacy. To discuss patriarchy and gender roles as primarily one overall thing, when it’s actually a great deal of things, is a mistake.
It is evident that throughout history, race has determined where you reside on the patriarchal scale. Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist, by Angela Davis, brings up how, after the Civil War, the falsehood that black men insatiably lusted after and raped white women was used to incite racial terror and countless lynchings. She also illustrates how rape was not only a weapon wielded against black men, but also against women because they were perceived as promiscuous and deserving of it. One of the stories she brings up says that
young activists often stated that nothing could protect Black women from being raped by Birmingham police. As recently as December 1974, in Chicago, a 17-year-old Black woman reported that she was gang-raped by 10 policemen. Some of the men were suspended, but ultimately, the whole thing was swept under the rug.
Not only were the women constantly persecuted, but they were also despised by the anti-rape groups, who were responsible for the lynchings of the black boys and men. Black people were all put under the umbrella of rapists, rape supporters, and sexual deviants. This contortion of gender roles enabled the hierarchy to uphold white supremacy, which is still majorly prevalent today. Unfortunately, no conversation can be had between Johnson and Davis because there was hardly anything regarding race within Patriarchy, the System. It is unacceptable to gloss over race when patriarchy and white supremacy uphold one another within society.
Of course, the intersectionality of patriarchy doesn’t stop there. It can be recognized through the dominion of white supremacy over all people of color in various ways. In Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy, Andrea Smith describes the three categories people of color can fall into: Slavery/Capitalism, Genocide/Colonialism, and Orientalism/War. Slavery/Capitalism describes how black people are inherently put in positions of enslavability, seen as property to be exploited economically through cheap labor or the prison-industrial complex. Genocide/Colonialism outlines how indigenous people had to disappear to justify colonists taking their land. Finally, Orientalism/War explains how people from Asia and other non-Western regions are framed as foreign threats to rationalize mass militarism, surveillance, and war. The foundation of these pillars, including the tragedies against black people post-Civil War, is heteropatriarchy. It is a model of dominion and patriarchal control that demands assimilation into the traditional societal rules and gender roles, such as the nuclear family, economic stability, heterosexuality, and a severe lack of melanin. The closer you are to heteropatriarchy, the less oppressed you are. As Smith puts it, “This helps people who are not Black to accept their lot in life, because they can feel that at least they are not at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy, at least they are not property; at least they are not slaveable.”
While Johnson had given a great description of gender roles and how patriarchy is not who we are, but a system we participate in, it doesn’t shed light on the intersectionality and white supremacy hidden underneath. In Davis’s Race, Rape, and the Myth of the Black Rapist, she exemplifies how traditional gender roles can be perverted to give a justification for mass murder and rape. Accompanied by Smith’s Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy, it gives a broad view of how racial suppression and division all are under the jurisdiction of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. We must decide to let go of division, fear, and complicity and begin to partake in a collectively better world. As humans, we have come quite far, but the work is nowhere near complete, not until everyone is free from persecution. A better world is possible.
Works Cited
Davis, Angela Y. “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist.” Oxford University Press EBooks, 30 Nov. 2000, pp. 50–64, academic.oup.com/book/48810/chapter-abstract/420804057?redirectedFrom=fulltext, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198782360.003.0006.
Okazawa, Margo, et al. Women’s Lives Multicultur al P Er Sp Ectia Es Third Edition C*Yn Kirk. 1997.
Smith, Andrea. Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy Rethinking Women of Color Organizing. 2005.
