Hello, White-Male-Dominance!

Henry Louis Gates explores race’s position throughout literary history. While reading Gates’ “Editor’s Introduction: Writing “Race” and the Difference It Makes,” parallels between feminism are brought to readers’ attention. Male dominance and white privilege hinder both people of color and females in English studies. As Gate mentions, “The growth of canonical national literatures was coterminous with the shared assumption among intellectuals that race was a “thing,” an ineffaceable quantity, which irresistibly determined the shape and contour of thought and feeling as surely as it did the shape and contour of human anatomy” (3).  Both race and feminism are made implicit throughout literature’s discourse.

White male dominance has altered the way in which both racial and feminist groups are discussed in texts. “The sense of difference defined in popular usages of the term “race” has both described and inscribed differences of language, belief system, artistic tradition, and gene pool, as well as all sorts of supposedly natural attributes such as rhythm, athletic ability, cerebration, usury, fidelity, and so forth” (5). Feminism can easily be used to replace “”race” in Gates’ statement. The power structures of society have ideologies that suggest racial and feminist groups defy the status quo. Public discourse, in this case literature, controls mentioned status quo, “To do so is to engage in a pernicious act of language, one which exacerbates the complex problem of cultural or ethnic difference, rather than to assuage or redress it” (5). In other words, society is deemed to suppress both racial and feminist groups almost innately.  

Gates suggests that race is the “ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which –more often than not –also have fundamentally opposed economic interests” (5). He states that race is not only a cultural distinction, but also a biological difference; I believe that the same goes for gender. However, Gates seems to believe that, “The biological criteria used to determine” difference” in sex simply do not hold when applied to “race” (5). Though I respect Gates’ claim, I do believe that race and gender are held in the same regard. Social domination has an objective interest in conceptualizing the tools needed in constructing a social reality in which suppresses both racial and feminist groups.

Both people of color and women emanate Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Otherness.” White males are the speaker, while racism and genderism determine who will be the “other” or receiver is. Gates speaks of the Vatican’s subjugation of the “black Other,” a similar comment can be said of the Catholic’s historical view of women. Though the Catholic religion oppresses Africans and females in a different sense, both have constrains placed on them.

“The pope, however, a rather vocal critic of the Creative African integration of traditional black (“animist”) beliefs with those received from Rome, emerged from his confrontation with the mystical black Other in the heart of darkness, still worried about “great confusions in ideas,” “syncretistic mysticism incompatible with the Church,” and customs “contrary to the will of God,” thereby denying Africans the right to remake European religion in their own images, just as various Western cultures have done” (5,6).

            While reading the Pope’s account of African beliefs, parallels towards women are illustrated: “you have it all wrong, and this is what you should believe and/or do…” Both groups appear to be subjects to the white male dominant figure, specifically, the Pope. Throughout history, instances such as this are transparent, and Gates describes said accounts.

            Racial and feminist groups are restricted by the discourse created by society’s structure of dominance. Both race and feminism are made implicit throughout literature’s discourse. Gates makes the relationship between race and feminism seamless in his depictions of domination.