Race and Gender through the lens of Gates

Race and gender cannot always be equated and there are some circumstances in which racial issues and gendered issues are vastly different. That being said, the issues faced by racial minorities are a lot of the very same issues faced by gender minorities. In "Writing Race and the Difference it Makes," Henry Louis Gates, Jr. makes the argument that, "scores of people are killed every day in the name of differences ascribed only to race," and that "the biological criteria used to determine 'difference' in sex simply do not hold when applied to "race," (Gates, 5-6). In some respects, this is true. After all, there are issues of race that cannot be properly applied to gender and vice versa. But the differences people are being killed for every day are not strictly racially based. Women are murdered on the streets for not responding to cat calls. Men have been known to go on violent rampages just as a result of women refusing to respond to their advances. Women face a lot of the same issues of difference that Gates mentions racial minorities face. We also have to keep in mind women of color, who face sexism and racism combined on a daily basis. While Gates arguments about the rhetorically- based discrimination people of color face are accurate, the majority of them can also be applied to women when looked at through a feminist lens rather than a racial lens.

Gates alludes to the fact that both I.A. Richards and Allen Tate both wrote prefaces for books of poems by black authors and pondered the importance of placing a black face to the texts (Gates, 4). We may like to think that the race of an author will not impact our reading of a text, but it unarguably will. We all have certain pre-conceived notions about people based on stereotypes. If someone reads the same text through the lens of a black person and through the lens of a white person, they could possibly come to a different conclusion about what the text means. This heavily relies on Foucault's author function. The way we view a text (or don't view a text) changes based on our opinions about the author of the text and opinions about a person can be heavily swayed when we know the person's ethnicity. The same certainly applies to gender. It was not very long ago that women had to publish books under male pseudonyms if they wanted to be read or even if they wanted to be published. J.K. Rowling and S.E. Hinton were both women who decided to adopt gender neutral pseudonyms to give their texts better chances at being published. It is hard to say whether they would have never been published if they had used their real names, but they both wound up having extraordinarily successful books that could have very well never been published if everyone knew the authors were women.  (example on page 7 with girl poet)The very same issues happen with race where people will use a pseudonym or some other method of having their race ignored as an author because many people will only take their work seriously if they think they are white. Gates mentioned the case of Phillis Wheatley who was a young African slave girl whose poetry needed to be approved by a board of prominent white men in order for people to read it (Gates, 7). Women, racial minorities, and especially women of racial minorities have a lot of trouble getting their literature published and read because of author function and stereotypes placed against them. In slave times in the U.S., black people were often not allowed to learn to read and write, so many of their stories never got told since they could not create their own literature (Gates, 9). They are not alone in this phenomenon. In the Middle Ages, the exact same case applied to women. Women were not typically able to receive education unless they were members of royal families, and thus women were often seen as less intelligent than men and they were largely not capable of telling their own stories. Though these issues were centuries apart, it is the same issue.

                While publishing issues have been faced by both racial and gender minorities, the need for these minorities to create literature is also equally as important. Groups of people gain representation b telling their stories and since women and people of color were barred from telling their stories for so long (and still have trouble getting their stories told to this day), they still lack representation. According to Hume, writing is "the ultimate sign of difference between animal and human," (Gates, 12). If women and people of color are not allowed to write freely and are not allowed to have their writing published for a larger audience, they will continue to be equated to animals.

                Pauline Johnson wanted to argue that Native Americans are represented in stereotypical ways in literature and media and it is up to people like her to properly represent themselves to fight such stereotypes (Johnson, 385). The same could definitely be applied to women who are often represented improperly by male dominated media producers. Johnson brings up the lack of intersectionality in the small amount of Native American representation that currently exists  in media (Johnson, 385). While the distinctions between tribes are ignored, the same could be said for women at large since when women are represented, it is usually a thin, white, able bodied woman when in actuality there are all sorts of women.

                As said by Karl Marx, "They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented," (Gates, 2). This quote can be applied to racial minorities, gender minorities, or any other minority struggling with representation. All underrepresented peoples need to be represented by the privileged people in power, who are largely white and male. Minorities such as women and racial minorities are often barred from getting higher positions in media jobs because of institutionalized racism and sexism. Therefore, the bulk of the people deciding who gets representation is heterosexual, white males. It is up to them to learn about this institutionalized sexism and racism so they can dole out proper representation in their projects and provide proper role models for minorities.

                The lack of media representation is very apparent for both people of color and people of the female gender. White washing is a major issue in Hollywood cinema. For example, the 2014 film Exodus came under fire for casting white people to play Egyptians. Meanwhile, a year earlier, Dallas Buyers Club was controversial for having a male actor play a transgender woman. Furthermore, the Bechdel test was invented to challenge sexism in works of fiction. In order for a piece of fiction to pass the Bechdel test, it must feature at least two women (with names) who talk to each other about something other than a man. It is shocking how many highly esteemed films and novels fail the Bechdel test. Clearly women are being underrepresented in film and literature. People have created a racial version of the Bechdel test in which there must be at least one character of color, at least two characters of color must have a conversation, and the conversation has to be about something other than a white person.

                On page five, Gates says, "Race...pretends to be an objective term of classification, when in fact it is a dangerous trope," (Gates, 5). He defends this claim in a very Derridean way by arguing that the concept of race creates an inside/outside mentality that links people with those like them and pushes them away from those unlike them. This differance-like application of minorities being classified by what makes them different from majorities is not only mostly arbitrary (as Gates insists later on on the same page), but it can also be applied to all minorities whether they be racially or gender based. Women are categorized by their differences to men while black people and native Americans are categorized based on their differences from white people. This creates an inside/outside relationship where majorities (white men) are the inside and minorities (women, people of color, and most importantly women of color) are the outside. This is why "Black literature," "female literature," "Hispanic literature," "Asian literature," "intersex literature," or any other literature genre based on the gendered or racial minority status of the author cannot be equated because they are inherently different, but they do all face similar discrimination. While it seems Gates was against the conflation of racial and sexual/gendered "otherness," as he called it, there are similarities that cannot be ignored (Gates, 17). After all, if the writings of African Americans, women, or any other underprivileged group were to be considered completely different, where then would the literature of women of color lie? Would their work be categorized by their race or their gender?  They could easily be categorized by both since they both fall under the larger category of "otherness".

-Kayla Goldstein