-
Notes
- University of Virginia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Notes Introduction 1. West, Race Matters, 56. 2. In “Toward a True Black Liberation Theology,” Horace Griffin argues against the biblical and theological justifications for homophobia by historicizing homophobia, heteronormativity, and sexism as important cultural frameworks that shape biblical and theological understandings. Irene Monroe’s “When and Where I Enter” offers a similar critique of heterosexism but emphasizes the cultural manifestations of sexism more than the biblical and theological contexts. Michael Eric Dyson’s “When You Divide the Body and Soul, Problems Multiply” is perhaps one of the most persuasive critiques of the philosophical, theological, and cultural ideologies that reproduce homophobia and disenfranchise black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people . Each of these scholars makes compelling arguments for why gay rights are civil rights while proposing useful ways to embark upon a paradigm shift to conceptualize them as such. 3. See Moynihan, Negro Family. 4. The black feminist notion of intersectionality foregrounds how one’s multiple subject positions constantly intersect and interact and affect one’s political and cultural opportunities and outcomes. It rejects the notion that race and gender, for example , are separable, or that race is more important than gender or vice versa. Instead, it considers how multiple identities are always already being constituted by each other. Although Kimberlé Crenshaw coined this term in a legal context in the 1990s, earlier work by Frances Beale on black women’s “double jeopardy” and by Deborah King on “multiple consciousness” expresses the same concept (Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins ”; Beale, “Double Jeopardy”; D. King, “Multiple Jeopardy”). 5. Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 8. 6. B. Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” 410. 7. Ibid., 417. 164 / notes to introduction 8. See Cheryl Clarke, “Lesbianism.” 9. Abdur-Rahman, Against the Closet, 2. 10. Ibid., 9. 11. See Carbado, “Introduction,” esp. 1–3. 12. See Patricia Hill Collins’s theory of the new racism in Black Sexual Politics. 13. Steve Estes’s I Am a Man! compellingly explains how gender, and manhood in particular, shaped civil rights movement discourses. This work importantly foregrounds the implicit ways that gender, and masculinism more specifically, intersected with race and sexuality to articulate the struggle for civil rights. 14. See Giddings, When and Where I Enter, and Robnett, How Long? How Long? 15. See Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness; Monroe, “When and Where I Enter”; and Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church. 16. See Mueller, “Ella Baker.” 17. See James, Transcending the Talented Tenth, to see her admonition against elevating literature to this status. 18. Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 6. 19. Monteith, “Revisiting the 1960s,” 234. 20. Ibid., 234. 21. Hall’s call for a “long” periodization echoes the arguments made in Lawson, Running for Freedom (1991), Marable, Black Leadership (1998), Joseph, “Waiting till the Midnight Hour” (2000), and Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (1995) insofar as collectively these historians desire to “make civil rights harder” by dismantling the notion in American history that the classical phase was the movement’s essence. Although they do not use the term long, their conceptualization of the civil rights movement in “phases” addresses the larger claim that Hall maintains. This “phasing ” not only reflects the historical shift in the movement’s strategies, philosophies, and goals as it transitioned from agitation to implementation but, more importantly, emphasizes the fact that legislative achievements were only an initial component of a more expansive set of corrective actions necessary to ensure that African Americans would enjoy their civil rights and liberties. 22. Here I am referring to Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), which invokes Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes's poem “Harlem” as its point of departure to examine the limits (symbolic and material) of residential integration in Chicago. 23. The idea here is that the rhetoric of equality has been used to shift the focus from institutional racism to personal responsibility in order to explain the disparities that exist between African Americans and whites. Hall, in “Long Civil Rights Movement,” draws attention to this point, but other cultural critics such as Michael Eric Dyson in Is Bill Cosby Right? have examined how this formulation obfuscates the institutional barriers that persist to obstruct civil rights justice. 24. Metress, “Making Civil Rights Harder,” 140. 25. Ibid., 141. In Neo-segregation Narratives, Brian Norman suggests further theorizations that should take place about segregation’s representation in African American literature. I am gesturing toward a theorization of the formal features that should constitute “a long civil rights movement...