Race and Gender in Modern America

Attempting to discuss race and gender as discrete categories of historical analysis is like trying to study a rushing river by capturing a piece of it in your hands. The river constitutes a powerful force and alters the landscape it traverses in dramatic ways; but it is not possible to isolate its constitutive parts and still appreciate its fluidity—that is, the very characteristic that defines it.

Over the last ten or fifteen years, scholars have dislodged racial and gender ideologies from their essentialist (that is, biological) moorings, and have recognized that these ideologies float freely in space and through time, ever changing and ever contingent on specific circumstances. One does not have to look very far to find instances in which physical appearance was irrelevant to definitions of “race,” and where sex organs were irrelevant to definitions of “gender.” In her study of black working women in Philadelphia in the 1890s, Isabel Eaton recorded a case of “a very fair young girl, apparently a white girl” employed as a department store clerk. After the girl had worked at the job for two years, “it was discovered that she had colored blood and she was promptly discharged.” ¹ In this instance, “colored blood” was not a physical characteristic, but rather a metaphor for an African heritage, broadly construed, and a heritage of enslavement in America, more specifically implied.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his memoir, Colored People, noted the World War II “racial” dynamic that assigned service work performed by female civilians to black men in Army life: “Because the Army replicates the social structure of the larger society it defends, almost all black draftees were taught to cook and clean. Of course, it was usually women who cooked and cleaned outside the Army, but someone had to do the work, so it would be black men.” ² In the case of both the Philadelphia store clerk and the Army cooks and custodians, white employers and military officers manipulated racial ideologies to reserve “modern” jobs for whites exclusively; these jobs included, for women, serving as the visible agents of a consumer culture, and, for men, working with pieces of technologically sophisticated defense hardware. Standards based upon “blackness” and “femaleness,” then, were invoked by whites in positions of authority as transparent ploys to preserve various social hierarchies—“whites” over people of African descent, and men over women.

Historians now simply add race and gender into the mix of social signifiers that drive American society—class, stages of life, marital status, and ethnicity (to name just a few). All of these characteristics are subject to constant redefinition; they reveal less about a person’s “objective” status and more about the larger political meaning attached to that person’s situation in any particular time and place. And it would be foolish to try to disentangle these social identifiers from each other—for example, to study a group of women in isolation from their specific socio-economic and demographic context. In fact, studies of racial and gender ideologies are successful only to the extent that they include consideration of a whole host of factors at work simultaneously. Social historians, then, juggle contingencies, and the more the better.

Of all public controversies in recent memory, the debate over the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1992 revealed the intertwining of issues related to gender and race. (As graduates of Yale Law School and successful lawyers, Clarence Hill and his accuser, Anita Hill, were arguably members of the same “class.”) Pundits and scholars alike attempted to isolate specific prejudices at work in the case: Was Hill a victim of sexism (on the part of the senators who questioned her as well as Thomas) or was Thomas a victim of racism (on the part of the media and the feminists who sided with Hill)? The framing of questions like these, in stark either-or fashion, obscured the intertwined systems of power on display during the hearings themselves. In the end, the hearings represented a socio-political phenomenon—a rushing river—that could not be understood without a full appreciation of its rich...