Project proposal for Fall 2023 Introduction to Public History Seminar.
Questions/Abstract:
How are racism and sexism not just forms of prejudice but are embedded into social structures? To what extent do intentions matter in the preservation of oppressive systems? Fannie Barrier Williams’s essay provides an opportunity to dissect these questions. Williams is a woman of color and an advocate for working-class Black Women, despite this, she appealed to white supremacist systems. She demonstrates that racism continues regardless of individual intentions. This website will guide visitors through definitions of racism and sexism, through Fannie Barrier Williams’s life, and through her words as a platform for racial discourse beyond prejudice.
Narrative:
Beyond Prejudice: Fannie Barrier Williams as a Lens into Structural Inequality
One day when I was working at the Susan B. Anthony House, a woman asked me if it was safe outside. This occurred during a bout of wildfire smoke, so I said I would not spend much time outdoors due to the air quality. She replied, “Oh no, that’s not what I meant.” It then became clear to me that as a white woman, she felt not just uncomfortable, but threatened, in a predominately black neighborhood. When I brought this up to friends and family, they were confused as to why I had a problem with it, despite them calling my workplace the “ghetto.” They said she was just looking out for her safety, and quickly became uncomfortable when I brought up the discussion of race, saying it had nothing to do with her remarks. Did she explicitly say that she had a prejudice against people of color? No, but she did imply race, whether she was conscious of it or not. So, how important are people’s intentions to the continuation of racism?
I then asked my 13-year-old sister how she defined racism, she said “Discrimination against any race like with the intention of being hurtful.” This definition echoes the responses I heard from my peers and older generations of my family. Why, at least within my white suburban circles, do people confuse racism with prejudice? This question is at the heart of this project. Why do people perceive forms of oppression, such as racism and sexism, as merely personal beliefs, and not structural entities? This project will facilitate discussions about racism and sexism larger than personal prejudices. Specifically, that race and gender cannot be separated from each other and broader power dynamics.
The key to understanding how to answer these is framing racism and sexism in a structural sense. To do that, I draw upon Leith Mullings, a Black Feminist cultural anthropologist. In her article “Interrogating Race,” she describes whiteness not as a race, but as status by emphasizing “the relational and dialectical aspects of race and racism…that all dispossession is inextricably connected to accumulation and that structured disadvantage is the inevitable foundation for privilege.”[1] Instead of defining race in terms of phenotypic characteristics, it is a concept inseparable from the transfer of resources from one group to another, so in this analysis whiteness is not a race but a relational power dynamic. This framework helps move beyond individual racism, or prejudice, and to a more comprehensive understanding of how racism is embedded in social, political, and economic systems.
This concept of dispossession and accumulation in terms of privilege and oppression is also applicable to gender. Rather than understanding womanhood strictly in biological terms, it is also a status inseparable from wealth accumulation and dispossession. Race, gender, and even sex are not biologically based, rather, they are “set(s) of practices, structures, beliefs, and representations that transform certain forms of perceived differences, generally regarded as indelible and unchangeable, into inequality.”[2] That is to say that what makes a person Black or a woman does not lie within biology, but in how those perceived differences translate into a dispossessed status. I aim to take an intersectional approach to say that ideas of race, gender, and class were not created independently, but in tandem to uphold White supremacist patriarchy. For this approach, I will draw upon bell hooks in her analysis of Black women and feminism. Her examination traces the devaluation of Black womanhood to slavery and demonstrates that our modern understandings of gender originated in the Victorian period in response to slavery. The construction of womanhood in the 19th century centered on sexual purity, something only White women could achieve as White men systemically raped Black women.[3] Therefore, American concepts of womanhood function as a gendered construction of whiteness, and cannot be divorced from slavery.
My use of an intersectional approach is to emphasize the connection between gender and race and to present these categories as hierarchical statuses rather than biological facts. The last piece contextualizes Fannie Barrier Williams’s life and analyzes her approaches to Black female liberation. Her speech, “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Woman since Emancipation” is the lens to explore larger power structures and personal prejudices. In this speech, she humanized Black women in an era where society did not accept them as women or people, but because her methods of liberation included conforming to white womanhood, she inevitably reproduced the systems of oppression despite her opposition to them. This speech provides an opportunity to explore how people without conscious prejudice enable systems of oppression.
How Will These Ideas Translate into a Project?
The project consists of a structured website where visitors explore topics of race, gender, Black women in society, and Fannie Barrier Williams. Although exploratory designs are perhaps more fun for visitors, a structured design is best for this project considering it aims to drive home the specific points that racism and sexism are co-constituted and extend beyond beliefs. Visitors will start at a page that displays different types of racism that provide definitions when clicked on. I intend to borrow the terms and definitions for individual racism, interpersonal racism, institutional racism, and structural racism from the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I would also like to include this chart from that site which demonstrates how implicit bias, or a form of individual racism, translates into structural inequality.
The following page will be the same but in terms of sexism. Unfortunately, no readily available credible resource exists for definitions and graphics to represent various forms of sexism, so I would relabel the above graphic to express individual sexism translated into structural.
The next page bridges these two concepts together with bell hooks. This section focuses on how race and gender, despite their existence in separate categories on this website, cannot be viewed independently. This decision to present them individually and then as co-constituted allows visitors to begin at a comprehensible level and then connect ideas into larger, class-driven themes about dispossession and accumulation. The format of this section will include a short video of bell hooks elaborating on interlocking oppressions and the importance of a co-constituted, holistic framework. This video will be accompanied by a few sentences explaining her main point and how it fits into the project.
On the next page, visitors will learn about Fannie Barrier Williams’s life in a timeline format, highlighting the obvious dates and achievements, but also how her opinions and ideas changed throughout her life. A subsection will include the text of the speech, with hyperlinks on the key sentences, phrases, or words in which she references a particular idea. If clicked on, they will take visitors to historical context pages. These will include Victorian constructs of morality, savagery, civilization, and Christianity. After her speech, I will introduce a discussion area about racism and sexism as individual vs. structural. I will pose questions like, how was Fannie Barrier Williams being radical for her time? How was she not? Was Barrier Williams upholding the forms of oppression she opposed? To what extent do intentions matter in the preservation of oppressive systems? Visitors to the site can submit answers to these questions. Although I would love for everyone to have kind, friendly, respectful ideas, that is just not realistic for the internet. To mitigate these issues, I will require people to create a verified account, have a moderator, a hate-speech detector, and post rules of discussion. These rules will include the importance of centering empathy, curiosity, and listening.
My intended audience is anyone who has access to the internet, which not everyone has access to. My goal is to reach as many voices as possible, but that is difficult, and perhaps impossible, for a single format. My target audience is white people because that is the demographic that understands the least about racism, as they rarely have to think about their race on a day-to-day basis. They are often the people uncomfortable with these conversations, and in today’s colorblind society, often equate discussions of race with fostering racism, especially when having conversations with children. This is an important distinction because white children growing up in this century are not used to racial discourse, which inevitably reproduces structural inequality. This predicament is also why this project is important, as it creates an accessible space for learning and dialogue. That being said, this is a space for everyone to contribute to, it is also imperative to have perspectives from people of color because they understand structural inequality in ways white people do not. If it were just white voices, the project would only continue historical discrimination. I should also note that what brought me to this topic of racism as personal vs systemic is a result of my positionality as a middle-class white woman from the suburbs, and living on the outskirts of an intensely segregated city. While this is a national trend, evidenced by trends in colorblindness since the 1980s, recent overhaul of affirmative action, and restricted slavery curriculum in certain states, it is important to note that people within different positionalities in different cities may not see racism as purely personal. This is why it is imperative to include many voices in this project, and most importantly, to foster discussion and collaboration between different groups of people.
Logistics
My budget will vary depending on whether I create the website myself or hire a professional to design it. According to Forbes, the cost of hiring a website designer for a small business (up to 16 pages) is between $2,000- $9,000 with annual costs up to $1,200. If I were to design the website myself, the do-it-yourself website builders cost between $100- $400 per year. Additional fees include domain name ($0-$20/year), web hosting ($30-$500/year), and SSL certificate ($0-$249). The prices vary because some of these costs are included in subscriptions to certain companies. The cost for this project would vary significantly depending on which route I choose. Considering I want a forum with a moderator and hate speech detectors, I believe hiring someone to create the website would be the most successful. Especially considering the sensitive nature of the website, I would not like to take chances on a project of this caliber.
Besides hiring a website designer, I think having the expertise of Black scholars in the museum field develop the content would help the website not have an exclusively White perspective. I believe having a curator from the National Museum of African American History and Culture would be most beneficial as they have both knowledge on the subject and experience relaying it to the public. I would like to have Spencer Crew as a consultant, he is a curator at this institution and his expertise is in the era of segregation (1876-1968), this is the time in which Fannie Barrier Williams’ lived and the experience that most impacted her life.
In sum, I wish to create a platform where people can learn about interlocking structures of oppression and engage in meaningful conversations with others. By highlighting Fannie Barrier Williams’ story, I hope to educate people about her life in both praise and criticism, showing that historical figures are individuals with complex feelings and thoughts. My goal is to help people in a highly individualistic society see beyond themselves, to think critically about their world, and to foster compassion and respect for one another.
[1] Leith Mullings, Interrogating Race: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005):680.
[2] Mullings, 684.
[3] bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1981), 32.
