Category Archives: Black Women’s Lives, Literacies, and Work

Black Bodies, Public Spectacle, and Narrative: Lessons from Karla Holloway

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Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks

I recently listened to a talk given by Karla Holloway at Georgia Tech University.  In her talk, Holloway discusses Rebecca Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, now destined for HBO, courtesy of Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball.  In her book trailer, Skloot herself confirms that it is the characters that basically make this science book readable and riveting to a general audience.  Henrietta Lacks, known by the medical/science industry as HeLa, was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951 for developing what we now know to be the vaccine for polio and the central tools for cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more.  Her cells have made billions of dollars but her family, then and now, do not have even health insurance.  The story is now widely known and was even dramatized/re-mixed by one of the Law and Order episodes.  What Skloot’s book does though is take us deep into the interior of this family, putting her, rightly so, in the direct line of Holloway’s fire.

In her talk, called “Henrietta Lacks and the Ethics of Privacy,” Holloway asks a compelling question: “which bodies have earned the public presumption of the right of privacy and which are available, reasonably available, for public scrutiny?”   Her own research shows that it is blacks and women who are most “readily rendered up for public storytelling,” what she calls a “persistent loss of privacy” where privacy is a “right” only granted to some audiences.  Holloway connects Skloot’s book to shows like the Real Housewives series and their exploitative representations of women, Maury Povich’s media publication of paternity cases, and Jerry Springer’s public consumption of community and family dysfunction.  She sees these media empires as the motivation and subtext for the ways in which Skloot invades and publicly showcases the lives, medical records, and stigmatized diseases of Henrietta Lacks and her family.  The most intimate medical histories are made public in this book, alongside a kind of voyeuristic unveiling of Deborah Lacks’s (the daughter) challenges with understanding medicine/science, the details of one of Lacks’s son and his time in prison, and even the amount of Deborah’s disability checks. Deborah Lacks actually dies before the manuscript was published so there clearly was none of what we qualitative researchers like to call “member checking” on the final product here.  Holloway reveals that she herself is uncomfortable in even summarizing Skloot’s book because it would mean participating in the very violation of this family’s history that the book exploits. What Holloway clearly shows here is a kind of parasitic relationship between a wealthy white journalist mining the stories and family histories of the Lacks and to brilliant fanfare given how well the book has sold and been awarded.  In sum, Henrietta Lacks’s body was “stripped” as a spectacle, first, in the name of science research, and now in the new telling that Skloot engages.   Holloway doesn’t hesitate to connect this history of violence and exploitation on black bodies in the name of academic research and public spectacle to James Marion Sims and his experiments on black slave women (Sims invented the speculum, made of bent spoons, to see inside of women’s uterus) and Katherine Stockett’s imagination of race in The Help.

What Holloway also compellingly shows me is that the focus on crafting a tantalizing, evocative narrative about black women’s bodies is rooted in historical white violence. A story is not good because it is widely read by and marketable to a general public already mesmerized by the likes of “Real Housewives,” Maury, Jerry Springer, The Help, and the general set of pathologies and dysfunction under capitalism.  This is not to say that black people do not themselves choose to offer their bodies and stories up for public spectacle, only that there is a history of white supremacy and consumption that makes this thinkable and desirable.

I am compelled by Holloway’s discussion as both a qualitative researcher and a writing teacher.  How you write, what you say, how you say it, who you talk about, and what you say/include are always deeply political and enmeshed in the ways that the culture tells you to consume black bodies. If the narratives we write as and about black women do not take as their first call of duty an unflinching critique of the unjust systems in which our bodies get defined and used, including the marketing and/or academic systems that tell/sell our stories, it seems to me that we are just being served up again as a James Marion Sims’s experiment.  Holloway has a stunning critique of these unjust systems and points us toward new directions in how we analyze, write, and talk about those systems too.

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My Father’s Black Working Class Consciousness as an Academic Necessity

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My Father as a Young Man

My Father as a Young Man

When I have heard white working class people talk about becoming academics/joining the academy, they seem to often talk about an estrangement from peers, neighborhoods, and, especially, from family.  I hear black academics sometimes talk this way also, usually in reference to the brothas and sistas on the block who no longer accept them.  I just don’t get it. I just don’t have these issues, never have, and don’t imagine I will in the future either. The older that I get, the further “ahead” (in years, I mean) that I move into the academy, the more I seem to be able to talk with and relate to my father.

My father is a retired heating and air conditioning mechanic and seems to be able to fix any motor/engine/system on the planet.  As is always so startlingly true of the discarding of black bodies, talent, and genius under white supremacy, in another world, my father could have been an engineer and inventor (I won’t even go into the everyday assistantship I have had to provide on his homemade barbecue grills and electric traps to catch squirrels and critters that eat the garden’s tomatoes).  His garage is the 21st century version of Fred Sanford’s junkyard/frontyard with anything that you could ever need to fix anything that is ever broken.

Sanford and Son

Sanford and Son… Now Insert Me as Daughter

For most of my life, my father worked as custodial staff for the federal building.  Today, he gets hassled daily for any odd job that any black person in that part of Ohio seems to need done, so much so that he never answers his phone anymore, forcing me to buy him a cell phone and put it on my account in order to talk to him (preachers seem to be his arch-nemesis for trying to get free or cheap work done).  As a scholarship student at an elite high school, my high school peers were the sons and daughters of lawyers and judges so they knew my father from their parents’ frequent visits to the federal building where my father worked.  To my peers, I was the janitor’s daughter and it didn’t seem to make a difference that my father was not the janitor at OUR building, he was just a janitor out there somewhere and so that was his and my only identity.  I won’t lie and say that I didn’t feel like an ugly, unwanted, poor black girl for most of my high school years— it was what that culture engendered— but I wasn’t estranged from my father’s class consciousness and had a full-blooded, full-bodied critique of elite and upper middle class white people.  Today, as a recently tenured professor of English, I relate to my father even more by nature of the work and white supremacy that I navigate daily in the academy.  What on earth would make anyone think that it would look any different for me than it did for him?

Being raised in a (very) large, black working class family is what I count as my greatest blessing and asset today.  The language and vernacular that redefines and plays, the ability to read whiteness and its violence, the knowledge that pleasure and sustenance won’t come from work, the explicit naming of unfairness in everyday banter, the transformation of the mundane (fish fries, the electric slide, etc) into the sacred have sustained me in ways that are beyond even my conscious awareness.

Last week, I mailed to my father one of the first copies of my first book.  When he received it, he called me and was stunned that it was 336 pages and DONE!  The thing he kept saying, over and over again, was this: “uhn, uhn, uhn, this is a whole lotta work, baby.”  He told me that it was time to rest now before I get back up and get back at it.  It was the best recognition of what I had done and the best advice for what I need to do next that I have received to date!  I knew he would understand just what I was feeling, down to the core.

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Love, Patriarchy & Capitalism: Prototypical

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heart-of-moneyThough I don’t talk much about relationships on this site, intimacy is as political as anything else.  Relationships, families, and  co-habitation are mediated by a stunning marriage of patriarchy and consumerism.  So much of the partnering that I see seems to work like business ventures: dating is like making an investment and getting the right woman/man is like selecting a good stock option. Heterosexual women are considered accomplished when they find a benevolent patriarch (i.e., Steve Harvey) who will protect and provide for them even if the women are as dumb as hell (which, for patriarchy to work, is usually most desired).

Our language often reveals just how difficult it is for us to re-script these kinds of relationships. Here’s an example. An acquaintance (we never spent any time together so I can’t call him much else) once called me, in a very round-about way, his “prototype”, emboldened by Raheem DeVaughn’s cover of Outkast’s problematic song (a man celebrates that he has fallen in love AGAIN and is grateful that he has now found his “prototype” because if things end, he can presumedly be better at falling in love… AGAIN.)  I’ve never been impressed by this masculinist discourse. I’d be silly to think a man has called me, and only me, his “prototype”— that’s a line, not a life choice. Unfortunately, too many women might see a compliment in this foolishness. In a patriarchal system, men’s definition of and giving of “love” holds the most value, even if that really only means consumption, power, and objectification. Many might be confused by my offense here, so let me cut straight to the point: a WOMAN is not a prototype so, when in doubt, avoid any discourse that calls her a thing on-the-way-to-the-next thing.

I did tread lightly here: I didn’t even respond to this “compliment” at first, I then stated on the next day that I didn’t get the intention of these words, and then, finally, I asked, casually so, for the brotha’s intention.  No in-depth answer was forthcoming.  When I then later pressed for a real explanation while indicating that I was offended, the brotha still wouldn’t budge, talked about guitar solos instead, insisted that he meant something else without any discussion of that something else, and just got rude and accused me of not listening (and, yes, I responded back to that).  There was no apology and no reclamation of a sexist offense.  While it might seem like I am focusing on a rather trivial conversation, the larger issues of patriarchy and consumption are all tied into this seemingly small interaction.  This exchange is exactly what bell hooks talks about in The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (there are many interesting discussions about this book amongst men; I like the way the blogger and activist, Alex Knight, describes patriarchy as terrorizing his life and emotional maturity).  When men choose patriarchal power this way (and hooks calls emotional withdrawal/withholding, etc all forms of patriarchal power/male control), there is a real danger for both men and women: men give up the ability to really love, feel, or communicate when they only take their place as patriarchs; women embrace violence by allowing male domination and power to script their daily lives.

Because the song does not re-invent the definition of prototype, it’s a problem to use this language in reference to women.  Let’s look:

Definition of Prototype
From the OED: c.1600, from Fr. prototype, from M.L. prototypon, from Gk. prototypon “a first or primitive form,” properly neut. sing. of prototypos “original, primitive,” from protos “first” (see proto-) + typos “impression” (see type).
popular definition: an original type, form, or instance serving as a basis or standard for later stages.

With this “prototype” labeling, a lot is revealed: women are types and there is one model to be molded, not that much different from people I know who have one specific kind of car that they like. The very definition assumes a manufactured object where new replicas/women will be created, distributed, sold.  It’s almost like watching the next women come down a factory assembly line and checking their parts to see which ones came out right.  480barbiesIf this all seems like a harsh indictment, I should add that this same man would do things like run down the list of: 1) birthdays or birthmonths for his ex-girlfriends, including his “baby momma” who bears the same sign as him, with almost identical birthdate (thus making them, fairly recently, the perfect match); 2) the various attributes of these women’s personalities as well as their other, um, attributes, and; 3) the various gifts he gave these women (with lists of what they liked to eat).  When MY BIRTHDAY came around, this man didn’t even remember and accused me of not telling him the date. I didn’t care so much about the missed birthday, except for the fact that I had actually told him the date— it was the precursor to his aforementioned 3-point discussion.  As you can see, he was more interested in the memories of his pre-“prototypes” and zodiac matches. When women are mere prototypes, as this case shows, they are things and so, as objects only, they are not worthy of real care, remembering, priority, or value.  I could tell more stories like this but, more importantly, this brotha would insist that he does not run game as a playa-playin’-on and that he works wholeheartedly at anti-patriarchy.  Choosing to name and relate to women as “prototypes” after previous conquests (and thinking single women just want your “seed”) is a virtual blueprint for misogyny, not a meaningful way to live, love, and raise a family.  I don’t want to suggest that heterosexual men are the only ones who treat women like commodities because heterosexual women try to manufacture men too (loving a man based solely on what he can do/perform vs. allowing him to be fully human); men just have patriarchy on their sides and, therefore, are encouraged and seemingly rewarded when they promote this system.  My point is that framing relationships outside of and beyond the patriarchy and hyper-consumption in which we live is a feat most of us are not achieving, with the various men making covers of this song a striking example.  There is a tragedy here, one that hooks continually warns us of: without the relinquish of patriarchy, even when men are tryna do right for they women, like these musicians perhaps, they still only turn women into things/objects/prototypes.

Now some people tend to think that I go off the deep end with my politics and, well, I don’t care. The fact of the matter is that we are in a system and no one’s language and actions are innocent.  I am not suggesting that all is lost, only that there is real talk AND work to do. At the end of the day, loving/being with someone beyond patriarchal violence and consumerist logic is amongst the most revolutionary and human things we can do. Of all things, love—black love— needs to be radical.

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Blueswomen: Discourse & Situation

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Bessie+Smith+Bessie_Smith2I just finished loading Unit Three of my course on Black Women’s Rhetoric, a unit that uses Angela Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism as a launching point for naming and defining blueswomen as rhetoricians.  I have a sense that what I will be asking students to do with black women’s music, lyrics, and performances might seem a bit strange to them, at first.  The task might be easier in relation to Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey, but I suspect it will feel stranger when we begin to look at contemporary artists who I think operate in the same tradition.  The main task will be for students to listen to and feel the contemporary songs they may already know but in a way where they can understand that there is an urgency underneath what might be regarded as mere romance, especially when we witness the live performances.   That is what we are trying to claim for rhetorical analysis.

A black feminist theorist prompted me to really start thinking this way.  Here I am talking about Hortense Spillers and this quote:

What is it like in the interstitial spaces where you fall between everyone who has a name, a category, a sponsor, an agenda, a spokesperson, people looking out for them— but you don’t have anybody.  That’s your situation.  But I am like the white elephant in the room. Though you can’t talk about the era of sound in the U.S. without talking about blues and black women.  You can’t talk about the era of slavery in the Americas without talking about black women, or black men without black women and how that changes the community— there is not a subject that you can speak about in the modern world where you will not have to talk about African women and new world African women.  But no one wants to address them…  I mean we really are invisible people.  And I just kind of went nuts.  And I am saying, I am here now, and I am doing it now, and you are not going to ignore me… ‘whatcha gonna do?’ [italics, mine]

For me, Spillers gets at what it feels like to be a black female academic/professor with some real soul-crushing and soul-reviving insights.  She really hits this nail on the head and drives it all the way through for me.  Her words make a difference for someone like me who is coming behind her and reading her; she helps me read my situation as a black female academic and understand exactly where I am.  “But you don’t have anybody.”   She ain’t never lied on that right there!  When I think back on the colleges where I have worked and many intellectual spaces where I do my work, there has been no one who has been down for me— no sponsor or spokesperson in my corner anydamnwhere!  And outside of my closest sister-friends, this is, just as Spillers says, my “situation.”

Now Spiller’s points might not seem like they would ever have anything to do with contemporary musicians and what my students and myself are talking about in unit three of this semester. Nonetheless, it IS related.  When I first, as an example, heard Goapele‘s “Tears on My Pillow” on her latest album, I felt like I was hearing and witnessing Spillers’s words and message all over again.  It’s that part where Goapele says that the tears she has shed were all in vain, no one ever really cared because she was all on her own, she had to just move forward from there. Goapele is obviously talking about a romantic relationship gone awry here.  Though Goapele’s individual romance/relationship may not carry the political urgency of the issues Spillers describes, Goapele’s song DOES certainly carry the weight and feeling of the world that Spillers delineates.  In this case, “I was crying in vain” resonates its pain, social implications, and impact from within that same lens that Spillers describes so damn well: “But you don’t have anybody.”   The issue of which women’s tears do and do not matter is also not neutral here.  I have in mind Karen Dace’s essay, “What Do I Do With All of Your Tears,” that describes the privileged treatment that white women receive, oftentimes at Dace’s own expense, each time they cry publicly in professional settings.  It is a kind of caring and centering that Dace, as a black female professor/administrator, knows better than to expect; to no one’s surprise, I have also witnessed the parting of the seas (especially by white men) every time a white woman cries at every white institution where I have worked.  So, yeah, Goapele has it right: her tears will do nothing but land straight on her own pillow.

My students are young and may not extrapolate such meaning from a song like “Tears on My Pillow.” But they have seen this thing I am talking about with their mothers, their aunties, their godmothers, their grandmothers. What I hope is for us to see that this is a unique and serious social and political location from which to understand black women’s discursive productions, even when they are talking about the relationships that they desire and/or must leave.

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