Dear Prof. Richardson:
I have been following your “Letters from an American” with interest for several months. I have read How the South Won the Civil War and look forward to reading more of your work on the Reconstruction in the future. I share your concern about the oligarchic trend in US politics and the Trumpist/white nationalist/fascist threat to our republican institutions. One must be judicious with the expression “Big Lie”, considering its origin, but I think your application of it to Trumpist disinformation is fair.
But there is another “Big Lie” that has been popular among the academic left for decades, one which you yourself have promoted unabashedly. That is the idea that the relationship between women and men in the US is essentially analogous to the relationship between blacks and whites. I don’t see how anyone can believe this after 2020.
I could cite government statistics and talk about all the areas in which the analogy of women:men::black:white doesn’t hold: life expectancy, educational attainment, incarceration, workplace death, etc., and I could talk about the way liberal feminists have prioritized the concerns of middle-class white women over the needs of African-Americans and the poor. I’m not going to bother because I’m confident that you know all that. (I’ve included some links below anyway for interested readers; scroll down to "Statistics: comparing race and sex".)
You know all that, yet you talk as if the post-Vietnam progressive coalition, of which feminists and African-Americans are key constituencies, has been part of American society since the founding of the nation. The current leftist politics of identity and demonization of cisgendered straight white males are problematic enough when applied to our own times, yet you seem to interpret all of US history according to the terms of this ideology.
Here is a recent example:
[The Civil War] had changed the idea of who should have a say in American society. Before the war, the ideal citizen was a white man, usually a property owner. But those were the very people who tried to destroy the country, while during the war, Black Americans and women, people previously excluded from politics, gave their lives and their livelihoods to support the government. ("Letters from an American", 1 July 2021.)
More facts that you know perfectly well: All states had eliminated the property qualification for suffrage before the Civil War; the Civil War killed over 618,000 Americans, the great majority of whom were white males; most of the officers on both sides came from the propertied classes. While it would be fair to blame Southern planter oligarchs for dragging the country into war, white male property owners also led the defense of the Union. African Americans supported the Union to the extent that they could, but I have no idea what you are alluding to when you say that “Black Americans and women . . . gave their lives and their livelihoods to support the government”; no reasonable sense of that predicate can be applied unequivocally to both of those subjects.
Throughout your work, you portray white women as either passive victims dragged along by white men as they dominated everyone else, or as actively joining minorities in the struggle for justice. This portrayal is almost cartoonish in its distortion and oversimplification. Power is distributed in the US primarily on the basis of socioeconomic class and secondarily on the basis of race, not sex/gender. Women who have had access to advantages based on class and race have generally not hesitated to enjoy them to the fullest and have at times fought to maintain them. You seem to suggest that women have generally fought for social justice against individualism, racism, and capitalism, and this is plainly not accurate. I have learned much from your work, but when I see the extent to which your interpretations are driven by a contemporary agenda, I do not know whether I can trust the conclusions you draw.
Maybe we both would benefit from re-reading Paula Giddings’s When and Where I Enter.
Respectfully,
M. D. Robertson
For the sake of sensitive readers, I have obscured the racial epithet that appears in this photo.
Statistics: comparing race and sex
Of all the areas listed below, the analogy white:black::men:women holds in only two areas: suicide and wages. In most of these areas, whites are better off than blacks, but women are better off than men.
Life expectancy
In 2018, the overall expectation of life at birth
was 78.7 years, increasing from 78.6 in 2017. Between 2017
and 2018, life expectancy at birth increased by 0.1 year for
males (76.1 to 76.2) and females (81.1 to 81.2). In 2018, life
expectancy at birth was 81.8 for the Hispanic population, 78.6
for the non-Hispanic single-race white population, and 74.7 for
the non-Hispanic single-race black population.
CDC NVSS 2017 data (pub. 17 Nov 2020)
Life expectancy at birth, in years:
Hispanic females 84.3
All females 81.2
White females 81.1
All Hispanics 81.8
Hispanic males 79.1
All 78.7
All whites 78.6
Black females 78.0
All males 76.2
White males 76.2
All blacks 74.7
Black males 71.3
See also Living Longer: Historical and Projected Life Expectancy in the United States, 1960 to 2060
Analysis by socioeconomic status
“When did women start to outlive men”
Education
Earnings
The above link states that women make 81% of what men make, in aggregate, and also breaks it down by occupation. Note that this only compares people who are employed. It doesn’t take into account those who are unemployed, incarcerated, in the military, or have left the workforce. Other relevant considerations: men are judged by their earning power to a greater degree than women and are under more social pressure than women to compete for higher paying positions. Men are less likely to take time off after the birth of a child.
43% of American workers are women. Why is this figure so low, when there are more women than men in the US, and more men than women are incarcerated or in the military? A likely answer: More men than women are supporting a stay-at-home partner of the opposite sex.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thoughtful comments welcome. All comments are moderated. To prevent spam, a Google account is required. (If you use gmail, you already have a Google account.)