Black Feminist Meditation #2: A Letter of Gratitude to Dr. Joy James
“My family’s mistake was believing that assimilation would be the same as liberation.”
Dear Dr. Joy James,
I write to you to express my gratitude.
I came to know your work through my Global Black Feminist Politics course at Oxford College of Emory University. We read a selected chapter from Shadowboxing during our unit on moving toward a Black Feminist political critique. While reading, I kept finding myself pulling extensive quotes and entire paragraphs of your work to annotate and retain as poignant examples of language of resistance for my feminist toolkit (inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed in Feminist Killjoys).
Some of the most impactful ideas I noted came from your meditations on assimilation as an antirevolutionary act. I am a young, bisexual, masculine-identifying Latino child of immigrants who grew up in the American South. For much of my life, assimilation was my goal. My parents insisted on my ‘proper’ assimilation into American culture, encouraging me to play with the white kids, to practice my English, and to understand American pop culture. I think they were traumatized in their move from Colombia to the U.S. from hearing about the stigmas surrounding certain behaviors, locations, and groups of people, some of which weren’t even necessarily applicable to me (I am able-bodied, but my parents actively wanted to keep me from being seen on a ‘short bus’ so I wouldn’t be mistaken for someone ‘unfit’ for social activity).
My family’s mistake was believing that assimilation would be the same as liberation. I knew for a long time that this wasn’t true, but I couldn’t understand precisely why. Your writings helped me understand. In your discussion about the myth of the ‘Talented Tenth,’ you illuminated that the central principles which had guided my life and my quest to rise to the top of my class so I might ‘prove myself’ were grounded in oppressive and prejudiced attitudes, the very same which bolster the model minority myth and encourage competition between marginalized groups.
What I’ve ultimately come to realize is that these oppressive structures derive directly from our economic and political systems. I grew up around a lot of racist, homophobic, and classist rhetoric in my small Georgia town, and a lot of the people who held these inherent biases were and still are my closest friends. Their harmful language is inexcusable, but you did help me come to terms with the idea that in order to practice a truly radical feminism, we have to resist the tendency to emphasize specifically white, specifically male, or specifically heterosexual persons as uniformly being the causes of oppression. Rather, oppression is systemic, arising from a neoliberal and capitalist logic built on exploitation and expropriation which happens to privilege the identities I named. It is not that those identities are bad, but rather that these toxic, corrosive social systems encourage malevolence in certain social groups.
A lot of my understanding about differentiating between individual actors and social systems came from your critique of uniform solidarity in social groups, specifically a racial uniformity in Black solidarity movements which includes reactionaries like Clarence Thomas. This insight was especially enlightening for me because I’ve recently had to reckon with the fact that not everyone who subscribes to a particular social identity is necessarily working against hegemonic structures which might marginalize that identity. I think my own parents, my friends, and even myself have at times been responsible for reifying white heterosexist values at the cost of our own groups’ social liberation. I’ve had to realize that while it’s easy to be liberal and complicit in an unforgiving socioeconomic structure, it takes active consciousness to be radical, and furthermore, it takes active resistance to be antirevolutionary.
“I made the proclamation that I am choosing to be radical. Your teachings have helped illuminate a path toward doing that.”
And this is why I feel like I must thank you. You taught me how to make these political distinctions between members of different social groups and movements. You were able to verbalize and expound upon concepts which for me were for so long mere ruminations or reflections on readings without substance. You showed me how easy it is to become entangled in respectability politics and a ‘mainstream’ radicalism that really only works to bring ideas and activities aimed at social justice into a hegemonic neoliberal framework.
For my first Black Feminist Meditation assignment for this course, I made the proclamation that I am choosing to be radical. Your teachings have helped illuminate a path toward doing that. I am grateful to you for the work that you are doing and the covert social systems you are exposing. I will carry your lessons in my heart for a very long time.
Most sincerely,
Alex Campo (he/him/his)
Second-Year Student at Oxford College of Emory University
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Major
