Obliterating the Hydra of Oppression
By William Peeples
This is one of two winning essays for the Janice Nora Lackey Award for Academic Excellence.
To be eligible for the Lackey Award, an essay must have been written for an NPEP course. NPEP received more than 20 essay submissions for consideration. Each essay was read by two members of an anonymous panel of three NPEP faculty members, who provided notes and a preliminary assessment. Essays that received two positive votes were then read by the third committee member. All of the essays were discussed and evaluated against the criteria identified in the award announcement: clarity of writing, creativity, argumentative strength, and level of development.
The year is 2022, when Dr. Hannibal Jackson, a young, Black sociologist, and inventor Dr. Nzinga Duboise invent a time machine.
Jackson and Duboise have been friends since their childhood days as members of Jack and Jill. Hannibal loves social theory and is a big fan of Karl Marx. Nzinga, a staunch Black Feminist theory fan, adores Kimberle Crenshaw and her ideas on intersectionality. Nzinga suggests that they travel back in time to retrieve Marx, bring him to 2022, and introduce him to Crenshaw, allowing the two writers to converse about their theories, their common ground, and their points of contention.
Karl Marx, deemed the Father of Social Conflict Theory, argues that society is comprised of class divisions that ensure wealth and power accrue to the upper classes, who determine and control the "means of production" to subjugate the working class; and that the law is used to reify and enforce class assignments. Marx argues that the concepts of "private property" and "rule of law” work hand-in-hand to protect the bourgeoisie and control the proletariat's socio-economic reality. Marx further asserts that the only cure for this ailment is the obliteration of privatization, state ownership of all means of production, and the distribution of wealth equally among all citizens, thus destroying the concept of socio-economic class.
Conversely, Kimberle Crenshaw posits that not just class but also race and gender play a significant part in how the law is utilized to maintain social control and legitimize exclusionary and discriminatory practices; and that the law's blindness to the realities of race and gender intersectionality in depriving people of equality of opportunity ensures socio-economic disparity.
We now fast-forward to a coffee shop in Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood in Chicago. Nzinga and Crenshaw are seated on one side of the booth, and Hannibal and Marx are seated opposite them. The waitress, a pretty, dark-complexioned Black woman, takes their order; she pauses, staring at Marx and the funny clothes he's wearing. She smiles but decides not to comment on his outdated attire. When she departs, Hannibal explains why he brought these two together. Both are eager to do theoretical battle, and Marx concedes to let Crenshaw fire the first salvo of argumentative points. Hannibal and Nzinga pull out their notebooks to preserve this historic event for posterity.
CRENSHAW: Comrade Marx, first let me assure you that, though we disagree on some points in our beliefs, I am nonetheless a huge admirer of much of your ideas and writings. I also want you to know I come as both teacher and student, as I believe this exchange will be mutually enlightening and beneficial.
With that said, let me begin my critique by pointing out the obvious: your theory fails to take into account the reality of race and gender oppression, as well as the historical implications of white supremacy, and the concept of white privilege as it pertains to law, and its utilization by those in power to effectively sustain a permanent underclass, as well as to create sub-categories of the proletariat class that ensures perpetual division amongst all workers based upon each fighting against the other to obtain, and maintain, personal interests and goals.
MARX: Comrade Crenshaw, first thank you for your gracious comments. Now, to counter your point. Can you not see how divisive your theory is to begin with? In effect, you do the work of the bourgeoisie by highlighting external differences like race, skin color, and sex. My ideas are predicated upon the universality and generality of the working class's subjugation and oppression for the benefit and ease of the upper classes. In my theory, there is no color, race, or sex. We are all one and must unite like the fingers of a hand to form a clenched fist and smash the machine of privatization, means of production, and property laws that uphold and ensure the existence of capitalism!
CRENSHAW: Brother Marx, with all due respect, you are arguing your point from a social context that no longer exists! At the time of your writings, you were in a homogeneous society, patriarchy prevailed, and ideas of the equality of the sexes or women's rights were not even under discussion. Additionally, you fail to take into account the legal history of my country.
America, at its inception, was founded by white, land-owning men, for white, land-owning men.
Blacks—the kidnapped and enslaved Africans (as well as their future offspring, into perpetuity)—were considered, literally, three-fifths human. Even post-slavery this country enacted Black codes, passed Jim Crow laws, and legalized exclusionary tactics that negatively impact Black Folks generally, and also coalesce into a "Bird-Cage" like structure, what I call intersectionality, that operates on a Racial+ Gender level of oppression that whites in their myopic "white normativity" fail to see, and likewise, Black men in their racially singular perspective fail to acknowledge and implement strategies to combat.
Lastly, even white feminists in their "I am woman, hear me roar" ideology neglects the reality that Black women, historically, were/are not deemed as "women" in the same patriarchal sense that white women are.
MARX: Touché, comrade Crenshaw, you make very valid and undeniable points. Still, I implore you to see reason! If the proletariat class first establishes common ground as workers, and our unification unseats the bourgeoisie from their throne, we can then, at our leisure, combat the inequalities of race, gender, and even this sexual orientation stuff I've heard about during my brief stay in your time.
Change, my dear sister, occurs in increments, and the first step is to overthrow capitalistic oppression of all people irrespective of color, race, gender, etc...
CRENSHAW: I feel you, brother Karl, but check this out! Blacks joined with the colonists during the Revolutionary War, and after they helped expel the British, white folks repaid them with the gift that kept on giving, chattel slavery, so thanks, but no thanks! The reality is if we start by "freeing" from socio-economic oppression the Black woman, who is arguably the most oppressed person in society, then by virtue of that, we dismantle, and render inoperable, all societal mechanisms of oppression, legal or otherwise, that all others face as well.
MARX: [bows his head in a gesture of humility and acquiescence and proclaims] Hail the Black woman! You have convinced me that my theory must be modified if it is to defeat the hydra of class, race, and gender oppression. That said, I really must be going, my wife will have my head on a pike if I don't make it home for supper on time!
All four people rise from the booth, and Crenshaw shakes Marx's hand, thinks better of it, and gives him a companionly hug, too. Marx a bit taken aback by the forwardness of women in this new time, smiles and bows to Crenshaw, and then Nzinga. He turns to Hannibal and says, "Dear fellow I've enjoyed my time, but please take me home." Hannibal smiles sheepishly and replies, "I'm the sociologist of the group, Nzinga is the brains that invented the machine. I don't even know how to turn it on." They all laugh, and Nzinga takes Marx back to the machine to send him home.
Although Marx and Crenshaw differ in terms of the position of importance of color, race, and gender in the system of capitalistic oppression, they agree that the law was created, and designed, to protect and reify capitalism via property rights, means of production, and class subjugation.
Crenshaw's emphasis on race and gender as components of legal mechanisms of control is one that those who fight oppression ignore at their own peril.
