What role does patriarchy play in racial fascism?
Photo Credits: Socialist Alternative
In “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” Ida B. Wells details the brutalization of the black body that characterized Jim Crow. In it, Wells discusses how accusations of rape were the primary justifications for the multitude of lynchings perpetrated by white mobs against black men. Wells grounds her rebuke of the Southern lynch law with a discussion of the high rate of lynching occurring in Memphis, Tennessee. Specifically, Wells’ account focuses on the period between May 17 and May 24, 1892, wherein eight black men had been accosted, abused, and brutally hanged after accusations of criminal conduct. Of these eight men, five of them were accused of rape. The truth of these accusations mattered not to the severity of the punishment. Discussing the case of Mr. Stricklin, a near victim of the South’s self-righteous racial vitriol, Wells identifies how the young Stricklin would have been lynched on the basis of his occupying the same room as his supposed victim for whom he was installing curtains. All this despite the notable lack of an “outcry of rape.” Had the woman not vouched for Mr. Stricklin, his body would be left beaten and bruised hanging from a poplar tree. Undeniably, the charge of black men raping white women has been used to legitimate the anti-black violence endemic to the Jim Crow South and whose legacy has metastasized into the fascist outgrowth that has brought American democracy to its knees.
This rhetoric is not isolated—the weaponization of gender-based violence as a call to action against targeted groups is a tactic endemic to racial fascism. To understand the function of patriarchy within a racial fascist order, it is first important to establish that race and gender do not operate within separate spheres, much less as parallel forces. A key insight proffered by an intersectional analytic lens is that identities and structures are indivisible. This framework attunes us to the inextricable nature of race and gender. So long as there exists a thing called “racial” fascism, there exists a distinctly gendered dimension that upholsters the racial dynamics that are brought into being. One cannot have race without gender or gender without race because they are co-constitutive and mutually reinforcing. Thus, patriarchy—the ideological and material structures which coalesce to privilege real men and subordinate everyone else—is itself a fixture of racial fascism, so-long as our understandings of race are contingent on our constructions of gender.
The imposition of a racial fascist order necessitates the proliferation of an ideology within which hierarchy and subordination must be naturalized and therefore justified. The creation of the subaltern as a distinctly denigrated class requires that the dominant ideology conceptualize the marginalized as barbarous and uncivilized, thereby authorizing the domination of said class by those who occupy the top of the racial hierarchy. Through the eyes of racial fascist ideology, then, the visceral acts of violence perpetrated against the oppressed body becomes the fated discipline of the brutes. The differentiation between the upper and lower races and the subsequent domestication of the latter within the racial fascist order is accomplished through a variety of means. Bible in hand, Western missionaries infiltrated the continent of Africa with a divine mandate to save the Native from himself, demonizing indigenous religion and enculturating the continent in the Western religious tradition. Alternative expressions of sexuality by colonized populations were denounced and considered evidence for the elimination of indigenous culture. Using the language of disability, British colonists would malign the desire for liberation in Kenya as the desire of madmen, stating that those who espoused whispers of revolution were mentally unwell and in need of rehabilitation. Evidently, then, religious extremism, homophobia and ableism, amongst many other systems of normatively-potent difference were used to substantiate the civilized-savage paradigm that legitimated and still legitimates the violence of various racial-fascist orders.
Patriarchy functions similarly here. For those who occupy the position of dominance within a racial hierarchy, the concept of the savage and his civilized other is bound up within traditional Western understandings of gender. Within a societal framework constructed upon patriarchal ideologies, to perform civility is to perform gender as properly construed. Within a racial fascist order, such notions of the proper are themselves constructed around the norms of the dominant race and in direct contention with the subordinated. For instance, in a white supremacist system, narratives of innocence and purity are inherent to whiteness. Such characteristics are personified through white womanhood wherein the civilized white woman is fragile, demure, and submissive, with an agency that is only fully expressed within the domain of the home and contingently expressed everywhere else vis-à-vis her husband. White manhood, free, rational, and domineering, is, above all, characterized by the duty to protect his own and police/defend the borders of the white family.
As we attune our focus to the systemic weaponization of gender-based violence in systems of racial fascism, it is important to note that the depiction of the ideal feminine and masculine run in direct opposition to the racialized other. The men of the subaltern class are not afforded the label of real men by virtue of their supposed inability to naturally conform to the dominant gendered and racial social norms. In some instances, this can manifest as the emasculation of men belonging to the subordinated group. Such a movement is evidenced by the proliferation of emasculating characterizations of East Asian men which were used to justify the exclusion of Chinese immigrant workers in the 19th and 20th centuries. In other instances, the refusal of real manhood can manifest as hypermasculinization. Here, men of the subordinated group are perceived in excess wherein they are characterized as too strong and tooviolent.
Let us return back to the case of the Jim Crow South as elucidated by Wells. The mobs of white men indiscriminately lynching black men in response to accusations of rape justified their violence by appealing to the ideal of feminine purity that inundated the concept of white womanhood. The dynamic here is twofold. Not only are the presuppositions that are attached to white femininity invoked, but those which characterize black masculinity are similarly revealed. Blackness is hypermasculinized through characterizations that emphasize the physical traits of masculinity without the so-called higher order cognitive qualities of discipline and rationality that are inherent to white (read: real) manhood. Body without mind, the black male expression of masculinity is necessarily dangerous because it lies beyond the bounds of self-regulation. Unable to control itself, the white man rationalizes his legal, political, and social confinement of the black other. It is this presupposition of unregulated masculinity that is the locus of the threat that has supposedly risen against the purity of white womanhood.
It is important to note that the depiction of ideal womanhood necessarily excludes the women of the denigrated class. These women are not real women and are therefore not afforded the same luxuries of protection that are experienced by said real women. Black women, for instance, are hypermasculanized and are therefore placed beyond the bounds of the proper performance of gender. In the Jim Crow South, this manifested as the lack of moral vitriol levied against the accused rapists of Black women despite the protection of the purity and innocence of womanhood being the primary motivator behind the extrajudicial death sentences threatening their male counterparts. Wells details the following case of the brutal assault of a young black girl by white assailants:
Last winter in Baltimore, Md., three white ruffians assaulted a Miss Camphor, a young Afro-American girl, while out walking with a young man of her own race. They held her escort and outraged the girl. It was a deed dastardly enough to arouse Southern blood, which gives its horror of rape as excuse for lawlessness, but she was an Afro-American. The case went to the courts, an Afro-American lawyer defended the men and they were acquitted.
Put simply by Wells, “when the victim is a colored woman it is different.” Ultimately, we would be remiss to forget that gender influences our conception of race inasmuch as race influences our conception of gender. Walking hand in hand, the two function to create a realm of ideals which upholster the dominant and dehumanize the dominated. An adequate analysis of racial fascism, then, must place constructions of the gendered self under patriarchy as central in understanding how the constitution of the racialized subject operates within such systems of denigrated difference.













