Women in Philosophy: Neocolonialism’s Anxieties? Schooling Women of Color

by Falguni A. Sheth

A number of news stories have appeared recently about self-appointed authorities who have taken it upon themselves to educate Black women and women of color on how they should conduct themselves. These “lessons” are shared with women of color on all sorts of occasions: from seemingly superficial admonishments of how women of color dress, to scoldings about “proper” public comportment or acceptable political opinions or speech.

In June, American Airlines made the headlines when a Black woman was asked to disembark a plane in Miami. Apparently, her clothing was deemed too skimpy by the fashion police who doubled as American Airlines flight attendants. Dr. Tisha Rowe, who identifies as African American and Caribbean American, was admonished to cover up before she was allowed back on the plane with her 8 year old son. Rowe, a physician returning home to Texas from a vacation in Jamaica, ruminated about her humiliating experience. She wondered why another woman on the same flight who –by her own admission–was wearing even less, had not been disturbed. “The difference between that woman and me is she was about a size 2, thin.” Rowe analyzed the event as follows:

We are policed for being black. Our bodies are over sexualized as women and we must ADJUST to make everyone around us feel comfortable.

Rowe’s experience was neither new nor unique. Black women have brought discrimination lawsuits time and time again for being prohibited or fired for wearing their hair in rows or locs on the grounds that their hair is not appropriate for professional contexts. Federal courts have repeatedly refused to affirm their rights to wear their hair as they like, and just last year, the Supreme Court refused to hear a case appealing a lower court’s judgment allowing employers to ban dreadlocks in the workplace. Ironically, all branches of the U.S. military now allow Black women to wear their hair in dreadlocks. As of last month, the states of California and New York have passed legislation banning discrimination against Black women on the basis of hair.

Rowe’s insight is important: the bodies and behavior of women of color must be comported to make others—especially those who are not darker minorities—feel less discomfort. The ability to present or comport oneself publicly as one pleases, without censure, is still only an allowance afforded to racially and culturally elite women (and of course, men). Muslim women have faced censure from employers about wearing the hijab to work—whether the workplace is a clothing store, prison, police department,  aircraft cleaning company or a car rental company. That disapproval is often affirmed by the U.S. courts, with some exceptions. But this dynamic does not extend merely to correcting the fashion sense or dress of women of color—it extends to every aspect of their comportment, from their behavior, opinions, and political speech—even whether they have the right to defend themselves from gratuitous and specious treatment by the political elite.

Many readers will be aware of last week’s firestorm where Trump admonished four new Democratic Congresswomen–all women of color–for being critical of the government and suggested that they “go back where they came from.” One sentence that was little discussed in the uproar was Trump’s suggestion that Speaker Nancy Pelosi–also a Democrat–might be happy to arrange for free travel back to their “home countries.” Aside from the xenophobia and racial ignorance of the statement, that sentence seemed to imply that Pelosi too was tired of the “Squad’s” criticism of her leadership (or lack thereof) and mainstream Democratic politics.

Trump had good reason to believe that. Pelosi has attempted to get the Squad to fall in line with the Democratic party’s agenda by sharply criticizing or outright dismissing their more radical proposals—on border funding, the environment, national health care. She also urged them to refrain from publicly announcing (or tweeting their criticisms) of her and the Democratic party.

It is notable that these four—as newly elected women of color—are departing from the mainstream of the party, and refusing to be silent in the wake of overwhelming criticisms of their radical stances. The Squad was chastised by long-time New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd for not following and respecting the Speaker’s political authority and wisdom. But why is it notable? Presumably, they share the same staunch aversion to the current President that Pelosi and other liberals—whether moderate or progressive—have. As NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg suggests: “[l]eftist criticism can be uniquely grating to liberals, especially the kind that treats disagreements over strategy as differences of morality.” The Squad not only disagree strongly with the strategies of the mainstream, they are also challenging a status quo that is being defended by Pelosi. In other words, they refuse to stay in their lanes.

As Dowd insisted, “A.O.C. should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her color.” She was echoing Trump’s position on Pelosi as well. In fact, Trump defended Pelosi from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s accusation that by singling the Squad out for continual criticism, she too was racist. She’s not a racist, insisted Trump–defending the Speaker, perhaps because he shares the Speaker’s aversion to progressive reform.

But it’s not that simple. Just because Pelosi (and Dowd) are not racist does not mean that they don’t have a vested interest in keeping an upper-hand in a political power struggle that involves loud, brassy, assertive women of color who are trying to challenge politics as usual as practices by elite, mostly white women. The Squad’s backgrounds as women of color are not irrelevant to this conflict. The dynamics between them parallel those found at earlier moments–in a long history of what I refer to as “neocolonialism.” Neocolonialism is an ideological marker of the power dynamics between elite men and women and the targets of slavery, empire, and colonization. Whether in relation to slavery or colonization, the subjects of both were in hierarchical, coercive relationships to their masters (in the case of slaves) or to the colonial occupants of their homelands. These dynamics, whether in the service of capitalism, resource-stripping, political or personal power, were such that for generations, white men and women have been in positions to demand that Black women and women of color submit to their sensibilities and moeurs—often under the aegis of uplifting and civilizing.

We have ample evidence of the imperial mandate to “uplift and civilize” uttered by administrators and theorists of empire such as John Stuart Mill, for whom barbarism was difficult to reform except by force:

Nothing but foreign force would induce a tribe of North American Indians to submit to the restraints of a regular and civilized government. The same might have been said, though somewhat less absolutely, of the barbarians who overran the Roman Empire. It required centuries of time, and an entire change of circumstances, to discipline them into regular obedience even to their own leaders, when not actually serving under their banner. (CRG, ch. 1 )

Mill believed that while most colonies should be returned to the right of self-governance, colonies such as India were not yet ready.

Outlying territories of some size and population, which are held as dependencies, that is, which are subject, more or less, to acts of sovereign power on the part of the paramount country, without being equally represented (if represented at all) in its Legislature, may be divided into two classes. Some are composed of people of similar civilization to the ruling country, capable of, and ripe for, representative government, such as the British possessions in America and Australia. Others, like India, are still at a great distance from that state. (CRG, ch. 18)

As political philosopher Uday Mehta argues, the British empire and its agents believed that some territories, like India, were child-like dependencies, whose inhabitants were reformable through education and the proper cultivation of worldviews:

Childhood is a theme that runs through the writings of British liberals on India with unerring constancy. It is the fixed point underlying the various imperial imperatives of education, forms of governance, and the alignment with progress. James Mill’s characterization of India as being the infancy of the “progress of civilization,” Macaulay’s characterizing of the British, who in the context of the empire must be like fathers who are “just and unjust, moderate and rapacious, (Mehta, 33)

Bernard Cohn reminds us of how these imperatives extended to local religious practices and dress—in the case of the British administrators and missionaries who coerced local women in South India to wear blouses and petticoats under their saris in order to become more modest. (Cohn, chap. 5) Similarly, Frantz Fanon offers a searing, at times uncomfortable and problematic analysis of how Algerian women were pressured to unveil by French colonists:

The dominant administration solemnly undertook to defend this woman, pictured as humiliated, sequestered, cloistered…It described the immense possibilities of woman, unfortunately transformed by the Algerian man into an inert, demonetized, indeed dehumanized object. The behavior of the Algerian was very firmly denounced and described as medieval and barbaric… (Fanon 1965, 38)

Demands to behave or comport oneself “properly” were not only about modesty or perceived liberation as in the case of Algerian women, they were often about knowing one’s place. Thus, Leon Higginbotham points to 18^th century legislation which forbade slaves from wearing clothing that “might accord him some dignity or prestige.” The 1735 Act allowed slaves to wear only items such as “negro cloth…blue linen, checked linen or coarse garlix or calicoes…not exceeding ten shillings per yard.” (174). By implication, slaves were prohibited from wearing clothes that were “above” their station such as discarded outfits from slave masters/mistresses. The regulation of clothing then, like today, was a vehicle to require women and men of color to know–to submit– to their subordinate place in relation to their masters and other free/elite populations.

As feminist scholars such as Angela Davis and Michelle Alexander argue, the hierarchical relationships between masters and slaves continued well after slavery was officially abolished—in forms such as the modern-day prisons, and the targeting and forced submission of black men, women and children by police forces. However, as Kristie Dotson, Shaeeda Mensah, and other feminist scholars have illustrated, these dynamics often inform everyday interactions between cultural/political elites (and their agents) and Black women and women of color. These dynamics are so entrenched that they are unreflexively presumed by dominant populations to “teach” or scold subordinate populations to behave “properly.”

The antagonisms between Pelosi, as the long-term senior white Speaker of the House from California and the young, bold junior Congresswomen of color, intensified by Trump’s tweets, forced Pelosi to choose between remaining silent in the wake of Trump’s support or allying herself with the Squad by pushing back against him. The exhortation for the Squad to fall in line with the Democratic party—resonates with a familiar if unacknowledged dynamic where women of color are admonished to behave or comport themselves in ways that older elite white men and women deem to be “proper.”

In this regard, we might consider how Dowd’s criticism is not just about the Squad’s youth and inexperience, but about the illegitimacy of their dissent because they are women of color. The neocolonial enterprise views them as descendants of groups that have historically been subject to slavery or colonization. They are officially registered as young women of color who “don’t know how things are done,” that is, who don’t know that they are supposed to defer to elite women ostensibly because they are “more experienced,” but also because they are the gatekeepers anxious to maintain their power.

The divide between Maureen Dowd, Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad may not be about a generational divide. It may be about elite women discomfited that their long-held authority, to which they have long been accustomed, is increasingly being challenged by women of color.

Falguni A. Sheth is Associate Professor at Emory University in WGSS. She has published articles in continental & political philosophy, legal and critical race theory and philosophy of race, post-colonial theory, and sub-altern and gender studies. She is currently completing a book on the hijab, feminism, and neocolonialism.