Week 7

I found this week’s readings to be particularly poignant, especially when relating to discussions I’ve been having in my other classes. I find that cross-race solidarity is essential in understanding the underlying system of racism and oppression as it manifests itself through various oppressed groups.

Grace Hong’s analysis of “A Fire in Fontana”, by Hisaye Yamamoto, relates racial discrimination, on both a personal and state level, to the idea of property ownership. Historically, people of color have been deprived of property on the basis of their color, whereas, reiterating what Harris has written, whiteness has been the basis of property and privilege therein. While the racial inequities have been evidenced is different ways for blacks and Japanese, internment and denial of citizenship for Japanese and the obvious ramifications of Slavery and Jim Crow Laws for African Americans, both have dealt with violent repercussions on the basis of their identities.

All of this hints to the ideas of intersectionality and the deconstruction of a hierarchy of oppression. Intersectionality is the idea that various modes of oppression, not solely race but also class, gender, sexuality, etc., do not act independently; rather, they are all interrelated and create a system of oppression reflecting the intersection of multiple forms of oppression. By looking at forms of discrimination in this way, we are able to undermine the notion of a hierarchy of oppression, where one group’s oppression trumps others. This set of beliefs directly plays into the political ideology of the oppressor, pitting one disenfranchised group with another rather than fighting directly for equal rights or against those who are creating these inequalities. It is not enough to simply understand one’s own oppressions, but instead, to place those within a greater context of all of those who are oppressed.

Rather than looking bleakly at the future of race relations in the United States, Hong ends positively, suggesting that “A Fire in Fontana” can be read as the “basis of an oppositional political project through its creation of an alternative collective memory, its imagining of a space where the cross-race solidarity that did not happen in the past could be forged in the future” (308).