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Racializing Patriarchy: Lessons from Police Brutality

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Gender, Considered

Part of the book series: Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences ((GSSS))

Abstract

The central point of this chapter is that patriarchy is not simply about male dominance over women but is an inherently racial formation. This point is developed through bringing together scholarship produced by Black feminist theorists, other feminist scholars, and research on racialized police brutality. Using Mary Douglas’s classic theory of purity and pollution, and using the Newark, NJ, racial uprising of 1967 as a case study, it is argued that patriarchal formations like the police are premised on a model of the “superior man” that aligns masculinity not only with biological maleness but also with whiteness, heterosexuality, and physical perfection.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Global Feminisms Project, based at the University of Michigan, provides in-depth empirical cases of feminist movements across multiple societies. See, for example, Lal et al. 2010.

  2. 2.

    Thanks to Hannah Appel for referring me to Taylor’s work.

  3. 3.

    For example, Andersen and Collins 1992; James and Busia 1993; Taylor 2017b; for anthropology in particular, see Bolles 2013; Cole 1986; Harrison 2010; McClaurin 2001.

  4. 4.

    Black women have also been victims of police brutality, but their stories are often not reported or discussed. New work is beginning to emerge on this subject. See, for example, Threadcraft 2018.

  5. 5.

    This film has not yet been released. I was only able to see it by the kind permission of the filmmaker, Kevin McLaughlin.

  6. 6.

    For two excellent histories of Newark before and since the uprising, see Mumford 2007 and Curvin 2014.

  7. 7.

    The two films, and indeed all the sources, vary in terms of the points of view of the filmmakers/authors, and also in terms of the sources or witnesses they were able to locate. In this case, the filmmaker interviewed the particular National Guardsman who witnessed the scene in question and who was either not located or not quoted by the other filmmakers.

  8. 8.

    Didier Fassin (2013) describes very similar patterns of routinely violent policing in the Paris banlieues (technically, “suburbs,” but more akin to American “inner cities”).

  9. 9.

    Bonilla-Silva (2012) uses a modified structuralist framework in discussing what he calls “the racial grammar” of life in the contemporary US.

  10. 10.

    Douglas’s work is less well known today than that of other figures of the structuralist movement—Claude Lévi-Strauss, of course, but also Victor Turner. This is not surprising, as studies have shown that female scholars are consistently less cited than men (Lutz 1991; Dominguez et al. 2013). The problem is particularly acute with respect to Black women/feminist scholars (see, e.g., Bolles 2013). Indeed, the citation problem affects all scholars of color; this is a large part of the “decolonizing anthropology” critique (Harrison 2010; Allen and Jobson 2016).

  11. 11.

    See also Beinart 2018. Thanks to Gail Kligman for putting me on the trail of this work.

  12. 12.

    There are some affinities between this discussion of a superior male “prototype” and Robert Connell’s discussion of “hegemonic masculinity” (1989), but there are also some important differences. It would unfortunately take me too far afield to discuss this here. Similarly, the idea of “the superior male” calls to mind analogies with the Nazi übermensch, but again it would take me too far afield to explore the similarities and differences.

  13. 13.

    Overweight persons may fall into the category of “differently bodied” and attract the same kinds of pollution reactions. See the discussion of the LAPD rank and file’s lack of respect, and actually “hatred,” for Chief Willie Williams not only because he was Black, but because he was overweight (Domanick 2015, 118–119).

  14. 14.

    The most recent version of this idea is to be found in Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and doxa (e.g., 1991).

  15. 15.

    The complete text of this essay is also available online on a site called WEBDuBois.org.

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Acknowledgments

I am profoundly grateful for the careful readings (sometimes more than one) and detailed comments from the following friends and colleagues: Hannah Appel, Philippe Bourgois, Didier Fassin, Sarah Fenstermaker, Laurie Hart, John Jackson, Jr., Gail Kligman, Abigail Stewart, Timothy Stewart-Winter, and Timothy D. Taylor. Deepest and sincerest thanks to all.

Jessica Cattelino kindly organized a panel discussion on my recent feminist work in our colloquium series at UCLA, Culture/Power/Social Change (CPSC), in which Lilith Mahmud, Purnima Mankekar, and Shannon Speed gave very thoughtful and helpful presentations. I also received very useful comments and feedback at UCLA from Jemima Pierre (on another panel); from Jeremy Levenson, Zachary Mondesire, and Stephanie Keeney Parks in my graduate core seminar; and from Christien Tompkins over several productive lunches.

An earlier version of this chapter was presented as a plenary lecture at the AES (American Ethnological Society) meetings in Philadelphia in April 2018. I thank Shalini Shankar for the invitation and for her kind assistance throughout. I received excellent comments from the floor after the lecture, and they have played a useful role in the revisions. In addition, graduate students Saudi Garcia and John Parsons kindly sent me a number of references by email after the meetings. I do appreciate all the feedback; it really makes a difference.

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    Sherry B. Ortner

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Correspondence to Sherry B. Ortner .

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  1. University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Sarah Fenstermaker

  2. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Abigail J. Stewart

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Ortner, S.B. (2020). Racializing Patriarchy: Lessons from Police Brutality. In: Fenstermaker, S., Stewart, A.J. (eds) Gender, Considered. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48501-6_7

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