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The Personal is Political

I first discovered the work of poet and essayist Maya Angelou in middle school. Even though the themes in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings were mature, I felt a deep connection to the story she told of growing up in Stamps, Arkansas. I flinched when she recounted being raped by her mother’s boyfriend. I cried when Uncle Willie hid in the potato bin to avoid the Ku Klux Klan. Klan leaders throughout the United States included sheriffs, judges, prosecutors, and ministers. It seemed ominous that the very people responsible for protecting vulnerable communities routinely engaged in terrorizing them.

Maya Angelou’s voice let me know that it was OK to be a little brown girl with a big Arabic name in a place called Lynchburg, Virginia, with the audacity to imagine possibilities unbound by geography. I vowed to someday thank Dr Angelou in person for inspiring me. At seventeen I finally had the chance – or so I thought. That year Angelou arrived at my high school as part of a citywide Black History Month observance. I was selected as one of the students who would get to speak with her. Being a nerd has its perks. I rehearsed what I would say to her a thousand times. I was determined not to come across as some naïve kid in search of an autograph. With dog-eared copy of my notebook in hand I patiently waited for my turn. But I was awe-struck. The words simply wouldn’t come. Angelou looked at me and said with that beautiful, commanding lilt, “Would you like to say hello?” I eagerly shook my head and squeaked out, “Hello?!” She smiled and took the time to nod her reassurance. I knew in that moment she realized the impact she had on me. Angelou was my intellectual rock star.

Quite literally, Angelou made it possible for me to be the first person in my immediate family to earn a four-year degree. I competed in oratorical competitions in high school and earned college scholarships using a number of her poems and essays. I discovered the poem “Our Grandmothers” while trying to understand why the contributions of women were so overlooked in the retelling of American freedom movements. I knew about Harriett Tubman and could recite Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” line by line. But “Our Grandmothers” highlighted the ways that everyday acts of resistance challenge exclusion. It is a beautifully complex poem that affirms the power of women who make personal sacrifices to inspire, protect, challenge, and build communities. I have always been struck by a line from it that reads “When you get, give. And when you learn, teach.”

Dr Maya Angelou was a poet, performer, and essayist. She delivered a poem at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton and received the 2011 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

I grew up in a town where the specter of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement loomed large. The Moral Majority was a concentrated effort in the 1980s to raise the political voice of the Christian Right. Despite my Southern Baptist upbringing, it didn’t make sense that one minister could convince local government officials to change the day my friends and I would trick or treat when Halloween fell on a Sunday. I looked to Angelou’s prose to give me the strength to speak before our city council to protest moving a busy fire station to the heart of our working-class neighborhood. I wondered why the demands of our neighbors weren’t enough to convince the board to change its decisions. Where was our power?

When Maya Angelou passed in 2014, a reporter asked me to choose my favorite work. At first it seemed like an impossible task, and then I remembered her essay titled “The Graduation.” Angelou reflects on her 1940 graduation from high school and paints a clear picture of how separate education is inherently unequal. She talks about the tattered textbooks and outdated science equipment that she and her classmates shared, while students at white schools had more equipment than they could actually use. Black graduates were expected to bring honor to their communities by becoming athletes, janitors, and entertainers. White graduates were encouraged to become physicians, lawyers, and teachers. Even then, the lens of identity was incredibly narrow. It didn’t matter that Angelou and her classmates had memorized Shakespeare’s “The Rape of Lucrece” or could recite “Invictus” with great conviction. Their destiny was predetermined. The name of schools for Black children in the South reinforced a sense of inferiority: training schools. I remember seeing my maternal grandmother’s class ring inscribed with “Amherst County Training School” and wondering why it wasn’t called a “high school.” In the 1940s, Black students were trained to serve society. White students were educated to shape it. That one essay helped me understand the necessity of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision better than any legal or historical text I have ever read. Sixty years later we are still trying to figure out how to educate students equally.

I lacked the language of intersectionality at the time, but I knew these disparate experiences were bound together by a tradition of treating groups differently based on their perceived worth. In her seminal work “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) cautions that “the problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite – that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences.” My neighborhood friends and I learned that lesson every morning as we passed three elementary schools en route to the suburban school we were chosen to integrate. We didn’t fully understand why we had to take the long bus ride to Paul Munro Elementary School instead of the short walk to Garland Rhodes. We dreaded the mandatory neighborhood walking tours with our teachers and classmates because it reminded us that we were perpetual interlopers. Our classmates would pass through familiar streets, pointing out their expansive homes and eagerly waving to neighbors heading to lunch at the country club, where people who looked like us were not allowed to join. Four years of field trips and the streets never felt familiar or welcoming to us. Those barriers, both real and imagined, made it clear that the meaning of our presence in multiple spaces was structured by interlocking systems related to education, religion, region, class, gender, and race. But it wasn’t just our personal experiences of being bussed to new schools or observing Halloween. It was a collective experience shared by various groups navigating identity politics in the United States.

Why This Book?

This book grows out of that interest fueled decades ago in Virginia. Democracy in the United States is built upon the battle of ideas related to how we see ourselves, how we see others, and the mechanisms available to reinforce these distinctions. To some the term identity politics has become a pejorative term used to decry the tendency to promote group solidarity at the expense of mutual progress. I reject this description because it is often lobbed against groups whose relationship to traditional spheres of influence and inclusion remains tenuous. Understanding lived political experiences across multiple identity markers isn’t an attempt to create a hierarchy of oppression based on who has suffered the most or who is entitled to the greatest political rewards. That approach is both intellectually lazy and fundamentally uninteresting. The solution, however, isn’t to tell people to strip away the layers of their identity or to ignore how those layers structure opportunities. The notion that people should stop talking about or stop affirming the groups to which they belong is inconsistent with the longstanding political practice of creating and reinforcing identity-based cleavages in US politics.

Consider, for example, contemporary efforts to address the growing opioid crisis sweeping the United States. President Donald J. Trump has declared a public health crisis as advocates argue for a kinder, gentler approach to addiction that promotes rehabilitation and support over punishment and incarceration. Some question why this new approach to opioid addiction varies from the 1990s political response to the crack epidemic that mostly ensnared Blacks and Latinos in urban areas, who were demonized as morally reprehensible (Forman 2018; Alexander 2010; Fortner 2015; Muhammad 2011; Hinton 2016). Indeed, the former mayor of Baltimore (Kurt Schmoke) was ridiculed for suggesting that addiction should be treated as a public health crisis rather than simply a criminal justice problem.1 Since the War on Drugs was formally launched in the 1970s during the Nixon administration, over $50 billion has been spent to significantly increase the arrests, prosecutions, and incarceration of millions of people in the United States. The result hasn’t made the country safer, nor has it significantly reduced addiction (Mauer and King 2007; Hart 2013). Instead, this massive collection of public policies has had a disproportionate impact on certain groups, even if members of those groups don’t perceive it as “their problem.” That type of divide makes it important to address and understand identity politics rather...