Identity as a belief system
Thoughts on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto.
Simone de Beauvoir and W. E. B. Du Bois analyze the discrimination faced by women and blacks respectively, highlighting the fact that oppression and racism are a result of social structures and cultural meanings that transcend the power of any one individual. Writing from the perspective of individuals who experienced oppression, they each address the prevailing ideas concerning discrimination, how it shaped their lives and understanding of their roles in society, and more importantly, the fact that social structures are not as natural or inherent as they may seem on the surface; on the contrary, they are a tool of oppression. In her Woman as Other essay, de Beauvoir claims that the oppression of women is more significant than the oppression of other groups (e.g. Blacks, Jews), whereas Du Bois maintains that oppression defies physiology, race, and belief in The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto. While, historically speaking, there are differences between these two discriminated-against groups, similarities can be found in the way both de Beauvoir and Du Bois describe oppression and its consequences on the individual.
In each essay, the question of “nature vs nurture” arises, and how the ideas and values we are conditioned by in childhood shape our lives, especially as they are continuously perpetuated by dominant social structures. Both would agree that this influence defines much of one’s daily thoughts and behavior, regardless of any logical defenses one might put up against inherited archaic approaches to and/or understandings of the human experience. More importantly, social structures condition one to see oneself through the oppressor’s eyes and this leads to a distorted perception of the world and one’s self. De Beauvoir addresses this by saying that “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him: she is not regarded as an autonomous being,” thus being delegated to an inferior position in a way that seems almost natural, where man is the essential and woman is “the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential” (Beauvoir and Parshley, 1979). This is how, de Beauvoir continues, a category of Otherness is created—a term used to describe people who are excluded from and/or marginalized by the dominant political, cultural, and social structures—which is then used to oppress specific groups, for “no group sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other as against itself” (Beauvoir and Parshley, 1979). In essence, men need women to be who they have categorized them as in order for men to also continue being who they are.
De Beauvoir also stresses that men, and patriarchy in particular, have created this inferior position for women to occupy and this is accomplished by imprisoning woman through her biology, by using it as a means to justify the limitations placed on her freedoms. She emphasis the fact that the idea of “woman” does not have its origins in history, because while the physiological differences between men and women are a biological fact, the social construction of gender is certainly not; regardless, the construction of gender and gender roles is real in its consequences, and it seems to permeate everything, becoming, in de Beauvoir’s terms, “as primordial as consciousness itself.” This, she argues, is precisely what makes it difficult, if not nearly impossible, for women to organize or relate to each other in a way that other marginalized and oppressed groups do—what is possible is limited to what one can perceive and make sense of intellectually.
Du Bois reaches a similar conclusion in The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto, after his trip to Germany in 1952. Having experienced racism and discrimination in the United States as a black man, Du Bois’ came to have a clearer and more complete understanding of racism only after being exposed to the atrocities in Warsaw and the prevailing racism still alive against anyone considered an “other” (people who did and do not possess dominant traits or characteristics). This experience, he states, “helped him emerge from a social provincialism into a broader conception of what the fight against race segregation, religious discrimination and the oppression by wealth had to become” because he finally understood that the “race problem” he was interested in “cut across lines of colour, physique and belief”; according to Du Bois, oppression is thus a result of “cultural patterns, perverted teachings, human hate and prejudice” and that this “reaches all sorts of people causing endless evil to all men” as we are all susceptible to the influence of the oppressor (Du Bois and Zuckerman, 2004). In other words, poverty is a tool of oppression, not an individual, spiritual or moral failing.
Both de Beauvoir and Du Bois reiterate how individuals are not born unequal or into any specific hierarchal category, and that the division which exists in society is hardly natural and entirely structural; nevertheless, such structural division causes certain groups to live a life of subordination and submission, and this is the root cause of inequality. Likewise, they both take into consideration the tension created from conflict between our own individual experiences, ideas and values and those we absorb through dominant social structures, and how this tension creates much distress and alienation. Our identity is a belief system, which affects what one believes to be possible and the stories one tells about the world and their life. Power is thus extracted from individuals and groups when belief systems are informed and established by these very social structures, which are more concerned with righteousness and/or control than truth.
Moreover, belief systems can be weaponized against any given group, which is, in essence, what social structures aim to do—uphold oppression and make individuals feel powerless in the face of systematic oppression. It could even be argued that weaponizing belief systems is an act of self-protection and self-preservation, an entitlement to the idea that the world ought to reflect the truth of what and who one is—in this case, the dominant group. Stories are better than facts and there is an incentive for the dominant group to perpetuate certain beliefs, which is often done by creating a narrative—through the interpretation of events, data or official statistics— that fit prevailing attitudes regarding issues of gender and race. Consequently, this is how one group is able to maintain power over others without excreting force, by affecting one’s understanding of the world that they live in: the stories people believe about who they are often prevent them from knowing the truth of who they actually are, and this lack of knowledge removes any possibility of self-determination. Du Bois’ experience attests to this when he’s confronted with the reality of the lives of Polish people in Germany, as Polish students and teachers “were hardly aware” of the Jewish problem and how it influenced and affected their lives and “what its meaning was in their lives” (Du Bois and Zuckerman, 2004). While the argument could be made that people still have free will, that would be irrelevant as the notion of free will is a philosophical belief born out of privilege and it only invalidates the oppressed and empowers the oppressor by the sheer implication that the condition of the former is a result of their inability and their lack of will power, not a conspiracy to disenfranchise and disempower. People internalize the oppression they are subjected to, becoming agents of their own oppression; therefore, affecting one’s consciousness is key, as chains and coercion are not necessary when people are mentally conditioned to self-censor, obey and consent.
Once an individual subscribes to the official narrative perpetuated by the dominant discourse, they give away their power—often at the expense of their very own lives. While it may seem impossible to envision an entirely different world, both De Beauvoir and Du Bois inspire one to ask the right questions, beginning with questions of one’s identity, which is often not as natural, inevitable or solid as one may think. People are able to make a difference “out there” if they first make a difference within, by asking questions to understand the truth of who they are, because one can only understand the world inasmuch as they understand the person closest to them—themselves. However, the individual and collective attachment and investment in the identities created by social structures make such undertaking difficult, which frees systems of oppression and their beneficiaries from responsibility and accountability, allowing them to undermine demands for justice by placing blame on the oppressed for being an “other.” In order to be able to speak truth to power, it is imperative that one must first understand how their identity was created and the role they play in a historical context, if they are to dismantle systematic oppression and find political, social and emotional freedom.
