Racial and gender identities

Dr Christine Whyte
The statues are usually of men, but women also play a role in creating and enforcing white supremacy. The relationship between gender and race lies at the heart of white supremacy, as Black Feminist scholars and activists have demonstrated. In Scotland, public acknowledgement of the national involvement in slavery and empire also needs to address gender stereotypes.
On New Year’s Eve, 1850, William and Ellen Craft spoke at a “great anti-slavery meeting” in Glasgow’s City Hall. This married couple had escaped from enslavement by disguising Ellen, a Black enslaved woman, as a wealthy white man. Her husband, William, played the part of an enslaved valet. The Crafts were aware that simply “passing” as white was not enough for their plan. Racist notions of white womanhood and black masculinity would have made it impossible for them to travel safely as a white woman accompanied by a Black male servant. To avoid the slave-catchers, the ancestors of the US police force, the Crafts re-fashioned both the racial and gender identities. This podcast interview with Jan Marion explains a bit more about the US context of the Fugitive Slave Law and the rise of anti cross-dressing laws.
Over a century and a half later, in Scotland, Kadi Johnson asks, “Why do police never believe black men?” Kadi’s question strikes at the role gender has played in the massive build-up of militarised policing and violence against people of colour in Scotland. Toxic masculinity plays a central role in public perceptions of the police and their role in society. A study by Color of Change showed that endless crime programming, “glorifies, justifies and normalizes the systematic violence and injustice meted out by police, making heroes out of police and prosecutors who engage in abuse, particularly against people of color”. This cultural portrayal relies on particular brands of toxic masculinity which are popularised through the media. Crime shows dominate the schedules, and the prominent Scottish examples all centre on white male leads, often “breaking the rules” and investing policing with a gritty cool.
The realities of the history of policing in the UK are very different, as in the US, its origins lie in a defence of private property, even when that property was children. The http://runaways.gla.ac.uk website offers a glimpse into how Black people experienced policing in the 18th century society. A search for “boy” generates 274 results, far more than “girl” (10 results), and “man” turns up 471 results, far outweighing “woman” (25 results). This reflects the realities of slavery in Britain. Young children were brought to Scotland against their will and taken from their families, to serve as page-boys and valets, apprentices and stable lads. They were disproportionately male. As children they sometimes appeared, in the background of their enslavers portraits. These enslavers were proud of their involvement in slavery, the children were included precisely to advertise the wealth and worldly possessions that profits from slavery had generated. As adults, they were monitored and confined. Sometimes dressed in fine livery, to showcase white wealth, but always prevented from free movement or communication.
A few escaped, Joseph Knight brought his case against his captor, and won. But more often, enslaved men were recaptured. Like Jamie Montgomerie, a skilled carpenter, who was arrested and died imprisoned in the Tolbooth. Others vanish from the record, an absence that we hope meant freedom. But in those cases the only record of their resistance that remains are the descriptions written by white enslavers, intended to rouse the public to hunt them down. These advertisements made public spaces unsafe not only for the escapees, but also for any Black person who might be mistaken for the brief and perhaps inaccurate descriptions circulated. Thanks to video footage, we know how white policing of black people in public continues today and from these widely-publicised examples there are clear gender, as well as racial, hierarchies at play. White women are frequently the instigators of many incidents, appealing to the authorities to restrict Black people’s access to public spaces.
White women played a substantial role in the enslavement of people of African descent. Scholars such as Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Cecily Jones and Hilary Beckles have refocused attention on the women who upheld the system, as well as those who suffered its consequences. After the legal emancipation of enslaved people In the British Empire, the term “slavery” was appropriated to describe first the harsh working conditions of male labourers, but was later deployed to raise concerns about the supposed abduction and trafficking of white women into forced prostitution.
“White slavery” as it was known was an early 20th century moral panic which coincided with growing tightening of border controls, as nations like the United States tried to stem the flow of migrants. The “white slavery” panic generated a million pages of literature, movies, radio shows and novels all of which reinforced the notion that white women were being victimised. While it might have seemed on the surface that this primarily targeted men of colour, expansive early 20th century notions of non-whiteness meant that Jewish, Eastern European and Russian men and women were criminalised for moving across borders. Prosecutions of so-called “white slavery” resulted in the Mann Act in the US, which criminalised crossing state lines for the purposes of prostitution, and was used disproportionately to target inter-racial couples, and the founding of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In Scotland, the 1902 the Immoral Traffic (Scotland) Act, criminalised male partners and relatives of sex workers. As Edinburgh-based activist and author Molly Smith has shown, criminalisation of prostitution has a disproportionate impact on trans sex workers, women of colour and people with migrant status. Black sex workers and Black trans people need protection from policing, not further violent intervention.
In the UK, the hostile environment towards migrants and refugees poses particular threats to women of colour. The 1993 death of Joy Gardner during an attempted deportation shows that targeting of Black people extends further back than the Windrush scandal. Gender history allows us to understand the specificity of how Black British, Caribbean and African women are targeted by immigration policy and border control. Immigration detention puts women’s lives at risk.
Challenging the legacies of slavery in Scottish society will mean thinking about gender while we think about race. Akwugo Emejulu and Francesca Sobande’s To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe highlights the contradictory state of invisibility and hypervisibility that defines the experience of women of colour in Europe, an experience heightened in Scotland where, too often, concerns about race are dismissed as “irrelevant” to a “largely white society”, or conversely a very small number of Black and Ethnic Minority people are permitted a platform to speak.

Dr Christine Whyte

Christine is a global historian focused on West Africa, slavery and its abolition and the history of children and childhoods. Her work focuses on the importance of children and ideas about childhood to labour regimes, particularly those systems designed to bring an end to slavery. https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/christinewhyte/

Subscribe to Our Newsletter?

Keep updated with all our news!