Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe:
An American
Grammar Book
1987
Hortense J. Spillers (b. 1942) was in her early twenties when the Moynihan Report (1965) was published by sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan for the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration, which had promised a political agenda for the “Great Society” aimed at eradicating poverty and racism and addressing the civil rights movements’ concerns. The Moynihan Report, for all its possible good intentions, Spillers writes, reinscribes racism into sociological and linguistic processes by reiterating the false concept of “ethnicity” — which is falsely “read” as legible or “knowable” via the dermis, or skin color — as ahistorical and independent of context. We can take some of the many, many lessons that Spillers teaches us in order to rethink class in similar ways: perhaps class, like race, is not “ahistorical” and “independent of context,” but instead is constituted by and constitutive of identity and subjectivity. Mythologies in the form of political rhetoric perpetuating the idea that poor people are poor because they are lazy performs the same kind of mistakes that Spillers says the Moynihan Report makes in regards to race.
Basically, Moynihan allows “family” to be the dependent variable where “ethnicity” becomes the independent variable. What does this mean? According to Moynihan, family changes depending on context; ethnicity, by contrast, does not. Ethnicity, then, is constructed as ahistorical — meaning that it inherently has certain characteristics, regardless of structural or environmental conditions or processes of dynamic constitution: essentially, historical context. This “symbolic paradigm” basically operates with the assumption that a specific ethnicity has a specific trait or set of traits — and takes it for granted that everyone else supposedly also believes this discourse as fact. The Moynihan Report, says Spillers, is one iteration of a common discourse that has racial assumptions embedded within it. She calls this discourse a class of “symbolic paradigms” —what we can consider the filter that people use to view the world, and the kinds of values and meanings they assign to events, other people, objects.
In this first paragraph of “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” published in 1987, Spillers describes the many “names” or stereotypes that are hastily read onto/from Black women based merely on their skin color. Spillers is trying to communicate how, from the first glance, the Black woman in particular is assumed to be many things (what she later calls in the second paragraph: “overdetermined nominative properties”; she continues: “they are markers so loaded with mythical prepossession that there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come clean,” meaning that the agency of Black women, and of other overtly racialized bodies, is constrained by the over-naming & over-reading of their skin such that people, upon first glance, typically assume they know the deep complexities of that person based on biases, prejudice, and, again, what Spillers refers to as “symbolic paradigms” alone.
To understand the first paragraph, it’s crucial to understand that Spillers is saying that the Moynihan Report is just like the extremely violent nominative process of assuming Black women inherently have x, y, or z characteristic and referring to them as or even just implicitly reading them as “Peaches,” or “Brown Sugar,” or so on. The Moynihan Report is not just a sociological text, but a linguistic one — one that tries to “name” the problem of the overlap of poverty and race by reiterating false concepts that are supposedly true throughout time — “ahistorical” or “inherent” or “essential” or “objective” — and what Spillers shows us, effectively, is that everything has context (be it temporal, cultural, linguistic, spatial, methodological, causal, evental, structural, etc.) and a complex genealogy that extends through many historical legacies beyond simple origin points or too-easy supposed “causes” or, in this case, syntactical-nominative processes operating as mere sociological explanations.
Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium“: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.
From Isabelle Waterfall, Bluestocking: “[Nina] Simone, enraged by the historical, social, political and economic situation of black women, was most like ‘Peaches’, the last narrator, whose raging, shouting verse brought the song to its dramatic climax. Peaches reflected the ‘angry black woman’ stereotype, but importantly, this anger was justified, righteous, and loudly, unapologetically proclaimed.“
Brown Sugar, how come you dance so good? /
“Brown Sugar,” a Rolling Stones song produced in 1971, places the imagined Black female figure of Brown Sugar within lyrics composed of violent, colonialist imagery in order to fetishize the figure as a sexual object within graphic fantasies of violence
From the Jim Crow Museum on the “Sapphire caricature”: “THE Sapphire Caricature portrays black women as rude, loud, malicious, stubborn, and overbearing.This is the Angry Black Woman (ABW) popularized in the cinema and on television.“
It is a difficult text, to be sure — and only multiple readings, multiple encounters render a clearer picture of the complexities of the text and of Spillers’ mastery over language. If you’re struggling with the text, you’re not alone, and that’s kind of the point — Spillers is not describing something that can be easily understood at first glance, not something immediately perceptible (if things were that easily knowable, the logic could easily be manipulated to say stereotypes are valid, or another toxic claim). We find many strands of arguments, many different trajectories and valences for meaning, and we might struggle to re-twine the strands into some kind of central narrative. But what happens if we let strands linger, and follow them along to where they lead? In other words, let the text speak, and listen generously.