Claudia Jones

Dzieła

• 1949An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! (Dość zaniedbywania problemów czarnej kobiety!)

  Esej w czasopiśmie „Political Affairs”: jako pomoce domowe i w przemyśle czarne kobiety zarabiają najmniej i są najsłabiej zorganizowane; ich „superwyzysk” jako Czarnych, jako kobiet i jako pracownic czyni ich walki centralnymi dla ruchu robotniczego, czarnego i kobiecego, które je zaniedbywały.

Stanowisko

Claudia Jones is on the map as a Marxist theorist of the intertwined oppression of Black women, decades before the term intersectionality. In “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” (1949) she argued that Black women in the United States are the most exploited part of the working class: concentrated in domestic service, paid less than white women and Black men, and largely left out of the labour movement, they suffer a “superexploitation” as Black people, as women and as workers. This position, she held, makes them not only victims but the most militant and decisive force in the struggles for labour, for Black liberation and for women’s rights, and she criticised the Communist Party, white women and Black men for neglecting them and for repeating stereotypes such as that of the “mammy”. In London she connected these ideas with the anti-colonial movements of the Caribbean, Africa and Asia and with the struggle against racism in Britain, holding that culture, too – the press, the carnival – is a means of the oppressed to assert themselves. Angela Davis drew on her in Women, Race and Class (1981); Carole Boyce Davies’s Left of Karl Marx (2008) presented her as a founding figure of Black feminist and diasporic thought, and her analysis is often summed up as a “triple oppression” of race, class and gender.

Życie i kontekst

Claudia Vera Cumberbatch was born on 15 February 1915 in Belmont, Port of Spain, in Trinidad. In 1924 her family emigrated to New York, where she grew up in poverty in Harlem; her mother died when she was twelve, and tuberculosis contracted in her youth damaged her health for life. Drawn to the Communist Party by its campaign for the Scottsboro defendants, she joined the Young Communist League in 1936 and took the name Jones. She worked as a journalist and editor for the party press, served on its women’s commission and national committee, and wrote widely on Black women, peace and anti-colonialism. Arrested several times, she was convicted in 1953 with other communist leaders under the Smith Act and served nearly a year in the federal prison at Alderson, West Virginia; in December 1955 she was deported to Britain. In London she founded the West Indian Gazette (1958), organised against racism after the Notting Hill riots, and in 1959 helped stage an indoor Caribbean carnival, a forerunner of the Notting Hill Carnival. She died in London on 24 December 1964 and is buried to the left of Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate Cemetery.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! (Political Affairs, June 1949)
• Women in the Struggle for Peace and Security (1950)
• Ben Davis: Fighter for Freedom (1954)
• The Caribbean Community in Britain (Freedomways, 1964)
• Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment (ed. C. Boyce Davies, 2011)