The assignment of gender-based roles in society, is one of the elements through which we can observe and study human cultures.
Everywhere, we notice that these gender assignments are included in children’s education literally since birth.
When children grow to adulthood, these roles are projected into the spheres of societal laws and inter-actions, creating values which can extend to naming objects and qualities, and therefore thinking, in gendered languages.
As societal meta-models, gender roles eventually become ingrained in automatic behavior, and their specificity can only fully come to light in relation to what they are in different cultures.
The orientation of these roles, when influenced by patriarchy, toward dominance and power, has often resulted in dramatic clashes and confrontations between models.
The patriarchal model of dominance, based on such male-oriented values as borders, ownership, force, territorial, national, or ideological groupings, even in competitive team sports, while using elective or evolved designations about itself, ended as targeting the bearers of opposite values as dangerous enemies, who even when unarmed, become systematic recipients of a violence which can take genocidal turns and proportions.
As an outcome of the patriarchal clash for dominance which resulted in racism, -the practice of ethno-cultural dehumanization as a profit system- gender roles of oppressed matriarchal cultures have been targeted for unprecedented scrutiny, and for systematic devaluation.
Throughout the colonial period and its aftermath, the edification of European Patriarchal gender and family models as intrinsically superior, evolved, or even ‘saved’, was officially propagated.
This was done to enforce privileges over matriarchal cultures, defined as ‘inferior’, ‘barbaric’, ‘primitive’, or ‘savage’.
Such categorization inevitably echoed in the domains of family dynamics, and had its effects on gender roles, within western spheres of influence.
Western women were not only used, but became instrumental, for spreading the image of white superiority over African standards of family, beauty, and sense of womanhood.
Skin bleaching creams is the example of a tool pushed on women, used for shaming African beauty, which largely illustrates this point in contemporary public space.
Accepted superiority of European gender definitions were seldom questioned, but have had factual outcomes in the oppression of African women, and in the tearing down of the matriarchal societies they were keeping alive.
Indeed, the divide between matriarchal and patriarchal societies, has been for a long time marred with violence.
Historically, this display of violence is very evident.
We can see it, in the repetitive treatment Jews and Roma people have received at the hands of their European patriarchal counterparts.
We see it in the long and tragic history of war on Native Americans, by White settler’s patriarchal cultures.
We see it in the confrontation of African nations, whose cultures are mostly matriarchal, with their colonial invaders, and their cultural heirs.
We see it in the history of disempowerment of many Asian and Polynesian matriarchal cultures, all the way to an entire continental culture , the aborigines of Australia.
By calling himself or herself a Rom, a Tzigane, a Gypsy, or a Jew, a person is referring to his or her mother, as primary designator of identity.
To all matriarchal societies across the world, this is how identity is understood.
Many millions of people live today in matriarchal societies, and can easily understand this perspective, commonly held in Africa.
In these clashes there are of course tales of heroism and resistance.
The African matriarchal tradition of Voodoo helped Haiti survive, as a nation connected to its African roots. This certainly shielded Haitians as a people, from the relentless aggressions they faced at the hands of their western patriarchal foes.
In this picture, it is important to realize that most women in the West were raised to function in the patriarchal model.
They see success within that model as happiness.
They evolve in a context where power and womanhood have been placed in diametrical opposition.
The White women plight for justice, is expressed in being allowed access to an equal position as men, within a male centered environment.
Their language, claims and counterclaims, belong to the dialectic of the patriarchal culture in which they live, and according to whose rules and standards they evolve.
When and if their own aspirations go to the side of matriarchy, they are typically met with repressive violence.
Along these lines, it can be argued that Native American males, who were raised according to matriarchal standards, naturally have a clearer understanding of a purely feminine perspective, than most feminist westerners do.
From experience, they know how the western world, its feminists included, treats native matriarchy.
Studies have shown that their Native American mothers, sisters, and daughters are, as a social group, recipients of the most systematic violence perpetrated on any population in the world.
Whereas in their own culture they were honored, celebrated, and could guide their community, Native women are today confronted with a brutal reality of dispossession on many levels, especially on their central role as women within their culture.
The plight of Native American women, and the one of White American women rights, is therefore not the same.
How could it be the same when White women are concerned with being allowed to share the male position, in a system that oppresses Native women, that makes of them target of continuous violence?
Matriarchal societies very rarely, if not never, devolve into the practice of wars of aggression, whereas aggression is the modus operandi of patriarchal societies.
Common terms of aggression, punishment, victimization, being evolved, or modern, are still being systematically used in discussions representing women’s place and issues in the patriarchal West, barely hiding the contempt in which they hold indigenous cultures.
Conveniently, the language of matriarchal indigenous cultures is not only absent from their platforms, it is constantly being crushed and downplayed by western standards and priorities.
It comes out of such discussions, that Western women are more evolved, know more about African women’s needs than African women themselves, and that they will only favor to associate with those African women who have been trained according to Western standards, in Western schools. But they certainly have nothing to learn from cultures whom they see as primitive, and do not desist from outright colonial shaming of indigenous matriarchal ways of life.
Africa, as a continent with hundreds of living matriarchal cultures, is thus confronted with a struggle of power positioning, in facing the patriarchal West, along with its male version of women emancipation.
When patriarchy’s loudest model, the war model, with its overtly male-only attributes of armies, dangerous weaponry, and world dominance, is surrounding us everywhere, and gender roles are required to become subservient to national agendas, women in the West must show they can obey, by putting their freedom claims to use for equality of participation.
But what if a woman is given the option, of being as a soldier equal in rank to a male, if the bullet fired by either one will cause the same unquestioned damage?
If all Western women really want, is to have the same right as their male counterparts to inflict pain and suffering upon women societies, the swapping of chairs in their patriarchal system will have meant nothing for matriarchal cultures, as far as the violence and disrespect they have to confront is concerned.
The surviving societies which have already entrusted women with positions of leadership thousands of years ago, are until this very day being disempowered and cynically disdained, by the onslaught of patriarchal standards imposed on them.
These communities cannot seek or expect to receive help in their plight for dignity, from women whose economic and social values depend upon perpetuating oppression against matriarchal cultures.
It is impossible to speak about Africa, without addressing the history of senseless suffering, that its matriarchal societies have had to endure under colonial patriarchy.
In the same vein, it is impossible to speak about Jewish or Roma cultures, without mentioning the historic violence consistent with their matriarchal position, in the midst of homicidal, and ultimately suicidal, patriarchal contexts.
Racism, as an arbitrary grouping of others, unrelated to culture and family is, just like the owning of land, national borders, and sedentary living, a patriarchal construct.
We can only hope that the fundamental teachings of matriarchal cultures, get a chance to be heard and shared by many, before they are forever silenced and replaced, by an entirely masculinized version of group bonding, and of women social development.
At the bottom of the ladder of oppression, the matriarchal African woman pays a heavy price for resistance, for doing her best to perpetuate the memory of a culture, a timeless inheritance, which naturally crowns her Queen in the eyes of her own community.
The Matriarchal/Patriarchal divide : Gender roles, and racism.
