Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump

by Duchess Harris

  In the weeks following the encounter, Yancey told the media that at no point during the meeting did she hear “a reflection on (Clinton’s) part in perpetuating white supremacist violence.”5 That reflection, in fact, never came during the campaign, nor in any post-mortems of it once Trump won the election. Black women might have been disappointed, but they were hardly surprised.

  What did occur in the postmortem, however, was an analysis of the ways in which white women failed to show up for Clinton. Former Slate editor L. V. Anderson (who is white) argued that white women decided that defending their position of power as white people was more important than defending their reproductive rights, their sexual autonomy, their access to health care, family leave, and child care.6 White women bought into Trump’s lies about immigrant rapists and decided they’d rather have the respect of their angry white fathers, brothers, and husbands than the respect of literally everyone else in the world.

  The bifurcations among women as expressed in the 2016 election are important to the intellectual project of American Studies, which centers the question of gender. Anderson wrote,The results of the election indicate[d] that most white women don’t consider themselves part of the coalition of non-white, non-straight, non-male voters who were supposed to carry Clinton to a comfortable victory. Most white women still identify more with white men than they do with Black women, Latina women, Muslim women, transwomen, and every other woman who will have good reason to fear for her physical safety under a Trump regime. And while it’s nonwhite and queer women who have the most to lose under Trump, white women will have to live with the consequences of their own actions in a country without a right to abortion , without access to health insurance, without an adequate family leave policy, and with a head of state who values them only insofar as he wants to fuck them.7

  Education was also a great divide, for women as well as for men. The president-elect won 62% of white women without college degrees; Secretary of State Clinton, 34%. “Class shapes gender identity,” says Nancy Isenberg, the author of White Trash, which examined how elites have derided rural, working-class Americans from the colonial era to this day. “I think a lot of people who support Trump think of themselves as being disinherited. They resent the fact that everything they believe in is mocked by the media elite, and Hollywood. That resentment is shared by men and women.”8

  While Clinton might have made token appearances in blue-collar communities, it could hardly be argued that Clinton was “in touch” with the 99%. Journalist Liza Featherstone noted that the campaign endlessly touted endorsements from the ranks of celebrity one-percenters, especially women. In the end, Clinton enjoyed a gender advantage only among the college-educated. Among white women without college degrees, Clinton lost to Trump by 28 points. Featherstone sarcastically commented, “It was almost as if waitresses in Ohio didn’t care that [Vogue editor-in-chief] Anna Wintour was #WithHer.”9 All the talk about angry white men glossed over the fact that they were married to angry white women. This is also why class analysis is critical to the discipline of American Studies. Salamishah Tillet, an associate professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania reflected, “It’s not like Black people or Latino people aren’t sexist and patriarchal. But when we thought about ourselves and collective best interest, we voted for Clinton.”10

  As a Black feminist, I know that I can’t “lean in” to a democracy that was built on a bridge called my back. Race is a central dimension of US social, political, cultural, and economic life. The prevailing concepts of citizenship, community, freedom, and individuality in the USA contain within them deep fissures, erasures, and conflicts that depend upon particular constructions of race and racial difference. To move “past race” at this historical moment would be to ignore these conflicts and, in effect, to defuse ongoing struggles for social justice. In stressing the continuing significance of race, we take our cues from the rich and generative scholarship in African-American Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicano/Latino Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Queer Studies, critical race theory, cultural studies, and transnational, postcolonial and diaspora studies. We also take our cues from outside the academy, specifically from Black Lives Matter, a movement that insists that we need and deserve an elaborate strategy to eradicate both white supremacy and implicit bias toward it. We must reckon with the anti-Blackness of America’s history that led to this political moment.

  When I first published Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton in 2008, there wasn’t much scholarship on the Combahee River Collective. I mention the Collective here because of its centrality to my own thought and scholarship, as well as to the core concerns of this book. The very notion of Black feminism as something discrete and unique compared to white feminism —indeed, as something that had to arise because white feminism neither invited nor embraced it (and, in fact, often actively worked against it)—can be traced back to Combahee, as is detailed extensively and exquisitely in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s 2017 book, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and The Combahee River Collective. In How We Get Free, Taylor interviews Collective founders and members Barbara Smith , Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier about the birth of Combahee “as a radical alternative to the National Black Feminist Organization,” which itself was a response to what Black feminists believed was the failure of white feminist organizations to adequately respond to racism . Combahee was also, she contends, intended to “creat[e] new entry points into activism for Black and Brown women who would have otherwise been ignored” in and by male-dominated Black and Brown liberation groups, such as the Black Panther Party. Combahee’s founding principles, articulated in the Combahee River Collective Statement , presaged what we now refer to as intersectionality, understanding what white feminism has never fully grasped: that a feminist theory and practice concerned only with gender will never be of interest or value to Black women. As you read further in this book, keep this idea in mind as you think about what, exactly, Black feminism is.11

  Black Feminist Politics in a Post-Obama Presidency

  The core beliefs and values of Black feminism originally articulated by Combahee and that have been and continue to find new expressions through Black Lives Matter, and other social movements have only become more urgent since the previous edition of this book was published. Indeed, the vision of the women of Combahee could hardly be more relevant to this moment in which the president openly scorns and denigrates people of color (referring to Black urban communities as “ghettos” during his campaign being just one example) and rode into office despite a long, extensively documented history of discrimination based on race and ethnicity.12 Like Bill and Hillary Clinton, he bought into the notion of young Black “super-predators,” even before the Clintons did; in 1989, upon the arrest of the “Central Park Five,” he bought full-page ads in newspapers calling for law and order and expressing his support for the death penalty as a way to achieve social stability.13 And once in office, he made it clear that his “police state” views had hardly changed; in fact, they’d become entrenched in the ensuing years. Six months after being sworn into office, Trump addressed a crowd of police officers on Long Island, saying that he authorized and encouraged them to not be “too nice” with suspects, especially gang members. “Like when you guys put somebody in the car, and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put your hand over [their head], I said, ‘You can take the hand away, O.K.?’”14 Though Black women had done their best to keep him out of office, it was obvious that the work that would be required to cope with and survive the Trump administration was only just beginning.

  Over 40 years after the Combahee River Collective Statement , and as movements like Black Lives Matter and the Dreamers remind us, America is still failing to provide an equal playing field for all people. And when it comes to electoral politics, even “progressive” leaders too often leave out those whose lives fall at the intersections of discrimination, such as p
oor black women or undocumented LGBTQ youth. Under the Trump administration, these groups are meanwhile overtly targeted for discriminatory treatment. Despite the continued abuses against marginalized people, it’s important to remember that Black feminist thinkers and activists have been dreaming and fighting for nuanced solutions to systemic oppression for many years, and their work deserves our attention and consideration as we discern how best to respond to the present moment. There is no need to reinvent the wheel: The tenets of Black feminism offer us a clear, sturdy foundation upon which to carry forward the work of progressive politics in a post-Obama society in which our very lives are threatened daily.

  What are those tenets? Standing in sharp contrast to a modern version of “trickle-down” social justice where those with the most power have their interests addressed first, the Combahee River Collective instead argued the reverse: that those who are most marginalized and disenfranchised in society should be centered, and through lifting up the most disenfranchised, everyone’s standard of living would in turn improve. Black women have long known that America’s destiny is inseparable from how it treats us and the nation ignores this truth at its peril.

  Though she is no longer First Lady, Michelle Obama certainly embodied this form of feminism in the White House, a subject that certainly deserves more critical scholarship than it has received to date. Instead, Obama’s feminism has all too often been interpreted through a white feminist lens, one in which white women feel authorized and compelled to critique Obama’s priorities and motives. “Are fashion and body-toning tips all we can expect from one of the most highly educated First Ladies in history?” asked Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of Mommy Wars: Stay-at-home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families. She continued by adding that she had “read enough bland dogma on home-grown vegetables and aerobic exercise to last…several lifetimes.”15

  Rebecca Walker, who writes about culture, identity and motherhood, remarked that such white questioning of Obama’s choices was “tedious.” Beyond tedious, such questioning and critique of Black feminists’ choices and priorities expose white women’s lack of familiarity with and understanding of the concerns that are most central to Black women’s lives.

  This void in white women’s understanding of Black women and Black feminism isn’t limited to wider society. I see it in my own classroom each year. I teach a course on Black Feminist Thought. My syllabus includes Angela Davis , Michele Wallace , Audre Lorde, Psyche Forson-Williams, Gloria Hull , Patricia Bell Scott, Barbara Smith , Patricia Hill Collins , Patricia Williams , Beverly Guy Sheftall, Paula Giddings , Ann duCille, Adrienne Davis, Cathy J. Cohen, Evelyn M. Hammonds, Joy James, Stanlie M. James, Carol Boyce Davies, Cheryl A. Wall, and the late, great June Jordan. This list is hardly exhaustive, but even my students who are majoring in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies are unfamiliar with these luminaries. If white feminists were familiar with these texts, they might understand that Black women have been able to define our own feminism within the context of US racism for 200 years.

  Encouraging young white women to learn about Black feminism is one of the best parts of my job, because they’re hungry to learn and in the paths of Black feminists they see—often with wonder—that we have mapped out a viable path to liberation. It’s a road map we made by walking, and it’s one that is well-traveled by Black feminists. It’s up to the Black women of my generation to pass this map down, teaching the daughters of our contemporaries that the feminism they grew up with ain’t like ours, but it can be. Black, Latina, Asian, and Native American feminists have been grappling with complex questions about gender, race, class, and sexuality for decades and, in their own lives, for centuries. We know that when intersectional feminist leadership can be enacted in practice, it brings important changes about which issues are centered.

  We also know that such enactment in practice is not easy and is, in fact, often painful. In the earliest feminist responses to the Trump administration and, in particular, that administration’s entrenched sexism, we saw how, yet again, Black women were often marginalized, left out entirely, and then discredited or ridiculed or silenced (or, more often, all three) when they critiqued “mainstream” feminist responses. No event was more indicative of this than the Women’s March that was organized as a response to Trump’s election and inauguration. As white women donned pink “pussy hats” and claimed their space in Washington, DC, Black women who brought all of their concerns to the march often found themselves and their messages to be ignored. S. T. Holloway, for example, wrote about attending the 2017 Women’s March as a black woman and why her experience there caused her not to attend in 2018: “[I]n a sea of thousands, at an event billed as a means of advancing the causes affecting all women, the first and last time I heard ‘Black Lives Matter’ chanted was when my two girlfriends and I began the chant,” she recalled. “About 40 to 50 others joined in, a comparatively pathetic response to the previous chorus given to the other chants…. It represented the continued neglect, dismissal and disregard of the issues affecting black women and other women of color.”16

  We can see this disregard on the part of white women in their voting patterns today, from the 57% of white women who voted for Trump—as opposed to the 89% of black women, 66% of Latina women, and 65% of Asian women who voted against him17—to the 63% of white women in the 2017 Alabama Senate special election who voted for Roy Moore, an alleged serial pedophile who would be comfortable jettisoning black Americans’ basic human rights under the 14th, 15th, and 24th Amendments, as well as women’s right to vote.18 In that same election, 98% of black women voted against Moore and his extremist racism and misogyny in favor of Doug Jones, turning a Senate seat in Alabama blue for the first time in 25 years.19

  It seems that although “sisterhood is powerful,” as the 1970 feminist anthology of the same name would proclaim, sisterhood that excludes so many of its sisters constitutes a failed revolution. Treva Lindsey, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University, argued in an op-ed for theGrio, “Black women show up and show out for candidates who rarely address our needs through tackling racial, gender, economic, and sexual injustice.” While the GOP, argues Lindsey, is more anti-black and anti-poor than ever, even to the extent of publicly embracing white nationalism, “The Democratic Party [also] continues to largely ignore the specific demands of black women while resting upon symbolic and empty gestures of inclusion and attempting to shore up more support among the white working class.”20

  Leading black feminists today like Black Lives Matter co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors; trans icons Janet Mock, Cece McDonald, and Laverne Cox; author Roxane Gay; The Body Is Not An Apology social movement founder and writer Sonya Renee Taylor; and former Bernie Sanders national press secretary and political commentator Symone Sanders are all leading the charge in embracing Black feminism that is intersectional, considers issues of power, access, and disenfranchisement in nuanced, layered ways, and ultimately offers a higher bar to which to hold US politics.

  Writes Lindsey, “Black women, and more specifically black feminists, have been trying for over a hundred years to get white feminists to address the pervasiveness of anti-blackness among white women and to proactively divest from and destroy white supremacy.… The fact that damn near everyone benefits from our ‘voting’ except black women speaks volumes about how we are marginalized even when we use our vote to push back against injustice. Until more black feminists are in office and black feminist policies are the status quo,” adds Lindsey, “we are doomed to repeat this alarming trend.”21

  If progressives want to retake Congress in 2018, which will also likely be the only way a Trump impeachment sees the light of day, they will, with humility and grace, need to embrace the contributions of Black feminism at the national level, not as a tokenizing move to win black and brown votes but to understand and address the multifaceted forms of injustice keeping so many people from living their dream
s. Crucially, this injustice also keeps marginalized groups from going out to the polls, whether they’re physically barred from doing so or are too disillusioned to do so given the long history of empty promises from Democrats seeking to coax their votes.

  Black feminists, and other feminists of color, have been strategizing around how to combat multiple forms of structural disadvantage for decades. It’s time that existing (mostly white, mostly male) Democratic leadership finally study what they have to say, genuinely invite them to the table, and make room for a shift.

  I initially wrote this book as a history, one intended to restore Black women’s narratives to histories of twentieth-century feminist politics, giving Black women their rightful place in that canon. In this third edition of Black Feminist Politics, that goal seems even more urgent to me, and I feel compelled to extend to you an invitation: Read this book to (re)consider Black feminism. Use it to inform your own praxis and to move ever closer toward an embodiment of the kind of feminism that Black feminists have developed and practiced throughout their history. Insist upon a feminism that centers Black and Brown women and that credits them for their contributions.

  Footnotes

  1Prashad, Vijay . (2008). “The Revelation of Bill Clinton.” Zcommentaries. https://​zcomm.​org/​zcommentary/​the-revelation-of-bill-clinton-by-vijay-prashad/​.

  2Scott, Eugene. (2016, February 25). “Black Lives Matter Protestors Confront Clinton at Fundraiser.” CNN. https://​www.​cnn.​com/​2016/​02/​25/​politics/​hillary-clinton-black-lives-matter-whichhillary/​index.​html.

  3McCammon, Sarah. (2016, August 19). “Between Police and Black Lives Matter, Hillary Clinton Walking a Fine Line.” NPR. https://​www.​npr.​org/​2016/​08/​19/​490622277/​between-police-and-black-lives-matter-hillary-clinton-walking-a-fine-line.