The necessity for coalitions has pushed many groups to rigorously examine the attitudes and ignorance within themselves that prevent coalitions from succeeding. Most notably there has been the commitment of some white feminists to make racism a priority issue within the women’s movement, to take responsibility for their racism as individuals, and to do anti-racist organizing in coalition with other groups.
Because I have written and spoken about racism during my entire involvement as a feminist and have also presented workshops on racism for white women’s organizations for several years during the 1970s, I have not only seen that there are white women who are fully committed to eradicating racism, but that new understandings of racial politics have evolved from feminism that other progressive people would do well to comprehend.11
Having begun my political life in the Civil Rights movement and having seen the black liberation movement virtually destroyed by the white power structure, I have been encouraged in recent years that women can be a significant force for bringing about racial change in a way that unites oppressions instead of isolating them. At the same time the percentage of white feminists who are concerned about racism is still a minority of the movement, and even within this minority those who are personally sensitive and completely serious about formulating an activist challenge to racism are fewer still.
Because I have usually worked with politically radical feminists, I know that there are indeed white women worth building coalitions with, at the same time that there are apolitical, even reactionary, women who take the name of feminism in vain.
BLACK AND FEMALE
One of the greatest gifts of black feminism to ourselves has been to make it a little easier simply to be black and female. A black feminist analysis has enabled us to understand that we are not hated and abused because there is something wrong with us, but because our status and treatment is absolutely prescribed by the racist, misogynist system under which we live.
There is not a black woman in this country who has not, at some time, internalized and been deeply scarred by the hateful propaganda about us. There is not a black woman in America who has not felt, at least once, like “the mule of the world,” to use Zora Neale Hurston’s still apt phrase.12 Until black feminism, very few people besides black women actually cared about or took seriously the demoralization of being female and colored and poor and hated.
When I was growing up, despite my family’s efforts to explain, or at least describe, attitudes prevalent in the outside world, I often thought that there was something fundamentally wrong with me because it was obvious that I and everybody like me was held in such contempt. The cold eyes of certain white teachers in school, the black men who yelled from cars as my sister and I stood waiting for the bus, convinced me that I must have done something horrible.
How was I to know that racism and sexism had formed a blueprint for my mistreatment long before I had ever arrived here? As with most black women, others’ hatred of me became self-hatred, which has diminished over the years, but has by no means disappeared. Black feminism has, for me and for so many others, given us the tools to finally comprehend that it is not something we have done that has heaped this psychic violence and material abuse upon us, but the very fact that, because of who we are, we are multiply oppressed.
Unlike any other movement, black feminism provides the theory that clarifies the nature of black women’s experience, makes possible positive support from other black women, and encourages political action that will change the very system that has put us down.
The accomplishments of black feminism have been not only in developing theory, but in day-to-day organizing. Black feminists have worked on countless issues, some previously identified with the feminist movement and others that we, ourselves, have defined as priorities. Whatever issues we have committed ourselves to, we have approached them with a comprehensiveness and pragmatism that exemplify the concept “grass roots.” If nothing else, black feminism deals in home truths, both in analysis and in action. Far from being irrelevant or peripheral to black people, the issues we have focused on touch the basic core of our community’s survival.
Some of the issues we have worked on are reproductive rights, equal access to abortion, sterilization abuse, health care, child care, the rights of the disabled, violence against women, rape, battering, sexual harassment, welfare rights, lesbian and gay rights, educational reform, housing, legal reform, women in prison, aging, police brutality, labor organizing, anti-imperialist struggles, antiracist organizing, nuclear disarmament, and preserving the environment.
Frustratingly, it is not even possible to know all the work black and other Third World women have done, because as I’ve already stated, we have had no consistent means of communication, no national Third World feminist newspaper, for example, that would link us across geographic boundaries.13 It is obvious, however, that with every passing year, more and more explicitly feminist organizing is being done by women of color. There are many signs:
Women of color have been heavily involved in exposing and combatting sterilization abuse on local, state, and national levels. Puertorriqueñas, Chicanas, Native American, and Afro-American women have been particularly active, since women in these groups are most subject to forced sterilization.
For a number of years, health issues, including reproductive freedom, have been a major organizing focus. Within the last year, a Third World women’s clinic has been established in Berkeley, and a black women’s Self-Help Collective has been established in Washington. The National Black Women’s Health Project in Atlanta held its first conference on black women’s health issues in 1983, bringing together two thousand women, many of them low-income women from the rural South.
Black and other Third World women have been centrally involved in all aspects of organizing to combat violence against women. Many women of color first became involved in the women’s movement through this work, particularly working/volunteering in battered women’s shelters. Because battering is so universal, shelters have characteristically offered services to diverse groups of women. There are now shelters that serve primarily Third World communities, such as Casa Myrna Vazquez in Boston.
In 1980, the First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence was held in Washington, D.C. Many precedent-setting sexual harassment cases have been initiated by black women, both because black women are disproportionately harassed in school and on their jobs, and also because it seems that they are willing to protest their harassment. A group in Washington, D.C., the African Women’s Committee for Community Education, has been organizing against harassment of black women by black men on the street. In Boston, the Combahee River Collective was a mobilizing force in bringing together Third World and feminist communities when twelve black women were murdered in a three and a half month period during 1979.
Third World women are organizing around women’s issues globally. Activists in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, India, New Zealand, England, and many other places are addressing issues which spring simultaneously from sexist, heterosexist, racist, imperialist, and economic oppression. Some of these individuals and groups specifically identify as feminist. For example, in the Virgin Islands there are a growing number of battered women’s organizations on various islands. Some Afro-American women and Virgin Islanders have worked together on issues of violence against women. In Jamaica, Sistren, a community-based women’s theater collective founded in 1977, organizes around basic survival issues including sexual violence and economic exploitation. In Brazil, black women are active in the women’s movement and have been especially involved in neighborhood organizing among poor women. Maori, Pacific Island, and other black women in New Zealand have been doing extensive organizing on a local and national level. The first National Hui (conference) for black women was held in September, 1980 in Otara, Auckland and the first Black Dyke Hui occurred in June, 1981.
Economic exploitation, poor working conditions, inadequate health care, and anti
-imperialist and antinuclear campaigns are just a few of the issues black women in New Zealand are addressing. At the same time they are challenging sexist attitudes and practices within their specific cultural groups.
Black women’s organizing that is often specifically feminist has been going on in England since the mid-1970s. National black women’s conferences, which include all women of color currently living in Great Britain, that is women born in England and women who have emigrated from India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, and Africa, are held annually. A Black Women’s Center, which works on a wide range of community concerns, was established several years ago in the black community of Brixton, and since that time, dozens of other black women’s centers have opened all over London.
Black and Indian women in South Africa, who have always been central in the struggle against Apartheid, are beginning to address specifically women’s issues such as rape, which is very widespread in the cities. In the future, Third World feminists in the United States and Third World women in other countries will no doubt make increasing contact with each other and continue to build a movement that is global in both its geographic range and political scope.
A number of black and Third World lesbian organizations are addressing a variety of issues as “out” lesbians, such as Salsa Soul Sisters in New York City and Sapphire Sapphos in Washington, D.C. They are doing education and challenging homophobia in their various communities as well as working on issues that affect lesbians, women, and people of color generally. The National Coalition of Black Gays (NCBG), which has had seven chapters in various cities and currently has several thousand members, has sponsored National Third World Lesbian and Gay conferences in Washington (1979) and Chicago (1981), attended by hundreds of participants.
NCBG was also successful in the struggle to include a lesbian speaker, Audre Lorde, in the rally at the 20th Anniversary March on Washington in 1983 and was instrumental in increasing the accountability of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign toward lesbian and gay issues.
A FLOURISHING CULTURE
Black feminist cultural work is flourishing, particularly in literature and in music. Azalea, a literary magazine for Third World lesbians, began publishing in 1977. The Varied Voices of Black Women concert tour featuring musicians Gwen Avery, Linda Tillery, and Mary Watkins, and poet Pat Parker appeared in eight cities in the fall of 1978. Third World women bands, singers, poets, novelists, visual artists, actors, and playwrights are everywhere creating and redefining their art from a feminist perspective.
We have done much. We have much to do. Some of the most pressing work before us is to build our own autonomous institutions. It is absolutely crucial that we make our visions real in a permanent form so that we can be even more effective and reach many more people. I would like to see ongoing multi-issued political organizations, rape crisis centers, battered women’s shelters, women’s centers, periodicals, publishers, buying cooperatives, clinics, and artists’ collectives started and run by women of color. The Third World Women’s Archives and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in New York, both founded in 1981, are examples of institutions controlled by women of color. We need more. I believe that everything is possible. It must be understood that black feminist organizing has never been a threat to the viability of the black community, but instead has enhanced the quality of life and insured the survival of every man, woman, and child in the community.
In the 1980s, every one of us faces a great deal of danger. The reign of Reagan is more blatantly opposed to people’s economic, civil, human, and land rights in this country and internationally than any U.S. government for the last fifty years. We are living in a world at war, but at the same time we are also in a period of increasing politicization and conscious struggle.
If we are going to make it into the twenty-first century, it will take every last one of us pulling together. The unswerving commitment and activism of feminists of color, of home girls, are essential to making this planet truly fit for human habitation. And as Bernice Johnson Reagon explains: “We are not on the defensive.... ’Cause like it is, it is our world, and we are here to stay.”14
ENDNOTES
1 This essay is excerpted from the introduction to Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983).
2 The terms Third World women and women of color are used here to designate Native American, Asian American, Latina, and Afro-American women in the U.S. and the indigenous peoples of Third World countries wherever they may live. Both the terms Third World women and women of color apply to black American women. At times in the introduction black women are specifically designated as black or Afro-American and at other times the terms women of color and Third World women are used to refer to women of color as a whole.
3 Barbara Smith, “Notes for Yet Another Paper on Black Feminism, Or Will the Real Enemy Please Stand Up” in Conditions: Five, The Black Women’s Issue, ed. Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith (Autumn 1979): 124.
4 W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkmater, Voices from Within the Veil (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 185.
5 June Jordan and Bernice Johnson Reagon. “Oughta Be a Woman,” Good News, Chicago: Flying Fish Records, 1981, Songtalk Publishing Co. Quoted by permission.
6 See Linda C. Powell’s review of Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (“Black Macho and Black Feminism”) in Home Girls and my review of bell hooks’s (Gloria Watkins) Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism in New Women’s Times Feminist Review 9 (November 1982): 10, 11, 18, 19 and 20, and in Black Scholar 14 (January/February 1983): 38—45.
7 Quoted from Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A., ed. Jonathan Katz (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1976), 425. Also see Adrienne Rich’s “The Problem with Lorraine Hansberry,” in “Lorraine Hansberry: Art of Thunder, Vision of Light,” Freedomways 19, no. 4, (1979): 247-255 for more material about her woman-identification.
8 “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls, 272.
9 Linda Tillery, “Freedom Time,” Linda Tillery, Oakland: Olivia Records, 1977, Tuizer Music.
10 Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in Home Girls, 356.
11 Some useful articles on racism by white feminists are Elly Bulkin’s “Racism and Writing: Some Implications for White Lesbian Critics.” Sinister Wisdom 13 (Spring 1980): 3-22; Minnie Bruce Pratt’s “Rebellion,” Feminary 11, nous. 1 and 2, (1980): 6-20; and Adrienne Rich’s “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia” in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966—1978 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 275—310.
12 Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1978), 29.
13 Between Ourselves: Women of Color Newspaper, vol. 1, no. 1, was published in February 1985, P. O. Box 1939, Washington, D.C. 20038.
14 Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 368.
bell hooks (1952- )
bell hooks, born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, is the most prolific, most anthologized black feminist theorist and cultural critic on the contemporary scene. Author of eleven books, her first was a groundbreaking but controversial text, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981). The major strengths of the text were its delineation of the impact of sexism on black women, both historically and contemporaneously; its discussion of the persistent racism of the first-wave and second-wave women’s movements ; and its discussion of the involvement of black women in struggles to achieve equality for women, even when they were discouraged from doing so by various segments of the white and black communities. Its major contribution was her revisionist approach to African American history, in which she advanced the thesis that slavery, a reflection of a patriarchal and racist social order, not only oppressed black men, but defeminized slave women. She is presently Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York (CUNY).
The essay “Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory” from her sec
ond book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), is a provocative critique of white feminist theory. hooks has helped to articulate the importance of feminism to a broad cross-section of the black community because of the accessibility of her writings and her attention to issues of paramount concern to African American women and men. Her most recent books are Teaching to Transgress (1994), Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994), and Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995).
BLACK WOMEN: SHAPING FEMINIST THEORY
Feminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually—women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is still heralded as having paved the way for contemporary feminist movement—it was written as if these women did not exist. Friedan’s famous phrase, “the problem that has no name,” often quoted to describe the condition of women in this society, actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper-class, married white women—housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life. Friedan concludes her first chapter by stating: “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my house.’ ” That “more” she defined as careers. She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all nonwhite women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute, than to be a leisure-class housewife.
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