Duchess Harris
Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump
Duchess HarrisMacalester College, Saint Paul, MN, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-95455-4e-ISBN 978-3-319-95456-1
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95456-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948202
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
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This book is lovingly dedicated to Jon V. Thomas, M.D., M.B.A.
We met on October 10, 1993. It was a crisp autumn Sunday. We went for brunch and to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. On the day that we met, I told you that I’d write a book about Black women. You talked about your belief in the harmony of athletic, intellectual, and artistic pursuits. Most women would have been impressed, but I was a myopic 24-year-old Ph.D. student who had never dated anyone who didn’t love poetry. You sensed my hesitation, and later that day, you gave me a collection of Toni Morrison’s essays and a Maya Angelou poem.
I reflect back on the twenty-five years of our relationship and marvel at how I almost ignored the guy who didn’t love poetry. At the time, I considered myself a premier student. What I didn’t know was that a poetry lesson could be learned from a scientist. It wasn’t until I saw you running in marathons, in your garden, at the piano, in the operating room, and playing with our children that I actually knew what poetry was. It’s quite simple: You are poetry in motion.
Jon, Austin, Avi, Zach, and Duch. Together we are JAAZD.
Foreword
Isabella Baumfree was born a slave in Ulster County, New York, in 1797. After having been sold several times and her last owner was quite cruel, Isabella escaped in 1826. Friends later bought her freedom. In 1843, Isabelle Baumfree changed her name to Sojourner Truth, in recognition of her religious and abolitionist activities. Sojourner Truth was among a small group of free, Black, feminist-abolitionists in the North in the early nineteenth century (McClain and Tauber 2017: 174). This group also included Maria Stewart (1803–1879), born a free Black but at some point became an indentured servant until she was sixteen and later became an abolitionist and lecturer, and Frances E. Watkins Harper (1825–1911), a free Black abolitionist, suffragist, author, and poet (McClain and Tauber 2017: 174). Truth began to connect the issue of the abolition of slavery with women’s rights during the nineteenth century. Truth was probably the first to highlight the complexities of the Black women’s race and gender identities.
In 1851, the Women’s Rights Convention was held in Akron, Ohio, and Sojourner Truth addressed the audience. She emphasized the important difference between white women and Black women in terms of their relationships to white men in her legendary “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. Part of her speech specifically addresses the differences in how white women and treated relative to Black women— That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
In 1989, 138 years after Truth’s speech, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Law Professor at Columbia University Law School, put a name to the complexity of Black women’s lives that Sojourner Truth identified in the nineteenth century. She coined the term “intersectionality” in a paper, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum (Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8) as a way to help explain the oppression of African-American women.
Professor Harris reminds us that the ideas articulated by Truth were an early form of Black Feminism, and that the issues she identified in the lives of Black women still need to be addressed. Just as white Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott did not understand or care about the plight of Black women, Harris identifies that white feminist for the most part still do not recognize or, in some instances, care about the issues of importance to Black women or how the lives of white women and Black women diverge in experiences. For those not familiar with many of the Black feminist writers, Harris introduces readers to the work of Michelle Wallace, whose book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman , that I enjoyed reading in 1979 when it was published; the poet Ntozake Shange, whose play When Colored Girls Consider Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf , which was turned into a Broadway play; Alice Walker author of The Color Purple , also made into a movie and a Broadway play; Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas that pushed the issue into the public debate; the Combahee River Collective; and, among many others, the women who founded the Black Lives Matters Movement. She situates these writers within the US presidents that were in office at the time and discusses the political environment in which these women wrote and were politically active.
Harris’ historical and current view of the power of Black women and the distinctiveness of Black Feminism demonstrates that contrary to popular myth, Black women to not shy from feminism, but they embrace their own particular form of feminism—Black Feminism. This is a significant update on a very important book, one that has stood the test of time.
Reference
McClain, Paula D., and Steven C. Tauber. 2017. American Government in Black and White: Diversity and Democracy , 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Paula D. McClain
Durham, NC, USA
Acknowledgements
The word collective was used often throughout this book. The effort that went into this intellectual journey was indeed a collaboration. I’d like to begin by thanking the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship Program at the University of Pennsylvania, especially Dr. Valarie Swain Cade-McCollum, Dr. Herman Beavers, and Patricia Ravenell. This work was also funded by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the Helen Hinto
n International Alumni Fund of the University of Minnesota, the Rockefeller Foundation at the Womanist Studies Consortium at the University of Georgia, the Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty sponsored by the New Jersey based Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, the G. Theodore Mitau Junior Faculty Sabbatical grant at Macalester College, and the Bush Leadership Fellowship.
The scholars who helped shape my work (in alphabetical order): Lisa Albrecht, Sharon Austin, Susannah Bartlow, Bruce D. Baum, Shanna Greene Benjamin, Michel Tracy Berger, Mary Frances Berry, Rose Brewer, Jennifer Devere Brody, Lisa Gail Collins, Maria Damon, Angela Dillard, Erica Dunbar, Natanya Duncan, Nikol Alexander-Floyd, DoVeanna Fulton, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Janet Hart, Tiffany Willoughby Herard, Michelle Scott Hillman, the late Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Leola Johnson, Peniel Joseph, Heidi Lewis, the late Manning Marable, M. J. Maynes, Carol Miller, Mark Anthony Neale, Anthony B. Pinn, the late Guillermo Rojas, Benita Roth, Evelyn Simien, Kimberly Springer, Dennis Valdes, Cally Waite, and Julia Jordan Zachery.
I would also like to thank every student that I have taught at Macalester between 1994 and 2018. My “crew” at Macalester has been invaluable: Lizeth Gutierrez, Cárol Mejía, Sedric McClure, Linda Sturtz, and Nate Tittman.
I am sincerely grateful to Yolanda Cabral who has been an “other-mother” to my children.
This book would not exist without the innovative and precise editing of Julie Schwietert Collazo, who has lived with this project for more than a decade.
Finally, my life changed in 2015 when I found Red Line Editorial and Abdo Publishing. Thank you, Bob Temple, Paul Abdo, Monte Kuehl, and Dorothy Toth, for introducing me to the world of Librarians. I am forever changed.
Contents
1 Introduction: The Departure of Michelle Obama from the White House and the Need for Black Feminism
2 A History of Black American Feminism
3 Black Women’s Relationships with Party Politics
4 The ’90s in Context: A History of Black Women in American Politics
5 Doubting the Democrats: Current Disenchantment and Political Futures
6 The State of Black Women in Politics Under the First Black President
7 Your President Is (a) White (Supremacist): Post Obama and Black Feminist Politics
8 Conclusion: Reclaiming Our Time—Black Feminist Politics in the Trump Era
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Bibliography
Index
© The Author(s) 2019
Duchess HarrisBlack Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trumphttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95456-1_1
1. Introduction: The Departure of Michelle Obama from the White House and the Need for Black Feminism
Duchess Harris1
(1)Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, USA
Duchess Harris
Email: [email protected]
2017 was a monumental year for Black women in America due to two important events: First Lady Michelle Obama left the White House, and it was the 40th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective Statement .
When I first published Black Feminist Politics in 2009 and 2011, the cover art was Faith Ringgold’s “The Purple Quilt.” In “The Purple Quilt,” panels of text from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple reinforce portraits of characters found in the novel. In hindsight, I would have chosen Ringgold’s “The Flag is Bleeding.” Ringgold has long used her art to voice her opinions on racism and gender inequality. In 1967, she created a series of paintings, “The American People,” focused on racial conflict and discrimination. “The Flag is Bleeding,” number 18 in the series, depicts an African-American man standing next to a white couple. Although the three seem united, the African-American man’s wound indicates otherwise. I love this work of art because its significance is not solely about who is represented in the flag. When I share “The Flag is Bleeding” in the classroom, I often ask students, “Who do you think is missing, and what do you think Ringgold is trying to say about America?”
Many Americans are missing, but my principal concern is the absence of the Black woman. I think Ringgold is trying to say that Black women are often invisible in America’s political narrative, despite the fact that we are integral to its very fabric.
In the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday, November 9, 2016, we found out that the next president of the United States A would be Donald J. Trump. As a demographic, Black women supported him less than any other group at a mere four percent. The inverse of this equation is that Black women voted for Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a whopping 94%. Notice I said “voted for.” I didn’t say that we were #WithHer, because many of us weren’t. The main reason? Feminism—that is to say, white feminism —has historically taken credit for Black women’s ideas and achievements while at the same time writing them out of narratives, failing to welcome them at the metaphorical (and often literal) table. In this way, Hillary Clinton was no different from most white feminists. For many Black women voters, she simply was the lesser of two evils.
In Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton, I noted that Vijay Prashad wrote that once Bill Clinton was sworn into office in 1993, “The braying of the right was so abhorrent and hypocritical that Bill Clinton gained some measure of forgiveness from those who were otherwise livid with him. It was in this context that Toni Morrison said that he was being treated like a Black man: given no quarter, shown no mercy, but treated as guilty as charged without any consideration or process.” Prashad explained how things changed between 1998 and 2008, when Hillary Clinton first ran for president:But now, finally Bill Clinton has given us some honesty. He has opened his heart during this primary season, joining Hillary Clinton in pandering to the Old South, the hard core racist bloc that was never reconciled to Civil Rights, that continues to blame Blacks for the vivisections of their economic fortunes. It is this bloc that handed Hillary Clinton the primaries of Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, and Kentucky. After her loss in the South Carolina primary, where the Democratic electorate is substantially Black, Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill, told the press, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in 1984 and 1988. Jackson ran a good campaign and Obama ran a good campaign here.”1
It was after these remarks were made that I predicted that Toni Morrison would take back Bill Clinton’s invitation into the Black family, and indeed she did. Some say that it’s unfair to entangle Hillary with the actions of her husband, but elite white feminism teaches us that marrying a president is the best way for a woman to become a presidential candidate.
Hillary’s pandering to the Old South in 2008 might have been forgiven by some once the Obamas campaigned for her, but an early colossal mistake—one underscoring that her feminism was largely for white women—was treating the women from #BlackLivesMatter with dismissive condescension in 2016. When Ashley Williams confronted Clinton during a fund-raiser in February of that year—a fund-raiser for which she had paid the $500 ticket—to ask why, in 1996, Clinton had defended her husband’s crime bill by denigrating Black communities by referring to some kids within them as “super-predators.” The super-predator image and Clinton’s crime bill are largely considered to be the precursors to the current and escalating epidemic of the mass incarceration of Black people, and Williams demanded during the fund-raiser that Clinton explain herself and apologize. Clinton’s response? “Well, can I talk? And then maybe you can listen to what I say.”2
By August 2016, the tensions between the Clinton campaign and Black Lives Matter activists had escalated. Many BLM activists and people of color generally were deeply dissatisfied when Clinton spoke publicly in response to the July shooting in Dallas, in which five police officers were killed and nine were wounded. Following the shooting, she met with police chiefs from around the country and went on record as saying that the Dallas officers “represent officers who get up every day, put on their uniforms, kiss their families goodbye and risk
their lives on behalf of our communities.”3 Meanwhile, BLM activists were urging her to be clear about her positions regarding aggressive policing and mass incarceration. Clinton, speaking to the General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, seemed to be keenly aware that she was on a tightrope, one that would leave nearly everyone dissatisfied. “I’m talking about criminal justice reform the day after a horrific attack on police officers,” she said. “I’m talking about courageous honorable police officers just a few days after officer-involved killings in Louisiana and Minnesota…. I know that just by saying all these things together, I may upset some people.”
Within weeks, the BLM-Clinton relationship would simmer into a boil.
When activists were not allowed into a campaign event in New Hampshire (the campaign said the local fire marshal prevented them from allowing more people into the venue), Clinton scheduled a meeting to discuss concerns with the activists, who included Daunasia Yancey, founder of Boston’s Black Lives Matter chapter. Far from assuming a posture of listening, Clinton instead assumed the posture so familiar to white feminist leaders: The white woman knows best. CNN’s Dan Merica described Clinton’s attitude in the encounter as follows:Throughout the 15-minute conversation, Clinton disagreed with the three activists from Black Lives Matter who had planned to publicly press the 2016 candidate on issues on [sic] mass incarceration…. The 2016 candidate even gave suggestions to the activists, telling them that without a concrete plan their movement will get nothing but “lip service from as many white people as you can pack into Yankee Stadium and a million more like it.”4
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