Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump

by Duchess Harris

  The inclusion of Wallace’s writing in the Collective’s statement affirmed that Wallace had accurately taken the pulse of the Black feminist movement—at least a significant part of it—and had articulated its concerns. Analyzing Wallace’s essay, the CRC wrote that Wallace “is not pessimistic but realistic in her assessment of Black feminists’ position, particularly in her allusion to the nearly classic isolation most of us face. We might use our positions at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action.”25

  The work of Michelle Wallace and Ntozake Shange shook Black academe and the predominantly male establishment, creating necessary controversy that advanced the Black feminist movement. Without the debates the works engendered, Black feminism and Black women’s writings would not be as developed as they are today. Wallace’s and Shange’s works were also necessary since they were articulations not only about Black women, but by Black women, offering a narrative that diverged considerably from the limiting stereotypes of the Moynihan Report , as well as those in books such as Soul on Ice by former Black Power leader Eldridge Cleaver . Black men had a long way to go before grasping Black feminism and its concerns, but Wallace’s and Shange’s work also revealed that Black women had a great deal of thinking to do and action to take as well.

  Without Wallace and Shange , would there have been bell hooks ’ book, Ain’t I a Woman , or Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins ? One thing is certain, and that is that Black feminist studies would not have been able to create its own identity and criticism if the ideas of self-love and the knowledge of self-hatred and sexism had not been articulated by Wallace and Shange . If it were not for early Black feminists’ writing that explicitly critiqued Black men’s sexism, many Black lesbian feminists would have felt very alienated and distanced from their straight sisters. Books like Black Macho and plays like for colored girls helped people like Barbara Smith of the Combahee River Collective to come back into the feminist movement after having been disenchanted, disenfranchised, and disempowered by the Black Power movement . Perhaps more women would agree with Wallace and Shange today than 20 years ago, but there is still a noticeable trend among Black men to stand up for other Black men in spite of obvious sexism during the Million Man March and the controversy over Anita Hill . This shows that some Black men still distance themselves from “those angry Black feminists” and are not willing to engage on a deeper level with the issues that Wallace and Shange brought up in their work.

  Ronald Reagan and the Culture of Politics

  As Wallace and Shange were busily stimulating conversation on the cultural scene with radical works, the political climate in the USA was growing increasingly conservative. The backlash movement against liberalism that emerged with Nixon was finally consummated with the election and presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. As Edsall and Edsall commented, “In many respects Ronald Reagan , in his quest for the presidency, updated and refined the right-populist, race-coded strategies of Wallace and Nixon .”26 Reagan had made bids for the presidency in 1968 and 1976, but it was not until 1980 that the political environment was ready for the California governor’s explicit, racially driven, ideological rhetoric. In making his case to voters in 1980, Reagan made it clear that his planned assault on government would rely primarily on the means-tested programs (i.e., “welfare”) that disproportionately served minorities .27 Reagan’s concentrated attack on AFDC and other means-tested programs was in alignment with the growing public support and sympathy for the plight of Blacks and other minorities. In 1979 and 1980, national support for increased spending to improve the conditions of Blacks and other minorities fell to a record low of 24%. Opposition to welfare spending swelled to its highest level in 1976 and remained intense through 1980. In addition, the 41% of respondents in 1980 who thought, “Blacks and other minorities should help themselves” versus those saying that “Government should improve the social and economic position of Blacks” (19%) was an all-time high, compared to 37 and 29%, respectively, in 1976 and 38 and 31% in 1972.28 The emerging racial conservatism within the electorate cut across racial lines, as a chasm developed between the views of Black and white Americans. Just as Wallace and Shange had oppressive social structures, the increasingly oppressive and highly racialized economic structures and policies of the nation prompted intellectuals and cultural creatives to explore issues related to Black poverty in their work. No work was more seminal during this period than Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple .

  Understanding Alice’s Garden: The Color Purple Controversy

  In 1981, Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple , which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for fiction. The novel was one of the most controversial books written by a Black woman and sparked years of discussion. Walker’s third novel, published after The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian , The Color Purple is centered on the subject of Black relationships and a clear critique of patriarchy, as well as an examination of the social and economic structures that perpetuate such conditions. The novel is set in the South, a region with which Walker was familiar. She was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944, the youngest of eight children. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta and was offered a scholarship to attend Sarah Lawrence College; instead, Walker took a leave of absence and travel to Africa. She came back from Africa pregnant, contemplated suicide, but had an abortion instead, and wrote her first poetry book, Once. Walker was extremely influenced by her family and their lives. “She makes no bones about loving her grandfathers and the stories they’d tell.” Her family and her surroundings influenced Walker when writing The Color Purple , and that is why she used Black vernacular and why Anglo American culture was so absent from the book. The author said, “[W]riting The Color Purple was not so much a struggle – but it was more a letting go, of just trying to clear my channels enough.”

  Before discussing the implications of the novel and the political message that it conveyed, it is important to place the book in a historical context that helps us to understand the significance of its arrival in the early 1980s. The Color Purple continued the tradition of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide /when the rainbow is enuf and Michele Wallace’s 1979 book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman , both of which were catalysts for discussions of sexism within Black society. The Color Purple was influenced not just by Wallace and Shange , but also by other “troublemakers” such as Lorraine Hansberry , who was dismissed by Black male critics in the 1960s, and countless other Black women writers like Zora Neale Hurston , similarly important to but marginalized during the Harlem Renaissance .

  One of the problems with the discussion that resulted from Walker’s book and the movie adaptation of The Color Purple is that few people are aware of the difference between the two. Most of the critique that Walker received was in response to the movie, and most of the people who criticized her felt that she was to blame for all the shortcomings of the film. The media also focused on the negative aspects of the movie instead of showing that most Black women enjoyed the movie and felt that it was both an accurate reflection of their experiences and a positive portrayal of Black women in general. As Jacqueline Bobo stated,in reaction to Black women’s favorable responses to the film, Black male criticism of the film began to attain much more media space. In January 1986 The New York Times reported that the film was the dominant topic of conversation on radio and talk shows.29

  The film reached its audience in several stages, and each time it induced a strong reaction. It was released during the holiday season in 1985, but was re-released theatrically at the beginning of 1987. The movie grossed $100 million by 1986, which is much more than the book’s profits, so it is safe to say that more people saw the movie than read the book; however, many people equated the two synonymously and talked about them as such.

  The critique of the movie extended from the producer and director to Walker herself, whose own version of the screenplay had not been used
for the movie. Even people who had not read the book started critiquing it and the author, calling Walker a “man hater.” One of the most vicious condemnations of Walker came from The Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy , who wrote that some Black women would enjoy seeing a movie about Black men shown as brutal bastards. Furthermore, he wrote, “I got tired a long time ago of White men publishing books by Black women about how screwed up Black men are.” The problem was that Milloy had not read the book, but still felt justified in commenting about the novel and its author. Even Spike Lee declared in Film Comment that “the reason that Hollywood elected Alice Walker’s novel to make into a film was that Black men are depicted as one-dimensional animals.” Such a comment is particularly curious coming from Lee, whose movies are widely considered to portray women unidimensionally and, often, negatively. The wide range of criticism reflected fear, especially among Black men, of a popular book by a Black female author in which they are being criticized. This fear existed in the white society as well, since the media and the talk shows are controlled by the white dominant society. It was a fear which would characterize another event that was about to unfold, and one which was far more visible to pop culture enthusiasts: The scandal involving Miss America , Vanessa Williams.

  Vanessa Williams, “Exemplary Queen”

  While Alice Walker’s novel may have represented a highbrow threat to Black masculinity and to dominant culture, Sarah Banet-Weiser argued that “… the [1983] crowning of Vanessa Williams is a particularly visible instance of the politics of the 1980s and Reaganism,” accessible to anyone with a television, radio, or a newspaper.30 To understand exactly what it was that Vanessa Williams represented and how her fall from grace constituted a threat to her symbolic accomplishment, it is first necessary to understand some of the dominant tropes deployed by politicians that cast Black women into the unidimensional role of the welfare queen.

  One of Ronald Reagan’s favorite anecdotes on the campaign trail, in multiple campaigns, was the story of a Chicago “welfare queen” who had “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and a tax-free income of over $150,000.”31 This supposedly true story represented a melding of resentments against the poor. At its most extreme, the image of the welfare queen conjured up a picture of a gold-clad, Cadillac-driving, promiscuous Black woman living off the government dole and buying steak and beer with food stamps. The food stamp program , another means-tested program, was a target of Reagan’s ire and also became an important part of the welfare queen narrative . Food stamps, according to the Hollywood actor-turned-President, were a vehicle to let “some fellow ahead of you buy T-bone steak while you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger.”32 Reagan’s depiction of the welfare queen was based on a woman from Chicago, Linda Taylor , who had been charged with welfare fraud in 1976. She was actually charged with defrauding the state of $8000, not $150,000.33 Not only was Taylor misrepresented, but also the President’s extensive use of the welfare queen narrative served to permanently consolidate racist stereotypes of Black women within contemporary political discourse . As a result of this shrewd manipulation of racist caricatures, social welfare discourse during the 1980s became fundamentally structured around the “welfare queen” trope, with race as its central ideological organizing axis. As Patricia Williams remarked, “Somewhere during the Reagan -Bush years the issue of race [became] more firmly wedded to the notion of welfare than ever before, and the rest is history” (Rooster’s Egg, year, 5).

  Vanessa Williams was the first Black Miss America and, like many other “first” Black Americans, was truly positioned as a test case for the viability of competing racial discourses in the context of emerging multiculturalism and New Right politics . Williams “was marked as a race-transcending American icon, and the pageant itself participated in marketing diversity as it happened, thereby incorporating it–and Williams herself–as a crucial element fueling the national imagination.” When Williams was first crowned, her success at crossing the historical color line of the Miss America pageant was read as evidence that Black women could be included within the parameters of white femininity. Former US Representative Shirley Chisholm said at the time of Williams’ coronation, “My first reaction is that the inherent racism in America must be diluting itself…. I would say, thank God I have lived long enough that this nation has been able to select a beautiful young woman of color to be Miss America .” Chisholm continued by emphasizing the significance of Williams’ victory for Black communities in the USA, claiming that “because it didn’t ‘put bread on the table’ people might say ‘So what?’ when considering the importance to the civil rights movement of a Black woman’s winning of the crown…. [But the event was] not trivial because it shows a sense that the country, for whatever the motivation might be, seems to be trying desperately to move toward an egalitarian set of circumstances.”34

  Williams’ success and the narrative constructed around it were not to last, however. In July 1984, Penthouse ran an issue that featured Vanessa Williams engaged in sexual acts with a white woman. These photographs, taken three years before the pageant, were the reason the Miss America pageant commission asked Williams to relinquish her crown and title. Banet-Weiser observed:Just as she was granted individual personhood when she won the Miss America crown, she was summarily denied this same category when the photographs were published: she became all Black women in U.S. society, and she affirmed mass-mediated representations of this identity.

  The “exposure” of Vanessa Williams recalled and foregrounded historically powerful narratives about Black women and sexuality, and it confirmed racist beliefs embedded within beauty pageants concerning ‘questionable morals’ purportedly held by all Black women. It can also be seen as an instance of a broader discourse about race and difference, and we should consider the story of Williams a particularly instructive instance of the ways the discourse of diversity works in U.S. culture.

  Jackie Goldsby added:[T]he telling and retelling of Vanessa Williams’s impressive victory and equally impressive downfall provided an opportunity –a lost opportunity– to engage in public conversation about the various ways race conditions and intersects sexuality. Without interrogating the racial specificity of the context in which Williams was positioned, her story could not be told– indeed, there was no available social narrative for the telling. Like the [White] feminist reaction to Anita Hill , the elative silence that greeted events precipitating Williams’s downfall was a result of America [stumbling] into a place where African-American women live, a political vacuum of erasure and contradiction maintained by the almost polarization of “Blacks and women” into separate and competing political camps.35

  Vanessa Williams became an Icarus figure who flew too high and fell. Once she lost her crown, many members of the Black community felt betrayed. One woman journalist wrote, “That [Williams] had been hailed as a particularly ‘exemplary’ queen, one who injected new life into the homogeneously bland pageant, only makes her fall more keenly felt by Black women who are trying hard to exert a sense of self.”36 Williams’s subsequent exploitation is the quintessential act of resistance against Black women in the 1980s. The “exemplary” queen of the ’80s is quickly and efficiently replaced by the welfare , quota, and condom queens of the ’90s.

  Footnotes

  1US Department of Health and Human Services. (2001, March 1). “Indicators of Welfare Dependence: Annual Report to Congress.” Accessed on May 20, 2018, from https://​aspe.​hhs.​gov/​report/​indicators-welfare-dependence-annual-report-congress-2001/​aid-families-dependent-children-afdc-and-temporary-assistance-needy-families-tanf.

  2Edsall, T. B. , & Edsall, M. D. (1992). Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 55–56.

  3Edsall, T. B. , & Edsall, M. D. (1992). Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 60.

  4Edsall, T. B. , & Edsall, M. D. (199
2). Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 74.

  5Edsall, T. B. , & Edsall, M. D. (1992). Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 75.

  6Dionne, E. J. (1991). Why Americans Hate Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 79.

  7Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, DC: Office of Policy Planning and Research United States Department of Labor.