Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  • Finally, she emphasizes the traditional roles of women, such as housekeeping, children, supportive roles, and self-maintenance, but she politicizes these roles by calling them the roles of black women. She then adopts the attitude that her job and her life is to have more children which can be used in the vanguard of the black struggle.

  • Black women, as the song “Black Pearl” relates, have been put up where they belong, but by American standards. Is it so inconceivable that the American value of respect and human relationships is distorted? It has taken the birth of women’s liberation to bring the black movement back to its senses.

  • The black woman is demanding a new set of female definitions and a recognition of herself as a citizen, companion, and confidante, not a matriarchal villain or a stepstool babymaker. Role integration advocates the complementary recognition of man and woman, not the competitive recognition of same.

  The recent unabated controversy over the use of birth control in the black community is of grave importance here. Black people, even the “most liberated of mind,” are still infused with ascribed inferiority of females and the natural superiority of males. These same values foster the idea of “good blood” in our children. If indeed there can be any black liberation, it must start with the recognition of contradictions like the following.

  It gives a great many black males pride to speak, as Dr. Robert Staple does, of “. . . the role of the black woman in the black liberation struggle is an important one and cannot be forgotten. From her womb have come the revolutionary warriors of our time.”4

  How many potential revolutionary warriors stand abandoned in orphanages while blacks rhetorize disdain for birth control as a “trick of The Man” to halt the growth of black population? Why are there not more revolutionary couples adopting black children? Could it be that the American concept of “bastard,” which is equivalent to inferior in our society, reflects black Anglo-Saxonism? Do blacks, like whites, discriminate against black babies because they do not represent “our own personal” image? Or do blacks, like the most racist of whites, require that a child be of their own blood before they can love that child or feed it? Does the vanguard of which Dr. Staples so reverently speaks recognize the existence of the term “bastard”?

  Someone once suggested that the word “bastard” be deleted from the values of black people. Would it not be more revolutionary for blacks to advocate a five-year moratorium on black births until every black baby in an American orphanage was adopted by one or more black parents? Then blacks could really have a valid reason for continuing to give birth. Children would mean more than simply a role for black women to play or fuel for the legendary vanguard. Indeed, blacks would be able to tap the potenial of the existing children and could sensibly add more potential to the black struggle for liberation. To do this would be to do something no other civilization, modern of course, has ever done, and blacks would be allowing every black child to have a home and not just a plot in some understaffed children’s penal farm....

  We can conclude that black women’s liberation and black men’s liberation is what we mean when we speak of the liberation of black people. I maintain that the true liberation of black people depends on their rejection of the inferiority of women, the rejection of competition as the only viable relationship between men, and their reaffirmation of respect for general human potential in whatever form—man, child, or woman—it is conceived.

  ENDNOTES

  1 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove, 1965), 107.

  2 Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 158.

  3 Robert Staples, “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy,” Black Scholar (January/ February 1970): 16.

  4 Ibid.

  Patricia Haden, Donna Middleton, and Patricia Robinson

  “A Historical and Critical Essay for Black Women,” written by Patricia Haden, Donna Middleton, and Patricia Robinson, appeared in Leslie Tanner’s Voices from Women’s Liberation (1970) in the chapter on “Radical Women.” M. Rivka Polatnick’s dissertation “Strategies for Women’s Liberation: A Study of a Black and a White Group of the 1960s” (1985, being revised for publication), is the only source I’ve been able to locate which describes this radical group of mostly poor black women from Mt. Vernon and New Rochelle, New York, whose writings appeared (without descriptions of the authors) in early treatises on women’s liberation. These women wrote about themselves in Lessons from the Damned in an essay entitled “The Revolt of Poor Black Women” (89–111).

  Like Mary Weathers, who also appears in this chapter, these women were involved in the black liberation struggle of the 60s and became frustrated by black men’s sexism and their romantic views of Africa. They argue, for example, that “it is a historical fact that our own feudal period in Africa was cruelly oppressive to black women and peasants.” They also critique Western gender and race frameworks which assign women and African peoples an inferior place. Their revolutionary vision of a new world imagined the end of all race, gender, and class hierarchies.

  A neglected topic in many histories of the radical phase of the women’s movement is the involvement of black women such as Haden, Middleton, and Robinson, though Alice Echols’s Daring to Be Bad (1989) attempts to correct these omissions. In this regard Cellestine Ware, a cofounder (with Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt) of New York Radical Feminists in 1969 (initially called the Stanton-Anthony Brigade) joined a small group of black feminists committed to radical social change. During the organization’s six-month probationary period, which would insure the involvement of radical feminists only, potential members participated in intensive study of feminist literature and consciousness-raising in order to understand the pervasiveness of systemic gender oppression. This small group of black women, which also included Florynce Kennedy and Patricia Robinson (New York social worker and psychotherapist) were adamant about the connection between racism and sexism and were very conspicuous because of the small number of women of color in the early years of the women’s liberation movement.

  A HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAY FOR BLACK WOMEN

  PART I

  It is time for the black woman to take a look at herself, not just individually and collectively, but historically, if she is to avoid sabotaging and delaying the black revolution. Taking a look at yourself is not simply good tactics; it is absolutely necessary at this time in the black movement when even black radical males are still so insecure about their identity and so full of revolutionary fantasies that they cannot reach out to the black woman in revolutionary love—to urge us to begin to liberate ourselves, to tell us the truth: “Black women, you are the most pressed down of us all. Rise up ... or we as black men can never be free!”

  No black man can or should even think he can liberate us. Black men do not have our economic, social, biologic, and historic outlook. We are placed by those who have historically formed and manipulated the values in this society—white males—at the very bottom of all these perspectives. There is so much scorn and fear of WOMEN, ANIMAL, and BLACK in this Western culture, and since we are all three, we are simply kept out of history. Except for certain “house women,” history is made only by males. The word ANIMAL is used by most males to mean a hated and despicable condition, and anything that is hated is simultaneously feared. Black women get put down as “bitch dogs” and “pussies” by Western white and black men, especially those who so smugly overestimate their brain power flying from campus to campus rapping about reason and SOUL. Their heads blow out this intellectual and educated spiel on white and black power. They back it up, like males have always done down through written history, with Gods in their own image. What a comedown it is to these males that they so often have to slip away from Harlem and Wall Street—to take “a crap.” And how they struggle against the fact that, like so many animals, they are born of the female, and from the moment of their leaving our dark wombs, they, like all animals, begin to die! Yet we black women in our deepest humanity love and n
eed black men, so we hesitate to revolt against them and go for ourselves.

  If we black women get a few of the goodies—and we have bought all that jive put down on us by our field-nigger families, who all our lifetime pushed and hustled to be just simple house niggers—our anger and frustration go underground. We don’t dare to endanger what we have been conditioned to accept as making it—a little glass house full of TV crap. We become nervous-nagging-narrow-minded murderers of ourselves and our children. We turn our madness and frustrations into other channels—against other black women and against our oppressed white sisters. We even trip out on smokes. We psyche out on sex with some cat that is as hung-up as we are. Then we got the nerve to break into the bag of cleanliness, godliness, and “I’m better than you are, baby!”

  If we are poor black women, one night in the streets we explode. That small razor cupped in our fingers slashes his hated black face, that face that reflects our own. We look at him and see ourselves for what we really are —traitors to ourselves as poor black women and traitors to him, our streetbrother, because we let him get to where he’s at now—not a man just a jive-time turkey. We did not confront him long ago because our minds were not “wrapped.” But now we can hear, see, feel our mistakes through his actions against us, toward his children and his mother. Now he’s going to try to prove himself a man—“walk that walk; talk that talk.” He’s still hanging on to his jive thing. He bops on the corner and raps that he’s straight. “I’m coming to my people!” He’s still out there fucking with his drugs and talking shit. We lunge and sink our knife deep into his chest to blot out this awful truth. His blood oozes and stops while ours gushes from between our legs. Nothing gets born. We just end up murderers of the future of our people.

  If we feel ourselves to be college-educated and politically aware, we end up nothing but common opportunists, playing some role of some dreamedup African Queen, like we “gonna” rule some black country somewhere with some dashiki cat, acting haughty and ending up a tripped out black king. It does not matter to us that it is a historical fact that our own feudal period in Africa was cruelly oppressive to black women and peasants; that in Africa this warring and exploitative period was only interrupted by the landing of the European colonialist and slave trader. The African chiefs and their clique had been selling troublesome relatives and competing tribesmen to Europeans, just as now three-fourths of the so-called African statesmen are wheeling and dealing to sell the riches of their land and the labor of their people under neocolonialism.

  We want desperately to feel black, but we also need to feel superior to whitey. We want to take his place. We really want to take over his system and rule over and exploit everyone. We want to be black masters and missies and have white maids and big white houses. We want to go to college to get good jobs and bring our learning back to the people in the streets. We’re jiving—we’re going to college to be social workers, NAACPers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, to keep the minds of the poor messed up and confused. We’re going to college to be a part of the system.

  All of us caught in this white male-jive that was meant to keep us hooked, exploited, and oppressed groove on this big white world of male supremacy, this way-out white capitalism. We hold tight to that little capital, clothes, furniture, and bank account, because if we lose it we’d have to go back to that old feeling of “I ain’t nothing.” “I ain’t nowhere!” We are scared to death of that “big dick,” the military-industrial complex. But how we give all praise to its power and tell all our friends how you can’t beat the man and his system!

  PART II

  Myths unite people and steer their culture. They are the dreams and hopes; they are the fears and confusions of people. They are found in their folk tales, customs, in their religious and economic systems. Myths are not about real people, but do express the movement of opposites which is contradiction. The deep thoughts and everyday attitudes of human beings are full of contradictions. Like electrical energy, these thoughts that may oppose each other at times, and may join together as one at other times, move whole peoples into action. They also keep a society steadily moving in one direction or keep it in general peace with itself and its neighbors.

  The American Dream is a myth. If you trace it symbolically and historically, it is a long route away from the ANIMAL BODY, away from the LAND, away from the WOMAN, and away from BLACK to condensed wealth (which is capital, and in the American Dream is money, machines, and property), to the CITIES, to MAN, and to WHITE. It is now the historical time to examine this myth that has made dead things and their creators sacred and overvalued by us.

  Black women in the United States are so systematically left out of this society that we do not have an important part in producing the products bought and sold in this economy. We are civil servants, domestic servants, and servants to our families. We have no Gods in our own image, even though South American women, through Catholicism, have the Black Madonna. We are separated from black men in the same way that white women have been separated from white men. But we are even less valued by white and black males because we are not white. The American Dream is white and male when examined symbolically. We are the exact opposite —black and female—and therefore carry the stigma, almost religious in nature, of the spurned and scorned and feared outcast.

  The Western world was built on much more than colonialism and imperialism. It was also built on a split in the minds of men that thoroughly separated male from female as well as the body from the mind. This mindblowing phenomenon caused all things having to do with the animal body to be repressed unconsciously. It is a fact of the psyche that repressed feelings, like oppressed peoples, do not stay repressed. Repressed feeling, like living energy, struggle against the force of repression to rise to consciousness. Repression of feelings, which we have learned through the conditioning of myths, is unacceptable, is a constant struggle.

  Oppression of unacceptable people—unacceptable to those who rule, reinforced by myths from their imagination—is also a constant struggle between those who oppress and those who are oppressed. The oppressed, like repressed feelings, struggle to rise into the open and freedom. This is an example of the movement of opposites and contradiction.

  Men who controlled the making of myths and culture after the overthrow of women managed to banish women and what they had always symbolized to a psychic underworld—a chaotic hell of folktales and fables. ANIMALS, WOMEN, and BLACKS became the underground witches and demons in men’s minds. Men’s own feminine nature, inherent in their bisexuality, was denied by them. This mental split enabled the male to deny the fact that he was an animal, to struggle against the darkness and toward the light, and to lessen the fact of his dependence on women for his nourishment before and after birth.

  Most important, he could deny his dependence on women for his very birth and life. He could now ripple his large muscles and dream of soaring one day to the heavens, where he could be in charge and therefore be worshiped as the God of Light and the Heavens—an Apollo. The woman’s body, which receives, hosts, and gives forth the future of the species, is inherently powerful. Her body and power had to be overthrown and suppressed when the male felt overwhelmed by this power and responded with the desperate need to take power from the woman. His desperate need became a living force in his use of external power over others and in the repression of his own soft femininity.

  Some thousands of years ago, the female was considered the Goddess of the Universe from which heaven and earth sprang. Certainly this myth conforms to basic reality—out of one comes two. The female births both the male and the female. The Adam and Eve myth that has for so long been an important part of black women’s education through our part-time father—the Negro minister—and our devoutly religious black mothers, turns this basic reality on its head and into its opposite. The male gives birth through the magical intervention of an all-powerful male God. The rib of Adam is plucked out and made into woman by this powerful medicine man who resembles in action the
African and Asian tribal priest. Indeed, this is a powerful myth, for it grants the role of man in human creation while at the same time utterly denying woman’s role. Deep down we black women still believe this clever religious tale that puts us out of creation. The fact that we do exposes our terrible dependence on outside authority and our fear of trusting and thinking for ourselves.

  Anthropologists have been able to trace the animal family to the first human family, and they observe that the male’s only role early in human history was insemination. Then he drifted off, leaving the female to take care of herself during pregnancy, birth, and the nursing of the young. When men and women began to live together, what can be called culture began. But women controlled the first fruit or surplus, the child, by reason of its long need for protection before it could take care of itself.

  This was concrete power over the child and the male in those places with a warm climate and readily available food and water. There was no real need for a male food gatherer, a hunter, in this Garden of Eden. When the male came to live with the female more often, parents and an extended family in a culture began. The children were molded and conditioned by all manner of rituals and folk stories. Their education kept them under control and made them ready to follow the customs and rules set up by parents—first by the female, then the male.

  Today in the time of the cities, cybernetics, nuclear power, and space exploration, white men have developed a man-made body, the self-regulating machine. It can operate a whole series of machines and adjust itself much as our human brain is able to readjust to the needs of our body and to operate the human body. It can also do the mental and physical work of men’s bodies. At last man has done away with the practical need for his own human form. Now he must turn his attention to the danger the woman’s body has always posed to his rule. He struggles to perfect artificial insemination and a machine host for the human fetus. He concerns himself with the biological control of reproduction of the species. Those white males who rule the free world (capitalist world) understand that if they are to keep their rule over women and so-called lesser men, they must stop being dependent on their bodies and must perfect machines which they can control absolutely.