Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  I started a black women’s consciousness-raising group around the same time. When I heard one of my friends, whom I considered the closest thing to a feminist in the room, saying at one of our sessions, ‘I feel sorry for any woman who tries to take my husband away from me because she’s just going to have a man who has to pay alimony and child support,’ even though she was not married to the man in question, I felt a great sinking somewhere in the chest area. Here was a woman who had insisted (at least to me) upon her right to bear a child outside of marriage, trying to convince a few black women, who were mostly single and very worried about it, that she was really married—unlike them. In fact, one of the first women to leave the group was a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence, her excuse being, ‘I want to place myself in situations where I will meet more men.’ The group eventually disintegrated. We had no strength to give to one another. Is that possible? At any rate, that’s the way it seemed, and perhaps it was the same on a larger scale with NBFO.

  Despite a sizable number of black feminists who have contributed much to the leadership of the women’s movement, there is still no black women’s movement, and it appears there won’t be for some time to come. It is conceivable that the level of consciousness feminism would demand in black women wouldn’t lead to any sort of separatist movement, anyway—despite our distinctive problems. Perhaps a multicultural women’s movement is somewhere in the future.

  But for now, black feminists, of necessity it seems, exist as individuals—some well known, like Eleanor Holmes Norton, Florynce Kennedy, Faith Ringgold, Shirley Chisholm, Alice Walker, and some unknown, like me. We exist as women who are black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle—because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world.

  (1975)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Beyond the Margins: Black Women Claiming Feminism

  Feminism is the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, disabled women, lesbians, old women—as well as white, economically privileged, heterosexual women. Anything less than this vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement.

  —BARBARA SMITH, . . . But Some of Us Are Brave

  ... we delight in remembering that half the world is female . . . more than half the globe’s female half is yellow, brown, black, and red.

  —HORTENSE SPILLERS

  INTRODUCTION

  Though black women did not join the mainstream women’s movement in large numbers, they have a long history of organizing for the purpose of improving their lives and the lives of their families. This work took place in civil rights and nationalist organizations, separate black women’s organizations, and community groups. In 1973, for example, Black Women Organized for Action was initiated in San Francisco. The founding in 1973 of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) in New York City a few months later signalled an important development in contemporary black women’s history and modern black feminism. No longer apologetic or ambivalent about self-identifying as feminists, some black women would change the terms of the discourse on women’s liberation and announce that they were no longer going to be silent about what ailed them, despite continuing charges of disloyalty within certain segments of the black community. The Statement of Purpose which NBFO released in 1973 illustrates their conception of black and women’s liberation and attempts to counter media assertions that the women’s movement is irrelevant to the Third World, particularly black women:Black women have suffered cruelly in this society from living the phenomenon of being both both black and female, in a country that is both racist and sexist.... Because we live in a patriarchy, we have allowed a premium to be put on black male suffering . . . We have been called “matriarchs” by white racists and black nationalists . . . We, not white men or black men, must define our own self-image . . . and not fall into the mistake of being placed upon the pedastal which is even being rejected by white women.... We will continue to remind the Black Liberation Movement that there can’t be liberation for half the race. We must, together, as a people, work to eliminate racism, from without the black community, which is trying to destroy us as an entire people; but we must remember that sexism is destroying and crippling us from within. (Schneir, 1994, 173–174)

  The publication three years earlier of Toni Cade’s The Black Woman, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Shirley Chisholm’s Unbought and Unbossed signalled the emergence of new voices surrounding issues of race, class, and gender. Lesbian writers Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and Cheryl Clarke would go on to challenge heterosexist practices within the black and feminist communities, practices that threatened to silence or marginalize lesbians of color. Throughout the 1980s black feminist theory would provide a corrective to the privileging of middle-class white women’s voices, help to shift the discourse on women’s empowerment, and articulate a transformative “humanist vision of community” (Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 39) which could be embraced by many communities of color.

  The Combahee River Collective

  The Combahee River Collective was an important black feminist group that began in 1974 as the Boston chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), founded in 1973. The name was inspired by a river in South Carolina where Harriet Tubman had mounted a military campaign during the Civil War to free 750 slaves. NBFO’s statement of purpose emphasized the importance of the much maligned women’s liberation movement to black and other Third World women and reminded the black liberation movement that “there can’t be liberation for half the race” (Statement of Purpose, Schneir, 174). In 1977, three members of the collective—Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier—wrote a statement documenting the activities of the collective and articulating their philosophy. This black feminist manifesto is a clear articulation of the evolution of contemporary black feminism and the concept of the simultaneity of oppressions that black women suffer. It also emphasized the importance of eradicating homophobia and acknowledging the role of lesbians in the development of black feminism.

  Black lesbians have indeed been critical to the development of black feminism as ideology and praxis. They were active in the founding of the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973 and the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gay Men in 1978. They started Azalea: A Magazine by Third World Lesbians in 1978 and, in 1981, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the only publishing collective of its kind in the United States. Despite their roles in shaping the contours of feminist discourse and liberation struggles, however, they have been denied their rightful place in African American cultural, intellectual, and political history. An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing (1995), which includes writings from throughout the diaspora, is another response to these silences.

  A BLACK FEMINIST STATEMENT

  We are a collective of black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974.1 During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As black women we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.

  We will discuss four major topics in the paper that follows: (i) The genesis of contemporary black feminism; (2) what we believe, i.e., the specific province of our politics; (3) the problems in organizing black feminists, including a brief herst
ory of our collective; and (4) black feminist issues and practice.

  1. THE GENESIS OF CONTEMPORARY BLACK FEMINISM

  Before looking at the recent development of black feminism, we would like to affirm that we find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American women’s continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation. Black women’s extremely negative relationship to the American political system (a system of white male rule) has always been determined by our membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes. As Angela Davis points out in “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” black women have always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways. There have always been black women activists —some known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknown—who had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique. Contemporary black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters.

  A black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American women’s movement beginning in the late 1960s. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. In 1973 black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate black feminist group. This became the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO).

  Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of us were active in those movements (civil rights, black nationalism, the Black Panthers), and all of our lives were greatly affected and changed by their ideology, their goals, and the tactics used to achieve their goals. It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and antisexist, unlike those of black and white men.

  There is also undeniably a personal genesis for black feminism, that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual black women’s lives. Black feminists and many more black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day existence.

  Black feminists often talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics, patriarchal rule, and, most importantly, feminism, the political analysis and practice that we women use to struggle against our oppression. The fact that racial politics and indeed racism are pervasive factors in our lives did not allow us, and still does not allow most black women, to look more deeply into our own experiences and define those things that make our lives what they are and our oppression specific to us. In the process of consciousness-raising, actually life-sharing, we began to recognize the commonality of our experiences and, from that sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression.

  Our development also must be tied to the contemporary economic and political position of black people. The post—World War II generation of black youth was the first to be able to minimally partake of certain educational and employment options, previously closed completely to black people. Although our economic position is still at the very bottom of the American capitalist economy, a handful of us have been able to gain certain tools as a result of tokenism in education and employment that potentially enable us to more effectively fight our oppression.

  A combined antiracist and antisexist position drew us together initially, and as we developed politically we addressed ourselves to heterosexism and economic oppression under capitalism.

  2. WHAT WE BELIEVE

  Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered our specific oppression a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to black women (e.g., mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western Hemisphere. We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation is us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community, which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

  This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

  We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression that is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.

  Although we are feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with black men against racism, while we also struggle with black men about sexism.

  We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe the work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and antiracist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that this analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as black women.

  A political contribution that we feel we have already made is the expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political. In our consciousness-raising sessions
, for example, we have in many ways gone beyond white women’s revelations because we are dealing with the implications of race and class as well as sex. Even our black women’s style of talking/testifying in black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political. We have spent a great deal of energy delving into the cultural and experiential nature of our oppression out of necessity because none of these matters have ever been looked at before. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of black women’s lives.

  As we have already stated, we reject the stance of lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. As black women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. We must also question whether lesbian separatism is an adequate and progressive political analysis and strategy, even for those who practice it, since it so completely denies any but the sexual sources of women’s oppression, negating the facts of class and race.

  3. PROBLEMS IN ORGANIZING BLACK FEMINISTS

  During our years together as a black feminist collective we have experienced success and defeat, joy and pain, victory and failure. We have found that it is very difficult to organize around black feminist issues, difficult even to announce in certain contexts that we are black feminists. We have tried to think about the reasons for our difficulties, particularly since the white women’s movement continues to be strong and to grow in many directions. In this section we will discuss some of the general reasons for the organizing problems we face and also talk specifically about the stages in organizing our own collective.