Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  Despite their enlightened views on such issues as a single standard of sexuality for men and women, as well as others, white feminists fell short on issues like nonmarital rape, probably because of its interracial implications. Although they could bring themselves to counter gender oppositions, those that involved race, and, to a lesser extent class, seemed to be beyond their reach. This would be left to black feminists like Ida B. Wells and others who constantly challenged the dualism between good and bad, black and white, and its implications especially as it affected African American women.

  Ida Wells simply turned this paradigm on its head, with her own empirical evidence gathered from her investigation of the circumstances of 728 lynchings that had taken place over the previous decade. Her meticulously documented findings would not only challenge the assumption of rape—which also exonerated black women to a significant extent—but also included findings about the lynching of black women as well as their sexual exploitation at the hands of whites. It was black women who needed protection, Wells insisted, as “the rape of helpless Negro girls and women, which began in slavery days, still continued without reproof from church, state, or press,” thus changing their representation to that of victims. Her most dramatic challenge to the paradigm, of course, was her questioning of the passionless purity of Southern white women. There where interracial liaisons between black men and white women, Wells published in her findings, but they were consensual and often initiated by white women. In May of 1892, Wells would publish the editorial that got her exiled from the South: “If Southern white men are not careful ... ,” she challenged, “a conclusion will be reached which will be damaging to the moral reputation of their women” (Wells, On Lynchings [New York: Arno Press, 1969]). Wells, perhaps the first leader to broach the subject of black sexual oppression after slavery, had now completely challenged the period’s assumptions. Black men weren’t rapists, white men were; black women weren’t doing what “nature prompted,” white women were; Wells’s framework actually rescued both black and white women from their dehumanized objectification.

  When, in reaction to Wells’s ideas, the president of the Missouri Press Association, John Jacks, wrote a letter calling all black women “prostitutes, thieves and liars,” it was the proverbial straw for nascent regional clubs to come together under a national umbrella in 1896. “Read the letter carefully, and use it discriminately” (it was “too indecent for publication”), challenged Boston activist and editor Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and “decide if it be not the time to stand before the world and declare ourselves and our principles.” Formed as the National Association for Colored Women (NACW), with a membership that would reach 50,000 by 1916, it would act not only as a means to realize suffrage, education, and community development, but the vessel through which black women challenged, in public, the beliefs that were getting black men lynched and black women raped and exploited. Sexual exploitation was so pervasive that it drove black women north in search of safer climes. “It is a significant and shameful fact that I am constantly in receipt of letters from still unprotected women in the South,” complained the nineteenth-century Chicago activist Fannie Barrier Williams, “begging me to find employment for their daughters ... to save them from going into the homes of the South as servants as there is nothing to save them from dishonor and degradation.” In 1893, before the predominantly white Congress of Representative Women, Williams challenged that black women shouldn’t be disparaged but protected, adding that “I do not want to disturb the serenity of this conference by suggesting why this protection is needed and the kind of man against whom it is needed.”

  IV.

  Nevertheless, despite their extraordinary boldness in bringing this issue before the white public, black women activists were precluded from presenting another kind of critique, one which was also important. The brutal concept of binary opposition prevented them from a frank public discourse concerning intraracial gender relations and sexuality, with which white feminists had been relatively successful. This void was a potentially lifethreatening one in a time of adjustment to nonslavery; a time when gender roles, altered first by slavery and then by rapid social and economic changes, were in chaos; a time when the sexuality of both black men and women had to have been twisted by sexism and racism, and now by numbing poverty. Ghettos were congealing, families were in disarray, domestic violence was on the increase, cocaine and alcohol were being abused, and venereal diseases were increasing at an alarming rate. But in this social-Darwinistic environment, where blacks were judged harshly, even murderously, by their perceived difference from the white middle-class ideal, where it was believed that the poor deserved to be poor because of moral and character flaws, where a man, as Wells reported, could be lynched under the pretense of beating his wife, how could there be a public discourse about such things? How was one going to explain the higher rates of venereal disease such as syphilis among blacks? And how was one to explain before a hostile white public that the higher rates of infant mortality were largely due to children’s inheriting “enfeebled constitutions and congenital diseases, inherited from parents suffering from the effects of sexual immorality and debauchery” (25), as an 1897 report, Proceedings of the Second Conference for the Study of Problems Concerning Negro City Life, under the general direction of W. E. B. Du Bois, then at Atlanta University, stated?

  Publicly voicing such concerns in a society defined by binary opposition could leave blacks in general and black women in particular vulnerable to the violent whims of whites. It is no wonder that the issues of intraracial sexuality and gender have long been tabooed in public discourse. At the same time, not voicing these concerns have left the community, especially women, bereft of the help and protection so needed. As an anonymous black women writer, one of the few who dared break the silence of intraracial sexuality, wrote to the Independent in 1904, “We poor colored wage earners of the South are fighting a terrible battle, on the one hand, we are assailed by white men, and on the other hand, we are assailed by black men who should be our natural protectors.” There are sexist backlashes within our community, too.

  For black women, the accumulated effects of assault and the inability to “eradicate negative social and sexual images of their womanhood” had “powerful ideological consequences,” concludes historian Darlene Hine. To protect themselves, she observes, black women created what she calls “a culture of dissemblance.” Hine defines this as “the behavior and attitudes of black women that created the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressors” (202)—and I would add, even from ourselves. This is the reason, I think, why we have not forced such sex/gender discourses, seen primarily as disclosures, in our community. It is why feminist issues, though not women’s rights issues, are more problematic for us. Not only is feminism specifically associated with our historic binary opposites—middle—class white women—it demands an analysis of sexual issues. This is why to break through the silence and traditional sense of racial solidarity is such a controversial act for us. This, in turn, largely accounts for the vitriol earned by those who indicate a public discourse on sexuality in their work, such as Alice Walker in The Color Purple or Ntozake Shange in For Colored Girls. ... I think these traditional notions are also the reason why Anita Hill’s appearance was so controversial in the black community. Those who publicly supported her, namely black scholars and the National Coalition of 100 Black Women—formed in 1970 when the women’s movement was making an impact—were those in touch with gender issues and their role in the needed transformation of our institutions and communities. This is the window black women writers have pointed toward but that Anita Hill, in her first-person, clear, unswervingly direct testimony before the public, has actually opened. It was an act of great inner courage and conviction, to turn back the veil of our Du Boisian double consciousness. It was an act that provided clarity about our new status in the late twentieth century.

  V.<
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  There would be some that would argue that that status is no more empowered than it was a hundred years ago, thus requiring that we use the same strategies of solidarity. There is no question that, in some ways, the essential aspects of racism and sexism still affect us. This was evident in the statement “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves,” first appearing in the New York Times as a paid ad on November 17, signed by 1,603 black women, most of them scholars, in response to the treatment of Anita Hill during the hearings. Insisting that the “malicious defamation of Professor Hill insulted all women of African American descent,” it concluded that “throughout U.S. history, black women have been stereotyped as immoral, insatiable, perverse; the initiators in all sexual contacts—abusive or otherwise.... As Anita Hill’s experience demonstrates, black women who speak of these matters are not likely to be believed....” The words sound very much like those that led women to organize the NACW almost exactly a century ago, and in fact, the similar conditions that previously made us want to wrap ourselves in that protective skin have come back around with a vengeance. Certainly, the late twentieth century, with its dislocating technological revolution, rapacious money-making, excesses of sex, guilt, and consumption, and incurable diseases viewed as Old Testament warnings should give us pause. For when such a confluence occurs, there are cultural reflexes to create categories of difference, including sexual difference, with all of its murderous Willie Horton, Bensonhurst, David Duke, and Central Park gang-rape implications. And although we may have passed the era that could take a Hottentot Venus seriously, we cannot rest assured that advances in science will save us from such folly. That respectable journals would make connections between green monkeys and African women, for example, or trace the origin of AIDS to African prostitutes—the polluted sexual organs of black women—reveals our continued vulnerability to racist ideology. It tells us that concepts of racial difference (in this situation, sexual practices) can still be used as weapons of degradation, and that the idea of difference turns on sexuality, and sexuality, in this culture, is loaded with concepts of race, gender, and class. This explains in part why the backlashes against women, black and nonblack, as well as race, carry a virulence that goes beyond the fear of competition or the sharing of power once so handily monopolized by others.

  On the other hand, there have been some fundamental, dramatic changes, largely realized by our own struggle for equality and empowerment, that allow us, in fact demand, a new strategy. For although racism still exists, our situation has changed since the sixties in spite of it. It has changed because of two interrelated developments: the sexual revolution and de jure desegregation. They are interrelated because sex was the principle around which wholesale segregation and discrimination was organized with the ultimate objective of preventing intermarriage (D’Emilio, Freedman, 1988). The sexual revolution, however, separated sexuality from reproduction, and so diluted the ideas about purity—moral, racial, and physical.

  Both desegregation and the sexual revolution make dissemblance and suppression in the name of racial solidarity anachronistic, for they were prescribed to divert perceptions of difference, based on sexual difference between black women and white. Despite the tenacity about ideas of difference, recent sociopolitical developments-further codified by feminist theory as well as black studies—make binary opposition as a sole indicator of meaning passé.

  In the meantime, increasing sexual aggression, including date rape on college campuses that tend to be underreported by black women; the number of “children having children”; the plague of domestic violence; the breakup of families; and the spread of fatal venereal disease among African Americans at a time when we have more “rights” than ever before tells us that gender issues are just as important—if not more so—in the black community as racial issues have always been. More than ever before it is essential that we advance a discourse on sexuality that is liberating for those who engage in it and truncating to the souls of those who don’t. As Naima Major, former director of the National Black Women’s Health Project (NBWHP)—one of the few black institutions that regularly engages in sexuality issues—said to me, most of the black women she sees “seem to cut themselves off at the waist,” even when they are coming to talk specifically about sexuality.

  This is particularly alarming in view of the fact that we are in a sexually aggressive era, one where sex is commodified and often depersonalized, especially for young women. Their worlds were the subject of a study of adolescents aged fifteen to seventeen, conducted by Pat McPherson and Michelle Fine, and their observations were disturbing. From the stories of these young women, the authors surmised that their generation is more likely to “be aware of, witness to, and victim of’ male sexual abuse among both peers and family. Their sexual experiences with peers are not characterized by learning the meaning or enjoyment of sex, or even making choices about engaging in it, but in protecting themselves from what is viewed (as in the past) as the irrepressible sexual drives of the men in their lives. A black adolescent in this interracial group spoke about not her own sexual preferences but the need to satisfy, indeed mollify, men quickly through cunnilingus so that the evening could end early, and hassle-free. And the authors noted that female adolescents also protect themselves by suppressing signs of their gender: by becoming ”one of the boys“ through not only dress, but through even misogynist behavior and attitudes. These are issues that were addressed a century ago, under similar sociosexual conditions, but the solutions have not been passed on through families or social institutions. We must begin to do it.

  The analysis of how sex/gender systems apply to us in the 1990s becomes urgent when we see that fifty-eight percent of black women beyond the age of eighteen never use any form of birth control, according to a 1991 study conducted by the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Yet only one percent of those women said that they wanted to get pregnant, and only two percent said that they did not know how to use birth control. Does this finding indicate ambivalence about separating sexuality from reproduction despite not wanting a child? Does it indicate the desire, however sublimated, to become pregnant? Or, as I suspect, is the finding a reflection of the fact that their male partners look down on birth control?

  One thing we know, there seems to be what one might call a cult of motherhood in our community. How else might one interpret the finding of journalist Leon Dash in his book When Children Want Children (1988), that nearly a fourth of all unmarried teenage mothers intentionally become pregnant? What does motherhood mean to these youngsters? The ability to exercise maternal authority in lieu of other avenues of self-esteem and empowerment? rebellion against the depersonalization of sex? or perhaps, as a century ago, does this finding represent the effort to control male sexuality? The answers to these questions are important, as the babies of teenagers are more apt to be underweight and thus have learning and other physical disabilities. There is also tragedy in another statistic: forty-eight percent of the teenagers who intentionally got pregnant later regretted their decision.

  Even college students, according to a report by the Black Women’s Health Project, indicated a conflict about delaying childbearing in the face of “women’s traditional and proper role as mother”—“indeed as a respected ‘matriarch’ in a community beset by failing family structures.” Of course, there is also male pressure insinuated in some of these findings. The college students said that they felt intense pressure from male partners who wanted to be fathers—one of the few avenues toward manhood?—as well as from cultural and religious leaders not to have abortions. Although one has to respect religious and/or moral views about this, one has to wonder if young women are making rational, informed decisions about these things —lives depend on it.

  Another issue not engaged adequately is one that Leon Dash discovered after hours of interviews with teenagers over the course of an entire year —the time it takes to get beyond their personal dissemblance strategies. Many of the motives behind sexual decisions�
��for better sometimes, but often for worse—were shaped by the fact that their families had a tremendous amount of sexual abuse within them, sometimes traced through two, three, or more generations. Ironically, Dash’s decision to publicly reveal such information caused more consternation among self-conscious middle-class blacks than the dire implications of the information itself.

  If all of this sounds very nineteenth-century, there is a reason for it. Black men and women have not had their own sexual revolution—the one we couldn’t have before. We need a discourse that will help us understand modern ideas about gender and sex/gender systems, about male privilege, and about power relations; about the oppressive implications of pornography—something even at least one Harvard professor seems not to understand.

  In our considerations of Anita Hill, it is important to understand that she spoke not of a physical transgression on the part of Clarence Thomas, but a verbal one masked in pornographic language. Pornography, “a fantasy salvation that inspires nonfantasy acts of punishment for uppity females,” as one historian put it, speaks specifically to power relations between men and women. For African Americans these relations remain unanalyzed in the light of the empowerment of black male elites like those represented by Thomas, who, since the seventies, have emerged as gatekeepers for the upward mobility of all blacks in the newly accessible corporate, political, academic, and business spheres of influence. It is men, not women, who control the sociosexual and professional relationships in the black community. Among other notions that must be dispensed with is the weak male/strong female patriarchal paradigm that clouds so much of our thinking about ourselves.