Words of Fire
Page 72
We are the African and the trader. We are the Indian and the settler. we are the slaver and the enslaved. We are oppressor and oppressed. We are the women and we are the men. We are the children. The ancestors, black and white, who suffered during slavery—and I’ve come to believe they all did; you need only check your own soul to imagine how—grieve, I believe, when a black man oppresses women, and when a black woman or man mistreats a child. They’ve paid those dues. Surely they bought our gentleness toward each other with their pain.
So, these are my thoughts. Mpinga. I love that, though born in America, you have chosen an African name. I can remember when such an expression of psychic and cultural duality would have been but vaguely understood. But times change, and people do, too. Now such affirmations are almost routine. The infinite faith I have in people’s ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior. In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.
Your sister,
Alice
1986
POSTSCRIPT
In my response to Mpinga I did not touch on what I consider the egregious hypocrisy of many of the critics of the novel and the movie. In letters sent to the producers of the film while it was being shot (letters threatening picket lines, boycotts, and worse if the script was not submitted to them, prior to filming, for approval), members of the group Blacks Against Black Exploitation of Blacks in the Media made it clear that a primary concern of theirs was not merely the character of Mister, but a fear of the “exposure” of lesbianism “in the black community.” One of the letters expressed the fear that, just as the use of cocaine skyrocketed in the black community after the showing of Superfly, a movie about a racially mixed, black-ghetto hustler, pimp, and dope dealer that many black audiences identified with in the seventies, lesbianism, apparently in their view another “plague,” would race through the black community in the eighties. It was also stated that homosexuality was “subject to control” by the community, and that love between black women was okay as long as it wasn’t publicly expressed. (This brought to mind the sentiment of white supremacists that they don’t mind black people being free, as long as they confine their freedom to some other planet.)
If the concern of critics had sincerely been the depiction of the cruel black male character Mister, as played by Danny Glover (in a film that is, after all, about a black woman, whose struggle is precisely that of overcoming abuse by two particularly unsavory men), they were late in sounding the alarm. What of black actors, men and women, who play CIA agents? United States spies? Members of COINTELPRO? These characters are used to legitimize real organizations that are involved in assassinating our leaders and heroes around the world and destabilizing and destroying whole Third World countries besides. Yet, because they’re middle class, speak Standard English, are never permitted to sleep with anybody at all, they are considered decent models for us to have.
In my opinion, it is not the depiction of the brutal behavior of a black male character that is the problem for the critics; after all, many of us have sat in packed theaters where black men have cheered (much as white racists have cheered at images depicting blacks being abused) when a black woman was being terrorized or beaten, or, as in one of Prince’s films, thrown in a garbage dumpster. Rather, it is the behavior of the women characters that is objectionable; because whatever else is happening in the novel and the film (and as is true more and more in real life), women have their own agenda, and it does not include knuckling under to abusive men. Women loving women, and expressing it “publicly,” if they so choose, is part and parcel of what freedom for women means, just as this is what it means for anyone else. If you are not free to express your love, you are a slave; and anyone who would demand that you enslave yourself by not freely expressing your love is a person with a slaveholder’s mentality.
Rather than be glad that the ability to love has not been destroyed altogether in us, some critics complain about the “rightness” of its direction, hiding behind such shockingly transparent defenses as “but what will white people think of us?” Since “white people” are to a large extent responsible for so much of our worst behavior, which is really their behavior copied slavishly, it is an insult to black people’s experience in America to make a pretense of caring what they think.
Much of the criticism leveled against me and my work by black men (and some women) has been delivered in arrogance (“I haven’t read the book or seen the movie, but....”), ignorance (“I don’t think any black people back then had wallpaper....”), bad faith (“I think the author just doesn’t like black men; after all, she was married to a white one....”), and without love.k In the end, this simple injustice will be an undeserved burden and worrisome puzzle to our children, our next generation of rebels and poets (dare they create from the heart? think with their own brain? make decisions that in a treacherous world inevitably involve risk or invite attack?), many of whom write to me frequently about both the film and the book and exhibit a generosity of heart and a tolerance of spirit sadly lacking in some of their parents.
Epilogue
Johnnetta B. Cole
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” I remember well that childhood saying, a saying that, even as an adult, I have had more than one occasion to use. I think that my mother taught it to me when I was three years old, when for the first time that I was conscious of, I was called a “nigger.” There is no confusion in my head about that incident when a little white boy called me that name; and perhaps it does not matter if my mother taught me that saying on that occasion or on some other. The point is that I, like all folks who are cast in the state of “the other,” was told early on to stay there; and the message was delivered by many means, including name-calling. Declaring that “names will never hurt me” was just one of several defenses that I was taught to deal with being black and female in America.
What is the relevance of that childhood saying to this brief comment on Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s collection of the writings of African American feminists? In the most obvious sense, it has everything to do with the long and ongoing struggle of African American women who have used multiple ways of saying (using another expression that I grew up with): “Don’t be calling me out of my name.” Or, put another way, I speak here of the struggle of we African American women to “name ourselves.”
In offering an epilogue on this book, I turn our attention to the very title, which places together the terms “African American” and “feminist.” In this pathbreaking collection of articles, Dr. Guy-Sheftall has taken us from the early 1830s to contemporary times. Only since the seventies have black women used the term “feminism.” And yet, it is that concept that she uses to bring into the same frame the ideas and analyses of Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Frances E. W. Harper of the early nineteenth century, and the work of women such as the late Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and bell hooks, who stand on the threshold of the twenty-first century.
Once again, I think of that childhood saying in recalling that the word, the term, “feminism,” is one that large numbers of African American women believe will hurt them. How often I hear a black woman say that she strongly believes in the equality of women and men, but she adds, she is not a feminist. At Spelman College, it is not uncommon for one of our students to speak of her deep commitment to a full professional life in which she is paid as well as any man who does a similar job. But, adds the young sister, I am not a feminist.
Why is it that among so many contemporary African American women there is a dread of being called feminist? It seems to me that it is not at all because of what a feminist perspective can do for black women, but because of what black women falsely assume that feminism will demand of them. Fueled by media misrepresentations and exaggerations of what feminism is and what feminists do, black women,
and indeed many women of color, assume that in order to be a feminist, one must put the struggle against racism after the struggle against sexism. This notion of either/or, the assumption that you must choose only one form of oppression against which you will struggle, is neither necessary nor helpful. Racism, sexism—sometimes we African American women cannot clearly tell where one ends and the other begins. But given the multiple ways in which racism and sexism are “cut from the same cloth,” we cannot afford to fight the oppressions to which we are subjected on only one front. I like to make the analogy that if both of your arms were tied behind your back as you prepared to swim, would you choose to have only one released?
Another factor, not totally unrelated, which continues to prevent the involvement of large numbers of black women in the feminist movement is the extent to which white women have not dealt with their racism. Black women argue that they cannot participate in a movement in which they are devalued because of their race. A corollary is when white women assume that their own realities of what it means to be a woman are the only realities in existence.
Surely the single most tenacious misconception about feminism is that to be a feminist is to hate men. Black women, like white women, know what it is to be the victim of male chauvinism, by black men as well as white men. But an enormous difference in the experiences of black and white women is that black women also witness countless ways in which their fathers, brothers, sons, husbands, lovers—indeed every black man they know, is also victimized by racism. And so African American women feel a bond with black men, which comes from being called that same name, from being denied access to similar opportunities, from so often receiving the poorest of what America has to offer in terms of jobs, education, health care, and housing.
And then there is the question of lesbianism. African American women are certainly not immune to the extensive presence of homophobia in American society, and indeed with African American communities. With the media and certain fundamentalist groups still implying that feminism and lesbianism are synonymous, large numbers of women of every racial and ethnic group turn away from a movement that is in their interest because they assume it was created by, and is currently dominated by, lesbians.
With such resistance to being associated with feminism, what choices do African American women have, especially when the very issues that feminism addresses are not the exclusive possession of white women? White women do not have a monopoly on the issues of equal pay for equal work; of men sharing with women the responsibilities of nurturing children and “keeping house”; of women’s being in charge of their own bodies and their reproductive powers; of bringing to an end the physical and sexual abuse of women. These are the issues of all of us women folks of all racial and ethnic groups, of every sexual orientation, of various ages and economic conditions, of women who are fully abled and those who are differently abled.
One response of African American women has been to insist on defining their struggle for gender equality through the use of words other than feminism. This is the approach taken by Alice Walker in using the word “womanist” and asserting that womanist is to purple as feminist is to lavender.
The alternative approach for black women who see the relevance to their lives of issues associated with the term feminism is the one Beverly Guy-Sheftall has taken in this volume. She has boldly and convincingly illustrated a long history of feminist thought among African American women. She has claimed the name. She has refused to cut off contemporary African American women from the long line of sisters who have righteously struggled for the liberation of African American women from the dual oppressions of racism and sexism. This is the extraordinary value of this book. It is the very first collection of readings on the evolution of black feminism in the United States.
As each African American woman brings closure on reading this volume, having felt the enormous courage, insight, and tenacity of early black feminists of the 1830s, down to the writings of sisters of these very days in which she lives, perhaps it will be possible for each to say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”
Selected
Bibliography
ALBERT, JUDITH CLAVIR and STEWART ALBERT, eds. The Sixties Papers. New York: Praegar, 1984.
ALBRECHT, LISA and ROSE M. BREWER. Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990.
ALLEN, ROBERT and PAMELA L. ALLEN. Reluctant Reformers: The Impact of Racism on American Social Reform Movements. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974.
ALTBACH, HOSHINO. From Feminism to Liberation. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1971.
ANDOLSEN, BARBARA HILKERT. “Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks”: Racism and American Feminism. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986.
ANDREWS, WILLIAM. Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
APTHEKER, BETTINA. Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
BABCOX, DEBORAH and MADELINE BELKIN, eds. Liberation Now: The Writings of the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Dell, 1971.
BAIR, BARBARA and SUSAN E. CAYLEFF, eds. Wings of Gauze: Women of Color and the Experience of Health and Illness. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993.
BAKER, HOUSTON A. J R . Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
BARTLETT, KATHARINE T. and ROSEANNE KENNEDY, eds. Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991.
BEALE, FRANCES. “Slave of a Slave No More.” Black Scholar 6 (March 1975), 2—10.
BEAUVOIR, SIMONE DE. The Second Sex. New York: Knopf, 1953.
BELL, ROSEANN, BETTYE PARKER, and BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL, eds. Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1979.
BELL SCOTT, PATRICIA. Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.
Birth Control Review (September 1919). Special Issue, “The Negroes’ Need for Birth Control.”
“Black Feminism: A New Mandate.” Ms. (May 1974), 99.
“Black Scholar Interviews Kathleen Cleaver.” Black Scholar 3 (December 1971), 54—59. Black Scholar 10 (May/June 1979).
Black Scholar 16 (March/June 1985).
BLAIR, KAREN J. The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868—1914. New York: Holmes and Maier, 1980.
BLANSFORD, VIRGINIA. Black Women and Liberation Movements. Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Arts and Humanities, n.d.
BOBO, JACQUELINE and ELLEN SEITER. “Black Feminism and Media Criticism.” Screen 32 (Fall 1991), 286—302.
BONTEMPS, ARNA ALEXANDER, ed. Forever Free: Art by African American Women, 1862—1980. Alexandria, Va.: Stephenson, 1980.
BORIS, EILEEN. “The Power of Motherhood: Black and White Activist Women Redefine the ‘Political.’ ” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 2 (1989), 25—49.
BOURNE, JENNY. “Towards an Anti-Racist Feminism.” Race and Class 25 (Summer 1983), 1—22.
BOYD, MELBA JOYCE. Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825—1911. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994.
BREEN, WILLIAM J . “Black Women and the Great War: Mobilization and Reform in the South.” Journal of Southern History 44 (August 1978), 421—40.
BROUGHTON, VIRGINIA. Twenty Years Experience of a Missionary. Chicago: Pony Press Publishers, 1907.
BROWN, CYNTHIA STOKES, ed. Ready From Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement. Navarro, Calif.: Wild Trees Press, 1986.
BROWN, ELAINE. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. New York: Pantheon, 1993.
BROWN, ELSA BARLEY. “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke.” Signs 14 (Spring 1989), 610—33.
. “A
frican-American Women’s Quilting: A Framework for Conceptualizing and Teaching African-American Women’s History.” Signs 13 (1989), 921—29.
BROWN, HALLIE QUINN. Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction. Xenia, Ohio: Aldine Printing House, 1926.
BROWN, IRA. “Racism and Sexism: The Case of Pennsylvania Hall.” Phylon 37 (1976), 126—36.
BUCK, PEARL. American Argument with Eslanda Goode Robeson. New York: John Day, 1949.
BURROUGHS, NANNIE. “Minutes, the Women’s Missionary Convention.” Journal of the Twentieth Annual Session of the National Baptist Convention Held in Richmond, Virginia, September 12—17, 1990. Vol. I. Nashville: National Baptist Publishing Board, 1990, 197.
————. “Not Color But Character.” Voice of the Negro 1 (July 1904), 294—98.
CADE, TONI, ed. The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York: Signet, 1970.
CANNON, KATIE S. Black Womanist Ethics. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988.
————. “The Emergence of a Black Feminist Consciousness.” Feminist Interpretations of the Bible, ed. Lett M. Russell. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985.
CARAWAY, NANCIE. Segregated Sisterhood: Racism and the Politics of American Feminism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.