Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (10 page)

This legacy stands behind the war zone in which Morgan attributes Black men and women today living and trying to love. This legacy prompts me to value love as the connecting factor between hip hop and my identity as a Black feminist. Love has been and continues to be a struggle for Black people in the United States. Yet Black people have found ways to love each other and to be together anyway, despite separations and sales of partners during slavery. During the days of segregation and Jim Crow, Black people—especially parents—had to practice tough love to ensure that loved ones would live to see another day and not become the victim of Klan violence.

While the hip-hop generation has the legacy of African-American history to build on and strands of these kinds of still love persist, the hip-hop generation also has its own demons. Life for young Black Americans is different, and the very nature of relationships within hip-hop culture is necessarily going to be expressed differently. What continues to fascinate me is that despite all the historical baggage and contemporary struggles, young Black people are still trying to find ways to love, just as their ancestors did. A recognition of the plight that Black men and women are up against, along with a realization that in spite of it all living and loving go hand in hand, is central to any brand of feminism that is going to work for young Black women.

A new direction for Black feminism would aid in the critique and exploration of the dialogue across the sexes found in rap music and hip-hop culture. Black feminists such as dream hampton, Tara Roberts, Joan Morgan and Eisa Davis have begun to explore the relationship between love and hip hop. Rap music provides a new direction for Black feminist criticism. It is not just about counting the bitches and hoes in each rap song. It is about exploring the nature of Black male and female relationships. These new Black feminists acknowledge that sexism exists in rap music. But they also recognize that sexism exists in America. Rap music and Black popular culture are not produced in a cultural and political vacuum. The systems of oppression that plague the larger society plague subcultures of society as well. Black feminists are looking for ways to speak out against sexism and racism while starting a dialogue with Black men right on the front lines of the battlefield against oppression.

On these front lines I will be fighting and hollering out, “Love feminism but where’s my hip hop?”

 

 

 

Siobhan Brooks

 

 

 

 

 

In 1948, when my mother was sixteen, she had sex and got pregnant with my sister, Connie. She gave birth to her on Valentine’s Day. Teenage pregnancy was seen as deviant behavior (the father had left), so she was removed from the tenth grade in San Francisco and sent back to the South to relearn the proper “traditional values.” My aunt, who was eighteen at the time and a firm believer in traditional values, thought my mother was too young to have a child and that she wouldn’t be able to give my sister a “good” life. My aunt, who had married a man in the military, went South where my sister was being raised by relatives and unofficially adopted her. They moved to Seattle to live a middle-class lifestyle.

In the 1950s my mother—now a single mom—was placed in a mental hospital for infanticide of her second daughter, Tara. No one in the family knew much about Tara; they had never met her. “During that time it was very hard for single mothers, especially Black women, to make it economically,” my aunt told me when I was sixteen and had arrived in Seattle thirsty for family history. My mother had been very poor and my aunt suspected she had had problems getting food for Tara. My mother had taken her to the hospital, claiming that she had fallen, but Tara was already dead when my mother brought her in. The doctors were suspicious of her injuries, suspecting that she had been thrown against the wall. My mother had a nervous breakdown then and was taken to Napa State Mental Hospital. She had schizophrenia.

When I heard this story as an adolescent, I was upset my family had not told me earlier what was “wrong” with my mother. This was the reason why I had never heard from Tara. All this time I had thought she was alive. My mother had told me I had two sisters, but I had only heard from her first daughter, Connie. I didn’t hate my mother because of it, but I was enraged that everyone in the family knew but me. Such stories are not unusual within traditional Black communities, even if they often remain family “secrets.” Abortion wasn’t an option for many poor and working-class Black women like my mom. When I think of the reproductive movement among many white middle-class feminists of the 1960s and 1970s—the black and white television footage of white women holding pro-choice signs, showing hangers with an X through them—I think it was “their” movement. Those feminists seemed to deal with abortion as a choice for middle-class white women. They didn’t deal with the issues of poverty and lack of education, the realities of infanticide and racism or making abortion accessible for all women.

I never discussed abortion with the women in my family, but I knew they were against it, as they were very involved in the church. Abortion and queerness were viewed as sins. My sister Connie had been much more active in the civil rights movement than in the feminist movement, even though she had worked mostly with Black women. She had attended high school in Seattle during the height of 1960s integration and had seen white parents, especially white women, protesting her very presence at a high school their children attended. She did not relate to white feminism because the poverty of women like our mother was never an agenda for them. I think largely the white mainstream feminist movement rarely considered issues of class regarding motherhood. They felt motherhood was imposed on them, and they were fighting to be in the workplace, not recognizing that Black women and other women of color and poor white women were already in the workplace. Some of these women served as nannies for the elite white women, allowing them to attend such “feminist” meetings.

Growing up, I knew better than to get pregnant because of my mother’s warnings about how I would end up on welfare, like most of our female neighbors who were single mothers. Many hadn’t completed their education. My mother did not hold these views because she claimed to be a feminist; she held these views because she knew firsthand the interlocking systems of racism, poverty and sexism. She wanted me to survive and have opportunities that were denied to her growing up. In fact, she never used the words “feminism” or “racism.” We also never talked about my father, whom I have only recently learned was Puerto Rican. Like many kids growing up in the projects to single mothers, I knew that to bring up issues concerning my father might be grounds for punishment.

 

In 1972, when Angela Davis was acquitted of murder charges in Marin County, California, I was born in the Sunnydale Housing Projects in San Francisco. We never discussed Angela Davis in our home. In fact, my mother wanted me to stay away from political activism altogether. Although she didn’t say it, I think she feared that I would be killed, like our leaders of the day who had been killed and arrested during this time. Growing up in the 1970s, it seemed to me as if neither the civil rights movement nor the feminist movement was happening. Few people around me ever talked about them. I remember watching footage of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. giving speeches, Angela with her infamous Afro and fist in the air, Black people being hosed down by the police, white women burning bras and scenes of the Vietnam War.

I remember thinking that we were free now. We weren’t being hosed down, and we didn’t live under the stifling conditions of southern racial segregation with signs that read “Black” and “White.” It never occurred to me, however, that our lives in poverty in the projects was testimony that we were
not
free, that racial segregation still existed. None of our neighbors talked much about politics; rather, they just lived life day to day. They were the least economically affected by these movements.

My mother used to live in the hippie neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury, but the rents increased and she had to move. Being a Black single woman without a high-school diploma, the projects were waiting for her. She worked as a maid for hotels, but when I was born she applied for disability because of her disfigured feet from years of wearing high heels. She was thirty-nine years old. When I was young, she would tell me how she had frantically looked for vacancies and there were none. But Sunnydale always had vacancies. These projects were the largest in San Francisco, built post-World War II, and they looked like red and white row houses. Sunnydale’s residents were also predominately Black. Even then, it had a bad reputation for violence and would later be known as Swampy Desert. I could tell that she felt defeated having to move into the projects, and she tried her best to make it our home. She was also dealing with reentering mainstream society after her stay at Napa.

As a whole, my family never talked about what their lives had been like in the South, before they migrated to the East and West Coast. There are only a few times that my mother talked about race. In one incident she was thirteen and went on the Ferris wheel at Ocean Beach. It was her first time riding it and she was excited. She hopped in and the operator, a young white guy a few years older, buckled everyone’s seat belt but hers. She told me how frightened she was when it reached the top, and she held on for her life as it swayed back and forth. She tried not to look down and felt her sweaty hands loosen with each sway. When it finally reached the end of the ride, she went up to the operator and told him that he had forgotten to fasten her seat belt. When he looked at her with sheer hatred, she realized it had been deliberate.

I remember another time, when I was little. I was sitting on the bus in the front and an old white woman got on and ordered me to move. I didn’t understand why I should get up for her, but my mother instantly swooped me up and placed me in her lap while this white woman sat down. Because we lived in the midst of racial apartheid and gender oppression, we did not need to talk about it—it was our daily reality.

Feminism was not a concept I grew up with. I never thought of myself in a gendered way, even while I was sexually harassed by the neighborhood boys as a teenager and socialized to be a good girl on account of my light skin and hair texture. But I always knew I was Black, largely from the racist media images on television and in the movies—from the maids in Shirley Temple films to the stereotyped characters in
Good Times
to the portrayal of the “apes” in
Planet of the Apes.
We laughed at these shows while knowing the images weren’t really us. This is how I learned to be ashamed of being Black. Even after the Black pride movement, no one wanted to be the maid, mammy or the apes.

When I was young, my mother and I would get dressed up on the first and fifteenth of the month and go downtown, so she could cash her welfare check. I would be happy because I knew she would buy me something from Woolworth’s. She wore her favorite black and white suit, makeup, wig, dark penciled-in eyebrows, orange lipstick that she never applied to the top of her lips and dark, round sunglasses. I didn’t understand that we were on welfare and that was why we stood in long lines with some people who looked “professional” in business suits but most of whom looked homeless and poor, some of whom smelled of urine. These people in the lines were also predominately Black and Latino/a, mainly women.

My mother lived in fear of the welfare agencies that were always trying to locate my abusive father and reincorporate him into our lives. If there were any political discussions in my neighborhood among the women, it was how the welfare agencies kept us all living in a constant state of fear of being cut off. The other discussions were how as Black women we often lived in fear of Black men attacking us, of being homeless and of being “relocated” by the housing authority because of white gentrification. Black women often feared that their sons would be killed by the police, the drug trade or one another; that their daughters would get pregnant, molested in the local preschool or raped. These were the two gendered realities for poor Blacks. I didn’t have a language for what our oppression was, but it seemed never-ending and often normalized.

Women in Sunnydale looked after each other and each other’s children, even if it could be perceived as nosey. They went food shopping for each other, strategized about how to get more money from the welfare system, drove their neighbors’s children to school and looked after the elderly. Such involvement in my well-being helped fill in the gaps due to my mother’s schizophrenia, which often made her frightened of the “outside” world. Because of this fear, she wanted to keep me close at all times (it didn’t help that we lived in the projects, where danger was always unpredictable). When I was eight, for example, an old Black woman with gray hair and glasses saw me playing outside and inquired as to why I wasn’t in school. When I said I didn’t know, she contacted a social worker who helped my mother with the process of enrolling me in school. Because of that neighbor, I started school at eight in the second grade. This is just the way things were in Sunnydale.

 

The term “mental illness” was not used among people in my community or usually within the Black community at large. Only recently we have begun to look at issues of mental illness among Black people, especially Black women, such as depression. Growing up I read little “feminist” literature that dealt with women of color and mental illness, outside of perhaps some fiction. In fact, I never saw my mother as having a mental illness at all because she was functional. I thought all mentally ill people were hospitalized. The books at my high-school library that dealt with mental illness usually talked about white women, as in
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden or Sybil.
Neither the feminist movement nor the civil rights movement had dealt with mentally ill women of color. In the mental health field young Black women are often portrayed as pathological for being single mothers, which is pegged as the cause of our poverty.

One of my earliest memories of my mother was of her talking to herself, and this behavior was considered normal in our household. When I was a child, I tried to mimic it and stopped feeling that this was odd behavior. She would often burst into angry, unpredictable spells of screaming and talking to herself. In fact, she spent a majority of her time alone, smoking in the kitchen and watching television. I would wake up to hear her screaming about things I didn’t understand. How a “nigger” was keeping her down, how she wasn’t going back to Napa, how in the future she would have a better life, that she was really white, how she was supposed to marry a white man and live in a house. Sometimes it sounded as if she was making up words or speaking a language I didn’t understand. She would look off into space with darting eyes, a dazed look across her eyes, wearing a torn green turtleneck and a gray skirt, even though she could afford not to, screaming furiously, sometimes to the point of hoarseness and drooling.

In the presence of other people, she could appear “normal” but would sometimes talk to herself in a handkerchief. I suspect the neighbors may have occasionally heard her screaming or beating me with a belt. Sometimes she would scream at me in the third person and say things like, “Get out of Siobhan’s room, you little nigger!” and throw me out onto the porch. I’m sure that there must have been times when the neighbors heard her or saw this behavior. My mother was one of the oldest tenants in the community, so there was a place for her. Everyone knew her, including our Greek mailman. In our community we did not use the term “child abuse” but we were aware that it existed. My friends’ parents would sometimes suspect that I wasn’t getting enough food because I was underweight. They would invite me over for meals and have me take food home. They never said I was being abused and never made me feel as if there was something obviously wrong with the way we lived.