The control over these racist messages about women was totalitarian. Goliath stood firm. Another blow to my spirit was the fact that representations of women that I knew, the woman that I was becoming were lacking. Who would write their stories, who would tell their tales, who would produce news reports asking questions about their plight? I wavered on the tightrope between religion and spiritual freedom, finally choosing to follow my spirit. My spirit motivated me to choose a journalism major in college, and I began to ask questions for African-American women at work.
Angela Davis, 1960s activist and professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz, came to speak at a rally on campus. I was expecting for her to light a fire under all of us, encouraging us to take our fight for a more egalitarian society to the streets! What she said, with a mellow vibe and tone that can only be attributed to older, wiser, black women who’ve been down roads and seen things we never will, was that our activism was not to mirror the activism of old. This generation faces the challenge of defining activism in a United States that no longer responds to sit-ins and marches. She suggested that our strength would come from building coalitions with other people of color and like-minded folks.
But first I had to build coalitions with the different parts of myself. The sexism within the African Student Alliance on my campus (which mirrored the kind of sexism I’d witnessed in my church and my local African-American community) was pushing out the feminist me. At the same time, I found feminist groups so desperate to hang on to some credibility in the mainstream, pushing against my focus on African heritage and pushing to keep the door closed to the closet behind which I hid my love for women. It seemed less and less likely that I would find a place in the world to fully be myself. I worried that the definition of feminism that my college professor had so eloquently laid out would never become a reality for me.
Of course, it was my mother who set me straight. She told me to stop worrying about what people said and to do what I was here to do. She told me I was an artist, and she said it with pride in her voice. With that, I began to put pen to paper, paint to canvas, voice to air and break down all the systems of thinking and accepted ways of being that excluded some part of myself. I found that while what my mother thought of me was paramount to my spiritual survival, what the world thought no longer mattered. Though I didn’t share her religious fervor any longer, I still respected her more than any other person.
I didn’t know any other women who’d worked a graveyard shift in various hospitals for more than twenty years to feed, clothe and care for five hungry girls. She’d worked overnight so she’d be home when we got out of school. I had never encountered any other women who would share her meager supply of groceries with the single mother across the street or spend the small amount of free time afforded a woman with five daughters sitting with the elderly folks in our church and taking their blood pressures. She was even willing to challenge our church on some of its interpretations of the Bible and didn’t force us to follow those interpretations, as most parents in the church did. When my father moved out, she continued to maintain the household without blinking an eye (at least I never saw her blink). Somehow she created time to go back to college and attain various certificates to further her nursing career. More deep and motivating than any books on feminist theory, I’d spent my entire life face to face with a feminist powerhouse who offered neither explanation nor apology. She taught me an abiding love for self and for humanity—and she taught by example. So I went to work.
I created a cable-access show called
Point of View
to discuss politics. A local show, it aired in four nearby Bay Area cities. For every negative representation I saw of people of color, I wrote a show that allowed us to shine. For every report I read that asked no questions about the plights of African-American women, I created a show and asked the questions myself. The walls between me and effecting change in the politics of oppression, racism and sexism that pervade the United States were starting to crumble. I wrote, produced, sang, painted and created ways to say, “We are here. We are diverse. We are good.” I knew I was on the right path when a man approached me in the BART train station and told me he’d taped and shown my Black History show to a group of students at a seminar he gave in Sacramento.
The momentum created by following my mother’s lead and becoming a woman of action gave me the strength to slowly open the doors to my closet. My passivity in loving created such a stark contrast to my passion in every other area, I could no longer ignore it. Spoken word provided a platform for me to be honest about falling in love again and again with women. My love of women was the one area in my life where fear of judgment, reprisal and loss still ruled me. Not only had I been raised in a religion that preached that same sex love was abominable, but I had grown up in a community with strictly defined male and female roles, and in a country that openly and lawfully discriminates against same-sex couples. Even feminists seemed obsessed with not being characterized as lesbians. What would it mean about my overall identity if I acknowledged this truth about my makeup? What doors would close? What would my mother think?
I found that just as my questions about our religion had not gone away, and just as my need to seek out my heritage had not been assuaged, in the same way the need to tell the stories of African-American women had risen to the top, so would my orientation reverberate through my spirit and force its way into my voice, my paintings, my writing and my reality. As the 1990s ended and the twenty-first century began, I reached a kind of wholeness. I sat with the woman who had given me all the tools and examples I needed to be strictly myself. I drank coffee and ate eggs and looked into the eyes of the woman who made feminism real for me when I didn’t even have words to describe it. I told her that I was in love, that it was not a fad, that I planned to spend my life and raise children with another woman. She didn’t accept it. Because of her I knew she didn’t have to. I was free to define myself.
How Sexual Harassment Slaughtered, Then Saved Me
Kiini Ibura Salaam
The New Orleans streets of my adolescence were a bizarre training ground where predatory men taught me that—in public—no part of me was safe from comment. At ages twelve and thirteen I was trained to keep my guard up by voices shouting lascivious phrases at me. Clothes were inconsequential, yet I inferred that the miniskirts and tight jeans of my preteen years would worsen the verbal attacks. Repeated lewdness can do that to you. The constancy of male aggression hammered in the suggestion that something bad could happen to me.
Indoctrination
Catcalling men are often a monumental challenge for adult women to navigate; for an adolescent, catcallers can be down right terrifying. After a time the simple act of walking past a group of men unnerved me. The abrupt break in conversation as their eyes crawled over me announced that my body had their attention for a few seconds. These were not casual appraisals, nor were they a simple appreciation of the female form. They were loud (silent) proclamations that informed me of the entertainment and sexual titillation I provided them, just by walking by. By the time my breasts and hips grew in, tense interactions with men on the street became normal. Not easy to deal with, not acceptable, not invisible, but expected.
I was never taught techniques to protect myself from the whispering lips of adult men. In the absence of safety, I developed tactics to handle the pressure.
1. If there is a group of men ahead, cross the street.
2. If there are groups of men on both sides of the street, choose the older ones. They might find you too young and let you slip by without comment.
3. Do not make eye contact.
4. Do not make any verbal or physical motion that can be perceived as an invitation for conversation.
5. If someone speaks to you politely, speak back while staring straight ahead.
Sometimes my tactics could not buy me escape. If I was stopped by a red light or waiting at a bus stop, I was easy prey for the next level of intrusion. Under the pretense of polite interaction between strangers, men often launched into proprietary interrogations. “What’s your name?” “How old are you?” “Where do you live?” “Do you have a boyfriend?” These inquires paved the way for forced conversations. To my ears the questions were staccato demands that chafed my self-control and independence. The men delivered these queries as if my participation in the conversation and the choice of whether or not I would be carted off was completely up to them. If I resisted the interaction, I was seen as abnormally hostile or angry without reason. I would answer their questions in a terse sullen manner, looking around for a possible exit. I hated my compliance. I wanted to destroy the assumption that their interest in me eclipsed my own disinterest. I wanted to smash the expectation that I would supply details about my personal life. I wanted to obliterate my own paralysis, my own inability to comfortably remove myself from their proximity.
Without knowledge of feminist doctrines and theories, I knew there was something wrong with catcalling. I don’t remember the word “feminist” being used in my house, yet my parents injected the same power, pride and self-governance into my and my sisters’ upbringing as they did in my brothers’. When my mother would go away on her Black women’s retreats, my sisters, brothers and I shared equal household duties. Decorating the walls of my childhood home were prints proclaiming “If it’s not appropriate for women, it’s not appropriate at all” and “Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” which was a print of the cover art from my father’s book of the same title. My home environment convinced me that feminism is the natural result when women are taught their worth.
As an adolescent, no one taught me that catcalling was anti-woman, yet I instinctively felt that it squelched my autonomy and personal power. I quickly discovered the only pass card I had to convince men to leave me alone was being possessed by another man. Hostility or disinterest on my part only resulted in surreal arguments about my right to say “no.” I could fabricate names and phone numbers or I could make up boyfriends or husbands, but I couldn’t simply say “no” without a fight. Having to lie to protect my legitimate disinterest was ridiculous to me. The men could continue with their pathologies, but the woman I wanted to be wouldn’t bow to their demand. Some mornings I woke up adamant. I’d swear to myself, If a man hits on me today, I will not lie. My disinterest is worth something and they are going to respect me. On one of those days a young man approached my friend. She smiled and demurred and told him she was married. He turned to me and said, “What about you?”
“What about me?” I asked.
“You married too?”
“No.”
“You got a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Well, give me your phone number,” he said.
This is the approach of men on the street. They cast a wide net, fishing for a response. Who the woman is, is irrelevant. Catcallers see the street as a grocery store where they can shop for entertainment, titillation and interaction, but this is my life. I have to deal with every joke, invitation and comment thrown my way. Multiple catcalls become a deluge of harassment that quickly overwhelms.
“You don’t even like me,” I told him, “You like my friend.”
“That don’t mean nothing,” he said to me, “Stop being so cold. Give me your number.”
I refused. With each rejection he grew more belligerent, pulling out the anger that keeps women in line. I feared the verbal attacks that might follow my refusal to give away access to myself. I feared the male anger that was always seething under the surface of men’s solicitous remarks.
“See,” the young man said, “that’s what’s wrong with Black people today. Black women don’t have time for the Black man.”
I grabbed my friend’s hand and walked away, once again angry at the male intrusion into my life. I was upset that I couldn’t stand on a corner without getting into a fight about sex and race. The men of my youth habitually positioned female disinterest as a hostile act of emasculation or genocide, while their harassment was defended as healthy male behavior. I will always remember the drunk vagrant, who—when my sister refused him—said, “You must like white men.” What warped psychology would jump to such a conclusion? When my sister’s choice not to date an alcoholic is considered a rejection of Black men as a whole, the relationship between men and women can only be seen as fractured.
By the time I reached college, I was fraught with anger and questions. I wondered who set up this predator and prey relationship. I wanted to know how I could walk by and not be judged by men. The questions clouded my mind. Do men gain power from making me feel unsafe? Do they get off on treating me like a pet or a toy, a nonhuman entity to play with just because I happen to pass by? Is it fun? Does it ever work? Do they ever wonder what catcalling feels like to me? Do they ever get bored with acting out the same old tired roles? What are men asserting about themselves by catcalling? And how can I opt out?
The Slaughter
During my junior year of college I went to the Dominican Republic to study Spanish. A few weeks after my arrival, I went to an outdoor concert with some friends. When we arrived, a man grabbed me and started dancing a merengué with me. His laughter told me he just wanted to have fun. Giggling, I joined in. It was exactly how I imagined a street party should be. Loud music, laughing crowds, strangers dancing together. My friends and I moved on into thicker crowds. As we paused momentarily, trying to determine how to get closer to the stage, a hand reached out and squeezed my vagina. My head snapped in the direction of the hand, but I was surrounded by a crowd of blank faces. I couldn’t tell who had molested me.
I might have written it off as the type of assault you can expect in a rowdy street crowd. But it happened to me again at an upscale dance club in Santiago. My friends and I were squeezing past a row of men on our way to the bathroom, when another hand reached out and touched my vagina. When I made it to the bathroom, I told my friend about the abuse, she said, “Yeah, he did it to me too.”
After a few months hanging out in the clubs, I realized these sexual intrusions were partly tied to race. My two white women friends were always the first asked to dance, then the Chicana woman, followed by Black friends with perms. Eventually I identified two types of men who would dance with me: the pity partners and the molesters. The pity partners saw that I had barely danced all night and, out of the kindness in their hearts, took me out on the dance floor. Invariably these men would comment, “Oh, you dance so well!” but at the end of the song, they would walk me back to my seat and never return for another dance. The molesters were men who used the closeness of the merengué as an excuse to press their bodies against mine. I would push them away, keeping my arm locked, struggling to hold them at a distance for the duration of the song. If they were too insistent, I would have to leave the dance floor before the song was over.
Interviews with my girlfriends revealed that the level of abuse I—the only Black woman with natural hair—was suffering was unique. Each of them had had one or two experiences that bothered them, yet all levels of harassment happened to me. The boys on the corner saying “Comb your ugly hair!” The guy reaching out of a passing bus to touch my hair. The man who stopped by the side of the road to pee and decided to turn around and display his genitals to me and my friends. The ancient tradition of throwing berries at a woman when she passes, to show that you think she is beautiful. Just as skin color is an easily identifiable marker for unequal treatment, my natural hair singled me out for sexist disrespect.
My fashion sense died in the Dominican Republic. I began to experiment with using my wardrobe to make me invisible. Baggy T-shirts and oversized pants became the order of the day. Although I understood that clothing does not cause sexual abuse, I hoped bigger clothing could stop it. I needed to believe I had some control over my own safety. But when a man reached out and casually squeezed my breast through a big, shapeless T-shirt, I learned that these acts were beyond my control. My hand shot out in retaliation, but I hit only air. The man walked on, as if molesting a woman while passing her in the street was an everyday occurrence.
When I relayed this story to my host mother, she said, “He must have thought you were Haitian.” My host mother’s dismissive remark revealed the Dominican belief that nationality (Haitianness) was a legitimate explanation for abuse. Haitian women were the only other adult women I saw with natural hair during my entire nine months in the Dominican Republic (I was in the city of Santiago in 1992, apparently in later years study-abroad students made links with Black women’s groups in the capital who identified as Black and had natural hair). I had unknowingly installed myself into a country whose hatred for all things African was infamous. My body learned of this hatred as my boundaries were crossed again and again and again.
My last clash with a Dominican man happened at three o’clock in the morning. My friend and I made the questionable choice of walking down a deserted side street on our way home from a club. We heard footsteps behind us and immediately stepped to the side. A man walked by, rubbing his hand along my friend’s arm as he passed. We had become so accustomed to Dominican men taking liberties with our bodies that we were not alarmed by this. Anger flared, we talked about how fucked up the men were, but we didn’t think for one moment we were in any danger. We were wrong.
After the man reached the corner—in hindsight I realize he was probably checking to see if there would be any witnesses—he made an about-face and confronted us with a gun. “Don’t scream,” he demanded. Everything else he said was a blur. My Spanish comprehension evaporated as my mind scrambled to make sense of the assault. He continued mumbling as my friend and I backed away. “Leave us alone,” I repeated in a flat voice over and over again. We backed into a corrugated metal fence. The man pulled the shoulder of my top down to my elbow, exposing my breast. My gaze fell to his pelvis. I noticed his fly was open and his penis was dangling. Although my spirit was battered by the myriad of molestations I had suffered during my time in the Dominican Republic, I was not so defeated as to not fight back. I kicked, pushed, did what I could to let him know he wouldn’t violate me while I was alive. We struggled until the man stopped fighting. He stared into my eyes, then turned and walked in the other direction. My friend pulled me toward home and we ran.
My host family was not helpful. “If he didn’t shoot, he wasn’t going to hurt you,” they said. “He must not have had bullets in the gun.” I wondered if that was true. I wondered how many women he had raped with a bulletless gun.
When I got back to the United States, my teachers noticed I was quiet and withdrawn. My mother’s friend said I looked shorter. I slept more and smiled less. When I faced emotional challenges—the same challenges I had previously surfed gracefully—I found myself breaking down into tears. I returned home hysterically afraid of walking too close to men on the street. What I needed then was a feminism that could cover me with a protective cloak. I needed a feminsm that could return my body to me. I needed a feminism that would nestle in the hearts and minds of men. Any political movement is only as advanced as the individuals it represents. Ultimately, the successes of feminism can only be measured by individual women’s quality of life. My quality of life on the street was low, and I needed a practical application of feminism so the streets would be, once again, safe for me.