Words of Fire (40 page)

Being a black woman means frequent spells of impotent, self-consuming rage. Such a spell came upon me when I recently attended a panel discussion at a women artists' conference. One of the panel members, a museum director and a white feminist, had come with a young black man in a sweatshirt, Pro-Keds, and rag tied around the kind of gigantic Afro you don't see much anymore. When asked about her commitment to black women artists, she responded with, ‘Well, what about Puerto Rican women artists, and Mexican women artists, and Indian women artists? ...' But she doesn't exhibit Hispanic women any more than she does black women (do I have to say anything about Indian women?), which is seldom indeed, though her museum is located in an area that is predominantly black and Puerto Rican. Yet she was confident in the position she took because the
living proof of her liberalism and good intentions sat in the front row, black and unsmiling, six foot something and militant-
looking
.

In the spring of 1973, Doris Wright, a black feminist writer, called a meeting to discuss ‘Black Women and Their Relationship to the Women's Movement.' The result was the National Black Feminist Organization, and I was fully delighted until, true to Women's Movement form, we got bogged down in an array of ideological disputes, the primary one being lesbianism versus heterosexuality. Dominated by the myths and facts of what white feminists had done and not done before us, it was nearly impossible to come to any agreement about our position on anything; and action was unthinkable.

Many of the prime movers in the organization seemed to be representing other interest groups and whatever commitment they might have had to black women's issues appeared to take a back seat to that. Women who had initiative and spirit usually attended one meeting, were turned off by the hopelessness of ever getting anything accomplished, and never returned again. Each meeting brought almost all new faces. Overhearing an aspiring political candidate say only half-jokingly at NBFO's first conference, ‘I'm gonna get me some votes out of these niggas,' convinced me that black feminists were not ready to form a movement in which I could, with clear conscience, participate.

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.

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

—HORTENSE SPILLERS

 

T
hough 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:

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.

T
he 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.

W
e 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 herstory of our collective; and (4) black feminist issues and practice.

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.