Barbara Smith
B
arbara Smith is one of the most important black feminist theorists and activists to emerge during the 1970s. She coedited (with Patricia Bell Scott and Gloria T. Hull) the first black women's studies anthologyâ
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave.
She also cofounded (with Audre Lorde) the first publishing collective by women of color, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Her path-breaking essay “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” defined black feminist literary criticism and underscored the importance of sexuality in reading black women's literature. She also taught one of the first black women writers classes in the academy at Simmons College in Boston. Her guest editorship (with Lorraine Bethel) of
Conditions Five: The Black Women's Issue
(1979) provided black lesbian feminists an outlet for their creative expression at a time when they did not have publishing outlets within the black press. The publication of
Home Girls
generated important dialogue within the mainstream feminist movement and the black community about the significance of black feminist discourse in liberation struggles. Smith is presently completing a book on the history of black lesbians.
SOME HOME TRUTHS ON THE CONTEMPORARY BLACK FEMINIST MOVEMENT
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n the fall of 1981, before most of
Home Girls
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was compiled, I was searching for a title. I'd come up with one that I knew was not quite right. At the time I was also working on the story which later became “Home” and thought that I'd like to get some of the feeling of that piece into the book. One day while doing something else entirely, and playing with words in my head, “home girls” came to me. Home Girls. The girls from the neighborhood and from the block, the girls we grew up with. I knew I was onto something, particularly when I considered that so many black people who are threatened by feminism have argued that by being a black feminist (particularly if you are also a lesbian) you have left the race, are no longer a part of the black community, in short no longer have a home.
I suspect that most of the contributors to
Home Girls
learned their varied politics and their shared commitment to black women from the same sources I did. Yet critics of feminism pretend that just because some of us speak out about sexual politics at home, within the black community, we must have sprung miraculously from somewhere else. But we are not strangers and never have been. I am convinced that black feminism is, on every level, organic to black experience.
Black women as a group have never been fools. We couldn't afford to be. Yet in the last two decades many of us have been deterred from identifying with a liberation struggle that might say significant things to women like ourselves, women who believe that we were put here for a purpose in our own right, women who are usually not afraid to struggle.
Although our involvement has increased considerably in recent years, there are countless reasons why black and other Third World women have not identified with contemporary feminism in large numbers
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The racism of white women in the women's movement has certainly been a major factor. The powers-that-be are also aware that a movement of progressive Third World women in this country would alter life as we know it.
As a result there has been a concerted effort to keep women of color from organizing autonomously and from organizing with other women around women's political issues. Third World men, desiring to maintain power over “their women” at all costs, have been among the most willing reinforcers of the fears and myths about the women's movement, attempting to scare us away from figuring things out for ourselves.
It is fascinating to look at various kinds of media from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when feminism was making its great initial impact, in order to see what black men, Native American men, Asian American men, Latino men, and white men were saying about the irrelevance of “women's lib” to women of color. White men and Third World men, ranging from conservatives to radicals, pointed to the seeming lack of participation of women of color in the movement in order to discredit it and to undermine the efforts of the movement as a whole. All kinds of men were running scared because they knew that, if the women in their midst were changing, they were going to have to change too. In 1976 I wrote:
Feminism is potentially the most threatening of movements to black and other Third-World people because it makes it absolutely essential that we examine the way we live, how we treat each other, and what we believe. It calls into question the most basic assumption about our existence, and this is the idea that biological, i.e., sexual, identity determines all, that it is the rationale for power relationships as well as for all other levels of human identity and action. An irony is that among Third-World people biological determinism is rejected and fought against when it is applied to race, but generally unquestioned when it applies to sex.
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In reaction to the “threat” of such change, black men, with the collaboration of some black women, developed a set of myths to divert black women from our own freedom.
MYTHS
MYTH No. I: THE BLACK WOMAN IS ALREADY LIBERATED.
This myth confuses liberation with the fact that black women have had to take on responsibilities that our oppression gives us no choice but to handle. This is an insidious, but widespread, myth that many black women have believed themselves. Heading families, working outside the home, not building lives or expectations dependent on males, seldom being sheltered or pampered as women, black women have known that their lives in some ways incorporated goals that white middle-class women were striving for, but race and class privileges, of course, reshaped the meaning of those goals profoundly.
As W. E. B. Du Bois said so long ago about black women: “... our
women in black had freedom contemptuously thrust upon them.”
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Of all the people here, women of color generally have the fewest choices about the circumstances of their lives. An ability to cope under the worst conditions is not liberation, although our spiritual capacities have often made it look like a life. Black men didn't say anything about how poverty, unequal pay, no child care, violence of every kind including battering, rape, and sterilization abuse, translated into “liberation.”
Underlying this myth is the assumption that black women are towers of strength who neither feel nor need what other human beings do, either emotionally or materially. White male social scientists, particularly Daniel P. Moynihan with his “matriarchy theory,” further reinforce distortions concerning black women's actual status. A song inspired by their mothers and sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Oughta Be a Woman,” with lyrics by June Jordan and music by Bernice Johnson Reagon, responds succinctly to the insensitivity of the myth that black women are already liberated and illustrates the home-based concerns of black feminism. Its final stanza states:
A way outa no way is flesh outa flesh
Courage that cries out at night
A way outa no way is flesh outa flesh
Bravery kept outa sight
A way outa no way is too much to ask
Too much of a task for any one woman.
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This myth goes hand in hand with the one that the black woman is already liberated. The notion that struggling against or eliminating racism will completely alleviate black women's problems does not take into account the way that sexual oppression cuts across all racial, nationality, age, religious, ethnic, and class groupings. Afro-Americans are no exception.
It also does not take into account how oppression operates. Every generation of black people, up until now, has had to face the reality that no matter how hard we work we will probably not see the end of racism in our lifetimes. Yet many of us keep faith and try to do all we can to make change now. If we have to wait for racism to be obliterated
before
we can begin to address sexism, we will be waiting for a long time. Denying that sexual oppression exists or requiring that we wait to bring it up until racism, or in some cases capitalism, is toppled, is a bankrupt position. A black feminist perspective has no use for ranking oppressions, but instead demonstrates the simultaneity of oppressions as they affect Third World women's lives.
MYTH No. 3: FEMINISM IS NOTHING BUT MAN-HATING.
It is important to make a distinction between attacking institutionalized, systematic oppression (the goal of any serious progressive movement) and attacking men as individuals. Unfortunately, some of the most widely distributed writing about black women's issues has not made this distinction sufficiently clear. Our issues have not been concisely defined in these writings, causing much adverse reaction and confusion about what black feminism really is.
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This myth is one of the silliest and at the same time one of the most dangerous. Antifeminists are incapable of making a distinction between being critically opposed to sexual oppression and simply hating men. Women's desire for fairness and safety in our lives does not necessitate hating men. Trying to educate and inform men about how their feet are planted on our necks doesn't translate into hatred either. Centuries of antiracist struggle by various people of color are not reduced, except by racists, to our merely hating white people. If anything it seems that the opposite is true. People of color know that white people have abused us unmercifully, and it is only sane for us to try to change that treatment by every means possible.
Likewise the bodies of murdered women are strewn across the landscape of this country. Rape is a national pastime, a form of torture visited upon all girls and women, from babies to the aged. One out of three women in the United States will be raped during her lifetime. Battering and incest, those home-based crimes are pandemic. Murder, of course, is men's ultimate violent “solution.” If you think that I exaggerate, please get today's newspaper and verify the facts.
If anything is going down here it's woman-hatred, not man-hatred, a veritable war against women. But wanting to end this war still doesn't equal man-hating. The feminist movement and the antiracist movement have in common trying to insure decent human life. Opposition to either movement aligns one with the most reactionary elements in American society.
MYTH No. 4: WOMEN'S ISSUES ARE NARROW, APOLITICAL CONCERNS. PEOPLE OF COLOR NEED TO DEAL WITH THE “LARCER STRUGGLE.”
This myth once again characterizes women's oppression as not particularly serious, and by no means a matter of life and death. I have often wished I could spread the word that a movement committed to fighting sexual, racial, economic, and heterosexist oppression, not to mention one that opposes
imperialism, anti-Semitism, the oppressions visited upon the physically disabled, the old and the young, at the same time that it challenges militarism and imminent nuclear destruction is the very opposite of narrow.
All segments of the women's movement have not dealt with all of these issues, but neither have all segments of black people. This myth is plausible when the women's movement is equated only with its most bourgeois and reformist elements. The most progressive sectors of the feminist movement, which includes some radical white women, have taken the above issues, and many more, quite seriously. Third World women have been the most consistent in defining our politics broadly. Why is it that feminism is considered “white-minded” and “narrow,” while socialism or Marxism, from verifiably white origins, is legitimately embraced by Third World male politicos, without their having their identity credentials questioned for a minute?
MYTH No. 5: THOSE FEMINISTS ARE NOTHING BUT LESBIANS.
This may be the most pernicious myth of all, and it is essential to understand that the distortion lies in the phrase “nothing but” and not in the identification lesbian. “Nothing but” reduces lesbians to a category of beings deserving only the most violent attack, a category totally alien from “decent” black folks, i.e., not your sisters, mothers, daughters, aunts, and cousins, but bizarre outsiders like no one you know or ever knew.
Many of the most committed and outspoken feminists of color have been and are lesbians. Since many of us are also radicals, our politics, as indicated by the issues merely outlined above, encompass all people. We're also as black as we ever were. (I always find it fascinating, for example, that many of the black lesbian-feminists I know still wear their hair natural, indicating that for us it was more than a “style.”)
Black feminism and black lesbianism are not interchangeable. Feminism is a political movement and many lesbians are not feminists. Although it is also true that many black feminists are not lesbians, this myth has acted as an accusation and a deterrent to keep nonlesbian black feminists from manifesting themselves, for fear it will be hurled against them.
Fortunately this is changing. Personally, I have seen increasing evidence that many black women of whatever sexual preference are more concerned with exploring and ending our oppression than they are committed to being either homophobic or sexually separatist. Direct historical precedent exists for such commitments. In 1957, black playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry wrote the following in a letter to the
Ladder,
an early lesbian periodical:
I think it is about time that equipped women began to take on some of the ethical questions that a male-dominated culture has produced and dissect and
analyze them quite to pieces in a serious fashion. It is time that “half the human race” had something to say about the nature of its existence. Otherwiseâwithout revised basic thinkingâthe woman intellectual is likely to find herself trying to draw conclusionsâmoral conclusionsâbased on acceptance of a social moral superstructure that has never admitted to the equality of women and is therefore immoral itself. As per marriage, as per sexual practices, as per the rearing of children, etc. In this kind of work there may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active antifeminist dogma.
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