Words of Fire (45 page)

I would like a lot more people to be aware that Lorraine Hansberry, one of our most respected artists and thinkers, was asking in a lesbian context some of the same questions we are asking today, and for which we have been so maligned.

Black heterosexual panic about the existence of both black lesbians and black gay men is a problem that they have to deal with themselves. A first step would be for them to better understand their own heterosexuality, which need not be defined by attacking everybody who is not heterosexual.

Above are some of the myths that have plagued black feminism. The truth is that there is a vital movement of women of color in this country. Despite continual resistance to women of color defining our specific issues and organizing around them, it is safe to say in 1985 that we have a movement of our own.

I have been involved in building that movement since 1973. It has been a struggle every step of the way, and I feel we are still in just the beginning stages of developing a workable politics and practice. Yet the feminism of women of color, particularly of Afro-American women, has wrought many changes during these years, has had both obvious and unrecognized impact upon the development of other political groupings and upon the lives and hopes of countless women.

The very nature of radical thought and action is that it has exponentially far-reaching results. But because all forms of media ignore black women, in particular black feminists, and because we have no widely distributed communication mechanisms of our own, few know the details of what we have accomplished. The story of our work and contributions remains untold.

One of the purposes of
Home Girls
was to get the word out about black feminism to the people who need it most: black people in the U.S., the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa—everywhere. It is not possible for a single essay to encompass all of what black feminism is, but there is basic
information I want every reader to have about the meaning of black feminism as I have lived and understood it.

In 1977, a black feminist organization in Boston of which I was a member from its founding in 1974, the Combahee River Collective, drafted a political statement for our own use and for inclusion in Zillah Eisenstein's anthology,
Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism.
In our opening paragraph we wrote:

The concept of the simultaneity of oppression is still the crux of a black feminist understanding of political reality and one of the most significant ideological contributions of black feminist thought.

We examined our own lives and found that everything out there was kicking our behinds—race, class, sex, and homophobia. We saw no reason to rank oppressions, or, as many forces in the black community would have us do, to pretend that sexism, among all the “isms,” was not happening to us.

Black feminists' efforts to comprehend the complexity of our situation as it was actually occurring, almost immediately began to deviate some of the cherished myths about black womanhood, for example, that we are “castrating matriarchs” or that we are more economically privileged than black men. Although we made use of the insights of other political ideologies, such as socialism, we added an element that has often been missing from the theory of others: what oppression is comprised of on a day-to-day basis, or, as black feminist musician Linda Tillery sings, “... what it's ... really like/To live this life of triple jeopardy.”
⁹

This multi-issued approach to politics has probably been most often used by other women of color who face very similar dynamics, at least as far as institutionalized oppression is concerned. It has also altered the women's movement as a whole. As a result of Third World feminist organizing, the women's movement now takes much more seriously the necessity for a multi-issued strategy for challenging women's oppression. The more progressive elements of the Left have also begun to recognize that the promotion
of sexism and homophobia within their ranks, besides being ethically unconscionable, ultimately undermines their ability to organize. Even a few Third World organizations have begun to include the challenging of women's and gay oppression on their public agendas.

Approaching politics with a comprehension of the simultaneity of oppressions has helped to create a political atmosphere particularly conducive to coalition building. Among all feminists, Third World women have undoubtedly felt most viscerally the need for linking struggles and have also been most capable of forging such coalitions. A commitment to principled coalitions, based not upon expediency, but upon our actual need for each other is a second major contribution of black feminist struggle. Many contributors to
Home Girls
wrote out of a sense of our ultimate interdependence. Bernice Johnson Reagon's essay, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” should be particularly noted. She wrote:

The necessity for coalitions has pushed many groups to rigorously examine the attitudes and ignorance within themselves that prevent coalitions from succeeding. Most notably there has been the commitment of some white feminists to make racism a priority issue within the women's movement, to take responsibility for their racism as individuals, and to do anti-racist organizing in coalition with other groups.

Because I have written and spoken about racism during my entire involvement as a feminist and have also presented workshops on racism for white women's organizations for several years during the 1970s, I have not only seen that there are white women who are fully committed to eradicating racism, but that new understandings of racial politics have evolved from feminism that other progressive people would do well to comprehend.
¹¹

Having begun my political life in the Civil Rights movement and having seen the black liberation movement virtually destroyed by the white power structure, I have been encouraged in recent years that women can be a significant force for bringing about racial change in a way that unites oppressions instead of isolating them. At the same time the percentage of white feminists who are concerned about racism is still a minority of the movement, and even within this minority those who are personally sensitive and completely serious about formulating an
activist
challenge to racism are fewer still.

Because I have usually worked with politically radical feminists, I know
that there are indeed white women worth building coalitions with, at the same time that there are apolitical, even reactionary, women who take the name of feminism in vain.

One of the greatest gifts of black feminism to ourselves has been to make it a little easier simply to
be
black and female. A black feminist analysis has enabled us to understand that we are not hated and abused because there is something wrong with us, but because our status and treatment is absolutely prescribed by the racist, misogynist system under which we live.

There is not a black woman in this country who has not, at some time, internalized and been deeply scarred by the hateful propaganda about us. There is not a black woman in America who has not felt, at least once, like “the mule of the world,” to use Zora Neale Hurston's still apt phrase.
¹²
Until black feminism, very few people besides black women actually cared about or took seriously the demoralization of being female
and
colored
and
poor
and
hated.

When I was growing up, despite my family's efforts to explain, or at least describe, attitudes prevalent in the outside world, I often thought that there was something fundamentally wrong with me because it was obvious that I and everybody like me was held in such contempt. The cold eyes of certain white teachers in school, the black men who yelled from cars as my sister and I stood waiting for the bus, convinced me that I must have done something horrible.

How was I to know that racism and sexism had formed a blueprint for my mistreatment long before I had ever arrived here? As with most black women, others' hatred of me became self-hatred, which has diminished over the years, but has by no means disappeared. Black feminism has, for me and for so many others, given us the tools to finally comprehend that it is not something we have done that has heaped this psychic violence and material abuse upon us, but the very fact that, because of who we are, we are multiply oppressed.

Unlike any other movement, black feminism provides the theory that clarifies the nature of black women's experience, makes possible positive support from other black women, and encourages political action that will change the very system that has put us down.

The accomplishments of black feminism have been not only in developing theory, but in day-to-day organizing. Black feminists have worked on countless issues, some previously identified with the feminist movement and others that we, ourselves, have defined as priorities. Whatever issues we have committed ourselves to, we have approached them with a comprehensiveness
and pragmatism that exemplify the concept “grass roots.” If nothing else, black feminism deals in home truths, both in analysis and in action. Far from being irrelevant or peripheral to black people, the issues we have focused on touch the basic core of our community's survival.

Some of the issues we have worked on are reproductive rights, equal access to abortion, sterilization abuse, health care, child care, the rights of the disabled, violence against women, rape, battering, sexual harassment, welfare rights, lesbian and gay rights, educational reform, housing, legal reform, women in prison, aging, police brutality, labor organizing, anti-imperialist struggles, antiracist organizing, nuclear disarmament, and preserving the environment.

Frustratingly, it is not even possible to know all the work black and other Third World women have done, because as I've already stated, we have had no consistent means of communication, no national Third World feminist newspaper, for example, that would link us across geographic boundaries.
¹³
It is obvious, however, that with every passing year, more and more explicitly feminist organizing is being done by women of color. There are many signs:

Women of color have been heavily involved in exposing and combatting sterilization abuse on local, state, and national levels. Puertorriqueñas, Chicanas, Native American, and Afro-American women have been particularly active, since women in these groups are most subject to forced sterilization.

For a number of years, health issues, including reproductive freedom, have been a major organizing focus. Within the last year, a Third World women's clinic has been established in Berkeley, and a black women's Self-Help Collective has been established in Washington. The National Black Women's Health Project in Atlanta held its first conference on black women's health issues in 1983, bringing together two thousand women, many of them low-income women from the rural South.

Black and other Third World women have been centrally involved in all aspects of organizing to combat violence against women. Many women of color first became involved in the women's movement through this work, particularly working/volunteering in battered women's shelters. Because battering is so universal, shelters have characteristically offered services to diverse groups of women. There are now shelters that serve primarily Third World communities, such as Casa Myrna Vazquez in Boston.

In 1980, the First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence was held in Washington, D.C. Many precedent-setting sexual harassment cases have been initiated by black women, both because black women are disproportionately harassed in school and on their jobs, and also because it seems that they are willing to protest their harassment. A group in Washington, D.C., the African Women's Committee for Community
Education, has been organizing against harassment of black women by black men on the street. In Boston, the Combahee River Collective was a mobilizing force in bringing together Third World and feminist communities when twelve black women were murdered in a three and a half month period during 1979.

Third World women are organizing around women's issues globally. Activists in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, India, New Zealand, England, and many other places are addressing issues which spring simultaneously from sexist, heterosexist, racist, imperialist, and economic oppression. Some of these individuals and groups specifically identify as feminist. For example, in the Virgin Islands there are a growing number of battered women's organizations on various islands. Some Afro-American women and Virgin Islanders have worked together on issues of violence against women. In Jamaica, Sistren, a community-based women's theater collective founded in 1977, organizes around basic survival issues including sexual violence and economic exploitation. In Brazil, black women are active in the women's movement and have been especially involved in neighborhood organizing among poor women. Maori, Pacific Island, and other black women in New Zealand have been doing extensive organizing on a local and national level. The first National Hui (conference) for black women was held in September, 1980 in Otara, Auckland and the first Black Dyke Hui occurred in June, 1981.