Words of Fire (75 page)

P
earl Cleage, Atlanta playwright and performance artist, edits
Catalyst,
a literary magazine, and is the author of two books—
Mad at
Miles, which focuses on violence against black women, and
Deals with the Devil,
a collection of personal essays.

“What Can I Say” is a black feminist response to the highly publicized O. J. Simpson case, which involves domestic violence and the double murder of his former wife, Nicole Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. This unfortunate saga provides an opportunity, yet again, for Cleage's exposure of the insensitivity of male politicians to the widespread social evil of violence against women. She offers as a last resort a disturbing solution —women arming themselves—and recalls Ida Wells-Barnett's admonishment to blacks at the turn of the century to defend themselves in the face of unrestrained racist attacks.

I
have been trying to think of something sensible to say about the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. But I can't, because this is nothing new. Men kill and torture and slap and stab and beat and abuse their wives and ex-wives and girlfriends and ex-girlfriends and lovers and ex-lovers every day. Nicole Brown Simpson is more real to us only because we heard her terrified sobbing on the recording of the 911 call where O. J. can be heard clearly in the background, screaming, threatening, cursing ...

She is more real because so many of us thought we knew and loved her ex-husband, although all we ever saw was his football skill and his smiling public face, which seems to have very little to do with the rampaging maniac kicking in her door at midnight, secure in the knowledge that the police were unlikely to restrain or arrest him.

But this isn't news to me. Nicole Simpson's death doesn't really provide any new information about male violence toward women and, so far, it hasn't given us the impetus to develop any new strategies to confront the problem either. The media is still filled with pictures of angry, signcarrying women marching on Congress, or picketing the state legislature or appealing to the president.

There we are, asking the powerful men who make the laws that govern our lives to pretty please focus on this issue for a minute if they can take a second from their busy schedules because, hey, we're dying out here. Well, that's just not enough. We've done all that asking and picketing and being indignant on the six o'clock news before, and there are still more animal shelters in this country than there are facilities for battered women on the run from their abusers.

And even though the most common advice given to women who are victims of nonstranger male violence is to leave him/move out/cut him loose, statistics show that a woman who leaves is seventy-five percent more likely to be killed by her abuser than a woman who stays.

So we've got a couple of options, it seems to me. We can sit around and bemoan the fact that this horrible thing happened, and is happening, make our picket signs, and head for City Hall; or we can decide to think about all of it differently. Having long ago lost my willingness to place my fate and the fate of my sisters in the hands of any men, the decision to think about it differently is my clear first choice. Let's not try to take on the whole subject at first. Let's start with two obvious things: self-definition and self-defense.

Generally, male crimes against women with whom they are, or have been, intimate, are grouped together under the term “domestic violence.” Notice how the phrase sounds somehow less horrible because of that word “domestic” in it? Just the word “domestic” calls up images of lovely little homes, presided over by a strong, generous dad and a smiling, wellorganized mom. Things that happen in such an environment might be a little unpleasant from time to time, but that's about as bad as it gets. The word violence tacked on the end seems almost benign.

So let's redefine our terms and call things by their proper names. Instead of saying O. J. Simpson was guilty of “domestic violence” back in October of 1993 when Nicole Simpson made the 911 call we've all heard, what if we charged him with breaking and entering? How about assault and battery? How about attempted murder? How about rape? (I know, I know ... but you don't think men terrorize women the way O. J. Simpson was terrorizing Nicole Simpson and then wait to be invited to have sex, do you?)

These itemized crimes sound a lot more serious than the catchall of “domestic violence.” We're used to people who commit these terrible crimes being punished severely. Sent to jail. Electrocuted. Hanged by the neck until dead. Sometimes these perpetrators are even killed in self-defense by their intended victims who were able to protect themselves when called upon to do so.

All of these punishments for these terrible crimes are societally sanctioned and community condoned. Nobody goes to prison for shooting somebody who kicked in the back door of the house and is coming up the steps, probably armed, and certainly intending to do bodily harm to the home owner. Unless the person doing the breaking and entering is an ex-husband. In that case, the woman is supposed to call 911 and hope for the best.

Well, I heard one of Nicole Brown Simpson's many 911 calls, and I heard O. J. screaming and raging in the background, and 911 is not enough. Which brings us to the question of self-defense. I think she should have been armed. I think she should have bought herself a gun and learned how to use it. I think she should have gotten comfortable with her ability to use that gun and defended herself and her children by any means necessary. Period.

I am afraid as I write those words. Afraid that my brothers will read it and be angry with me. Afraid that I will be accused of male bashing, of judging O. J. too harshly before he's even had a trial. Of being a part of bringing down another good brother. Even worse, I can hear the howls of outrage that I could even think of advocating that black women arm themselves when our community is already an armed camp.

But as you think about the whole idea of self-defense for women who are experiencing male violence in their homes, I ask you to remember the words of crusading African American woman journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells. Wells was distraught and terrified after the murderous turn-of-the-century riot in Memphis, Tennessee, where two of her friends were killed and black folks were dragged from their houses by white mobs and beaten in the streets. But she channeled that horror into a renewed determination to take personal responsibility for her own safety.

“A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every home,” Wells told her community. “When the white man knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have a greater respect for Afro-American life.”

What if we substitute gender for race? “When the male knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his female victim does, he will have a greater respect for female life.”

It sounds so terrible to me even as I write the words. So angry and vengeful. I don't want to write about female self-defense. I want to write about love and healing and black nationalism and wholeness. But then a voice whispers deep inside me: What would I be writing about if Nicole Brown Simpson had been my daughter?

Or yours.

E
velynn Hammonds, professor in the program in science, technology, and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of the few black women historians of science in the country. She attributes the development of her feminist consciousness to the racism and sexism she experienced as a graduate student in MIT's physics department, which she describes in Sandra Harding's anthology
The “Racial” Economy of Science
(1993) during an interview with Aimee Sands. She is one of the few black academics doing feminist critiques of science, and writing about the situation of black women scientists from a feminist perspective. One of her major research interests has been blacks and AIDS. She, along with Robin Kilson, convened the historic conference “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name, 1894—1994,” which brought over two thousand mostly black women academics to MIT, January 13—15, 1994. Hammonds reminded the audience at the opening plenary session that there were parallels between 1894, when black women's morality was being maligned, and 1994, when black women, such as Anita Hill and Lani Guinier, were being demonized in the media. Hammonds is on leave from MIT with a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University's School for Advanced Studies.

I
n 1990, every two hours a black person died from HIV disease.
²
Needless to say, in 1992 the situation is worsening. Between 1981 (when the first cases of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) were reported in the United States) and 1991, 15,493 cases in women have been reported. The number of cases in women increased from 6.6 percent of the total in 1985, to 11.5 percent of the total reported cases by the end of 1990.
³

Fifty-two percent of these women are African American; twenty-seven percent are white; twenty-one percent are Hispanic; and one percent are classified as unknown. Under the category “unknown” are the cases of AIDS among Native American and Asian American women. By 1987, AIDS had become the eighth leading cause of death in women of reproductive age in the United States. Today, it is the leading cause of death for black women 15—44 years old in New York and New Jersey.
⁴

In spite of the fact that the majority of women with AIDS are African American, the devastating toll that AIDS is taking on the lives of these women has yet to be perceived as a national crisis. Neither scientific, epidemiological, nor historical or cultural studies about AIDS have addressed
the question of why African American women are at such greater risk for HIV infection and why their survival rates are so abysmally low. Now that the percentages for women with AIDS have more than doubled in the last two years (in some cities women make up twenty-five percent of the AIDS cases), research on women is in process. One might wonder, however, whether the government's recent focus on women is not mainly directed at their reproductive lives, that is, women become the risk factor for HIV in children. In this essay I want to look at a number of factors that have supported the invisibility of African American women with AIDS. First, I look at examples of the representation of these women in the media, in particular focusing on how media reports shape and reflect the social context of the epidemic with regard to African American women with AIDS. Secondly, I discuss how AIDS is affecting the lives of poor, African American women. Many analyses of the AIDS epidemic have noted that much of our contemporary response, both in terms of methods of controlling the epidemic and confronting the stigma associated with this disease, is linked to earlier practices and responses to the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the first half of the twentieth century. In the final section, I raise a number of questions about how African American women were viewed with regard to this history of sexually transmitted diseases. In sum, I argue that African American women are disproportionately vulnerable to the ravages of AIDS in part because of the long-term and persistent failure of public health practices to control sexually transmitted diseases in the African American community.

It goes without saying that gender has not been at the center of discussions or research about AIDS. The way in which AIDS was first conceptualized as a disease of gay men, then a disease of various “risk groups,” e.g., intravenous drug users, foreclosed the recognition of women as potentially a significant proportion of the AIDS caseload.
⁵
This is even more apparent when examining gender within racial categories. In the broadest sense, little attention has been paid to the plight of African American women with AIDS because they are women. Overall, the medical establishment and most activist groups have focused on men, who make up the larger numbers of people with AIDS.
⁶
And as feminists and other activists have documented, women have historically received unequal treatment in the United States health care system. African American women, as evidenced by their higher rates of many diseases, have long been among the least served by the health care system. AIDS appears in African American communities at the end of a long trail of neglect in the Reagan-Bush years —including the cut-off of federal funds for abortion, jobs, housing, and the failure to control
sexually transmitted diseases
. The conditions that African American women live under in their communities, their roles as mothers, wives, workers, and lovers, all shape their responses to AIDS.

The impact of HIV infection on African American women and other women of color has received an odd sort of coverage in the media. On the one hand when the threat of AIDS to women is discussed, no mention is made of African American women. When African American women are discussed, they are relegated to the drug abuser category or partners of drug abusers or bad mother category for passing AIDS onto their children. A good example of this appeared in August 1987 in an article by Jane Gross, which appeared on the front page of the
New York Times
. The headline read: “Bleak Lives: Women Carrying AIDS,” followed by “Women Who Carry the AIDS Virus: Most Are Poor, Many Are Reckless.”
⁷
I refer to this article in part to underline how little has changed since it appeared in 1987 and because it so clearly lays out the assumptions about women who become infected with HIV.