1. THE INVISIBILITY OF THE BLACK WOMAN
First of all, I would like to thank the Palmares Cultural Foundation for inviting me to participate in this wonderful meeting of black women, especially for the pleasure of honoring Lélia Gonzales, founder of Grupo Nzinga – Coletivo de Mulheres Negras do Rio de Janeiro. I think she was one of the most important figures in the black movement in Brazil. I feel privileged to be here and share our struggles with you, especially as we move into the next millennium.
In this meeting, you are discussing the issue of the forced invisibility of black women. I know how it goes. At the same time that the black woman is considered the mother of Brazilian culture, she is at the same time invisible. And you know that in the United States black women have been fighting for decades to end this invisibility. Look at the examples of contemporary black women writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.
In one sense we have come a long way and in another we remain invisible. I am part of a committee that nominates people to receive the award given by a black entity called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and I was startled to find among the recipients a number so little of black women.
Even when we look at the situation of black women in Hollywood, we observe that they play a role that resembles the “Black Mother”. The roles played by Whoopi Godberg, for example, are almost always characters who facilitate relationships between white people or initiate white children into adulthood.
Another point I would like to address is the fact that, when black women acquire more visibility, it is always about middle-class women. I would like to go back to the 19th century, when there were black women's clubs that used the following slogan: "Pull up while we move forward". This to explain the current relationship between middle-class and poor black women based on a new project. Today, in the US, due to increasing impoverishment, poor black women are held responsible for their own misery. Single mothers are usually in the Social Security services and are placed as the breeders of poverty and marginality.
I would also like to share with you the idea of a project that has included the participation of several black women. It brings together women writers and filmmakers who have come to work alongside Social Security single mother women. This union was carried out because we believe that some of us still have a voice. Some of us are more visible, we can write and publish, we are journalists. And some of us can shoot documentaries.
So, black women writers and filmmakers teamed up with single mothers and these began to tell their life story, which is taken to the black press, to black magazine and the press in general. This is why we, middle-class women, decided that we have a responsibility towards women who are victims of poverty and that we are going to lift them up, show solidarity or, as they say in Brazil, “give them a helping hand”.
One problem we are currently facing is the following: as black people ascend socially, they have left their own community behind. They don't want to establish any relationship with the black women on Social Security, nor to be related to the black people who are in prison. However, some of us are saying: “they are our brothers, and if we acquired a certain degree of visibility, it was on the shoulders of those who stayed behind”.
2. THE LEGACY OF THE BLUES AND THE BLACK INFLUENCE
As this conference is specifically proposed to deal with the image of black women in their cultural relationship, from now on I will talk about a research where I try to rescue the relationship between the cultural and the political (2). I think it's important that we look at history in an unorthodox way. When the names of our feminist ancestors are called today, we realize that they were educated, schooled. They were women who could write. They have organized several women's clubs in the past.
But what happened to the women who didn't write? What happened to the poor working-class woman? Is there any way to recover this woman's contribution to black feminism? That's why I started looking at and analyzing the blues, I observed women blues singers and realized that they found ways to talk about feminism, talking, for example, about sexuality. Middle-class women were not allowed to talk about sexuality in public. That was taboo. In the context of the blues, however, any theme related to sexuality could be explored.
It seems to me that this issue of sexuality is linked to the struggle of black people for freedom. Why do I say that? Because, if we look at the conditions of black people immediately after abolition in the USA (in 1865), we realize that they did not have economic freedom. There was demand for “40 acres of land and a mule”, but few were able to receive the 40 acres of land. Most blacks had neither economic nor political freedom. So, in the immediate aftermath of slavery, there were three ways in which blacks could be free: the right to come and go and leave plantations, the right to education, for which many gave their own lives, and the right to choose their sexual partners. This freedom from sexuality embodies many other aspirations for freedom. Since they had neither political nor economic freedom, there was a certain degree of freedom in their sex lives. When we take the feminist slogan “the personal is political” and analyze it in light of the history of black people as slaves, we realize that the slogan takes on an entirely different meaning.
The blues was the first artistic form to emerge after abolition. And the black women of the 1920s emerged as blues singers, as workers, as professionals, and that was how they recorded songs. The issue of historical research is very important for our contemporary struggle. And we academics and intellectuals need to rescue this contemporary struggle for justice. The great contemporary challenge in the USA is to make the connection between the public and the private, between the personal and the political, in order to establish the relationship between domestic and public violence.
For many years our motto was black unity, or perhaps what is called racial solidarity between black men and women. Often, however, Black women's silence in the face of domestic violence has greatly damaged their own lives. Black unity as it has been formulated protects a partner in the black movement who beats women from publicly answering for his attitude, always arguing that “dirty clothes are washed at home”. We know that partner violence against women is just as bad as police violence.
The female blues singers of the 1920s knew how to talk about these relationship issues, and they did so openly. Even considering that they didn't have the vocabulary we have today to deal with the political aspect of domestic violence, they never hid it, never pretended that it didn't happen. And many of these women who sang shared with other women the fact that, within a situation of violence, what they should do is get out.
It is necessary to learn to establish the relationship between gender, race, class and sexuality. We have to fight for physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. We know that black American women have much to learn from our Brazilian sisters about spiritual health. And learn to revere our ancestors, allow them to feed us so we can continue our fight. We have to evoke spirits like Aqualtume, Beatriz Nascimento and the name of Lélia Gonzales. To conclude this part, I will recite a poem often used to inspire black women in the USA:
"I stand up.
You can write my story with your bitterness and lies.
You can throw me in the mud.
But still, like dust, I rise.
Do you think my sensuality bothers you?
Why are you so full of resentment, so saddened and discouraged?
Because I'm going to walk like I have oil wells in my living room.
Like the moon and the sun, with the certainty of the tides and with hope.
Jumping high, still I rise.
You want to see me broken and with my head and eyes down,
With shoulders slumped,
With tears and weakened by my crying.
Does my harshness offend you?
Don't take this as a bad thing.
Because I smile like I have gold mines in my backyard.
You can throw me your words.
You can cut me with your gaze.
You can kill me with your hate.
But still, like air, I rise.
Does my sensuality bother you?
This comes as a surprise.
I dance like I have diamonds where my thighs meet.
Out of the shame of history I rise high.
I find the past that is rooted in pain.
I stand up. I am a black ocean
Going high and long, swelling, I hold back the tides.
And, putting aside the nights of terror and fear,
I get up in the morning that is wonderfully clear,
I rise bringing the gifts my ancestors gave me,
I am the slave's dream and hope,
I stand up."
3. THE JOINT FIGHT FOR FREEDOM
The NAACP was founded in the early 20th century in the USA to defend the rights of black people. With some of its wings very conservative and others more progressive, it is not possible to characterize the organization as a whole. Recently, for the first time in history, a woman was elected president of this entity, and I think this is important. In the American black community there is a very strong desire to be part of the struggle. The identity of the black community was largely built on the marches and actions of the black movement. From the 1990s, however, we no longer have a unified black movement around a struggle.
The famous One Million Man March attracted many people with that desire to join the fight, but what we know now is that the movement of the 60's was masculinist. Just as they conquered many things, they made women invisible, they represented black freedom as male freedom. They assumed that, once men got together to solve their problems, practically all the problems of the black community would be solved. And that's not true. On the other hand, there was no political analysis of what men's problems were. The organizers of the March called the men to go to Washington (USA) with the appeal for the examination of conscience of each one and basically proposed to affirm them as heads of the family. Meanwhile, women were asked to stay at home and look after the children.
But they did not accept this kind of proposal. The great challenge, therefore, is to make the connection between the private and the public, between the personal and the political, and to accept the black woman as an equal partner in this fight for freedom. We have a long way to go.
4. THE ARTIST'S ROLE AND THE POLITICAL STRUGGLE (3)
Historically, in the US, there has been an idea that artists exist to entertain people. In this way, one loses sight of the profound role of artists, which is to bring about a new awareness, since they have visual and performance resources, use the body as a form of artistic expression, in short, have ways of saying things that the political discourse is not enough. When talking about a person who became famous in Europe, for example, this is important if he is a spokesperson for the fight against racism.
This attitude for the Brazilian artist is important because Brazil finds the idea of the myth of racial democracy abroad. Oral tradition is very central to our culture. But this also has its own problems and contradictions, such as the commodification of oral culture, as is the case with black music in the US today. If this makes music available worldwide, it creates, however, a certain hegemony of African-American culture, making it more difficult to recognize the original culture of each diaspora country, especially when looking at the kind of message that comes through the songs. , mainly in the young age group.
5. THE POLITICS OF THE LEFT AND THE RACIAL ISSUE
Leftist organizations have argued within a Marxist and orthodox view that class is the most important thing. Of course class is important. It is necessary to understand that class informs race. But race, too, informs class. And gender informs the class. Race is the way class is lived. In the same way that gender is the way race is lived. We need to reflect a lot to understand the intersections between race, class and gender, in order to realize that among these categories there are relationships that are mutual and others that are crossed. No one can assume the primacy of one category over the others.
6. HOW BLACK FEMINISTS RELATE TO WOMEN IN GENERAL AND BLACK WOMEN IN PARTICULAR
The feminist movement is so diverse that I don't know if we can talk about a single feminism. We have feminists everywhere. We have feminists in the Republican Party who are very politically conservative. And even among black feminists, it is necessary to recognize the great diversity that exists. Some black women refer to themselves as womanists, using Alice Walker's term. Others are feminists and do more practical work, for example against sexual violence. There are also black feminists who are academics, like Patricia Hill Collins, who has written a book on black feminist thought. Among all these types, it is evident that they do not necessarily agree with each other, since there are many differences.
The challenge is to know how to work with differences and contradictions. The difference can be a creative port. We do not need homogeneity or sameness. We don't need to force everyone to agree with a certain way of thinking. This means that we need to learn to respect the differences of each way of thinking, using all the differences as a “creative spark”, which would help us to create bridges of communication with people from other fields. For example, when people talk about black women in Great Britain, they mean Asian women, Caribbean women, etc.
7. THE BLACK WOMAN AND THE ISSUE OF HEALTH
I am a member of the National Black Women's Health Project. Such a project is not only about physical health, but also about mental, emotional and spiritual health, seeking to see health in a holistic way. The Geledés Institute knows about this project because it has participated in several conferences on the subject (4).
Thus, at the same time that we fight for a public health system, we seek to create concepts to discuss the specific issues of the health of black women, who are more affected by diabetes and hypertension and die more from cervical and breast cancer than white women. .
There is also the issue of self-esteem that we are addressing in this conference. And, in a way, even some of us who made it to a certain point still feel really bad about ourselves, feel inferior. And women who feel this way will find it very difficult to help the most impoverished, on whose shoulders they lean in order to ascend. In this project we have groups of women who talk a lot about the problems that are bothering them.
8. THE GENERATION OF ACTIVISTS IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
The notion of civil rights became important in terms of defining struggle in the 1960s. How can one politically assess such a situation? History gives us the ability to evaluate the past from the present. And when we look at history, we always want to emphasize what was most positive and we forget to see the contradictions. However, if we looked at the contradictions or the problems, it would help us to move forward, to move forward.
The Civil Rights movement was very important, but it had a problem regarding the role of women in the struggle that was not recognized. The women organized the movement, they organized the boycott of Montgomery (Alabama) in the year 1955. And what everybody knows is the name of the young pastor that the women asked him to act as spokesman for the Civil Rights movement, a man named Martin Luther King Jr.
No one knows the names of the women who did the organizing work. To the extent that people revere Dr. King, must at the same time criticize the movement for its failure to recognize the central role that women played. See an example in the image of Rosa Lee Parks. She is represented as a woman who refused to give way to a white man on the bus because she was tired. What is generally said is that she was a domestic worker returning from work and, because of her fatigue, disobeyed the racist southern city ordinance. And so the movement originated in 1955. As if she didn't know what she was doing.
But the truth is, she was a politically aware person, she was organized and she knew exactly what she was doing. Before her, two other women had already been arrested in the same circumstance, but these two previous cases were unsuccessful due to certain legal conditions. Rosa Parks was the third attempt and with success. This explains the masculinism of the Civil Rights movement that we must evaluate and criticize.
We must also recognize that after thirty years the Civil Rights discourse does not have the same power. The same discourse used by Luther King to call for justice for all is now used by conservatives to propose the dismantling of affirmative action. The recent initiatives that took place in California – and which are called the “California Civil Rights Initiative” – aim to overturn achievements of affirmative action on the grounds that they would contain proposals that discriminate against white men in favor of blacks, women and people of color in general.
Thus, the same kind of language used by the Civil Rights movement is being used today by conservatives to protect the privileges of white men. All the achievements we have obtained invite us to rethink and reconsider possible future victories. Nothing is written in stone. What is progressive in one context may be extremely retrograde at another point in history.
9. THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW UTOPIA
In the US, some of us on the left relied on the type of discussion that took place in the Communist Party to help us understand our projects. Today I am no longer a member of the Communist Party. Some of us were struggling to democratize the Party internally. We were in the leadership and we took on the fight for democratization, but we were not authorized to run for elected office. We couldn't and we lost that fight. That's why some communists and other socialists built a new articulation, a network called "Committee of Correspondence" of the revolutionary era in the USA.
I still believe in socialism, even considering that socialist countries no longer exist as they used to. It must be seen that capitalism is still very developed. Indeed, globalized capitalism is insinuating itself into people's lives in a way that has never happened before. Just look at the international economy in terms of sex tourism and the way in which working women are exploited within the Americas. Now international corporations use the black population as their mouthpiece. Take the example of Michael Jordan and Nike, a company that exploits black workers in the US, Indonesia and Vietnam. In the US, we are running a campaign to boycott Nike. There we have a T-shirt with the slogan "Don't do it".
I really think utopia is when we move in new directions and visions. Utopia in the sense that we need visions to inspire us and move forward. This has to be global. We need to find a way to account and know how we are going to link our struggles and visions and arrive at some conclusions about how to develop new revolutionary values and, mainly, how to disentangle capitalist values from democratic values.
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* Angela Yvonne Davis was born in 1944 in Birmingham (Alabama). A militant of racial and class issues, she was arrested in 1970, accused of participating in armed actions promoted by the Black Panthers. Judged innocent in 1972, after almost two years in prison, she is currently a professor in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she seeks to articulate, in a new perspective, the categories of class, race and sex, aiming at social liberation of the oppressed.
(1) Conference held on December 13, 1997, in São Luís (MA), at the 1st Lélia Gonzales Cultural Journey, promoted by the Centro de Cultura Negra do Maranhão and by the Grup
Black Women Mãe Andreza.
(2) The research turned into one of Angela Davis' books, Blues legacies and black feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holliday (Editor's Note).
(3) Both this and the following sections resulted from questions posed to the author in the debate held after the presentation.
(4) Headquartered in São Paulo (SP), the main objective of Geledés – Instituto da Mulher Negra is to combat the various forms of racial discrimination. For more information, see www.geledes.com.br (Editor's Note).
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This text was taken from the Gé portal
