Before we March on Washington tomorrow (Guiding Principles and Vision of the march), let us learn from our ancestor’s mistakes and victories. All of our collective liberation is at stake. We cannot march on without listening to our sisters of color and learning from our herstory.
As I, a white middle class woman of Irish and German decent, prepare to march behind the leadership of poor and working class women of color (as part of the #ItTakesRoots to #GrowTheResistance Women of Color & Allies Contingent) at a march initially started by white feminists, I am thinking a lot about herstory. I am thinking about the many times throughout herstory, from the suffrage to the birth control movements, that white woman have missed opportunities (by organizing in isolation, being stubborn, and focused on their own self interest at the expense of the needs of others) to listen to women of color, learn from their struggles, and organize in solidarity with them. Our herstory is filled with moments when we (white women) have called for unity—thus ignoring the differences in our experiences of oppression—and expediency—thus silencing the voices and needs of our sisters of color—and as a result have betrayed our sisters of color. Our herstory is also rich with white women who organized with women of color for collective liberation and against racism and white supremacy. I will be marching on their shoulders tomorrow.
I spent most of my life ignorant to this herstory. It is not what I learned from my history books or in my suburban bubble; it is what I learned from Angela Davis a few years ago when I read her book Women, Race, & Class.
Thank you Angela Davis—you changed my life!
I am sharing my notes and reflections from a few years ago with you today because I owe it to Angela Davis and all the women of color feminists who have organized for our collective liberation. I owe it to my white sisters who have yet to learn and grow from this herstory, but are so excited to do so; I can’t wait to organize with you. Lastly, I owe it to our future generations—all of our freedom depends on it. None of us can uproot and overcome cis-heteropatriarchal white supremacist capitalism alone (thank you bell hooks and Herukhuti for this phrasing). We will no longer be divided and conquered.
Note: In 2017, I am giving up perfectionism and pushing myself towards more vulnerability. As such, I am sending this reflection and summary from a few years ago out to you today without hours of edits and updates. I welcome your questions and criticisms. I offer this to you with love.
From the first pages of Women, Race, & Class, it was clear to me that Black women in America had a different experience of womanhood than white women. The bulk of the book explores the times that white women did and did not work towards liberation and ending racism and white supremacy. First I will explore the times when they did not do so.
Although many white women took on the cause of abolition and learned a lot about their own oppression and organizing techniques by doing so, they were not committed to (Black) liberation overall. The white abolition movement and the women's rights movement unquestioningly accepted the capitalist economic system; they saw slavery and male supremacy as an immoral flaw in their otherwise acceptable society. They wanted freedom from slavery, but couldn’t imagine a Black male vote over their own. At the turn of the century, racism began to take on a rising influence. In 1893, the year of the fatal NAWSA resolution, the Supreme Court reversed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. With this decision, Jim Crow and Lynch law, a new mode of racist enslavement, received judicial sanction. These institutional supports and ideological justifications built the foundation for modern racism. More than any other time since the Civil War, consistent and principled protest against racism were needed because of the disenfranchisement of Black people in the South, the legal system of segregation, and the reign of lynch law. Yet instead of solidarity, women suffragists allowed racism, eugenics, and the cult of motherhood to creep into their movement.
Many suffragists, including the famous Susan B. Anthony, capitulated to racism “on the ground of expediency." Her and her peers wanted to keep white supremacy in place and argued for giving “women of the race” the vote. Suffragists chose "women" over racial and labor solidarity again and again. At the time, Black women constituted more than two million of eight million workingwomen, but were excluded from the women’s suffrage movement. Despite their exclusion, they still supported the suffrage cause until the end.
Davis doesn’t only provide the names and stories of the white women who betrayed their Black sisters for their own interests. She also shares endless examples of people working towards liberation and organizing across gender, class, and racial lines. She argues that when working towards liberation and in sisterhood with Black women, white women could accomplish much.
Additionally, she provides examples of Black men who advocated for women’s voting rights and leadership. Frederick Douglas supported women’s right to vote even when campaigning for the Black right to vote. He saw the two as interconnected. Uniquely for Black and white men, WEB DuBois supported female leadership, not just for increasing black leadership, but for strengthening political life overall.
More so, Angela Davis points to the power Black women could have had if they organized across class lines. For this example, she turns to the herstory of women’s clubs and the club movement. In that late 19th century affluent black women formed clubs and called a convention in response to waves of lynchings and sexual abuse. Although they shared a similar amount of free time to their white counterparts, these affluent Black women were less motivated by considerations of charity or by general moral principles than by the demands of their people's survival. Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell led the Black women’s club movement. Wells was known for her agitation-confrontation techniques. Terrell, who was extremely educated, advocated for Black liberation through written and spoken word, logic, and persuasion. Davis reflects that they were individually powerful and monumental in their time, but could have "moved mountains" if united (136). Learning from some of these mistakes and specifically the ones of white labor organizations, the National Colored Labor Union included women.
Similarly, Communists learned their lessons and joined the fight against racism. According to communist leader and historian William Z Foster, "during the early 1920's, the Party.... was neglectful of the particular demands of Negro women in industry" (152). Over next decade, communists started to realize the centrality of racism in US society. Upon this realization, they developed a serious theory of Black Liberation and "forged a consistent activist record in the overall struggle against racism" (152).
This section of the book is particularly inspiring for Davis dedicates it to Black and white female anarchists, communists and socialists that worked against racism and towards liberation. Here is a brief overview of their stories and contributions:
Lucy Parsons: a Black anarchist who argued that racism and sexism (since all were victims of capitalist exploitation) were overshadowed by the capitalists' overall exploitation of working class.
Ella Reeve Bloor, a.k.a. “Mother” Bloor: deeply principled white ally of the Black Liberation movement. Two highlights of her story are from the 1930s. During the early 1930s, she was attached by a racist mob in Loup City, Nebraska at a meeting for/about poultry-farm employees who were striking. She was arrested and stayed in jail with her Black comrades despite receiving bail. Additionally, she took four black women with her to an International Women's Conference in Paris in 1934.
Anita Whitney: a wealthy woman born in 1867 in San Francisco. She was simultaneously on the executive committee of the NAACP while also serving in the Communist and Socialist parties. She was known for talking to white women club members about lynching and their responsibility for righting this from herstory. For this, she was arrested and charged with criminal syndicalism and sent to jail in San Quentin.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: a white Socialist who gave her first speech when sixteen. She was active in the socialist and communist movement for sixty years. She was a leading I.W.W. (International Workers of the World) organizer. As an aside, the IWW was initially the only labor union in the U.S. with a policy of forthright struggle against racism. Because the IWW was industrial and women were mostly kept from industrial work and Black men were mostly agricultural workers, few Blacks were involved despite Black liberation stance. Flynn became active in the Communist Party in 1937, and after spending a weekend with Black communists, developed an understanding of the central role of Black Liberation within the overall battle for emancipation of working class. This became central to her life’s work. She constantly reminded her readers that black women suffered most as Blacks, workers, and women. During the McCarthy era she was arrested with three other women, one of them was Claudia Jones, a black woman from Trinidad who immigrated to the United States as a young girl. Spending time in jail and connecting with Black women there further cemented her commitment to the black liberation struggle.
Claudia Jones: as mentioned above she was born in Trinidad and immigrated to the United States as a kid. In1949, she wrote an article in Political Affairs called, "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women." She argued that Black women's leadership has always been indispensable to their peoples fight for freedom. She pointed out many historical examples of Negro Women leading labor struggles, and noted that it was seldom mentioned that Negro Women sparked sharecroppers’ strikes of the 1930s. More so, she called on progressives and trade unionists to recognize Black domestic workers efforts to organize. She’s quoted as saying, "madam-maid relationships feed chauvinist attitudes and make it incumbent on white women progressives, and especially Communists, to fight consciously against all manifestations of white chauvinism, open and subtle" (169).
After sharing such an inspirational narrative of women’s labor organizing across racial lines, Davis opens up a discussion about rape, racism and the myth of the Black rapist. This section and the following section about the birth control movement blew my mind. I grew up being told to lock my door when a Black man walked by. I felt a sense of fear when an unknown Black man walked past me at night. I’ve learned over the years that my fear stems from racism and white supremacy and the way that our society, the media, and my family perpetuate it, but I’ve never known the history and systems that led to my misconception of Black men. Davis breaks it down and clearly outlines the origin of the myth of the Black rapist and how we all suffer from this myth.
Frederick Douglass pointed out that there was NO black male rape of white women during the Civil War when white men were away. After slavery ended, rape was used as justification for lynchings, which were a "valuable political weapon" for maintaining white supremacy (185). At first lynchings were justified as a preventive measure to deter the Black masses from rising up in revolt. Later when it became evident that these conspiracies, plots, and insurrections were fabrications that never materialized, white’s needed to modify their justification. This is where the myth of the Black rapist comes in. This myth also led to decrease in white support for the cause of Black equality.
Like she does so often and so astutely, she ties all of this to capitalism, "the colonization of the southern economy by capitalists from the North gave lynching its most vigorous impulse” (190). The superexploitation of blacks made their labor cheap. Resentment became the justification for poor whites’ performing lynchings. As a result, white workers’ hostilities towards employers diffused. Assenting to lynching, gave white workers racism solidarity with the oppressors. This was a "critical moment in the popularization of racist ideology" (190).
Yet again, this could have been a moment for white women to say and do something. They didn’t do so until 1930, when they founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching in response to appeals of massive numbers of Black women.
What white women then and now do not realize is how their own safety and liberation is affected by this wrongful blaming of rape on Black men and the racist-inspired rape inflicted on Black women by white men. As Davis explains throughout this section of the book, there is a "historical knot binding Black women-systematically abused and violated by white men-to Black men-maimed and murdered because of racist manipulation of the rape charge" (173).
When white women feel more comfortable reporting rapes by Black men then by the white men they live and work with, they suffer and they myth of the Black rapist continues. From slavery to the Vietnam War, rape was used as a tool of exploitation and domination. “The license to rape emanated from and facilitated the ruthless economic domination that was the gruesome hallmark of slavery" and continued beyond slavery (175). When white men used sexual coercion to gain power over Black women and got away with it, Davis argues, we must assume, “their conduct toward women of their own race could not have remained unmarred” (177). More so, she shares that in the U.S. and other capitalist countries, rape laws as a rule were created for protection of upper class men, whose daughters and wives might be assaulted. What happened to working class women was irrelevant.
When reading the herstory and impact of rape on Black Americans and the herstory of the birth control movement which I am about to summarize, it became more and more clear to me how many misses have been made by white women. In getting to know the stories and sufferings of Black women, I, as a white woman, can better understand why for example, Black women may not be the first to get on board for asking for rape relief from police and judges. Too many innocent black men have been arrested and executed on rape charges. Davis concludes her chapter, with a clear demand, the “anti rape movement must be anti racist and anti capitalist” (201).
Despite the fact that all women need it, the birth control movement has not united women of different social backgrounds and rarely have the movement's leaders addressed the concerns of working class women. The Abortion Rights Campaign did not have women of color in leadership. Had they taken the time to understand the stories and experiences of women of color, they may have done things entirely differently. Instead they blamed women of color and assumed their fight against racism overburdened them and/or they lacked a consciousness of the centrality of sexism. In actuality, black people's suspicion came from a herstory of involuntary and state-sanctioned sterilization. In 1972, between 100,000 and 200,000 sterilizations were funded by the federal government. In comparison during Hitler's Germany, there were 250,000 sterilizations under the Nazis hereditary health law (218).
This herstory needed to be understood and fights for women's right to control birth control needed to be matched by an end to sterilization abuse. It is also important to note that many Black, brown, and poor women were for abortion rights, not necessarily pro-abortion. Early campaigns failed to provide a voice for women who wanted the right to legal abortions while deploring the social conditions that prohibited them from bearing more children.
How can we possibly organize with and march next to other women without learning their herstories, sharing our struggles, and honoring our differences? It makes my blood curdle to hear these tales.
Had women organized across race and class lines with a commitment to collective liberation and against capitalism, imagine where we would be today. Since that is not quite what happened, I am trying to look beyond my frustration and disappointment, remember how inspired I felt reading about the white women who spoke out and took action in solidarity for Black liberation, and feel gratitude that I can learn from Angela Davis and the mistakes of well-intentioned white women who have come before me.
With love,
Kristin
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, & Class. 1st Vintage Books ed edition. New York: Vintage, 1983. Print.
