Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (28 page)

The control over these racist messages about women was totalitarian. Goliath stood firm. Another blow to my spirit was the fact that representations of women that I knew, the woman that I was becoming were lacking. Who would write their stories, who would tell their tales, who would produce news reports asking questions about their plight? I wavered on the tightrope between religion and spiritual freedom, finally choosing to follow my spirit. My spirit motivated me to choose a journalism major in college, and I began to ask questions for African-American women at work.

Angela Davis, 1960s activist and professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz, came to speak at a rally on campus. I was expecting for her to light a fire under all of us, encouraging us to take our fight for a more egalitarian society to the streets! What she said, with a mellow vibe and tone that can only be attributed to older, wiser, black women who’ve been down roads and seen things we never will, was that our activism was not to mirror the activism of old. This generation faces the challenge of defining activism in a United States that no longer responds to sit-ins and marches. She suggested that our strength would come from building coalitions with other people of color and like-minded folks.

But first I had to build coalitions with the different parts of myself. The sexism within the African Student Alliance on my campus (which mirrored the kind of sexism I’d witnessed in my church and my local African-American community) was pushing out the feminist me. At the same time, I found feminist groups so desperate to hang on to some credibility in the mainstream, pushing against my focus on African heritage and pushing to keep the door closed to the closet behind which I hid my love for women. It seemed less and less likely that I would find a place in the world to fully be myself. I worried that the definition of feminism that my college professor had so eloquently laid out would never become a reality for me.

Of course, it was my mother who set me straight. She told me to stop worrying about what people said and to do what I was here to do. She told me I was an artist, and she said it with pride in her voice. With that, I began to put pen to paper, paint to canvas, voice to air and break down all the systems of thinking and accepted ways of being that excluded some part of myself. I found that while what my mother thought of me was paramount to my spiritual survival, what the world thought no longer mattered. Though I didn’t share her religious fervor any longer, I still respected her more than any other person.

I didn’t know any other women who’d worked a graveyard shift in various hospitals for more than twenty years to feed, clothe and care for five hungry girls. She’d worked overnight so she’d be home when we got out of school. I had never encountered any other women who would share her meager supply of groceries with the single mother across the street or spend the small amount of free time afforded a woman with five daughters sitting with the elderly folks in our church and taking their blood pressures. She was even willing to challenge our church on some of its interpretations of the Bible and didn’t force us to follow those interpretations, as most parents in the church did. When my father moved out, she continued to maintain the household without blinking an eye (at least I never saw her blink). Somehow she created time to go back to college and attain various certificates to further her nursing career. More deep and motivating than any books on feminist theory, I’d spent my entire life face to face with a feminist powerhouse who offered neither explanation nor apology. She taught me an abiding love for self and for humanity—and she taught by example. So I went to work.

 

I created a cable-access show called
Point of View
to discuss politics. A local show, it aired in four nearby Bay Area cities. For every negative representation I saw of people of color, I wrote a show that allowed us to shine. For every report I read that asked no questions about the plights of African-American women, I created a show and asked the questions myself. The walls between me and effecting change in the politics of oppression, racism and sexism that pervade the United States were starting to crumble. I wrote, produced, sang, painted and created ways to say, “We are here. We are diverse. We are good.” I knew I was on the right path when a man approached me in the BART train station and told me he’d taped and shown my Black History show to a group of students at a seminar he gave in Sacramento.

The momentum created by following my mother’s lead and becoming a woman of action gave me the strength to slowly open the doors to my closet. My passivity in loving created such a stark contrast to my passion in every other area, I could no longer ignore it. Spoken word provided a platform for me to be honest about falling in love again and again with women. My love of women was the one area in my life where fear of judgment, reprisal and loss still ruled me. Not only had I been raised in a religion that preached that same sex love was abominable, but I had grown up in a community with strictly defined male and female roles, and in a country that openly and lawfully discriminates against same-sex couples. Even feminists seemed obsessed with not being characterized as lesbians. What would it mean about my overall identity if I acknowledged this truth about my makeup? What doors would close? What would my mother think?

I found that just as my questions about our religion had not gone away, and just as my need to seek out my heritage had not been assuaged, in the same way the need to tell the stories of African-American women had risen to the top, so would my orientation reverberate through my spirit and force its way into my voice, my paintings, my writing and my reality. As the 1990s ended and the twenty-first century began, I reached a kind of wholeness. I sat with the woman who had given me all the tools and examples I needed to be strictly myself. I drank coffee and ate eggs and looked into the eyes of the woman who made feminism real for me when I didn’t even have words to describe it. I told her that I was in love, that it was not a fad, that I planned to spend my life and raise children with another woman. She didn’t accept it. Because of her I knew she didn’t have to. I was free to define myself.

 

Kiini Ibura Salaam

 

 

 

 

 

The New Orleans streets of my adolescence were a bizarre training ground where predatory men taught me that—in public—no part of me was safe from comment. At ages twelve and thirteen I was trained to keep my guard up by voices shouting lascivious phrases at me. Clothes were inconsequential, yet I inferred that the miniskirts and tight jeans of my preteen years would worsen the verbal attacks. Repeated lewdness can do that to you. The constancy of male aggression hammered in the suggestion that something bad could happen to me.