Words of Fire (29 page)

Older women have a wealth of information and experience to offer and
would be instrumental in closing the communications gap between the generations. To be black and to tolerate this jive about discounting people over thirty is madness.

Poor women have knowledge to teach us all. Who else in this society see more and are more realistic about ourselves and this society and about the faults that lie within our own people than our poor women? Who else could profit and benefit from a communal setting that could be established than these sisters? We must let the sisters know that we are capable, and some of us already do love them. We women must begin to unabashedly learn to use the word “love” for one another. We must stop the petty jealousies, the violence, that we black women have for so long perpetrated on one another about fighting over this man or the other. (Black men should have better sense than to encourage this kind of destructive behavior.) We must turn to ourselves and one another for strength and solace. Just think for a moment what it would be like if we got together and internalized our own 24-hour-a-day communal centers knowing our children would be safe and loved constantly. Not to mention what it would do for everyone's egos, especially the children's. Women should not have to be enslaved by this society's concept of motherhood through their children; and then the kids suffer through a mother's resentment of them by beatings, punishment, and rigid discipline. All one has to do is look at the statistics of black women who are rapidly filling the beast's mental institutions to know that the time for innovation and change and creative thinking is here. We cannot sit on our behinds waiting for someone else to do it for us. We must save ourselves.

We do not have to look at ourselves as someone's personal sex objects, maids, baby sitters, domestics, and the like in exchange for a man's attention. Men hold this power, along with that of the breadwinner, over our heads for these services, and that's all it is—servitude. In return we torture him, and fill him with insecurities about his manhood, and literally force him to “cat” and “mess around” bringing in all sorts of conflicts. This is not the way really human people live. This is whitey's thing. And we play the game with as much proficiency as he does.

If we are going to bring about a better world, where best to begin than with ourselves? We must rid ourselves of our own hang-ups, before we can begin to talk about the rest of the world and we mean the world and nothing short of just that. (Let's not kid ourselves.) We will be in a position soon of having to hook up with the rest of the oppressed peoples of the world who are involved in liberation just as we are, and we had better be ready to act.

All women suffer oppression, even white women, particularly poor white women, and especially Indian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Oriental, and black American women whose oppression is tripled by any of the above mentioned.
But we do have female's oppression in common. This means that we can begin to talk to other women with this common factor and start building links with them and thereby build and transform the revolutionary force we are now beginning to amass. This is what Dr. King was doing. We can no longer allow ourselves to be duped by the guise of racism. Any time the white man admits to something, you know he is trying to cover something else up. We are all being exploited, even the white middle class, by the few people in control of this entire world. And to keep the real issue clouded, he keeps us at one another's throats with this racism jive. Although whites are most certainly racist, we must understand that they have been programmed to think in these patterns to divert their attention. If they are busy fighting us, then they have no time to question the policies of the war being run by this government. With the way the elections went down, it is clear that they are as powerless as the rest of us. Make no question about it, folks, this fool knows what he is doing. This man is playing the death game for money and power, not because he doesn't like us. He couldn't care less one way or the other. But think for a moment if we all go together and just walk on out. Who would fight his wars, who would run his police state, who would work his factories, who would buy his products?

We women must start this thing rolling.

L
inda La Rue discusses in “The Black Movement and Women's Liberation” (1970) the frustration of some blacks with the emergence of the middle-class women's liberation movement, whose origins could be traced to John F. Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women (1961), which Eleanor Roosevelt chaired; the publication of Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
(1963); the addition of “sex” to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (to prevent job discrimination based on gender); and the founding, in 1966, of the National Organization for Women (NOW), whose first president, Betty Friedan was replaced in 1970 by a black woman, union organizer and civil rights activist Aileen Hernandez. Novelist Toni Morrison also raised questions about the white-dominated women's movement in “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women's Lib,” (
New York Times Magazine,
22 August 1971). This distrust of white women, a legacy of slavery, explained in part the ambivalence of many black women about the emerging movement, in which they felt marginalized There was also a belief that the women's movement had helped to eclipse the black movement, which was perceived to be in disarray in some circles. La Rue, a graduate student in political science at Purdue University when she wrote “The Black Movement,” also objected to the analogy drawn in then current feminist literature between the oppression of women and the oppression of blacks.

L
et us first discuss what common literature addresses as the “common oppression” of blacks and women. This is a tasty abstraction designed purposely or inadvertently to draw validity and seriousness to the women's movement through a universality of plight. Every movement worth its “revolutionary salt” makes these headliner generalities about “common oppression” with others—but let us state unequivocally that, with few exceptions, the American white woman has had a better opportunity to live a free and fulfilling life, both mentally and physically, than any other group in the United States, with the exception of her white husband. Thus, any attempt to analogize black oppression with the plight of the American white woman has the validity of comparing the neck of a hanging man with the hands of an amateur mountain climber with rope burns.

“Common oppression” is fine for rhetoric, but it does not reflect the actual distance between the oppression of the black man and woman who are unemployed, and the “oppression” of the American white woman who is “sick and tired” of
Playboy
foldouts, or of Christian Dior lowering hemlines or adding ruffles, or of Miss Clairol telling her that blondes have more fun.

Is there any logical comparison between the oppression of the black woman on welfare who has difficulty feeding her children and the discontent of the suburban mother who has the luxury to protest the washing of the dishes on which her family's full meal was consumed?

The surge of “common oppression” rhetoric and propaganda may lure the unsuspecting into an intellectual alliance with the goals of women's liberation, but it is not a wise alliance. It is not that women ought not to be liberated from the shackles of their present unfulfillment, but the depth, the extent, the intensity, the importance—indeed, the suffering and depravity of the
real
oppression blacks have experienced—can only be minimized in an alliance with women who heretofore have suffered little more than boredom, genteel repression, and dishpan hands.

For all the similarities and analogies drawn between the liberation of women and the liberation of blacks, the point remains that when white women received their voting rights, most blacks, male and female, had been systematically disenfranchised since Reconstruction. And even in 1970, when women's right of franchise is rarely questioned, it is still a less than common occurrence for blacks to vote in some areas of the South.

Tasteless analogies like abortion for oppressed middle-class and poor women idealistically assert that all women have the right to decide if and when they want children and thus fail to catch the flavor of the actual circumstances. Actual circumstances boil down to middle-class women deciding when it is convenient to have children, while poor women decide the prudence of bringing into a world of already scarce resources another mouth to feed. Neither their motives nor their objectives are the same. But current literature leads one to lumping the decisions of these two women under one generalization, when in fact the difference between the plights of these two women is as clear as the difference between being hungry and out of work, and skipping lunch and taking a day off.

If we are realisticallly candid with ourselves, we will accept the fact that despite our beloved rhetoric of Pan-Africanism, our vision of Third-World liberation, and perhaps our dreams of a world state of multi-racial humanism, most blacks and a good many who generally exempt themselves from categories still want the proverbial “piece of cake.” American values are difficult to discard, for, unlike what more militant “brothers” would have us believe, Americanism does not end with the adoption of Afro hairstyles on pregnant women covered in long African robes.

Indeed, the fact that the independent black capitalism demonstrated by the black Muslims and illustrated in Nixon's speeches appeared for many blacks as the way out of the ghetto into the light lends a truthful vengeance to the maxim that perhaps blacks are nothing more than black Anglo-Saxons. Upon the rebirth of the liberation struggle in the sixties, a whole genre of “women's place” advocates immediately relegated black women to home and babies which is almost as ugly an expression of black Anglo-Saxonism as is Nixon's concept of “black capitalism.”

The study of many developing areas and countries reflects at least an attempt to allow freedom of education and opportunity to women. Yet black Americans have not adopted developing areas' “new role” paradigm, but rather the Puritan-American status of “home and babies” which is advocated by the capitalist Muslims. This reflects either ingrained Americanism or the lack of the simplest imagination.

Several weeks ago, women's lib advocates demanded that a local women's magazine be “manned” by a woman editor. Other segments of the women's movement have carried on smaller campaigns in industry and business.

If white women have heretofore remained silent while white men maintained the better position and monopolized the opportunities by excluding blacks, can we really expect that white women, when put in direct competition for employment, will be any more openminded than their male counterparts when it comes to the hiring of black males and females in the same positions for which they are competing? From the standpoint of previous American social interaction, it does not seem logical that white females will not be tempted to take advantage of the fact that they are white in an economy that favors whites. It is entirely possible that women's liberation has developed a sudden attachment to the black liberation movement as a ploy to share the attention that it has taken blacks 400 years to generate. In short, it can be argued that women's liberation not only attached itself to the black movement, but did so with only marginal concern for black women and black liberation and with functional concern for the rights of white women.

The industrial demands of two world wars temporarily offset the racial limitations to mobility and allowed the possibility of blacks entering industry, as an important labor force, to be actualized. Similarly women have benefited from an expanded science and industrialization. Their biological limitation, successfully curbed by the pill and by automation, which makes stressing physical labor more the exception than the rule, has created an impressively large and available labor force of women.

The black labor force, never fully employed and always representing a substantial percentage of the unemployed in the American economy, will now be driven into greater unemployment as white women converge at every level on an already dwindling job market.

Ideally, we chanced to think of women's liberation as a promising beginning of the “oppressed rising everywhere” in the typically Marxian fashion that many blacks seem drawn to. Instead, the spectre of racism and inadequate education, job discrimination, and even greater unequal opportunity will be, more than ever before, a function of neither maleness nor femaleness, but of blackness.

This discussion has been primarily to ward off any unintelligent alliance of black people with white women in this new liberation movement, Rhetoric and anathema hurled at the right industrial complex, idealism that speaks of a final humanism, and denunciation of the system that makes competition a fact of life, do not mean that women's liberation has as its goal anyone else's liberation except its own.

It is time that definitions be made clear. Blacks are
oppressed
, and that means unreasonably burdened, unjustly, severely, rigorously, cruelly, and harshly fettered by white authority. White women, on the other hand, are only
suppressed
, and that means checked, restrained, excluded from conscious and overt activity. And there is a difference.

For some, the dangers of an unintelligent alliance with women's liberation will suggest female suppression as the only protection against a new economic threat. For others, a greater answer is needed, and required, before women's liberation can be seen in perspective.

To say that black women must be freed before the black movement can attain full revolutionary consciousness is meaningless because of its malleability. To say that black women must be freed from the unsatisfactory male-female role relationship that we adopted from whites as the paradigm of the good family has more meaning because it indicates the incompatibility of white role models with the goal of black liberation. If there is anything to be learned from the current women's lib agitation, it is that roles are not ascribed and inherent, but adopted and interchangeable in every respect except pregnancy, breast feeding, and the system generally employed to bring the two former into existence.