Words of Fire (74 page)

There would be some that would argue that that status is no more empowered than it was a hundred years ago, thus requiring that we use the same strategies of solidarity. There is no question that, in some ways, the essential aspects of racism and sexism still affect us. This was evident in the statement “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves,” first appearing
in the
New York Times
as a paid ad on November 17, signed by 1,603 black women, most of them scholars, in response to the treatment of Anita Hill during the hearings. Insisting that the “malicious defamation of Professor Hill insulted all women of African American descent,” it concluded that “throughout U.S. history, black women have been stereotyped as immoral, insatiable, perverse; the initiators in all sexual contacts—abusive or otherwise.... As Anita Hill's experience demonstrates, black women who speak of these matters are not likely to be believed....” The words sound very much like those that led women to organize the NACW almost exactly a century ago, and in fact, the similar conditions that previously made us want to wrap ourselves in that protective skin have come back around with a vengeance. Certainly, the late twentieth century, with its dislocating technological revolution, rapacious money-making, excesses of sex, guilt, and consumption, and incurable diseases viewed as Old Testament warnings should give us pause. For when such a confluence occurs, there are cultural reflexes to create categories of difference, including sexual difference, with all of its murderous Willie Horton, Bensonhurst, David Duke, and Central Park gang-rape implications. And although we may have passed the era that could take a Hottentot Venus seriously, we cannot rest assured that advances in science will save us from such folly. That respectable journals would make connections between green monkeys and African women, for example, or trace the origin of AIDS to African prostitutes—the polluted sexual organs of black women—reveals our continued vulnerability to racist ideology. It tells us that concepts of racial difference (in this situation, sexual practices) can still be used as weapons of degradation, and that the idea of difference turns on sexuality, and sexuality, in this culture, is loaded with concepts of race, gender, and class. This explains in part why the backlashes against women, black and nonblack, as well as race, carry a virulence that goes beyond the fear of competition or the sharing of power once so handily monopolized by others.

On the other hand, there have been some fundamental, dramatic changes, largely realized by our own struggle for equality and empowerment, that allow us, in fact demand, a new strategy. For although racism still exists, our situation has changed since the sixties in spite of it. It has changed because of two interrelated developments: the sexual revolution and de jure desegregation. They are interrelated because sex was the principle around which wholesale segregation and discrimination was organized with the ultimate objective of preventing intermarriage (D'Emilio, Freedman, 1988). The sexual revolution, however, separated sexuality from reproduction, and so diluted the ideas about purity—moral, racial, and physical.

Both desegregation and the sexual revolution make dissemblance and suppression in the name of racial solidarity anachronistic, for they were
prescribed to divert perceptions of difference, based on sexual difference between black women and white. Despite the tenacity about ideas of difference, recent sociopolitical developments-further codified by feminist theory as well as black studies—make binary opposition as a sole indicator of meaning passé.

 

In the meantime, increasing sexual aggression, including date rape on college campuses that tend to be underreported by black women; the number of “children having children”; the plague of domestic violence; the breakup of families; and the spread of fatal venereal disease among African Americans at a time when we have more “rights” than ever before tells us that gender issues are just as important—if not more so—in the black community as racial issues have always been. More than ever before it is essential that we advance a discourse on sexuality that is liberating for those who engage in it and truncating to the souls of those who don't. As Naima Major, former director of the National Black Women's Health Project (NBWHP)—one of the few black institutions that regularly engages in sexuality issues—said to me, most of the black women she sees “seem to cut themselves off at the waist,” even when they are coming to talk specifically about sexuality.

This is particularly alarming in view of the fact that we are in a sexually aggressive era, one where sex is commodified and often depersonalized, especially for young women. Their worlds were the subject of a study of adolescents aged fifteen to seventeen, conducted by Pat McPherson and Michelle Fine, and their observations were disturbing. From the stories of these young women, the authors surmised that their generation is more likely to “be aware of, witness to, and victim of' male sexual abuse among both peers and family. Their sexual experiences with peers are not characterized by learning the meaning or enjoyment of sex, or even making choices about engaging in it, but in protecting themselves from what is viewed (as in the past) as the irrepressible sexual drives of the men in their lives. A black adolescent in this interracial group spoke about not her own sexual preferences but the need to satisfy, indeed mollify, men quickly through cunnilingus so that the evening could end early, and hassle-free. And the authors noted that female adolescents also protect themselves by suppressing signs of their gender: by becoming ”one of the boys“ through not only dress, but through even misogynist behavior and attitudes. These are issues that were addressed a century ago, under similar sociosexual conditions, but the solutions have not been passed on through families or social institutions. We must begin to do it.

The analysis of how sex/gender systems apply to us in the 1990s becomes urgent when we see that
fifty-eight percent
of black women beyond the age of eighteen
never
use any form of birth control, according to a 1991 study
conducted by the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Yet only one percent of those women said that they wanted to get pregnant, and only two percent said that they did not know how to use birth control. Does this finding indicate ambivalence about separating sexuality from reproduction despite not wanting a child? Does it indicate the desire, however sublimated, to become pregnant? Or, as I suspect, is the finding a reflection of the fact that their male partners look down on birth control?

One thing we know, there seems to be what one might call a cult of motherhood in our community. How else might one interpret the finding of journalist Leon Dash in his book
When Children Want Children
(1988), that nearly a fourth of all unmarried teenage mothers intentionally become pregnant? What does motherhood mean to these youngsters? The ability to exercise maternal authority in lieu of other avenues of self-esteem and empowerment? rebellion against the depersonalization of sex? or perhaps, as a century ago, does this finding represent the effort to control male sexuality? The answers to these questions are important, as the babies of teenagers are more apt to be underweight and thus have learning and other physical disabilities. There is also tragedy in another statistic: forty-eight percent of the teenagers who intentionally got pregnant later regretted their decision.

Even college students, according to a report by the Black Women's Health Project, indicated a conflict about delaying childbearing in the face of “women's traditional and proper role as mother”—“indeed as a respected ‘matriarch' in a community beset by failing family structures.” Of course, there is also male pressure insinuated in some of these findings. The college students said that they felt intense pressure from male partners who wanted to be fathers—one of the few avenues toward manhood?—as well as from cultural and religious leaders not to have abortions. Although one has to respect religious and/or moral views about this, one has to wonder if young women are making rational, informed decisions about these things —lives depend on it.

Another issue not engaged adequately is one that Leon Dash discovered after hours of interviews with teenagers over the course of an entire year —the time it takes to get beyond their personal dissemblance strategies. Many of the motives behind sexual decisions—for better sometimes, but often for worse—were shaped by the fact that their families had a tremendous amount of sexual abuse within them, sometimes traced through two, three, or more generations. Ironically, Dash's decision to publicly reveal such information caused more consternation among self-conscious middle-class blacks than the dire implications of the information itself.

If all of this sounds very nineteenth-century, there is a reason for it. Black men and women have not had their own sexual revolution—the one we couldn't have before. We need a discourse that will help us understand
modern ideas about gender and sex/gender systems, about male privilege, and about power relations; about the oppressive implications of pornography—something even at least one Harvard professor seems not to understand.

In our considerations of Anita Hill, it is important to understand that she spoke not of a physical transgression on the part of Clarence Thomas, but a verbal one masked in pornographic language. Pornography, “a fantasy salvation that inspires nonfantasy acts of punishment for uppity females,” as one historian put it, speaks specifically to power relations between men and women. For African Americans these relations remain unanalyzed in the light of the empowerment of black male elites like those represented by Thomas, who, since the seventies, have emerged as gatekeepers for the upward mobility of all blacks in the newly accessible corporate, political, academic, and business spheres of influence. It is men, not women, who control the sociosexual and professional relationships in the black community. Among other notions that must be dispensed with is the weak male/strong female patriarchal paradigm that clouds so much of our thinking about ourselves.

Implicit in Hill's testimony is the challenge to transcend a past that once protected, but now twists, the deepest sense of ourselves and our identities. The silences and dissemblance in the name of a misguided solidarity must end. A modern and transformative discourse must begin. Anita Hill has broken through. Let us follow.
¹

1
In this essay, Gerda Lerner's definition of gender can be found in
The Creation of Patriarchy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Secondary sources regarding Phillip A. Bruce can be found in Herbert G. Gutman,
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925
(New York: Pantheon, 1976); and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall explores lynching and rape in
Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1971). The issue of the
Independent
referred to is dated March 17, 1904; and explications of Sara Bartmann, the Hottentot Venus, can be found in Sander L. Gilman's essay “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature,” in “
Race
,”
Writing and Difference
, ed. Henry Louis Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, 1986). Analysis of sexuality during different periods in American history can be found in John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman,
Intimate Matters: The History of Sexuality in America
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988). Discussions of the National Association of Colored Women, black women's status in the nineteenth century, and Fannie B. Williams's and Ida B. Wells's anti-lynching campaign can be found in Paula Giddings,
When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
(New York: William Morrow, 1984). The article by Barbara Fields is entitled “Ideology and Race in American History” and is found in J. Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds.,
Race, Region and Reconstruction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). The references to Gordon and DuBois are found in Ellen DuBois and Linda Gordon, “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century Feminist Sexual Thought,”
Feminist Studies
, vol. 9.,
no. 1 (Spring 1983). The quote by Anna Julia Cooper is in her
Voice from the South
(1892), reprinted by Negro Universities Press (New York, 1969), 68-69. The report cited under the direction of W. E. B. Du Bois, about blacks' health and sexuality in the late nineteenth century, is entitled
Proceedings of the Second Conference for the Study of Problems Concerning Negro City Life,
originally published by Atlanta University Publications. See vol. I, reprinted by Octagon Books, 1968. The explanation of the culture of dissemblance is found in Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in
Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History
, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1990). The study on contemporary adolescents is “Hungry for an Us: Our Girl Group Talks About Sexual and Racial Identities,” by Pat McPherson and Michelle Fine. It was published in Janice M. Irvine, ed.,
Sexual Cultures: Adolescence, Community and the Construction of Identity
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). The women-of-color study was underwritten by the National Council of Negro Women with the Communications Consortium Media Center and is entitled “Women of Color Reproductive Health Poll,” August 29, 1991. The book in which Leon Dash published his findings on pregnant teenagers is entitled
When Children Want Children: The Urban Crisis of Teenage Childbearing
(New York: William Morrow, 1989). The report issued in 1991 by the National Black Women's Health Project is entitled “Report: Reproductive Health Program of the National Black Women's Health Project.”