Women and Racism
There have been many articles in the feminist press on racism,and anti-semitism. Sources for the article below include Off Our Backs (June 1981); Big Mama Rag (November 1981), and to a large extent Broadside (November 1981). See the Resources for publications on racism and the women's movement
Feminists in the United States have been struggling with racism within the movement. The theme of the National Women's Studies Association May 1981 conference was
"Women respond to racism". Other public contoversies have raged in feminist publications such as Sinister Wisdom and Chrysalis. On a personal level, many black women, native women and other Third World women — Asian, Chicana, "immigrant" — in the U.S. have been drawn by the realization of their oppression as women to the feminist movement, but have encountered racist attitudes there. The third section of This Bridge Called My Back, an anthology of "writings by radical women of color", published by Persephone Press (see Resources) recalls some of these experiences. Other sections of the book look from different points of view, at the differences among women of color themselves. In one section, the writers consider growing up, their earliest experiences of racism and other oppressions. As Beverly Smith says, "There is virtually no Black person in this country who is surprised about oppression... Because the thing is we have had it meted out to us from infancy on." Another section describes the ways women evolve their political consciousness from their own experiences. Women describe visits back to old communities, experiences at white colleges and political work. Yet another section of the book probes the ways differences in class, culture and sexual orientation divide women of color.
The recognition of these differences — between women of color and white women, and among women of color — is key. We — especially white feminists — need to explore these differences, not deny them. Indeed, it is the denial — the ignorance and ignoring of differences — which is racist.
Nawal El Saadawi, a physician and author born in Egypt, talked about conditions in her country at the NWSA conference (reported in Off Our Backs June 81), and discussed the common oppression, and the differences, of women in the U.S. and Africa. For instance, in both places men own women's breasts. In the United States many women don't breastfeed their children because they want to preserve their breasts in order to be attractive to men. In Egypt women don't breastfeed because they can't. They do hard work in the fields and they are malnourished, with the result that they have no milk and their children often die. "When American women tell
us to go back to breastfeeding, we feel bitter. There is no problem naming the enemy, but our concrete problems are different."
As one author in Big Mama Rag (Nov. 81) put it, the failure to acknowledge differences, the exclusion or inclusion of women of color or issues important to women of color in the women's movement is the exercise and maintenance of class privilege by white feminists, and the failure to revolutionise hierarchical and oppressive structures.
But dynamic criticism and self-criticism can be combined with co-operation and solidarity. Audre Lorde articulates this attitude to difference in this way. Advocating the mere tolerence of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. For difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic... Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.
(This Bridge Called My Back)
The message for white feminists is clear : bridge building is the responsibility of us all. As a white feminist, it's my responsibility to educate myself about Third World women's issues and lives. Writes Audre Lorde :
the gap of male ignorance, and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that is is the task of black and third world women to educate white women, in the face of tremendous resistance, as to our existence,
our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought... Racism and homophobia
are real conditions of all our lives in this place and this time. / urge each of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and
loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal and the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.
(This Bridge Called My Back)
Minnie Bruce Pratt, a white feminist poet and speaker at the NWSA conference, described four ways in which white women can make their journey towards understanding racism and becoming anti-racist:
1. Recognise the ways in which you are personally outside the boundaries of safety — for example, lesbian, poor working class, feminist...
2. Make a commitment not to compromise yourself for the sake of safety.
3. Recognise the similarity between your experience of exile and others who are exiled for different reasons.
4. Recognise the racist events of history, not as abstractions but as real events that happen(ed) in your family or where you live(d).
In reading anthologies such as This Bridge Called My Back (which concludes with a select bibliography of writing by and about Third World US women), and the fiction and non- fiction of other Third World women, in respecting differences, in working to change oppressive structures and racist attitudes — both on a personal and broader basis (campaigning in our own countries against foreign investment in South Africa , for example), in responding to racism, we advance in
building an international women's movement.
Resources
This Bridge Called M y Back edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua Persephone Press P.O. Box 7222 Watertown MS 02172 USA. $8.95.
A n anthology of prose, poetry , personal narrative and analysis by Afro - American , Asian American, Latina , and Native Americans
women. Includes a selected bibliography of " world women in the United States - by and about us". " This Bridge... can coax us into the habit of listening to
each other and learning each other's ways of seeing and being . " An important book and highly recommended.
Conditions No.5 the Black Women's Issue P.O. 56 Van Brunt Station Brooklyn NY 11215 USA. $ 4.50 plus postage.
Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise Michelle Cliff Persephone Press P.O. 7222 Watertown MA 02172 USA. $ 4.00 plus postage.
Off Our Backs 1724 2 0 t h St. N.W. Washington DC 20009 USA.
Big Mama Rag 1724 Gay lord St. Denver, CO 80206 USA.
Broadside P.O. Box 494 Station P Toronto, Ontario M5S 2TI Canada.