From Englewood, The Summer of 2006

Perhaps I will be perceived as dangerously lacking in solidarity in these troubling times, but it seems to me that nobody is really concerning themselves with the challenges facing black women, and that our political capital couldn’t be any lower. 

The difficulty of stating the nature of my black feminist consciousness has made me aware of how much I am at present betwixt and between.  Nonetheless, I continue to work at it and think I am growing clearer about my hesitation whenever the topic comes up.  It is this:  so far as black feminism is concerned, I have never been an adequately representative voice because I never really bought into the premise of identity politics.  This was, by the way, why my motives were so rigorously questioned when my first controversial little book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, was first published in 1979, when I was all of 27. 

Even then, as muddle-headed as I may have seemed, I knew it had never been my intention to speak for anyone else.  As I understood feminism – as I had learned it from my Mom, the artist Faith Ringgold, and her downtown New York compatriots – it wasn’t necessary that I sacrifice my selfhood in order to be an advocate.  In fact, quite the contrary: being a feminist would mean for the first time that I could be myself. 

Regardless of my desire to ameliorate conditions for women, the poor, the oppressed, I don’t think of myself as sharing any manner of essentialist or class or corporate identity with such groups.  I am not friends with all the black people I see.  We don’t have much in common based upon skin color.  I’ve learned that whatever community I may have once felt with other black people, or even black women, isn’t particularly sustainable on anything other than a purely social or cultural level. 

This is not an encouraging situation, because it is not as though I am now experiencing any greater connection or sense of community with white Americans.  I felt this particularly in a place like Ithaca, where black people are scarce and where the racism was so thick you could cut it with a knife, both on and off campus, although the cold-blooded knowledge of this isolation was not nearly as bad as you might think.  Finally at 55, I guess I am approaching the point where it feels better to know the unvarnished truth, no matter how bitter it is. 

I believe the great wonder of the human mind remains largely a mysterious matter, despite Western civilization’s various attempts to penetrate its mechanics and construction.  And until there is information to the contrary, I will persist in thinking of myself as an individual of unique consciousness, as responsible for my choices and behavior.  I believe that all persons have the capacity for agency whether or not they choose to recognize or utilize it, and that my racial identity as a black feminist is only partly and strategically determined by my biological and cultural and religious categorization.  Genetics, geography and family environment probably have as much if not more to do with the person I have become as race, sexuality or religious training.  I do believe it is possible to accomplish some things in like-minded formations with clearly set political and social goals.  Indeed, I think that group formations are probably essential to correct the situations we find ourselves in globally.  But I also think that it is an important idea to embrace the notion of individual responsibility from as early an age as possible so that it becomes habit as an adult to desist from destructive behavior.  Right now, it is the job of the parent to provide this early instruction in ethics and self-discipline, but I believe, as Hillary said, it also takes a village, and that every one of us is equally responsible for every child who ends up running amok. 

Identity politics as I understand it was designed to offer the outsider group an alternative corporate identity to inoculate them against an identification with the mainstream, which is understood solely in terms of domination, exploitation and privilege.  Identity of this kind works only as group-think.  In the first heady days, you may fantasize about the mountains you can climb with the group.  Ultimately however, you realize that you must be willing to subsume yourself to the lowest common denominator that the group can tolerate.  I want no further part of the posturing that passes itself off as feminist solidarity.  This group no longer cares for the terminology of feminism; it prefers ‘womanism,’ if for no other reason than its less associated with gender debates and with ‘whiteness.’  The group doesn’t like ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ – these terms seem already territorialized by the dreaded spectre of ‘whiteness’ again.  Rather let’s call it ‘same-gender loving,’ whatever that might or might not mean.  As usual in the extended family paradigm, the squeaky wheel gets the oil and everything else worth having. 

I remain reluctant to be the one to define black feminism for an international audience, as it means radically different things to different black female constituencies – I know for a fact that most black feminists I’ve met entirely disagree with my view of everything.  Yet instead of confronting our disagreements in a forthright way, we squabble amongst ourselves: are black men our fellow victims or our oppressors?  Are black women failed matriarchs or are the men failed patriarchs?  Rather, what about female-headed households; black schools segregated by gender because the black boys are falling behind; and what will we do about all the black male felons who are barred from voting in national elections for the rest of their lives? 

Right now, it seems safe to say that feminism is a doctrine of empowering woman at the level of the most basic political rights; specifically, of making sure they have the vote, the right to work for wages, the opportunity to make a living and control their own money, to move freely without encumbering or debilitating restrictions of one kind or another.  Women in the West take such basic human rights for granted, and yet all over the world many still struggle to secure these liberties.  Maybe this is why our victories have felt so hollow and been so empty in terms of bearing more liberal political fruit, and why perhaps none of us possess the power we think we do, while so many throughout the world suffer under the yoke of oppression.  

Published in The Liberal, UK, Fall of 2007.