Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (11 page)

Domestic violence also occurred in Sunnydale but was not called by that name. It was discussed and dealt with among the women, however. I remember a big Black woman who quickly ran in the nude across the lawn from our neighbor’s place, where an older Black man lived, to my mother’s place. He was beating her and she didn’t have time to put on any clothes. Another one of our female neighbors went to jail for stabbing her husband, who used to beat her. When she came out, the women in the community did not judge her. They knew she did what she felt was right. Looking back at these women, I doubt any of them would have used the term “feminism” to describe their actions. I did not link phrases like “child abuse,” “domestic violence,” “drug addiction” or “mental illness” to my experience.

To my colored eye, the TV shows and billboards about abuse sponsored by white feminists who were trying to raise consciousness, it looked like these issues only affected white people. It was as if issues of abuse had nothing to do with us, that only white people were worthy of naming abuse. Suffering and systematic abuse in communities of color was so normalized. We often didn’t even know we were oppressed. Some of us thought suffering was just a part of being Black. To have access to health care, good education, healthy food and safe, affordable housing, to have aspirations and a desire to improve one’s mental and physical health was often seen as “white.”

Many of us did not have access to such things, and we often died young—where was a feminist movement to help us? The Black women I grew up with prided themselves on being “strong Black women,” not “weak” like white women or “crazy” like white people who were in therapy. These women were angry, as they felt they’d been forced into being the backbone of the community. To justify their sexism, some Black men also subscribed to this notion. These women prided themselves on raising children, supporting men and their families on low wages—without health care, let alone mental health care. For a Black woman to be depressed was seen as a type of luxury. Despite my mother’s mental state, she paid the bills on time, shopped for food and refused the free bread-and-butter services the government offered us. When she died recently from emphysema and I told some of my friends about her mental illness, they asked if she had been on medication. I didn’t know she was supposed to be.

 

As a college student at San Francisco State University, I started calling myself a feminist when I came into women’s studies. Like many young women of color from poor and working-class backgrounds, college was the first environment where I learned a language for racism, sexism and classism. I was also coming into consciousness around being Black and learning Black history. I shaved my head of permed hair.

My first women’s studies class was about sexuality and the body, and how our vaginas were never seen as part of our whole body. We read
Our Bodies, Ourselves
(edited by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective) and
Powers and Desires: The Politics of Sexuality
(edited by Ann Snitow, Sharon Thompson and Christine Stansell) and talked about body images of women (mostly white) in magazines and sexuality. I found this class interesting but very Eurocentric, despite the inclusion of some readings by women of color, such as an essay by Cherríe Moraga. I thought of my Mexican childhood friend Lupé, who lived in the projects, smelled of strawberry hair spray and wrote in lipstick on her bedroom wall the names of the boys she had kissed—where was she in this?

We discussed the pornography debates, and I learned many women were doing sex work to pay for school. This led me to work at the Lusty Lady, a peepshow in San Francisco known for its “feminist,” “sex-positive” politics and commitment to hiring female managers. I later became a union organizer there and fought to get more women of color hired.

Most of my professors were women of color, but most of the students were white and middle class. These students often spoke with the universal understanding that “woman” meant white like them. When race was discussed, at least one white woman would start crying out of white guilt. We could all exist as “women” in the classroom but not within our differences based on race, class and cultural identity. I felt that these crying spells frequently functioned to mask white women’s racism about issues affecting women of color. White middle-class women who had been socialized by the dominant culture to be quiet could speak out in their women’s studies classes. But time and again, they could not see that while their participation could be personally liberating, it could be silencing for women of color (and the few men of color), who because of race and gender often did not feel entitled to speak. I began to understand why most women of color were in ethnic studies, not women’s studies. I felt the racial isolation of being one of few women of color in the department, since many women of color felt that feminism was a white lesbian thing. Some saw the concept as separating them from the men in their communities. The voices of queer women of color who were active in the fighting for our civil rights were often silenced within ethnic studies departments and tokenized in women’s studies.

In a class called “Women and Violence” taught by a Black woman who was a lesbian mother, the white women felt the class should only focus on them. There were few women of color in the class, so the professor made sure we felt empowered to speak by prioritizing our participation. I loved this class because we talked about real issues that affected the lives of poor women and women of color. My mother and I had never talked about feminism or racism, but this class made me feel that at least experiences of poor working-class women of color like us were being studied—we weren’t invisible.

Reading works by many poor and working-class women of color gave me a blueprint to write about my own experiences with poverty and mental illness. We read
Bastard out of Carolina
by Dorothy Allison and
Beloved
by Toni Morrison. The class loved Allison’s novel—many of the women were from middle-class backgrounds, but they could relate to the reality of sexism and violence within the family. But when we read
Beloved,
suddenly some of the women felt that the class was getting “off track,” that we were talking about race, not gender. The other Black female student and I loved it. I felt empowered reading about infanticide, since it was close to home for me.

One white woman raised her hand and protested, “Why are we reading about Black people? I thought this was a women’s studies class.” The professor lost her temper and told her that in case she didn’t know, it was a Black woman teaching the class and that Black people can also be women. The white woman started crying and angrily left the class. I was amazed at this white woman’s sense of entitlement and privilege, of being able to protest and cry in the classroom. I can think of only a few times I’ve ever seen Black women in my community cry, even when tragedy occurs.

In a class called “Feminism and Marxism,” taught by lesbian Asian-American socialist feminist Merle Woo, a similar incident happened. There were three wome n of color in the class, including myself—all of us Black. We talked about internalized oppression, the body and race. The subject of nose jobs came up for the Jewish women in the class along with skin color and slavery regarding Black people. The Jewish women tried to equate the “Jewish nose” to body images for Blacks. The Black women silently listened to what the white Jewish women had to say, giving each other that “Can you believe these white people” look. After the Jewish women were finished, a Black woman expressed that she felt the dialogue was racist. Even though Jewish women also felt pressured to conform to European beauty standards, it was nowhere near the extent that Black women and other women of color do, because in this country Jewish women can pass for white while we cannot. The Jewish women got upset and accused us of not understanding them. They dismissed our feelings but wanted theirs validated.

Their words were a symbolic form of violence. That the experiences of women of color are dismissed in the classroom reflects the physical violence that happens to us on the street. What I experienced in the classroom was not so different from what happened to my mother years earlier, when the Ferris wheel’s white male conductor would not fasten her seat belt. The mentality is the same: our humanity is not valued.

At the next class a Black woman who had been one of the few to actually major in women’s studies besides myself brought in a definition of white privilege, listing all the ways white people are vision-ally, culturally, racially and economically privileged relative to people of color. This dialogue happened over a period of two days. The second day the Black woman left the class. Although I respected her choice, I remained because I didn’t feel a need to leave. The Jewish women then thanked me for “understanding” where they were coming from. I was the token “good” Black. This put me in an awkward position: Even though I didn’t leave the class, my staying didn’t mean that I agreed with them either. I stayed because I wanted to bear witness to what was going on. So often women of color leave white environments because of fear. They feel like their presence doesn’t matter, that if they speak they will not be listened to. Even though I didn’t say anything, I wanted to stay and have my presence as a Black woman known. Just because they were getting upset that the Black women in the classroom were bringing issues of racism to their attention did not mean that we had to leave the situation.

My upbringing in the projects and my mother’s mental illness prepared me for hostile environments. I always had to navigate between the “normal” world and my mother’s world, often hoping those two worlds would never meet. I feared my survival would be at risk if I were ever taken away from her. As I became older, I learned to survive balancing the Black world of my community with the white middle-class world that in many ways showed me my world did not matter. Women’s studies was no exception. I learned my skills back home from dealing with racist school teachers who placed me in English as a second language (ESL) classes in fifth grade, even though I had only spoken English at home. I had to fend for myself because my mother did not understand what was going on. The ESL teacher finally realized that I should not have been in her class, and I was placed in regular classes. I had to go through this experience alone, but I knew my people back home thought I was intelligent and that I mattered. This knowledge got me through fifth grade, and it got me through women’s studies.

This kind of navigating between two worlds is not new to women of color, to immigrants or to many of us born in the United States. We come from different cultures, speak different languages and have different worldviews, many of which are not respected in white environments. Many white women are often afraid of difference and try to ignore it or silence us when we bring up our race and class differences. They often say they don’t see race, only human beings. But this is a lie and we all know it. They do not seem to understand that for women of color, our race is a central part of our humanity, especially in a white-dominated society, such as the United States. It is incidents like these that make women’s studies hard for women of color and that keep the classes mostly white, even at a progressive college like San Francisco State, where the ethnic studies program had grown directly out of the civil rights movement. In women’s studies we read the work of some women of color, but surprisingly not that of bell hooks or Angela Davis (even though she used to teach at State). Rather, I read them in my Black studies classes.

The white women in my classes often did not understand their racial and class privilege, and they frequently didn’t see themselves as being racist. In my friend’s class on women and nature, for example, which was mostly white, there were white women appropriating Native American culture: carrying dream catchers or wearing Native American jewelry. They had a blast hiking off into the wilderness, but my friend had to get over her fear of nature, a fear many urban women of color have toward nature since many of us are taught at an early age not to go into parks alone for fear of being raped.

Once a white woman and I were talking about class and education, and she said that I must have had the same education as she because we were attending the same college, learning in the same classroom. She was trying to argue that the problem in this country was really one of class, not race. She was shocked when I told her I didn’t start school until I was eight. Another time a white woman asked me to get her a scone as I was heading toward the cafeteria. I had never heard of a scone. I could only hope that the pastry would be clearly labeled. These women just assumed everyone was coming from a similar environment as theirs.

 

The everyday feminism that I grew up with was missing from my classes; the women had the theory but not the practice. Even though many of these women were involved in some sort of “progressive” organizing, it seemed we spent hours in classes and consciousness-raising groups trying to convince them that people of color were humans. Then there were the women in Sunnydale who organized against welfare cuts and drugs in their neighborhood, for better housing and daycare, who would never call themselves feminists. They were more .“feminist” in their actions than many of the white women in my women’s studies classes.

I think about my mother who took time to read to me every night before going to bed, bought me school clothes from Macy’s, struggled to keep food on the table despite her illness and loved me enough to instill a sense of self-esteem even though we lived in the projects. I honor her strength in raising a Black girl in the midst of oppressive poverty—a challenge for many poor Black mothers. This is the kind of feminism that doesn’t make it to the doors of women’s studies classes. Despite the racism, majoring in women’s studies made me feel empowered as a queer Black woman. I am proud to call myself a feminist. I learned critical thinking skills in women’s studies that changed my life forever, and I met great friends. I attended readings of many Black feminists that I admired, such as Alice Walker, who had defined the term “womanist.”