Black Women's History, Absent White Fathers & "Beijing+10"

Sorry I missed ABC-TV's airing of Oprah Winfrey's television production of Zora Neale Hurston's powerful novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston (who also was an anthropologist) wrote about Black Americans in a manner that was neither comedy nor set in a stereotyped urban neighborhood.

For some combination of reasons being a woman often seems to make issues public and political when in essence they're very personal. I think it's easier to write on public politics than personal, and I think for various reasons for women of colour this effect is multiplied.

In March 2005 and throughout much of this year some parts of the world are commemorating the 10th anniversary of a 1995 women's conference held in Beijing (previously westernised as Peking), which is in China. At the same time and with a few key exceptions of places and organisations who did celebrate, most of us heard not one word about March 1st and the 16th annual International Women of Colour Day. Last October 2004 just after my presentation at the European Social Forum (on the Alliances We Need to Fight Racism plenary at Alexandra Palace), at another meeting on the future of Africa, Africa's Diaspora and the African Union held at Kensington Town Hall (London UK), I proposed publicly that the office of London Mayor Ken Livingstone co-sponsor a 2005 celebration of International Women of Colour Day. ...maybe they're still thinking about it... IWCD is about recognising the triumphs and struggles of Black and other women of colour any and everywhere in the world. Speaking for my corner of the Americas plus a spot of Europe, I want to say that despite seemingly unending forms of indifference, neglect and abuse, most Black women keep on keeping on - and at the same time the majority of us continue to help the people in our lives do the same. Some years ago I wrote an essay published in Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women. Sage - which I believe is out-of-print - was published by Beverly Guy-Sheftall of Spelman College's Women's Center in Atlanta. Beverly and Johnetta Cole co-authored Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (One World/Ballantine 2003). I called my essay "Building Community for Black Single Mothers" and from what I see today so many people and institutions care even less today for women-headed families than they did 15 or 20 years ago. And yet, if the whole truth be known and told, everywhere in the Americas were it not for Black families headed by Black women, there would be few if any Black families & communities in the Americas. At the very same time attitudes toward Black women [and often also other women of colour] by many white people - men and women - but also from a significant number of men of colour (though certainly not all), often are less than encouraging, to put it delicately, and basically full of contempt. There was white Irish American armchair pundit (and later U.S. senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan expounding on his disapproval of Black women-headed families in his 1965 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action; and we've got the closet miscegenationists - i.e., "race mixers/rapists" and thus absent white fathers - comprising a huge & hidden community of men including white U.S. senator Strom Thurmond (who was from South Carolina) and slaveholder/president Thomas Jefferson. Tens of thousands of such men forced themselves as 'uninvited sperm donors' into the gene pool of virtually every Black and Native family in the Americas. This has had consequences for millions of white women for whom our existence poses a sticky problem - and particularly for those for whom our unmistakable physical resemblance to their daddies, brothers, themselves and their own children poses a most uncomfortable and unwelcome reality check. Some of the same women went to Beijing in 1995 where they uttered not one word on these particular racialised gender realities. Lastly, the fact of Black families loved and nurtured by serious women even seems to discomfit and antagonise some Black men, although large numbers of them too have been raised by their own mothers, grandmothers, aunts and "play mothers." That's it for today on this subject.

Comments

[Mama JunkYard]

Found this via Pinko Feminist HellCat.

Black women, especially in America have always been classed at the bottom of the racial and gender hierarchy. When we were no longer considered the property of white slave masters there were a few black men present to remind us that we were considered their property.

For white women, one of the ways that they have been able to trample on us is by rubbishing the one thing that all of society is agreed that women are fit for - motherhood. By claiming that black women are unfit mothers white women are not only able to reassert their own racial superiority by they also ensure that we come second to them on the gender based scale.

[Sheelzebub]

Wow, this is excellent. I'm linking this!

[owukori]

Great post