Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

8. Must Revolution Be a Family Affair?: Revisiting The Black Woman

185 8 Must Revolution Be a Family Affair? Revisiting The Black Woman Margo Natalie Crawford The reason we are in the bag we are in isn’t because of my mama, it’s because of what they did to my mama. Stokely Carmichael1 Black men, during the 1960s and 1970s black freedom struggles , were very aware of intersectionality, that which Kimberlé Crenshaw defines as the “need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed.”2 Indeed, they insisted on the need to connect manhood and blackness. Their emphasis on black male power often convinced them that the liberation of black men would lead to the liberation of all black people. The black struggle, in this point of view, could not afford to be divided; a black women’s movement would allow the dominant power structure to continue to “divide and conquer.” This subsuming of black women in the black male struggle becomes particularly troubling when we realize that the intersectionality that overdetermined black male consciousness-raising was not extended to black women. As black women refused to be subsumed in the black male struggle, they began to think about the black family affair in a more critical manner as they confronted the problems of the “brother and sister” rhetoric and the Moynihan paradigm (the larger circulation of the idea of 186 Margo Natalie Crawford pathological black families and gender trouble) that often overdetermined the gender politics of the 1960s and 1970s black freedom struggles. In the common story of the role of women of color in second-wave feminism, the intersectionality of race and gender is the new layer that feminists of color add to the male-dominated protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. When we acknowledge that Black Power masculinist discourse was deeply intersectional, the signature difference of Black Power feminism is not intersectionality but the seizure of intersectionality from the male stronghold. Although Benita Roth, in Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (2004), does not acknowledge Black (male) Power’s use of intersectionality (as she sets up intersectionality as the intervention of black feminists and other feminists of color), she does establish that a focus on intersectionality allows 1960s and 1970s black feminists to rewrite the idea that liberation for black women will necessarily arise from black men’s liberation. As Roth explains , since black women’s lives intersect the oppressive structures of race, gender, and class, 1960s and 1970s black feminists often insisted that once black women were liberated, everyone would be liberated. Roth writes, “Since black women were at the intersection of oppressive structures, they reasoned that their liberation would mean the liberation of all people. This legacy of intersectional feminist theory—of analyzing and organizing The Wall of Respect,1969, Bob Crawford. Must Revolution Be a Family Affair? 187 against interlocking oppressions—would come to have a profound impact on feminist theory as a whole.”3 On the surface, this understanding of the “liberation of all people” seems to simply replace “black men” with “black women” (in the masculinist thinkers’ formula of black male liberation leading to total black liberation). It is significant, however, that 1960s and 1970s black feminists were using black women’s lowest position in the social hierarchy as a means of explaining the “freedom for all” mind-set. In the anthology The Black Woman (1970), this analysis of class and race is described in the following manner: “First, that the class hierarchy as seen from the poor Black woman’s position is one of white male in power, followed by the white female, then the Black male, and lastly the Black female.”4 Critical thinking about being black and a woman led Toni Cade Bambara, in 1970, to edit The Black Woman, which is often recognized as one of the most vivid records of the critical thought of African American women during the 1960s. Although the anthology includes creative writing (five poems and three short stories), essays predominate. There are twenty-five essays, including creative nonfiction, a drama review , and the “working papers” of black women’s collectives. The contributors range from very well-known voices such as Nikki Giovanni and Abbey Lincoln to students and community organizers. The anthology sold so quickly that, two months after publication, a new edition appeared. Farah Jasmine Griffin provides a captivating analysis of Bambara’s...