Further To Fly: Black Women and the Politics of Empowerment

Preface

I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex ([1953] 1974) in 1971. My friend Alix Mitchell lent me the book and insisted that I read it. Although the length of the book was forbidding and much of it was decidedly over my twenty-twoyear -old head, I remember being struck by its cogent and unrelenting analysis of the second-class status of women. Much of de Beauvoir’s theory connected with and seemed to explain many of my own experiences in the peace, civil rights, and black nationalist movements. Although I did not understand it all, the book definitely left me with a new lens through which to view the social order. The idea that gender consciousness could lead to a new understanding of the power relations in society and culture transformed my thinking. Although I could not have foreseen this in 1971, I have spent the last twenty-eight years thinking about the implications of gender consciousness for social change. During those years, feminist theory has significantly contributed to our knowledge of how the world is or should be organized. Its promise of gender liberation through collective struggle has not, however, been fully realized. Like many of us, I was a 1970s political activist whose experience with the gender hierarchies of radical protest movements was up close and painful. My campus peace activities, for example, provided me with numerous occasions to see and experience the marginal status of women in radical politics. My participation in the black nationalist movement directly exposed me to the gender dilemmas resulting from the inherent contradictions of black power politics. Because the politics of the liberation movements of the 1960s failed to include any substantive discussion of gender issues, some of us thought that feminist writing about sexual politics could in some way be applied to our situation. In those days, there was contentious interest in whether feminism offered an intellectual framework that could engender social change. I remember many and occasionally heated conversations about the utility of feminism both as a framework for challenging black women’s positions in political movements and as a strategy for improving the social condition of black people. Preface ix After de Beauvoir, I continued to read feminist classics, such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. I also became actively involved in a few women’s issues, but after several years of organizing , protesting, and consciousness-raising, I was more than a little put off by the hysteria of early feminist bravado and much more than a little tired of the constant need to educate white women about their own racism. The more I learned about feminist politics, the more skeptical I became about the validity of a social movement based solely on gender. I acknowledged the need for struggle against male domination, but, like most black women, I took the position that racism was still the most dominant aspect of black experience. This position was buttressed by direct exposure to white feminist racism. Through this exposure, I began to understand that white feminists’ fixation on patriarchal dominance masked their culpability for black women’s oppression and for their own. Although feminist politics was disappointing almost from its inception, feminist theorizing seemed more promising. The early feminist theorists and early black feminist writers and activists explored the social reality that I was experiencing and extended a vision of women and their relationship to the social order that was far more compelling than the vision provided by feminist politics or by nationalist-inspired black politics. Throughout much of the 1970s, I was an active participant and skeptical observer . Black women spent significant energy resisting the reactionary roles envisioned for them by the radical left. For example, black women were often infuriated by the misogyny of the civil rights and black nationalist movements. They were marginalized and dismissed by the peace movement, and they were annoyed by the self-indulgent politics of the sisterhood. Although I enjoyed and loved many of the men in the so-called revolutionary vanguard—most metaphorically and a few physically —I knew instinctively that the political practice of these movements was disingenuous and contradictory. In contrast to the political madness of radicals in search of liberation, feminist theorizing represented a serious attempt to envision alternatives to male hegemony in what I thought was the time between the defeated old order and the emerging new...