Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics

7. Maintaining the Momentum, Sustaining an Ethic of Resistance

Maintaining the Momentum, Sustaining an Ethic of Resistance As women initiate resistance on behalf of themselves and in so doing advance the interests of a civil society, it is incumbent upon their communities to continue that momentum. We who are committed to countering the social and intimate violence against black women must overcome our reluctance to join them. We need to participate in specifying a direction for constructive communal change. Of course, the effort to sustain a deliberate commitment to address violence in women’s lives represents a formidable challenge. Some base points for the kind of ethical analysis and practice that can nurture this ongoing work are needed. How do we maintain an ethical vision of human wholeness and wellbeing that is directly responsive to the converging forms of violence confronted by women? The ethic that we embrace must not only envision inclusive, truthtelling, moral communities which resist assaults on women; it must also help to build a social movement that brings such communities into existence. These goals have specific implications for the crafting of Christian social ethics. Those implications will be considered here alongside further elaborations on what the decision to construct this ethic of violence resistance requires. Concrete strategies for community action will be enumerated as well. They will emphasize ways in which a local church might become involved in this effort. Structuring the Ethic Committing Ourselves to Pay Attention to Women In the continuing work of developing Christian social ethics, activating a commitment to taking violence against African-American women 7 181 seriously dramatically affects our methodology. This commitment amends and molds the terms of the starting point. It realigns the focus and assumptions about the moral center and norms of our culture. Pursuing this commitment not only means adjusting the lens of our critical thinking, but also involves wrestling with some of our own anxieties that may be evoked in making that adjustment. In our endeavor to identify and comprehend the moral costs of violence , we must start from the vantage point of a concrete understanding of women’s lives. Bringing a feminist approach to Christian social ethics, I eschew objectivist moral claims that are based on an anonymous, rational agent. As Virginia Held explains, feminist moral inquiry attends to the actual experience of suffering domestic violence or of being conceptualized in terms of one’s sexual availability. It “suggests that women must be listened to as we express our actual experience and our efforts to act morally and to arrive at morally sound judgments in our actual, not hypothetical , lives.”1 Since the act of listening to women must be the starting point for our method, African-American women’s voices are a nonnegotiable source for developing an ethical assessment of, and response to, violence. This type of listening will not involve a passive or merely pitying reaction. Rather, it requires politically engaged, active expressions of empathy. It is one thing to understand the need for such a basic starting point, but quite another to do it. Listening to women’s stories of violence is uncomfortable and deeply disturbing. There is an enormous temptation to tune them out, partly because we fear that we will be swallowed up by their anguish. Perhaps we are afraid that the destructive power of the violence will seize and overwhelm us if we open our sensibilities up too widely in empathy with them. We need to remember that listening is an act of solidarity. It means tarrying awhile in that place of isolation and degradation created by the violence our sister has endured. No one wants to be there, not even as an observer and supporter. Awakening our senses from their dulled state of apathy or hiding demands courage as well as a compassionate commitment to resist violence. Women who reach out to one another in this act of listening will have to give up any romantic notions they may harbor about solidarity among women. These listeners will need to let go of any expectation that such solidarity is implicitly comforting or comfortable. A woman listener has to fashion a quality of empathy that does not subsume the victim-sur182 | Maintaining the Momentum vivor in the listener’s own need to also be heard. Perhaps out of an intense desire to heal their own woundedness, some women listeners will want to jump quickly to conclusions about the painful experiences of women being “basically all the same...