Further To Fly: Black Women and the Politics of Empowerment

4. The Crisis of Black Womanhood

Historically, the black woman . . . has had to work alongside the black man in a struggle unlike that of any other group in the United States. For black people have had to hack their way through the wilderness of racism embedded by nearly four centuries of a barbarous international slave trade, two centuries of chattel slavery and a century of struggle to achieve full citizenship even after the Emancipation Proclamation. Hers has been a desperate effort to make a place of dignity for her people. . . . Not only have these women stood shoulder to shoulder with black men in every phase of the battle, but they have continued to stand when their men have been destroyed by it. —Dorothy Height, “Testimony before the New York City Commission on —Human Rights” Women have been hosts for fear, doubt, and depression which has immobilized them and urged them to resist the necessary moves to correct what’s not working in our lives or in our world. —Susan L. Taylor, “Perspective,” Essence magazine I Toni Cade Bambara, Michele Wallace, KeshoYvonne Scott, and Hortense Spillers, among others, have discussed the negative images of black womanhood embodied in the myth of matriarchy and its attendant twin mythologies: the myth of the castrating black bitch and the myth of the superwoman (Bambara, 1970; Wallace, 1979; Scott, 1991; Spillers, 1984). Few have discussed what happened to move black women from Dorothy Height’s description in 1970 to Susan Taylor’s in 1991. What caused black women to become immobilized? Why are black women resisting the “necessary moves to correct what’s not working in [their] lives”? What, in short, is the cause of the present crisis of black womanhood? What strategies can black women develop to respond positively to the situations, challenges, and circumstances in their lives? What can motivate black women to take collective action to strengthen each other across social class and to have a political impact on the people and the issues they care about? 4. The Crisis of Black Womanhood 39 To answer these questions, it is important to understand that Taylor’s comment is not an isolated occurrence; rather, it describes a particular rupture in black women’s gender identity. This disruption of historical patterns of black womanhood is the aftermath of a subtle but relentless attack on the traditions of black female gender consciousness. The attack and its aftermath have been called a crisis because the situation is unprecedented, pervasive, and far-reaching (Radford-Hill, 1986). Moreover, the root cause of this disconnection between historical forms of black gender socialization and today’s loss of black women’s empowerment is beyond the capacity of individual women to solve. Crisis is an overused term. From a crisis at the White House to the next crisis in our nation’s schools, from the periodic crisis in the world economy to the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, times of instability, danger, and impending doom are becoming almost routine. Given this context, merely explaining the crisis of black womanhood is not enough. In any turning point in history, people often wall off their emotions to separate their psyches from perpetual pain. This has been especially true for black women, who are forbidden to reflect on themselves and each other. We are encouraged to be strong and stay strong. We are encouraged to erect a fire wall between life and its miseries, between us and our vulnerabilities. This wall and our faith are our means of making it through. But when we simply jettison the pain, bury the shame, and hide the confusion of our disappointments, the power of our emotions becomes unavailable for healing use. It is necessary, therefore, to understand that both the emotional and the intellectual aspects of the crisis are part of the continuing aftermath of gender issues that the civil rights and black power movements left unresolved (Hine and Thompson, 1998). The crisis occurred in part because, in the wake of these movements, segments of the black community, including some black feminists, negated the idea that black women have a responsibility to preserve and renew black culture and to build the black community. Thus, the crisis of black womanhood is both a crisis of political identity and a crisis of belief. The crisis of identity requires an active reassessment of the value of social activism as a vehicle for personal growth and group advancement. The crisis of belief reflects the profound disappointment of a generation whose coming of age witnessed the limits...