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Civil Rights Review: Do you know these courageous women?
Posted by: | CommentsI continue to be impressed and inspired by Shirley Sherrod who, in the face of adversity, is taking us all to school, and doing it with tremendous grace. Today, she appeared at the National Association of Black Journalists convention and said that we all need to know more about civil rights history. (You can see the plenary with Sherrod here.)
There’s a good bit of scholarship on the civil rights movement which documents the ways that women have been written out of civil rights history. So, in honor of Ms. Sherrod and to remind people about women’s influence in civil rights history and the struggle for racial justice, I’ve assembled a short list of women who might be called civil rights heroes. Do you know these courageous women?
- Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a journalist and anti-lynching activist and suffragist who led the way in the struggle for racial justice at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Many people believe that the foundations of the civil rights struggle were laid down in the fight against lynching. (Factoid for sociology geeks: Troy Duster is a descendant of Wells-Barnett.) You can read more about Wells-Barnett here.
- Claudette Colvin is a African American woman from Alabama sometimes referred to as “The First Rosa Parks.” In 1955, at the age of 15, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white person, in violation of local law. Her arrest preceded Parks’ (on December 1, 1955) by nine months. You can read more about Colvin here.
- Ella Baker was perhaps the consummate organizer within the civil rights movement. She began her organizing career in the 1940s with the NAACP. In the 1950s, she helped Dr. King organize his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). And, in the early 1980s, when she wanted to assist the new student activists she organized a meeting at Shaw University for the student leaders of the sit-ins. From that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born. In many ways, SNCC was the forerunner of the Black Power and Black Panther movements. You may have heard SNCC mentioned in recent days as Ms. Sherrod’s husband was a member of this organization. You can read more about Ella Baker here.
- Mamie Till-Mobley was the mother of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy who looked at a white woman (some say whistled at her) and for that was lynched in 1955. Mrs. Till-Mobley made the heroic decision to have an open-casket funeral. At the time of her death, Jesse Jackson remarked about this decision: “She was a very articulate teacher who saw the pain of her son and did a profound, strategic thing.When they pulled his water-soaked body from the river, most people would have kept the casket closed. She kept it open.” The press took pictures of Till with a bullet in the skull, an eye gouged out and his head partially crushed. His body had been found floating in the Tallahatchie River, identifiable only by the ring Till wore that belonged to his late father. These photos were widely published and attributed with helping to galvanize the civil rights movement. You can read more about Mamie Till-Mobley here.
- Fannie Lou Hamer was the daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers, who became one of the most dynamic speakers of the civil rights movement. She is widely known for the phrase “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Hamer became active in the movement when members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came to Mississippi. She worked on voter registration drives in the South. She was among several workers stopped by officials in Winona, Miss., on June 9, 1963. She and other workers were jailed and beaten. SNCC lawyers bailed her and the others out and filed suit against the Winona police. All the whites who were charged were found not guilty. She continued to work on grass-roots anti-poverty, civil rights, and women’s rights projects into the 1970s.
- Daisy Bates was a mentor to the Little Rock Nine, the African-American school children who integrated Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. She and the Little Rock Nine gained national and international recognition for their courage and persistence during the desegregation of Central High when Governor Orval Faubus ordered members of the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the entry of black students. She and her husband, Lucious Christopher (L. C.) Bates, published the Arkansas State Press, a newspaper dealing primarily with civil rights and other issues in the black community. You can read more about Daisy Bates here.
- Violet Liuzzo was a civil rights activist from Michigan and mother of five who left her home to become involved in the civil rights movement. She was inspired to act after seeing protesters assaulted by police in Selma, Alabama and reportedly told her husband, “this is everyone’s struggle.” While driving protesters in Alabama, was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members. You can read more about Violet Liuzzo here.
- Angela Y. Davis was an early pioneer in seeing the connections between the struggle for racial justice, gender equality and the prison-industrial complex. Her book, Women, Race & Class in many ways launched what we think of today as “intersectionality” studies. Davis is probably most widely known for the fact that in 1970, she became the third woman to appear on the FBI’s Most Wanted List when she was charged with conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide. She evaded police for two months and was eventually arrested. She was tried and acquitted of all charges eighteen months after her capture. Her trial became a focus of the Black Power movement as people wore buttons with her iconic afro with the words “Free Angela” around it. Years later, she would write “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion and Nostalgia,” (Critical Inquiry, 21(1):37-45), in which she would bemoan the fact that people remember her as simply “the afro” and critique the fact that “a politics of liberation could be reduced to a politics of fashion.” You can read more about Angela Y. Davis here.
- Beulah Mae Donald‘s son, Michael, was lynched by two members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1981 in Mobile, Alabama. Upset about the verdict in a trial of an African American man for the murder of a white cop, KKK members Henry Hays and James Knowles spotted Michael Donald walking home from getting his sister a pack of cigarettes. They kidnapped him, drove out to a secluded area in the woods, attacked him and beat him with a tree limb. They wrapped a rope around his neck, and pulled on it to strangle him, before slitting his throat and hanging him from a tree across the street from Hays’ house. Local police first stated that Donald had been killed as part of a drug deal gone wrong, despite his mother’s insistence that he had not been involved in drugs. Beulah Mae Donald then contacted civil rights leaders and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Eventually, the SPLC won a civil victory against the KKK. In 1987, Ms. Donald won a judgment in the amount of $7 million dollars against the KKK and as a result, the group was forced to turn over its headquarters to her. The verdict marked the end of the United Klans, the same group that had beaten the Freedom Riders in 1961, murdered civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo in 1965, and bombed Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963. You can read more about Beulah Mae Donald’s successful case against the KKK here.
These are just a few of the people who’ve struggled to bring about racial justice. Did you know all the names?
Shirley Sherrod: On the Vilification of Black Women (Updated)
Posted by: | CommentsThe intense political firestorm around Shirley Sherrod, the former USDA worker, has once again put racism at the center of many of the mainstream news shows. Few have done a better job in talking about this than political commentator and Princeton University professor of political science, Melissa Harris Lacewell. Appearing on MSNBC’s Countdown, she notes that the Sherrod case highlights the way that black women have been vilified in American politics (5:00):
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In this short clip, Harris Lacewell points out that the vilification of black women has been a feature of both the left and the right, both Republicans and Democrats (Bill Clinton, Sister Soulja, anyone?) in this country. My favorite part of her comments come toward the end when she likens the attacks on Sherrod to that film of a few years ago, “Crash.” Here’s the transcript of this part of her interview:
It reminds me very much of the Academy-award-winning of 2004, “Crash.” I heard this story breaking, and I thought, this sounds like that film to me. If you remember that film, the first act of really horrifying racism occurs when the white police officer puts his hand up an African American woman’s dress, a sexual assault on her. But – in a scene right after that – we see a black woman bureaucrat refusing government services to this police officer’s aging father. The idea in that film, that the movie made …and we embraced it as a country and felt good about awarding the Oscar … is that the police officer and the low-level bureaucrat are the same, all prejudice is equal, this is the thing the NAACP is moved to do, it’s to explain that it is structural racism matters, not just momentary lapses of prejudice. Even if that tape had been true, it would not have been the equivalency of Jim Crow, to slavery, to institutional racism.
While many of the mainstream news outlets will blame this on Fox News, or a conservative blogger, or the White House’s “race to judgment,” the fact is that the vilification of Shirley Sherrod is indicative of a larger pattern of systemic racism in the U.S., and the particular way that black women get vilified in this culture.
UPDATED: For further context on the real racism happening at the USDA, check this link about the systematic pattern of racism at the agency, whose own Commission on Small Farms admitted in 1998 that “the history of discrimination at the U.S. Department of Agriculture … is well-documented” — not against white farmers, but African-American, Native American and other minorities who were pushed off their land by decades of racially-biased laws and practices.
Intermarriage among Blacks in America
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The newly released report Marrying Out tracks the boundary crossings in terms of interracial marriages that are happening among the races in the United States. The timing of the report is propitious; for the past year or so, we have been investigating another aspect of this boundary crossing in America – that is, intermarriages among blacks. Using Census data from 2000, we identify, for the first time, the proportion and the dominant forms of interethnic marriage between black Americans, who are native to America, and blacks who come from the Caribbean and Africa.
The report Marrying Out reveals the historical significance of interracial marriage as an indication of race relations in this great land of ours. But equally significant, we think, is the extent to which immigrant blacks are marrying native black Americans. In general, researchers presume that cultural differences among blacks are so profound and conflict so pervasive that black immigrants (mainly Caribbean and African) are more likely to distance themselves than identify with African Americans. Even as the American black population becomes more diverse through immigration, especially in large metropolitan areas, it is taken for granted that, as immigrants, Caribbean and African blacks wish to increase their chances of social mobility by avoiding marriage with African Americans (Jackson 2007, Beyond social distancing: Intermarriage and ethnic boundaries among black Americans in Boston pp. 217 – 254).
We focused our attention on black ethnic intermarriages: marriages among blacks with different ethnic ancestry (also described as black intraracial marriages) because we realized, after reviewing the literature, that there was no information on black interethnic marriages. Despite much recent scholarly attention, we did not find definitive answers to (basic) questions such as: What proportion of black marriages is interethnic? What are the dominant types of interethnic marriage among blacks? Who marries whom among blacks? How educated are these intermarried couples? What do they earn? How long has America been home to the immigrant spouses? Where in America do these couples live? We used data from the 5% Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) of the 2000 U.S. Census that link the attributes of individuals in a given household to the attributes of the head of household. (The designation “head of household” is usually the person, or one of the people, in whose name the home is owned, bought, or rented. The head of household is usually the one who provides primary support for the household.) Our goal was to capture black interethnic married couple households.
Results
Based on Census 2000 data, we obtained a sub-population of 102,887 black intraracial non-Hispanic married couples from America, the Caribbean and Africa. This number represents about 3% of all marriages involving non-Hispanic blacks (as shown in table 1).
Undoubtedly, the estimate we report here has grown over the past 10 years given current migration and mobility patterns. Although we cannot be certain about the extent of growth, our baseline 2000 data gives a threshold for measuring the boundary crossing that is occurring among blacks. But, compared to interracial marriages (see Marrying Out report), should the rate of black interethnic (black intraracial) marriages be higher, at least about the same as the rate of black interracial marriages?
Among black interethnic marriages, there are more unions involving Caribbean husbands and American wives (41%) followed by American husbands with Caribbean wives (34%). This represents three-quarters of all black interethnic marriages. The higher rate of interethnic marriage with Caribbean partners is consistent with their population size and their history of migration to the United States. Caribbean blacks have been migrating to the United States since the early 1900s; and American and Caribbean blacks share a long period of interaction when compared to recent African immigrants. And the probability of intermarriage with native-born counterparts increases the longer the migrant resides in the host country. The rarest form of intraracial coupling is the one involving Caribbean husbands and African wives.
We also found that: (1) By proportion, more Caribbean husbands are older (≥ 55 years) when compared to American husbands and African husbands in interethnic married households (shown in table 2). (2) By proportion, more intermarried Africans have college degrees (tables 2 and 3). (3) Proportionately more American husbands and African husbands earn high incomes (≥ $75,000) than Caribbean husbands (table 2). (4) More Caribbean spouses have been in the United States longer when compared to African spouses (tables 2 & 3). (5) The households of African husbands and Caribbean wives seem to be prosperous – more of these couples have college degrees and more of them earn high incomes. Their profile suggests that among black interethnic married couples, this type may be the proverbial ‘power couple.’ Black interethnic married couple households are mainly in New York/New Jersey, Florida, Georgia, Maryland/Virginia/DC, Texas, and California. They are, to a lesser extent, also in Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota/Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Our results and the results of the Marrying Out report contradict the conclusions of two studies; one study by Model and Fisher (2002: Unions between blacks and whites: England and the US compared. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25, pp 728–754) contended that: “when blacks out-marry, they are far less likely to choose white partners than black partners of a different ethnicity”. Another study by Batson, Qian, & Lichter (2006, Interracial and intraracial patterns of mate selection among America’s diverse black population. Journal of Marriage and Family, 68, 658 – 672) reported that “a disproportionate share of Blacks, regardless of national origin, are likely to cohabit with other groups than to out-marry.”
Regine O. Jackson (Assistant Professor, Emory University) and
Yoku Shaw-Taylor (Research Scientist)
Unlearning Racism: Lecture from Bettina Aptheker
Posted by: | CommentsBelow is a link to a lecture by Bettina Aptheker, professor at University of California-Santa Cruz. The lecture is long (over an hour) but it’s a holiday weekend and I figure people have some time on their hands.
The lecture’s worth listening to for a variety of reasons. For the truly geeky sociologists among us (myself included), there are a couple of stories about Aptheker’s connections to W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Davis near the front that are gems. Readers interested in more of those gems may want to read Aptheker’s recent memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Seal Press, 2006). Aptheker’s lecture is also a good primer for a lot of the concepts we discuss here. And, finally, I like the fact that this lecture from within the ‘ivory tower’ can be liberated online – a little bit of hacking the academy, if you will.
The producers of the video podcast have disabled the embedding feature (which would allow me to post the video here), so I just have to post it at this link (it takes a minute to load, so be patient). Updated: Lots of people have been reporting trouble with that link so here’s another link to try:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/uc-santa-cruz-podcasts/id110693429
Happy long weekend!
Cyber Racism on College Campuses
Posted by: | CommentsRacism on college campuses these days often spreads through email or via popular social networking sites, such as Facebook. This new medium for racist expression is forcing universities to reconsider what it means to provide a safe space on campus for all students. My research on cyber racism indicates that this is a growing problem in the U.S., and a recent incident at the University of Minnesota-Duluth (UM-D) illustrates a few of the relevant issues.
photo credit: Chris Campbell
Here’s what happened at UM-D. Two first year students, self-described white girls, began a Facebook wall conversation after an African-American classmate entered the room where they were studying. More on what they typed to each other via the local news in Duluth:
One of the posts read, “ewww a obabacare (sic) is in the room, i feel dirty, and unsafe. keep a eye on all of your valuables and dont make direct eye contact….i just threw up in my mouth right now …”
In another post, one of the women wrote, “were two white girls..she already has her (N-word) instinct to kill us and use us to her pleasure …”
In the past, this sort of conversation between two white students might have happened in handwritten notes passed in class. While some may view such overt expressions of racism a thing of the past, overtly racist comments often occur – even today – in the “backstage” (white-only space), as research by Leslie Pouts-Hicca and Joe Feagin demonstrates. Social media has changed all that now. As more white people spend time online, they forget that the comments they think they’re making in the “backstage” (white-only spaces) are easily made public and shared in the “frontstage” by people who do not share their views (or, have other agendas). As more of these expressions of overt racism come to light, it forces all of us to decide again and again what is socially acceptable and what isn’t, especially on college campuses. The question for colleges and universities is also what can and should be done about incidents like this one?
Many people, like the young man quoted in this article, think that: “If you really do believe in free speech, they shouldn’t be punished.” But “free speech” is not that simple. There are a couple of issues here.
First, the UM-D has an “anti-hate” policy which the white girls clearly violated.
Second, the framers of the U.S. Constitution didn’t have Facebook in mind when they were drafting the First Amendment to protect free speech. No one has a constitutionally protected right to be on Facebook. If you use Facebook, you have to abide by their Terms of Service (TOS) agreement which prohibits overtly racist speech (although it’s only sporadically enforced). If ‘we’ – all of us, users of Facebook – allow it there, we’re condoning a return to overt racism of Jim Crow.
In my view, the white girls at UM-D who racially harassed their African American classmate deserve some kind of punishment from the university. To address this sort of behavior, I want to suggest that ‘human rights’ is a better, more useful frame for dealing with cyber racism than ‘censorship’ and ‘free speech.’
There are no reports that I’ve been able to find (interesting fact in itself) about what the African American student who was the target of this racism has to say. I’ll bet that her experience of college life (+ life in general) has been damaged in some way by this run-in with her two white ‘friends.’ At the very least, she has a new awareness of that her college campus is just a little less ‘safe’ from racism than it was before. In some ways, it’s not surprising that this African American student’s story is not being reported. As critical race scholars have pointed out, the ‘victims’ story is almost never told. Our understanding of “free speech” shifts when we listen to these stories.
In 2003, the Supreme Court of the U.S. ruled that a burning cross is *NOT* protected speech (Virginia v. Black). Part of that ruling declared that a “burning cross has no value in a democracy” because it is not meant to be a discussion, but it’s a symbol meant to racially terrorize a group of people. (Today, 14 states have anti-cross burning laws.) So, not all speech counts as “protected speech,” and the Supreme Court has already ruled that racist speech in the form of a burning cross, can be ruled illegal. Given the rise of social media, the question becomes: what constitutes a burning cross in the digital era?
I think what those white girls did on FB was akin to cross burning in the digital era. That kind of speech is harmful and it has no value for democracy.
There are real, material consequences from racism. Children who experience racial discrimination feel psychological stress that may lead to depression. Likewise, there are real, material consequences from actions that seem to be exclusively digital. The tragic case of Phoebe Prince, who was harassed online and offline (and called an “Irish slut”) and then took her own life is a case in point. Perhaps not surprisingly, minority college students report more experiences of online bias than do whites.
Yet, whites like these two white college students at UM-D, say overtly racist online and very few step up to challenge them because of misplaced belief in what kind of speech the First Amendment protects. Americans are quick to say “free speech” (1st amendment) is an ideal that trumps equal protection under the law (14th amendment), but most other democracies see “speech” and “equal protection” as two values that always need to be balanced against each other. I discuss this argument at length in my book Cyber Racism – which I wrote in many ways as challenge to (white) liberal friends who often seem hamstrung by misunderstandings of the first amendment and free speech. The solution is not to abandon free speech as principle, but to shift the discussion to a consideration for how we balance the 1st and 14th amendments, balance between free speech and equal protection.
Given this re-framing of “free speech,” it seems clear to me that a college campus should be a place where we want to protect all of our students from the intentional infliction of emotional distress at the same time we encourage a lively exchange of ideas.
Race, Abortion and Reproductive Justice (Updated)
Posted by: | CommentsMarch 1 marks “National Women of Color Day,” situated at the end of Black History Month and at the beginning of Women’s History Month. Over the weekend, I attended the SexTech conference in San Francisco and heard a discussion by feminist sexual health educators that was interesting and flawed because it largely left out black women’s experience of sexual and reproductive health. This confluence of events seemed like an opportune moment to address the controversy churning around race and abortion. The current discussion, which is highly politicized in the U.S. in ways that it’s not elsewhere, has been touched off by a new multimedia activist campaign, called “The Endangered Species Project.”
The campaign was launched in early February at a press conference by Georgia Right to Life and The Renaissance Foundation announcing a provocative billboard which proclaims “Black Children are an Endangered Species” and urges people to go to the site TooManyAborted.com (more about which below). Here’s one of the billboards in the campaign (which reportedly costs $20,000 for approximately 65 signs around Georgia):
The main group behind the billboard campaign is the predominantly white organization, Georgia Right to Life (GRTL). Prior to this campaign, the GRTL was probably best known in the region for its “Miss Right to Life” pageant. With the new ‘endangered species project’ campaign, GRTL is partnering with a Ryan and Bethany Bomberger. The very slick website for the campaign, says the effort is a “collaborative effort between The Radiance Foundation and Georgia’s Operation Outrage.” The three layers of identification here — “Too Many Aborted.com,” then The Radiance Foundation, and then Operation Outrage — work as a kind of Internet slight-of-hand. The illusion of a multi-layered organizational structure disguises the fact there’s no staff here beyond the Bombergers. Ryan Bomberger is a former ad exec, and wife Bethany is a former school teacher, and they live in Georgia with their three children. Ryan Bomberger, who is biracial, has a compelling story about being the product of rape and the beneficiary of adoption, and this narrative frames much of the discussion in this multimedia campaign. Bomberger wants more mothers of black and biracial children to consider adoption rather than abortion.
Perhaps more disturbing even than the slickly deceptive multimedia campaign is the corporate involvement of CBS. According to RHRealityCheck, the billboards are the property of CBS Outdoors, a subsidiary of the multi-media CBS corporation. This pro-life campaign comes very quickly on the heels of the CBS decision to air a Super Bowl ad earlier this month from Focus on the Family, the ultra-right conservative organization that seeks to limit the rights of women, LGBT folks, and people of color generally. CBS simultaneously denied ad space to advertisers for condoms and organizations representing gay advertisers. At this point, it’s not clear whether CBS is endorsing or underwriting the ads in any way, but it’s certainly a telling coincidence.
At the launch of the ‘endangered species project’ GRTL also announced that they would seek to pass House Bill 1155, legislation that would:
“make it a crime to ‘solicit a woman to have an abortion based on the race or sex of the unborn child.’ “
GRTL’s “endangered species” ad campaign is an incredibly sophisticated strategy for reaching out to black women about issues of reproduction because it trades on a rhetoric that evokes the long history of racist practices directed specifically at black women. For example, forced sterilization of black women was so commonplace in parts of the deep south during the Jim Crow era that it was referred to as a “Mississippi Appendectomy.” It was routine for white doctors who perform these sterilizations on black women without their knowledge or consent, presumably “for their own good” and the “good of the larger society.”
It’s also true that black women, like women of other races, want to control their reproductive lives. Usually what this means is deciding on when and how many children to have. For many African American women in Georgia (and around the U.S.), a lack of access to birth control, lack of education, and even a high rate of sexual violence make this kind of control difficult to achieve. The fact is that a disproportionately high percentage of black women seek abortions, from the New York Times:
Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that black women get almost 40 percent of the country’s abortions, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. Nearly 40 percent of black pregnancies end in induced abortion, a rate far higher than for white or Hispanic women.
As the state’s largest anti-abortion group, GRTL has been trying to find ways to address the issue of abortion in the black community, but without much success until they began to reframe the issue as one of genocide. GRTL also did a very savvy thing and hired an African American woman, Catherine Davis, to be its minority outreach coordinator. Ms. Davis travels to black churches and colleges around the state, delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks. Not surprisingly, given the genocidal practices in the U.S. against black and brown people over centuries, this is a message that has resonated with African American audiences.
SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta works for reproductive justice for women of color. Executive Director Loretta Ross refers to the controversy this way:
“It’s a perfect storm. There’s an assumption that every time a girl is pregnant it’s because of voluntary activity, and it’s so not the case.”
SisterSong also notes that “the association between the born and unborn with endangered animals provides a disempowering and dehumanizing message to the Black community, which is completely unacceptable.” Other people, such as this blogger, have noted that the “endangered species” ad campaign sends an insidious message about African American women’s sexuality that:
African Americans are more promiscuous, practice unsafe sex, and because they obtain more abortions, are less responsible. This has many lasting effect across the country that further enables historical constructs and stereotypes surrounding race to flourish. (Such as the construct in which the African American Women are portrayed to be an out-of-control sexual being that always wants sex).
The billboards also imply that “black women somehow are perpetrators of a coordinated and intentional effort to ‘execute’ black babies is harmful, deplorable and counterproductive.” This assessment comes from SPARK, another reproductive justice organization that, along with SisterSong, is pushing back against the “endangered species” ad campaign and the proposed House Bill 1155. SPARK released this statement in support of black women’s self-determination over their own reproductive lives:
“Black women know what is best for our lives, our families, and our communities and are capable of making these decisions without a coordinated assault by organizations that are not genuinely committed to addressing the host of social issues confronted by the black community. We strongly reject and denounce these billboards and the sponsoring organizations, Georgia Right to Life, the Radiance Foundation, and Operation Outrage for speaking about us, demonizing our decisions, and assuming they know what is best for our lives.”
While the Bombergers and other pro-life advocates like the GRTL say they want to encourage adoption because they care about black children, the reality is that adoption placements are heavily influenced by race and the racial preferences (if not outright racism) of adoptive parents. According to one recent study, both straight and gay adoptive parents in the U.S. exhibit racial biases when applying to adopt a child, consistently preferring non-African-American babies (pdf). So the reality is that if more African American babies are given up for adoption, they will very likely languish in the foster care system rather than being adopted due to the racism of prospective adoptive parents.
The “Endangered Species Project” is yet another villification of black women (there are so many available), and a rather cynical effort to play upon some well-founded suspicions of black people. If groups like GRTL really cared about black children they might better spend their time working to reduce or eliminate the racism which negatively affects birth outcomes for black mothers (pdf). Rather than the narrowly focused agenda of preventing black women from getting abortions, we need think differently about abortion, not as a “right to life” versus a choice, but as part of a broader reproductive justice agenda that places black women’s experience at the center.
Updated 3/1/10 @ 12:10pmET: A reader responded saying she was confused by the stance toward abortion in the original post. The point here is not to re-hash “pro-life” vs. “pro-choice” arguments which are framed by a white feminist movement and the mainstream media, but rather, to put reproductive justice at the center of the analysis. One way to do that is to begin my looking at women of color’s experience with reproduction, such as African American women’s lives. For an excellent analysis from this perspective, I encourage readers to read Renee at Womanist Musings (also linked in the original post). Miriam writing at Feministing has a good analysis of the bias in the NYTimes piece (which I linked to above) that also offers some insight into reproductive justice and women of color.
And, I was remiss in leaving out a call to action from the organization SPARK Reproductive Justice Now, mentioned in the original post, which has a campaign to urge CBS Outdoor to bring the billboards down. Click here to take action.
Woman Kills White Supremacist Husband (updated)
Posted by: | CommentsThere’s an under-reported story out of Belfast, Maine that merits some attention here (h/t: Cheryl Fuller). Amber Cummings, 32, admits to killing her husband James Cummings, a white supremacist.
On December 9, 2009, Amber Cummings walked into her husband’s bedroom and fired two bullets into his head while he slept, then fled with her 9-year-old daughter to a neighbor’s home and called police. On January 8, 2010, Cummings appeared in court and received a suspended sentence for the killing. In granting the suspended sentence, the judge said that James Cummings had subjected his wife and their daughter to years of extreme abuse. What’s noteworthy in the story for discussing here is this bit about James Cummings:
“The killing drew the FBI’s attention after Nazi mementos, radioactive materials and instructions on how to build a ‘dirty bomb’ were found in their home. ….Her husband was angered by Barack Obama’s election as president and the bomb-making materials were discovered near the time of Obama’s inauguration… “
James Cummings, then, gets added to the growing list of white people – mostly white men – who are so angered by the election of black president that they are contemplating resorting to violence. Amber Cummings reported feeling an “escalating sense of doom” about her husband’s plans to set off large scale destruction and his increasing abuse of her and their daughter. Following the sentencing, Amber Cummings referred to her husband as “mentally ill,” and that’s undoubtedly one part of the explanation for his behavior. I also want to offer another explanation that directly takes into account race, gender and sexuality. James Cummings’ abusive treatment of his wife and daughter and his white supremacy are connected to more mainstream manifestations of gender and racial entitlement.
Entitlement is the sense that one is deserving of some particular reward or benefit. In many ways, gender and racial entitlement are a defining characteristic of white men in contemporary U.S. society, whether as “white saviors” in popular culture or as “masters of the universe” in banking, white men – by their own words - see themselves as those who are most entitled to material wealth and psycho-sexual power over individual women and children. Yet, if anyone dares to point this out, there are lots of people – frequently white women – who are eager to call this is “lunacy.”
Examples from the mainstream of this sort of connection between gender and racial entitlement abound, but there is a very recent one in the news that makes this point quite nicely. John Mayer, a white male, a pop singer, most known for his ballad “Wonderland,” and for dating actress Jennifer Anniston. Mayer is about as far away from the popular notion of a ‘white supremacist’ as anyone would imagine. He’s also not visibly mentally ill. In a recent interview for Playboy magazine (to understand how the underpinnings of this magazine’s founding in a sense of male entitlement, read: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Hearts of Men), Mayer revealed perhaps more than he intended. When asked if he dated black women (actually, the interviewer revealed his own racial/gender assumptions by asking “do black women throw themselves at you?”), Mayer’s answer was no, because his (male member) “is sort of like a white supremacist,” and went on to refer to it as “David Duke.” While Mayer’s racist response has quite reasonably offended lots of people and he’s apologized for the interview, it’s emblematic of the same sort of intertwined gender and racial entitlement that extreme white supremacists like Cummings exhibit. Interestingly, while Mayer is not being portrayed as “mentally ill” for his statements in the interview, at least one report attributes his remarks to the fact that he was drinking Scotch during the interview, which brings me back to the putatively mentally ill James Cummings.
Entitlement, in its extreme form, is often associated with a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and this may have been part of what went so terribly awry with James Cummings. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss this story as merely a personal tragedy separate and apart from a broader social and political context. In that broader context, white men have a disproportionate amount of resources, wealth and privilege and feel entitled to it. Like the old joke that Jim Hightower used to tell about George W. Bush, “he was born on third base and think he hit a triple.” That’s the essence of entitlement. Whether or not Amber Cummings did the only thing she could by killing her husband, I don’t know. The fact Amber Cummings took extreme action to save her daughter and herself from – and possibly lots of other people – from her husband’s excessive sense of aggrieved entitlement and violent tendencies is a symptom of a larger set of social conditions.
Updated (Friday, 2/12/10): Another name to add to the growing list of angry, violent white men: Gregory Girard, a Massachusetts technology consultant who said he feared an imminent “Armageddon” and appears to have been active in the Tea Party movement, was found with a stash of military grade weapons, explosive devices including tear gas and pepper ball canisters, camouflage clothing, knives, handcuffs, bulletproof vests and helmets, and night vision goggles, reports TPM. Online news reports I found did not mention whether Mr. Girard was married, or whether his wife was also heavily armed.
Once Again, Women – Especially Black Women – Are to Blame
Posted by: | CommentsHow many readers remember the Moynihan Report, the shorthand title for The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” written by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965? Supposedly, the rationale for the report was to draw attention to the need for social policies and programs that would address the many problems faced by Black families, especially single-parent, female-headed Black families, in the United States. Regardless of the intent, the Moynihan Report soon became one of the most frequently cited sources to support the argument that the problems facing Black, single-parent, female-headed families – e.g., disproportionately high rates of poverty, crime, illness, substance abuse, “illegitimate” births – were not the products of racism, but were actually caused by Black women themselves: by their strength, their independence, their emasculation of Black men. In subsequent years, the “myth of the Black matriarchy” was refuted by sound empirical research, but such myths, it seems, die hard, and it appears that this one has been resurrected recently, albeit in somewhat different form.
I am referring to the substantial media coverage recently of “the successful, but lonely Black single woman.” As one recent Washington Post article put it, there is now a large group of young Black women who seem to “have it all” – good jobs, high incomes, nice homes and cars and clothes – but they’re lonely; they don’t have a man or the prospect of marrying anytime soon. It turns out, according to a report released today by the Pew Research Center, that young, successful White women are experiencing the same relationship troubles. Among Americans aged 30-44 years old, women are more likely than men to have a college degree. They are also less likely to have lost their jobs in the recent economic recession; men held about 3 out of every 4 jobs that were lost. These changes are producing a “role reversal,” according to the Pew report, that is “profoundly affecting the marriage pool.” While the Pew report, which analyzes recent Census data, shows that the education and income gap by gender is greater for Blacks than for Whites, the focus of many media stories it seems to me is a new twist on the notion of the Black matriarchy.
photo credit: craigfinlay
In a recent ABC News Nightline segment, for example, it was reported that the number of never-married Black women is about double the number of never-married White women. The segment mentions various reasons for this difference, including the smaller number of “marriageable” Black men due to higher mortality, incarceration, and unemployment rates. But the segment focuses primarily on Black women. Several young, successful Black women were interviewed about their intimate relationships and what they desire in men they date. The women come across as strong and independent – and as wanting too much. “Relationship guru” Steve Harvey is also interviewed and he makes it fairly clear that these women have unrealistic expectations. He is shown advising the women to adjust their goals by, for instance, dating older Black men.
The Washington Post article I mentioned previously is even more explicit. It features Helena Andrews, author of Bitch is the New Black, a collection of satirical essays about young, successful Black women in Washington, DC. Andrews and her friends, according to the article, pride themselves on being “mean girls,” especially when it comes to meeting and dating men. But their “bitchiness” is just a mask; in their public presentations of self they convey a “don’t mess with me” attitude, but beneath this veneer is a well of loneliness and, it appears, it’s all their own fault. What do they expect? Instead of exploring with men – men of all races – why perhaps strong, independent women might be threatening to their masculinity and why this is their problem not the women’s problem, the implication of these and other similar stories is what man would want a woman like this? According to the Pew Research Center study, women’s educational and occupational successes in recent years mean that men benefit more from the economic gains of marriage than women do; in 1965, when the Moynihan Report was issued, the reverse was true. So why aren’t we applauding young, successful Black women for their achievements instead of blaming them for lower marriage rates? Why are we ignoring the fact that young, successful White women are also reporting difficulties finding compatible marriage partners? And why aren’t we analyzing why men cannot let go of norms of hegemonic masculinity and why they find successful, strong, and independent women intimidating? Sexism and racism are alive and well.
On Kwanzaa
Posted by: | CommentsToday, I celebrated Kwanzaa with the folks at my church. There are conflicting takes on Kwanzaa in the blogosphere from black neo-cons who take issue with it and white lefties who are anxious to make fun of white right-wingers making fun of Kwanzaa. One of the common critiques (from the left and the right) about Kwanzaa is that it’s a “made up holiday.” Hey, guess what? All holidays are made up… including Christmas.
More positive takes on the holiday include The Grio’s post that enlightens us about the five things you didn’t know about Kwanzaa (but should) (#3. Hip Hop played an instrumental role in Kwanzaa’s growth in the eighties and early nineties). There’s also Prof. (Dumi) Lewis’ excellent piece “Quit Frontin on Kwanzaa” in which he schools us all on the seven principles of Kwanzaa and reminds us of the importance of looking around “your family, your neighborhood, your nation, and tell me if we can afford to continue to not be self-reflective and work towards a better community?”
In a piece from The Root from last year about this time, Erin Evans wonders about the commercialization and lack of real observance makes me wonder where the celebration will be in a generation or two. Evans ends with this reflection:
In 2003, NPR’s Farai Chideya canvassed Ladera Heights, a largely black area of Los Angeles, to find out if young folks were celebrating Kwanzaa.
“Ain’t that a Jewish holiday?” asked Jaleel Miller, one of the young people she interviewed.
I shook my head when I heard it, but I could also relate. The future of Kwanzaa is in shaky hands—mine included.
I have my own issues with Kwanzaa, and they mainly have to do with the legacy of the founder Maulana Karenga (nee Ron Everett), once a member of the US organization – a political rival to the Black Panthers. While a leader of US (as in “us” not “them”), two leaders of the rival Black Panthers were gunned down in a parking lot at UCLA. Karenga was not charged with these crimes but was rumored to have been involved. What Karenga was charged, and convicted of, was a brutal attack on two women – Deborah Jones and Gail Davis. In 1971, Karenga and two other men were convicted of felony assault and false imprisonment for torturing Jones and Davis who were involved in the US Organization. An article in the Los Angeles Times described the testimony of one of the women: “Deborah Jones, who once was given the title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.”
Contemplating all this today sent me to the academic literature to see if I could find anything that would give me some answers. I came across a very good peer-reviewed article by scholar Elizabeth Peck, called “Kwanzaa: The Making of a Black Nationalist Tradition, 1966-1990″ (Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 20, No. 4, Summer, 2001, pp. 3-28). Pleck explores the discourse around Kwanzaa between its founding in 1966 and an artificial end point, 1990. Like all rituals, Pleck argues, Kwanzaa is a ritual that both reflects and is shaped by the discourses that surround it.
A key element in Pleck’s argument about Kwanzaa is that it is a ritual filled with ironies. Here’s a paragraph from near the beginning:
“As a flexible ritual that changed, grew, and flourished over the years, the history of Kwanzaa is replete with ironies. Born in part out of a critique of capitalism in the United States, the holiday owed much of its growing acceptance to refurbishing through consumerism. Originating among a black nationalist scornful of black “matriarchy,” Kwanzaa found its most eager enthusiasts among black women, who usually organized the feast in the home. Seen as an accessible ritual bound to appeal to the black masses, Kwanzaa was taken up mainly by the black middle class. A ceremony intended to replicate a simple harvest festival, most Kwanzaa celebrations occurred among residents of large cities or suburbs. Created by an intellectual hostile to Christianity, Kwanzaa proved dynamic enough to be redefined as religious, secular, or both, and as fully compatible with Christianity. Stemming from a rejection of racial integration, the holiday-time Kwanzaa celebration at many public schools functioned as a sign of toleration for cultural difference. Seen as a ritual to develop a diasporic African identity, Kwanzaa became more appealing as it came to include many more elements of African American history and culture” (p.3).
Pleck traces the ebbs and flows of Kwanzaa’s popularity by examining the mentions of it in the black press. Not surprisingly, much of the ritual’s popularity has followed the personal ups and downs of Karenga’s life. While he was in prison for the crimes against Jones and Davis, Kwanzaa suffered what Pleck refers to as period of “duldrums.” Pleck argues that the holiday “thus carried the weight of this specific incident,” as well as of Karenga’s fairly well-known attitudes toward black women in general.
Karenga in the 1960s believed that the proper role of black women was to be submissive to black men; he opposed equality between the sexes. In speeches between 1965 and 1967 he argued that “equality is false; it is the devil’s concept.” He said that the black husband had “any right that does not destroy the collective needs of the family” (p.11).
After his release from prison, there was a small but growing interest in the ritual. And, as Karenga transformed himself from radical political activist to professor and eventually chair of the African American Studies Department at Cal State Long Beach, the holiday’s popularity continued to rise. Pleck also ties the rise in the ritual’s popularity with a growing black middle class and an increasing self-definition among middle class blacks as African American, and with an increasing desire to identify with African cultural roots.
Pleck notes that the black mainstream press discovered Kwanzaa in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first article on Kwanzaa in the black mainstream press appeared in Essence in 1979, and seems to have been an act of self-promotion by a Bay Area nationalist, who had written a Kwanzaa manual. But it was in the early 1980s that the ritual began to really emerge in the black mainstream media:
“The more significant date is 1983, when Ebony and Jet first published articles about Kwanzaa. Black sororities began to invite speakers to show their members how to celebrate Kwanzaa. Cedric McClester’s handbook on the holiday, written in a more accessible style than Karenga’s … pamphlets, appeared in 1985. He developed a lengthier script for the Karamu. He also created the folk figure of Nia Umoja, a Kwanzaa “Santa” and teller of African tales, who brought gifts to children. Large national museums, New York City’s American Museum of Natural History (beginning in 1985) and the Smithsonian (beginning in 1988), staged Kwanzaa celebrations” (p.13).
These large institutions, most located near large, urban, black populations, Pleck argues, wanted to add programming that showed an interest in and demonstrated good will toward African Americans.
“Celebrations of Kwanzaa at many college campuses date from this period. Increased publicity about Kwanzaa on television, radio, and main stream newspapers encouraged the celebration, although many first learned about it from a friend. Some of those who celebrated Kwanzaa in public school or at a community center later came to practice it at home” (p.13).
Through the 1980s and 1990s while many black women, both in institutions such as college sororities and in private family homes, increasingly adopted Kwanzaa as a way of celebrating ancestral heritage and uniting family, at the same time Pleck notes that some black feminists, such as bell hooks, have remained critical:
In 1997, the feminist social critic bell hooks was interviewed in Essence and offered several reasons why she did not celebrate Kwanzaa. She began by noting her dislike for what she considered the rigid format of Kwanzaa and the Ngusa Saba. She also told the interviewer, “Another troubling thing about Kwanzaa is that you’re talking about patriarchal Black Nationalist men who decided they had to reinvent [these principles]. As if they didn’t already exist” (p.13).
And this is where I come back to with Kwanzaa. Is there a point to this ritual in a way that’s meaningful for me or is this, as hooks would have it, a celebration of patriarchal principles that already exists elsewhere in the culture? Pleck argues that because black women took on most of the organizing work of Kwanzaa that they re-made the ritual and in so doing, “erased entirely Karenga’s initial ideas about the submissiveness of women” (p.20). This was certainly what I saw today at my (queer), multi-racial church where black women led a transformed Kwanzaa celebration that highlighted diversity and the work of black women who did the work of organizing the civil rights movement, such as Ella Baker. Honoring this chosen and diverse family, unity around social justice and a commitment to a faith that the world can be a better place are worth celebrating.
World AIDS Day: Black Women, Racism and HIV/AIDS
Posted by: | CommentsToday is World AIDS Day, when people around the globe stop to reflect on those lost to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which is almost in its third decade. While many people may associate the disease with white, gay men because they were one of the groups initially infected and affected by HIV and among the most political vocal about it, the fact is the epidemic has changed. Within the U.S., if you examine the epidemic across racial and ethnic groups, you will see that HIV/AIDS is not a disease that exclusively, or even primarily, affects whites. Blacks and Latinos are increasingly affected by the disease, as this graph based on 2007 CDC statistics illustrates:
The changing nature of the epidemic is even more striking when you include gender.Today, black women are the group with the highest rates of new HIV/AIDS infections. According to CDC:
- African American women account for a majority of new AIDS cases (66% in 2006); white women and Latina women account for 17% and 16% of new AIDS cases, respectively.
- African American women account for the largest share of new HIV infections among women (61% in 2006), an incidence rate nearly 15 times the rate among white women. (For more detailed look at statistics about the epidemic’s impact on African Americans, see: “Black Americans and HIV/AIDS” compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation, opens PDF.)
During the first decade of the epidemic, most social science research focused on changing individual behavior (e.g., wearing condoms, using clean needles) as the primary intervention strategy to prevent HIV infection, these efforts often failed in the face of complex settings of social inequality. For example, telling a woman that her partner should wear a condom becomes a risky proposition if she is economically dependent on that man for survival and he sees the request to wear a condom as an affront of some kind. Thus, researchers and community activists interested in stopping the spread of the disease began to look at the dynamics of sexuality within a broader social and cultural factors.
Just as an increasing amount of research demonstrates that mothers who experience racism are more likely to have low-birth-weight babies, the experience of racism and sexism are part of the social and cultural factors affecting HIV/AIDS rates among African American women. One way to measure this combined racism and sexism, is to look at what national leaders have to say about the HIV/AIDS epidemic among black women. In 2004, when journalist and vice-presidential debate moderator Gwen Ifill raised this important issue in the form of a question to then-candidates John Edwards and Dick Cheney, neither one could stammer out a coherent answer. It was clear that the alarming rates of HIV/AIDS among black women were simply not a concern for powerful political leaders (who also happened to be white men).
Some of the most exciting research that attempts to address this inequality is the pioneering intervention studies conducted by Gina Wingood and Ralph DiClemente of Emory University who, drawing on Connell’s gender and power theory, began to think differently about HIV prevention for young, black women. Wingood and DiClemente developed an intervention study for African American adolescent girls that used workshops that emphasized ethnic and gender pride along with the usual HIV-prevention information. Basically, the researchers included a consciousness-raising group about race and gender along with the usual health education information. These positive messages about racial and gender pride are important for enabling and empowering young, black women who encounter a layered burden of racism, sexism and often, poverty.
However, not all black women who are HIV-infected are poor, as several activists remind us. Marvelyn Brown, for example, diagnosed at age 19 with HIV/AIDS has become an outspoken proponent and visible spokesperson for HIV-prevention among young, black women. The author of Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful and (HIV) Positive, Brown has won several awards for her activism. Rae Lewis-Thornton, diagnosed at age 23, was featured on the cover of Essence magazine in 1994 and described as, “I’m young, I’m educated, I’m drug-free, and I’m dying of AIDS.” It’s been fifteen years and, fortunately, Lewis-Thornton is still very much alive and an tireless activist. Yet, she struggles with the legacy of her diagnosis (powerful video interview with Lewis-Thornton here). And, young black women who are allies, are harnessing the power of new media to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS, such as Karyn and Luvvie of the Red Pump Project.
The growing epidemic among black women in the U.S. reflects a global trend. The World Health Organization’s estimate (via AIDS.org) is that there are over three million women with HIV in the world, most of them in Africa. In fact, one in 50 women in sub-Saharan Africa is infected with HIV. AIDS is the leading cause of death for women ages 20-40 in major
cities in the Americas, Western Europe, and Africa. The fact that this disease is shape-shifting into one what disproportionately affects black women both here in the U.S. and globally raises important questions about whether or not we will, collectively, be able to put aside our racism (and sexism) to address this epidemic.
As you go to a service, attend a vigil, or just hold a good thought or observe a moment of silence on this World AIDS Day, reflect also on the ways that racism shapes the epidemic and who we lose because of it. If you care about racial and gender equality, you need to start paying attention to HIV/AIDS. IF you’re concerned about HIV/AIDS, you need to start learning about racism and sexism.
For more on the public health crisis affecting black women, you can watch this video (approximately 27 minutes) which features a discussion with C. Virginia Fields, President of National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, Monica Sweeney, MD, Assistant Commissioner for the Bureau of HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control of the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and Marvelyn Brown.
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