Several members of The Feminist Wire will be in San Juan, PR for the National Women’s Studies Association annual conference this November! Will you? If so, please consider adding our presentations to your personal schedule and checking us out!

Friday, November 14

Tanisha C. Ford will be presenting during a round table entitled Electric Ladies: Black Women, (Hyper)Visibility, and Transgressive Body Politics at 7:45 am.

Heather M. Turcotte will be presenting during a round table entitled Feminisms and the Corporate Academy: A Collective Critique for the Future of Feminist Justice at 7:45 am.

During a panel entitled Bodies of Empire at 9:15 am, Monica J. Casper will be presenting a paper entitled “Subject to Loss: Puerto Rican Infant Death in Transnational Context. Mariko Nagai will also be presenting a paper entitled “Occupied Bodies: Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) and Postwar Comfort Station in the Occupied Japan.”

Saturday, November 15

During the Igniting Interdisciplinary Activism: Creating Feminist Justice through Curriculum panel at 2:30 pm, Aishah Shahidah Simmons will be presenting a paper entitled “Using the Lorde’s Work to Centralize the Margins in the Academy and in Cyberspace.” Stephanie Troutman will also be presenting a paper entitled “Feminist Pedagogy/ies, Social Justice, and Curriculum.”

Heidi R. Lewis will be presenting a paper entitled “Damn, I Love the Strippers: An Examination of Rihanna’s ‘Pour It Up’” during the The Booty Don’t Lie: Black Women’s Movement Vocabularies panel at 2:30 pm.

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Please check us out at NWSA 2014! Additionally, if you’re presenting, let us know in the comments, and we’ll do our best to come see you!

The post TFW at the Upcoming National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Paula Maggio

On the Ohio campus where I taught women’s studies for five years, the lavender Saturn of one of my most thoughtful feminist theory students was easy to identify. Its bumper was plastered with inspiring feminist slogans, and the most prominent among them featured this quote by Audre Lorde: “Your silence will not protect you.” Several years later that quote reappeared on the same campus, this time on a sign I carried at a May Day rally for equity, where I made the “A” in Lorde’s first name the scarlet “A” for adjunct. Lorde’s warning, from “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” a paper she delivered at the 1977 MLA convention, is a fitting caveat to women’s studies directors and faculty in today’s highly corporatized university, where both our discipline and our faculty have become increasingly contingent. What it tells us is that even if we remain careful and silent, even if we don’t talk back to the dominant corporate culture about the precarity of our programs and our faculty, our programs and our positions will not be protected.

Consider the numbers. The problem of contingency has grown steadily since the 1970s, the decade that also saw the birth of women’s studies as an academic discipline and the subsequent launch of the National Women’s Studies Association. In the discipline’s early years, women’s studies programs asked the question, “Where are the women?” Today we know that many of them are in the academy. We also know they make up the majority of contingent academic workers. As Sivagami Subbaraman maintains, the position of adjunct has become feminized and is now a “women’s problem.” Contingent faculty – non-tenure track and adjunct instructors – represent 73 percent of all faculty nationwide, and women are 10 to 15 percent more likely to be in those positions. They comprise between 51 and 61 percent of adjunct faculty nationwide. And they are victims of the gender pay gap. Women who teach as contingent faculty earn 27 percent less than their male counterparts. And contingent positions are the highest in the disciplines transformed by feminism: women’s, LGBTQ and ethnic studies, as well as English. At the same time, women’s and gender studies programs find themselves increasingly vulnerable, disproportionally affected by institutional cuts justified by corporate-speak about “sustainability” and “marketplace demands.”

New Faculty Majority, an organization that advocates for equity for contingent faculty, speaks loudly about the issue of women and precarity. This year, NFM launched its Women and Contingency Project, which focuses on women as the most politically vulnerable and economically precarious faculty workers and on women’s and gender studies programs as among the most precarious disciplines in the academy. As part of the project, researchers compiled a database of existing research on women and contingent academic employment and identified research gaps. To fill one such gap, they conducted a nationwide survey of WGS programs, asking questions about the stability of their departments or programs as well as their autonomy to improve the working conditions of their contingent faculty.

In her piece on the Feminist Wire, Gwendolyn Beetham argued that WGS has abdicated its role as a leader in the fight against academic contingency and the corporatization of higher ed. That view was born out by the NFM survey. While chairs and directors of WGS programs who responded to the survey said they do everything they can to improve the working conditions of their contingent faculty, they admitted they are silent about contingency on an institutional level. They see themselves as having “no control over working conditions” and carrying “little real weight in significant decisions.” One admitted that threats to her position meant she had fewer opportunities to advocate for both contingent faculty and her students.

However, survey respondents also said they looked to their professional organizations for advice on how to improve working conditions for contingent faculty. They want to learn about best practices and exemplary initiatives that could help them fight the inequities experienced by contingent faculty. They want advice regarding how to engage with students and the public about the issues. They want to learn how they can best share available data with their administrations. And they want concrete action steps they can take to make a difference for equity.

They may get some or all of that. Preliminary results of the NFM survey were included in an article submitted for a special issue on “Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University,” edited by Jennifer Nash and Emily Owens, for the journal Feminist Formation. More complete results will be presented at a roundtable on “Advocacy and Activism in the Contingent Labor Movement,” one of three at this month’s NWSA conference that for the first time will include a feminist perspective on contingency. Participants on those three roundtables have submitted resolutions advocating for contingent faculty that will be considered at the conference’s Nov. 14 Membership Assembly Meeting. I urge NWSA leaders to listen carefully to what contingent faculty have to say about contingency, realize the vital role they play in advocating for them, refuse to stay silent on the issue, and take positive, substantive action. The organization’s leadership is already on the right track. Its Governing Council has agreed to take on the issue of contingency in 2015 and beyond.

You can do your part, too. Whether you are a student, a parent, a tenured faculty member, an administrator, an adjunct or a member of the public, you can educate yourself on the topic, then advocate for equity for adjuncts. Share what you learn at meetings on your campus or within your community. Spread the word via social media using the hashtag #WGScontingency. And if you are going to NWSA 14, join us at one or more of the roundtables on contingency. Because as Lorde tells us, “Your silence will not protect you…And there are so many silences to be broken.” Be a warrior. Break this one.

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Paula Maggio received her Master’s in Liberal Studies from Kent State University. She created and edits Blogging Woolf. She is on the board of AAUW Ohio, has worked as Communications Director for New Faculty Majority and was one of the founding members of the Ohio Part-Time Faculty Association. She tweets as @woolfwriter.

The post Speak out for adjunct equity because your silence will not protect you appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

In her 1999 book, Remembered Rapture: the writer at work, bell hooks devotes a chapter to remembering and celebrating the life and work of Toni Cade Bambara. Fifteen years later, on the occasion of The Feminist Wire’s Toni Cade Bambara Forum, hooks revisits and highlights this chapter from Remembered Rapture, knowing that part of our work as Black feminists is to speak the names of our beloved foremothers, sisters, and departed friends and colleagues—to continue to uplift their work, in the doing of which we honor their labor and keep their memories alive.

Excerpts and Recollections from bell hooks
*Quoted from Original Text

Lorraine Hansberry
source: http://bit.ly/1zDzEHr

Toni Cade Bambara was a central and important figure in the development of my political conscience, because she was by far one of the most radical black thinkers of her time. Unlike many black writers, Toni was deeply aware of global politics. In the tradition of Lorraine Hansberry, she continually linked the struggle for black self-determination in the U.S. to struggles in Africa and other countries in the global south.

Kimberle Crenshaw
source: http://bit.ly/1tVRPFf

I was a senior in high school when TCB published The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970), and single-handedly the anthology placed Black women at the center of various feminist debates. TCB’s essay/piece “on the issue of (gender) roles” was one of the first essays on feminist theory that looked at the interlocking relations between race, sex, and class (this concept would later be expanded upon and coined as “intersectionality” by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw). White feminist thinkers were not eager to promote her, because the revolutionary feminism she espoused included a critique of imperialism, racism, and capitalism. As a dissident thinker on the left, she was a constant champion of the Black poor and working classes. She captured in her writing the wit and humor of Black life. She recognized the role of laughter in struggles for decolonization.

Toni Cade Bambara

Everybody close to Toni Cade Bambara knows she could have had a different life. She could have been part of the literary mainstream, but that was not her nature. She was bohemian—she liked to live on the edge. She invented the life that she wanted to live. And she lived this life on her own terms. Many folks thought she was mad for not taking the good jobs she could have had at predominantly white colleges in all white communities. She was the high priestess of community, understanding that Black survival depends on our capacity to make and live in community.

When Toni was based in Atlanta, I met her at a conference on Spelman’s campus. Coming from a working-class southern background, I often felt I lacked the bourgeois demeanor valued in academic settings. Bambara affirmed it was better to forget decorum and “just be real.”

Toni Cade Bambara loved Blackness; she loved Black people. Her love was nurtured by an understanding of the political importance of self-determination. She insisted always that decolonization was an intimate process—telling us that revolution begins in the self and with the self. Prophetically, this insight continues to serve as a necessary guide for Black liberation, and all global freedom struggles.

 Stephanie Troutman is the daughter of interracial, working class parents. Raised primarily by a single, low-income mother, Stephanie is a Black feminist scholar and first-generation college student. She received a Dual-PhD in Education and Women’s Studies from The Pennsylvania State University in 2011. A former high school and middle grades public school teacher, Stephanie currently serves as Assistant Professor of Leadership & Education Studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. She is a member of the Editorial Collective of The Feminist Wire. Dr. Troutman is also involved in local activism. She serves on The School Board of Two Rivers Community School and is an active member of the Ashe and Watauga County NAACP. Stephanie also serves on the Governing Council of the National Women’s Studies Association and Co-Chairs The Women of Color Leadership Project. She is in the process of writing a book that links the politics of ‘the war on women’ to discourses of the U.S. as a ‘post-race’ society through critical, feminist analysis of several contemporary popular films. Some of her work can be found here. She is also the mother of ten-year old Melora and Rex, age seven: they inspire her to stay vigilant in the fight for social justice and to continue toward an ethic of deep, unconditional Love.

bell hooks, noted cultural critic, public intellectual, scholar, commentator, and feminist, is Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, she has chosen the lower case pen name bell hooks, based on the names of her mother and grandmother, to emphasize the importance of the substance of her writing as opposed to who she is. Dr. hooks is the author of over thirty books, many of which have focused on issues of social class, race, and gender. In 2013,  she published the award-winning poetry collection Appalachian Elegy and Writing Beyond Race. You can follow her on twitter @bellhooks  and on her public Facebook page.

The post bell hooks Remembers Toni Cade Bambara appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Kalamu ya Salaam

Toni Cade Bambara
Photographer/copyright: Jane Poindexter

Toni was unprocessed, natural sea salt. No chemical additives, too glitzy or trendy packaging, no capitalist mark-ups to sell shit for usurious profit. There was no Toni Cade book bag, special correspondence course, or exclusive MFA summer program with only 21 openings.

Forget all that. You know all these dudes on radio and the social media talking about “real talk.” Ten minutes with Toni Cade would leave them tongue-tied. Toni never wanted to talk about fantasy when reality was up in our face. It’s nice to conversate about rose-scented moments and reminisce about fond memories of good times past, but Jojo’s in jail, Esther was date raped the other night, Bib Mama’s diabetes is getting worse, and who knows where Uncle Alfred is.

Let’s talk about life. But don’t start with none of that woe-is-us crybaby bullshit. Toni would just glare at you. “Baby, what you gonna do about it?” Rather than a stern confrontational stance, she would put a steady hand on your forearm and lean slightly forward while lowering her voice to a conspiratorial level as if to say, I’m all in with you if you want take this on.

Or like she asked in her opus The Salt Eaters:

Do you really want to be well?

Toni Cade. Thank god, she was no saint. She was one of us, from the same earth, these same mean streets, this same-old, same-old community of captives and maroons, always striving to break free. Once we talked about making movies. One day, she told me in the husky half-drawl—that was Toni’s way of slowing down time to make sure you would catch on to what she was putting down—that she knew she had to go to where movies were if she wanted to learn about movies, so she booked a ticket…

(I could not then imagine Toni in Hollywood, but I would hear her out. You don’t interrupt a prophet when she is foretelling the way ahead.)

…and flew to Paris. Didn’t know anyone there. Didn’t have a stash saved up. Just knew she had to do what she had to do cause the only way to do it is to actually do it. And spent, if I remember correctly, at least a week in the Louvre examining French cinema.

You know I never asked her is she spoke French. That was not the point of the story, and was actually irrelevant, because with good movies, there is so much you can learn if you just pay attention. The three “Ls”: Look, listen, and learn.

She had emptied her bank account not to chase a dream but to make real a fervent desire. She was righteously stupid. The learned might call her impractical, impetuous, immature, and a bunch of other “im’s,” but Toni knew there was never any perfect time to break free. She was from the Charlie Parker school of righteous practice: Now Is The Time. Always now. Never later.

I remember asking myself, had I ever fully committed myself to anything that would be like Toni flying off to Europe. But wait, Toni, that’s not a black thing. Well, it is now; cause I’m black and that’s what I did.

Next.

Toni Cade Bambara, West End Festival
©Susan J. Ross

I’m a man. Toni was a woman, eight years my senior. I never “hit” on her (back then most of us men, even those of us beginning to move in progressive directions, still had no popular progressive language to describe our interpersonal relations). I occasionally wondered what it would be like to be in a relationship with Toni, but I never approached her in that way. Besides my own moral code vis-à-vis women that I prided myself with holding to, what gave my musings pause was the realization that I was not as fierce as she. Toni was no one to take lightly, not even in your dreams.

Toni Morrison
source: http://bit.ly/1Eg7mke

I used to see her ‘round Mardi Gras time in New Orleans, sitting on a stoop waiting for the Indians, once (maybe it was twice) the other Toni was with her, Toni Morrison; the two Toni’s hung out in our city from time to time. And of course, we would cross paths all the time at conferences. I miss all those get-togethers we used to have, especially the Howard gatherings that John Oliver Killens initiated.

I always say that one of my most important essays from that period was commissioned by Toni Cade Bambara. I don’t remember what year it was, but that particular seventies D.C. conference was a rowdy affair (actually, all of our national cultural conclaves were rowdy, just different issues were the focus of our rowdiness). Anyway, I remember this was the year of black male writers whining about how black women writers were locking out the men from publishing, were receiving all the attention—some were even gender attacking the brothers, blah, blah, blah.

I had friends on both sides of the chasm.

Flying back home after the event, Toni and I shared the flight from D.C. to Atlanta, where she departed and I went on to New Orleans. Although I had spoken out on one of the panels, I felt like more needed to be said. These dudes were wrong and…Toni firmly raised the stakes as I played my hand. Sure the sisters should defend themselves, but what was also needed was for some men to be front liners in this anti-sexist struggle.

Kalamu, you ought to write it out.

That’s how my serious polemic, “If The Hat Don’t Fit How Come We Wearing It?: An Appreciation of Women Writing,” was born. That hours-long plane ride was when I graduated from being Toni’s friend and became her comrade. Later, we put together the mother tongue interview and overview, a piece of writing that has been anthologized in two or three of the Toni tribute books[1] that have come out over the years.

Not to receive applause or awards; indeed, we would often be ignored or vilified, dismissed as irrelevant or fanatical; even our closest friends and associates would provide shelter from time to time, but would seldom join us in the lonely fight against this now globalized capitalist-based system of oppression and exploitation. Naw, being on the front lines is a lonely fight.

Toni understood the solitary aspect of our search for a better life, and rather than try to make the struggle seem sweet, she told me, and told all of us, the truth. What was needed was not the sweetness of sugar suggesting that everything was going to be alright or that we had the chance now to join the descendants of our former slave masters at a White House banquet. America was offering us permission to wine and dine with them if we just acted right; and if we refused the invitation, well, America would make it hard on those of us who were smart enough to advance but dumb enough to retreat from equal opportunities.

This Toni was never going to win major awards, never going to be enshrined in the academy. This Toni would look back on America and turn to salt before she would abandon her people.

I remember Toni. Every time I be discouraged, be tempted to throw in the towel, be offered some material gain to shut up or be silent, or stop refusing to pledge…every time disaster strikes, every time we do something stupid or something horrible (like the Atlanta child murders), I remember Toni, shake off the doubts and hesitations, take a lick of salt off the back of my hand to clear the bad taste out my mouth, and re-resolve to be true to my vows to never surrender, never give up, never quit. I remember Toni. And I travel on.

Kalamu ya Salaam
Photographer/copyright: Alex Lear

New Orleans writer, filmmaker and educator Kalamu ya Salaam is co-director of Students at the Center, a writing program in the New Orleans public schools. Kalamu blogs at neo•griot. You can also follow him on Twitter @neogriot or email him at kalamu@mac.com.

The post It’s Not the Salt; it’s the Sugar that Will Kill You appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Thabiti Lewis

Maria Stewart
source: http://bit.ly/115SKYH

The March 2014 issue of Ebony Magazine published an article by Jamilah Lemieux entitled “Black Feminism Goes Viral.” Lemieux mentions Black feminist figures present and past from Melissa Harris Perry, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Joan Morgan, to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Angela Y. Davis, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Maria Stewart, and Anna Julia Cooper.

Anna Julia Cooper
source: http://bit.ly/10JfZXM

One purpose of the article is to inform readers that black women remain subject to both sexism and racism (and that’s without mentioning class discrimination, homophobia, and any other number of ways in which a Black woman can be “othered” by society), yet are largely marginalized by white women and black men when those issues are being addressed. Another goal of the article is to focus on the increased representation of black feminism in pop culture and how social media has enabled young women to connect with thought leaders around gender instead of key figures. The inclusion of Beyoncé and W.E.B. Dubois and the omission of Toni Cade Bambara amongst important theorists and thought leaders was noticeable.

I loved that the article drew attention to contemporary feminism, its spread in popular culture and praise of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s powerful TED talk “Why We Should All Be Feminists.” But I was disquieted that a full-length feature story about feminism omitted Bambara’s The Black Woman (1970) as seminal to many of the ideas finding traction in the popular sphere (the Ebony.com version of the article briefly mentions Bambara). When I think about Gorilla, My Love, which includes Bambara’s short story “Raymond’s Run,” whereby the protagonist reconnoiters very similar assertions as Adichie regarding female unity, resistance to patriarchy and gender inequity, I am left feeling uncomfortable. The “blueprint” of sorts offered by contemporary feminist like Kimberlé that: “The way to handle the crisis facing Black women and girls is first, fix what’s happening to men,” reminds me of Bambara’s astute essay “On the Issue of Roles,” in which she levels a similar suggestion. For instance, “On the Issue of Roles” challenges men and women to discard gender definitions and find the true “self” while also maintaining that feminism is a key liberation issue for women and men who are serious about freedom and equality. Leading black feminists like Crenshaw and bell hooks echo Bambara’s assertion that if women are oppressed, if sexism endures, then freedom is compromised.[1]

The point here is not critique Lemieux’s story, but to contend that young feminists need to pay more attention to Bambara’s fiction and essays, which reveal a pioneering voice that betrothed answers to the range of issues consuming contemporary feminist struggles. Indeed, Bambara’s art is in the tradition of abolitionist Maria Stewart, who deftly negotiated Christianity, nationalism, and feminism. There is no question that a deeper examination of her work is necessary, above all her revolutionary feminist approach and early transnational perspective.

The first thing that extensive and plentiful examinations of Bambara’s work will reveal is that she was a leading voice with a transnational reach before there was a term for it. Bambara was an early transnational visionary. Hence, what we call transnational Bambara was already doing before it had a name. Indeed, transnationalism was common in Bambara’s ideological practice and artistic expressions of the 1970s and 1980s. This is easily true of her 1977 collection of fiction The Sea Birds Are Still Alive and her first novel The Salt Eaters (1980). She was deeply impacted by her 1970s trips to Vietnam and Cuba, which influenced her depiction of Asian and Algerian freedom fighters in her second collection of short stories. In two of the stories in The Sea Birds, “The Long Night” and “The Sea Birds,” Bambara focuses on revolutionary women of color entrenched in revolutionary activity or training for participation in revolutionary activity. Her global feminist perspective is unmistakable in the memorable “The Long Night,” in which she conjures a courageous young female National Liberation Front (FLN) fighter. This global feminist vision takes shape in The Salt Eaters via the spirits the Seven Sisters who represent North, Central, and South America collectively traveling together throughout the novel. Bambara lamented in several interviews how women of color missed an important moment to unite in the 1970s. The Seven Sisters seems to be her corrective of this missed moment among feminist women of color. Bambara was aware of intersectional feminist principles; she understood that one size does not fit all women—especially women of color, but she also discerned that was not a deterrent for uniting around salient issues such as sexism and racism.

While perhaps not popular, it is true that Bambara’s transnational black feminist thrust has roots in the Black Arts Movement (BAM), which looked at blackness more globally and led to the emergence and expansion of new courses and fields of study, such as Women’s Studies, Cultural and Ethnic Studies, and Post-Colonial Studies. Like many of her BAM colleagues, Bambara’s global focus via history, literary, and cultural analysis brought to the surface issues of colonial, neo-colonial, hegemony, race, empire, gender and sexuality. Much of her work forced a reorganizing of the parameters of Black Aesthetic and black feminism to be ever-inclusive and global in scope and location. She does not allow women to be marginalized nor does she marginalize men to achieve this.

Ella Baker
source: http://bit.ly/1uLk4Yy

Septima Clark
source: http://bit.ly/1ua7X5J

Deeper analysis of this black activist feminist scholar reveal an artist that emerged as a model of what the Black Arts encouraged: interdisciplinary, transnational, and community-oriented artistic expression. She is a model, because she imports an undeniable feminist focus, and her work is always internal, self-critical, and explores African diaspora and spirituality. Few of her peers matched her unique trans-ideological, transnational, and intersectional approach. Bambara is a unique literary figure who models how to engage day-to-day liberation in life and art. She carves out her own brand of feminism and nationalism, reminding us of figures like Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Maria Stewart.

In Linda Janet Holmes’s wonderful biography of Toni Cade Bambara, A Joyous Revolt: Toni Cade Bambara, Writer and Activist (2014), she excerpts a May 1985 speech Bambara gave at the “Roots in Georgia” symposium at the University of Georgia. As usual, Bambara’s focus was getting the voice of the people heard over what she called “the official version of things.” Although she was speaking about John Oliver Killens, Bambara was also talking about herself when she reminded the audience, “It is not how little we know that hurts so, but that so much of what we know ain’t so.” Bambara’s life, her art, her organizing activism was consumed with delivering what she terms “usable truths to people” that differed from “the official version” of the truth.

In her art, she takes the 1960s and 1970s, which many agree was an era of enormous redefinition, creativity, and social turbulence, and revises it to unite and empower various constituencies, such as neighborhoods, health systems, women, elders, children and men. The rhetoric of the time was Black Power. Her liberation impulse is empowering the disenfranchised. In life and in her fiction, her impulse models a feminist, transnational, spirit of wholeness. Thus, she bridges a world where praxis and theory can work together.

Malcolm X
source: http://bit.ly/1nX7qju

The 1960s and 1970s was a volatile moment. The tone was driven by the struggle for civil rights in the United States reaching a high point, the struggle for feminism making strides, and the resistance to U.S. imperialism, particularly in Vietnam and Cuba. Both Kennedys were murdered; so was Evers, King, and Malcolm X. The Black Panthers, whose core focus was food distribution, health education programs, and voter registration, was one of the many black organizations targeted in the late 1960s by the FBI and local law enforcement agencies. This generation pushed back. Social critiques were being launched at imperialism, capitalism, race, class, and gender. It was a scary time that many people want to forget. It also produced the more violent tone of the generation’s shift toward more revolutionary ideas. They assumed equality and demanded agency without the permission or approval of the dominant culture. As a result, the call in black communities nation-wide was for nationalism linking black politics and art together for “Black Power.” Artist of this era mostly abided by a black aesthetic that emphasized connections between ideological and functional purposes of black art.

Sometimes in contemporary academic circles, there is a tendency to ignore or dismiss the impact of this era by emphasizing contradictions or negative outcomes. But luckily, scholars like Bracey, Sanchez, Smethurst, Traylor, Ranbsy, Shockley, and others have written books that help us see the value and creative space the BAM carved for the creative developments that arose from this era. They encouraged black artists to mine black cultural elements, such as blues, jazz, call and response, and black speech, as the dominant focus in their art. These elements have proven to be central to African American literary and cultural tradition, becoming the dominant aesthetic forces in much of the contemporary works being produced. Whether the many questions raised were correct or not, what was key was that they were raised. And Bambara’s art extends this tradition more effectively than many of her contemporaries, for not only did she produce an anthology of feminist resistance and agency, but she produced literature of resistance (The Sea Birds Are Still Alive), recovery (The Salt Eaters), and renewal (Those Bones Are Not My Child) that provided necessary space for black women and men to reimagine strategies for revolution and liberation through a prism of race, gender, and class.

The impulse of liberation in Bambara’s work represents an artistry that demands being situated in the self. In other words, the artfulness of Bambara’s activist art comes from engaging the “I,” not from separating from the text. In my own study of the liberation impulse in Bambara’s art, I engage the “I” of her distinct perspective, setting the self free. Bambara’s essays and fiction instruct us that before men can be free of racism, they must first be liberated from patriarchy and notions of what it means to be a man. And, the first step for women is similar with the added requirement that they discover their true selves absent from accepted notions of what it means to be a woman.[2] In The Salt Eaters, this is the first step Velma must take on the path to becoming whole or liberated so that she can move toward a larger representation of liberation. Bambara, through the character Minnie Ransom, reminds us that liberation comes at a cost, a small ransom, which is the price or acquiring inner liberation prior to achieving community, nation, or global liberation.

Bambara is one of the very bright points that we want to remember. She functioned as a feminist and activist willing to challenge accepted norms to give space to marginalized and oppressed women and communities. I would agree with Linda Janet Holmes’s assessment of Bambara as a writer and activist who called for

“creating wholeness within one’s self and in the community by interconnecting sometimes competing forces emanating from still divided political and spiritual camps” (A Joyous Revolt 183).

What are the costs of not giving her legacy the treatment it deserves? First, what we lose is an important paradigm of activist scholarship wherein the activism is not just confined to the discussion realm. Bambara sustained day-to-day practices of liberation. Further, Bambara is a unique writer; she is not episodic. She teaches us the art (pun intended) of daily unglamorous liberation work. As we shift towards deeper analysis of social movement her type of work needs to be studied and modeled. As the historiography of social movements unfolds there should be a swifter shift towards Bambara-like day-to-day work for it is central to understanding practices of liberation. It is time to move her work deeper into the core of feminist and black historical memory.

****

Editors’ Note: Following is a list of of some of the literature/reading materials/pamphlets from Toni Cade Bambara’s library that Thabiti Lewis found while conducting research for his forthcoming book about her.  Lewis believes this material reflects what she does in much of her fiction. 

1. George Breitman, Black Nationalism and Socialism
2. George Breitman, How a Minority Can Change Society: The Real Potential of the Afro-American Struggle
3. Evelyn Reed, The Answer to “The Naked Ape” and Other Books on Oppression
4. Committee for Political Development, Change Yourself to Change the World
5. The Struggle for Chicano Liberation
6. LeonTrotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination
7. The Coup in Chile
8. Liberation Support Movements, Getting Hip to Imperialism

The post Toni Cade Bambara’s Art of Bridging Praxis and Theory appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Dr. Eleanor Traylor

The telephone rang insistently. I had just crossed the threshold of sleep having entered that territory where angels and demons stage a holy or profane war which consciousness will not resist…consciousness desires only escape from care but discovers pandemonium announced by hell’s bells. The telephone was ranging insistently. In stupor, I instinctively clawed for the receiver to make it stop; I hear

Hazel, Miz Hazel.

Consciousness snaps to attention. This is not a demon. I am not in Hell, at least. Miz Hazel is the code name for me and the person on the other end of the line. I had named her that, and she, me. It was Toni Cade Bambara asking me,

“Do you Know Rudolfo Anaya?” I said, “No, Hazel, and I don’t care, I’m sleep.” She said, “You can’t sleep on this, Miss, call me soon’s you finish Bless Me Ultima tomorrow.”

Toni Cade Bambara was an archeologist. She had just discovered the ore from one of her digs. It was two o’clock in the morning EST, and she was telling me of a “culturally out-of-doors community” now entering the domain of “giant talk.” That domain invokes the muse of culture that “powerfully doubles and complicates the discourse of aestheticism, challenges the [imperial] debasements of non-European and African culture, questions the patriarchal paranoia of the master narrative and explores cosmologies that suggest alternative forms of knowledge from which we might salvage possibilities outside the hegemony of [an ontological paradigm for literature]” (Clyde Taylor, The Mask of Art, 275). At two o’clock in the morning, Hazel was telling me that what I needed was not sleep, but the layin’-on-of-hands and the healing potions and council of a Curandera. Despite that stimulus, I was on the nod when I finally hung up from that fore-day in the morning call. But no demons interrupted my brief sleep because whirling in my deep consciousness were the thematics of our usual conversations:

• new possibilities in formation
• new configurations to move with (SE 293)
• the need for legend and fable
• for the extraordinary so big
• the courage to pursue (SE 268)

This, of course would be the gist of The Salt Eaters to be published in 1980. But these conversations are typical of her archival mind years before she put pen to paper crafting the opening question of that book: “Sweetheart, don’t you want to be well?” In any case, she found in Anaya’s stunning first novel the very stuff of “new formations,” “new configurations to move with,” “new legends and fables,” the extraordinary, and the courage to pursue his large treasure to publication after mainstream publishers had rejected it years before its publication in 1970. Well, we knew that story by rote, we were the children of Sterling Brown and Miss glorious Zora Neale Hurston. What Bambara knew when she woke me to Señor Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima was that she was standing arms outstretched, at the welcome table when Chicano literature came marching in.

Toni Cade Bambara
source: http://bit.ly/10AYCYy

I met Toni Cade as she was becoming Bambara alias TCB, alias “the swamphag,” alias the loa of the yellow flowers,” alias Miz Hazel. I met her at one of Dr. Richard A. Long’s conferences on African and African American Studies at Atlanta University. The conference was the veritable academic home for what Bambara called “cultural workers.” I had just completed a Post Doc fellowship at the University of Ibadan and at Legon, Ghana studying African Drama and my paper at the conference was a presentation of the Drama of Ola Rotimi, Wale Ogunyemi and the scene design of Demas Nwoko. The Q and A was rigorous and vigorous. Toni was ebullient, but I had not matched the name with the gorgeous gele on the head that kept bowing. At the party following the day’s session hosted by my former professor Baldwin Burroughs, Chair of the Drama Department at Spelman, Toni walked over to me and said,

I know you have a Gorilla in your house.

I went blank; I just smiled stupidly. Someone called to her:

“Hey, Toni Cade!” Consciousness snapped. I said, “Oh it’s you! It’s Miz Hazel, Gorilla, My Love,” and hugged her. She said, “Slow on the uptake, but right on the money.”

It was a fabulous party.

Since then, we became communicants like those described in “the Johnson Girls” in Gorilla. And our talk, like those girls, was self-fashioning talk. Yes, we were hip as the “fly” hats and dresses that Paula Baldwin Whaley made. Toni introduced me to Paula, James Baldwin’s youngest sister. But it was more than that. More even than “the bath!” she had excavated from the loas and the gins and the Shamen. As she told it, the potions for these baths remain secured in her archives. They are color-coded. I was the human subject for “the green bath.” I can only say that it worked. We were having the conversation about the body. The literature had told the story of a whole body moving in a coherent society, unperplexed; then manacled, then flayed, then uniformed, then adorned, then aware of itself as nation. The moment we were speaking in was the moment of self-fashioning or as she would further fashion it, “consciousness of a certain way of being in the world.”

Dr. Eleanor W. Traylor, Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Howard University, is an acclaimed scholar and critic in African-American literature and criticism, Dr. Traylor earned a B.A. from Spelman College; an M.A. from Atlanta University; and a Ph.D. from Catholic University, from which she later received an Alumni Achievement Award in Literary Criticism.  Her work has appeared in the form of chapter essays, biographies, articles, and papers on such critically renowned African-American writers as Larry Neal, Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Margaret Walker, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Richard Wright. Among the texts that she has produced are Broad Sympathy: The Howard University Oral Traditions Reader (1996), The Humanities and Afro-American Literary Tradition (1988), a multimedia piece entitled The Dream Awake: A Spoken Arts Production (1968), College Reading Skills (1966), and biographical and cultural scripts for the Smithsonian Institution Program in Black American Culture. Her most recent theoretical essays are published in Black Renaissance Noir Volume 9:1 and 2:3 Winter (2009/2010); The Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Literature edited by Angelyn Mitchell and Danille K. Taylor, 2009; and Contemporary African American Fiction: Critical Essays edited by Dana Williams, 2010. She is currently working on a book to identify and define an ignored or underexplored genre of African American literature.

The post Toni Cade Bambara: The Moment In-Between appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Imani Uzuri

I was a heading into my sophomore year in undergrad, and took my first Women’s Studies class during that Summer. After a full year of beginning to be politicized around my Blackness, I was beginning to understand myself within a Feminist Womanist context.

The teacher of the class was a cool young white woman grad student, but she had NO books by or about Black women or other women of color on the reading list, and I was appalled. I complained to her, and she pointed my attention to the one lonely book by a Black woman, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. The first line in the book has been a question that has stayed with me for most of my adult life, “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”

The circular nature of the novel was brilliant and difficult. Memory within a memory and dealing with women’s work within the 60s/70s Black radical movement and also what it means to seek to be free from societal and self-imposed constraints of Blackness, Womaness, Selfness etc.

The main character Velma was emotionally, psychologically, spiritually and psychically bereft, and I related, because I was on the verge of my own dangerous burnout as a political activist on my mid-western campus. Racism was immersively rampant, and as an outspoken woman student leader, I was confronted with my own share of dismissiveness by some folks. I was tired and a workaholic, and at the time, had no idea on what it meant to balance.

Toni Cade Bambara
credit/copyright: Harvey Finkle

I found myself waking up to the world around me due to reading Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hammer, Ntozake Shange, and others. I had not quite begun to explore my sexuality as a Black queer (bisexual) woman, but this time in my life was an important doorway for me to begin that journey. The woman healer(s) in The Salt Eaters, these mystics, were not unlike women in my family, not unlike myself possessing sight beyond eyesight. The book opened my heart, mind and soul to a million questions, its themes deeply cracked my framework of who I thought I was.

I spent the rest of that Summer after the class ended angst-ridden about the uncomfortable space reading The Salt Eaters had opened up for me. I was swirling in a shroud of fear, because I was awakening. I was coming to terms with parts of my sexuality; I was exploring what it would mean to call God she instead of he (which was in direct opposition to my patriarchal Christian upbringing); I was on the verge of a difficult rebirthing of myself.

I spent many stolen hours crying in a quiet gazebo meditating on the wide sky and trying to understand who I was becoming, trying to understand how I was changing.

The questions cascaded over me, Who are you? Do you want to be whole?

Are you willing to be broken apart, separated from old narratives of who the world says you are and who you think you are?

I sat in that gazebo feeling afraid, isolated and scared, looking out over the woods with all of these thoughts swirling in my spirit.

And then Toni Cade Bambara’s question came down to me again like a cleansing breeze from beyond, “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” and with a deep breath of clarity, understanding and knowing my answer was and still is a resounding yes.

Photo Credit: Petra Richterova

Praised in the New York Times for her “gorgeously chesty ruminations,” vocalist, composer, cultural worker Imani Uzuri is an eclectic interdisciplinary artist who travels internationally to diverse locales, such as Morocco and Moscow, creating concerts, experimental theater, performance art, theater compositions, and sound installations in venues/festivals, including Central Park SummerStage, Joe’s Pub, The Kitchen, Blue Note Jazz Club, Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center, Performa Biennial, Festival Sons d’hiver, London’s ICA, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The Village Voice says, “With a voice that would sound equally at home on an opera stage or a disco 12-inch, Imani Uzuri is a constant surprise…seamlessly combining jazz, classical, country and blues motifs into highly personalized compositions.” Uzuri has collaborated with a wide range of noted artists across various artistic disciplines, including Herbie Hancock, Wangechi Mutu, John Legend, Vijay Iyer, Carrie Mae Weems, Trajal Harrell, Sanford Biggers, and Robert Ashley. Her television credits include a featured commercial on BET for their Black History Month campaign and the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon show performing with Talib Kweli, Hi Tek and The Roots. New York Magazine has called her work “stunning.” Her acclaimed new album The Gypsy Diaries draws on her rural Southern roots, as well as influences ranging from Sufi devotionals to Romany laments. Uzuri is currently composing a new musical GIRL Shakes Lose Her Skin, inspired by the works of Philadelphia Poet Laureate Sonia Sanchez. Recently, Uzuri premiered her first orchestral composition Placeless at Ecstatic Music Festival, and was subsequently named by The New Yorker as one of the emerging “female composers edg[ing] forward.” Time Out New York says, “Uzuri never fails to mesmerize with her narcotic blend of ethereal sounds.” Uzuri is currently a Master’s candidate in African American Studies at Columbia University. To learn more, please visit her website: www.imaniuzuri.com.

The post How Toni Cade Bambara Saved Me appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By M. Bahati Kuumba and Malika Redmond

Throughout the country in recent years, Black women have been forming work-study groups, discussions clubs, cooperative nurseries, cooperative businesses, consumer education groups, women’s workshops on the campuses, women’s caucuses within existing organizations, Afro-American women’s magazines. – Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman 

 [W]hile academic legitimation was crucial to the advancement of feminist thought, it created a new set of difficulties. Suddenly the feminist thinking that had emerged directly from theory and practice received less attention…Feminist thinking and theory were no longer tied to feminist movement.…Academic politics and careerism overshadowed feminist politics.  Feminist theory began to be housed in an academic ghetto with little connection to a world outside…as a consequence, the academization of feminist thought in this manner undermines feminist movement via depoliticization.  Deradicalized, it is like every other academic discipline with the only difference being the focus on gender”(hooks 2000:22).  – bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody

Strategic Subversions: A Black Feminist Intervention in the Academy

Toni Cade Bambara and Spelman Sisters, Mar 25, 1989
Photograph: ©Susan J. Ross

Toni Cade Bambara was the quintessential scholar-activist seeing no contradiction between her involvement in radical movements for Black liberation and women’s rights and the “intellectual” pursuits through her writings, production of new knowledges, and areas of research.  Importantly, Bambara was a teacher.  She taught writing and Afro-American studies in the academy at institutions like Spelman College, Emory University and Atlanta University.  Yet it was in living rooms and community meetings of artists and neighbors that she thrived, at the center of spirited gatherings of intellectuals, music and food that echoed the intimate vibe of the Harlem neighborhood where she grew up in the 1940s. Thus when Spelman administrators turned down her proposed course on Black women writers, Bambara taught the class out of her home and it became a gathering called Pamoja (Kiswahili for unity) Writing Workshop, whose alumnae include award-winning writers Shay Youngblood and Nikky Finney, and Spelman College archivist who oversaw the preservation of her papers, Taronda Spencer*.

Pamoja was indicative of the kind of resistance teaching, women’s movement consciousness-raising groups and other formations that characterized the radical women’s liberation.  The entre of social justice movements existed in at the same time that the women’s liberation movement was transforming and the emergence of women’s studies as an academic discipline.  According to bell hooks, establishing women’s studies as an academic discipline was progress for the women’s liberation movement that was not necessarily progressive.  In her view, this institutionalization in the form of women’s studies departments, research projects, conferences and journals that emerged throughout the 1970s-80s actually “disciplined” and flattened the radical edge of the movement.

Established in 1981, the Spelman College Women’s Research and Resource Center (WRRC) has resisted this counter-revolutionary tendency with an academic curriculum and activist programming inspired by Bambara’s example that is deliberate and transgressive.  Founding director, Beverly Guy-Sheftall admits that multiple obstacles had to be navigated strategically in order to launch the first Center of its kind at a Historically Black College, despite it being all women.  This act of Black feminist subversion at Spelman College continues to nurture students’ ability to challenge political and social boundaries in and outside the academy.   Moreover at the recent induction of stellar Comparative Women’s Studies (CWS) students into TRIOTA, the National Women’s and Gender Studies Honors Society, Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, founding director of the in the Spelman College Women’s Research and Resource Center (WRRC), stated that whatever else we are in the Women’s Center, we’re always “righteous.”  This righteousness refers to the WRRC’s deliberate grounding in Black liberation and women’s movements that gave rise to the Comparative Women’s Studies major and minor.

Conjointly, the growth of student activism over the last decade or so at Spelman did not emerge in a vacuum nor was sparked simply because Nelly released the “Tip Drill” video. It was grounded in the Black feminist thought and theories taught in the courses of the WRRC.  While the activism against the misogynist images of women in Hip Hop videos made national headlines (largely due to the external attention that it attracted), this particular core of student activists and their organizations had become increasingly engaged in a wide range of progressive political actions during their undergraduate pursuit at Spelman College (e.g., Afrekete’s “Day of Silence,” AUC Peace’s anti-war mobilizations, SisterFire’s “Take Back the Night,” etc.).  It is also the case that many of the student leadership in these movements were Comparative Women’s Studies majors/minors and/or in organizations affiliated with the Women’s Center, including: the Feminist Majority Leadership Foundation (FMLA), Afrekete (Spelman’s LGBTQ & Allies organization), and the Toni Cade Bambara Scholars/Writers/Activists Program (e.g., FMLA, Afrekete, SisterFire, and AUC Peace).

What we have found is the students leading the most progressive actions on campus perspectives are largely informed by learning the radical work of legendary black feminists such as Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara and Barbara Smith.  Along with reading the work of Black feminist intellectuals, students enjoy meeting and engaging in conversation with these scholars who frequently acknowledge Toni Cade Bambara as key to their scholar-activist trajectory.  It is the combination of feminist intellectual content, progressive programming, and organizational/leadership development offered by the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College that are crucial components to keeping the radical edges of feminism in the academy rather than flattening them.

Toni Enters the Room

Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activism Conference
courtesy: ©Malika Redmond

The Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activism Conference happens in March during Women’s History Month on or near Bambara’s birthday.  It is both a celebration of her audacious body of work on behalf of Black people and gives students the opportunity to set the conference agenda, take charge of conference logistics, present scholarly work, and hear from scholar-activists in and outside of the Atlanta University Center. Conceived in the year 2000 by M. Bahati Kuumba, a new Assistant Professor in the Women’s Research and Resource center, it was to be a culmination of the existing Toni Cade Bambara Scholars/Writers/Activists Program.  This pre-existing year-long program engaged students from of a range of majors with Black feminist scholar-activists on national and international levels.

The execution of the conference was the brainchild of Malika Redmond, C’02, and Comparative Women’s Studies Major, to ensure both content and logistic are managed by students.  The first event was in 2001, and now more than a decade later, the conference opens with a celebration of the life of Toni Cade Bambara with words from friends and colleagues, and even Toni herself enters the room through listening to her voice narrate while watching The Bombing of Osage Avenue.  Students of Spelman College perform and give words of appreciation for the Black feminist legacy of Toni Cade Bambara.

Finally, the family of Toni Cade Bambara represented by daughter and only child Karma Bambara Smith attending the opening ceremony annually, is recognized and presented with a gift of appreciation on behalf of the Women’s Research and Resource Center.  The opening ceremony of the conference allowed for many breakthrough moments and announcements honoring the life and legacy of Toni Cade Bambara including announcing the dedications of the official papers of Toni Cade Bambara to the Spelman College Archives.

Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activism Conference
Photograph: ©Malika Redmond

The annual student-led conference bridges scholarship with activism.  Furthermore, during the 25^th Anniversary Celebration of the Women’s Research and Resource Center, (when) reflections were written regarding the founding of the Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activism conference:
“The second ‘bold transformation’ occurred with the inauguration of the annual Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activism Conference during Women’s History Month in March.  This project is significant because it was organized and executed by students, mostly women’s studies majors or double majors, who understand the importance of working collaboratively across the disciplines and with community organizations for positive social transformation.  Here they put the feminist theories they learn in the classroom into practice as they craft bold agendas that are inquiry-driven, intellectually engaged, and action-oriented.”

“The Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activism conference is not just an event, but a process…”

I took from this conference a sense of empowerment about being my own Spelman woman; it’s OK not to conform,” said McGee. “I also left the conference with a sense of dignity about my differences, about who I am, and being a woman. On the Spelman campus, differences aren’t appreciated as much as we would like. The spectrum of our conference topics showed that there are differences [among us]. It’s like a call to service, if we don’t do it, who will do it? And, if we don’t speak on it, no one else is going to speak on it for us.

Gha said preparation to encourage positive action by participants was key to the conference’s success. “Personally, I am really proud of this conference because it showed how our weeks of planning and conversations turned into creative activism,” said the sociology and comparative women’s studies double major. “It was a great moment for Spelman College because it showed the diversity of students on campus and how much we care about our College and want to make it a better place by offering these new kinds of voices.

In Closing…

Toni Cade Bambara
courtesy: Andrea Benton Rushing

Toni Cade Bambara was a deliberate writer and teacher.  She aligned herself with the workers of the world and her writing reflected it.  She described her work as that of a culture worker and she did it with conviction and fierce integrity.  The faculty of the Women’s Research and Resource Center of Spelman College takes seriously the work of preparing the next generation of Black feminist scholar-activists that engage justice issues facing our society with conviction and fierce integrity.  And, the Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activist Conference will continue to honor Bambara by bringing community activists, students, and academics together to engage new ideas fight for social justice.

The Spelman College Toni Cade Bambara Writers/Scholars/Activists Program and Women’s Research and Resource Center (WRRC) Presents…

The Toni Cade Bambara Radical Sisterhood Lectures,
Fall 2009

Toni Cade Bambara Radical Sisterhood Lectures
Spelman College

“A Place Like This: Some Thoughts on Making Revolution Irresistible”
Pearl Cleage
Black Feminist Author and Playwright
Friday, September 11 @ 3pm

“Making Peace a Passion”
Alice Lovelace
Cultural Activist and Poet
Associate Regional Director, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
Friday, September 25 @ 3pm

Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) Women of Color Conference
Friday, October 9 & Saturday, October 10
Camille Hanks Cosby Center (Rooms TBA)

“Black Women’s Leadership in Environmental Justice”
Dr. Valerie Ann Johnson
Director of Africana Women’s Studies, Bennett College for Women
Friday, November 6 @ 3pm

Unless otherwise noted, events will be held in the WRRC Conference Room,
Cosby Center, 2nd Floor.
For more information, contact the WRRC @ (404) 270-5625

“Always Righteous”: Scholar-Activism in the Women’s Center

Opening Plenary (2012): 

‘Ain’t I A Spelman Woman?’ Channeling The Rebellious Spirit of Toni Cade Bambara

Women of the Revolution: Radical Women Who Started the Arab Spring

Malika Redmond

Malika Redmond, MA is a feminist researcher, reproductive justice and human rights leader working more than a decade both nationally and internationally developing and managing projects that focus on reproductive justice, LGBT rights, and youth empowerment with organizations and institutions such as SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW, National Center for Human Rights Education, Spelman College Women’s Research and Resource Center, and the International Black Youth Summit. Malika is the co-founder of the Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activism Conference and was one of the youngest national field organizers for the 2004 March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C.  This event that brought nearly 1 million participants to the national Mall and is considered one of the largest marches in U.S. history.

In 2012, she completed a two-term leadership position as a board member of the National Women’s Health Network and currently sits on the board of Our Bodies Ourselves. Her writings are featured in RH Reality Check, Truthout, The Women’s Health Activist, and AlterNet. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Spelman College and a master’s degree from Georgia State University in Women’s Studies.

M. Bahati Kuumba

M. Bahati Kuumba, Ph.D., is the Associate Professor of Women’s Studies/Associate Director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College, co-founder of the Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activism Conference, and 2005 recipient of the Fannie Lou Hamer Award.

Her scholarly research, activism, and public presentations focus on African women transnationally in the areas of social resistance movements, population policy, and global African/Black feminist theory and praxis. She has also done work in the areas of participatory research methodologies and popular education for movement-building. Her research and activism have led to collaborations with women and women’s organizations in the United States, Canada, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

Dr. Kuumba is a prolific scholar who has published widely in scholarly journals and activist publications such as Sociological Forum; Race, Gender, and Class; Africa Today; Mobilization: International Journal of Social and Political Movements; 21 st Century Afro Review, Feminist Issues; and A genda – Empowered Women for Gender Equity (a South African feminist journal).

The post Liberation Legacy: Fifteen Years of the Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activism Program and Conferences at Spelman College, 2000-2015 appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Linda Janet Holmes
Photographer: Sonali Gulati
©AfroLez® Productions

I firmly believe that my friendship/camaraderie with Linda Janet Holmes is one of many lasting gifts that Toni Cade Bambara gave both of us when she transcended on December 9, 1995. I first met Linda at Louis Massiah’s home a few days after Toni’s passing in December 1995. A small group of us (Toni’s daughter Karma, Louis, Linda, Jane Poindexter, Arlene Wooley, Sonia Sanchez, Marlene Patterson, Nadine Patterson, Sandra Swans, Tina Morton, and I) gathered to begin planning the first of several programs in the United States that celebrated Toni’s Life. The first one was held on December 17, 1995 at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia.

A generation apart from each other, Linda and I first met Toni during different time periods in Toni’s life. Despite this, we are a part of a diverse chorus that share similar stories about Toni’s steadfast guidance in our lives. Over the past nineteen years, I’ve had the privilege to witness Linda’s unshakable commitment to document Toni’s life and living legacy. Prior to her retirement a couple of years ago, Linda did a huge part of her Bambara legacy work while working a full time job as the director of New Jersey’s Office of Minority and Multicultural Health.

Linda is a writer, independent scholar, curator and women’s health activist. Her recently published book, A Joyous Revolt:  Toni Cade Bambara, Writer and Activist, (Praeger Press, 2014), is the first biography on the groundbreaking writer who transformed social movements.  Holmes also is co-editor, with Cheryl A. Wall of Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara, (Temple University Press, 2008).  Decades ago, Linda’s first short story, “The True Story of Chicken Licken,” appeared in Bambara’s Tales and Stories for Black Folks, (Doubleday, 1971).

“Reclaiming Midwives: Stills From All My Babies”
Photograph: ©Robert Galbraith, 2005

As an activist and writer, Linda continues to be pivotal in increasing recognition of traditional African American midwifery practices.  Holmes co-authored, with Margaret Charles Smith, the book Listen To Me Good:  The Life Story of an Alabama Midwife, (Ohio State University Press, l996).  In 2005, Linda curated “Reclaiming Midwives:  Stills from All My Babies,” a first-time national exhibition on African American midwives at the Smithsonian Institution Anacostia Museum in Washington, D.C.  Initially receiving a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to tape record oral histories with African American midwives in Alabama, Linda recently donated her collection of 50 tape-recorded interviews to the Sophia Smith Collection, Women’s History Archives at Smith College.

Linda presently lives in Portsmouth Virginia, where she is a part-time supervisor of the Portsmouth Community Library Museum, a landmark institution in the Portsmouth African American community.  She is also writing about Uttingertown, Kentucky, an African American community established after the Civil War.  Six generations of her family have claimed Uttingertown as home place.

I cannot imagine The Feminist Wire’s forum on Toni Cade Bambara without both of my sisters/comrades/confidantes Heidi R. Lewis and Linda. Ever since Heidi and I co-envisioned this forum many months ago, Linda has been an unwavering anchor and a hardcore supporter of Heidi and my efforts and work. Linda is the reason that we knew about Kamili Feelings’ previously unpublished 2002 interview with his father the late Tom Feelings. The same is also true with Janice Liddell’s, Donald P. Stone’s and Wesley Brown’s previously unpublished essays. Linda connected us with Chadra Pittman Walke, Kwame Dawes, and  “Cuzzin” Carole Brown who is Toni’s cousin and an original contributor to the 1970 groundbreaking The Black Woman Anthology. Frequently, Linda would check in with me to make sure that Heidi and I reached out to wide range of folks. Recognizing that there are so many people across the United States and internationally who knew and loved Toni, I finally l said,

Linda, we’ve got to stop. Heidi and I curated over fifty voices in this forum. We can’t invite another person. Hopefully our work on this forum will be viewed as a part of the continuum of your and the work of many others that are committed to keeping Toni Cade Bambara’s legacy alive.

She laughed and completely agreed.

Poet extraordinaire Sonia Sanchez said that Toni Cade Bambara was “a visionary.” Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison called Toni Cade Bambara, “a writer’s writer.” Toni was most definitely all of that and more. Linda is Toni’s first biographer and she is an incredible storyteller. During our interview, Linda shared so much about Toni’s incredible life.  Her reflections, stories and remembrances unearth some of the depth of Toni’s foresight, radicalism, and profundity about a wide range of topics. Linda also shared her own herstory about how she became the radical, bohemian, Black feminist writer, mother, women’s health advocate, cultural worker, and grandmother that she is today. Linda’s interview will underscore why both she and Toni Cade Bambara are feminists The Feminist Wire loves.

Linda Janet Holmes, Sonali Gulati,
and Aishah Shahidah Simmons
photographer: Geeta Jhaveri
©AfroLez® Productions

This video interview would not have been possible without Linda’s onscreen participation and willingness to drive to and from Richmond, VA to be interviewed in Sonali Gulati and Geeta Jhaveri’s home.  There are no words to express my deep gratitude. I’m also deeply grateful to my sister-filmmaker Sonali Gulati for joyously  agreeing to be the director of photography and for securing Charles Belt to be the sound person. Sonali, Geeta and their son Rohan were extremely kind, loving, and generous with their time and their home. Immeditately following the interview with Linda, they provided an amazing smorgasbord of incredible home cooked food. They also provided exceptional hospitality to me during my weekend visit. It was truly a celebratory occasion in the spirit of Toni Cade Bambara.

I also extend so much gratitude to sister-filmmaker Tina Morton. Despite her extremely hectic schedule, Tina came in and saved the day with editing this interview in the twelfth hour. The recent passing of my Uncle/Cousin Harold White meant I had to cancel my original plan to travel to Connecticut to edit with sister-filmmaker Roxana Walker-Canton. While I was extremely disappointed that I wasn’t able to work with my sister Roxana, there was a cosmic symmetry with my working with Tina on this specific interview. Tina and I first met in a Bambara scriptwriting workshop at Scribe Video Center over twenty years ago. Linda and Tina also shared Bambara moments together almost two decades ago. All three of us gathered  with others a few days after Toni transcended on December 9, 1995. VIVA Toni Cade Bambara’s Legacy, VIVA!!!!

Because of time constraints and the ‘holiday,’ this video is a rough cut. Tina and I will finesse it and replace it in the immediate future.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons
Photograph: ©Julie Yarbrough

Aishah Shahidah Simmons is a Black feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, cultural worker, and international lecturer. An incest and rape survivor, she is the Creator of the Ford Foundation-funded internationally acclaimed and award-winning feature length film NO! The Rape Documentary.  Presently, she is an adjunct professor in the Women’s and LGBT Studies Program at Temple University. Previously, she was an O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Scripps College and a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Committed to archiving, documenting, and telling Black women’s herstories and contemporary realities, Aishah was the Curator and Lead Editor of  The Feminist Wire‘s (TFW), “Global Forum on Audre Lorde.” She is also the Co-Curator and Co-Editor, with Heidi Renee Lewis, of TFW’s “Toni Cade Bambara 75th Birthday Anniversary Forum.”  Aishah is the author of several essays  including the Foreword to the recently released Dear Sister: Letters to Survivors of Sexual Violence. She has screened her work, guest lectured, and facilitated workshops and dialogues about ending all forms of sexual violence; queer identity from an AfroLez®femcentric perspective; the grassroots process of making social change documentaries; and non-Christocentric spirituality at colleges and universities, high schools, conferences, international film festivals, rape crisis centers, battered women shelters, community centers, juvenile correctional facilities, and government sponsored events across the United States and Canada, throughout Italy, in South Africa, France, England, Croatia, Hungary, The Netherlands, Mexico, Kenya, Malaysia, and India. You can follow Aishah on twitter at @AfroLez and connect via her public Facebook page. For more information, please visit: http://NOtheRapeDocumentary.org

Sonali Gulati
Photograph: ©Harrison Möenich

Sonali Gulati is an independent filmmaker, a feminist, grass-roots activist, and an educator. She is an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Photography & Film. She has an MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University and a BA in Critical Social Thought from Mount Holyoke College. Ms. Gulati grew up in New Delhi, India and has made several short films that have screened at over three hundred film festivals worldwide. Her films have screened at venues such as the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and at film festivals such as the Margaret Mead Film Festival, the Black Maria Film Festival and the Slamdance Film Festival. Gulati’s award-winning documentary, Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night, was broadcast on television in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, The Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. Her most recent film I Am has won 12 awards and continues to exhibit extensively in the film festival circuit. Gulati has won awards, grants, and fellowships from the Third Wave Foundation, World Studio Foundation, the Robert Giard Memorial Fellowship, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, the Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts, the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), VCU School of the Arts Faculty Award of Excellence and most recently a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation. For more information, please visit: http://sonalifilm.com

Tina Morton is a media activist, video oral historian, Associate Professor at Howard University, and 2010 Pew Fellowship in The Arts recipient. Deeply committed to facilitating members of community groups in telling their own stories, Tina has taught various organizations how to use media for social activism. In 2010 in Dakar, Senegal she taught young women and men how to use video for social change with the Young Women’s Knowledge and Leadership Institute. Tina’s personal work, done under If The Creek Don’t Rise Productions, focuses on oral community and family histories. Her award-winning documentary Severed Souls chronicles community memory of the execution of Corrine Sykes, a 20-year-old North Philadelphia resident wrongly executed for murder and the first African American woman to be legally executed in PA. Tina has been a video facilitator for the Precious Places Community History Projects sponsored by the Scribe Video Center, and, she has facilitated the making of The Taking of South Central …Philadelphia, a documentary focusing on problems of gentrification. Nature and Neighbors in Harmony documents the history of Philadelphia’s first planned integrated community. For more information, please visit: http://tinamorton.com.

Charles Belt
©AfroLez® Productions

Charles Belt will earn a B.F.A in Film from  Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Photography & Film in May 2015. He has written and directed several shorts in the Richmond, Virginia area.

The post Feminists We Love: Linda Janet Holmes [VIDEO] appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

#BambaraOnTFW Sixty-nine essays, remembrances, love notes, poems, and videos and thirteen days later, my sister co-curator and co-editor, Heidi Renée Lewis and I are closing The Feminist Wire’s online celebration in honor of daughter, mother, sister, writer, organizer, filmmaker, activist, and cultural worker Toni Cade Bambara‘s 75th birthday anniversary year.

#TFWPraisesTheLorde Heidi and I started our Bambara journey together at the end of our work on The Feminist Wire’s forum in honor of Black Lesbian Feminist Mother Warrior Poet Audre Lorde in March 2014. As Black feminists who are straight and lesbian, Heidi and I can’t help but invoke Audre Lorde’s essay “I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities.”[1] Our work on this forum has underscored that we are each other’s sister, regardless of any differences on the apparent level.

We are both explicitly clear that our individual work is rooted in the communities from which we come in this lifetime. We strive to be committed to do the challenging work in the trenches with ALL (straight, LGBTQIA, Cis, Trans) of our people in Black communities. This, of course, doesn’t mean that we’re not committed to multi-racial feminisms and by extension, all of humanity, because we are. Similar to Toni Cade Bambara, there isn’t a contradiction in our stance:

I don’t find any contradiction or any tension between being a feminist, being a pan-Africanist, being a [B]lack nationalist, being an internationalist, being a socialist, and being a woman in North America. I’m not sensitive enough to people caught in the “contradiction” to be able to unravel the dilemma and adequately speak to the question at this particular point in time. My head is somewhere else… — Toni Cade Bambara in an interview with Beverly Guy-Sheftall[2]

We know firsthand that it takes an intimate volunteer village to keep The Feminist Wire (TFW) moving. Simultaneously, we uplift our sister, TFW Co-Managing Editor, and Black feminist scholar Tamura A. Lomax, for her shared vision, along with Black feminist literary critic Hortense Spillers, which wo/manifested into The Feminist Wire almost four years ago. We believe that TFW’s Black feminist origins are a part of the continuum of Toni Cade Bambara’s living legacy. To be clear, though, TFW is a multi-racial collective and site that works, struggles, and loves across multiple differences, as our sister and brother, TFW Co-Managing Editors Monica J. Casper and Darnell L. Moore, wrote eloquently about in their “Love in the Time of Racism” essay.

Dr Hubert Ross and Toni Cade Bambara at NBAF, 1988
©Susan J. Ross

Heidi and I are infinitely grateful for the hard work of every single contributor. Without their offerings in the name of Toni Cade Bambara, this forum would not exist. Period. We extend additional gratitude to Susan J. Ross, Sarah and Jane Poindexter, Michael Simmons, Andrea Benton Rushing, Monica F. Walker, and Nikky Finney who gave us permission to use their wonderful Toni Cade Bambara images repeatedly throughout the forum. We are grateful to Spelman College archivist Holly Smith, who helped us secure a gorgeous photograph of Toni and Karma that is featured in Beverly Guy-Sheftall‘s love note. We also deeply thank Royal Sharif, who helped us secure Christopher P. Moore’s wonderful photograph of our sister the late Cheryll Y. Greene. We know that if she were with us in the physical form today, she would’ve contributed to this forum. Her spirit made it explicitly clear that she needed to join the chorus, and she did. Her name was invoked, and her image is featured in both Malaika Adero’s and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ essays. The same was also true with several of our ancestors whose names were invoked and faces were visible in this forum. Heidi and I both adopted “Cuzzin” Carole Brown who was in our corner every step of the way with her hand written notes and cards. Last, but certainly not least, we also thank Linda Janet Holmes for her unending support of this forum.

Where would we be without Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays and Conversations, Those Bones Are Not My Child, the second edition of The Black Woman with a new introduction by Dr. Eleanor Traylor, Savoring The Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara, and A Joyous Revolt: Toni Cade Bambara Writer, Organizer, Activist? How do we begin to thank Toni Morrison, Malaika Adero, Linda Janet Holmes, Cheryl A. Wall, and Thabiti Lewis for their unwavering commitment to ensuring that Toni’s words and living legacy are in print? There are no words to express our gratitude for these lasting treasures. Similarly, we are indebted to all of the filmmakers’ who partnered with Toni on documentary and experimental narrative films. They include but are not limited to: Louis Massiah (The Bombing of Osage Avenue and W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices), John Akomfrah (Seven Songs of Malcom X), Nadine Patterson (Anna Russell Jones: Praisesong for a Pioneering Spirit), Peal Bowser (Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies), Arlene Wooley and United Hands Community Land Trust (More Than Just Property), and Frances Negron-Muntaner (Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican). We are truly grateful that her voice and image are and will forever be cinematic treasures.

Toni Cade Bambara’s personal papers are housed at the Spelman College Archives and under the direction of Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Spelman College’s Women’s Research and Resource Center manages them. Her papers are in Black feminist sister-warrior company with the papers of Audre Lorde and Spelman’s first Black woman president Johnnetta Betsch Cole.[3]

Heidi and I also want to thank Toni’s daughter Karma Bene Bambara Smith for donating her mother’s papers to the Spelman College Archives, for supporting this forum and most importantly for continuously sharing her mother with so many diverse people across this country and internationally. This is one of the most generous acts that anyone can do. At the end of the day, we’re aware, and we honor the fact that Toni was and will always be her mom.

Heidi R. Lewis and Aishah Shahidah SImmons, NWSA 2014
photograph: Tracy Fisher

One of many invaluable gifts that I’ve received through my work on both the Lorde and Bambara forums in 2014 was the opportunity to build and work closely with my sister/comrade Heidi Renée Lewis. In fact, because we are conditioned to view work as laborious, I don’t even want to use that word. I wish I could create a new word that would adequately describe the depth of the connection that we’ve built over the past eight months. The emails, texts, Facebook inbox messages, and marathon phone calls have been life-sustaining and affirming. We have been a non-stop tag team embodying Bambara’s definition of the word Sister (or Sista) being both a noun and a verb. We had each other’s back every single step of the way. We were never ever each other’s competition or pawns. We were and we are sister-friends-comrades. Our bond is a gift in the name of the Lorde and the Bambara. We don’t take it lightly.

The ending of this forum is also the continuation of our work at TFW and beyond. Sister-warrior-healer Cara Page shared that Toni Cade Bambara’s organizing work around both the Atlanta Child Murders and the 1985 state sanctioned bombing of a residential African-American neighborhood and the massacre of many members of the MOVE organization and family in Philadelphia were precursors to the current Black Lives Matter movements. Heidi and I wholeheartedly agree.

Past is prologue.

*SAVE THE DATES* From January 15 through January 17, 2015, TFW, in partnership with University of Arizona, will host a Black Life Matters conference in Tucson, AZ. “Scholars, writers, artists, activists, policymakers, and community members will come together in Tucson, Arizona, in January 2015 to discuss WHY Black life matters and WHAT can be done about sustained racialized state violence.” We hope that those of you who are able will join us either in person in Tucson or virtually. For more information, please visit the Black Life Matters website, and connect via the Black Life Matters Facebook page.

One of the greatest afflictions in American society for both the teacher/student and the writer is the affliction of disconnectedness. The separation between the world of academia and the world of knowledge that exists beyond the campus gates, the seeming dichotomy between politics and ethics, the division between politics and art, the division between dead authors and live authors, etc., etc. It is extremely difficult to arrive at the formula for living or for defining what the [B]lack agenda should be, once you fall victim to this disconnectedness. In this society, forgetfulness is a virtue, amnesia is a virtue. We are always asked to celebrate the new and improved laundry detergent as though that which came out yesterday is already obsolete. And we carry this habit, this outlook, into our daily lives. This is extremely dangerous. So I teach about the necessity of being connected, and about the necessity of resurrecting the truth about our experiences (and revising the texts) in this place called America. – Toni Cade Bambara in an interview with Zala Chandler[4]

In our ongoing effort to support our total well being, TFW will go on a critically needed break for most if not all of December 2014. The struggles for peace and justice are never ending. And yet, we know that our work can never be healthier than we are.

Are you sure you want to be well? … [W]holeness is no trifling matter… A lot of weight when you’re well.
-Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

Not all speed is movement!
-Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology

In the Hands of the Ancestors! Ase’.

The Toni Cade Bambara Index

Main Column

1. The Feminist Wire Celebrates Writer Toni Cade Bambara’s Life In An Upcoming 75th Birthday Forum
2. Not All Speed Is Movement”: Toni Cade Bambara and the Black Feminist Tradition by Heidi Renée Lewis
3. Changing the Letter: TFW Celebrates Toni Cade Bambara by Tamura A. Lomax
   
4. Mother of the Movement: Remembering Bambara and the “African Bones in the Briny Deep” by Chadra Pittman Walke
5. Toni Cade Bambara—A Member of My Small Village [Video] by Sarah C. Poindexter  
   
6. The Authenticating Audience by Louis Massiah
7. The Good Death of Toni Cade Bambara by Clyde Taylor
   
8. Laughing on the Other Side of the Mountain: A Love Letter to My Friend Toni Cade Bambara by ayoka chenzira 

   
9. Love Note for Toni Cade Bambara by Zeinabu irene Davis
10. Listen You Can Hear the Mothers Crying in the Universe: A Black Feminist Poet’s Requiem for Our Black Warrior Toni by Cara Page
    
11. Rage and Meditation: Celebrating Toni Cade Bambara’s 75th Birthday by Aishah Shahidah Simmons
12. The Weight in Being Well: The Salt Eaters and the Genius of Toni Cade Bambara by Steven Fullwood and Joel Diaz
13. Exposing the Invisible Betrayal: Removing the Gag from Our Mouths and Speaking of the Police Rapes of Black Women by Farah Tanis
14. We Remember You, Me and Us: Transgender Day of Remembrance by Kai M. Green
15. Toni Cade Bambara’s Art of Bridging Theory and Praxis by Thabiti Lewis
16. It’s Not the Salt, it’s the Sugar that will Kill You by Kalamu ya Salaam
17. Toni’s Powerful Intervention: Artist Tom Feelings Talks with His Son by Kamili and Tom Feelings
18. Resembling a Revolutionary: My Sister Toni by Malaika Adero
    
19. Remembering Toni by Alice Lovelace
20. In ‘My Solitude’ with Toni Cade Bambara by Pamela A. Hooks:
21. Unleashing the Power of the Soul: Spirit and Spirituality through Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters and John Bolling’s The Spirit of the Soul (Part I) by Janice Liddell
22. Unleashing the Power of the Soul: Spirit and Spirituality through Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters and John Bolling’s The Spirit of the Soul (Part II) by Janice Liddell
    
23. Black Blessings: Toni Cade Bambara and Octavia E. Butler by Ayana Jamieson
24. One Thing: Toni Cade Bambara in the Speaking Everyday by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
25. Image Weavers: In Honor of the Spirit of Toni Cade Bambara by NaOme Richardson
26. Becoming…  by Nikki Harmon
27. No Doubt: Your Mission, if You Choose to Accept it, is to Make Revolution Irresistible by Nadine Patterson
28. Fondness for Toni Cade Bambara by Miyoshi Smith
29. On Toni Cade Bambara and the Darren Wilson Jury Decision by Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Heidi Renée Lewis on behalf of The Feminist Wire
30. For Toni and the Sisterhood, with Love… by Denise Brown
31. My TCB Experience 1991-1995 by Amadee Braxton
32. The Telling of Stories by Bia Vieira
33. A Meditation on Toni Cade Bambara by Sande Smith
34. The Seabirds Don’t Lie by Laura Whitehorn
35. Toni Cade Bambara: A Woman of and for the People by Michael Simmons
36. Toni Cade Bambara Remembered by Donald P. Stone
37. Toni Cade Bambara: The Moment In-Between by Dr. Eleanor Traylor
38. Bambara: What She Meant To Us/Me by Haki Madhubuti
39. And The Beat Goes On: Toni Cade Bambara by Dr. Gloria I. Joseph
40. Love Note to Toni by Beverly Guy-Sheftall
41. Liberation Legacy: Fifteen Years of the Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activism Program and Conferences at Spelman College, 2000-2015 by M. Bahati Kuumba and Malika Redmond
42. Toni Cade Bambara: ‘…an uptown Griot‘ by Cheryl Clarke

Personal Is Political Column

1. Toni Cade Bambara by Paula J. Giddings
2. bell hooks Remembers Toni Cade Bambara by Stephanie Troutman and bell hooks
3. TCB Is What She Did and Was Who She Was by E. Ethelbert Miller
4. Reflections on Toni Cade Bambara by S.E. Anderson and Rosemari Mealy
5. Toni Cade Bambara of Simpson Avenue by Nikky Finney
6. Toni Cade Bambara’s “Toni-Isms” by Carole Brown
7. Permission [VIDEO] by Tina Morton
8. The Art of Getting to the Point by Wesley Brown
9. A Letter to Toni  by Pearl Cleage
10. How Toni Cade Bambara Saved Me by Imani Uzuri
11. Wholeness, Homeness: A Love Note to Toni by Rita Dove

Feminists We Love Column

1. Feminists We Love: Toni Cade Bambara by Heidi R. Lewis
2. Feminists We Love: Linda Janet Holmes [VIDEO] by Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Arts and Culture Column

1. Photographs of Toni Cade Bambara & Friends by Susan J. Ross
   
2. Re-Membering Audre Lorde and Celebrating Toni Cade Bambara by Aishah Shahidah Simmons 
   
3. Dark Energy (a poem) by Samiya A. Bashir
   
4. A State of Rage by Aishah Shahidah Simmons
5. spell to save your life by Alexis Pauline Gumbs 
6. Are we ready to be well? by Cara Page
7. I’ve Got Something To Say About This: A Survival Incantation by Kate Rushin
8. what is left by M. Nzadi Keita
9. Praise to the Writer by Alice Lovelace
10. Stroller (A Screenplay) by Roxana Walker-Canton
11. Hunger by Kwame Dawes
12. Remembering and Honoring Toni Cade Bambara by Sonia Sanchez

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[1] ”I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities” by Audre Lorde is included in Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s edited volume, I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings by Audre Lorde. Oxford University Press, 2011

[2]  Bambara, Toni Cade, and Thabiti Lewis. “Commitment: Toni Cade Bambara Speaks with Beverly Guy-Sheftall.” In Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 10.

[3] Sheftall, Beverly Guy. “Love Note To Toni.” in The Feminist Wire’s forum on Toni Cade Bambara, http://thefeministwire.com/2014/11/not-all-speed-is-movement/

[4] Bambara, Toni Cade, and Thabiti Lewis. “An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara: Zala Chandler.” In Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 93-94.

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Aishah Shahidah Simmons
Photograph: ©Julie Yarbrough

Aishah Shahidah Simmons is a Black feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, cultural worker, and international lecturer. An incest and rape survivor, she is the Creator of the Ford Foundation-funded internationally acclaimed and award-winning feature length film NO! The Rape Documentary.  Presently, she is an adjunct professor in the Women’s and LGBT Studies Program at Temple University. Previously, she was an O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Scripps College and a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Committed to archiving, documenting, and telling Black women’s herstories and contemporary realities, Aishah was the Curator and Lead Editor of  The Feminist Wire‘s (TFW), “Global Forum on Audre Lorde.” She is also the Co-Curator and Co-Editor, with Heidi Renee Lewis, of TFW’s “Toni Cade Bambara 75th Birthday Anniversary Forum.”  Aishah is the author of several essays  including the Foreword to the recently released Dear Sister: Letters to Survivors of Sexual Violence. She has screened her work, guest lectured, and facilitated workshops and dialogues about ending all forms of sexual violence; queer identity from an AfroLez®femcentric perspective; the grassroots process of making social change documentaries; and non-Christocentric spirituality at colleges and universities, high schools, conferences, international film festivals, rape crisis centers, battered women shelters, community centers, juvenile correctional facilities, and government sponsored events across the United States and Canada, throughout Italy, in South Africa, France, England, Croatia, Hungary, The Netherlands, Mexico, Kenya, Malaysia, and India. You can follow Aishah on twitter at @AfroLez and connect via her public Facebook page. For more information, please visit: http://NOtheRapeDocumentary.org

 

The post Afterword: Toni Cade Bambara’s Living Legacy appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

In January 2015, The Feminist Wire and the University of Arizona will co-host the Black Life Matters conference in Tucson, Arizona. Free and open to the public, the event aims to build on the visionary work of Black Lives Matter and a surge of activism emerging from the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. We understand that our event, like many others, is not an isolated occasion but rather part of an ongoing, vital conversation about anti-Black state violence in the United States (and globally).

Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore both will participate in the January conference (along with many other fantastic and formidable activists, scholars, and artists). I spoke with them on November 22—the day before the anticipated announcement out of Ferguson about the indictment—about their work and the Black Lives Matter movement. In particular, I wanted to discuss the relationship between the movement Black Lives Matter and the conference Black Life Matters, as our various publics have noted the overlap. Both terms are deployed somewhat interchangeably in various media, and the latter is sometimes used without a discussion of its important genealogy.

It is fitting that this interview with Patrisse and Darnell follows TFW’s monumental, inspiring, and urgently needed Toni Cada Bambara forum, curated by associate editors Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Heidi R. Lewis. In their afterword to the forum (which includes links to all the contributions), Aishah and Heidi write, “The ending of this forum is also the continuation of our work at TFW and beyond…Past is prologue.” Indeed.

Monica: Why are you involved in Black Lives Matter?

Patrisse: I feel like it changes every day. I want to give an authentic answer, not a rhetorical one. What I’ll say this morning is that I’m involved because my life depends on it. Because it’s one of the most healing calls I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime. I’m involved in Black Lives Matter because it pushes me to think creatively and to think about what actions, what kind of strategy, what tactics can come from a call like Black Lives Matters.

Darnell: Because I feel like I have to be. It’s a really important political intervention.  Not only in its naming, but we shouldn’t have to say in 2014 that the lives of Black people matter. But given anti-Black policies and the ways that those policies allow for the deaths of Black people, extrajudicial or not, in so many ways we are told that our lives and bodies don’t matter. The other thing I’ll say is that this is a movement begun by three Black queer women after Trayvon Martin’s murder. Most of these social movements are only thought to be organized by cisgender men, at least that’s who we see. And it means something that Black queer women are at the forefront of leading this, leading us. It’s important for me to be part of something more intersectional and inclusive of a range of Black bodies and experiences that are often left out and marginalized in Black justice work.

Monica: Can you describe the nature of your involvement in the movement?

Patrisse: As one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, I think that I provide leadership around…well, that is a really good question. What is the nature? It’s so collaborative. I think, the nature of my involvement: yes, co-founder. I like to also say co-visionary. So, envisioning what this political project is, what this network is. I’ve been working with a lot of potential chapters across the country and in Canada; folks in Toronto just created a Black Lives Matter Facebook page. I want to talk to them a bit more, because they have an interesting relationship to Black Lives Matter. They are pushing the U.S. in a particular way about anti-Black violence; the Black folks in Canada have our backs! I know there are issues in Canada too for black people. So I’m trying to think about these potential chapters across the country, and trying to think about the relationship between the national and regional movements.

The other piece of this involvement is: how does Black Lives Matter really push the narrative that all Black lives matter? Darnell, Alicia [Garza], and I are in conversation with TWOCC [Trans Women of Color Collective], led by Lourdes Ashley Hunter. We have reached out to Black trans women about Black Lives Matter. I have reached out to them, giving Ashley a call today, in fact, to talk about inclusion. As the leadership of this movement, we’re trying to push ourselves to be responsible that it is not just Black cis folks leading it, but trying to figure out what are we calling for, how to not just get stuck in the narrative of ‘save the life of young straight black cis men.’ Though this is important. So the nature of the work is about shaping, trying to shape this network politically, in ways that are aligned with ourselves given that we’re all queer. And also aligned with our vision for how much we love all Black people.

Darnell: My involvement began with organizing the Black Lives Matter ride to Ferguson after Michael Brown’s death. It wasn’t planned. I got a text early one morning from Darius Clark Monroe, a filmmaker who lives in my neighborhood. It was about four in the morning. I was up; I couldn’t sleep either. Darius and I were both thinking about Mike Brown’s death, which was haunting us. We said we should go there, to Ferguson; we were going to drive, get some folks together and just head there spontaneously that weekend. But, we decided to plan, to get a larger plan in place and a larger community. We also wanted to connect with people in Ferguson first. The next day, I was on a conference call with Patrisse, Alicia Garza, dream hampton, and Thandisizwe Chimurenga to discuss the Theodore Wafer case (Wafer murdered Renisha McBride), after he had been found guilty. We were discussing movement work, prison abolition, and anti-Black police and vigilante violence. I said to Patrisse after the call that I was planning to organize a ride to Ferguson. And noted that we should do it together. She agreed. So we decided to do it together.

We used our lists of email addresses and various networks to pull people together. We reached out to our friends, really. Within 24 hours, we had a person on board that was going to handle administration, somebody to handle media stuff, and so on. Within a few days, we had a national team of volunteers.  Patrisse mentioned that we already have this Black Lives Matter hashtag in place and that we should use it. Alicia [Garza] gave us the passwords to all the social media outlets for the hashtag, and before we knew it, we had some 500 people across the country riding to Ferguson! All were organized by volunteers from within the U.S. and Canada. And in their own communities, they are still organizing in various ways as volunteers. There is national work, and then localized work that folk can commit to in their own spaces.

I’m so tired today because last night I was with folks from New York and New Jersey who are doing community work and building actions. I just now got a text from a friend that says, “I need to be around my people tomorrow.” With this indictment decision coming down, you need another to be held, you need embraces, to be angry, to breathe, to be creative, and to think about solutions with folks who care about you. This movement has brought a wonderful family and community structure, bringing together people from a range of sexualities, gender expressions, different ages.

Recently, folks have been importantly attending to inclusion of trans women and trans men; the last two weeks BLM has facilitated Twitter chats, doing work with the Trans Women of Color Collective. We are trying to make racial justice work more inclusive of trans women issues. And it’s important to note, we are all queer leaders. This is so important, not only because it shapes our politics, which is why we’re pushing ourselves to be more expansive. We have been talking to TWOCC because there have been failures to be inclusive in the past. It is important in this conversation to say that we are queer. Patrisse and I have talked a lot about how Black queer, women’s, and trans voices are absolutely left out of national conversations about Black people’s lives. So it is important to reiterate our own queerness. Patrisse and I have spent a lot of time with young queer leaders in Ferguson; we have spent a lot of time providing them with support.

Monica: What does Black Lives Matter have to do with Black Life Matters? Is this a movement that is bigger than each event?

Patrisse: This is a good question, mostly because there have now been so many things using that term—academia has done conferences, folks are using the slogan. There are two things. There is the slogan Black Lives Matter that has been utilized in some of the most amazing ways, and then some not so amazing ways. The Atlanta Democratic Party put it on their brochure—did you see this, Darnell? There are interesting things we’re all trying to figure out, and the slogan is out there and being used. Lots of folks have seen it, it’s gone viral, even the most sheltered white people have seen it. So now we’re trying to figure out, what is the actual political project?

I can only imagine during the 1960s, when Black Power emerged, that the phrase went viral; folks were using it, that’s what happened. Then, there were actually different political projects that grounded Black Power in actual work. Black Lives Matter is in that place where even with this conference, I’m interested in being in spaces that are being elevated by folks that work closely with and alongside of the people who are showing up. The conference should reconnect with Black Lives Matter folks we rode with and haven’t seen; we should make space for Darnell, myself, other Black Lives Matter folk to sit and be with each other, to strategize.

Source: Black America Uncensored

I’m also very interested in how folks are going to use the slogan. UC Berkeley had a Black Lives Matter conference after the ride; I emailed them, to let them know before Alicia came out with her story of Black Lives Matter – she is a really cool convener, brings people together. But the UCB folks didn’t reach out to us, I reached out to them. More often now folks are reaching out to myself and Alicia and Darnell; especially more now that Alicia has written her story. And folks tell others to talk with Alicia [Garza], Opal [Tometi], and me. So people use the slogan, but in ways that are not necessarily connected to the other work. We want to change that.

Darnell: The movement is bigger than each event! Black Lives Matter as both spirit and movement was catalyzed by three women, Patrisse, Opal [Tometi], Alicia [Garza] – that is, all of these actions and expressions are not only about solidarity, but also various community commitments, in the spirit of ameliorating and destroying anti-Black structures. All in the same spirit, all in the same tradition. There are these various expressions of Black solidarity, of Black liberation and freedom, that now have a place to call home.

And this is not at all disconnected from a range of other movements. In our TFW forum on Toni Cade Bambara, Cara Page wrote about the response to the Atlanta child murders; might this have been a precursor or movement in the same tradition of Black Life Matters today? Black Lives Matter is innovative, but it is not disconnected from all the movement work that has been going on forever. We are purposely saying that this iteration of Black struggles must be inclusive of all Black lives. And that is different in some ways. When we say Black lives, we mean all Black lives: women, cis and transgendered women, queer, undocumented, disabled Black folk. This iteration is pretty phenomenal.

Monica: Why do you want to participate in the Black Life Matters in January 2015?

Darnell: I have no choice…that’s not even an issue. I am here sitting with my stomach in knots because of this impending verdict that’s going to come down regarding Darren Wilson. Somebody just texted me as I am talking to you, what’s the update? So many people are on edge. I spent Wednesday night trying to find a lawyer for a friend of mine, who had a ring on that looked like it could be a weapon. He’s a photographer, and he was wearing a ring that he can wear over two fingers. I tried to find a lawyer for him, because he spent the night in jail. Mike Brown’s death is not disconnected from the mundane forms of police profiling and brutality Black folk encounter everyday. It’s about Andre my friend being arrested because he looks suspicious. I have no choice. I’m tired. I’m really, really tired and I want to see things change. The law that makes it possible for my friend to be stopped, the law that says if the police have a sense of you having a weapon of any kind, including clothing, they can stop you. That law has to be changed.

Patrisse: I’m not even sure how to answer that question. What does it mean? Like Darnell, I have no choice.

Monica: If you could describe in one phrase or sentence what’s been happening post-Ferguson, what would it be?

Patrisse: Black excellence. I’ve seen the folks in St. Louis go from being tear-gassed, in utter chaos, with lots of splintering, to moving toward some deep and profound goals for themselves and Black people across the country. The level of leadership from folks who have never been leaders, the level of clarity is amazing. I also want to say that this movement allows for Black folks across the country, from those of us who have already been talking about this, for Black folks to be reborn and to push themselves to show up for Black people, and to show up for themselves.

Darnell:  I don’t want to use the term movement (though, I think we are in the midst of one), because I think it’s something different. There are ripples. Many of us are awake. The alarm clock has gone off again. And it has really awakened the conscience of a lot of people, and not just Black people either. The word I’ve been using is animated, maybe activated; because it’s easy to fall asleep, particularly under neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, capitalism is meant to keep us asleep; to give us the things we need so we feel good. Give somebody an iPhone, and all of a sudden we feel like we’re okay. But on that iPhone, you can now see a picture of a Black body laying in the street for more than four hours. Suddenly you see what’s happening, you can’t be comfortable in the belief that racism is over. Women’s bodies are not safe. You can pretend that trans women are not being killed; but then you wake up, and that trans woman’s body is right there before us in social media. As we talk, Islan Nettles’s murderer is out of jail, he wasn’t arrested. We have to wake up.

Monica: Tell me what you see five, ten years from now in terms of ‘black life matters’? What have we gained?

Patrisse: That’s so good. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, the 5-10 year plan. I hope in ten years, I hope in five years, that we’ve been able to develop a strong enough narrative that really pushes the debate. I’m a firm believer that you have to win the battle of ideas around the world, because culture shifts that way. Then you have to do the major policy work. But if you do the major policy work without shifting ideas, then you’ve not won. With the debate about Black Lives Matter, within five years I’d like to see some really beautiful campaigns led by all Black lives, that are funded in a way that makes them sustainable. I’d like to see major policy around decriminalizing Black lives, including reducing the law enforcement budget (one of our demands). I think this is something we can win in five years.

In ten years, I’d like to see some law enforcement agencies be disbanded or abolished, as well the development of a national network of families and victims working together in tandem, pushing for reform in their own cities. Either getting rid of police departments or having some serious checks and balances. With a reduction of law enforcement money, we can then be putting it back into Black communities. We need a new vision for jobs for Black folks, housing, healthy food. In ten years, I’ll be 41 years old; I really want all of this to happen. If it doesn’t, I’m outta here.

Darnell: Policy changes, legal changes, structural changes are important; but if we don’t change mindsets, ideologies, discourses—if folks don’t look at us and see us as humans, as worthy of living, as deserving of wellbeing—then I don’t think things will change. My hope is that in ten years, the Black people will be able to recognize that we do deserve to live, to survive. And that the state agents will recognize this, too. Until we can recognize this, things won’t change. Having laws in place doesn’t make us any more thoughtful about lives. I’m hopeful for mind-change, for our hearts to be expanded. And that in our social movements, we won’t only focus on the needs of those in the center of the power; that our movements will begin with those at the margins. We haven’t gotten there yet, and yet this is vitally important.

To register for the Black Life Matters conference, which is free and open to the public, visit the website.

______________________________________

Patrisse Cullors is a native born Angeleno and an artist, organizer, and freedom fighter. She is the founder and executive director of Dignity and Power Now, and is building a coalition to implement permanent civilian oversight of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Follow her on Twitter at @osope.

Darnell L. Moore is a managing editor of The Feminist Wire and a writer and activist who lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is a faculty member in the Africana Studies program at Vassar College. He and Patrisse Cullors were co-organizers of the Black Lives Matter Ride to Ferguson, Missouri. Follow him on Twitter at @Moore_Darnell.

The post Black Lives Matter / Black Life Matters: A Conversation with Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By blackspaceblog

Black students and professors, Beaumont Tower, Michigan State University, December 6, 2014. photo by Darryl Quinton Evans

We are Black professors.

We are daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, godchildren, grandfathers, grandmothers, fathers, and mothers.

We’re writing to tell you we see you and hear you.

We know the stories of dolls hanging by nooses, nigger written on dry erase boards and walls, stories of nigger said casually at parties by White students too drunk to know their own names but who know their place well enough to know nothing will happen if they call you out your name, stories of nigger said stone sober, stories of them calling you nigger using every other word except what they really mean to call you, stories of you having to explain your experience in classrooms—your language, your dress, your hair, your music, your skin—yourself, of you having to fight for all of us in classrooms where you are often the only one or one of a few, stories of you choosing silence as a matter of survival.

Sometimes we’re in those classrooms with you.

We know there is always more people don’t see or hear or want to know, but we see you. We hear you.

In our mostly White classrooms we work with some of you, you who tell us other professors don’t see, don’t hear you. You, who come to our offices with stories of erasure that make you break down. They don’t see me, you say. They don’t hear me. We know and don’t know how to hold your tears.

How do we hold your tears, and your anger?

You are our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our mothers, our fathers, our godchildren. You, with your stories of erasure break our hearts because you are family, because your stories of erasure ultimately are stories of violence, because your stories mirror our experiences, past and present.

Right now. This is all happening now. Every day. We know this.

We want you to hear.

You tell us your stories and sometimes we tell you our own stories of cops who stop us on the way to work, of grandparents born in Jim Crow, of parents born during segregation into an economic reality that made them encourage us to get solid jobs, of parents born outside the United States who came face-to-face with the harsh reality of U.S. anti-Blackness, how we chose institutions where we often feel alone. We tell you stories of almost dropping out of school, stories of working harder than anyone else even when it felt like it was killing us, even when it is killing us. We tell you we know historically and predominantly White universities might let you/us in, but they don’t care much about retaining us no matter how many times they misuse pretty words like diversity, or insult us with the hard slap of minority.

We tell you about the underground network of folks who helped us, the people who wrote us letters, the offices we cried in, the times we were silent, the times we spoke up, the times we thought we wouldn’t make it, the people who told us to hold on. We tell you over and over about the railroad of Black professors and other professors of color who we call when we know one of us is in need. We remind you skinfolk isn’t always kinfolk. We tell you to be careful. We tell you to take risks. We tell you, guard your heart. We tell you, keep your heart open. We tell you to hold on. Hold on, we say, to you, to us, because holding on to each other is everything, often the only thing.

Hold on.

We want a future for you, for us right now.

We write this is in solidarity with the families of Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, Renisha McBride, Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley Jones, and so many others who they are killing, so many others who should have had the chance to be in our classrooms, who should have had the chance to simply be.

We write this in solidarity with Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and too many others stolen and gone, too many others who fought for us to be in this privileged place where we still have to fight for justice.

We write this in solidarity with The Combahee River Collective and #BlackLivesMatter who knew and know we have to fight for and love all of us if any one of us is going to survive.

We write this in solidarity with you, Black students, here and elsewhere, and with those on the ground for over 100 days, four and a half hours, two seconds.

The living and the dead. We hear you. We see you.

In our classes we’ll continue to do what we’ve always done: teach about race, anti-blackness, and White Supremacy. This has and will continue to put us in positions we have to defend. This has and will continue to compromise our jobs, our health, our relationships with other people who profess to be our colleagues. This has and will compromise relationships with partners who tell us with love we need to set better boundaries.

We’re trying.

We study ourselves. We study, we live Black lives. We organize. We strategize. We march. We teach to nurture and resist. We don’t always talk about the letters we write to administrators, the angry emails we send, the committees and task forces we serve on, the department meetings where we question and push for more, the colleagues who question our research, our presence, our skin, our manner of being. We don’t always talk about the weight of pushing for more, more being basic equity, more being the right to exist without explanation or apology, more being the right to love and be loved.

What we do is not enough. It’s never enough, but we’ll keep on. We’ll keep finding ways to do more. For all of us.

We’re supposed to say views expressed herein are ours alone, but we believe that truth to be self-evident.

Some people who share our views will not sign this but they’re still with us. The living and the dead.

We’ve never been alone.

You already know your life matters. Know we’re fighting with you and for you. With all of us. For all of us.

We got you.

We see you. We hear you. We love you.

********

Rae Paris, Michigan State University

Django Paris, Michigan State University

Jessica Marie Johnson, Michigan State University

Brian G. Gilmore, Michigan State University

Michael J. Dumas, New York University

Terry Flennaugh, Michigan State University

Tama Hamilton-Wray, Michigan State University

Jeff Wray, Michigan State University

Yomaira Figueroa, Michigan State University

Tacuma Peters, Michigan State University

Michelle A. Purdy, Washington University in St. Louis

Adrienne Dixson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Maisha T. Winn, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dorinda J. Carter Andrews, Michigan State University

Terrion Williamson, Michigan State University

Karla FC Holloway, Duke University

Kiese Laymon, Vassar College

Chezare A. Warren, Michigan State University

Shaun R. Harper, University of Pennsylvania

Adam J. Banks, University of Kentucky

Metta Samá, Salem College

Tamara Butler, Michigan State University

Lisa Ze Winters, Wayne State University

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, University of Pennsylvania

Valerie Kinloch, The Ohio State University

Ibram X Kendi, University at Albany-SUNY

NiCole T. Buchanan, Michigan State University

Geneva Smitherman, Michigan State University

Keisha L. Green, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Terah Venzant Chambers, Michigan State University

Glenn Chambers, Michigan State University

David E. Kirkland, New York University

Brittney Cooper, Rutgers University

Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University

Tamura Lomax, Virginia Commonwealth University

Treva Lindsey, The Ohio State University

If you are a Black professor and would like to add your name, please email blackspaceblog@gmail.com with your name as you would like it to appear, along with your institution. You can also visit blackspaceblog to view the original letter.

The post Breaking News: An Open Letter of Love to Black Students: #BlackLivesMatter Dec appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Mali D. Collins

In 2013, I began an internship with an academic publishing press. It seemed to be the perfect combination of my dream job: higher education and publishing. I was a young writer, my early love of children’s books had waned, and I no longer looked to fulfill my pre-teen dream of working in a lifestyle magazine. Despite being young, Black, and feminist, I was a published and experienced writer whose content addressed issues important to my peers and me.  After several internships at magazines and book publishers, I wanted to work with a more socially conscious press to round out my undergraduate career.  I wanted a more critical writing trajectory as I prepared myself for graduate school.

I found my intern home in my state’s historical society. Similar to accredited universities, institutions of history often hold their own prestigious publishing houses. Throughout my internship, my fellow intern and I made clear to our managers that our intentions were on progressive content and inclusive and diverse authorship.  We asserted our perspectives in individual and office meetings alike.  But we were the only Black folks in the department and we were part of a small “diversified” pool of workers institution wide. We felt the tension that often accompanies being the “only ones” in a work place, particularly in the most intimate inner workings of the Press in the acquisitions room. We witnessed overt racial violence in the reproduction of the same anti-Indigenous narratives over and over, the fear of “inexperienced” writers, and the consideration of prospective writers only if a “Ph.D.” accompanied their name. Much to my dismay, the historical society had the same cosmetic devotion to “diversity,” along with a finite amount of advocacy for diversity. Within our four-month stint, there was not an increased representation of ourselves in these books; thus, we felt it was time to expedite people of color’s contributions to public history. We demanded the institution to see us in the state’s history books and historical consciousness, and without a colonial lens.

My co-intern and I took the initiative to call these issues to attention. We tried to show the importance of bridging the gap between talent, story, and institutional racism.  The Press nodded, agreed, but failed to act on these obvious vacancies. Although it made us uncomfortable that we still need this conversation in 2014, we were willing to be facilitators between our communities and the institution. We networked, evoked excitement for a writing project within our diverse communities, and proposed an anthology to the Press. This anthology focused on a compilation of personal narratives by millennials of color in our state, which was over due.  We felt it would be an important entry point to introduce the Press’ work to communities of color. At first we were met with excitement from the Press, but then their focus turned to incessant questions about quality, veracity, and expertise.  Ultimately, these tropes created doubt about the project, and led to its demise.

http://stateofhbcus.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/zora-neale-hurston-the-howard-university-years/

The consistent rejection of diversity in publishing is a paradox. As the industry attempts to stay current, relevant, and malleable in an increasingly digital age, it can no longer afford to deny Black and Brown authors and audiences. Academic and university presses must be accountable to diversity quotas, if not because it makes them money. More ethically, however, publishing is a pillar of cultural and knowledge production and must be all-inclusive because presses have a duty, onus, or what ever you may call it in cultural production. Presses have the power to orchestrate the circulation of knowledge and without the institutional commitment to eradicating injustice they’re asleep at the wheel.

The need for more just institutional representation of state constituencies is a major issue in the academic community as well. The academy is routinely criticized for its racism, sexism, and heteronormativity; it, too, validates pedigrees of whiteness rather than the diversity and quality of experience. We need to reflect more on the politics of unequal representation that is couched in the rhetoric of validity and eligibility. The constant privileging of English speakers and white folks perpetuates racist politics of knowledge production. The academy and academic publishing have integral roles in knowledge production and these roles must change.

Why do Black and Brown people have to continue to wait to be validated as knowledge and cultural producers? I believe any mediator between art and its exposure—editors, curators, and bookshop owners—hold the unique and simultaneous position of the Midas touch and that of gatekeeper.  Jessie Redmon Fauset and Toni Morrison are both legendary editors who have fought for what they knew would not just be one-day acclaimed books and capital generators; they published unpopular work that was essential to edifying the masses.  These key players in our literary history were revolutionary because minorities were seen as both financial and quality liabilities for presses—but they were clearly risks worth taking.

After our anthology’s rejection based on the Press’ apprehension of the book’s “writing quality,” I found refuge in Zora Neale Hurston’s words on publishing:

Publishers and producers…are not in the business to educate, but to make money. Sympathetic as they might be, they cannot afford to be crusaders.

What White People Won’t Print, 1950

But if editors and publishers aren’t willing to take the “risk,” then who will?

I began to study experiences like mine—ones that focused on rejection implicitly articulated through race. Studying the ways creators have balanced the tightrope of criticism, rejection, and praise provided me strategies that enabled me to continue to practice my craft and to recognize institutional racism when I see it.

I read The Indignant Generation and took direction from Black Professor Nick Aaron Ford who was the chair of Morgan State College’s English Department and a prolific writer.  His 1947 manuscript titled, “Fighting With Words,” was new, radical, and argued for the creation of a Black protest tradition.  However, it was rejected by racist editor Allen Tate at the University of Illinois Press who refused to publish him and cited that his work simply did not “justify the publisher’s expense.”  Additionally, the University of North Carolina Press wrote that they were afraid “they couldn’t even make suggestions to save the work.” Further, the University of Chicago Press said that it was simply “not profound enough.”

Like ours, the critique of Ford’s book questioned his basic competency. Despite holding a post-doctorate and prolific writing career, the University of Illinois Press simply decided “Professor Ford is uncertain in his grammar, his spelling, and occasionally in his punctuation.” After a series of dead-end revisions made by Ford and the Press, Illinois simply concluded that to publish a work about literary criticism through a multi-racial lens was “social protest” and ultimately, “unconvincing.” The manuscript was revised and reworked over the course of four to five years, but ended in disappointment. After a total of eight years, Ford regrettably abandoned the project.

The Press asked these very same questions of our project: What will the quality of the writing be? Who will read it? Can we make money off it? At first glance they may seem to be asked of everyone, regardless of race. But the assumed threat to the credibility of their Press reveals the institutional racism and fear the Press exhibits.

R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. argues that racial prejudice happens in workspaces of all kinds: “What managers fear from diversity is a lowering of standards, a sense that ‘anything goes.”

“IS THIS NOT WHY WE WERE REJECTED?” my co-creator asked me. He was right. Wasn’t he?

http://www.amazon.com/This-Bridge-Called-My-Back/dp/091317503X

Anthologies by non-degree holders are frequently published and are used as academic material long after they’re published. In fact, publishing young, new, radical talent can elevate editors and presses to “cutting edge” status for publishing houses. Third Women Press, South End Press, and Beacon Hill Press have all successfully exhibited this talent. But the folding of some of these legendary presses and the rise of “radical” academic presses such as Duke University Press and University of Minnesota Press suggest a disturbing trend in the role of institutional financial support and publishing. Is obtaining a Ph.D. the only way express knowledge, share stories, and validate history?  And what does this mean in a historical context that has denied people of color despite their degrees?

What is the trouble in publishing content written by people of color without degrees? And what is the assumption that independent scholars cannot accurately produce research and theory? As an emerging scholar soon to be working toward my doctorate, I want to know:

Will the questions about my quality ever stop or will my experience always be that of Nick Aaron Ford’s?

Prejudice is deeply interwoven into the fabric of institutions and presses. But the unraveling of these fabrics can begin by presses recognizing their own distrust of people of color and their writing by calling it by its real name: racism. Presses are accountable to their constituents and culture writ large and marginalized people must have the space to tell our own stories.  “Quality control” culminates at a nexus of ageism, racism, and fear. The preconceived notions about a writer are racial biases, and audiences and publishers alike are paying dearly for it.  Knowledge production, and publishing in particular, will remain exclusionary until presses commit to a praxis rooted in an anti-racist agenda.  Until publishers stop viewing people of color, and their stories, as fiscal and quality risks, they continue to perpetuate racism and knowledge production remains white, heteronormative, ageist, and classist.

The post “What White Publishers Won’t Print:” Systemic Racism in (Institutionalized) Knowledge Production appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Ruth Corkill

I Never Called You Lolita

She’s a real glamour puss hmm. She doesn’t

Just doodle around she actually

Calls herself an artist, the sort of thing

That makes my teeth curl, watch your diction here

Humbert, you will have to fend her off saying:

You looked so lovely in your grinning and bared

Gym slip and above the collar cut,

The little slopes around your lips and thighs,

Now you’ve underlined your eyes and arched back

In black- its insufferable my darling!

Sealing over the little hairs and stains

You’ve made yourself a wax doll that you can

Pose and photograph in all the most

Challenging  positions. I see you’ve

Taken up tobacco. How tormented

How wretched how achingly beautiful

You didn’t even take the time to clear

The smoke from your eyes. It was a rough night.

French phrases escape you. Are you being

Self disparaging or is this a net?

À mauvais ouvrier point de bon outil.

Yes! I wish I knew what you were saying.

I wish you were still mine to criticize.

I wish I could speak with the tongues of

Jeremy Irons. My darling, my dearest

My doll I have a confession to make;

I dropped a raisin somewhere in your car.

It’s grown the sort of shaggy mould that makes

It cringe worthy to pick up and throw out.

But you know my belle, for me it was one

Of many different items of dried fruit.

Look, I’m not sure you’re really taking this in,

Oh, and about the way you look at me sadly;

Those were the days. Whimsy. Letting-me-go-

Although-you-love-me. Would you piss off!

You of girlish hands and tight girlish farts

Crying Humbert Humbert Humbert in a

Lilting twin tone lie!

Honestly, why in the name of Christ

Did you let yourself fall so far?

I never even looked at you my pet.

I was a child too my dear, a frightened child.

You said you were the Watson to my Holmes

A frankly disturbing observation.

I would never cast another in such

A great role. How can you be so resigned?

Go do something would you. Try hating me.

***************

My Mother Told Me

To put on my seatbelt or I’d end up

Like Lady Di. She took me to a clinic

to show me what would happen if I rolled

off the top bunk. Before I could read I

Had Macbeth dramatized on cassette,

I had exodus memorized in my head,

I had some Alberta Hunter with bed

Time debriefs and Wagner for the nights when

we were glad to be listening and not to

Listing with the hours. Mother she showed me

animated Animal Farm which I

re-enacted with the playmobil,

trapping the farmer in the loft, bolting

the green barn doors. I lined up all the little

plastic piggies with their neck hinges bent

All the way back, craning up at the captive.

When I asked who joe DiMaggio was

she said “just one of Marilyn’s husbands.”

When I asked if the mountain would burst or

seep soporific deep breathing suffocation

over its own body to drown us in

our huts or hurl fire, gush water heavy

with mud she said “maybe.” She told me to

ask that mountain what he had seen stolen.

She told me that Grandfather found a child’s

shoe in the drudge of Tangiwai. She told

me long neckie giraffe lasts longer than

short neckie giraffe. She told me I could

be a detective. She told me people

are born, impregnated and killed just like

sheep, she said in some cultures these are still

called christening, wedding, and funeral.

She told me I was beautiful and

unnaturally sagacious, this would

cause trouble, I was a rat, an urchin

a delightfully sly fox, I was Kim,

I was even Iago. She never

told me why. But everyone else knew.

*******************************************

Ruth Corkill is a physicist working in Wellington, New Zealand. She studied poetry and fiction at The Iowa Writers Workshop Summer Graduate Program and has a minor in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington. Her work appears in the New Welsh Review, Poetry 24, Tuesday Poem, The Dominion Post, Hue and Cry, The Listener, Jaam, Landfall, and The Bristol Short Story Competition Anthology.

The post Two Poems by Ruth Corkill appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

From the Bitch Magazine website:

What are young feminists excited about today? On this episode, we head back to school, talking with students around the country about feminism on campus. The first half of this show explores feminism inside and outside of the classroom, then we have three stories revolving around how colleges respond to sexual assault.

This show features interviews with Harvard Lampoon editor Alexis Wilkinson, Colorado College feminism and gender studies professor Heidi R. Lewis, filmmaker Kelly Kend, and a University of Oregon student who has deep thoughts on athletics and sexual assault. The team at education website Noodle brings us a story profiling the work of Columbia University artist and activist Emma Sulkowicz, who is carrying her mattress around campus to make a statement about sexual assault. Also on the show: smart ideas for changing campus culture from students at Wesleyan, University of Wisconsin Madison, Lewis and Clark, University of Washington, and UCLA.

Click here to access the podcast.

The post TFW’s Heidi R. Lewis on Bitch Media’s “Propaganda” appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Marquis Bey

A feminist friend of mine—a 4’10” queer white woman—jokingly mocks my “bro-ness,” that is to say, my proclivity to throw around weights in the gym; my love for hip-hop; my boilerplate outfit for almost every day of the week: DC sneakers, sweatpants, black tank top, and bandana; and my eleven tattoos. It is this bro-ness that initially seemed to proscribe, for her as well as countless others, any adherence to a feminist ideology. Indeed, when one thinks “feminist” the image that conjures up is certainly not me—a powerlifting, tattooed, Black dude from Philly.

The body is the vehicle through which one acquires understanding of the world; it navigates the social realm and filters all experiences. The body is a site of signification. In the words of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “I am my body.” Or, to quote Charles Johnson, the body “is that which reveals the subject to a world, anchors him [sic] in history, thus individualizing him [sic], and makes possible perception and ‘meaning’” (p. 225).

Feminism, as an ideology to which certain bodies are hailed, seems to be codified as primarily white and/or female-bodied. Thus, white female bodies most readily signify feminist. This is by no mistake. As feminism is largely predicated on dismantling patriarchy and male supremacy, it would seem to more easily attract those bodies that are oppressed and marginalized by patriarchy and cisgendered men—women and noncisgendered people. Because of this, too, my maleness signifies hostility.  Because I inhabit the corporeal vessel that has historically manufactured the very structures and ideologies that oppress women and trans people, that vessel (my body) signifies and foreshadows, quite validly from a historical perspective, an anti-feminist posture.

While my body can be read as hostile in some spaces and my “bro-ness” may appear to counteract feminist aims, I maintain that my very bro-ness is a fertile site of subversion and can do different feminist work that women and trans people may not be able to do.

First, though, it seems imperative that I outline my particular feminist standpoint as my embodiment corporeally “confesses” a legacy of hostility, sexism, homophobia, and misogyny. To begin, I am of the opinion that men can be feminists. Some female feminists argue that men cannot be feminists; feminism, they assert, is the sole terrain of women. Men are urged to identify themselves as “pro-feminists” or “feminist allies.” Black feminist Joy James “prefer[s] the terms feminism or feminist for female and profeminism or profeminist for male advocates of gender equality.” She is hesitant to concede that men “use of the label ‘feminism’ given that it now requires the qualifiers male and female to distinguish advocates for an ideol­ogy associated with females” (p. 421).

While James rightly critiques the whiteness of hegemonic feminist practices and ideologies, and is justifiably wary of men’s presence in feminist spaces, I must humbly say that James’s argument as to whether men can be considered “feminists” is unconvincing to me for a few reasons. First, the underlying logic bolsters a gender binary and effectively erases even the potentiality of trans feminist activists. What constitutes adequate womanness? Do trans people have permission to claim the appellation of “feminist”? Second, James’s assertions equate feminist with woman, making feminism by, for, and of women. Feminism seeks to interrogate the scripts inscribed into gendered bodies. James’s claims imply that “woman” is axiomatic and self-evident, rather than critiquing what it means to be a gendered body. Lastly, James fails to acknowledge that feminism is a practice; it is what one does rather than what one is.

I ascribe to Black feminist bell hooks’ argument that feminism is concerned about (or at least should be concerned about) revolutionary politics, which all people—women, men, trans, and genderqueer people—have a stake in usurping and deconstructing in terms of gender relations. What feminism does is provide the ideological conduit through which to enact change. The main problem with the notion that feminism is for “women only,” hooks suggests, is that it provides men with a political out, effectively branding feminism as “woman’s work.” According to hooks, “Even as [feminists] were attacking sex role divisions of labor, the institutional­ized sexism that assigns unpaid, devalued, and ‘dirty’ work to women, they were assigning to women yet another sex role task: making a feminist revolution” (p. 68).

To return the utility of my bro-ness, a college anecdote may prove insightful.

While a junior in college I was the resident assistant (RA) of a floor of twenty-eight guys: twenty-seven were white and twenty were football or ex-football players. As an RA we were required to post four bulletin boards per semester on our floors. One of mine halfway through the Fall semester was a privilege board, donned with Peggy McIntosh-esque knapsack items spanning the big hegemonic identities:

No one asks if I think my sexual orientation is just a phase.

 

I can walk around outside at night and not fear that because of my gender I will be assaulted.

 

I can sit in the cafeteria with all people of my race and not worry about others thinking why we’re all sitting together.

 

I can wear what I want and have no one assume anything about my sexual availability.

There were at least a dozen others. Night after night after I posted these statements, I found them torn down. A week later, after working around my residents’ schedules, I called a mandatory hall meeting.

As my residents sat along the wall huddled around me, and the disheveled bulletin board, I struggled to find the words to begin. “Look at this,” I said, referring to the tattered board. “It seems to me that somebody’s a coward. Can’t face this shit so they tear it down and run anonymously from the truths they ripped down.”

I became acutely aware of my body—I am my body—seeing them see me as a Black man. I became aware of how my language, which constructs the parameters of our world and defines our knowledge, is the “House of Being.” I realized I could effect change linguistico-corporeally, that is, through the combination of language exuding from my particular body.

Ten minutes of noting how nineteen Arab Muslims can hijack planes and kill 2,991 Americans over a decade ago and consequently every Brown person with a heavy jacket is “randomly searched,” but white, presumably Christian people can bomb abortion clinics and no white Christian is looked at twice or thought to be up to terrorist machinations planted a seed. Ten minutes of noting that all of us in that hallway never had to worry about being preyed upon for our genders, could be moody, irritable, and angry without it being attributed to our “time of the month,” and could be sure that our reputation would not diminish (and would in fact be aided) with each person we had sex with got my point across.

The following week, one of my residents—a scruffy outside linebacker— caught me just as I was leaving for class and yelled down the hall, “Marquis! Colonialism also dehumanizes the colonizer.” “That’s right! There you go, yo,” I yelled back. The following semester, an ex-wideout from a rural, conservative town in central Pennsylvania found me in the library and asked why, after he held a door open for a female student, she scoffed at him. “Because of the historical implication of that act and your maleness. You effectively inferiorized her, told her—by your action and gender—that she was too weak to get the door herself. It is not you per se that she scoffed at but the sexist legacy that your action signified,” I told him. “That’s what I thought!” he replied. “And that’s why I ain’t even get mad. But you said it a lot smarter than I did in my head.”

In this brief example, I think my bro-ness largely contributed to my ability to reach my male privileged residents. The ideologies that my corporeality signified gave me a presumed rapport with them, allowing me to infiltrate their spaces, thus granting me the perfect opportunity to subvert those ideologies from the inside. To broaden the implications because of what my body signifies, I can go back home to Philly and be on the block spittin’ some bell hooks or Sara Ahmed to other Black dudes and be listened to because of the capital that I carry through my embodiment. Thus my bro-ness, while inimical in, say, a space containing older, white, second wave feminist women, is subversive and anti-patriarchal in a space containing Black Nationalists and hip-hop heads in North Philly precisely because I am granted access to that space.

To be a “bro-feminist,” then, is to enact what Mark Anthony Neal dubs the “NewBlackMan” or what Athena D. Mutua calls “progressive masculinities,” the “unique and innovative practices of the masculine self actively engaged in struggles to transform social structures of domination” (2006, p. xi). Through my masculine self, albeit appearing staunchly hegemonic, I uniquely comport my subversive feminist ideologies in relation to my embodiment.  I use my bro-ness as a guise to infiltrate enemy (that is, patriarchal, sexist, homophobic, etc.) lines and dissolve it from within.

I put my body to work.

Indeed, our identities do “work,” as Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati have written. My own physical identity as Black, buff, and tattooed does a very specific kind of work: the work of feminism, a bro-feminism, if you will.

*********************************************

Marquis Bey is a Ph.D. student at Cornell University, where he focuses broadly on African American Studies and Gender Studies. His particular areas of concentration include philosophy of race and the co-constitutivity of race, gender, and sexuality. He has a keen interest in the ways in which Black bodies are discursively inscribed with racial and gendered scripts, the historical trajectory of Black feminist thought and articulations of Black male feminist thought, Black sexuality, and African American atheism.

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: Buff, Black, Tattooed, and Feminist: On the Utility of a Bro-Feminist appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Zoel T. Rodriguez

I was in class today talking about poverty. We were discussing public benefits. Or rather, something having to do with poverty and poor people and how terrible it is that some people do not have stable jobs or income or food or access to hospitals. And I was sitting there trying not to think about my own situation, because I feel I shouldn’t be thinking about it. Somehow, thinking about poverty makes me feel guilty.

I worry that I should not feel or talk about my personal experiences, because that would be attention-seeking behavior, which would then be indicative of all my childhood struggles, and I would be dissected by my peers. I feel like a stereotype. Today, I cried because I felt like the stereotypical broke minority chick with the neurotic boyfriend, unstable mother, and a teenage sister who’s in her own world. Yesterday, I cried because I felt that we might become so poor and miserable and depressed that little white maggots would devour what’s left of the apples and pears and completely cover the walls and floors. And there we would live.

I am a graduate student at one of the nation’s best universities. I am an indigenous woman-in-the-works, a sister, a daughter, a volunteer, and I live below the poverty line.

Today in class, we spent a great deal of time talking about the emergence of our reluctant welfare state and the ongoing worry that people receiving welfare might become dependent on it. We talked about ineffective programs and how the ever-changing political climate was affecting progress, and how disadvantaged people are just fucked all around.

At my university this year, as I suspect was the case in prior years, the racial composition is over 70% white. I hate to use stereotypes, but I’m going to assume that most of the people with great opinions about social justice, those people who look horrified at the percentages of people who don’t have enough to eat, have never had to experience intergenerational poverty. So while discussion went on in class, I played with the backgrounds on my Word document and began to panic about the things I had to get done.

Disengaged, I spent the remainder of class thinking about how I could locate my Medicaid case worker, so that I could cancel student insurance, so that I could get some student loan money back, so that I could pay a ticket that doubled last week, so that the amount doesn’t increase, so that my car doesn’t get the boot, so that I can go to field placement, so I don’t get behind on hours, so that I can complete my field placement hours, so that I can graduate. Yup. This class is spot on. Poverty is a complex thing, and hunger sucks. And have I mentioned that I also have to call DHS to see if I can list my sister as my dependent because my $189 in food stamps are not enough to feed three people? (My mother is not working because of long-standing mental health issues.)

I decided to attend graduate school because this is what we’re supposed to do to not be poor like our parents. At least, this is what my father says. He never loses an opportunity to remind me that he has tried to ensure my sister and I don’t have to work long hours of difficult labor, like he has had to in an infinite number of jobs. My father nearly lost half his hand in a factory job accident, and yes, access to health care and insurance IS really fucked up, especially for undocumented people.

My story goes like this: I was born into relative economic stability, but divorce and my mother’s subsequent emotional instability and economic crisis pushed us back into hunger, second-hand clothes, free toys from a community organization at Christmas, emotional abuse, and anger. And I internalized and externalized all those anti-social behaviors commonly associated with poor people of color.

Then came problems in high school: a low GPA on graduation from high school, poverty, a decision to attend community college because people said it was less expensive. Then I was not so sad anymore, and I graduated with an A.A. degree with a better GPA, applied to one university, got into that one, went to that university, hated that university. More sadness and poverty, but I graduated with a great GPA. I suppose I could have ended it there and obtained a job. My experiences could have landed me decent-paying employment, I might have secured my own apartment, severed ties with my mother and sister, and possibly made it to the other side of the poverty line.

But I received a degree in a stupid major and had to continue studying on to get a “Carrera.” So I applied to two graduate schools that are considered ‘prestigious,’ was accepted into both, chose one, received loans, stayed with my mother and sister, found three jobs, and then dropped one. More worries, sadness, and poverty.

Why am I writing this? Because I tried to Google stories about other graduate-level women of color who are living below the poverty line, and I found very few. I was trying to find an online connection with someone, anyone, who understood. But I did not find any such stories, and so I’m writing my own. At the risk of sounding naive, maybe other women like me are looking for someone to relate to. I hope that my story will pop up in Google as a source of comfort.

______________________________________

Zoel T. Rodriguez (a pen name) is currently in graduate school for a Master’s degree. She has been in the struggle for social justice and activist work since high school through environmental justice, advocacy for youth, and fighting for justice for indigenous and American Indian people. Her writing experience has been kept on the personal level, but she is excited to begin sharing her thoughts, questions, fears, and ticks with others.

The post We Walk Among You: Poverty in the Ivory Tower appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Brianna Suslovic

You took me to my first protest when I was in

the first grade,

Mom,

a peaceful affair

outside the federal building downtown

where the cops glared

and we chalked the sidewalk,

shouting anti-war chants

and holding hands.

It was you who fed me

the word feminist,

and I swallowed it whole,

letting it linger on my tongue,

sitting delicious as I took it in

because

it felt more fitting

than any prior label had,

for my six-year-old self.

I still have the women’s history books

gifted to me

from a decade past;

I basked in the glory of

femmes before me,

those women who dared to

resist,

taking on singlehood

just as you had,

protesting

just as we had.

You shaped the high school girl

who chopped off her hair

and thanked the boy who called her

“Communist”

in English class,

letting her thrive instead of

squelching

her desires for a romanticized

activist experience.

Now, we sit

across from each other

in the dining room

still separated by 40 years or so

and a dinner table,

our feminisms divergent

yet linked,

and while we speak of the same issues,

we do so in different languages.

**********************************

Brianna Suslovic is a junior at Harvard College studying Social Anthropology and Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality. Her passions include acoustic music, reproductive justice, and intersectional activism. She hails from Syracuse, New York, with grand plans to remain in academia and in the struggle.

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: Divergence appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By ray(nise) cange

Preface:  I started this piece before Mike Brown. Before we were protesting for our rights. I started this one day after running late to work because a cop thought I looked suspicious as I waited for the bus. I started this when I had to sit in a room and comfort a Black boy when his statement “fuck the police” was greeted by whiteness yelling “not all cops.” I started this the day I realized how unsafe my body is walking in my own neighbor and I was forced to find shelter in a six-block radius also known as Macalester College.

As a Black, working-class queer my liberal arts college filled with white, upper-middle class liberals is not an easy place. During my freshmen year I listened to students pathologize Black men. In a moment of immense pain, I looked to my professor to say or do something but she stood silently by in the name of “academic growth.” It was this moment where I began to normalize the violence of whiteness. A violence that often produces situations on campus where I am silenced, oppressed, or dismissed. In my four years, despite being an active student leader, I was assumed to be a misplaced community member, a passerby, but never a student. However, to my and many others’ surprise as Black people are being shot where they stand, I feel the safest on this six-block campus.

Considering my college a safe haven comes from my awareness that, as a Black, genderqueer person, I am often read as a Black man by police. Therefore, the biggest threat to my body is state violence enacted through bodily harm at the hands of cops. I tend to avoid spaces where cops exist. I see this as simply increasing my life chances. I have also come to realize my college does not take too kindly to cops roaming the private landscape on which it stands.

I never noticed the lack of police on my campus until one Sunday afternoon the cops on horses were strolling around the quad. After the horse defecated, I promptly texted our Dean of Students writing “The cops and their horses are pooping on campus.” He responded asking why the cops were on our campus, and I made a quick joke telling him “If this campus has become so dangerous that we need mounted police I might need a refund.”  Within minutes the cops were gone. While the campus is “open,” it is still private property, and the cops cannot just roam around private property.

After talking to my friends, I further realized what a beautiful thing it is to have a place where cops can’t go. Our college does have security services with maybe ten or so guards, all of who will strike up a conversation on their rounds. And at the very least they say “Hi” if you make eye contact. They are non-threatening and I feel that my safety, even as a Black person, is actually their main priority.

Just a few highway exits down I-94 resides one of the community colleges in Minneapolis. Their student body is roughly sixty percent people of color. There is a large police presence. Black bodies on that campus are consistently monitored and disciplined by the cops, who casually stand with their hands on their guns and wear smirks that say “Try something, I dare you.” This state-run institution has become another site of state-sanctioned violence through the policing of Black and Brown bodies. Education is a prison here. While the violence in classrooms with white students may be similar, the police presence and activity at the community college is vastly different; it is the perpetual continuation of the school to prison pipeline for some bodies. However, I am protected from the police because of the privatization of my education and the shield of a white institution.

The tuition of my college is nearly $60,000 a year and I am aware that my place on this campus is a privilege. However, my student status carries more than educational access and support—I feel protected from the state. Not only is our campus police-free, it also helps me ward off police when I am not on campus. I am quick to pull out my student ID in addition to my state ID when cops ask for identification. In these instances, the viewing of my college ID immediately changes the interaction with the police. They hand my IDs over, apologize, and give praise for my attendance at such a good school.

I know I am searching my humanity through an institution that was not built for me. My diploma is not meant to be bulletproof, but the process of earning it has shielded my body. A college ID should be for discounts at coffee shops, not a pass that gives a cop permission to remove his hand from his gun when he addresses you.

Despite all of my struggles as a Black student on my campus, I am afraid to leave because I know that I will never feel safe in any other public place the way I do sitting in the library. I won’t worry if my ID is on my desk instead of in my wallet. My wrists can move without fear of handcuffs. I will not become a body lying on the ground. All simply because the cops can’t come here.

***************************************************

ray(nise) cange* comes from the beaches of New Jersey, the books on the intersection of Snelling and Grand, and poverty masked by love. They are a student of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies, a product of the teachings of intellectuals; they are the embodiment of intersectional feminist teachings written by Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldúa. They carry a perspective charted by unexpected intersections; my working-class first generation American spirit met with the whiteness and wealth of a liberal arts campus.

*Author uses they/them/theirs pronouns

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: The Cops Can’t Come Here: How A Predominantly White Institution Is My Safe Haven appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Shama Nathan

Retrieved from: http://internationalliving.com/fund-your-life/teaching-english/

My friend and I sat on his back porch, slithering in the Caribbean heat. We sat in quietness, mostly slapping mosquitoes.

“You talk like a white person.” He blurted out. It was not until a few minutes later, that I realize that this is meant to be a compliment.

“That’s why you’re smart.” He added, with a grin appearing on his face.

I raised an eyebrow. It did not make sense to me that a person’s intelligence level was associated with their ethnicity.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Like proper.” He continues, “You know what I mean…it’s very good.”

I shake my head, furiously. “There is nothing wrong with the way that you speak.”

He drops his head and huffs at me.

“Awa. You know it’s not.” His Creole accent is thick and fluid as he continues to prove his point. As he tries to round his “R’s” and soften his “T’s” they slap against his tongue and struggle to be liberated. Eventually, the conversation shifts into another topic but in my head, I never stopped replaying the words, “proper.”

When I return home later that night, my mother is talking on the phone. I can hear a voice similar to my friend, emerging from the bedroom door. It is loud, vibrant, and chaotic. My ears strain to make out a single word but I cannot.

“Is that you?” My mother peeks around the corner, glaring at me. The conversation quickly ends when she recognizes my presence. When she speaks, her language quickly changes.

She stares at the mess on the floor. “Did you forget your belongings on the balcony?”

“You are such a rambunctious child.” Her voice is smooth and eloquent. I hate that I feel this way but I do.

I shuffle around the room, “I didn’t do it on purpose. Me and—”

She stops me abruptly. “You mean, I and-”

She shakes her head. I can tell this irritates her to a great deal. For her, this one mistake will affect the success of my future. Yet, I know her comfort lies in the fact that like herself, I, too, possess a love of the English language. She is proud because this means that she has done well.

As the day carries on, I think about my friend and his mother who speak their own language. Unlike my friend, English is my first language. Thus, I do not have to try and sound “proper.”  For some reason, I now recognize that I have an enormous privilege. Still, I hate this privilege. My mother who bombarded me with a strong vocabulary since birth, never allowed me to speak anything other than her definition of, “prefect English”

I begin to realize that this privilege will exist far beyond my English classroom; it will follow me for life. On the other hand, my friend will have to suppress his language, in order to be recognized as “successful” in this world. I know that when he leaves the cyan shores of the Caribbean, he will try to hide his native tongue. As much as he tries, it will always be there in the backdrop. Even when he meets strangers, they will ask,

“Where are you from?”

This single question is asked because no matter how hard we try our native roots are always there. They fasten to the tip of our tongues and they never leave.

The problem is: those who speak another language think there is something wrong with them, but it is the structure of the colonial language.

Looking back now, I wish that I could tell him that he should embrace his native language. Yet, I understand that these words would be false. I know that the English language opens many doors to privilege in this world. I cannot change this system by myself.

I can, however, contribute to changing it by drawing attention to how “white” and “proper talk” is congruent with the idea that European culture is superior to others. White supremacist thinking has reached the minds of youth before they can embrace their own culture. As I reflect on my own privilege, I urge parents to teach their children the importance of their first language—to embrace its sound and never lose it.

After all, how can we, as young people, love ourselves, if we don’t love parts of who we are?

*************************

Shama Nathan is a 17-year old writer and advocate for women’s rights.

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