Black History Month: my homework, Angela Davis

I am the kind of white woman whom 2016 America desperately needed to be paying closer attention. Earlier too of course, but 2016 was when I came to understand that my way of doing things was untenable. I had said many times since 9/11 that I kept myself in-a-bubble-in-a-bubble of my lunatic-fringe-progressive community, isolated from the increasing deplorability of America. Perhaps understandable, but not okay.

I went to the 2017 Women’s March in DC, where I encountered the term “intersectional feminism” and the Angela Y. Davis quote, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” Slow and therefore picky reader that I am, I got myself her collection of essays, Women, Culture, & Politics, and a year later took it in for Black History Month.

Wow, was that a serendipitous choice. I’ve spent the last year learning why African American people, and women in particular, are pissed off at me, the oblivious white woman. This book makes it clear that everything they’ve been trying to get through to me, they’ve been saying the exact same for decades. Black women have been telling white women for generations that we cannot decouple racism and sexism and poverty issues, we cannot make significant progress towards the betterment of women while ignoring racial inequality. American white supremacy and male supremacy are inextricably linked.

I’ve been watching #MeToo unfurl in amazement, disgust, schadenfreude, new hope, etc, and with #TimesUp, am freshly aware of the prevalence of harassment against lower wage workers and minorities. And there’s Davis telling us over 30 years ago, “As domestic racist violence mounts - and as global imperialist aggression becomes more widespread - so women can expect that individual men will be more prone to commit acts of sexual violence against the women around them.” She talks of the battle against rape culture going back to the 1970’s. It is painful reading, but then most worthwhile things are these days.

And then there are nuggets like this, from 1985: “I was privileged to hear Maxine Waters...[speak of] the painful reality that only one Black woman then served in Congress... I could not help but speculate that if Maxine Waters herself were elected to Congress, Ronald Reagan and his cohorts would find it all the more difficult to execute their heinous schemes.” The book is liberally sprinkled with anecdotes with an all-too-familiar feel, of fighting the unbridled greed and bad faith of a hostile and reactionary administration.

One of the most surprising bits was in a visit Davis made to Egypt, where she was roundly scolded by the Egyptian feminists for focusing on issues of female genital mutilation and the veil. They schooled her that she had been made a tool of the oppressive white American feminists, whose focus on FGM to the exclusion of economic issues was somewhere between useless and dangerous to the Egyptian women. An unnamed woman tells her, “We want to be liberated, we want to be emancipated, we want to be equal - but from an economic point of view, not from a sexual point of view.” Davis muses, “She seemed to be suggesting that an isolated challenge to sexual inequality would not solve the problems associated with women’s state of economic dependency or their exclusion from the political process, not to mention the exploitation and poverty suffered by women and men alike.” It was a powerful lesson in speaking truths and listening to what disadvantaged people have to say about their own lives, which is, again, the sort of thing that has come into focus for me this last year.

Of course, some of the book is wincingly ironic. Davis’s wishes for her people are, if anything, less fulfilled now than then. She says to a high school graduating class, “Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan had already been relegated to the distant past and that we would never again have to worry about the establishment of camps where young white kids learn to hate and brutalize Black people, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, and Jews...
“Imagine that we lived in a world where Mexicans, Central Americans, and Haitians without immigrant papers would not be rounded up like cattle and incarcerated in concentration camps, only to be shipped back to their own countries, where they face abject poverty and brutal political repression...
“Imagine that we lived in a world where physically and mentally disabled youth would not be subject to devastating routine discrimination...”

Then she says, to these kids, “My young sisters and brothers, we must do more than engage in such flights of imagination. All of us, the young and the old alike, women as well as men, must stand up, speak out, and fight for a better world.” Watching the Parkland kids now taking up the banner really brings that home to me. And this year, for the first time in my life, I feel like I’m finally over the hump myself: I’m paying attention, taking cues from people of color, doing my phone calls and marching and widow’s mite of donations and stuff. I feel embarrassed at how much catch-up I’ve needed to do, that I not be giving mere lip service to Black History Month, but I no longer feel shamefully ignorant.