*Each week leading up to the election my blog posts will focus on various issues, people and policies that voters should consider as they head to the polls. This is blog #2 in that series*
I spent much of my high school tenure competing in oratorical competitions. Every weekend from late fall to spring my teammates and I would pile into a white activity bus and travel to schools across the state armed with small black notebooks, boundless nerves and the crisp words of our favorite poets, playwrights, humorists and satirists encased in clear plastic sheets.
During the school week we were a ragtag group with varied interests. There were the student government devotees hustling homecoming tickets and spirit week flyers. There were student athletes who spent more time on the bench than on the court. There were band geeks and emo kids who rejected forced socialization. There were spelling bee champs and troublemakers who were on a first name basis with the Principal. Some sought refuge in a space where their love of reading and performance could be nurtured. Others, like me, joined the team to avoid detention. Some came from families who could afford to buy the entire Encyclopedia Britannica collection at once while others knew the disappointment of having a favorite pair of sneakers placed back on the shelves because their parents let the layaway lapse.
No matter what separated us in the classroom, we were a team of proud, card carrying members of the National Forensic League now known as the Speech and Debate Association. Our Coach was an HBCU alum and English teacher who taught us to expand the cannon to include the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni and Ntozake Shange. Through her we understood the Black Arts Movement and the power of art as a revolutionary act. There in a small, conservative, town nestled in the heart of the Bible Belt, we tackled the mature themes in George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum,” Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Play” and Maya Angelou’s “Our Grandmothers.” Across the markers of race, gender identity, social class and ethnicity, we were a team who listened to Boogie Down Productions, Jimmy Buffet, Chuck Brown, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley and the Clark Sisters before heading into competition.
Each season we browsed rows of books and scripts to select pieces that would challenge us. It was on a bookshelf in a classroom that served as our home base that I found a tattered copy of a poem by Beah Richards entitled, A Black Woman Speaks of White Womanhood, of White Supremacy, of Peace. In the provocative piece, Richards condemns the myriad ways White supremacy erects barriers between Black and White women and prevents them from working toward a common goal of equality, justice and peace. She cites the historical tensions that rendered some women blind to their own unequal status, while damning others to permanent second class citizenship. The pervasive failure to build a representative movement based on shared gender identity reflected the reality that demography isn’t always destiny.
Richards’ words were at once haunting and intriguing for me as a high school sophomore. I lacked the language of intersectionality at the time, but I knew Richards’ words resonated with me when I thought about the failure of women’s organizations to stand up for Anita Hill even as watched the hearings on TV. I couldn’t grasp in 1991 why women of color were underrepresented in policy spaces or why more durable multiracial, multiethnic coalitions between women didn’t exist. In her seminal work Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity, and Violence Against Women, Kimberle Crenshaw (1991) cautions that “the problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences.”
Beah Richards’ poem addressed those intra group differences as a barrier to forging a path forward. She moves effortlessly across the spans of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and contemporary (for her time) efforts to protect civil rights for all Americans. Twenty years later, the Combahee River Collective challenged the multiple ways discrimination weakened the standing of all women. The Collective was comprised of Black queer women who worked to advance the standing of marginalized women across a range of identities. They named themselves after an 1853 raid in Combahee, South Carolina that freed 300 enslaved Africans. Led by Harriet Tubman, the Combahee raid was viewed a deliberate calling for Black women to lead movements for freedom and liberation. For the Collective, heeding that call meant resisting discrimination based on race, class, gender and sexual identity, and ability. It meant making the conscious decision to make political choices based on loyalty to people and principles rather than parties and ideologies. They believed that any credible effort to address sex discrimination had to do so in the context of multiple, overlapping identities that fuel group standing and exclusion.
