Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 17, 1995 TAG: 9510170027
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELLEN GOODMAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
family. To be constantly ambushed by pop quizzes about your loyalty. To be asked to pledge allegiance to one part of your heritage and asked to deny one piece of your reality. To have to choose.
On the day the O.J. verdict of ``not guilty'' came down from a jury that included nine black women, you could hear stunned white women saying to each other, barely out of earshot of black friends and co-workers: ``So much for sisterhood.''
When a black professional woman in Boston disagreed with the verdict, and broke ranks with her nephews who were celebrating with high-fives and high fists, she was given a scornful look by the 16-year-old that said: So much for sisterhood.
When a black woman was asked what she thought about the Million Man March in Washington, the men-only gathering Monday that had relegated women to organizing, her sigh echoed: So much for sisterhood.
And when this same woman told a black co-worker how she felt, he turned on her, saying that any black woman who didn't understand, who didn't support the need for brothers to march strong and apart from women wasn't, well, ``a real sister.''
This is what it's like for many, perhaps most, African-American women. Divided by race and gender, and yet a composite of race and gender. A two-fer, and yet the bearer of a double burden.
For most of our history, they have led complex and conflicted lives in an America that continually cleaves our identities into categories.
In this troubled past, in the decades after abolition, sisters and brothers were both legally liberated and kept together on the hard side of the racial divide. But even then, black men were more privileged than women by a law that gave them the rights of white men, and more endangered by lawless lynch mobs that took those rights away. Even then, black women were often required by economic realities to be the strong, primary providers, and expected by the intimate standards of gender to be the womanly, second sex.
In the 1960s, the civil rights movement ended legal segregation for black men and women alike. Yet in that decade Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee issued his infamous declaration that ``the only place for women in SNCC was prone.''
Not much later, the women's movement broke barriers for all women, declaring that sisterhood is powerful. Yet many of those feminists categorized men - including the black fathers and sons who had been kept down for so long - as oppressors.
Sometimes it seems harder, not easier, to find a comfortable place to rest in the vortex of race and gender and, don't forget, class.
Think of the roles as remarkable a woman as Maya Angelou plays now. In ``How to Make an American Quilt,'' Angelou acts the part of a proud woman once impregnated by the son of her mother's white employer and ``taken'' in by another white family. Now the elder of this mixed- race quilting bee of old friends, she is also central to a ``woman's movie'' stitched out of disappointments with men and the healing threads of sisterhood. Yet in real life on Monday, Angelou was one of only two women--Rosa Parks is the other--welcomed (should I say allowed) to speak at the Million Man March. A gathering called by a profoundly divisive figure, Louis Farrakhan.Today, African-American women occupy the poorest rungs of society. But they are also often more educated than black men, sometimes more welcome by the white working world that may feel threatened by their ``brothers.'' Many are simultaneously aware of the obstacles their men face and disappointed by the shortage of what are called ``marriageable'' black men.
Navigating such an emotional terrain is hard. To say that all women are ``multi-identified,'' that we all have multiple claims of background and beliefs on our loyalty, barely touches the dimension of the problem among black women who can feel these claims rip at their emotional life.
These claims are especially wrenching at moments when the world demands that sides be taken. At the Clarence Thomas hearings. At the Mike Tyson trial. With the O.J. verdict, when allegiance to a black man who married and, at least, beat a white woman becomes a test of sisterhood with men who face their share of Mark Fuhrmans.
Running this seemingly endless gantlet of loyalty tests, black women are asked to decide what they are rather than to explain who they are. In this ongoing struggle of American life, it isn't just the sense of sisterhood that they have to hold secure. It's a strong sense of self.
- The Boston Globe
by CNB