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NEWS & LETTERS, April 2002
Woman as Reason Column
Recapturing the Reason of women of color by Maya Jhansi The weekend of March 16, I went to the Color of Violence
conference held in Chicago at the University of Illinois, attended by 1,400
mostly women of color from around the world. While there were a lot of great
things at the conference (see article on this page by Angee Moorer), there were
also some serious problems that came out in some of the sessions, particularly
in the workshop I attended called "War and Militarism." Over the past few months, women in the U.S. have become
visible in the anti-war movement in their support for the work of the
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). RAWA has held a
very principled stand against both the policies of the U.S. and the rabid
Islamic fundamentalists that have ravaged the country. While the anti-war
movement in Chicago and other parts of the country debated whether or not to
take a stand against the attacks on the World Trade Center, hundreds of women
flocked to show their support for RAWA. Women in the U.S. and all over the world
heard RAWA as a genuine human voice of freedom and democracy. WHERE'S THE FEMINISM? That is why I was surprised at the panel on "War
and Militarism" to find that only the speaker from RAWA took up the problem
of religious fundamentalism. The speaker who took up the anti-war movement here
in the U.S. focused only on U.S. policies, arguing that the Left in the U.S. had
not done enough to educate the people on U.S. culpability in Afghanistan.
This is hardly true, since the main focus of the anti-war movement has been U.S.
imperialism. The anti-war movement, rather, has neglected the issue
of fundamentalism, and has not tried to solidarize with women fighting against
it. An important case in mind is the plight of Safiya Hussaini, who was
condemned to death by stoning for adultery in Nigeria and was just freed (see
page 11). At a feminist conference, I would expect a panel on
"War and Militarism" to focus on women's lives; I would expect to
learn about women's resistance to war and militarism. But there was hardly any
discussion of struggles of women against fundamentalism and war. One of these
speakers even called Islamic fundamentalism an "image" concocted by
the West! Two speakers addressed the plight of Palestinian women; however, both
talks were marred by rhetoric about the supposed "Zionist-Imperialist"
plot to destroy the Arab world. Many people, myself included, are horrified by
the violence perpetrated by Sharon against the Palestinian people-but to talk
about Israel as an "illegitimate, racist settler state" ignores the
two worlds in Israel and the work of people like Women in Black. I felt very confused that this kind of Old Left and
cultural nationalist and even anti-Semitic rhetoric came to dominate a panel at
a feminist conference. How could this happen? It shows that the Women's
Liberation Movement is not exempt from the problems of the Left, but is part of
the contradiction. We have to work to make sure that the category of "women
of color" not be reduced to an empty identity politics, a shiny new package
for old ideas that the Women's Liberation Movement once challenged. ENVISIONING WOMEN AS REASON U.S. women in the 1960s and '70s, including Black,
white, Chicana, Native American women, came out of the Left and challenged its
narrow vision of freedom from within the Left, which had subordinated women's
liberation to the more "important" problems of race, class and nation.
Women of color in the 1970s and '80s challenged the way the feminist movement
began to narrow itself in the same way, self-limiting its vision of freedom to
increasingly narrow definitions of gender oppression. As the statement issued by the Combahee River
Collective, a Black feminist organization founded in 1974, declared: "Black
women are inherently valuable. Our liberation is a necessity, not as an
adjunct to somebody else's, but because of our need as human persons for
autonomy." To the Combahee River Collective, identitypolitics was not
separate from a liberatory agenda. They had a vision of total social
transformation. "If Black women were free," they wrote, "it would
mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would
necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression." It is this revolutionary impulse inherent in the Women's
Liberation Movement that has to be recaptured for today. While Bush plans out the nuclear destruction of the
planet, and Al Qaeda and other fundamentalists continue to wreak havoc on the
lives of women, it is important that feminists and anti-war activists not fall
into the ideological traps that destroyed many great movements of the past. We
need to make sure that the profound concept raised by the Women's Liberation
Movement of transforming human relations and not just external structures of
oppression is not lost. |
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