Black women in feminism: You lose if you ignore us
There has been a noticeable lack of representation and invitation to black women in feminism. When I spoke at the Women’s March at Lake Eola in Orlando on Sunday, that’s the point I made. This is a conversation we need to have.
Yes, our march was in solidarity and protest not only for women’s rights but also for environmental rights, reproductive rights, immigration reform and voting rights. Although all of these topics are important and crucial for ensuring liberty and justice for all, a specific group of people had been left out.
It was very peculiar that the loud statement of resistance and protest that was made by the black women who attended the event — they brought their own chairs and signs on the stage to show their existence and lifted up our absence in feminism — was even absent in news reporting of the women’s march.
This lack of recognition goes to show that the voices and actions of black women are not appreciated or uplifted.
I, a black woman, was invited to speak on rights restoration, but I was not invited to speak about the black women’s experience. As the great Sojourner Truth said, “Ain’t I a woman?”
Black women have always been at the forefront of feminist movements. It is time that we recognize the accomplishments of black women in history like black scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, the woman who coined the term “intersectionality” for feminism/activism with the meaning that race, gender, class, etc., are not separate, and that they all intersect with each other.
I wish every woman who marched with signs containing the phrase “intersectional feminism” knew its true meaning and were aware of the woman who coined it because the misuse of it can be harmful.
We must all understand that sexism does not affect all women equally, which is why we have terms like (misogyny directed toward black women where race and gender both play roles in bias). Misogynoir is a pervasive ideology ingrained in every aspect of our society where sexism and racism intersect, creating specific hatred against black women.
With our black girls unfairly criminalized at a young age, pushed out of basic education and suspended from schools disproportionally compared to their white counterparts, our black trans women murdered at a high rate, and our incarcerated sisters who are among the 1.6 million Floridians who cannot vote, we cannot ignore and misrepresent them by saying, “We are all in this together.”
We are all women in the end, but first we must break the boundaries in our own community before targeting anything else. Otherwise, our activism is useless and we will not make change.
If we fight against sexism only when it affects a certain type of woman, we will fail.
If we ignore our black and brown sisters in feminism and fail to represent them in times of hardship, when all odds are against us already, we lose.
It is simply illogical to protest and march only when President Trump makes us mad, because regardless of our president’s controversial actions toward millions of citizens in this country, we will still come face-to-face with these problems eventually.
At the end of the day, there was no space created to involve black women in a meaningful and impacting way.
The first black woman elected to Congress, Shirley Chisholm, once said, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair,” and that’s exactly what the black women from different organizations and coalitions did Sunday. These women linked arms on stage to represent our solidarity with each other and constant passion to fight for our rights no matter what obstacles we face.
The link was also symbolic to the chains that keep us bound in oppression and division that we can only break when we come in solidarity with all women. Then we will win.