Black Women's Writing Revisited

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Duke University, USA

The Problem
Black mothers are dangerous.

1      In 2005 former U.S. Secretary of Education and officer of Drug Policy William Bennett publicly stated that aborting every black baby would decrease crime.[1]September 28 broadcast of Salem Radio Network's Bill Bennett's Morning in America. This neo-eugenicist statement about US race relations corresponds with globalized "family planning" agendas that have historically forced women in the Caribbean, Latin America, South Asia and Africa to undergo sterilization in order to work for multinational corporations. In 1977 World Bank official Richard Rosenthal went so far as to suggest that three fourths of the women in developing nations should be sterilized to prevent economically disruptive revolutions.[2]Luz Rodriguez, "Population Control in Puerto Rico", Conference Presentation at Let's Talk About Sex the SisterSong 10th Anniversary Conference, May 2006.

2      Policy makers justify these disproportionate and selective barriers against the birth of people of color through a narrative about the deviance of black and "third world mothers." The moral of the story is that racist inequities and extreme poverty in "developed" nations is reproduced, not by the economic actions of the state, not by divestment from social institutions in communities of color, not from increased policing in the same communities, but by the cultural persistence of poverty perpetuated by the black mother who either passes "poverty" on through her genes, or at the very least nurtures it through her deviant mothering practices. Likewise, in this story, the global problems of pollution and global warming are not results of the environmentally detrimental practices of multinational corporations, but by "overpopulation" caused by women of color who defy the economically necessary worthlessness of their lives by daring to give birth. Which is to say that "population control" is exactly what it sounds like. Which is also to say, the attack on the reproductive subjectivity of black woman and other women of color is actually a pre-emptive attack on what women of color and young people were (are) positioned to create: a new world. I offer a revised reading of black feminist publication that takes into consideration the problematic discursive function of black women as producers.

3      In the face of this genocidal attack, black feminists from the 1970s to the 1990s appropriated motherhood as a challenge and a refusal to the violence that these discourses of stabilization and welfare would naturalize. While the U.S. state enacted domestic and foreign policies that required, allowed and endorsed violence against the bodies of black woman and early death for black children, black feminists audaciously centered an entire literary movement around the invocation of this criminal act of black maternity, demanding not only the rights of black women to reproductive autonomy in the biological sense, but also the imperative to create narratives, theories, contexts, collectives, publications, political ideology and more. I read the black feminist literary production that occurred between 1970 and 1990 as the experimental creation of a rival economy and temporality in which black women and children would be generators of an alternative destiny. A black feminist position became articulable and necessary not only because of the lived experiences of capitalism and empire that black women resisted, but also because of the successes and failures of the black cultural nationalist movement and the white radical lesbian/feminist movement. Critical of a racist, nationalist and patriarchal set of limits and amputations, this movement was necessarily as internationalist as the developing neo-liberal tactics of empire it resisted. If a growing neo-liberal world order endorsed the literal and social deaths of black women and children, then this literary movement, at its most radical, imagined the death of the dominant capitalist relation, a halt to the reproduction of the state and the counter-production of a livable community against the chronopolitics of development.[3]Elizabeth Freeman. "Time Binds or Erotohistoriography." Social Text 84-85, Vol. 23, Nos 3-4, Fall -Winter 2005. Discussed in more detail later. And this is a queer thing.

4      To answer death with utopian futurity, to rival the social reproduction of capital on a global scale with a forward dreaming diasporic accountability is a queer thing to do. A strange thing to do. A thing that changes "the family" and "the future forever." To name oneself mother in a moment where representatives of the state conscripted "black" and "mother" into vile epithets is a queer thing. To insist on an black motherhood despite black cultural nationalist claims to own black women's wombs and white feminist attempts to use the maternal labor of black women as domestic servants to buy their own freedom (and to implicitly support the use of black women as guinea pigs in their fight to perfect the privilege of sterilization) is an almost illegible thing, an outlawed practice, a queer thing.

5      During the period between 1970 and 1990 the pathologization of black women's bodies occurred directly alongside a post-Civil Rights project of disciplinary inclusion in which both the black power movement and the mainstream white feminist movement were complicit. The Black Nationalist effort to construct a black patriarchy and the white feminist effort to tokenistically incorporate the labor of women of color led to an environment in which black women's writing was increasingly marketable. By 1990 Henry Louis Gates was able to explain that black women's writing was valuable because of its unprecedented marketability, combining the black interest and women's interest readerships that had developed in the post-civil rights era. With this statement Gates proclaims the fulfillment of a prophecy made almost one hundred years earlier by black industrialist Booker T. Washington who said (without literature in mind), "In proportion as the black woman is able to produce something that the white or other races want, in this same proportion does prejudice disappear." (87 cited in Ferguson) Roderick Ferguson cites this suggestion from Washington along with other statements about keeping young black women employed and off the streets in his article "Of Our Normative Strivings" in order to demonstrate his argument that the project of black uplift was complicit in the process through which normative sexual behavior became a prerequisite for acceptable racial difference in the construction of 'productive citizenship' in the post-slavery era. I read Henry Louis Gates Jr. alongside Booker T. Washington to point out a practice in the post-civil rights era through which the literary practices of black women we reincorporated into a capitalist and imperialist framework where black women's lives were "new subject matter" to be consumed and "new territory" to be discovered by an expanded market, which is similar to the way black bodies were prepared for resale in the post-reconstruction moment. (Gates 4) The reconstitution of the black family as a consumer unit and the reconfiguration of black women as marketable tokens were parts of the same process. The same capitalist narrative that had created black lack of family to reproduce enslavability, also created the post civil-rights black family as a circuit through which to perpetuate itself.