Born free and looking for justice: What “justice” means to me

 Won't you help to sing

This songs of freedom-

'Cause all I ever have:

Redemption songs;

Redemption songs;

Redemption songs.

Bob Marley

I wish I knew how

It would feel to be free

I wish that I could break

All the chains holding me

I wish I could say

All the things that I'd like to say

Say 'em loud say 'em clear

For the whole round world to hear

Nina Simone

Here I am, born after the so-called modern Civil Rights Movement. Here I am, a part of a generation that is close (in time) to this movement for justice; but most of my living “in” the Movement is done via readings and watching documentaries. Here I am a so-called beneficiary of the Civil Rights Movement. I stand in front of a college classroom, me a Black woman, an immigrant Black woman, a Black woman only a few generations past slavery and indentured servitude, as a college professor. Here I am the mother of a teen daughter who lives in a world that tells her that there is no racism. She is told this “lie” of post-racalism because for example, she does not see the possibility of herself in older Black women as there are no Black female teachers (or males for that matter) at her school. How then do I understand justice? How does my social identity and the context within which I reside shape my understandings of justice and freedom?

March on Washington

As a child, growing up in Barbados, I was fed a steady diet of Bob Marley. To this day, my mother owns every Bob Marley record. I can fondly remember me singing along to “Get up Stand up”, and “No woman, No Cry”. I am the point where I simply hear a few opening bars of a Marley song and I can start singing. I didn’t know that Marley’s music was about social justice. As a child, I didn’t know of or fully appreciate my mother’s commitment to justice. Marley’s music was simply something that was a part of our lives. Here commitment to social justice was simply a part of our lives. Then at the age of 16 I migrated to the US to attend college. At the age of 21, while in graduate school, I had an experience that reminded me of my so-called space in society. I was walking one morning and out ran a lady yelling “Nigger, Nigger.” She was clutching her robe and dressed in her house slippers. The anger I felt after this experience, coupled with the isolation I felt in higher education in general, left me wondering if there was ever a space for me in society. My experiences in higher education exposed me to racism and injustices in a way that I had not experienced before.

The injustices I experienced challenged my understanding of freedom. However, those songs my mother poured into me and that sense of self my parents cultivated served as the foundation for my response to the injustices I experienced. I didn’t always know how to name my experiences and how I wanted to respond to them. But the lyrics of Bob Marley, among others, and the teachings of my parents helped me to see my experiences as part of what I eventually learned was structural and institutional racism, sexism, and classism.

The words of my teachers and of random strangers caused anger; but they also prompted me to dig deeper into understanding intersectionality and justice.

The legacy of Black women, known and un-known to me, served as my “drinking gourd”. What is it that Black women sing about when they sing spirituals, the blues…? What is that yearning in their voice? It is a yearning to be free.

My digging led me to the likes of Nina Simone, to the works of Audre Lorde, Zora Neal Hurston, and Langston Hughes among others. I found the writings of Black women such as the Combahee River Collective, Dorothy Roberts, Nikol Alexander-Floyd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. These women gave me a home for my raced-gendered-classed experiences. Through these various voices I have come to define a notion of justice.

Justice involves critically analyzing how the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality work to constrain access, life choices, and understandings of self. Justice is not only about critical assessment of these intersecting oppressive structures; it is also about defining “my” reality. Although I use the term “my” I recognize that “my” incorporates all members of my larger community—those who are not free.

My struggle for justice is an on-going process. At this stage of my life I am confronted with teaching my teen daughter about justice—social, economic, cultural and political. My challenge stems from, in part that unlike me she is being raised in a majority environment—one that espouses a notion of color-blindness. She is one of two Black girls in her class. The irony of this color-blind ideology is that racism and the racial order is often hidden in plain sight. Injustice remains unchallenged as a result of silence. There is no community available for me to ground my daughter in—a community that reaffirms her Blackness in the way that I had as a child growing up in Barbados. That is just a part of the problem. Culturally she’s inundated with notions of beauty that often render her invisible. My attempts to counter the dominant narratives she confronts is often met with silence, mis-understanding, or a type of sympathy but very little action to actually change the environment in a critically manner. 

Often I’m left singing the words of Nina Simone, “I wish I knew how to be free”. I wish that I knew how it is for my daughters, biological and non-biological, to be free. Until then there is no justice. 

Melissa Harris-Perry is Wrong: There is a War on Women, particularly Black Women

Politics is about words; it’s a struggle to define issues. E. E. Schattschneider, in the Semi Sovereign People, details how (problem) definition is central to politics.  Deborah Stone extends this argument in her discussion of causal stories and their functioning in the policy process. I say all of that to say—words and images matter!  Whether consciously or unconsciously selected to describe a policy issue/response, words matter. 

On April 28, 2012 Melissa Harris Perry asked her viewers to consider not using the words “war on women” to frame the current conservative policy response to women. According to Harris-Perry

“about a war on women in America. At first, all these war talk had me stockpiling supplies and wondering if I needed to run for the hills or stop, drop and roll, and then it hit me. There is no war on women, and you didn't think that I would say that? Just chillax, my fellow feminists. Don't get me wrong. We are in the midst of a massive, coordinated effort to roll back women's rights. But I take issue of the word, war. War means something specific especially for those who have lived through the war. And we need to be careful with how we use words. Now, I want to urge the folks to just say no to hyperbole and cliché’s. To help out, I want to introduce the MHP guide of what not what not to say in political conversation. Number one, unless someone is shooting at you or about to drop a bomb on your head, you are not at war. Good-bye to the war on women, the war on the poor, the war on terrorism, and other falsely created notions of war. War talk too often distracts us from understanding the complexity of policy.”

Harris-Perry considers the use of the term “war”, as a way of talking about social problems, detracting. She might be valid. If we name everything a war, we might become desensitized to the larger policy issues. However, the narrow conceptualization of her meaning of war, as simply shooting and dropping bombs, ignores so many aspects of war.  

 Bombs don't Equal War 

Bombs are simply a tool of war. Also ignored in Harris-Perry's conceptualization of war is that war involves propaganda and ideology. 

I find the term war, as a tool to characterize the policy response to Black women, particularly useful. This is where a little Bob Marley might be helpful. In War, Marley eloquently sings,

“Until the philosophy which hold one race superior/And another/Inferior/Is finally/And permanently/Discredited/And abandoned/Everywhere is war/Me say war.”

I would guess that Harris-Perry, like Marley, recognizes that war is so much more than bombs. That war is also about ideology. It is the ideological component that I want to focus on in my argument as to why there is indeed a war being waged against Black women and why we should call it such.

As a result of policies, or non-policies, Black women are:

  

“The number of women incarcerated for drug-related crimes increased by 433 percent between 1986 and 1991. But for African-American women it rose an astounding 828 percent, while the increase for white women was 241 percent, and for Latina women a 328 percent increase.” 

“The HIV rate among black women living in some U.S. cities is the same rate as that of some African countries, according to a new multicenter study presented Thursday at the 19th Conference of Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. The jarring findings acknowledge that HIV is not an infection that has been eradicated, but one that has been somewhat forgotten, researchers said.”

“Among full-time, year-round workers, black women with Bachelors' degrees make only $1,545 more per year than white males who have only completed high school.”

“single Black women have a median wealth of $100, which is less than 1 percent of the wealth of their same-race male counterparts. It is only a fraction of one-percent of the wealth of single white women….Prior to age 50, women of color have virtually no wealth at all.

As the above suggest there is a war being waged against Black women.  

Black Women are the Recipients of Policy Drones

 

Why I think that there is an ongoing war on Black women. War is about power, it is about ideology, it is about a desire to eliminate those that some group has determine does not belong. War is about changing behaviors. If we unpack the policy treatment of Black women, from a historical perspective, we can see how indeed there has been a war against them. This ideological war involves the: 

• Power to define in a systematic manner, Black women’s value to society;
• Power to determine how these women are to be treated; and
• Power to alienate, destroy and/or remove Black women from society.

I agree with Harris-Perry that it is a cliché to talk about war on drugs, war on the poor, etc. However, what Harris-Perry ignores are other definitions of war which include “active hostility or contention, and  conflict.” This is why her plea to end the use of “war on women” for example is wrong.  Since Black women were forcibly stolen from the shores of Africa there has been a war waged against us--there has in fact been active hostility and conflict. This war does not necessarily involve drones, but it is one of ideology with real consequences that often results in our death, incarceration, abject poverty,  and geographic isolation in “ghettos” and by ghetto I’m referring to confinement of those who are considered “other”.  Black women have recognized such actions as war and have mounted systematic campaigns to combat the negative impact of policies directly or indirectly targeting our communities. 

Black women’s villages are being pillaged as a result of policy drones. Policy bombs have been raining down on us via stealth and overt actions. Should I be so bold as to use the analogy of war. This is all being conducted under an ideology that constructs Black women as "bad" and "dangerous". So Harris-Perry, if we can’t call this systematic attack on the bodies of Black women a war, what should we call it?