Toni Cade Bambara lecture, "Black Women as a Political Force," at the University of Iowa, June 7, 1978

[Darwin Turner]: Ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to welcome you to the fourth evening lecture of the 10th Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture at the University of Iowa, the fifth in succession sponsored through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. [Darwin Turner]: I'm very pleased also to introduce our lecturer for this evening, Toni Cade Bambara. She was born in New York City, received a Bachelor's from Queens College, a Master's from City College. She's worked in a variety of occupations as a community organizer, a health and youth worker, a freelance writer, a director of psychiatry, very good occupation for those dealing with English teachers and writers, as a program director for settlement homes in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. She's also worked as a teacher at such schools as City College and Atlanta where she now resides. [Darwin Turner]: She's been a writer in residence at Spelman, a consultant at Atlanta University and Emory, and has been called upon by most of the schools in the area to perform in one capacity or another. One of her most rewarding experiences has been developing a multimedia training unit for infants. I suppose that many people nationally know her best as an editor and author, the editor of The Black Woman, the author of Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks, Gorilla, My Love, a collection of short stories, junior case book on racism, and most recently a collection published last year entitled The Sea Birds are Still Alive. [Darwin Turner]: As a result of her work she's received many awards for community service, for child development, but she states that the two which have brought her the most pleasure are the Do Right Mama award presented in 1974... The term is somewhat misleading since this is award from a group of mothers I understand. A second award that has brought her extreme pleasure is an award presented by the graduating Black students of Rutgers, an award entitled The Wise Woman award, also in 1974. This evening she will be talking to us on the topic Black women as political force. With great pleasure I introduce Toni Cade Bambara. Toni Cade Bamba...: My intention is to be brief so that we have ample time to exchange, because usually that is the most productive portion of these kinds of gatherings, but being a big mouth that may not be the case. Toni Cade Bamba...: What I would like to do is simply provide a context in which we might explore together some specific questions that you may have about the women's movement, Black women, third world women abroad, in this country, or whatever. But I thought it important to at least establish what time it is. It is spring finally, 1978, and we are in the third year of the last quarter of the 20th century. And one of the major questions that confront the peoples on the earth at this time is in whose name will the 21st century be claimed. Toni Cade Bamba...: We have heard that question or pieces of that question couched in various kinds of ways coming from various quarters throughout the globe... Speaker 3: May I interrupt. Speaker 4: [crosstalk]. Speaker 3: We're having some difficulties. There is no projecting microphone, the air conditioning must be kept on, it does blow rather loud, but we ask those of you in the back of the room please to come forward so that the speaker won't have to- Toni Cade Bamba...: Kill herself. Speaker 3: ... strain. Toni Cade Bamba...: Have a martini here. Straight. Toni Cade Bamba...: I was saying that if there is a single unifying concern or one question that is being raised universally throughout the world at this particular point in time in history, it has to do with the nature of the new order or the nature of life on earth in the 21st century. Many people are raising the question, for example, can we rescue the planet from the psychopaths? That is to say, can the marshal energies that are about to be unleashed, we're talking about the neutron bomb, the plutonium bomb, can that be stopped? Particularly, can it be stopped before it's dropped in Soweto? Toni Cade Bamba...: Can those kinds of energies and that kind of sensibility that Sonia was talking about this afternoon, be deflected, be transformed, converted in the interest of people's development? Or another way to put that, are there sufficiently evolved, committed, competent, principled people throughout the various nations on the earth at this point in time in history that can administer power in a human interest, that can utilize resources for the development of whole, sane, clean human beings in the 21st century? Toni Cade Bamba...: In other words, what is on the floor? The question that has been brought to the floor continuously and increasingly with increasing desperation in recent years is what must we do now to prepare ourselves for the 21st century? What ought to be going on in this last quarter? As every basketball or football fan knows, a lot can happen in the last quarter. A lot happened in the previous quarter. From 1950 to 1975, an era that was hallmarked by revolution, we experienced, those of us who were on the earth, at least two centuries of change in that mere 25 years. Toni Cade Bamba...: The entire face of Africa changed. The face of Africa changed. The relationship between the former have nots, those people who had been systematically underdeveloped so that the haves, the super thieves, could grow more greedy and more powerful living off the blood and bones of people, that whole relationship has shifted. That is to say the power configurations of the globe have changed, and we will never be the same. It's a whole new chapter in human history being written. Toni Cade Bamba...: In that previous quarter '50 to '75 we experienced, or at least we witnessed, the rise of national liberation movements around the globe, a massive attempt by people who had been undervalued or devalued, certainly underdeveloped, exploited, oppressed, a massive attempt to overthrow both the external structures of oppression, colonialism, imperialism, as well as the internal structures of oppression, the way in which colonized people are encouraged to buy into the agenda of the oppressor, the mindset, the sensibility, so that in cooperating with that training we become geniuses in our own self ambush. We become collaborators in our own under development. Toni Cade Bamba...: And we saw, as part of that movement, worldwide movement, a rise of a nationalist literature. We saw that in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and quiet as it's kept, in Oceana, Pacifica, and the Aleutian islands. And in this country certainly we saw it from the Native American community, Chicano community, Puerto Rican community. And of course we experienced that very stunning release of Black energy that got translated in political, ideological, aesthetic, scientific, and organizational arena. Toni Cade Bamba...: We saw to the rise of a cinema, an alternative cinema, or so called third world cinema. Former peasants, dentists, teachers, midwives began to pick up the camera in the same way that many of us began to pick up the pen, with a recognition that the camera, the pen can be tools in the reeducation of a people and can be weapons in the war, and there is a war going on. Toni Cade Bamba...: And I'm not simply talking about the war that we experience daily that is to say white America has declared war on each and every generation of Black people that have been birthed into this country. And I'm not simply talking about the war, that hot debate that wages between the socialist camp and the capitalist camp over whose political, economic, and social arrangement will have hegemony in the world. In other words, the war is not simply being fought over the issue of turf, who has the right to the diamonds over here and who has the right to the oil over there, the war is also being fought over the issue of the truth. Toni Cade Bamba...: What constitutes the truth about history, the history of humankind, what constitutes the truth about the basic nature of mankind, womankind? What is the potential for development of so-called human beings? And so during that period, 1950 to 1975, we see, as they say, a rise of a literature that is deliberately very consciously nationalistic and that challenges that version of history, that version of the truth projected by the European who enjoyed not only political and economic hegemony, but communication hegemony as well. Toni Cade Bamba...: And we see, particularly toward the latter part of the previous quarter, around this early '70s, the rise of a new cinema in Cuba, in Vietnam, in Sierra Leone, in Senegal, in parts of Egypt, among progressive forces in India, in Chile, and more recently the PLO. We see not only a new way to inform, a new way to approach content, but also a new way to make films collectively, a new reason for making films. Toni Cade Bamba...: And so we see the cinema, this new cinema, challenging Hollywood, because Hollywood after all has annexed the globe and has managed very successfully to lure, bribe, coax, mystify peoples all over the world into a Western sensibility, that same dangerous sensibility Sonia was talking about, a sensibility that is anti-work, anti-responsibility and accountability, anti-problem solving, anti-color, anti-women, anti-life, anti-life. Toni Cade Bamba...: We saw then in short, in that previous quarter we experienced the breakout of people, people who had for so long been entrapped in someone else's fictions begin to break out and become so irresistibly and irrefutably for real that they could no longer be denied, ignored, or distorted. For example, Charlie Chan, the whole fiction of Charlie Chan and the Dragon Lady, all of that had to give way once Mao Tse-tung became a fact, once the Republic of China became a fact. Toni Cade Bamba...: That easy convenient image of the sleeping, lazy, siesta taking under the sombrero muchacho had to give away once Cesar Chavez came on the scene and united farm workers became a fact. The Vanishing American, The Last of the Mohicans and other wishful thinking fantasies projected by the mythmaking class had to break down once the Macleods, and the clan mothers, and Dennis Banks, and Russell Means, and the whole American Indian movement became real. Stepin Fetchit, the tragic mulatto, the Mammy, The Myth of Negro Progress had to be broken up once Malcolm arrived, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and the whole Black power movement. Toni Cade Bamba...: And the notion of the have-nots, those formerly colonized people caught up in the vicious cycle of poverty as though it was the cycle that was vicious, enjoying, well, not enjoying, but fatalistically resigned to being under the boot, this too had to give way once the formerly colonized nations and peoples began to form the non-alignment movement, began to unite their wrath, their vision, their strength, and not only break out of a mindset, but also managed to break down the barriers of that once exclusive country club, the UN, and life will never be the same. Toni Cade Bamba...: And finally, the image or the fiction of illiterate impoverished peasants, unsophisticated, with no technology, not hardly in the modern age even, the Vietnamese broke open that particular fiction and taught the world, and hopefully the lesson has not been lost on us, that what can defeat the most powerful military machine ever established, what can break the back of the most sophisticated technological counter-revolutionary force is a people who are unified, disciplined, and politically conscious. Toni Cade Bamba...: And finally, the women, we women, we ancient women, we original women, and the kinds of fictions that had been projected about, say, African women, for example, by anthropologists, and Hollywood, and the novelist, particularly the empire novel tradition writers, the Conrad era, and especially by the Southern American writers, Faulkner and exhorted fads. Toni Cade Bamba...: And when we look at the kinds of fictions they offered about the African woman and push it up against the realities documented by African women in films, tapes, essays, poetry, drama, novel, short stories, in newsletters that are coming out of the organizations of African women, the Mozambican Women's Union, the Union of Angolan Women, the federation of women's unions of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde islands, the women's sections of ANC, PAIGC, ZANU, ZAPU, and SWAPO, etc. Toni Cade Bamba...: When we push that fiction up against those facts, it's not enough to say that those anthropological texts were riddled with racism, nephnocentrism, and anglocentrism, or whatever that word is, meaning a male mindset, and then you go research in that manner. It is not enough to say that those texts tell us more about the pathologies of the investigator than about the realities of the investigated. Toni Cade Bamba...: As a matter of fact, all there is to say once we begin pushing the fictions up against the fact, well, it's like the old folks used to say, it's not how little we know that hurts so, but that so much of what we know ain't so. Because they told us that African women were devalued, they devalued themselves, they were despised within their communities, they were beasts of burden, they were wretched, powerless, they were considered profane and polluted and polluting, they had absolutely no influence anywhere, they were bought and sold and traded about like so many sacks of grits. Toni Cade Bamba...: That's what we were told. And yet, if that is a fact, it doesn't help to explain the traditions of a great many African women and a great many societies on the continent that have always enjoyed economic independence, that have always had control over their own bodies, their own destinies, colonialism not withstanding, and have enjoyed a particular kind of personal and public power that women of this hemisphere have never known. Toni Cade Bamba...: We began to look at the kinds of realities documented by the women themselves when they talk about the power that they have exerted in the private arena, that is to say in the home, within the neighborhood, within indigenous economy, and within the public and national arena. Toni Cade Bamba...: And Nkrumah never made a secret of the fact that it was the market women of Ghana that brought him to power, just as Martin Luther King never made it any secret, although you'd never know it by the media, and you'll certainly never know that watching that most recent $5 million hustle playing with the man's bones, but he always talked about it, wrote about it. Matter of fact, C.L.R. James recently was relating it in one of his essays, that it was the women, the community of women, we brand new women, we original women that made him a leader. Toni Cade Bamba...: When Rosa Parks sat down so that we could stand up, the mamas got on the phone, the head dresses, the church ladies, the taxicab drivers' wives, Ms. Mary who makes the fish sandwiches and brings them to the beauty parlor, all such ladies got on the phone. And we know that whatever city or neighborhood, there was always an informal network of women that at any time can be lifted up and made formalized, at anytime can be lifted up and made effective. Toni Cade Bamba...: And these women got on the phone and said, well, sister Parks has to be supported and blah, blah, blah. We got to have a meeting and we gon' have it blah, blah, blah. And then the men of Montgomery in the community got together and found a place in the church. And everybody came, and they talked, and they set up the whole Montgomery association, improvement association, mapped out the whole plan for the bus boycott. And then one of the ladies said, well, we have to have a spokesman, a leader. Toni Cade Bamba...: And they said, what about you reverend so and so, and he said, no, because the board of trustees of the church might not understand. And they asked the deacon, he said, no, no something, something. And they asked Ms. Mary, but Ms. Mary was having some visitors and some relatives come to town and she couldn't, and who listens to a mama anyhow. So they turned to this nice looking young man who at least had a suit, and he was a minister, and his daddy was a preacher, so we know he can talk. He has a sense of the power of the word. So they asked him, be the leader. And the rest is history. Toni Cade Bamba...: Also, in terms of this whole tradition of women, we women, as a political force, it's never been any secret, in Kenya, for example, that if you want to run for public office you have got to go see the market women. You have got to just figure out some way to get to the country and talk to them women, because it's very possible that you can run a campaign without them, and you might even get into office without their help, on a first name basis somebody would choose in the city, but if you're not right the women will bring you down. It's as simple as that. Toni Cade Bamba...: Nkrumah talks about that as well. He says he gained disfavor with the market women and that worried him more than anything else. So these things that we had been told by the experts does not jibe with those documents that are being offered up now by the people who should know best, namely the community, the men and the women, the elders and the children of these Black women, these African women. Toni Cade Bamba...: Because if indeed we were beasts of burden and profane and devalued and despised, it cannot explain the tradition of medicine women, healers, seers, visionaries, military strategists, diplomats, teachers, counselors that are still celebrated in the old songs and the old poems and sermons and toasts that have now been revived by women of organizations that I've named before in their attempt to mobilize and organize those women who have succumbed to the colonialist myths and are not part of the productive forces, that they revive these traditions and celebrate these models in order to pump up the heart of the sisters who have fallen by the wayside. Toni Cade Bamba...: Which is not to say that in many societies and probably in lots of societies a lot of women did not enjoy a great deal of mobility, but the picture that is generally offered to us is one of those paralyzing myths that certainly do not operate in our interests, operate to rob us of political will, rob us of the vibrancy that we could gain if we were to look at the reality of our traditions, rob us of an opportunity to find the models, those usable models that will help us get clear as to what our tasks are at this particular time in human history. Toni Cade Bamba...: And it is this whole notion of breaking people out of fictions, breaking people entrapped in other people's fictions that I want to just lean on for a minute, because it's one of the more fine contributions that Black women writers in the last decade and a half, those writers who came of age in the neo-Black arts movement, it was this that was their contribution to community mental health, namely, the attempt to break us out of stereotypes and to help us realign our political and cultural loyalties so that we might be able to rise above our training, think better than we've taught, and look back into our own history, both in the past and immediate history. and find those models, those reservoirs of vibrancy that can keep us keeping on. Toni Cade Bamba...: Because the stereotypes, after all, not only inform the literature and the popular culture, they also inform public policy in this country, for example. And they also tend to inform the most personal intimate relationships between people. And so they can be very deadly. It's not a minor question. This contribution is breaking people out of a trap. What seems to be a language trap always seems to be the especial contribution of women writers, but that's only because it was the women writers who mined that particular vein and who did something with it and made it usable and made it accessible to people. Toni Cade Bamba...: Certainly cultural workers at the time, in the '60s, women poets, writers, novelists, dramatists were also participants in every phase, every outburst of energy that characterized that decade. And you find them in the civil rights movement, the Black power movement, the neo-Black arts movement, the Black studies movement, the consumer rights movement, the tenants' rights movement, the welfare rights movement. They helped to revitalize the Black trade union movement. They were involved in the anti-war movement, the women's consciousness movement, and the women's rights movement. They were part of the gay rights movement. Toni Cade Bamba...: They were part of the campus forces that fought for community control of schools as well as fought for independent Black school movement. They were part of the prison forces that worked on behalf of sisters and brothers behind the walls. And they did that work from both sides of the walls. They were part of the popular health movement, that is to say they revived a tradition that had gotten... to say had gotten eclipsed is not rough enough, that got repressed in the 19th century when the AMA began to rise and had to wipe out the whole popular health movement. Toni Cade Bamba...: Many of the old midwives and grannies began to train women again, not only in techniques, but also in the whole aspect of curing and caring, of dealing with the total person rather than just pumping inner substances because you exhibit a symptom, but dealing with the total care of people. Toni Cade Bamba...: And these women, these cultural workers, mostly writers, encouraged us to perceive ourselves in a new way. They offered up new categories of perception in producing poetry and songs, novels, essays, and position papers. And whether they intentionally or unintentionally went about their work in terms of writing, that body of work that does exist in the past decade and a half is an absolute challenge to those convenient pictures, those image stereotypes that had been projected about us by not only the oppressor class, but by ourselves as well. Toni Cade Bamba...: I mean, it is the nature of colonized people to incorporate the pathology and to become pro insane, so to speak. And I'm talking about this particular stereotypes that we have seen trotted out time and time again, the Mammy, the matriarch, the tragic mulatto, the amazon, the victim, the whore, the bitch, and so forth. Toni Cade Bamba...: In all of these images these stereotypes were certainly derived from the role that the state defined for us, though not in our interest, and these images did not come out of the role that we defined historically, the role that we defined operationally, because whatever role has been assigned for us, economic role, psychosocial role, our own role, we have been developers. Toni Cade Bamba...: Black women have been developers. We have developed children. We have developed families. We have developed the church. We have developed an indigenous economy that enabled us to keep on keeping on during those lean periods when Black labor was no longer necessary. You know how they just... during periods of crisis they sweep us up, and then after that they throw us back. And we have been permanently locked at the bottom. But every once in a while we confuse a trend with a new policy, and we forget that we have got to keep something going for those lean times. Toni Cade Bamba...: Black women have kept alive that indigenous economy. We have been fundraisers. Three fifths of all real estate owned by the Black church was directly raised by Black women. Two thirds of all monies leaving the United States since 1947 that have been aid to what we have to call the national liberation movements was raised directly by Black women. Toni Cade Bamba...: We have also been developers of vision, that vision that has kept us keeping on during those very brutalizing times. The notion that we know there is a better way, we know that old people do not have to eat dog food, we know that there ought to be more options for our brothers than the armed services, or prison, or the street, we know there has to be more options for our sisters than welfare or the street, a better way, another way to be in the universe, a more human and responsible way, that vision of that possibility, that's very much kept alive by Black women, the community of women. Toni Cade Bamba...: I've been asked to, somewhere in a little note to me, to talk a little bit about the background of the book, The Black Woman, how it came about, blah, blah, blah, the times, dah dah dah dah. Toni Cade Bamba...: In 1967 and '68, in my immediate neighborhood, I became aware of a kind of energy in everything that I had only seen before on the part of women in the church or in school associations. But I now began to see in my immediate neighborhood Black women who were then strike leaders, who were part of the consumer guilds that in New York closed down the safe ways by proving that the food, particularly the produce, in our neighborhoods was second rate and were more expensive than across town, and by proving that the prices in our neighborhood always went up the day the welfare checks were issued. Toni Cade Bamba...: So here were the mamas closing down supermarkets and mamas together with the GI, GIs had come back from Korea, beginning to do draft counseling, late '50s, early '60s, but it's most especially noticeable in '67, '68. Black women as part of the prison support groups setting up, not as part of agencies or not... without government stipends or anything else, but setting up halfway houses within apartments for folks coming out of the jungle, also setting up drug programs. Toni Cade Bamba...: When methadone became the magic answer in the middle of the, well, roughly '61, '62 in New York at any rate, a great many Black women who had been healers, the whole voodoo folk conjure women so forth and just plain old mamas on the block began demanding that people take another look at this methadone thing, Black women on the block in the buildings. Toni Cade Bamba...: And I began to think that what might be very interesting would be to put some of this vibrancy between two covers to document this release of energy, this widespread concern, this across the board activity on the part of Black women, ordinary women, so that we could look at it, we'd have something aha to assess, and also a way of documenting a moment in time. Toni Cade Bamba...: And originally I thought it would be very interesting, for example, to get from the Women's Caucus in SNCC, which later became the core group for the Third World Women's Alliance in New York to get them to deliver up some of the position papers they had written on the war, on drugs, on prisons, on experiments between men and women, that is to say new ways to be with each other, exploring that. Toni Cade Bamba...: And I thought it would be very important to get some position papers from the women's caucus of the Panther Party, which later became the core group that kept alive the schools, and to get them to look at some of the questions that were confronting women at that time, and most especially to get in touch with that sector that we almost never hear from. Toni Cade Bamba...: In any period, I mean, every 40 years when we find ourselves again and wake up and go through the whole number, there was one sector we almost never hear from, poor Black women, I mean, really poor, people who are absolutely entrapped in persistent poverty, particularly poor rural, but poor urban as well. Toni Cade Bamba...: And to get it from them directly in some manner, if it meant photographing quilts that symbolically expressed what it is like living like that, if it meant getting someone to sit down and talk about what the carvings in a cooking spoon meant, if it was something other than print, something other than writings, then we just have to deal with that, but not to rely on women of comfort, no matter how progressive and conscious they may be, who think they have a mandate to speak in the name of poor Black women. Toni Cade Bamba...: Well, this was not exactly how the book turned out, mainly because of my own inaptitude, impatience, running around to try to snatch things from people instead of waiting and [inaudible] with them phone calls and stuff. But I think what did get captured in that anthology, which strikes me as a very readable anthology, I think it's also very dated, but it's evidently still usable for the generation coming up, I think what did get captured in that anthology is a voice of the times. Toni Cade Bamba...: There are some passionate pieces, I mean, really strident, angry, enraged voices in that book and some, hey, kind of atti... There's a lot of different kinds of attitudes. It's the voice of that book that strikes me the most long after the content may or may not be terribly usable for a generation that did not come of age in that period. Toni Cade Bamba...: There's not too much else I can say about the background of that book, because I cannot read my notebooks from that period, my handwriting is absolutely insane. And also, that was a good 10 years ago after all, and I'm looking to the 21st century, quite frankly, because I'm beginning to wonder, looking at this generation of children, I mean the short folks who seem to be a breakaway generation. They don't seem to have the connections to family, church, and school that many of us did. They don't seem to have connections to those socializing institutions that held us in good stead. Toni Cade Bamba...: And many of us are very alarmed about the children. And I'm sure we have heard from various speakers, as you did this afternoon, a sense of great concern about this generation and what their task will be, and what our responsibility is for developing them given the fact that so many of us have capitulated in the last 10 years, although many of us have never skipped a beat and have kept right on. So it's a little hard for me to talk about that book so I won't. Toni Cade Bamba...: But what I think is very important about that period, and to some extent the book documents that, is that we begin, as a community of women, to become very conscious of the fact that it is Black people in America, Black and other people of color, but especially Black people, who have agitated and protested, etc., and who have constantly raised the critical questions and challenged this whole system of inequity, the whole system of privilege that is built on our backs, that have questioned that whole diseased network of racism, imperialism, materialism, carelessness, opportunism, male chauvinism, but mostly just sheer carelessness presented to us as a norm. Toni Cade Bamba...: I mean, it's presented to us as the best of all possible, a few quirks here and there, but really quite advanced when you come down to it. It has been the persistent revolt of the Black community in this country that has kept alive the notion of struggle, that has kept at the very center of American life the question of what is just, what is justice, what is equity, what is fair play, etc. Toni Cade Bamba...: And it is this community and persistent revolt that has helped to demystify America for a great many peoples around the globe. And these peoples around the globe every day express solidarity with our struggle here quiet as it's kept, that is to say the media is ominously silent about these expressions of solidarity and goodwill that come pouring in over the wires every day. Toni Cade Bamba...: I don't know if you're familiar with the FRETILIN, which is a national liberation movement in East Timor, which is not one of the more gargantuan nations. It's a little country, republic that is being invaded by Indonesia at a time, right after Kissinger went to Indonesia and said it was all right to do that. Toni Cade Bamba...: And their first hour after they proclaimed themselves a national liberation front was to express solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, peoples of Guinea Bissau, etc. And they spent three or four sentences in a celebrating way talking about Black women in this country, Black men in this country, and Black children, and expressing a concern that one day soon we will all sit down at a negotiating table, a community of women. And it was very moving. But we don't hear all of that. Toni Cade Bamba...: And the most times we ever do hear that is when a few of us are invited as delegations to other countries. The women's union of Oman and Yemen express solidarity with our struggle every day. The women's union of Oman send letters of love and expression to Black sisters in this country every day. But it's no secret why they are blocked. That they are blocked perhaps is a secret, but why they are blocked should certainly be clear. Toni Cade Bamba...: But what is crucial or what got to be very energizing in that period is the realization that it is our struggle in this country that has helped raise the consciousness of other nationals and other peoples in this country, that has helped raise expectations for other people in this country and around the world, and that have encouraged other sectors of the US to begin raising some critical questions at least, and hopefully encouraging to launch strikes against the state. Toni Cade Bamba...: To talk a little further about the business of roles, images, stereotypes, the state defines Black women economically as cheap labor, part of that surplus labor pool that you absolutely need in order to depress wages and in order to deflect militancy on the part of labor. We also have psychosocial roles, and so images naturally derived from that, because it's so much easier to encourage people to not think, but rather to have a convenient picture about behavior or the essence of a people, you strip it of all complexity and just got this one dimensional picture in your head in which case response can be highly predictable. Toni Cade Bamba...: And I think that's the key to this kind of society, this mystification. To a great degree drugs is very much used as a tool of constraint and force and threat, but mystification more than anything. And to a great degree that is one of the absolute horrors of capitalism, because you think you're thinking when you're not thinking. We're encouraged to think we're thinking when we're not thinking, and stereotypes is a perfect example of that kind of phenomenon. Toni Cade Bamba...: So what are these stereotypes? The Mammy. We all know the Mammy. She has to be fat and jolly. And she also has to be thoroughly tied up with the welfare and wellbeing of them white folks. Any actress, Black actress, too old or too large to be the bronze barbie doll in this particular point in time knows that when they're called to audition they'd better force feed themselves before they go. All actresses know that, that if you're not the cute thin and all such as that, you have got to be fat. You've got to be large. Toni Cade Bamba...: Minnie Gentry almost wrecked her health doing that, Esther Rolle, all of them. It's just a fact of life, because the Mammy image looms large in the American mentality. There was a great need for this Mammy. The Mammy functions in much the same way as Linc in Mod Squad to show that there is nothing of worth in the Black community. In Mod Squad, every time there is someone from the block that comes back into Link's life, someone he knew from high school, and Link goes all out to prove that he's right, he's always wrong. And then Link goes on running around with the other two agents, voodoo cops, or whatever they are. Toni Cade Bamba...: But the Mammy functions in that manner. The Mammy need not be female, sometimes it's male. You have mother figures, for example, in the film Mother, Jugs & Speed. You don't know the film? Bill Cosby. This is not to crack on Cosby, but just to indicate the persistence of this image and the persistence of this need to have this image. But again, the Mammy figure helps to keep alive the notion of Black men as boys, and helps to keep alive the notion that there was nothing of interest going on the Black community and that is why these women, these mothers, these nurturing people are so tied up with Miss Anne and the little child. Toni Cade Bamba...: Then you have, of course the prime example is, what's her name, [inaudible], it was not... Imitation of Life where Louise Beaver has a gift. They both start off, the white women and Black women both start off seemingly on the same... They both broke, no job, no house, no nothing, but Mammy has a gift. She got these [inaudible] pancakes, but somehow it is Miss Ann who gets rich, and Mammy stays on as the maid, but she got the gift of the pancakes. At no time other than going to church do we see her connection with her community. Again, it is the same message as Link in Mod Squad, there is nothing there for you. Toni Cade Bamba...: Then we had the matriarch. This is that dominant powerful tyrant of the house. Again, operates to keep alive the notion of Black men as boys, and also helps to keep alive the notion of... or help to keep heat off the enemy. The reason Black children fail, the reason Black men feel powerless is on account of this woman, this large, angry, bossy woman. And to the degree that a people, an oppressed people cannot identify their enemy is to the degree that they are available for servitude. So the matriarch is a very handy, very convenient, very usable image. Toni Cade Bamba...: Then you have the tragic mulatto. You've met her constantly. This is the woman who is very pretty on account of her white blood and very unhappy on account of her Black blood. And usually in the novel she agonizes for the first 47 pages because she doesn't belong here, doesn't belong there, where's she going to go? Blah, blah, blah. She has to go to the back of the bus, the back of the train, the rowdy niggers and dwell over there. Toni Cade Bamba...: And what is very interesting though about The tragic mulatto, we invented her or him. When William Wells Brown wrote, or published at least, his first novel, he created a tragic mulatto because it was part of his protest agenda. He wanted to show just how low down slavery was, that the slave owner was selling his own children. And so the tragic mulatto was created as a protest figure. Toni Cade Bamba...: In the '20s many of our writers, particularly Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, attempted to use the tragic mulatto figure to make some comments on class in the Black community, particularly pigmentocracy or class shade and cast shade, that whole cast shade system. To some extent they were not too successful because they were too intrigued with the middle class. But all that to say this, we invented her for a particular reason, usually a protest reason. Toni Cade Bamba...: But she was quickly or he was quickly taken over and used in the interest of white supremacy to argue, you see, that Black people want desperately to be white, want desperately to pass, not because life has been made a hell for Black people, but because they just love the white blood, etc. Toni Cade Bamba...: The tragedy of stereotypes, these one dimensional coverups, is that they mask traditions. They erect barriers between us and the real stuff up under the stereotypes. For example, if we were to research the mulatto as a real figure as opposed to a fiction, we would find that in this country, looking at the women, that during the period of captivity we have people like Ellen Craft, Mary Pleasant, etc, women who used their skin privileges in order to have mobility so that they could move themselves away from this place and get in that place to be in better position to do some righteous work, which was freeing up the rest of the folk. Toni Cade Bamba...: Do you know Mary Pleasant, because somebody blinked, Mary Ellen Pleasant. Now here's a woman they say a lot of awful things about, said she used to kill people, used to do a lot of voodoo stuff in the cellar and used to pull brains. People who went up against her, she would blow them through the head and pull their brains out. I imagine she did that for laughs. What she did for work was to fashion a fortune and to bankroll the resistance movement during the period of captivity. It was Mary Ellen Pleasant after all who was going to bank roll Harpers ferry. Toni Cade Bamba...: And during that period, disguised as a jockey, she had been disguised before as a white boy, as a this and a that using, again, skin privileges, mobility to do some righteous work, began to travel throughout the Virginia plantations alerting captive Africans that soon we would be armed and soon we would rise, came down to Virginia with $30,000 cash money in the hand to buy the arms. But by the time she got there of course John Brown had already broken discipline, Frederick Douglass threw up his hands, Harriet Tubman said, look, I've laid it all out, the campaign. You want to do an adventurous cowboy thing, you got it. Step back. Toni Cade Bamba...: So Mary Pleasant took her money and went on home. What she did for fun is what generally comes up in the books whenever she is handed down through history at all. But what she did as her life's work was to utilize the fact that she could pass in order to get information about the silver market, the gold market, stocks and bonds, buy up real estate and began to buy people out of bondage, set up a whole employment agency, got people working, got people with land, got them property, jobs, careers, a mulatto. Toni Cade Bamba...: Another figure, another image stereotype is the whore, the lowlife nasty bitch. And this is a very, very, very handy image. It came about, that is to say it emerged right around the turn of the century during the reign of terror after the betrayal of Reconstruction. Now, how did it operate? It operated to mask the fact that anti-miscegenation laws weren't working, to mask the fact that rape was a common practice on a plantation and somebody has got to be the culprit, because Mr. [inaudible] has got to be able to look Miss Anne in the face. Toni Cade Bamba...: And during the reign of terror when rape became the major terror attack, we get the rise of this image, the whore. Also during that period you might recall, those of you who are researching American women's history, that one of the pass times of upper class white women who had nothing to do but swoon and faint, which was a disease invented by the doctors once they had come to power, they began to start reform movements and to rescue poor unfortunate children from immoral, unfit mothers. Toni Cade Bamba...: Black women, Black mothers by definition were unfit. And so during this period we see the wholesale kidnapping of Black children just as in periods prior and in periods later we would see the wholesale kidnapping of Navajo children, and then of course in more recent years, the wholesale kidnapping of Vietnamese children, pretty much based on the same bogus, fraudulent kinds of myths. Toni Cade Bamba...: Then we get the bitch, which is a figure that is very popular with Black male writers. The bitch is this assertive, will not shut up, will not get back problem. This woman, she's very handy in the sense that she exempts the pimp, exempts the hustler, and like the whore, having this figure masks economic and sexual exploitation of Black women. So she's a very handy all purpose flour figure. Toni Cade Bamba...: But what again is so unfortunate is that this figure, again, masks, eclipses, covers over a great deal of usable stuff that is important to us at this particular point in time in human history when we were trying to clarify our agenda so that we may move into the 21st century as whole, sane, clean people. Toni Cade Bamba...: For example, Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells-Barnett, and other pistol packing mamas who come from that tradition of courageous daring and no messing around women. I mean, Ida Wells-Barnett, I believe, was the quickest person to start an anti-lynching crusade. That is to say, outside the window, she noticed, she saw, observed that a fugitive slave was being snatched, because of the fugitive slave code, and she simply strapped on her pistols and stepped outside and that was the beginning of Illinois state first anti-lynching league. Took about three minutes, I believe. Toni Cade Bamba...: Well, all these kinds of women, these assertive women, these socially responsible women, these perhaps reckless women, these champion women, women who come from the championship tradition, and by that I mean... Mohammad Ali defines a champion as a person who gets the blow in the jaw and goes down and hits the canvas hard and can't possibly get up, your energy is shot, your legs are spent, it is not feasible to get up, and so you do get up and keep on getting up. Toni Cade Bamba...: It is women like Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells-Barnett, I think there are many other women you could name who come from that tradition that becomes unavailable to us because of this top layer called bitch. This assertive, angry, hip swinging, gum chewing, won't get back woman. And again, the unfortunate thing is that to the degree that we buy into those one dimensional stereotypes is to the degree that we do not recognize activists in our past who can be models for us, we don't recognize them in our neighborhood, in our families, and most importantly within ourselves. It erects a barrier between ourself and ourself, so to speak. Toni Cade Bamba...: Then there's the amazon. I want to go through the 18,000 stereotypes, but the amazon is intriguing because it's a fairly new one. The Cleopatra Jones and, give me some, what, Pam Grier, this figure, like the matriarch, helps, again, to keep alive the notion of the Black man as a boy. And like the matriarch, also helps to alive the notion of the Black community as somehow deviant and strange, and the women are eight feet tall and they run around going up against mafia guns with karate chops and kicks and things of that sort. Toni Cade Bamba...: They wear boots that are 100,000 pounds and so forth. And again, the problem of the amazon figure is that it absolutely eclipses the whole tradition of the African warrior queens, the Candace queens, for example, Madam Tinubu, Nzinga, Cleopatra, the for real one as opposed to the holiday version, all these women, the Dahomey warrior women, women who raised armies to throw Alex The Great off the continent. Toni Cade Bamba...: One of John Henrik Clarke's favorite little anecdotes, you remember when Alex was weeping on his 30th birthday because he had no more territory to conquer, he was really crying out of embarrassment because a woman kicked his great behind off the continent of Africa. Toni Cade Bamba...: What is especially of interest about that whole warrior queen tradition is that, I'm trying to think of who I can claim as resources when you challenge me, but I'll have it ready when you ask, is that of all the coalitions African people have made since 3000 BC with people other than ourselves, it was only those coalitions made by the Black warrior queens in which we were not betrayed. Toni Cade Bamba...: So that whole tradition of activists, military strategists, war counselors becomes unavailable to us to the degree that we buy into the Mickey Mouse, that Disney version of a warrior, of an activist. And so it was the contribution of the Black women writers that came of age in the '60s that offered us new ways to perceive ourselves, not Mammy, but worker, not matriarch, but mother, not whore, but lover, not bitch or amazon, but change agent, activist. Toni Cade Bamba...: And we began to see in poems, songs, graphics, novels, dramas, particularly the short plays, we began to see arriving on the scene women that were very familiar to us that had been waiting in the wings for a long time and could not be brought center stage because we had not our own audience yet. But once we began dialoguing with each other, which is a very radical act in the '60s, Black writers talking to Black readers, which means we did not have to do little footnotes, little glossaries in the back, we did not have to cater or pander to a sensibility that cannot tolerate certain kinds of realities. Toni Cade Bamba...: We were then freed up to explore language, to explore models, to explore the neighborhood, and to bring center stage those people who had something to offer, something usable about their lives to share. And during this period we began to see a certain, not a certain kind of women, a whole repertoire, a whole range of women beginning to come up appearing as characters in poems, plays, etc. Certainly mothers became heroes. Toni Cade Bamba...: There's not a single anthology you can pick up that was produced in the '60s or published recently with writers from the '60s that does not have a whole slew of poems about mother. But whether or not we were celebrating Bessie Smith, Mama Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, Harriet Tubman, and Queen Nzinga, etc, whether we were talking about ourselves or whether we were not talking about women at all, what got produced was a call and encouragement to begin to perceive of ourselves as experts about ourselves and to free ourselves from those psychopaths who were feeding convenient one dimensional images to us that certainly were not fashioned in our interest. Toni Cade Bamba...: Also during the '60s, and this is particularly noticeable not so much in the fiction but in the position papers that came out of organizations, this is most noticeable in the newsletters, in the newspapers like the Third [World] Women's Alliance paper, Triple Jeopardy, we began to do all over the country, Black women, whether they're cultural workers, artists, or something else, we began to write, organize, and study, and finally move on a task that has been long overdue, to move on a task that we set ourselves in the 19th century. Toni Cade Bamba...: In the 19th century we began organizing protective leagues, which gave rise to the temperance movement by the way, except that we weren't talking about an abhorrence to devil's brew. I mean, we didn't have nothing against alcohol, it was the fact that we were being attacked by drunken sailors on the streets of San Francisco or wherever that we felt there should be a need for some kind of protective league. Toni Cade Bamba...: In the days of the protective leagues in the 19th century of the self-help associations that we established in the contraband camps and then after emancipation, the kinds of banks and credit unions we established, women within the community of women, the schools for girls that we established, the platform, the women's platforms and the colored people's conventions in the 19th century, the early labor unions that we established, and quiet as it's kept, the first labor unions all over the South were started by Black women in the 19th century. Toni Cade Bamba...: Mississippi's first labor union, for example, was the Granny, Midwives, Laundry Workers, and Domestics of Mississippi, Jackson Mississippi 1862, '62. Interesting date. They later dropped grannies and midwives from their name because that was still a period in which the popular health movement was under attack by the European trained white men of wealth who wanted to have a monopoly of medical arts and healing. So they dropped that. Toni Cade Bamba...: But it's of interest to look at the kinds of charters they drew up. They were most concerned about ending the abuses of child labor. They were very much concerned about safety conditions, hygiene, etc., in the plant and in the neighboring environments, they were very much talking about wages as opposed to being paid off with old magazines and old clothes, and they very much were talking about establishing a network of women's unions. Toni Cade Bamba...: And we can trace this whole development, this long overdue effort, to establish a national Black women's union with a national strategy from the 19th century up until this morning. It's a very direct continuity. But unfortunately the efforts of many Black women in the '60s to form study groups that were all women came under attack as we well know. They were regarded as divisive by many sectors of our community, women as well as men. Toni Cade Bamba...: Our loyalties were called into question, our commitment to Black liberation movement was called into question as though you are Black or woman. And a great many women became less insistent about demanding that we redefine politics so that we understand that the personal as well as the public component need to be examined. We became less insistent about pointing out that male chauvinism, sexism is not only unattractive and ugly, it is not fair, and it's not nice. Toni Cade Bamba...: We also became less insistent about arguing that the concerns of women, daycare, child grooming practices, and the fact that man women relationships are absolutely deformed in this country. Oh, man woman relationships are deformed in this country to the degree that we have been encouraged to establish social relations with things and commodity relations with people, or as Karenga says, the relationships have been informed by the cash, flesh, fear, and force connections, which tend to pervert that which can be most healthy and creative about ways to be with each other. Toni Cade Bamba...: We also became less insistent that the so-called woman question was not a woman's question and was certainly not secondary, it was a man woman question, it was a community question, and needed to be addressed. And the fact that the attempt of Black women, this community of Black women, to begin to move together and to recognize and nourish what they have discovered, which is that we can be and have been a political force in the community and within the country, that this came under attack and that sisters began to back down speaks to the political immaturity of our community, speaks to the immaturity of our community. Toni Cade Bamba...: The two end products or fallout, two aspects, consequences of this attack and fallback, one of which doesn't terribly concern me, one which does. One effect is that we have left the arena, that is to say the whole women's rights movement to Bourgeois feminists who invest time, energy, and evil genius in looking out for their own race and class interests. And I think that is very obvious in the sense that you hear a great deal of talk about abortion but not a great deal about forced sterilization. Toni Cade Bamba...: You hear a great deal about admissions to medical school, but not a great deal about daycare. You hear, well, now, for example, an OW did not endorse the [Baki] demonstration, all of which is to say this, that to the degree... which is not to say that Black women and other women of color are not active, extremely active ideologically in the women's consciousness and women's rights movement, and they're also very active politically and organizationally, but it is to say that the groups, like now, enjoy political, ideological, and organizational hegemony at the moment, and that is most unfortunate, most unfortunate. Toni Cade Bamba...: The other problem, which is a little nearer to home is that when sisters backed off, many sisters backed... heterosexual sisters backed off of this feminist business, we left the arena wide open to lesbians, which is not to say I got anything against lesbians, so they do not think they should be any pariahs in our community except those diehard collaborationists who have already demonstrated they have no capacity for transformation, pimps who cannot change, for example, drug dealers who will not change, but lesbians do not fall in that category. Toni Cade Bamba...: But all the women's organizations that we had established, their agenda got captured. And now in 1978 at a time when we need to be moving on all fronts as always I'm hearing that feminism is lesbianism, that you cannot be a Black feminist if you're a heterosexual. This is rather bizarre. This is rather bizarre. Let me shut up at this point so that we have some time for questions and discussion and criticism or whatever, but first I need to find a pencil so I can write them down. Okay. Thank you.