She Was Right. She Was Prophetic.
We should have listened to her then. We’d damned well better listen now.
In this monumentally difficult time for so many of us who deeply care about our Black sisters, I have a question. How many of us follow Zora? Read Black women’s writing?
How many of us avail ourselves of the words and wisdom and truth of the lives of those women of color?
One of the reasons I ponder this question is the number of incendiary comments I’ve been receiving from some of my fellow (young, White, female) Medium writers. These comments are coming from self-appointed, so-called Justice Warriors, usually overly-educated young women with virtually no life experience, skin the thickness of onion paper and the terrible, awful need to find injustice and offense where none exists. They eviscerate the writer without warning, justification or bothering to offer the slightest courtesy or regard. I’m hardly the only one on the receiving end here.
Sisters attacking sisters.
Kindly, this does not move the female cause forward.
As someone who has been in the business of developing women and women leaders since I was in the Army in the 70s, as a woman who was repeatedly raped, who has immense empathy for the plight of women, I totally get the pain that all of us feel. I get it. Most of the angry commenters haven’t even begun their life’s journey, and yet they are trying desperately to lead a charge, any charge at all, against offenders and offenses which are about as substantial as morning fog.
All that does is drip unnecessary blood on the battlefield from what we in the military call “friendly fire.” Not too friendly.
As someone raised with a Black family along with my birth family, I also get, perhaps as much as a White woman can, the experience of Black women in our society, and the absolute need for us to stand with, link arms with, and give our love and support to our Black sisters. What that means is that we share the pie by making the pie bigger, which requires collaboration and cooperation. What I am seeing is bitch-fighting over crumbs left by the White Male patriarchy.
At the very moment when we most need each other, too many are taking out our pain on each other. The Community of Women is here to heal, but not if we are heat-seeking missiles against the very creatures best designed to offer us comfort. Not only does that hamstring the cause for women in general, it sets us back farther and farther, serving the purpose of continual enslavement.
You and I as sisters of any color cannot create abundance when we are knifing each other publicly on social media, including here on Medium, which used to be a haven from those very ambushes.
I see and hear about this behavior from more and more sources. Other Medium buddies of mine have reported similar experiences. This is a deeply disturbing trend. There is no question that the pain these people are feeling, that we are all feeling, is real. I’m not mocking that. I question the compulsion to take that pain out on each other.
Better writers than I am- most of them Black- have pointed out the particular ugliness of how White women enslave our sisters. To that I might share one of my favorite Black writers and her prophetic commencement speech from 1979:
From the article:
I am alarmed by the violence that women do to each other: professional violence, competitive violence, emotional violence. I am alarmed by the willlingness of women to enslave other women.
Many of our greatest Black writers have again and again pointed out that the #2 rung on the White Supremacy ladder is occupied by White women. It might be fair to note that many of those women likely have no clue that what they think, believe and how they act are all velcroed to the jack-booted hip of every White Supremacist in the United States. In fact, they might be righteously horrified to realize this.
But then, denial is ever the cocktail of the righteously ignorant. We all get our turns being ignorant. That’s an essential part of developing emotional maturity. Understanding that we can be, are, and sometimes act on that ignorance is the beginning of not being ignorant. I have done plenty of hard time being ignorant about a great many things. All I can do is my best to not remain so.
If Black women rise, then White women have to share.
If we stopped eviscerating each other, we could create an entirely different economy, culture and world. But we can’t when we spend our time and emotional energy carrying on hateful warfare against each other over trivialities and manufactured injustices.
What I am seeing, or more honestly my interpretation of what I’m seeing, is that there is a growing community of White women who are attacking other White women who have decided to break ranks and truly become allies. This is masked by the appearance of wanting justice, while in fact, it’s anything but.
I wish I could find and link to the article I read the other day which pointed out that there is a special place in hell for those White allies who walk to the other side of the road and join ranks with our Black brothers and Sisters. We become deserters. As such, we deserve a special kind of punishment.
My beloved Thai masseuse said to me the other day that we as a society are either getting bitter or better, a statement that struck me hard with its truth. The harder I work to support those causes I care about, write about, link to and elevate my Black sisters and their writing, the more I find myself the subject of genuinely ugly attacks by young, White, educated women who have decided I’m the enemy. They don’t like this word, that word. They’ve decided what I mean, what I’m really saying, they’ve decided that they know who I am and what’s in my heart. They’ve decided I’m sexist, ableist, a whole raft of words to put me in my aging Boomer place.
What is so interesting about this is that this is identical to the behavior of every Angry White Male Troll who came after me when I went public with my sexual assault history during the Kavanaugh hearings.
Identical.
Apparently none of them can see it. In fact, if you and I had the temerity to call them out, they’d be just as vicious in their denial. Frankly I don’t blame them one bit. I’d be defensive, too.
One claimed to be a true “ally,” and then launched into one of the most remarkably ugly diatribes I’ve ever been subjected to on Medium. She dripped with viciousness. I’ve rarely seen worse, and Angry White Males are pretty damned good at it. She took the cake.
While I have compassion for the pain she must have been in to write such a thing, I am also troubled by the lack of scruples to take such a whipping public. The need to be a fishwife, to show dominance, while in an exchange with someone is another mark of White Supremacists.
When we White sisters are willing to publicly draw and quarter each other, what particular torture do we have in store for our Black sisters, pray tell?
Black sisters, who have every right to the pie that our privilege offers us, over which we tear each other to pieces over the false perception that said pie is limited? And that as women, we only deserve a few bites to begin with, the Great White Lie that enslaves us all? The lie of scarcity?
The Cinderella Story
Morrison was using the Cinderella story to make her point. Here is where Morrison’s words ring so vividly through the last forty years to right here, right now, on Medium and elsewhere:
I am curious about (the stepsisters’)fortunes after the story ends. For contrary to recent adaptions, the stepsisters were not ugly, clumsy, stupid girls with outsized feet. The Grimm collection describes them as “beautiful and fair in appearance.” When we are introduced to them, they are beautiful, elegant women of status and clearly women of power. And in the violence of the power they exert, there is no one, not anyone, to stay their hand. All one can hope for is a magical escape from them. Hoping for a way to defuse their misdirected violence is in vain. Having watched and participated in the dominion of another woman, will they be any less cruel when it comes their turn to enslave other children, or even when they are required to take care of their own mother? (author bolded)
When I have visited the profiles of the women whose vile words are flung at me from the safe enclaves of their home offices, or wherever they hide to hurl their anger, I see very pretty women. VERY attractive women, as Morrison says, often of status. I find it particularly saddening that these women, so gifted with loveliness and stature, appear to be so full of bile and bitterness. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised at their cruelty.
Beauty confers a sense of entitlement in this world, but it’s also terribly, terribly fragile (there’s that word again). Beauty knows that it is fleeting. The terrible power of pretty is relative and subjective, and its power diminishes fast in a world where age is hated above all things. So it follows, from these young beauties, is that the foulest insult they can muster is the very one they fear the most.
One of the more amusing insults one very angry White woman hurled at me last week was that I was an OLD BOOMER WOMAN. As I have said before, I’d rather be old, seasoned, wise and with a wicked ass sense of humor than young, foolish, bitter and with the common sense of a garden slug, but I digress.
I have done plenty of my own time young, foolish, bitter and with the common sense of a garden slug.
Still do.
It’s legendary throughout history, women enslaving and torturing other women. Education doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. In fact, the more education (my attackers almost always have a Master’s degree or better) the more eloquent the diatribe. And, the more eloquent the demonstration of pure cruelty, the compulsive need to punish a Sister, Black or otherwise.
The Killing Floor
Back in 1979, I was just leaving the Army after five years of active duty. I was just about to witness a revolution in movie making, when Sigourney Weaver single-handedly rewrote the role of the supremely badass heroine in Alien. I was entering the corporate world in New York City, and was about to begin a long career in working with women, women’s networks, developing women leaders and diversity work. Plenty of failures, fuckups, fumbles, falls awaited me.
Still do.
I have been working diversity issues my entire adult life, most particularly as it has pertained to supporting, elevating and developing women.
Still do.
I have been the keynote speaker for untold numbers of women’s conferences, for diversity programs, for business conferences for minorities, for corporate networks both nationally and abroad. I have seen what is possible when women link arms. I have brought audiences of a thousand to their feet. I have been where those women have been, sexually assaulted, demeaned by the system, and punished for being female.
Those experiences have made me very outspoken, unapologetic, and if anything, pretty clear in what I stand for and believe in. My formal education has nothing to do with what I write. My life experiences, travel to 47 countries, studies of other cultures and intense cultural immersions in developing countries all guide what I write.
Among my greatest sources of learning are my friends, whose brilliance is extraordinary. Those friends run the gamut across color, culture, country, gender. Because excellence isn’t limited. It’s just excellence.
Yet, with all that, these commenters are fond of addressing me as though I spent the last 67 years in a state of complete isolation on Mars. Of course I know nothing. I’m old. (you will forgive me for falling over laughing).
Today as a writer on Medium, I am increasingly a target for young, educated, inexperienced, uber-sensitive and apparently rudderless White Women on a Mission. The only mission I can perceive is that they are desperate to enslave other women in one way or another. For if not, basic manners would demand that if they had an issue with a choice of wording, then cultured, polite, and truly educated people would PM, go private, inquire with empathy and compassion.
Seek to first understand. Gain context.
I’ve made that mistake, too. I also have apologized and worked to make things right. I understand that great anxiety makes us do ugly things.
Not in this community’s vocabulary. They use their privilege to attempt to demean, punish and cancel. Which brings me to this article:
Dr. Hamilton points out all the ways that we White women can be allies, a topic I’ve also written about from the standpoint of someone who actively promotes and supports my Black brothers and sisters and have for decades. I am not new to this work, and as one of my favorite Black sisters said to me the other day, I don’t need to read the popular books on White fragility. I am not new to the issue, it’s been part of my DNA from the start. This is not to say I can’t keep learning- it is to say that I’ve been doing the work my entire life. That work by design and by rights has to morph and change over time. What was required of me in the 80s is nothing like what is required of me today.
Which is why some of this vitriol fired at my articles and those of my fellow White female Medium writers who have the temerity to speak their minds (Nicole Chardenet, Gillian Sisley, Kris Gage, Shannon Ashley and many others, you know who you are, ladies) is so interesting.
Difficult times during transition make for extraordinary opportunities. In the middle of a lot of societal upheaval, great things can be birthed. But I see some White women, now clear that racism isn’t such a socially acceptable thing to be, turning to hurling insults at each other (ageism, ableism, sexism, you name it). They appear to be doing their best to enslave others in ways that they perceive are more socially acceptable. If all we are doing as White women is redirecting all that bile, bitterness and self-revulsion towards new targets among our sisters, what is being birthed strikes me as simply a different iteration of the same kind of enslavement.
Nothing changes.
The fact that so many of the most vicious of the comments I’ve been receiving lately are from women with advanced degrees speaks to this from Morrison:
If education is to have value as well as price; if it is to have meaning as well as substance, then it must be about something other than careers and power. The pursuit of a liberal education and the pursuit of the arts and sciences cannot be simply about husbanding beauty, isolating goods, and making sure enrichment is the privilege of a few. The function of a 20th-century education must be to produce humane human beings. To refuse to continue to produce generation after generation of people trained to make expedient decisions rather than humane ones. (author bolded)
Intense Black Sister Wisdom, kindly.
An education is nothing more than the establishing of -hopefully- fertile ground. As my Medium buddy Rosennab pointed out to me- she of the Fourth Degree Black Belt in Taekwando-the achievement of the Black Belt is nothing more than the statement that the student is only now ready to learn. All the work up to that point is making the student ready to be educated.
Perhaps.
None of these commenters, these White, entitled, middle class, self-righteous, apparently bitterly angry and self-appointed Warriors is educated in that sense of the word. Their educations have only just begun. Maybe.
Rosenna, or Dr. Bakari, teaches a simple and Universal truth: all relationships are relationships with the self. So if there is bitterness, anger, vitriol and the like, another Medium writer isn’t the author of that. The commenter is. That is as true of me as well, my hand is way up here.
Brilliant Black Sister wisdom.
Again, to Morrison:
In pursuing your highest ambitions, don’t let your personal safety diminish the safety of your stepsister. In wielding the power that is deservedly yours, don’t permit it to enslave your stepsisters.
…Don’t measure your wealth by the desperation of a poor stepsister; don’t define personal success by the frequency with which you can identify deficiencies in a less fortunate stepsister. Know the difference between what is just and what is mean-spirited; between what is fastidious and what is disdainful; between womanly pride and feminine petulance. It is dangerous, I know, to put love before one’s own ambitions. (author bolded)
White Women, in behaving precisely the same way as their Angry White Male trollers on social media and on Medium, are failing spectacularly in this regard. I am well aware that this article is going to get me trolled again. Have at it. However, our Black sisters have said it, said it best, and keep saying it, and I have their backs just as I do my fellow sisters of any color who are trolled for their truths:
There is no place for Sister Hate. The world dies as we slice each other to bits. Our blood feeds and fertilizes the White patriarchy. But the world rises triumphantly when we love, link arms, support, and accept our immense and perfect/imperfect diversity.
Our intolerance of each other is fodder for the patriarchy’s agenda. We sisters, and the very good men who support us and desperately need us to stop this stupid ugliness against each other, deserve better.
You and I deserve better from each other.
Our children, especially our girl children deserve better from us.
We really do have the whole world in our hands.
If our hands are slick with each other’s blood, we will drop her.
We have a world to save. Toni Morrison, as usual, was right. I can’t speak for anyone else, but as my favorite Black female writers on Medium have heard from me,
I am attending.
Better yet, I am still working with and for my beloved Sisters. All colors, all cultures, all backgrounds. You can join that circle or hurl knives at people who stumble or disagree with you. The more blood on the Killing Floor, the more we all fall down.
Up to us.
