GET YOUR OWN FREE HOME PAGE Two of my most cherished possessions are books penned by a woman I adore. They are "Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience" and "Straight, No Chaser: How I Became a Grown-up Black Woman". She is Jill Nelson. She is an author, sage, journalist, afrocentric activist, visionary, sister warrior, single mother, feminist, and one of my greatest inspirations.
I share Jill's love of sisterhood. I share her experiences as a middle-class child, who struggles with poverty as an adult, under the economic genocide of the New World Order. Most of all, I share her rage against racism and sexism.
Like Jill, I embrace my anger and express it regularly. I will do so ALWAYS. My anger is as much a part of my being as my joy. To deny my anger, or any other part of my truest self, would be suicidal.
Anyone who can live in this cruel, elitist, sexist, racist world and not be angry is insane/in denial. It is righteous to be angry in an evil world. Anger MUST be expressed. If I ever stop penning my anger, I may begin to express it in other ways. I may use fatal sex, bombs, crack, cocaine, alcohol, guns, or knives instead of my pen…
From Straight, No Chaser: “I write because I am angry. Angry at either being ignored or defined and spoken for by others… When we look in the mirror, it's hard to put on a happy face, since no matter what we do we remain who we are, black women in America, invisible at worst, unattractive at best. When was the last time you saw a black male public figure with a brown or dark-skinned wife whose hair wasn't conked or woven?
I used to try and escape my rage in notions of love, sex, orgasm, but even that does not work very often anymore. My rage's appetite has grown over the years, become more specific. Now it can only be satisfied by action, and not the pelvic kind…Recognize, understand, and put your rage to use…My rage is often so tangible I can have a conversation with it…There is no way to stay alive, a black woman in this culture and not feed my rage. Fed regularly, my rage grows stronger, wiser, more cunning…My rage is always present, never late, short or full of maybes...My rage, like Papa, don't take no mess. My rage says nothing to me but yes! yes! yes! And why not? What a host she has found in me, in this nation, in this moment...What better feeding ground for my rage than right here, with me, a black woman existing in a culture that despises women, and black people most of all. I am a two-fer in American hell. I have no intention of burning silently.”
As a lesbian, the abuse I suffer is intensified. In a world that hates "dykes" almost as much as it hates "niggers" and "bitches", my life is a trilogy of terror. Just as no sister can separate her African soul from her female soul, my lesbian soul is equally inseparable from my person and my politics. As Jill is a two-fer, I am a three-fer.
I refuse to fight with Black men for my space at the bottom of the world. While sisters cry "Let's heal OUR wounds brother!", too many brothers cry "MY wound is BIGGER than yours sister!!!" It is a phallic mantra that rapes our collective revolution. (It is very similar to the homophobic cry that racist/gaybashing blacks aim at activist homosexuals: "OUR discrimination is BIGGER than yours, fag/dyke!!!")
Gender does not protect us from racism. Sexism doubles our burden. Brothers who are oppressed because of their skin oppress us because of our sex organs. We will NOT be silent as such fascist fallout trickles down upon us!
Macho misogynists love to whine about Black women being more employed. While they ignore our lower wages for superior work. They whine about the smaller populations of Black men on college campuses, while they ignore sexist professors who give superior grades/degrees to illiterate jocks like O. J. Simpson. Likewise, they ignore the rapid increase of campus date rapes, from fraternity houses to dormitories. They whine about Black men in prison, as they ignore the droves of Black women in IDENTICAL cages, giving birth in chains to wards of states, fathered by men who never visit them.
From Straight, No Chaser: “The notion that black women's independence is a contributing factor to black male oppression has long been a subtext in the black community, and its political, cultural, and social movements. It is founded on the belief that women inherently have it easier, that we are less threatening and therefore given more leeway by the dominant white culture…Nationalism required that we do the behind-the-scenes work, keep our mouths shut in public, and in private, happily assume the prone position at the whim of our King, the better to produce more male warriors. Nothing really changed for Black women except the rap and the costumes…Men who refused to buy into the white man's system by working as a slave, seemed to have little problem with his woman's enslavement…
Unlike white men, we do not have most of the political power and nearly all of the corporate money. Unlike white women, we are neither the wives nor sisters of the masters of the universe. We have no National Organization for Women or other group with clout to advocate for us. Even though Black women do most of the work in our communities, are the mainstay of the strongest organization African Americans have, the black church ...unlike black men, we seldom head churches, are elected to political office, are in leadership…White male politicians demonize me as a welfare cheat, illegitimate baby-making machine, and drain on government programs.
Black men single me out when they need either help or an example of why they are "endangered" or hindered. I am asked to cook the food, stuff the envelopes, open my legs, and keep my mouth shut…”
On my talk radio show, I often speak against all marches. I believe that they are all ineffectual, favoring style over substance. The flames of revolution MUST be fanned with FAR more than the winds of marching feet. I suport NO marches, including The Million Man March.
I would rather see a million brothers gather to pay child support, promise to become superior fathers, or pledge to be monogamous. I loathe the sexism and gaybashing of the Nation of Islam. I am wounded by the misogyny of Louis Farrakhan and the lechery of Ben Chavis.
From Straight, No Chaser: “Wouldn't it have been more effective for black men to amass in southeast D.C., a neighborhood with one of the highest crime rates in the country and shut down the crack houses, seize the guns, clean up the community, talk to the young brothers? But that would have required work and ongoing commitment…Was the atonement really to black women or was that just a cover story to hide the far more ominous agenda, that black men were going to apologize to the great patriarchal white father for not being real men and keeping their women and children in line, to pledge allegiance to the patriarchy of the United States of America?…Whatever black men's failings in America, they pale by comparison to what was visited upon all black people by slavery and its continuing aftermath. When it comes to who needs to atone in America, black men are not at the top of the list…Black so-called leadership has accepted their consignment to the colored leadership ghetto, where their primary function is to either bemoan or denigrate the state of black people. They are never allowed to critique white people. Even through all the rhetoric and bad politics, Louis Farrakhan speaks to a broad spectrum of black folks because he dares to speak some truth, as many black folks see it, to white people, plain and simple…I found it hard to sit still and view the spectacle. To do so would have been to forget who I was, actively collude in my own erasure.”
I have spoken often of the brutality of Mike Tyson. Mike recently expanded his lengthy and documented record of assaulting women, to include Evander Holyfield and his ear. Unlike fellow rapist William Kennedy Smith, Mike did not receive a fair trial. Yet, he does NOT deserve the national fan club that dares to demand that we all regard a rapist as a hero!
From Straight, No Chaser: “I wasn't surprised when I heard the boys wanted to make Mike [Tyson] a hero, hold him up as a role model to our children. I was first sad, then sick, then angry…Why is it when black women stand up for ourselves we're accused of attacking black men? Is it that we have no role other than adjuncts, supporters, appendages? Well here's what I say to those backward brothers: If your penis needs maintenance, go to a urologist, that's not my job…I cry like a baby when I hear about Deletha Word. Then I tremble with a rage so fierce my whole body vibrates. Then I go and swim for an hour and fifteen minutes. Afterward, even though I am eager to get home and lock the door, I do not drive fast and aggressively as I usually do, but slowly, cautiously, suddenly aware of another aspect of everyday violence, that for a black woman, a fender bender can mean death.”
Jill and I, and our kindred sister spirits are not bitter, we are battered; emotionally/racially/physically/politically/financially/socially etc…We are not anti-male. We are anti-misogyny. Many mindless females are misogynists too. We are not "bitches", we are survivors and warriors. We are not racists. We are realists. I prefer womanism to feminism because too many feminists prefer racism/elitism to global sisterhood.
From Straight, No Chaser: “White feminist women ignore me, cut deals for themselves, and then invite me to the meeting, panel or forum as an afterthought, when it suddenly occurs to them that they need a visible- and preferably silent- black woman on stage to give their self-interested agenda the image of inclusion…Nationalists essentially colluded with white men and mainstream media to portray feminism and the feminist movement as antithetical to black women who, unlike those crazy white women, had never had it good, loved men, weren't dykes, and liked wearing a bra…Twenty years later racism is alive and very well, there is no national voice or organization fighting for the rights of black women, and most of us are far from being Miss Ann, although more black men, many of them lapsed nationalists, are busy balling her.”
In an era when neocons in blackface, like Ward Connerly and Ken Hamblin, reign supreme, by chanting blindly patriotic mantras of deception and delusion, Jill's political honesty and passion are healing. She can always be counted on for a regal reality check. In a world where denial is death, sister Jill is salvation for real life.
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