Colonial construction of the Black female body has been bent on her reduction. On the plantation, she is reduced to the utility of her biological sex organs. In the house, she is reduced to the labor of her hands. But this supposed reduction produced a distinct dynamism of self-performance too nuanced to be pigeon-holed into traditional, white-normed ideas of binary gender.
Let me begin again. African women built and birthed the Americas. In her building, she worked like and was whipped with men. In her birthing, she was violated in rape, and policed in caretaking. Despite all this, she remained the key in leading revolution.
Angela Davis’ “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” details various ways antebellum Black women incited insurgency — be it by burning down plantations, poisoning planters’ food, ruining crops or passing on knowledge to her children — hers was the twice-bruised body that fought on the front lines. Often these rebellions were championed by maroons — autonomous groups of escaped or freed Blacks. Maroons’ presence was continuous and widespread throughout the antebellum South.
To say slavery was dehumanizing is an understatement, but this dehumanization is the crux of the fundamental difference between contemporary white feminism and Black womanism. Meaning, for Black women the struggle is not being seen as human, whereas white feminism already supposes humanity in its opposition to patriarchy. Of this Davis writes, “Although he would not pet her and deck her out in frills, the white master could endeavor to reestablish her femaleness by reducing her to the level of her biological being. Aspiring with his sexual assaults to establish her as a female animal, he would be striving to destroy her proclivities towards resistance.”
But what the master did not imagine is that the Black woman has never conceded to her reduction. Take General Harriet Tubman for example, head of the Intelligent Service, renowned orator, militant combat leader, remembered only as an old Black woman who led Blacks through the underground railroad.
It is for the fact that the complexity of her racial and gendered situation leads her to a non-traditional understanding of womanhood — a double consciousness of racial and gendered emasculation. But also one that survives off constantly imagining freedom, rebellion and the fashioning tools of intergenerational knowledge.
Today, Black women in the States aren’t chained to one another by the ankles, but the condition of her slavery is a mental hold on her ability to imagine freedom — which is a paradox in itself because hers is the mind from which all revolution is birthed.
Somewhere along the way, templates for Black liberation were erased from American creation myths, confused by multiculturalism, forgotten by post-racialism. Yet, the ancestors still speak through us in our struggle to reclaim our imaginations. We must draw strength from our mothers so we can know the truth of our collective power.
