Can a black mother be a feminist? Of course, there’s nothing mutually exclusive about either identity. But I’m here to tell you that our black feminist voices are not being heard. Or they are being distorted in ways that make us appear as though we somehow tolerate sexual abuse and harassment.
The end game is not to get more women in Congress. 53% of white women voted for Trump, after all. The goal is to get the fascist, white supremacist, sexist Trump administration and GOP Congress out of power before they install a police state that cannot be removed by anything but force. Sexual harassment can only be handled in a democratic environment that recognizes both moral principles and due process.
While white feminists worry about sexual harassment, black feminists who are mothers worry even more about that problem because our daughters will be treated like whores regardless of their level of education. This is because of the lingering taint of sexual slavery, where our foremothers were sexually assaulted and the Christian clergy in the South justified this behavior as a means of keeping white womanhood “pure”. But we also worry that our unarmed sons will get shot in the back by a cop, just doing his job. And for the last one hundred years we have had to worry about our sons being falsely accused by white women and thus ending up hanging from tree branches. Even nowadays, we have cases of the white woman falsely accusing a black male of raping her, or carving a backwards “B” on her face, or drowning her children.
For us as black women, we consider it a political luxury to say that sinking into a neo-Nazi, fascist police state can wait until we solve this sexual harassment crisis.
