By Beth Godbee, faculty member at Marquette University Refueling with Feminists of Color March is Women's History Month. This year we celebrated International Women's Day through "A Day Without a Woman" and #WomenStrike. Against this backdrop of marches and strikes, I’d like to invite you to make explicit the commitment to racial justice as a commitment to all women. As a white woman committed to racial justice, I see March as a time to center and connect with the voices, intellectual contributions, and leadership of women of color. This means looking to and learning from the writing, art, and activism that feminists and womanists of color share in the world. It means getting fired up with visions of the “ought to be.” It means exploring white racial privilege/power and imagining different ways of seeing, being, and doing. With these goals in mind, I’d like to suggest three (of many!) ways we can learn from feminists and womanists of color.
There are many important books, but I return to a few “classics” again and again—for inspiration, for grounding, for critical orientation, and for building emotional resilience. These include: GloriaAnzaldúa’s Borderlands/LaFrontera bell hooks’s Feminism Is for Everybody Chandra Mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
For Harriet—"celebrating the fullness of Black womanhood” Crunk Feminist Collective—a rhetorical space for “hip hop generation feminists of color, queer and straight, in the academy and without” The Sistah Vegan Project—“a critical race feminist’s journey through the ‘post racial’ ethical foodscape…and beyond”
Beyond books, blogs, and events, there are many other media created by feminists and womanists of color. For example, you might watch Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Jacqueline Olive’s Always in Season. Or listen to the Black Girl Dangerous Podcast. Or try TED talks like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story” or Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “The Urgency of Intersectionality.”
I hope the books, blogs, and events will inspire and refuel you (as they do me) for the everyday activism needed to keep this movement alive and alight. |