Sisters of the Yam

Black Women and Self-Recovery

bell hooks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317588306
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks reflects on the ways in which the emotional health of black women has been and continues to be impacted by sexism and racism. Desiring to create a context where black females could both work on their individual efforts for self-actualization while remaining connected to a larger world of collective struggle, hooks articulates the link between self-recovery and political resistance. Both an expression of the joy of self-healing and the need to be ever vigilant in the struggle for equality, Sisters of the Yam continues to speak to the experience of black womanhood.

1
Seeking After Truth

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other. But we can practice being gentle with each other by being gentle with that piece of ourselves that is hardest to hold, by giving more to the brave bruised girlchild within each of us, by expecting a little less from her gargantuan efforts to excel. We can love her in the light as well as in the darkness, quiet her frenzy toward perfection and encourage her attentions toward fulfillment…As we arm ourselves with ourselves and each other, we can stand toe to toe inside that rigorous loving and begin to speak the impossible—or what has always seemed like the impossible—to one another. The first step toward genuine change. Eventually, if we speak the truth to each other, it will become unavoidable to ourselves.

—Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” Sister Outsider

Healing takes place within us as we speak the truth of our lives. In M. Scott Peck’s popular discussion of a new healing psychology in The Road Less Traveled, he emphasizes the link between dedication to truth and our capacity to be well. He stresses that: “One of the roots of mental illness is invariably an interlocking system of lies we have been told and lies we have told ourselves.” Commitment to truth-telling is thus the first step in any process of self-recovery. A culture of domination is necessarily a culture where lying is an acceptable social norm. It, in fact, is required. White folks knew that they were lying about African slaves who labored from sun-up to sundown when they then told the world that those same slaves were “lazy.” White supremacy has always relied upon a structure of deceit to perpetuate degrading racial stereotypes, myths that black people were inferior, more “animalistic.” Within the colonizing process, black people were socialized to believe that survival was possible only if they learned how to deceive. And indeed, this was often the case.

Slaves often told “lies” to white oppressors to keep from being brutally punished or murdered. They learned that the art of hiding behind a false appearance could be useful when dealing with the white master and mistress. Skillful lying could protect one’s safety, could help one gain access to greater resources, or make resistance possible. Slave narratives testify that the ability to deceive was a requirement for survival. One collection of slave narratives edited by Gilbert Osofsky is even titled Puttin’ On Ole Massa. In her slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’ Harriet Jacobs expresses motherly pride that her children learn at an early age that they must keep the secret of her hiding place from oppressive white people as well as untrustworthy black folks. A Jamaican proverb that was often quoted among slaves urged folks to “play fool, to catch wise.” This was seen as essential for black survival, even if it required lying and deceit.

Any reader of slave narratives knows that religious black folks expressed anger and rage that they were forced by oppressive social circumstances to commit the sin of “lying.” Slaves expressed righteous indignation that oppressive white people created a dehumanizing social structure where truth-telling could be valued but not practiced and where black people were judged inferior because of their “inability” to be truthful. Caught in a double-bind, on one hand believing in the importance of honesty, but on the other hand knowing that it was not prudent to always speak truthfully to one’s oppressors, slaves judiciously withheld information and lied when necessary. Even free black people knew that white supremacist power could so easily be asserted in an oppressive way, that they too practiced the art of hiding behind a false appearance in the interest of survival. In The Narrative of Tunsford Lane, published in 1848, Lane stated that even after freedom:

I had endeavored to conduct myself as not to become obnoxious to the white inhabitants, knowing as I did their power, and their hostility to the colored people…First, I had made no display of the little property or money I possessed, but in every way I wore as much as possible the aspect of slavery. Second, I had never appeared to be even so intelligent as I really was. This all colored in the south, free and slaves, find it particularly necessary for their own comfort and safety to observe.

The realities of daily life in white-supremacist America conveyed to black people in the long years after slavery had ended that it was still not in their interest to forsake this practice of dissimulation. Continued racial oppression, especially when it took the form of lynching and outright murder of black people, made it clear to all black folks that one had to be careful about speaking the truth to whites.

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s much quoted poem gives eloquent witness to how conscious black folks were of the way that they had to practice falsehood in daily life:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,
This debt we pay to human guile,
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

The justification for “wearing a mask” is obvious when we consider the circumstances of living in conditions of legal racial apartheid, where black folks had so little recourse with which to address wrongs perpetrated against them by whites. Yet the time has come when we must examine to what extent the practice of dissimulation, of being deceitful, carried over into our social norms with one another. Encouraged to wear the mask to ensure survival in relation to the white world, black folks found themselves using strategies of dissimulation and withholding truth in interpersonal relationships within black communities. This was especially true for gender relations.

Patriarchal politics not only gave black men a bit of an edge over black women, it affirmed that males did not have to answer to females. Hence, it was socially acceptable for all men in patriarchal society (black men were no exception) to lie and deceive to maintain power over women. Just as the slaves had learned from their white masters the art of dissimulation, women learned that they could subvert male power over them by also withholding truth. The many southern black women who learned to keep a bit of money stashed away somewhere that “he don’t know about” were responding to the reality of domestic cruelty and violence and the need to have means to escape. However, the negative impact of these strategies was that truth-telling, honest and open communication, was less and less seen as necessary to the building of positive love relationships.

Even though most black children raised in traditional southern homes are taught the importance of honesty, the lesson is undermined when parents are not honest. Growing up, many of us saw that grown folks did not always practice the same honesty they told us was so important. Or, many times, we would tell the “truth” only to be punished for such talk. And again, since racism was still the crucial factor shaping power relations between black and white people, there was still an emphasis on practicing dissimulation—one that persists in most black people’s lives.

Many of the survival strategies that were once useful to black people, like dissimulation, are no longer appropriate to the lives we are living and therefore do us grave harm. Imagine, for example, this scenario: A black woman professor who has never completed her Ph.D. finds that in her daily life most folks she interacts with simply assume that she has this degree. She finds it easier not to explain. And indeed finds that she receives greater respect and recognition when folks see her as doctor so-and-so. Yet, there is a price she must pay for this deception—inner stress, fear of being found out, fear of losing the status she has falsely acquired. Now, one healthy response she could have had when she found that people accorded her greater respect when they assumed she had the degree would have been to use this information as a catalyst inspiring her to complete unfinished graduate work. We could all give countless examples related to jobs where black folks feel that the decks are stacked against us to begin with because of racism and therefore feel it is okay to lie about skills, experience, etc. Unfortunately such strategies may help one get jobs but the burden of maintaining deception may be so great that it renders individuals psychologically unable to withstand the pressure. Lies hurt. While they may give the teller greater advantage in one arena, they may undermine her well-being in another.

Cultivating the art of dissimulation has also created an over-valuation of “appearance” in black life. So much so that black children are often raised to believe that it is more important how things seem than the way they really are. If illusions are valued more than reality, and black children are taught how to skillfully create them even as they are simultaneously deprived of the means to face reality, they are being socialized to feel comfortable, at ease, only in situations where lying is taking place. They are being taught to exist in a state of denial. These psychic conditions lay the groundwork for mental stress, for mental illness. Dissimulation makes us dysfunctional. Since it encourages us to deny what we genuinely feel and experience, we lose our capacity to know who we really are and what we need and desire. When I can stand before a class of predominantly black students who refuse to believe that conscious decisions and choices are made as to what roles black actors will portray in a given television show, I feel compelled to name that their desire to believe that the images they see emerge from a politically neutral fantasy world of make-believe is disempowering—is a part of a colonizing process. If they cannot face the way structures of domination are institutionalized, they cannot possibly organize to resist the racism and sexism that informs the white-dominated media’s construction of black representation. And, on a more basic level, they lack the capacity to protect themselves from being daily bombarded and assaulted by disenabling imagery. Our mental well-being is dependent on our capacity to face reality. We can only face reality by breaking through denial.

In Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, Celie, the black heroine, only begins to recover from her traumatic experiences of incest/rape, domestic violence, and marital rape when she is able to tell her story, to be open and honest. Reading fictional narratives where black female characters break through silences to speak the truth of their lives, to give testimony, has helped individual black women take the risk to openly share painful experiences. We see examples of such courageous testimony in The Black Women’s Health Book. Yet many black readers of Alice Walker’s fiction were angered by Celie’s story. They sought to “punish” Walker by denouncing the work, suggesting it represented a betrayal of blackness. If this is the way folks respond to fiction, we can imagine then how much harder it is for black women to actually speak honestly in daily life about their real traumatic experiences. And yet there is no healing in silence. Collective black healing can take place only when we face reality. As poet Audre Lorde reminds us in “Litany for Survival”:

and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

Collective unmasking is an important act of resistance. If it remains a mark of our oppression that as black people we cannot be dedicated to truth in our lives, without putting ourselves at risk, then it is a mark of our resistance, our commitment to liberation, when we claim the right to speak the truth of our reality anyway.

Many individual black women, particularly those among us involved in the feminist movement, consider it important that black females who have been victimized by traumatic events like incest and rape speak openly about their experiences. Yet some are not necessarily committed to a philosophy of well-being dedicated to truth. While these individuals may applaud a black woman who publicly names an injury done to her by a man, they may fail to support her if she is committed to speaking truthfully in other areas of her daily life. These women may punish another black woman for speaking truthfully, or critique her by suggesting that she does not possess certain social graces. This is especially true among professional classes of black women who buy into notions of social etiquette informed by bourgeois values committed to keeping the public and the private separate. Indeed, black females from working-class backgrounds who have been raised to speak openly and honestly may find those traits a social handicap when dealing in bourgeois circles. They will be encouraged, usually by forms of social exclusion (which serve as punishment), to change their ways. It is not easy for a black female to be dedicated to truth. And yet the willingness to be honest is essential for our well-being. Dissimulation may make one more successful, but it also creates life-threatening stress.

Among poor and working-class black people the impetus to dissimulate is usually connected with the desire to cover up realities that are regarded as “shameful.” Many of us were raised to be believe that we should never speak publicly about our private lives, because the public world was powerful enough to use such information against us. For poor people, especially those receiving any form of government aid, this might mean loss of material resources or that one’s children could be taken away. Yet, again, we hold onto these strategies even when they are not connected to our survival and undermine our well-being. Telling the truth about one’s life is not simply about naming the “bad” things, exposing horrors. It is also about being able to speak openly and honestly about feelings, about a variety of experiences. It is fundamentally not about withholding information so as to exercise power over others.

A few weeks ago, I was talking with one of my sisters about a very obvious lie that someone in our family had told to me. Emotionally upset, I was crying and saying, “I could deal with anything this family does if folks would just tell the truth. It’s the lying that makes me feel crazy.” We had a deep discussion about telling the truth, wherein she confessed that she tells a lot of lies. I was shocked, since I had always seen her as an honest person. And I wanted to know why. She admitted that it started with trying to gain a financial edge in her domestic life, but then she found herself just lying about little things even when it was not necessary. Analyzing this, we decided that the ability to withhold information, even it was something very trivial, gave her a feeling of power. We talked about the importance of learning that this feeling is “illusory” for it does not correspond with actual power to effect changes in one’s daily social reality and is thus ultimately disenabling. Parents who lie do nothing to teach children the importance of speaking the truth.

For many poor black people, learning to be honest must take place in a situation where one also learns to confront the question of shame. The dominant culture acts as though the very experience of poverty is shameful. So how then can the poor speak about the conditions of their lives openly and honestly. Those of us raised in traditional southern black homes were taught to critique the notion of “shame” when it was evoked to strip us of dignity and integrity. We were taught to believe that there was nothing shameful about being poor, that richness of life could not ultimately be determined by our access to material goods. Black women working as maids in white homes had first-hand experience to prove money did not guarantee happiness, well-being, or integrity.

It is one of the tragic ironies of contemporary life that the privileged classes have convinced the poor and underclass that they must hide and deny the realities of their lives while the privileged go public, in therapy, sharing all that they might have repressed out of shame, in order to try and heal their wounds. In the introduction to my third book, Talking Back, I wrote about the importance of speaking openly and honestly about our lives. I wrote about the negative “flak” I get from folks for being honest. Or lately, in bourgeois work settings, it is said about me that I do not keep confidences, when what is really happening is that I politically choose to resist being put in the position of keeping the secrets of the powerful, or of being welcomed into social circles of deceit. I had written years ago that “even folks who talk about ending domination seem to be afraid to break down the barriers separating public and private” by truth-telling. That ...