'Other Kinds of Dreams'

Black Women's Organisations and the Politics of Transformation

Julia Sudbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134705214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

'Other Kinds of Dreams' provides an invaluable insight into the political activity of black and Asian women in the UK both inside and outside the black and Asian communities. The book breaks new ground by: * destroying the misconception that black and Asian women lack political involvement * integrating gender into the study of black and Asian political participation in Britain
* exploring the potential for alliances between black women and the new progressive 'black man's movement'
* examining black women activists' perception and experiences of white feminism. 'Other Kinds of Dreams also questions the homogeneity of the term 'black' and asks whether increasing social stratification within black communities undermines this unity.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Community activists love to hark back to a golden age, that mythical era when ‘the movement’ was united in purpose and determined in action; when divisions and resentments did not distract one from the struggle; when it was clear who was oppressed and who the oppressor; when leaders had integrity and passion, and when confidence and optimism were boundless. The black¹ women’s movement in Britain is no exception: we are haunted by the spectre of the ‘OWAAD days’² (Brah 1992b; R. Bhavnaai 1994). According to this popular mythology, the collective empowerment experienced by black women in the late 1970s and early 1980s has since been dissipated and black women have become introspective, fragmented and competitive (Grewal et al. 1988; Parmar 1990). A certain magic and innocence has been forever lost.

Black women’s activism has come under criticism from all sides. Socialist feminists have accused black feminists of fostering divisions at a time when unity and collective determination are required to ensure that the few gains won by women are not undermined, and of ignoring critical differences between black women such as class, nationality and citizenship (Tang Nain 1991; Anthias et al. 1992). Increasingly Asian scholars and activists have refuted the project of building unity under the banner of blackness, claiming that ‘black’ only ever meant compromise under an African leadership (Modood 1988, 1990; Cole 1993). Some African Caribbean activists have joined the critique of blackness, preferring to identify their struggles within the rubric of Pan-African or Afrocentric ideology (Ackah 1993). ‘Black and Asian’, a phrase coined by the Commission for Racial Equality has become the basis for governmental classification and a symbol for the disintegration of black unity (Mason 1990; Owen 1993). Black women themselves have begun to question whether that unity was ever more than a facade for rigid authenticity codes and exclusionary practices (Grewal et al. 1988; Mama 1995).

Yet black women’s organisations have demonstrated remarkable staying power. As established groups celebrate their second and third decades and new groups spring up in places as far afield as Aberdeen and Cardiff, we must question the suggestion that they have been unable to deal with the complex realities of black women’s lives in the 1990s. It is time to revisit these organisations and ask what lessons they hold for us. How have black women’s organisations adapted to the 1990s? How have they dealt with the challenge of difference and the stripping bare of the myths of a unitary black womanhood? Can we continue to make ‘truth claims’ about black women organising or does the recognition of multiple and shifting identities challenge such a project? Have black women retained their commitment to action, or has political activism given way to internal divisions? How have the inclusion and exclusion of lesbian women at different moments influenced the development of organisations? What does the rise of a (so-called) black middle class of professional women mea\n for the politics of black women organising? These are some of the questions that this book will address.

The title of the book owes a debt to June Jordan, an African American activist intellectual who, in conversation with Pratibha Parmar, states that black women’s visions are not limited to a narrow and essentialist identity politics (Parmar 1990: 108). Black women have ‘other kinds of dreams’ which are broader and far more revolutionary (ibid.: 109). This dialogue, which takes place across borders created by ethnicity, nationality and space, offers a starting-point for this study. It speaks to my own commitment to bridging racialised and national identities in search of alliances. It also creates a new framework for the examination of the political, cultural and increasingly contested space which many of us still call ‘black’³ (R. Bhavnani 1994; The 1990 Trust 1993). This framework enables us to examine the complexities and practicalities of black women’s organising while keeping one eye on the dreams and aspirations of social transformation which underpin these organisations. It allows us realism without despair, honesty without cynicism and perhaps charts a path for a more reflexive and self aware form of black women’s activism.

The goals of this book are twofold. First, I aim to redress the erasure of black women’s collective agency in current thinking about social change. My second aim is to explore black women’s organisational responses to diversity and differentiation within black communities along lines of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class and political ideology. The book interrogates contemporary theories of racism and racialisation, gender and political mobilisation through an empirical study of black women’s organisations in Britain from the 1970s to the present day. Implicit in my approach to this study is my belief, from personal involvement in autonomous organisations, that first, the black women’s movement is far from dead and second, black women are engaged in everyday acts of theorising about their lives, experiences and struggles (Sia 1996a, 1996b). My interest lies in drawing together the strands of the theorising taking place in autonomous spaces created by black women.

RETHINKING HISTORIES OF MIGRATION AND RESISTANCE

The landing of the Empire Windrush in 1948 with its human cargo of 492 Jamaicans is for many scholars the symbolic dawn of modern British ‘race relations’. While few would claim that these were the first black people in Britain, writers point to the increased visibility that the arrival of ships full of black migrant workers created (Ramdin 1987: 189; Jarrett-Macauley 1996: xii). If the Windrush is the symbolic moment, it is also important to note the make up of its passengers: ex-servicemen seeking refuge from unemployment and low wages in the Caribbean. These ‘men from Jamaica’ left an imprint on the British consciousness⁴ (Fryer 1984: 372). It is hardly surprising then, that subsequent studies of black people in Britain have focused on male migrant workers, with only passing reference to their ‘wives and children’ (ibid.: 372). Women were seen not as workers, but as wives and mothers, their experiences of productive work obscured by their unwaged domestic role (R. Bhavnani 1994: 14; Parmar 1982: 250)⁵. These black women never quite came to the forefront of the academic imagination.

Revisionist researchers of British history have established beyond doubt the presence of people of African descent in Britain from the third century AD and a continuous and significant African, Indian and Chinese presence from the sixteenth century onwards (Fryer 1984; Shyllon 1977). Scanning these histories for the role of black women, we will find black ladies inspiring Scottish poet Dunbar in the sixteenth century, captive African women and girls brought to England as sex workers, maids and entertainers from the 1570s to the end of the nineteenth century, Asian women and girls brought to Britain as maidservants and ‘ayahs’ by English women returning from travels to India in the eighteenth century, wealthy Indian women students and impoverished British born daughters of Indian, Chinese and African sailors found in British ports in the nineteenth century (Walvin 1971; Visram 1986; Myers 1996).

Yet while we can find evidence of their presence filtered through the perceptions of white chroniclers, we find little reference to black women as agents in shaping the destiny of black communities in Britain. Nor is this omission remedied by the common approach of describing black resistance to racism and colonialism, whereby the lives of ‘great’ black leaders and thinkers are revisited. Ramdin (1987), for example, struggling to include a black women’s presence in his history of the black working class in Britain, describes the life stories of Mary Seacole and Mary Prince. Yet the inclusion of these histories of women engaged in caring – the former as a nurse, the latter an enslaved servant – appears peripheral to Ramdin’s thesis of black working class resistance. Within this resistance black engagement in political struggles and organisations which change the face of British politics, is led by black men, from Robert Wedderburn and William Cuffay in the eighteenth century, to Pan-Africanists George Padmore, W.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey and Indian Nationalists Shapurji Saklatvali and Joseph Baptiste in the twentieth century (Ramdin 1987).

In order to correct this omission, the woman-centred researcher could focus on those black women who have been remembered in political journals and the minutes of conferences and rallies – Cornelia Sorabji⁶, Amy Garvey⁷, Claudia Jones⁸ to mention three – and draw out how these women’s contributions have shaped the movements in which they were involved. However, this ‘history of the greats’ will by necessity ignore the masses of women who have been the backbone of the black struggle, those women who ran the hostel services and food kitchens in the League of Coloured Peoples in the 1930–50s; women who made sure that the minutes of meetings and conferences were kept which have made an analysis of the Pan-African and Home Rule movements in British history possible. Those women who cooked, nurtured and supported, but also whose radical vision of black community liberation was central to the continuation of black activism. To capture the role of black women in community resistance, we must by necessity look beyond individual contributions, to the organisations which have formed and continue to form the basis of black community struggles.

While the seeds of black women’s political activism in Britain can be identified as far back as the black women who attended the Somerset case of 1772⁹ and the societies of escaped enslaved and indentured servants¹⁰ which enraged white Londoners in the late eighteenth century, it was not until the early 1970s that black women began to organise autonomously (Fryer 1984: 69; Walvin 1971). What were the motors for this new movement? First, the social, economic and political environment of Britain in the early 1970s was particularly harsh for black people. The cycle of racism and exclusion began with education where African Caribbean pupils were labelled educationally sub-normal and all black pupils suffered from ‘bussing’ (dispersal) policies (Coard 1971; Troyna and Williams 1986). Poor education combined with endemic institutional racism in the workplace and unions led to high levels of unemployment, low pay and unsafe conditions (Phizacklea and Miles 1980; Hiro 1971). In the field of health, racist practices led to disproportionate numbers of black people being diagnosed as mentally unstable (Bryan et al. 1985). Black women in particular suffered from unsafe and irreparable birth control methods (Bryan et al. 1985; Amos and Parmar 1984). The criminal justice system was also embedded with racist practices, police brutality and harassment that went unchecked and biased media coverage contributed to the criminalisation of young black people (S. Small 1983; Gilroy 1987). In addition, the 1960s and early 1970s witnessed the institutionalisation of the equation of black presence with social disorder through the introduction of racist criteria into immigration laws¹¹ (Solomos 1992; Miles 1993).

Second, the late 1960s offered a new ideological weapon which could be brought to bear in the struggle against racism. Inspired by massive political and social mobilization in the United States and in the recently independent African and Caribbean nations and by visits by Malcolm X in 1965 and Stokely Carmichael in 1967, black people in Britain embraced the assertiveness and symbolic energy of Black Power (Heineman 1972; Hiro 1971). Black Power in Britain was never entirely a North American borrowing but drew heavily from ideas and strategies generated in the Caribbean and influenced by the interaction of activists and thinkers from Britain, Africa, the Caribbean, North America and Asia¹². In Britain, Black Power captured the militant mood of many young black people infuriated by attitudes encapsulated in Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘River of Blood’ speech¹³. Moreover, Black Power offered a renewed emphasis on Pan-African unity which appeared to offer a solution to the divisions between and within African and Caribbean communities. While it is often assumed that Black Power appealed most to ‘alienated Caribbean youth’, two of the first Black Power organisations, the Radical Adjustment Action Society (RAAS) (1965) and the Black Peoples’ Alliance (1968) were initiated by coalitions of West African, Caribbean, Indian and Pakistani activists (Hiro 1971: 145). By the late 1960s, branches of the Black Panther Party, Black Unity and Freedom Party (BUFP) and Black Liberation Front were established in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham.

Unlike the American experience, where Black Power was limited to those of African descent, Britain’s black communities forged a rallying cry which would unite men and women of African and Asian origin in challenging racism and state brutality. African, Caribbean and Asian communities in Britain had faced common obstacles and had developed a history of joint struggles. In 1963, for example, a march in solidarity with Martin Luther King’s March on Washington had been convened in London by the Confederation of Afro-Asian-Caribbean Organisations, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) established in 1964 was also a pan-ethnic group (Anwar 1991: 42; Heineman 1972). ‘Black’ was therefore expanded in the British context (Hensman 1995; R. Bhavnani 1994). Many Black Power organisations had African, Caribbean and Asian members and were instrumental in supporting Asian community struggles, such as the strikes at Red Scar mills in Preston in 1965 and Crepe Sizes in Nottingham in 1972 (Ramdin 1987: 450; Sivanandan 1974: 20). Both the Indian Workers Association GB, which had long been central to political organising in Punjabi communities, and the National Federation of Pakistani Associations which formed in 1963, embraced the notion of solidarity under the political umbrella of blackness (Hiro 1971). Radical Asian youth organisations had also begun to emerge in communities such as Southall, Newham and Brick Lane in London, Bradford, Birmingham, Leicester and Manchester (Bains 1988; Mukherjee 1988). At times, these groups formed campaigns in conjunction with African Caribbean young people. Bradford United Black Youth League and Hackney Black People’s Defence Organisation were two such pan-ethnic groups (Ramdin 1987; Mason-John and Khambatta 1993).

Michelle Wallace (1978) in her much maligned exposé of black gender relations has captured the exclusion from decision making, the sexual objectification and the pressure to conform to the role of African queen’ imposed on African American women in the Black Power movement (see also Brixton Black Women’s Group 1984b). African Caribbean women in Britain had similar experiences:

We could not realise our full organisational potential in a situation where we were constantly regarded as sexual prey. Although we worked tirelessly, the significance of our contribution to the mass mobilisation of the Black Power era was undermined and overshadowed by the men. They both set the agenda and stole the show.

(Bryan et al. 1985: 144)

The Black Power movement was not unique in its attempted restriction of women’s participation. Women of African descent who turned to Rastafari in search of an alternative to ‘babylon culture’, were also forced to struggle with patriarchal ideologies. These were given justification by Bible readings, but were firmly rooted in the nationalist vision of black male liberation:

Rasta ‘queens’ could not cook if menstruating, women could not ‘reason’ with the ‘kingmen’ nor partake of the chalice (smoke marijuana). Biblical support was found for limiting Rasta women’s access to knowledge except through the guidance of their ‘kingmen’.

(Turner 1994: 30)

Asian women had a similar battle for recognition in community struggles against racist attacks, deportations and miscarriages of justice. The young Asian men who transformed themselves into urban warriors defending their communities from racist attacks were quick to chastise young women who wished to stray from traditional gender roles and participate in political activism:

Any girl who tries to take an active part in the running of SYM [Southall Youth Movement] is popularly regarded as ‘loose’, with the consequences that those who do try to get involved very quickly leave.

(Bains 1988: 237; see also A. Wilson 1984: 174)

These barriers did not prevent black women from throwing themselves into community activism. Black women refused to take a backseat role, they were active in sit-ins, boycotts, Saturday schools, defence committees, conferences and study circles. Above all, this activity was critical in politicising young black women, many of whom had been educated in Britain and had little knowledge of anti-colonial struggles. Young black women championing the black berets, socks and shoes of militant resistance were inspired by women activists from the United States, in particular Angela Davis: Angela Davis was such an inspiration to black women at the time. She seemed to have liberated herself mentally and fought in her own...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Gender, Racism, Ethnicity Series editors
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Angela Davis
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Writing against the grain: towards a womanist methodology
• 3 ‘We don’t just make tea’: redefining political activism
• 4 Talking across difference
• 5 Articulating ‘race’, class and gender
• 6 Sisters and brothers in struggle? Looking for coalitions
• 7 Conclusions: from identity politics to the politics of transformation
• Appendix I Summary of case study organisations
• Appendix II Chronology of black women organising autonomously in Britain
• Bibliography
• Index