Ain't We Women?

Most of us rejected the white women’s movement. Miss ann was still Miss ann to us whether she burned her bras or not. We could not muster sympathy for the fact that she was trapped in her mansion and oppressed by her husband. We were, and still are, in a much more terrible jail. We knew that our experiences as black women were completely different from those of our sisters in the white women’s movement. And we had no desire to sit in some consciousness raising group with white women and bare our souls.

But it is imperative to our struggle that we build a strong black women’s movement. It is imperative that we, as black women, talk about the experiences that shaped us; that we assess our strengths and weaknesses and define our own history. It is imperative that we discuss positive ways to teach and socialize our children.

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Black women are not universally angry, because no group of human beings is universally angry. Black women can be kind, warm, sensitive, gentle, thoughtful, and forgiving. Every day, millions of women of African descent around the world prove the accuracy of this statement, prove it quietly, with unseen gestures and whispered words as they go about the business of leading challenging, unobtrusive, but meaningful lives that rarely attract the glare of media spotlights or the sharp tongues of patronizing, preening, pundits. And yet, without the radical kindness of Black women on every continent of this planet, even more Black children would suffer before they had the chance to grow, even more of the elderly of all races would die alone and without care, even more Black women and, yes, more Black men - and more people of all races whose lives have been touched by the kinds of Black women you never see on television or read about in academic articles - would exist with less love, grace, and meaning in their lives. We speak here of RADICAL KINDNESS because Black women have every social, political, cultural, and historical reason to be relentlessly and perpetually unkind, in the interest of their own success and survival, to abandon kindness as an unwieldy and unrewarding burden that they cannot afford to carry. But carry it they do and distribute it with great, and greatly ignored, generosity.

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