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Introduction: 'Round the kitchen table

New Crisis, The, Nov/Dec 2000 by Crenshaw, Kimberle

Every African-American woman has a childhood story of coming to terms with what it means to be a Black person who is female. In my family, the story of my coming initiation into Black girlhood came in kindergarten when I finally figured out after months of lobbying that there was a reason that I was never chosen to play the beautiful long-haired princess during our playtime ritual. I was able to play every other conceivable role in our little play-acted fairy tale-every witch, animal or inanimate object---except the heavenly princess "Thornrosa," an amalgam of Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel. Despite the withering prospects, my hopes that I would eventually don the crown survived until the last minute of the last hour of the last day of kindergarten when it was clear that it was not to be. I wailed and carried on quite a bit walking home from school, calling out "Thornrosa" like a mantra so much that my brother thought Thornrosa was an eighthgrade girl who had beaten me up at school. It is a bittersweet story often told at family reunions; but as a tale of my awakening as a Black girl-child, it is only partial. The Thornrosa incident taught me about who I wasn't in society, but I learned who I was sitting at the feet of Black women. I mean this literally. It was in those women's spaces, usually around the kitchen table, sometimes in beauty shops or on front porches, that I learned some of the basic lessons of what to expect from living a life shaped by my race and my gender. Of course, the women I listened to didn't talk about their lives as separated into race experiences and gender experiences because as Black women, they didn't live their lives that way. As I listened to them, sometimes sitting there on the floor or on someone's lap, I learned about Black women through the seamlessly integrated way in which they talked about their lives. I took it all in as quietly as I could because the women around me were old-school about children being seen and not heard. But I got the benefit of the bargain because I saw and heard enough to school me for a lifetime of living in this world as a Black woman. I heard, early on, the stereotypes about us and the special burdens that they placed on us in almost every sphere of our lives. I learned about the context of Black women's working lives and the special obstacles they had to negotiate in factories, in hospitals, in schools and, sometimes, in homes of other women. I learned, too, that not all of our obstacles came from outside the community, or even outside our families. There was plenty to be said about our longing for loving, supportive interpersonal relationships and about the host of circumstances that often challenged our ability to achieve these simple desires. And when I listened more closely, I sometimes heard painful things, experiences that were silenced in more public spaces out of concern about the social and political consequences of airing dirty laundry.

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But, of course, there was balance; there was joy; there was connection/comraderie. I felt that something was unique about Black womanhood-not that we were born different, but, as is the case with any muscle that is constantly exercised, that we have developed a certain kind of bearing, some would say strength, from surviving as Black women. It would be later that I would learn that those characteristics all too often mistakenly mark us as unwomanly, or especially capable of carrying heavy loads. Interestingly enough, though, this strength, this ability to negotiate our way through, would not readily warrant us a place as recognized leaders even within our communities.

Listening to these conversations, it strikes me as hard to understand how one could possibly separate out Black women's issues from race issues. Yet, it is not uncommon to hear people urge that we as a community deal with "race first, gender second" as though any of those women that I learned so much from could or would think about their lives as mutually exclusive pieces that could be sliced apart so that one could be put on hold while the other could be fully addressed. When I've heard this, I have responded with the tools at my disposal, but I have often wished that I could transport myself back to those kitchen table conversations or, better yet, transport those conversations into the ongoing political and social discussions in and about the Black community today. That wish came true when Shirley Poole and Ida Lewis approached me with an exciting proposal to reprint Du Bois' "The Damnation of Women" accompanied with an essay exploring its contemporary implications. Why not, I thought, make the essay a collective commentary drawing on the wisdom and experience of a range of African American women? So, in short notice, we gathered eight interesting, accomplished and talkative women who were willing to get together early Sunday morning around a virtual kitchen table to discuss "Damnation." Presented below is that lively, provocative and poignant conversation. It is lightly edited for clarity and continuity. I have set aside convention and decided to refer to the participants by their first names, not out of disrespect, but in recognition that as women, we are all to often known "by the men to whom we are related and not in the fashion of our own souls."

Introduction: 'Round the kitchen table

New Crisis, The, Nov/Dec 2000 by Crenshaw, Kimberle

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