round table's response to Du Bois' "Damnation", The

Kimberle: Good morning everyone. Shirley Poole, Ida Lewis and I thank you for participating in this round table. When we got together to talk about "The Damnation of Women," our strong and emotional reactions to the piece set the tone for a rich conversation. So I want to canvass the group to get your first impression of "Damnation" when you read it.

Beverly: Du Bois' essay actually inspired my dissertation, which I titled Daughters of Sorrow. I am pleased that someone resurfaced it so that we could discuss it in this round table. "Damnation" had a profound impact on me almost 20 years ago. And when I read it again, I was almost, in some sense, weeping.

Judy: The piece is amazing for its modernity. It could be written as is right now. I am proud of my fellow New Englander for having this kind of perception. He is truly the father of sociology. He spoke out so nobly and so movingly about Black women, who are still maligned and negatively portrayed 90 percent of the time. I'm pleased to have been acquainted with this piece and don't understand why the men I've met who are Du Bois scholars have never mentioned it to me.

Elaine: First, I want to thank Kim, Ida and Shirley for bringing "Damnation" to my attention. I am glad that Du Bois wrote this essay. After reading it, I said "hallelujah." And having read it only once, I know that I must reread it to try to fit it in with my work and LDF's. I knew nothing about this piece. Why?

Jewell: Let me weigh in here. I found it intellectually empowering and, like Judy, felt a sense of pride. But I feel conflicted because of how he dealt with his wife and daughter. I view him as a theoretical feminist, and I'm pleased about that. But I want to talk about this in terms of what plagues most of our contemporary African American male leaders.

Judy: Rampant sexism.

Jewell: With the basic conflict of talking one way and living another way.

Beverly: One of the things that strikes me about the essay is that those contradictions that Jewell just spoke of are inherent in the essay. On the one hand, it is pro-feminist and modern; on the other, it's a piece of its time. Another thing that strikes me was his love, support and encouragement of Black women's efforts; yet he doesn't name any of his Black women contemporaries. Anna Julia Cooper-he mentions her work, but he doesn't name her. So I think that it's a both-and situation: We see both the progressive nature of the essay and sense some of the contradiction.

Faye: Extending what you just said, Beverly, he attempted to eschew the concept of beauty, yet he spoke endlessly about it, a subject with which he obviously was having his own internal conflict. So I found contradictions within the words themselves. But on another level, I also felt that it revealed how far we haven't come; its modernness reflected how long and difficult social struggle can be.

Ruby: I agree with what's been said. I was also impressed with the fact that he was a man reaching for some truth about the condition of women from the beginning of time and that he was looking for ways to level the playing field. He also was, I believe, presenting the challenge of how do we love each other and treat each other equally.

Johnnetta: There are no perfect articles or books, except, of course, the ones that the nine of us have written. [laughter] I, too, was deeply moved as I read this piece again. But I was also disturbed. I was disturbed by the good doctor's own unresolved issues. It wasn't clear to me how much beauty really does matter to him. It wasn't clear to me how much he thinks Black women really are put on earth to be mothers, even though he questions that and calls on us to be contributors to society. It wasn't clear to me the extent to which he was able to incorporate into this article his own commitment to the liberation of African-American women. So like my sisters in this round table, I am moved, but I have a series of questions, perhaps the largest of which is, why in the world has it taken so long for us to even raise up this article again?

Kimberle: So let's address that directly, and let me summarize a few things put on the table: What is remarkable here is that a prominent Black man is dealing with questions of gender and doing so in ways that moved all of us. Yet, there are contradictions inherent in the article itself and in terms of the inability of Du Bois to lead his own life in accordance with the values expressed in the article. Then there's the issue of why this piece is not part of the intellectual canon in the Black community. What do we want to say about why this has been lost to history and about these contradictions? Why is there nothing like it being produced by brothers today?

Beverly: Let me quickly say that the pro-feminist women's rights activism of African-American men has basically been erased in African-American history. We have lost sight of not only Du Bois' passionate activism but also Frederick Douglass'. And I mention Du Bois and Douglass, although there were other Black male feminists, because they were probably the most outspoken and most committed throughout their lives to issues of race and gender liberation.

Johnnetta: How can we continue that lineage, Beverly? We must make sure that in calling the names of Douglass and Du Bois that we don't stop there. Who else can we name? I'm certainly aware of a couple of texts that attempt to lift up AfricanAmerican male feminists, but this is not going to be a long list.

Farah: To follow up on why we don't know or talk about this essay: People don't know about this essay because the larger intellectual community hasn't paid attention to the works of Black feminists in the academy. Feminists like Beverly, Joy James and Hazel Carby have long been aware of it; it has been important in their works. The lack of attention paid to their writings just goes to show why Du Bois' essay is still relevant. Black women's work continues to be marginal, even today.

Kimberle: The idea that Black women's work is marginal will come as a surprise to those who believe the complaint of some Black male critics that Black male writers are marginal and Black women get all the attention. How can you explain that?

Judy: That perception is the same as the "two-fer" perception in terms of our getting hired-the corporate myth that has been in existence now for 30 years: that Black women count as both female and Black and therefore punitive White people prefer to hire us and we make all kinds of money.

Jewell: That's Black male propaganda that we buy into or don't challenge for fear that some other sister will get annoyed if we challenge it. One of the reasons that we are having discourse about this now is that we don't exist in terms of the race agenda. We are workers in the field. I don't have the stats with me right now, but if you take a photograph of corporate power centers, as well as the U.S. Senate, it will reflect where we are. Virtually nonexistent. And when Black Enterprise magazine had on its cover 50 succession tract African Americans for CEO leadership of Fortune 500 companies, there was not one African-American woman. Why? Because nobody was there. Oh yes, when Equitable held its two annual lunches-one for African-American line officers and one for its female line officers, the same Black woman was present at both lunches. So that's the story.

Kimberle: We can throw in the entertainment industry as well. Black women have fewer roles, are paid less and are even less represented behind the camera. When talking about filmmakers, we're actually talking about Black men, not the Julie Dashes. No matter how successful a woman's first film may be, it's often regarded as a fluke.

Beverly: Can we also add here that Black women make less money than all the folk in the U.S., except, I guess, Native Americans.

Kimberle: Elaine, from the perspective of a litigator, what do you see in terms of this two-fer issue?

Elaine: We continue to face all kinds of problems, and we've got an issue now that's out of control-this prison industrial complex. There has been an 800 percent increase in Black women prisoners. I will never forget Christmas, being in Danbury Federal Prison. These are Black and Latino women in prison, with the average woman having two kids. These kids are going into these prisons to see their mommy for Christmas. And many of these women are imprisoned for nonviolent offenses. They haven't harmed anybody but had the wrong associations.

Beverly: I just want to say that Du Bois would never have made the ludicrous statement in the nineteenth century that Black women had any advantages. So the one thing we can say about this piece is that he feels deeply that Black women have been the most maligned group of folk in the United States and perhaps even in the world. So this double advantage-this notion of Black women as emasculators and as dominators-was not in Du Bois' head in 1920. In fact, that's a recent mythology.

Kimberle: Beverly, that's a point I had hoped we could get to. Why does our community accept Moynihan's notion of Black women as emasculators?1 To hear Moynihan tell it, that's what causes our family breakdown and that's why Black men should go to the military-to find their masculinity. Du Bois put an entirely different spin on Black women, which makes it odd that we as a community seem more open to some version of Moynihan's take on Black women rather than Du Bois'.

Faye: It was interesting that reproductive issues came up at the very beginning of the piece. And what is often not recognized about Du Bois is that he was active in the early years of the reproductive rights movement and worked closely with Margaret Sanger when her movement was under attack because of the perception that she was engaging in eugenics. At the time that she didn't know what to do with her movement, he added a Black male feminist dimension to the theory of her movement and to her struggle for the legitimacy of it. At the beginning of his essay, he brings into immediate focus that this aspect of a woman's liberation is fundamental. And his virgin motherhood concept is sort of the idealized motherhood. But the virgin-whore contradiction also is an interesting one because it reflects the contemporary struggle that women were going through and the attempt to be liberated from required childbearing.

Kimberle: Can you say more about the contemporary aspects of the unendurable paradox? Do you think the essay captures the context of Black women and childbearing today, in particular poor Black women?

Faye: It does capture the powerlessness of poor Black women to control their lives, and central to that is to control their fertility decisions. So it is incredibly contemporary that he spoke and worked for women having this aspect of power, yet the effort being made in the twenty-first century to take away the power will certainly be on the shoulders of poor Black women who will be more heavily harmed by this regressive direction than their White affluent contemporaries.

Judy: Du Bois also anticipated the juggling act, the super-mommy stuff that's been going on for the last 25 years. As he said, "only at the sacrifice of intelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority of modern women bear children," and this is what he sees as the damnation of women.

Faye: Three paragraphs after the one you mentioned, Judy, he says "civilization must show two things: the glory and beauty of creating life and the need and duty of power and intelligence." The Center for Gender Equality just did a couple of focus groups in Memphis. I was stunned by the level of conflict that Black women have over this issue. They are frustrated about living up to that expectation. How does one do it? Society has done little to support the duality of the expectation of creating and nurturing life and fulfilling one's potential. The women told us about their resentment of the high expectations.

Johnnetta: I want to raise the question about Du Bois' religious beliefs and practices. I raise it for two reasons. One, God is often invoked in this piece. That is not uncharacteristic of Du Bois. But what forces me to raise this question is that so much of what we've just been talking about is embedded in Christian ideology, which influences Black women. Certainly, the position that we hear espoused over and over again, not only by African-American men but by African-American women, is that God made us to have babies. And the notion that any Black woman would choose not to do so is just heresy.

Second, much of what is said about our reproductive rights, about our own possession of those rights, is referenced out of the church. As I read this piece, I asked, where was Du Bois on all of this? Certainly, he made no statement that his point of view is anti-Christian, but what stands out to me is the difference between the standard, even classic, African-American Christian view about women and what Du Bois espouses.

Farah: One of the things that is central to his perspective-and this might be grounded in his sense of religiosity-is the individual's realization of his or her potential. Du Bois dares to say that Black women, like men, have a God given right to realize their potential. And once one believes that Black women have that right, it then calls into question the dominance of the view that they're only to be mothers. That's the missing piece in much of the theology that we get out of the Black church.

Elaine: Du Bois says that the Black woman must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion. The debate that's been going on in this country regarding women's control of their bodies impacts Black women, but does the society at large care whether we have freedom of choice or not?

Judy: Are you referring to what we now call the White women's feminist movement and asking whether or not it addresses Black women's concerns?

Elaine: No.

Jewell: Elaine's being much deeper than that. What I'm hearing is that the societal focus is about creating options and viable options for White women.

Elaine: That's right. It's not about us. At least Du Bois was thinking about us. In regard to this larger debate about freedom of choice that we've been having in this country for the past 30 years, we need it and we must have it, but it doesn't include us; it has an impact on us. We need Roe versus Wade like anybody else, but it's not about protecting our right. It's about the demographics. On the one hand, White America wants White women to have these babies and cares about what happens to these babies. On the other hand, it sterilizes Black women, rips us from our kids and sends us off to prison. Maybe I've been in this work too long, but that's where it's sending me.

Judy: Are you saying groups like Planned Parenthood that promote reproductive freedom in the larger society do not intend for that message to include women of color?

Elaine: Planned Parenthood certainly does. It understands the impact. But it's the way the debate has come up, the vigor with which the question is discussed. I just don't think that the concern is reproductive freedom for women of color.

Faye: Going back, Elaine, to what you raised earlier about whether anybody really cares about whether Black women have control over their bodies, the answer is "yes" in the negative. They care with respect to whether Black women are going to be dependent on the state, and the policies around welfare have been punitive in that regard. Poor women and Black women disproportionately bear the burden of those regressive policies. And with the country leaning and trending more to the conservative, the so-called conservative and regressive pole is likely to sweep these kinds of attitudes much more into the national agenda, and Black women will suffer. So, yes, I believe they do care, but I'm not sure it's in the caring direction we have in mind.

The agenda for control of reproductive rights was one that had to be fought especially for African-American women because of the past abuses. That's why Du Bois' work and his early activism around birth control was revolutionary, especially for a Black man in which aspects of chauvinism that are bonded to the Black church are still dominant and prevalent.

One of the questions we asked Black women who participated in the Memphis focus groups was, what were the issues they felt divided women? I found it absolutely stunning that abortion was perceived by this group as a divisive issue among women, which relates to something that was said earlier about a lot of this being rooted in Black church theology.

Johnnetta: What I'm about to say will come out strong and harsh, and I really mean it this way. We Black women who write about, care about, live about gender must pose the question of our own centeredness in men's views, in men's approval. That takes us directly to what Faye has just said about the abortion issue. I am intuitively convinced that an enormous amount of giving up of our control of our own reproductive rights is centered in the need to satisfy what men want us to do. Again, a sweeping comment: The extent to which we do not hear a Du Bois voice in the twenty-first century talking about our reproductive rights leads me to make this kind of statement.

Beverly: It's important to underscore what Johnnetta just said because of what Du Bois says early in the essay. He remembers four women of his boyhood and says "they existed not for themselves, but for men; they were named after the men to whom they were related and not after the fashion of their own souls. They were not beings; they were relations. ..." This is a direct and explicit acknowledgment of how women live within the construct of male privilege.

Jewell: I see the use of the church and the church doctrine as part of the propaganda to keep us suppressed, repressed and controlled. You can take the beautiful prose, the scholarship and the reality of what Du Bois has done in this particular piece, but lurking in the back of my mind is the paranoid feeling that it was really about engaging with the Margaret Sangers and the massive group of White women.

Beverly: In all fairness, I would not put Du Bois in that category. I wouldn't put him in the familiar camp of some contemporary Black men being, metaphorically speaking, "in bed" with White women around these political issues. If you really look at Du Bois' activism within the Black community, which preceded his 1920s engagement with Margaret Sanger with the birth control clinic in Harlem, you will see a person within the Black community trying to get Black folk to have some different kinds of attitudes about gender.

Faye: Quite the opposite in his work with Margaret Sanger; she was working for him. She needed him.

Jewell: I appreciate Du Bois' body of work; I respect it; and, in fact, I need it. But I still have a problem with AfricanAmerican men who have a feminist platform in relationship with White women while Black women are still either invisible and/or not respected as coequals within our community.

Kimberle: And the point is a valid one, regardless of whether Du Bois is subject to that critique. The point that Jewell is making is that there is a question about whether today's Black male leaders who take up a quasi-feminist stand are taking it up to embrace Black women's issues or whether it's to position themselves as political allies to organized White women. But now I'd like to move this conversation to talk about the cultural production of Black women's images. I was struck by Du Bois' paragraph about all the things that he can forgive the South for but never, "neither in this world nor the world to come," would he forgive the South for "its wanton and continued and persistent insulting of Black womanhood." When I read this, I couldn't help but wonder what Du Bois would say and do about the imagery of Black womanhood in today's society, especially within Black cultural production. And I don't mean to focus just on Black folk.

Beverly: Let's go there for a minute.

Farah: He would have to be utterly dismayed at what we see today as the internalization of White supremacist perspectives on Black women.

Kimberle: Can you give us some examples of internalization? Young people would be interested in this.

Farah: I don't want to malign all forms of popular culture because some of the critique going on within hip-hop itself is just as critical as I am about certain things. But certainly, we can't look at videos without seeing Black women constantly exposing their behinds or seeing more and more of them taking off their clothing because they believe that's the way to gain status and fame and notoriety or hearing them talk about their sexuality in terms that Du Bois fights against in this essay. He says those characterizations have been imposed on us and hold us down. Because those kinds of images are strong in the media, little girls, unfortunately, want to look like Lil' Kim. So it's not just about images and media, but about impact.

Kimberle: One of the arguments that young Black women in the entertainment industry make today is that this is the nature of the industry. If one wants to work, one works within the roles that are prescribed. Ruby, as a Black woman who has negotiated a long career in the entertainment industry, you are not associated with degraded images of Black women. What would you say to women about how to negotiate this dilemma? How have you negotiated choices over the course of your career?

Ruby: I've had to adjust to the moment. I believe in this business of fighting and struggling and affirmation of the things in which we believe. But I don't want to give my advertising space to all those things-that I decry but can't do anything about. I can't look at the butt-shakers because that's too depressing. Although I've tried to understand, I don't know why the country needs a mammy image. I believe that there's something extraordinary and superior about Black women, and I'm trying to put that in perspective and not be chauvinistic about it. We need to discover what that thing is and to acknowledge it. Something in us is the root of the salvation of humanity. My experience with Black women has been comforting and reassuring. I don't think we can make sense of racism or sexism. So we have to keep our eyes on realizing our own greatness and our own power.

Judy: Right.

Johnnetta: Thank you, sister Ruby, for bringing the balance. I want to use your comments to say that what you remind us of is the extraordinary diversity among Black women. But I want to move beyond just the acknowledgment that we come in different colors and different sexual orientations and that we are Lil' Kims and we are Ruby Dees to say that what haunts me is that I see so few ways in which I can communicate with the hip-hop generation. Now, maybe that's arrogant of me.

Farah: In fairness to that generation, I must say that some of the most exciting debates around the issue of how our image is portrayed are occurring within hip-hop. There's Lauryn Hill, Jill Scott and other talented and gifted young women; Lil' Kim herself talks about the kind of pain leading to her own decision to show herself in the way that she does. This generation understands many of these problems and is trying to deal with them in ways that are admirable.

Kimberle: Farah, I'm glad that you mentioned these counter debates within hip-hop. How can our critiques be included without being dismissed by the hip-hop generation as intergenerational?

Farah: There are two ways. We must first acknowledge and recognize that the debate is going on within that generation. And second, to engage legitimately in the debate, we must take the time to be informed about what's being said in these debates. Sometimes we tend to be lax in terms of being as informed as we can about the culture our children are producing.

Jewell: We have a unique opportunity to bridge the intergenerational issue, but we do need to do our homework. I found out by looking at Chris Rock the other night that the young African-American woman-I don't know her name-who held a youth dialogue on BET left out of protest over images related to her body and the bodies of young girls in videos. We need to engage in a good dialogue with these young women who want a support system.

Farah: I teach this generation of students every day, and they teach me constantly. And one of their critiques of us is that all we know is what the corporate forces want us to know about their culture. The corporate forces want us to know Eminem or certain images of young women because they sell. But those aren't the people whom they see as speaking for them. In one of the recent issues of Essence, a young woman wrote a loving critique from her generation to Lil' Kim.

Judy: That was an excellent piece.

Beverly: Having said all that, we also have to say that many young Black women have not a clue about what feminist ideas are. We have a lot of work to do together, and I'm also speaking now about the students whom I teach who are conflicted about the very things that we're talking about. They are desperate for male approval, will do all kinds of things for their boyfriends, will tell you about the competition and so forth. So I'm not just talking about popular culture; I'm talking about the positive aspects of the women's movement that passed the Black community by. Progressive notions about gender are just not the norm in our communities. And there are many reasons for that, which we need to talk about. Even if you read the books of the so-called hip-hop feminist generation, the authors use the term feminism, but they have problematic notions about what constitutes a feminist agenda.

Kimberle: Let me play the devil's advocate and press this point. If we were dealing with images that were as racist against the entire community as these images are against us, would we be tied up in debating how to have the critique or would we come out swinging? Is there something about the fact that this concerns women that makes it difficult?

Jewell: You're absolutely right, Kim. The reality is that if Black men saw themselves as under siege in terms of imaging as Black women do in this popular culture, the men would come out swinging. The issue for me is that the feminist ideology is nonexistent within African American women's organizations.

Johnnetta: Jewell, I'm interrupting just to say, let's be clear. You're talking now about our generation, not the younger generation. You're saying, where is feminism among us?

Beverly: Exactly.

Jewell: Oh, absolutely.

Kimberle: Can we use that to segue into Black women's leadership in Black institutions? The starting point is WE.B. Du Bois' discussion about how women are the pillars of our institutions. Today, when asked why we aren't more feminist, the argument, many times, is that we don't need to be because we are the backbone of our institutions. Clearly, we have strength, and that's often been the basis of many Black women's rejection of feminism. But do we have leadership? Do we have control in any sense?

Johnnetta: Or to put it in very quick voice, we are the backbones; but you know what, we want to be the heads, too.

Kimberle: Right. So when we think about leadership in our institutions, how do we turn our strength into leadership, or, to put it another way, how do we turn the centrality of our work in Black institutions into having our interests more central?

Johnnetta: I'd like to pick up on what Jewell said about the Black male-centric leadership of Black organizations. I think it's remarkable that no Black woman has headed a major Black organization in this country And the power of that reality should not be overlooked by us.

Faye: I'm disturbed that a Black woman has never headed any of our major institutions in the Black community. The profound power of what that says in terms of looking at where Black women are in the hierarchy is something that we really need to address. How do our issues get articulated if we're not in a position to have a platform to articulate them?

Kimberle: Faye, okay, so there's never been a woman to head a major Black organization. I don't think it's necessarily clear what this says.

Faye: Leadership is power, and leadership and women and power are dangerous entities. That's what Beverly and Johnnetta were talking about in terms of our seeking approval. What is that approval? To be subservient and to be subjugated to the male power structure? We are really talking about a fundamental shift in our place in our society. And I think that we can do that in many ways, and one of these is to organize politically to effect change.

Elaine: I wish we as women could come together and put some emphasis on the issue related to the incarceration of huge numbers of women of color. It's something we need to change.

Ruby: This is one of the things that's high on my agenda. We must get the prisons off the stock market. How do we bring attention to this issue and make change, not just discuss it, not just march about it, but make change.

Elaine: It's going to take massive grassroots activism. The courts aren't going to do anything about the system until we get it on the public agenda. We have to discuss the specific ways we can help these women and get the laws changed. These folks are being abused by the industries and corporations, for example, at the tune of $4 a minute for a phone call.

Johnnetta: Elaine, this is a knee-jerk reaction, but I do want to speak to education and information. We simply are not aware of this. We have to be educated about what is happening with this prison industrial complex. We do not have the information about what privatized prisons are doing. This is now the newest way to make major money in America.

Farah: One of the things we might start talking about is that the face of the prisoner is not always a man of color, which we're used to seeing, but a woman of color, the fastest-growing prison population. Even people who are aware of the prison industrial complex, don't think about that.

Beverly: We need programs designed to deal with the codependence of violence in our communities, which is encouraging these young women to act out in gangs.

Elaine: Let me tell you what's happening with these women, especially why the sisters are in prison. Most often, she fell in love with a guy who was pushing drugs. When he gets picked up, he is able to deal with the prosecutor because he understands the drug enterprise, and ends up with a four- or five-year sentence. Although she wasn't involved in the drug ring, she knows "Johnnie" and may have made a phone call or gone to the bank for him. She gets tagged as a conspirator, has no one to give up and ends up with a 20- or 25-year sentence without the possibility of parole.

Kimberle: And it's not an unusual story, either. This is what happened not only to Kemba Smith, but also to thousands of other women. Beth Richie calls it "gender entrapment" in her book about how so many women she interviewed got caught up in abusive relationships that set them on a path to prison. Her work is a powerful foundation to the larger conversation that Beverly has been suggesting about how our relationships sometimes get us into trouble. This is a great example of how our political agenda would be different-more inclusive-if Black women were also at the center of it. We talk about the prison crisis in the Black community; but if we don't know that our women are also being incarcerated, we won't begin to talk about how and why they are being incarcerated, and, of course, we won't be able to prevent it. Building on what Elaine has given us, can we list some other issues that affect Black women but that are not well understood or talked about in our communities?

Judy: The issue of AIDS: The fastestgrowing incidence of AIDS is among Black women. Part of this is obviously connected to the use of our bodies for economic purposes, the use of our bodies because we are invested in male centeredness.

Beverly: Gender-specific violence within the African-American community: It's a topic that's still difficult for us to talk about. I'm talking about incest, battery, elderly abuse, the whole range of things. And one of the reasons why it's difficult for us to talk about gender-specific violence is that it raises questions about Black male sexism and Black male privilege.

Kimberle: Absolutely. Other issues?

Farah: Beverly brought up a topic earlier that we seldom talk about: How do Black feminists speak to other Black women across generations whose greatest concern is to have Black men in their lives. Much of what we're talking about in terms of desire for men's approval stems from the very fact that many Black women are without partners.

Kimberle: Can I use that, Farah, to transition into the next topic, which comes out of that Moynihan-influenced critique of Black women-that we are misshaped as women, not nurturing, emasculating, et cetera? Many Black women feel this pressure, and it's part of the political conversation about who's to blame for the so-called breakdown of the Black family.

Beverly: This is one of our most difficult challenges. Elaine has just given a good example of why many Black women are in prison. We don't necessarily make the connection between the desire for male approval and the increase in the Black female prison population and therefore don't realize how serious it is. I don't have the answers, but I do know that it's something we must talk about.

Ruby: One of our challenges is to make our agenda a living, breathing thing. We have to ask ourselves, "What do we want to accomplish?" and "Is there a specific issue that we can address?" Only when we focus on a specific issue and move with great determination will we really make a difference and reclaim our children's allegiance and attention.

Kimberle: Many of you mentioned the aesthetic contradiction in Du Bois' piece. This is relevant to the crisis that many Black women are experiencing. When competing for scarce resources, namely male attention, they feel that they have less aesthetic capital. What happened to "Black is beautiful"? Why are skin tone, hair texture and all that stuff still used to rank Black women after all these years? Weren't we supposed to have rejected this in the sixties?

Jewell: It was hypocritical then! I grew up in the sixties when people gave great speeches about this. Some of our so-called leaders told me they wouldn't date a sister with an Afro. I find the hypocrisy-I'm so angry at even having tonI can't finish it.

Farah: Well, I find it interesting how popular culture exaggerates and, perhaps, denigrates our unique Afrocentric features, making them more closely akin to savagery than to a beauty standard. In some cases "Black" is uncivilized in the way it's presented.

Kimberle: Beverly or johnnetta, do one of you want to draw a connection to the Hottentot Venus? 2

Beverly: Well, I find it disturbing that young Black women claim a hypersexualized, almost Hottentot Venus image as something positive. This was the image Du Bois railed against. I don't know how to intervene because this is not a generation who necessarily reads or has historical images in their heads. So it's easy for them to say, "I don't mind being called a whore." That's not a bad word to them because they don't have the century-old negative attachment to the way Black women have been seen as whores. They don't realize how much damage it has done to us, and don't know how much we've had to fight against negative images. When they say that "whore" is not a bad word, I almost want to choke them.

Johnnetta: Clearly, we need to reaffirm some old-fashioned stuff; it's called educate, legislate and agitate. And the truth of the matter is that we have all fallen down on the job of each of these.

Elaine: Since being on these shores, we've had to reflect on such issues. Beauty doesn't come from external forces. It comes from an inner sense of self-worth and selfesteem and a belief in survival and growth. We must not only help ourselves and our other sisters who are in our age group, but also reach out to other generations.

Johnnetta: To continue Elaine's point: There is something about a group of Black women sharing common perceptions, looking for what is not there, reaching out and supporting each other. It sounds terribly old-fashioned to call for more of that again, to infuse some of it back into our organizations.

Judy: Why hasn't African-American leadership embraced a progressive women's rights agenda? That's what we don't talk about enough.

Elaine: I agree with that, but I think this takes us back to Ruby's earlier point, which is having people understand how important these issues are. A "feminist agenda" is not going to resonate. People deal with the concrete. Applying a principle to their lives gets them involved.

Beverly: But the lack of concreteness or direct experience is not the reason the feminist agenda doesn't resonate. Black people certainly understand that police brutality is an issue in their communities and will rally around that issue whether they've ever experienced it or not. Why have we been unable to get Black folk to rally around, for example, the rape of Black women?

Judy: It's the way we socialize our girls not to do things because boys won't like them. Until we socialize our girls differently, things won't change much.

Kimberle: We've responded to Du Bois' essay with a purpose. Is there something about our ability to look back that helps us to confront our contemporary reality much more directly? What do we think might come out of the republishing of "Damnation" and this conversation? What are your hopes?

Beverly: Ruby mentioned something earlier that Du Bois also said: that Black women are the most incredible, extraordinary group of women on the face of the earth. This idea does not float around in contemporary culture. But on some level, Du Bois believed that his Black male contemporaries knew that there's something extraordinary about Black women that the world can learn from. That he put it in print is incredible.

Johnnetta: This dialogue was truly historic. I'm going to say something that I hope doesn't contradict my earlier critique of our being male centered: I would love to see a group of Black male leaders address "The Damnation of Women."

(Participants react enthusiastically.)

Judy: My expectation is that our sisters will hear this conversation and realize that we refuse to remain invisible and that we are not without power to change the way people think about gender in our community.

Farah: My hope is that younger women, from age 16 to 25, will participate in a discussion similar to ours that focuses on how these same issues affect their lives.

Faye: As I indicated earlier, I found this piece sobering in the sense of how long it takes to create fundamental and lasting change. I hope that we can facilitate a fundamental shift in the perception of where Black women are both in the structure of our communities and in our place in society. There's always a great temptation to move on to the next compelling issue without realizing that we still have long-standing issues to address that shape our lives.

Kimberle: In wrapping up, I want to add my hope that our dialogue may be the catalyst in eliminating the stigma around the "F" word-feminism-in our community and in getting Black feminist politics associated with concrete issues that matter to all of us. If this happens, I hope people will remember Elaine talking about the prison industrial complex, Beverly talking about violence and Farah talking about popular culture. I hope people recall Faye and Judy talking about our quest for sexual autonomy, Jewell and Johnnetta talking about Black women's leadership and Ruby reminding us about what is special about Black women. If all this resonates, then 20 years from now no one will have to rediscover "Damnation" or this document, but both will be embraced to help broaden the inclusiveness of our institutions, our leadership and our politics.

Ida E. Lewis: Thank you, ladies, for your thought-provoking ideas and opinions. You're wonderful!

(Chorus of good-byes.)

1 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: Tbe Case for NationalAction (Washington, D.C., 1965).

2 In 1810, Saare Baartman (Sara Bartman), a member of the Khoi-Khoi people known as Hottentots by Dutch settlers in imitation of their clicking language, was taken first to Britain and then to Paris, where she was paraded before fascinated crowds drawn less by anthropological curiosity than by the sight of her prominent buttocks, Using historical drawings, cartoons, legal documents and interviews with noted cultural historians and anthropologists, the documentary The Life and Times of Sara Batman-"The Hottentot Venus" deconstructs the social, political, scientific and philosophical assumptions that transformed one young African woman into a representation of savage sexualtiy and racial inferiortiy.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Nov/Dec 2000
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