BHM: Marcus Books knowledge is power

Marcus Books is the oldest and still thriving bookstores dedicated to African American and black authors. It has been serving the Bay area for 50 years and has survived the gentrification of their neighborhood when so few other black owned businesses ever do. More important for African American herstory, Marcus Books was co-founded by Raye Richardson, along with her husband, and she continues to be committed to the store’s success. Currently, Marcus Books is run by her two daughters, Blanche Richardson and Karen Johnson who most store patrons credit as being the most knowledgeable people about black books they have ever met. Rounding out this matriarchy of black female booksellers/owners is Johnson’s daughter Tamiko who already helps out in the bookstore and will likely be in charge of it when her mother and aunt pass it on.

The store focuses on history and literature by and about African Americans from children’s literature to adult fiction and is named after black national Marcus Garvey. Both Richardson and her husband grew up in households heavily influenced by Garvey’s writing and Raye credits black nationalism as one of the reasons she had such a thirst for black books. As she grew up, she found herself lending her books out to all of her friends, who were also having a hard time finding or being exposed to new black books. The bookstore idea came from both the need to have ready access to books and to allow avid readers to retain their copies; you see, like me, when Richardson lent out her books, she almost never got them back because people loved them so much.

The bookstore marks a critical and long term intervention into the narrow publishing and stocking traditions of publishing houses and bookstores by refusing to ghettoize African American literary production. As one store patron put it:

” Years ago I grew tired of looking for books in the ‘African American Section’ of Borders or B[arnes] &N[oble] only to be inundated with trashy Black novels about a man who ain’t “no good” and the Sistah strong enought [sic] to love him.” – Jabir F

As many of us know, this and historical books about slavery are about all you can get on the shelves of mainstream bookstores. And if you want something on black women and empowerment or black women and feminism, you will neither find it in the WS section nor in the AFAm section unless it is a chapter in a book about [white women and] feminism in general or church women or a civil rights picture book respectively. Thus mainstream bookstores’ ordering policies work to erase a wide range of black intellectual thought and to perpetuate urban fantasies and the erasure of black women feminists and pro-woman movements.

Another patron explains his trouble in finding two popular biographies at the chain stores and how Marcus Books filled in the gap:

After much back and forth, I finally decided to purchase either Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story or The Pact for my ninth grade mentees.  So I hit my usual haunts Borders – “if we have it will be in the African-American section located on the second floor rear corner.” Bad sign.  Some 50 years post Rosa and we are still riding the back of the bus. “Most likely we don’t have it and can order it and have it in a couple of days.”

I call Stacey’s ask them about both books.  ”I haven’t heard of The Pact and Gifted Hands is the that by Robbins?”

“The Pact, about 3 Newark doctors who made a pact to finish school, to become doctors, and to return to help the community.  Gifted Hands by and about Dr. Ben Carson, who escaped the mean streets of Detroit to become a gifted peds neurosurgeon.”

“Don’t have it, we can order it.”

“I need to find me an ethnic bookstore.”

“Good-bye.” Click.

One google search later, I find Marcus Books in Oakland.  ”The Pact, about the doctors, they have another book coming out; we hope to have them back when they do their book tour.  Yes, we have two copies.  I don’t see that we have Gifted Hands in stock but I will call our San Francisco store…Yes, they have both books.”

Marcus Book Store I love you.  Like the big chain stores, Marcus has the technical, historical context books that white professionals like to read to understand the ways of black folk, but unlike the big chains and the “other local bookstores,” Marcus actually has general interest books, books about people, poetry, and every type of book by, about or for [black people that] you would find in Borders except [Borders only has these books about white people]. – Ralph C

This story is all too familiar to most of us. What is disconcerting about it is less that the books weren’t stocked, as we all should have expected that, but that these books were mainstream titles (meaning they were published by publishers these chains order from) and yet unknown to anyone working at the store. Worse, when mildly confronted about their absence, the response was not “we can order it” but to simply hand up on the potential buyer.

And while mainstream bookstores have failed to represent a wide range of black authors and historic and contemporary events, black bookstores have often had limited, aging, and male-centric selections that make them unappealing to the average browser and the discerning feminist reader. According to another book patron at Marcus books however, they have not fallen into this trap:

Aside from the late Karibu chain in DC/MD, in the past I’ve been disappointed by the offerings of black bookstores. But this place has a GREAT selection, even of hard to find books (I needed an older Percival Everett joint for a last minute gift, and couldn’t find it ANYWHERE except Marcus Books).  They had everything i wanted, some things I didn’t know I wanted (like Zora Neale Hurston’s writeup of her ethnographic work on voodoo), and offered to order anything I couldn’t find. – Jakeya C

And while many of the guest speakers at Marcus Books have been male authors and intellectuals, they also have a thriving number of up and coming and established female authors who have spoken or had book readings at the store.

I’ve seen Nikki Giovanni and Octavia Butler read here, to a room full of people of color, mostly Black folks. Need I say more? – Rona F

Marcus Books is also implicated in a larger narrative of African American history in the Bay area. During the 1950s, the bookstore shared the building with Jimbo’s Bop City, a famous Jazz club. Artists such as John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Art Tatum would stop by the store before late night jam sessions. They also featured talks by Elison (a classmate of Richardson’s husband), Baldwin, and Malcom X as well as contemporary movers and shakers in the black literary scene like Angelou and Morrison. The bookstore also embraces contemporary fiction, including urban fiction which they see as potentially an observation on the plight of working class and subsistence level black youth in a setting that both booksellers and readers can easily identify (way to make something subversive, no?), and the authors writing it.

While Marcus Books is small, housing only 6000 volumes, it also manages to keep several of the most high demand books in stock and on the shelves according to patrons. This is extremely important to readers of black literature because Marcus Books circumvents the unfair tax mainstream stores’ “we can order it” places on their customers. By unfair tax, I mean not only potentially monetary cost but also emotional tax, ie:

1. unlike white readers or readers looking for books by/for/about white people, black readers and ppl with interest in black books have to wait 5-14 business days to get a book they are interested in reading
2. if the person is unable to return to the store to pick up their books or chooses to buy online out of frustration, they have to pay shipping and handling when mainstream white readers do not
3. readers of black books almost always have to ask for help in the hopes of finding a book and as a result run the risk of being hung up on or the in person equivalent like the story quoted above
4. even when they are not hung up on these book searches often include the tiring task of having to explain repeatedly what the book is and what it is about, even when the book is a popular paperback, which reinforces the idea that black literature and black lives are less important
5. while mainstream white readers can spend hours roaming the stacks of any mainstream bookstore only to stumble upon a book they have never heard of but soon becomes their favorite, readers of black books have 1 small shelf to look through meaning they will likely never be exposed to the wide array of black books available to them in a bookstore

The last of the above list is critical for two reasons:

1. the ongoing lack of exposure to a wide array of black books for patrons of bookstores (regardless of their interests)
2. the reinforcing failure to buy a substantial number of black books b/c no one knows about them that the publishers and bookstores use for neither publishing nor stocking black books

The availability of inventory at Marcus books has not only been helpful to regular readers but also to academics. Several of the patrons attesting to the import of Marcus books were students or teachers/professors all of whom claimed Marcus Books has been invaluable to their own reading and their teaching. As one graduate student put it:

Marcus is responsible for more than half of my cherished book collection. – Jamila N

And one principal credits the bookstore with ensuring her school had a diverse lending library and curriculum for its diverse students.

For me, growing up in areas where black owned bookstores have been tiny, ratty, hovels with only a handful of ancient books and where the feminist bookstore is just as guilty of failing to stock a wide range of black women’s literature and theory as the mainstream stores, Marcus Books is an inspiration on how to get independent bookstores and black lit right. I wish anyone running a bookstore, but especially an independent feminist one, would have the opportunity to sit down with these three generations of women with 50 years of black owned bookstore knowledge behind them and ask how they can better represent black women’s intellectual production and black books in general.

Recently the store launched an online community to help customers and people outside of the Bay area stay connected (see link at top of page) as well as twitter @marcusbooks.

Want Ad for Feminist Revolution Pt II: What Kind of Feminist Are You?

I am back from my impromptu trip to P-Land with news that makes me question how feminists operate in Oregon at the same time that I celebrate many of the feminists I spent time with while there. It seems that in the State of Oregon, if you have 5 full time employees or less you can discriminate against differently-abled people with no legal consequences. What this means for “social change” and feminist programs in Oregon who run on mostly volunteer and part-time labor is that unless feminist programs are intentional about including ability in their “cultural competence” no one can actually hold them accountable at the legal level. While social action around disability can permanently mar the public image of agencies dependent on soft-money, the lack of commitment on the part of the state, the ongoing unspoken ableism in N. America that far outreaches the spoken kind, and the overall willingness of liberals to fund organizations that discriminate against people who are not generally associated with them (ex: funding so-called feminist agencies that don’t serve trans women or are known to have had multiple racism complaints in their history, etc) means that action comes at a great cost. Not only does it pit ability rights activists against “feminist social justice workers” but is often reduced to interpersonal conflict with “unreasonable” differently-abled women “angry” about “personal issues” getting in the way of “real” feminist social justice.

After reviewing my friend’s case, which by report of two lawyers and BOLI was “open and shut”, the legal advisers involved wondered if in fact the agency in question was well aware of the disability loophole since “the discrimination in this case is so blatant” and “they didn’t even try to cover themselves”. That question horrified me.

my question: Could supposed “feminist social justice workers” actually know the law and use it to openly defy respecting the rights and humanity of differently-abled women?

answer: Sadly, most of us on the margins need only look at our own personal histories of marginalization to find the answer.

In the state of Oregon the issue is much deeper than a single incident between the self-described “best place to work in the world” and an individual employee who lost her job offer over disability issues. In fact, disability issues and feminism in Oregon have likely seeped into your own homes and pocket books without you even realizing it. Most of you involved in trying to save feminist bookstores are well aware of the organizing to save a certain feminist bookstore in that state. On the one hand, this organizing saved the last and oldest openly feminist bookstore in one of the largest cities in the state and one of three largest cities on the West Coast. It spoke to the commitment of local and national feminist groups to the ongoing support of women’s literature, theory, and herstory, and consciousness raising that are often located in women’s bookstores. And it showed a needed alliance between feminist bookstores and feminist academics; in an effort to save the store, women’s studies professors in the area moved their book orders there and gave extra credit for student participation in events or volunteering at the store. It also represents a key win for a feminist bookstore that actually does care about transgender and gender queer issues which many feminist bookstores have failed to do on any large or consistent scale.

What did not happen in this huge outpouring of feminist activism was a discussion of the ableist past of the bookstore. You see,  the bookstore is well known amongst disability feminists on the West Coast for being unapologetic about the lack of wheel chair accessibility at their original site. The original store contained an elevated area in the back that was impossible to access by wheel chair with poor lighting that also made it questionable for people with other mobility and sight issues. Several years ago a well known disability rights feminist advocate and wheelchair user pointed this out to the leadership of the store to no avail. When she went public with their lack of response, the store rallied not around supporting feminists with disabilities but around “the need for a feminist bookstore at any cost” (including the cost of an entire group of feminists). They released PSAs and held meetings claiming that they had no money to fix the ramp issue and that it was “the plight of underfunding feminist businesses” that was the real issue, not discrimination. They failed to mention that they could have addressed the issue when they bought the store by either buying a different space or by not utilizing that small area of the store for retail space.

While a wheelchair brigade picketed outside the store, irate able-bodied feminists marched past them to buy extra books. It was a debacle that resulted in no apology from the leadership at the store or its employees and no lasting impact on their retail sales; except maybe when they went up in a show of ableist solidarity by Oregon resident feminists … Worse, through mechinations I cannot fathom, there is no online documentation of the action against the bookstore to which I can now link as if it was intentionally erased by someone with something to hide. I only know about the story because I was involved with one of the out-of-state disability feminist organizations that lent support to the original action.

In the midst of this protest, an oped piece in one of two local black owned papers, mused about how the inaccessible area of the store also housed the black feminism, multicultural feminism, and global feminism sections. Neither the able-bodied nor the differently-abled feminists involved in the conflict, most of whom were white on both sides, had bothered to think intersectionally in their attempts to rally support. In a store that was 90% accessible, well lit, with an open plan so one could see their children, the store clerks, and the various areas of the store in one glance, the woc books, with the exception of fiction, had been relegated to the one corner of the store that was poorly lit, walled in to block view of the children’s area or the front desk, and which most of the volunteer staff had no knowledge of what was housed there. Given that a whole section of the front of the store was taken up with candles, posters, and other non-book items, there was no excuse for this physical ghettoization. Where women of color and differently-abled women could have come together in protest over this shared marginalization no such activism occurred because the activists involved, primarily from Oregon and Washington, could not see past their own identities long enough to address the real systemic issues impacting the Portland based mainstream feminist movement as embodied by the bookstore. (This includes certain communities of color who saw the feminist bookstore as “irrelevant” to their issues.)

Since that conflict, said bookstore has made a point of moving into a single level building and advertising its accessibility. However, they have not acknowledged the history behind why they make sure to advertise this piece of information. While visiting my colleague, I went to the store and several things struck me about the space:

1. the stacks are still not accessible by wheelchair or crutches – while all of the books are on the same floor, the shelf spacing in one area of the store is so tight that it would be impossible to move a chair through them let alone turn around in one (I am told by a colleague in a wheelchair that the same holds true for speaking events where the seating is equally packed to tight to move through)
2. the store is located on the outer edge of gentrification – a process that in P-Land has led to a vibrant multicultural neighborhood, predominantly African-American and Latino but also including API people who have also almost all been shoved out, to become almost exclusively white with certain stores that employ people who actively frown at you or pretend you are not there even if you ask for help (this is something I’ve written about before since I visit my cousins in P-land and the surrounding area once a year); this is not the case however at the feminist bookstore
3. they chose to put the bookstore less than 5 blocks from an already established radical feminist bookstore and activist center – thus creating unnecessary competition in an already dwindling market and concentrating access to feminist books into one area of a rather large city that is only served by large chain bookstores everywhere else
4. for the most part the book selection is still dominated by white cis feminist voices, including a display of books that were actively being boycotted at one point or another during the last two summers by women of color across the feminist blogosphere, and a staff pool that is still largely white

I should note however, that

1. the new Director is a woman of color and that she comes from one of the more radical feminist organizations in the area, Sisters in Action. (UPDATE: According to a comment maker this is no longer the case; either she is mistaken or the volunteer I spoke w/ was mistaken or lying. END UPDATE)
2. I was also told by the volunteer who was working there that they also have genderqueer and woc volunteers, though she did not tell me the percentage of them nor does the website seem to indicate they exist.
3. And they have also held a series of discussions on gentrification, including a film viewing, that includes discussion about their decision-making in the move to the outskirts of gentrification grand central.
4. though the majority, if not all, of their paid staff is white all of them have highlighted books by women of color in their “staff suggestions pages”
5. they have at least one book group devoted to Mexico and Mexicana organizing

Unfortunately, for black history month, they are having a film series on Masculinities not black feminisms or black feminist interpretations of masculinities; in fact, according to the February Calender they have ABSOLUTELY NO BLACK HERSTORY EVENTS SCHEDULED WHATSOEVER. And while they have standing reading groups on queer sexualities, they have neither standing reading groups nor regular events related to disability feminism or women of color feminists or the intersection of the two. Nor do the staff suggestion pages seem to include any references to books specifically about disability feminism or authored by disability feminists. What they do have is a reference to Spanish groups offered at the store, not listed on their website or their calender, and a reference to “diversity” on every page of their website.

Sound familiar?

I’m not calling this bookstore out anymore than it needs to be; instead, I am using it as a recognizable example of a larger problem in the “liberal” “queer mecca” of Oregon and its feminist organizing vis-a-vis women of color, differently-abled women, and differently-abled women of color. It seems to me, that if in the course of 4 days, I can find two well-known and popular organizations in the same city, operating in or around the same neighborhoods, that are guilty of the same forms of discrimination while claiming to be good people and being labeled as such by social justice activists, than I have to believe that the dual issues of racism and ableism are entrenched in the city. More than that, it seems to me that the loophole in the state’s regulation of the ADA helps to encourage and normalize this behavior to the extent that feminist agencies and feminists believe they are engaged in radical social change at the same time they openly, and/or unwittingly, discriminate against differently-abled women and to a lesser extent women of color. In other words, the state sets the tone through its legal loopholes regarding discrimination against differently-abled people and its longstanding history of homogeneity and racial discrimination dating back to its first constitution barring people of color from holding office to its urban planning that intentionally leveled communities of color for freeways to its ongoing problems with supremacist organizations to its recent failures to try to intervene in gentrification. So called social justice agencies, particularly mainstream feminist ones, are simply mirroring a larger milieu rather than causing it. Where they are at fault is in failing to live up to the decolonized and/or anti-racist and anti-ableist ideals implied by social justice organizing and feminism.

After thinking about architecture, milieu, and the creation of difference, and/or the reinforcement of difference through spatial realities, in gentrification grand central, my colleagues and I went on a walking tour of our old haunts as people who currently live in Oregon or have organized in Oregon in the past (some of us, myself included, are West Coast regulars, and some of us are residents, like my colleague who prompted the trip up to Oregon). Many of the black owned businesses and fixtures are long gone, prompting me to consider writing a book about the Vanport flood, intentional racialized districting, and the rise of [white] liberal institutions that capitalized on “commitments to diversity” and/or “cultural competence” without knowing or ultimately caring about the histories behind the areas that allow them to do so. It seemed to dovetail nicely with a talk I gave about 15 years ago on the myths and realities surrounding liberal perceptions of racial histories in liberal cities that included a look at San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. While I was thinking this through, one of my colleagues shared this story:

You see [that building] over there? It used to be the oldest storage facility in a black neighborhood in the city. It housed generations of people’s working class people’s momentos dating all the way back to Vanport.

You see [that building] across the street? It’s owned by feminists who moved into the area about a year before the storage facility burned down. I’ll never forget watching the news that night while the owner stood there and said that she as glad it burned down b/c ‘it isn’t really the kind of business we want in our neighborhood’ while black elders cried in the background and smoke twisted up toward the sky. I swear, I thought this must be what it was like when they got mobs together and burned our cities to the ground.

My colleague who had lost her job because of ableist discrimination pointed to the parking lot and added:

“You see that flight of stairs?” we all nodded. “That’s the entrance to [the agency that fired her and claimed she was a threat to children b/c she was differently-abled]. If I’d been in a wheel chair I wouldn’t have even made it to the first interview.”

We stood there, dumbfounded at the intersection of racism and ableism, at the heart of a supposed feminist stomping ground, alienated and intentionally marginalized. We were silent. Silent in the face of how history repeats not only through the will of the Right but also the self-absorbed Left, their hypocrisy like a shimmering mask that phases out in the light of their gaze but never really disappears.

Later that night, when I was sitting at a friend’s house in a lesser known African American area of the city, she told me how they had just renamed her neighborhood into a catchy phrase that likely meant they were next in the grand gentrifying scheme that the Mayor of Portland, who is one of her distant neighbors, calls “amazing progress.” We sat together, feminists from so-called first, second, and third waves, [temporarily] able-bodied and differently-abled, cis and trans, queer and straight, traditionally educated and self-educated, employed and unemployed, woc and white, immigrants, indigenous, and “born here”, residents of this state, people with family here, and people just coming for the weekend impromptu get together from around the area, sharing a meal and deep conversation about the feminist work that we do.

One such story about work in Oregon involved a partnership between a largely white staffed feminist organization and a black staffed and black serving healing organization that had just culminated in an amazing black women’s healing weekend. My colleague told me about how a white lesbian director had made the black healing program a priority and saved their funding, and how both black and white feminists had come together to grow the program.

Another friend told me about a young girls group she is doing with Latina and API youth in an extremely low income area of the city. She only has a little bit of funding but the buy in by the community has led to overwhelming success in her first few weeks of work with the girls and she hopes that it will lead to ongoing cross-cultural opportunities around girls empowerment.

Still another is taking her knowledge of Russian culture and Russian feminism, and working to empower working class first and second generation Russian women in communities dominated by them on the outskirts of the city. She has recently partnered with other advocated to start doing diversity workshops and diversity centered girls groups to cut down on racial tensions between the Russian, black, and Latino communities in the area she serves and says the outpouring from feminists who work within all three of these communities has been amazing.

The stories of hard work toward decolonized feminist praxis in and outside of Oregon abounded. And I was proud to be there talking to these amazing women in and outside of academe in the same city where feminism had gone so wrong. At the same time, I noted there were no stories about local or city wide disability feminism organizing amongst my friends and there seemed to be a sense that work on disability feminism in the area was being done by the same activists from Seattle who had failed to include woc issues in their action against the feminist bookstore so many years ago. On a bright note, some felt that the mainstream queer community in P-land, which has sadly failed at diversity except at the most superficial levels, was doing work around the intersections of queer and poly sexualities and disability rights.

As we sat in the shadow of an impending gentrification, planning strategies to create more inclusive feminism in the state and encourage changes to the law that allows people in Oregon to discriminate against differently-able people, I couldn’t help but wonder about the glaring dichotomies between communities of feminists doing decolonized work and those canonized places and spaces where there is still so much work left to do. It is sadly something that is not unique to Oregon, as I pointed out similar problems in my state recently here on the blog.

I found myself left with one question: What kind of feminist are you?

Do you take time to ask about the history of an agency, organization, or “radical space”? Do you consider whether the places you frequent are accessible? Do you actively seek out ways to make your favorite places or organizations open and inviting to diverse groups beyond a simple diversity statement? When given a budget that says it will serve “women” in the following areas, do you consider which areas and which women are falling through the cracks?

And when you are called on your stuff, the way I have recently called out the state of Oregon on this blog, do you simply stop reading the blog in question as my Oregon readers did (that’s right, I had 20% Oregon readership prior to my first Want Ad post and now I have between 1 and less than 1% per day), or do you engage the criticism and make a change?

I encourage you to consider writing a Want Ad for the kind of feminism you want and use it to “interview” potential feminist “employees”, including yourself. We can build a decolonized movement but not until we actually take the time out to look at every aspect of our lives and our organizing and be accountable to the most marginalized among us instead of just to ourselves.

BHM: Vonetta Flowers

Todays black herstory post is part two of the “Do You Know” post from yesterday. You can find it there “after the fold” or click here

Next Do You Know contest will be this Sunday. Get your research skills ready!!!

Legal Help for Haitians Seeking Temporary Status in the U.S.

If you live in or around the New York area and are Haitian seeking temporary status, or know some one who is, The New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) has compiled a list of legal resources for Haitians considering Temporary Protected Status (TPS), including upcoming legal clinics for Haitians seeking TPS (both in NYC and upstate), nonprofit immigration legal service organizations and community-based organizations providing social services. The list is on the NYIC website direct link here (if that does not work try the website here and look for Haitian TPS link)

Other helpful numbers:

• Legal Aid Society has a TPS Hotline for Haitian nationals. Call: 1-888-284-2772. (info is free and includes help with paper work, referrals, and advocacy)

There has been a lot of fraud and price per service gauging of the Haitian refugee community as a result of people exploiting the recent earthquake crisis. Please pass this information along, &/or post it, so that Haitians can access their immigration amnesty without any more trauma or abuse.

BHM: Do You Know Who This Is Super Bowl Edition

Since everyone’s mind is on the Superbowl and the Winter Olympics is coming up, I thought I would do a special athletic “do you know” post for black herstory month. If you can name this person and her import to sports and black history by Monday @ 12pm EST, I will give you a $20 gift certificate from powells books (preferably to be spent on a black author of your choosing):

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Part Two (02/08/10):

Yesterdays “Do You Know” post was about Vonetta Flowers. She was a track and field athlete who switched to bobsledding in 2000. She won a gold medal on her first Olympic bid in bobsledding ever to become the first black person to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics. That means she is:

1. the first African American woman to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics
2. the first African American (regardless of gender) to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics
3. the first BLACK PERSON FROM ANY COUNTRY to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics
4. one of a handful of athletes to switch sports at the Olympic level and go on to gold

Flowers story is an inspiration because of its rural to gold, N. American dream, trajectory. She was discovered in a competition held by Coach DeWitt Thomas in the parking lot of her modest grade school. She had the fatest running time of all the other students and was recruited to learn track and field. That recruitment, along with her own drive and determination, helped give her the funding and commitment to become the first person in her family to go on to college. Her track and field scholarship ensured Flowers would not have to worry about how to pay for school.

Her college years were also marked by athletic firsts in track and field. Not only did she win over 35 conference trials in track and field but she also became:

1. the first person (of any race) to win All American seven times

Flowers first attempt at going to the Olympics was in 1996. Though she tried out, she did not make the team. When she tried out again in 2000 she was derailed by sports related surgery, the 8th in just a few short years. Instead of giving up, Flowers, spurred on by her husband, decided to switch sports. Initially going to the bobsled tryouts was Flowers way of supporting her husband, but after he pulled a hamstring muscle and could not continue, she took on the dream for both of them and brought home gold.

Flowers, and her bobsled partner Bonny Warner, were ranked 2nd in the U.S. and 3rd in the world. I’m sure this too is a first, but have not been able to confirm it.

Flowers strength and perseverance is an inspiration to women in sport. Her career proves that you can succeed in the most unlikely places and her commitment and drive, prove that you can succeed as an athlete even if you have to switch sports. Her success at the Winter Olympics also helped break the color barrier in winter sports and encourage other black athletes to consider sports traditionally dominated by white athletes and/or by men. She helped change the way that coaches and commentators talked about black athletes at the winter games and about black people’s participation in winter sports like bobsledding.

Our Contest Winner: No one made it by the deadline. Bianca, who was the first person to get the answer, has graciously suggested we have another contest. So be looking out on Sunday for another Do You Know Post.

An Open Invitation: National Level Feminist Organizing and the Super Bowl

So it’s the Super Bowl, one of the highest emergency phone call days for women’s crisis lines and E.R.s … it seems odd to me that there was more national organizing this year around the conservative “christian” advertising for the Super Bowl than there has been about the link between violence against women and super bowl weekend in at least 15 years. And it makes me wonder about the shift to “lifestyle liberalism” in feminism that makes it more hip to discuss the potential feminism of Beyonce’s latest single than to address the failure of relief agencies to consider women’s basic needs (sanitary napkins, plan b, estrogen replacement meds, etc.) to disaster zones on a regular basis. In other words, it makes me wonder when we stopped fighting to change the world and started just wanting to be comfortable in the one we already live in.

Don’t get me wrong, obviously Focus on the Family has a major impact on the rights of women and the queer community/ies around the world, but

• where is the public, national, concerted effort to block Focus on the Family lobbyists from working to deny women in developing countries access to a wide range of reproductive choices and family planning services?
• Where is the public, national, concerted effort to expose Focus on the Family’s supposition that all gay people are child predators and to mobilize anti-gay rallies and sentiment in battleground states by main stream feminists?
• Where is the concerted effort in a campaign that targets hypocrisy at CBS to hold Focus on the Family accountable and raise awareness about their local, national, and global agendas to stunt define family in ways that negatively impacts both straight and queer women, to deny repro rights around the globe, to invest in homophobic and transphobic campaigns, etc.
• How does writing songs about how much CBS sucks and putting them on youtube actually impact what Focus on the Family does or does not do? (And I love that song and that elder women did it by the way)
• How does focusing on CBS’ hypocrisy raise awareness about how much money is generated by advertising for the Super Bowl while no money is being spent on women’s safety during the event?
• How does today’s activism translate into a concerted effort to continue to confront these issues in the future?
• And does this effort, which has so much potential for intersectional feminist organizing, actually address intersections relevant to ALL of the women impacted by Focus on the Family and CBS’ hypocrisy?

So while I see this organizing as a critical part of a larger feminist movement, I wonder about its narrow focus and the ease with which we can rally at the national level against a single commercial while funding for domestic and sexual violence services are being universally cut, women’s crisis services were not budgeted for as part of the extra money funneled into Super Bowl security and EMT services, and some women’s advocates dared to pit the needs of “women” (read white floridians) against those of Haitian refugees (read black men, b/c obviously they aren’t women right? and certainly not women who experienced any kind of sexual or physical trauma), while the nation is silent.

I could go on with this guilt trip, after all it seems when I do my stats always go through the roof, but instead I’ll leave you to ponder these things and if you are so inclined to weigh in on the things you think we should have been organizing around as a national level feminist movement with a local-global focus in addition to the advertising for the Super Bowl.

BHM: Connecting Diasporic Freedoms Quilombo Country Showing to Benefit Haiti

Today’s BHM/Latinegras post is an announcement of a film showing put on by the Nuyorican Poets Cafe to benefit Haiti and the distribution of Quilombo Country.

Quilombo Country is a documentary film that looks at the modern day syncretic culture of Afro-Brazilians descended from escaped slaves who set up free black communities on the outskirts of Brazil. It blends culture expression such as music, dance, religion, and ritual with concerns about racial, economic, environmental, and human rights issues that threaten these historic Latinegra/o communities.

For those unfamiliar with the history of Quilombos, encampments of escaped slaves that tried to preserve blended African cultures in the new world, you can either read the history of the Quilombos provided on the film’s website or watch Quilombo, an experimental documentary style film that mixes creative re-telling, performance, and history to address the founding of renegade free black societies in Brazil during slavery.

Both of these films were done by male directors and feature male narrators. While they are informative, I can say that the latter does lack a critical eye for gender or female subjectivity and can only hope that Quilombo Country not only brings the narrative of Quilombos into the present but also their gender politics as well. Having not seen the Quilombo Country, I can say that I am hopeful it has done this based on the number of women who appear in the film. The film opens with women dancing as the narrative explains that this and similar dance were an act of resistance through cultural survival during slavery and the implication is that women used the dance to both retain their African cultures and to express autonomy under enslavement. When the film addresses issues of environmental degradation and urban encroachment, women speak about how new roads and cities are scaring away their livestock and leaving their families hungry. Their discussion of urbanization then highlights the roles women play in Quilombos to sustain the community, generate income, and remain self-sufficient. The director’s eye also lingers on the labor women do to harvest and prepare food, and while these shots to speak to a forced primitive view of the labor going on, it also highlights the work of women and how it comes into direct conflict with Brazilian ranchers who want their land.

The film has been criticized for being too “educational” in tone, meaning that it juxtaposes images of the people with definitions of words and maps that show where the action is taking place, or digitally imposed explanations of the rituals on the screen rather than allowing the narrative to run smoothly. On the one hand, I think this gives people who have no knowledge about these critical free black, Latinegras/os societies, an opportunity to learn it may also hinder their willingness to see this film as anything other than a high school teaching tool.

The other major critical complaint about the film is its juxtaposition of Quilombos with the rest of Brazilian society as primitive or stuck in time vs. modernity. While the goal of the Director was to create the sense of continuity between the African past and the Latinegra/o present, the traditional vs. modern narrative style comes riddled with embedded hierarchies and erasures that do not lend themselves to honoring any people placed in the “tradition” side.  The Director does make sure to interview both women and men from Quilombos on both sides of that divides; a particularly poignant moment occurs when a young woman who has left the Quilombo discusses how the hard work women do inside them nearly killed her grandmother and how she decided modern conveniences outweigh the cultural comraderie she felt in the Quilombos as a result.

The director, Leonard Abrams, will be on hand to discuss the making of the movie and its import to understanding the black diaspora. The Nuyorican is also donating a portion of the proceeds to Haitian Relief, drawing the critical connection between the freedom Quilombo communities represented for enslaved black people in Latin America and what Haiti meant for them in both Spanish and French colonies and ultimately to the entire diaspora.

When: Feb 14

Where: Nuyorican Poets Cafe, NYC

Cost: $12 ($1 goes to Haitian relief or you can donate more)

BHM: Strengthening Our Communities Aud M. L Secard

Aud M. L. Secard was born in Haiti and moved to Chicago in 1977. In 1991, she became the first Haitian woman to own her own boutique through the Ford Foundation economic development grants. Fifi’s Boutique catered to the desires and homesickness of the Haitian immigrant community, a community that Secard has been deeply committed to serving since arriving in the U.S. In 1982, she joined the Haitian American Benevolent Association to help newly arrived Haitian immigrants buy homes and become economically viable and she also worked as a mentor and guide to young Haitian and Haitian-American children. She also helped found the Haitian American Grassroots Coalition which was instrumental in passing the Haitian Immigration Fairness Act. And she worked as a liaison with FL Police Department to curb anti-Haitian profiling and harassment of Haitian women.

She has also been a critical force in local and national politics in support of Haitian American rights, particularly Haitian American women and children. In 1994, she interned with Congresswoman Meeks working on both immigration and women’s issues. A few years earlier she founded and was president of Women Alliance of Miami-Dade & Broward. The Women’s Alliance focused on the rights of Haitian immigrant women and children, with a particular focus on health issues. She also published an award winning essay about edler women’s access to health care and how elder Haitian women immigrants are among the highest groups being ignored in the Fl health system.

Thus her work draws attention to women and girls across the age range in the hopes of supporting Haitian and Haitian American women’s rights and supporting the Haitian diasporic community. She has received numerous awards for her work with women as well, including from: The Commission on the Status of Women in Miami, County Commission on Immigration Advocacy, the Haitian Organization of Women, etc. As well as winning the Women of Impact Award and the Women of Distinction Award.

She is currently working to raise awareness about the health and safety needs of women and girls in the Haitian crisis and advocating for new immigrants displaced by the earthquake.

BHM: Marisa Richmond – Rocking the Intersections

In 2008, Dr. Marisa Richmond made herstory as the first trans woman to win an election in the state of Tennessee. Though some have disparaged her win of 99.7% because she ran unopposed, they are ignoring the massive election based movements around the country designed to shove queer people out of politics. Dr. Richmond’s candidacy was so solid in her district that no such concerted opposition led to an oppositional candidate on the ballot. In fact, only 6 people who cast a named vote in her district voted for someone else. Her overwhelming win thus tell us a story of powerful success against an increasingly hostile national political climate.

Dr. Richmond is also the first black trans woman to be elected a delegate to a major party convention from any state in the union. She worked tirelessly to ensure increased representation of queer people at the DNC in 2008 and specifically requested that more trans people were included in the Democratic Party and its representation at the DNC and other critical caucuses. She was also an active participant in the Women’s Caucus there advocating for women’s rights. (You can read more about her impressions of the DNC in a 5 part post here – brief discussion of immigrant rights, black caucus and LGBTQ caucus meetings, here – some discussion of women’s safety at the DNC and her response to both anti-Obama hecklers and “get over it” anti-Clinton delegates, here – where she talks specifically about creating an impromptu trans women’s caucus on the DNC floor, here, and here- where she talks about the Women’s Caucus and Michelle Obama)

She has also worked tirelessly to ensure transgender equality, and equality between white and poc transgender people, in TN. As such she is President of the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition and served on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Equality Project & Board of Advisors of National Center for Transgender Equality. she was also a Board member of the Nashville’s Rainbow Community Center, helping to provide leadership, publicity, and critical funding for the now defunct queer hub. Her work on the planning committee of Nashville’s Black Pride 2004 also represented a critical intervention into the whiteness of Pride events and the dominance of gay and lesbian people in leadership positions for Pride events in general.

Her work has also had an important impact on education and social discourse. She served on the Boards of American Educational Gender Information Service and the International Foundation for Gender Education working to create and support gender inclusive education at the local, national, and international levels. In 2008, she started a column for the Triangle Journal News in Memphis, an area with one of the highest rates of murder of black trans women in the nation. Like her participation in Pride, her column helped serve the dual purpose of re-inserting black and trans identities into the queer alphabet for readers. Since the column is also written in Memphis is gives voice to the plight of black trans women in the area and hopefully helps to humanize black trans women in the eyes of those who are systematically killing them and the people (both in the community and in law enforcement) who are doing nothing to stop it. When the Triangle Journal News made the decision to stop print circulation, Dr. Richmond began contributing to Out and About Today, a feature on local news.

Dr. Richmond’s tireless work to create and sustain transgender communities and equality for transgender people is an important part of black herstory. Not only has she participated in milestones in both trans and black history but has taken on the sometimes difficult task of representing black people in the queer and straight communities, trans people in the queer and straight communities, trans women and trans women of color in the trans community, and black trans people in these same spaces. More than just working on representation, she has been a strong advocate and activist for multicultural trans inclusion in education, media, government, etc.

As a black woman representing her district in local, state, and national politics she also increased the visibility and inclusion of black women’s perspectives and leadership in our government. She works actively on women’s and feminist issues at the national level as well. She was a Clinton delegate, hoping to support female leadership at the highest level of office and a strong Obama supporter. She has offered women’s and gender analysis at the structural and personal level throughout her career. And she is able to talk about “women’s issues” while actively resisting the mainstream urge to reduce those issues to white, straight, able-bodied concerns. Her ability to move across intersections from a feminist perspective is invaluable to women’s equality.

BHM: Josefina Baez and the Power of the Play

Josefina Baez is an Afra-Latina Dominican performance artist whose works revolves around the intersections of race, gender, sprirituality, class, and immmigration. In her most famous work, Domicanish, she explores the meaning of blackness in a Dominican and Dominican diasporic context through an examination of words, sights, and sounds. She also engages in shared storytelling as part of her performance process, using a grassroots method of meeting women in their homes and engaging in creative process together for a project she calls apartarte/casarte. She also engages in active street theater to encourage discussion of identity and creativity.

Excerpt from Dominicanish Performance

In 1986, she started the Latinarte/Ay Ombe Theatre troupe which draws attention to mixed media and performance art by Latinegras/os. It has been a critical space for black Latin@s workshopping their work and trying to reach new audiences. Like Baez’s own work Ay Ombe offers creative arts through alternative spirituality frameworks that focus on women, blackness, immigration, etc. Their missionis both healing and global in nature while still thoroughly grounded in the Latinegra/o experience:

Baez also works relentlessly at decolonizing major forms of creativity and knowledge. In art, she eschews distinctions between “high” and “low” art and “art” and “ethnic art.” She incorporates spirituality and street performance to encourage art as woc feminist praxis, healing, engaging, and always questioning.  Despite having the opportunity to teach at the university level, she teaches in high school and middle schools regularly to ensure the message of art as self-expression and knowing reaches the widest audience. Understanding that performance and art is often out of the reach of the very working class people she engages, she performs in poor areas in the U.S. and the Dominican Republic and also offers workshops on a sliding scale. Besides engaging people on the street and in the classroom, Josefina also operates a listserv that keeps people abreast of the work of Latinegras/os. And she is also always available for conversations about her work and her process to encourage the next generation of Afra-Latina artists to reach their dreams.

She has self-published two books in order to keep costs down for readers and make connections with people looking to buy her work. Those books are: Dominicanish, a non-linear poetry-play about identity, and Bliss Ain’t Playin‘, a collection of her poetry on women, race, immigration, and identity.

you can read reviews of  her work here