Thinking Black: Black Womanhood and the Protection of the Community
Thinking Black is a Black UK-based community organisation focused on equipping and empowering a new generation of young Black student voices. Every year they run their annual Afro-Caribbean Tyler Essay Prize for Black state-school students aged 11-18 and select a winner. In collaboration, Onyx agreed to publish the winning essay and is proud to present the 2021 winner Rebekah Forte’s essay response below.
Q: “Black women are the pillars of the community but rarely the leaders.”
A:
Black women have always been an integral part of the fight for Black liberation, as leaders and pillars of the Black community. Their role as “pillars'' has been defined by their intrinsic nurturance, consistency and reliability. Time and time again, they have been willing to work the hardest in social movements to end racial injustices. Yet history has shown the efforts of Black women have been intentionally and subconsciously downplayed by the wider Black community.
The unfair disparity between Black men and women leaders is not due to Black women’s inability to lead, as there have been exceptions of Black women leaders such as Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti and Claudia Jones who have assumed power within their local and national communities, and I will first explore the meaningful impact they have made. Secondly, I will argue that Black women’s exclusion from leadership roles has been due to misogynoir and Eurocentric standards. Finally, I will focus on the damaging stereotypes of Black women throughout history that have held Black women in “pillar” positions.
Black women have always been natural leaders and organisers in the community throughout history and were willing to stand up for the community as leaders. Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti is one of the many Black women in the 20th century who took up the leadership mantle and fought for the rights of Nigerian women. Kuti’s protests were concentrated on the unfair taxes imposed on small traders, who were mostly women. After initiating the blockade of the ruling Alake’s palace (Yoruba King) in 1947, Kuti with the support of her husband and other men, she was able to force the Alake to halt the taxation of women traders before going into exile (Agunbiade, 2020). Ransome-Kuti strategically balanced men's influence as a platform to discuss Nigerian women’s rights but also utilised her unrelenting voice in her local village, and across Nigeria, to prove that she was capable of challenging injustices against women.
The 1950s and 60s were a time of racial discrimination against the Black community in Britain, propelling Black women further into activist and leadership positions. One of the leading women trailblazers was Claudia Jones; the founder of the first Black British newspaper and Notting Hill Carnival. Her fight was not against colonial powers like Ransome-Kuti, but against the formidable struggle of individual and systemic racism in Britain.
Claudia Jones
Jones’ first feat was launching the West Indian Gazette in 1958, the first Black newspaper in Britain. The purpose of the Gazette was to provide the Black community with a safe outlet to share their experiences of racism. With the escalation of violence against the Black community in the 1958 Notting Hill and Nottingham riots, and the subsequent racially-motivated murder of Kelso Cochrane, Jones successfully organised, ‘Claudia’s Caribbean Carnival’ in January 1959 (Mohammed, 2020). This was the first celebration of Afro-Caribbean culture and heritage in Britain as a way to unify a broken people. It later became known as the renowned Notting Hill Carnival, which is still celebrated today, proving that the revolutionary legacy of Claudia Jones remains.
Ransome-Kuti and Claudia Jones are both women who embodied exemplary Black leadership across two different times and nations, however, their achievements have not been historically recognised by their communities, and it is only recently that they have been acknowledged as leaders and activists. Ransome-Kuti only gained initial appreciation from her local community- in Abeokuta, whilst many are oblivious of the role Claudia Jones played as the visionary founding mother of the Notting Hill Carnival. Arguably Black women achieve more than they are given credit for and their efforts are constantly downplayed by the wider Black community.
Thus far I have explored the histories of Black women considered to be leaders within the Black community but who are also the exceptions and not the rule. Arguably the definition of what defines Black women as the leaders of social movements has been set by white men. In 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to move from the white seating area of a Montgomery Bus Boycott, she became the face of the Civil Rights movement. Her act of defiance led to the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott which resulted in the end of racial segregation in US public transport (Henry Ford, no date). Her resistance became the catalyst that birthed the Civil Rights movement and resulted in greater freedoms for Black Americans than Parks’ predecessors. Although the success of Parks’ action is undeniable, it is evident that the key reason why she was able to represent Black rights was because she was perceived as possessing qualities that fit the Eurocentric mould of how acceptable contributions of Black women were measured. For instance, Parks was married, middle-aged and of a fair complexion– the skin tone that people associated with the Black middle class (Hoose, 2009).
Claudette Colvin
This contrasts with the experience of Claudette Colvin who underwent a similar experience to Park nine months earlier, where she also refused to give up her seat. However, Colvin was a pregnant teenager with a darker complexion, therefore her unequal treatment was not given the same platform as Parks (Hoose, 2009). Black women were not given the opportunities to succeed as leaders in the 1960s in the US as men who led Black social movements would succumb to the demands of white people for a sanitised version of activism and leadership. “They [White men] may allow us to temporarily beat them at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (Lorde, 1984, p.4). As long as the Black community overlooks the fact that white men are the gatekeepers of leadership within the Black community, Black women will always be confined to “pillar” positions. Even Parks’ rebellious activism has been white-washed and exchanged for the “meek seamstress” (Theoharis, 2015). Lorde believed that Black women are treated as tokens and this is true for the rare minority of Black women in the US who became “leaders” in outlook, but conformed to white patriarchal standards and were still relegated to pillar positions in their work.
I have explored the Eurocentric mould that dictates which Black women are accepted as leaders. But what else keeps Black women from breaking out of the pillar position that society has enforced on them? Initially, the word pillar connoted support, importance and worth; Black women are essential in the composition of the Black community. However, over time Black women’s identification as “pillar” has unconsciously transformed into the pejorative word, “backbone”. This erasure of Black women's vulnerability can be traced to the 19th century during James Sim’s dehumanizing gynaecology experiments on enslaved Black women, which was justified by the racist idea that Black people did not feel pain (Holland, 2018). Since then, damaging white perceptions of Black womanhood have been perpetuated, from the dark-skinned subservient mammy caricature to the hyper-sexual Jezebel (Green, 1998-99). Both ideas contributed to the creation of the “Strong Black Woman”, a Black trope that depicts Black women as superhuman, fearless, self-sacrificing and maternal. The Strong Black Woman appears to empower Black women after years of subjugation, but in reality, the trope “crafts an expectation that [Black women] should be autonomously responsible and self-denying caregivers in their home and communities,” (Perry, 2011). Dehumanising caricatures of Black women have been a force that has historically pushed Black women into homogenised “backbone” positions.
The current position of Black women within the Black community is as the pillar. With the exception of a growing number of Black women who are challenging this way of thinking through their revolutionary contributions – such as the women noted earlier in this essay, most Black women gone before may never attain the traditional level of leadership that has been recognised with Black men. This is due to the fact that Black women are positioned as pawns in a system that has been set up against them. For every Black woman accepted by society as a leader, there are hundreds whose work has been undermined by the Black community and society at large. For change to take place, society must begin self-evaluation, realising that there are multiple facets to the identity of Black Women; they are not infallible or fearless and the weight of the community should not be on their shoulders. Idolising the few Black women who have made it into global leadership positions is counterproductive, and in order to strive forward, Black women must look to women's spheres of influence who don’t conform to the Eurocentric mould of leadership.
Reinventing the status quo of historical leadership begins at the grassroots level of education, therefore local women educators including Black head teachers or health care professionals should be promoted in all sectors of the community to provide safe spaces for Black women’s leadership skills and contributions to be cultivated. Positive progression from within these fields are important to instill appreciation and value into the next generation of young Black girls. If the Black community fails to change and passes the mantle of “pillar” onto the next unprotected young Black girl, we could be witnessing the modern self-disintegration of the Black community.
You can find out more about the work that Thinking Black delivers here.
Reference List:
Agunbiade T. (2020, October 1). Remembering Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti: Nigeria’s ‘lioness of Lisabi’. Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/10/1/the-lioness-of-lisabi-who-ended-unfair-taxes-for-nigerian-women
Mohammed, S. (2020, July 25). Marxist, Feminist, Revolutionary: Remembering Notting Hill Carnival Founder Claudia Jones. Retrieved from
https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/claudia-jones-notting-hill-carnival
Bryan, B. Dadzie, S. Scafe, S. 1985. The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain, Virago Press
Theoharis, J. (2015, December 1). How History got the Rosa Parks Story Wrong. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/01/how-history-got-the-rosa-parks-story-wrong/
The Henry Ford.(no date). Rosa Parks: What If I Don’t Move To The Back Of The Bus
https://www.thehenryford.org/explore/stories-of-innovation/what-if/rosa-parks/
Hoose, P. (2009, March 15). Before Rosa Parks There Was Claudette Colvin. Retrieved from
Ross, J. (2015, December 1). Rosa Parks is the name you know. Claudette Colvin is a name you probably should. Retrieved from
Green, L. (1998-99) Negative Racial Stereotypes and Their Effect on Attitudes Toward African-Americans. Retrieved from
https://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/links/essays/vcu.htm
Video: The Strong Black Woman Trope, Explained.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSjs_pm8MZk
Holland, B. (2017, August 29). The ‘Father of Modern Gynecology’ Performed Shocking Experiments on Enslaved Women. Retrieved from
Perry M. 2011. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Yale University Press