GloriaAnzaldjaBorderlandst3b&ñfltSecond EditionIRA.docx

GloriaAnzaldja
Borderlands
t3b&ñflt
Second Edition
IRA J. TAYLOR LtBRNy
THE 1L1FF SCHOOL OF ThEOLOGY
DNVER.
CU%RApçtint ute 00
Copyright (c) 1987, 1999 by Gloria Anzaidüa
Copyright (c) 1999 by Karin Ikas
Mi rights reserved
Second Edition
10-9-8-
Aunt Lute Books
P0. Box 410687
San Francisco, CA 94141
Holy ReLics” first appeared in Conditions Six, 1980.
“Cervicide” first appeared in Labyris, A Feminist Arts Journal,
Vol. 4,
No. 11, Winter 1983.
“En ci nombre tie todas las madres que ban perdido sus hifvs en
Ia guerra”

first appeared in IKON: Creativity and Change, Second Series,
No. 4, 1985.
First Edition Cover and Text Design: Pamela Wilson Design
Studio
Second Edition Cover Re-Design: Kajun Design
first Edition Cover Art: Pamela Wilson (Ehécall, The Wind)
Second Edition Typesetting: Kathleen Wilkinson
Senior Editor: Joan Pinkvoss
Managing Editor: Shay Brawn
Production, Second Edition: Emma Bianchi, Corey Cohen, Gina
GemeLlo,
Shahara Godfrey, Golda Sargento, Pimpila Thanaporn
Production, first Edition: Cindy Cleary, Martha Davis, Debra
DeBondt,
Rosana Francescato, Amelia Gonzalez, Lorraine Grassano,
Ambrosia Marvin,
Papusa Molina, SukeyWilder, Kathleen Wilkinson
Printed in the U.S.A.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anzaldtia, Gloria.
Borderlands : the new mestiza = La frontera / Gloria Anzaldba
introduction by Sonia SaldIvar-Hult. -- 2nd ed.
p. 264 cm.
EngLish and Spanish.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-i 3: 978-1-879960-56-5 (paper) -- ISBN-b: 1-879960-56-7
(paper)
1. Mexican-American Border Region--Poetry. 2. Mexican-

American
women--Poetry. 3. Mexican-American Border Region--
Civilization.
I. Title. II. Title: Frontera.
PS3551.N95B6 1999
811’ .54——dc2l
With an introduction by Sonia SaldIvar-Hull
99-22546
CIP
7
La conciencia de la mestiza
Towards a New Consciousness
For Ia mujer de ml raza
habtará et espIritu.1
José Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher, envisaged una raza
mestiza, una mezcta de razas afines, una raza de color—ta
primera raza sIntesis del gtobo. He called it a cosmic race, ta
raza casmica, a fifth race embracing the four major races of the
world.2 Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the pol
icy of racial purity that white America practices, his theory is
one
of inclusivity. At the confluence of two or more genetic
streams,
with chromosomes constantly “crossing over,” this mixture of
races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid
progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene
pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross

poffinization, an “alien” consciousness is presently in the mak
ing—a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencla de mujer It
is a consciousness of the Borderlands.
Una lucha de fronteras I A Struggle of Borders
Because I, a mestiza,
continually walk out of one culture
and into another,
because I am in all cultures at the same time,
alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,
me zumba la cabeza con to confradictorio.
Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me habtan
simuttáneamen te.
101100
La conciencia tie Ia mestiza /Towards a New Consciousness
The ambivalence from the clash of voices results in mental
and emotional states of perplexity. InternaL strife results in inse
curity and indecisiveness. The mestiza’s dual or multiple per
sonality is plagued by psychic restlessness.
In a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word
meaning torn between ways, ta mestiza is a product of the trans
fer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another.
Being tricultural, monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual, speak
ing a patois, and in a state of perpetual transition, the mestiza
faces the dilemma of the mixed breed: which collectivity does
the daughter of a darksldnned mother listen to?

Et choque tie un alma atrapado entre et mundo del
espfritu y et mundo tie la técnica a veces ta deja entuttada.
Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, strad
dling all three cultures and their value systems, Ia mestiza under
goes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war.
Like
all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture
communicates. Like others having or living in more than one
cul
ture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming
together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible
frames of reference3 causes un choque, a cultural collision.
Within us and within ta cuttura chicana, commonly held
beliefs of the white culture attack commonly held beliefs of the
Mexican culture, and both attack commonly held beliefs of the
indigenous culture. Subconsciously, we see an attack on our
selves and our beliefs as a threat and we attempt to block with a
counterstance.
But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank,
shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions.
A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and
oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the crimi
nal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence. The
counterstance refutes the dominant culture’s views and beliefs,
and, for this, it is proudly defiant. MI reaction is limited by, and
dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counter-
stance stems from a problem with authority—outer as well as
inner—it’s a step towards liberation from cultural domination.
But it is not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a new
consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split
between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we
are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and
La conciencia tie la mestiza /Towards a New Consciousness

eagle eyes. Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the
dominant culture, write it off altogether as a lost cause, and
cross
the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we
might
go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide
to act and not react.
A Tolerance For Ambiguity
These numerous possibilities leave Ia mestiza floundering in
uncharted seas. In perceiving conflicting information and points
of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological
bor
ders. She has discovered that she can’t hold concepts or ideas in
rigid boundaries. The borders and walls that are supposed to
keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and pat
terns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy with
in. Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible is she able
to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza con
stantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent
thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to
move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent think
ing,4 characterized by movement away from set patterns and
goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes
rather than excludes.
The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for con
tradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian
in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view.
She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she
operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good
the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not
only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence
into something else.

She can be jarred out of ambivalence by an intense, and
often painful, emotional event which inverts or resolves the
ambivalence. I’m not sure exactly how. The work takes place
underground—subconsciously. It is work that the soul performs.
That focal point or fulcrum, that juncture where the mestiza
stands, is where phenomena tend to collide. It is where the pos
sibility of uniting all that is separate occurs. This assembly is
not
one where severed or separated pieces merely come together.
Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In attempting to work
out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is
102 103
La conciencia tie Ia mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness
greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a
new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness—and though ft is
a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual cre
ative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of
each
new paradigm.
En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mes
tiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of para
digms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By
creating a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive
reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave—ta
mestiza creates a new consciousness.
The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the
subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in
the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is tran
scended. The answer to the problem between the white race and

the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split
that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture,
our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic
thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the
beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best
hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.
Lu encrucijada I The Crossroads
A chicken is being sacrificed
at a crossroads, a simple mound of earth
a mud shrine for Eshu,
Yoruba god of indeterminacy,
who blesses her choice of path.
She begins her journey.
Su cuerpo es una bocacatte. La mestiza has gone from
being the sacrificial goat to becoming the officiating priestess
at
the crossroads.
As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out;
yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or
potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people dis
claim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in
all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge
the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo
La conciencia tie Ia mestiza /Iowards a New Consciousness
Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participat
ing in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain
the world and our participation in it, a new value system with
images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the

planet. Soy un arnasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of unit
ing and joining that not only has produced both a creature of
darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that
questions
the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.
We are the people who leap in the dark, we are the people
on the knees of the gods. In our very flesh, (r)evolution works
out the clash of cultures. It makes us crazy constantly, but if the
center holds, we’ve made some kind of evolutionary step for
ward. Nuestra alma et trabajo, the opus, the great alchemical
work; spiritual mestizaje, a “morphogenesis,”5 an inevitable
unfolding. We have become the quickening serpent movement.
Indigenous like corn, like corn, the mestiza is a product of
crossbreeding, designed for preservation under a variety of con
ditions. Like an ear of corn—a female seed-bearing organ—the
mestiza is tenacious, tightly wrapped in the husks of her
culture.
Like kernels she clings to the cob; with thick stalks and strong
brace roots, she holds tight to the earth—she will survive the
crossroads.
Lavando y remojando et maIz en agua tie cal, despojando
etpellejo. Moliendo, mixteando, amasando, haciendo tortillas tie
masa.6 She steeps the corn in lime, it swells, softens. With
stone
roller on metate, she grinds the corn, then grinds again. She
kneads and moulds the dough, pats the round balls into tortillas.
We are the porous rock in the stone metate
squatting on the ground.
We are the rolling pin, et maIzy agua,
Ia masa barina. Somos el amasijo.
Somos to molido en et metate.
We are the comat sizzling hot,

the hot tortilla, the hungry mouth.
We are the coarse rock.
We are the grinding motion,
the mixed potion, somos et molcajete.
We are the pestle, the comino, ajo, pimienta,
104 105
La conciencia tie Ia mestiza / Towards a New ConsciousnessLa
conciencia tie Ia mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness
We are the chile colorado,
the green shoot that cracks the rock.
We will abide.
El camino de Ia mestiza I The Mestiza Way
Caught between the sudden contraction, the breath
sucked in and the endless space, the brown woman stands
still, looks at the sky. She decides to go down, digging her
way along the roots of trees. Sifting through the bones, she
shakes them to see if there is any marrow in them. Then,
touching the dirt to her forehead, to her tongue, she takes a
few bones, leaves the rest in their burial place.
She goes through her backpack, keeps her journal and
address book, throws away the muni-bart metromaps. The
coins are heavy and they go next, then the greenbacks flut
ter through the air. She keeps her knife, can opener and eye
brow pencil. She puts bones, pieces of bark, hierbas, eagle
feather, snakesldn, tape recorder, the rattle and drum in her
pack and she sets out to become the complete tolteca.
Her first step is to take inventory. Despojando, desgranan
do, quitando paja. Just what did she inherit from her ancestors?

This weight on her back—which is the baggage from the Indian
mother, which the baggage from the Spanish father, which the
baggage from the Anglo?
Pero es difIcit differentiating between to beredado, lo
adquirido, to impuesto. She puts history through a sieve,
winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as
women, have been a part of. Luego bota lo que no vale, los
desmientos, los desencuentos, et embrutecimiento. Aguarda el
juicio, hondo y enraIzado, tie ta gente antigua. This step is a
conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures
and religions. She communicates that rupture, documents the
struggle. She reinterprets history and, using new symbols,
she shapes new myths. She adopts new perspectives toward
the darkskinned, women and queers. She strengthens her toler
ance (and intolerance) for ambiguity. She is willing to share, to
make herself vulnerable to foreign ways of seeing and thinking.
She surrenders all notions of safety, of the familiar.
Deconstruct,
construct. She becomes a nahual, able to transform herself into
a tree, a coyote, into another person. She learns to transform the
small “I” into the total Self. Se hace rnotdeadora tie su atma.
Segzin ta concepcion que tiene tie SI misma, asi será.
Que no se nos otviden los hombres
“Tti no sirves pa’ nada—
you’re good for nothing.
Erespura vieja.”
“You’re nothing but a woman” means you are defective Its
opposite is to be un macho. The modern meaning of the word
“machismo,” as well as the concept, is actually an Anglo inven
tion. for men like my father, being “macho” meant being strong
enough to protect and support my mother and us, yet being able

to show love. Today’s macho has doubts about his ability to
feed
and protect his family. His “machismo” is an adaptation to
oppres
sion and poverty and low self-esteem. It is the result of
hierarchical male dominance. The Anglo, feeling inadequate and
inferior and powerless, displaces or transfers these feelings to
the
Chicano by shaming him. In the Grmgo world, the Chicano suf
fers from excessive humility and self-effacement, shame of self
and self-deprecation. Around Latinos he suffers from a sense of
language inadequacy and its accompanying discomfort; with
Native Americans he suffers from a racial amnesia which
ignores
our common blood, and from guilt because the Spanish part of
him took their land and oppressed them. He has an excessive
compensatory hubris when around Mexicans from the other
side. It overlays a deep sense of racial shame.
The loss of a sense of dignity and respect in the macho
breeds a false machismo which leads him to put down women
and even to brutalize them. Coexisting with his sexist behavior
is a love for the mother which takes precedence over that of all
others. Devoted son, macho pig. To wash down the shame of his
acts, of his very being, and to handle the brute in the mirror, he
takes to the bottle, the snort, the needle, and the fist.
Though we uunderstand the root causes of male hatred and
fear, and the subsequent wounding of women, we do not excuse,
we do not condone, and we will no longer put up with it. from
106 107
La conciencia tie ta mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness

the men of our race, we demand the admission/acknowledg
ment/disclosure/testimony that they wound us, violate us, are
afraid of us and of our power. We need them to say they will
begin to eliminate their hurtful put-down ways. But more than
the words, we demand acts. We say to them: We will develop
equal power with you and those who have shamed us.
It is imperative that mestizas support each other in chang
mg the sexist elements in the Mexican-Indian culture. As long
as
woman is put down, the Indian and the Black in all of us is put
down. The struggle of the mestiza is above all a feminist one.
As
long as los hombres think they have to chingar mujeres and each
other to be men, as long as men are taught that they are superi
or and therefore culturally favored over ta rnuje as long as to be
a vieja is a thing of derision, there can be no real healing of our
psyches. We’re halfway there—we have such love of the
Mother,
the good mother. The first step is to unlearn the puta/virgen
dichotomy and to see Coatlalopeub-Coatticue in the Mother,
Guadalupe.
Tenderness, a sign of vulnerability, is so feared that it is
showered on women with verbal abuse and blows. Men, even
more than women, are fettered to gender roles. Women at least
have had the guts to break out of bondage. Only gay men have
had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them
and to challenge the current masculinity. I’ve encountered a few
scattered and isolated gentle straight men, the beginnings of a
new breed, but they are confused, and entangled with sexist
behaviors that they have not been able to eradicate. We need a
new masculinity and the new man needs a movement.
Lumping the males who deviate from the general norm with
man, the oppressor, is a gross injustice. Asombra pensar que

nos hernos quedado en esepozo oscuro donde et rnundo encier
ra a las tesbianas. Asombra pensar que hernos, corno
fernenistas y lesbianas, cerrado nuestros corazónes a los horn
bres, a nuestros hernranos tosjotos, desheredados y ;narginales
corno nosotros. Being the supreme crossers of cultures, homo
sexuals have strong bonds with the queer white, Black, Asian,
Native American, Latino, and with the queer in Italy, Australia
and the rest of the planet. We come from all colors, all classes,
all races, all time periods. Our role is to link people with each
other—the Blacks with Jews with Indians with Asians with
La conciencja tie Ia mestiza /Towards a New Consciousness
whites with extraterrestrjals. It is to transfer ideas and informa
tion from one culture to another. Colored homosexuals have
more knowledge of other cultures; have always been at the fore
front (although sometimes in the closet) of all liberation
struggles
in this country; have suffered more injustices and have survived
them despite all odds. Chicanos need to acknowledge the politi
cal and artistic contributions of their queer. People, listen to
what your joterla is saying.
The mestizo and the queer exist at this time and point on the
evolutionary continuum for a purpose. We are a blending that
proves that all blood is intricately woven together, and that we
are spawned out of similar souls.
Sornos una gente
Hay tantIsirnas fronteras
que dividen a ta gente,
pero por cadafrontera
existe tarnbién un puente.
—Gina Valdés7

Divided Loyalties. Many women and men of color do not
want to have any dealings with white people. It takes too much
time and energy to explain to the downwardly mobile, white
middle-class women that it’s okay for us to want to own “posses
sions,” never having had any nice furniture on our dirt floors or
“luxuries” like washing machines. Many feel that whites should
help their own people rid themselves of face hatred and fear
first. I, for one, choose to use some of my energy to serve as
mediator. I think we need to allow whites to be our allies.
Through our literature, art, corridos, and folktales we must
share
our history with them so when they set up committees to help
Big Mountain Navajos or the Chicano farmworkers or los
Nicaraguenses they won’t turn people away because of their
racial fears and ignorances. They will come to see that they are
not helping us but following our lead.
Individually, but also as a racial entity, we need to voice our
needs. We need to say to white society: We need you to accept
the fact that Chicanos are different, to acknowledge your rejec
tion and negation of us. We need you to own the fact that you
looked upon us as less than human, that you stole our lands, our
108 109
La conciencia tie Ia inestiza / Towards a New Consciousness
personhood, our self-respect. We need you to make public resti
tution: to say that, to compensate for your own sense of defec
tiveness, you strive for power over us, you erase our history and
our experience because it makes you feel guilty—you’d rather
forget your brutish acts. To say you’ve split yourself from
minor
ity groups, that you disown us, that your dual consciousness

splits off parts of yourself, transferring the “negative” parts
onto
us. (Where there is persecution of minorities, there is shadow
projection. Where there is violence and war, there is repression
of shadow.) To say that you are afraid of us, that to put distance
between us, you wear the mask of contempt. Admit that Mexico
is your double, that she exists in the shadow of this country,
that
we are irrevocably tied to her. Gringo, accept the doppelganger
in your psyche. By taking back your collective shadow the intra
cultural split will heal. And finally, tell us what you need from
us.
By Your True faces We Wifi Know You
I am visible—see this Indian face—yet I am invisible. I both
blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I
exist, we exist. They’d like to think I have melted in the pot.
But
I haven’t, we haven’t.
The dominant white culture is killing us slowly with its igno
rance. By taking away our self-determination, it has made us
weak and empty. As a people we have resisted and we have
taken
expedient positions, but we have never been allowed to develop
unencumbered—we have never been allowed to be fully our
selves. The whites in power want us people of color to barricade
ourselves behind our separate tribal walls so they can pick us
off
one at a time with their hidden weapons; so they can whitewash
and distort history. Ignorance splits people, creates prejudices.
A misinformed people is a subjugated people.
Before the Chicano and the undocumented worker and the
Mexican from the other side can come together, before the

Chicano can have unity with Native Americans and other
groups,
we need to know the history of their struggle and they need to
know ours. Our mothers, our sisters and brothers, the guys who
hang out on street corners, the children in the playgrounds, each
of us must know our Indian lineage, our afro-mestizaje, our his
tory of resistance.
La conciencia tie ta mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness
To the immigrant mexicano and the recent arrivals we must
teach our history. The 80 million mexicanos and the Latinos
from Central and South America must know of our struggles.
Each one of us must know basic facts about Nicaragua, Chile
and
the rest of Latin America. The Latinoist movement (Chicanos,
Puerto Ricans, Cubans and other Spanish-speaking people work
ing together to combat racial discrimination in the marketplace)
is good but it is not enough. Other than a common culture we
will have nothing to hold us together. We need to meet on a
broader communal ground.
The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian,
mojado, ;nexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working
class Anglo, Black, Asian—our psyches resemble the
bordertowns
and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always
been inner, and is played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of
our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn
come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real”
world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.
El dIa de La Chicana
I will not be shamed again
Nor will I shame myself.

I am possessed by a vision: that we Chicanas and Chicanos
have taken back or uncovered our true faces, our dignity and
self-
respect. It’s a validation vision.
Seeing the Chicana anew in light of her history. I seek an
exoneration, a seeing through the fictions of white supremacy, a
seeing of ourselves in our true guises and not as the false racial
personality that has been given to us and that we have given to
ourselves. I seek our woman’s face, our true features, the posi
tive and the negative seen clearly, free of the tainted biases of
male dominance. I seek new images of identity, new beliefs
about ourselves, our humanity and worth no longer in question.
Estarnos viviendo en ta noche tie ta Raza, un tiempo cuan
do et trabajo se bace a to quieto, en lo oscuro. El dIa cuando
aceptamos taty corno Somosypara donde vamosyporque—ese
dia serd el dIa tie ta Raza. Yo tengo et conprorniso tie expresar
110 111
La conciencia de Ia mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness La
conciencia de Ia mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness
mi vision, ml sensibitidad, mlpercepciOn de ta revatidaciOn de
ta
gente mexicana, su mérito, esttmación, honra, apreclo, y
validez.
On December 2nd when my sun goes into my first house, I
celebrate et ella de ta Chicana y el Chicano. On that day I clean
my altars, light my Coattatopeub candle, burn sage and copal,
take et baño para espantar basura, sweep my house. On that
day I bare my soul, make myself vulnerable to friends and

family
by expressing my feelings. On that day I affirm who we are.
On that day I look inside our conflicts and our basic intro
verted racial temperament. I identify our needs, voice them. I
acknowledge that the self and the race have been wounded. I
recognize the need to take care of our personhood, of our racial
self. On that day I gather the splintered and disowned parts of Ia
gente mexicana and hold them in my arms. Todas las partes de
nosotros vaten.
On that day I say, “Yes, all you people wound us when you
reject us. Rejection strips us of self-worth; our vulnerability
exposes us to shame. It is our innate identity you find wanting.
We are ashamed that we need your good opinion, that we need
your acceptance. We can no longer camouflage our needs, can
no longer let defenses and fences sprout around us. We can no
longer withdraw. To rage and look upon you with contempt is to
rage and be contemptuous of ourselves. We can no longer blame
you, nor disown the white parts, the male parts, the pathological
parts, the queer parts, the vulnerable parts. Here we are
weaponless with open arms, with only our magic. Let’s try it
our
way, the mestiza way, the Chicana way, the woman way.”
On that day, I search for our essential dignity as a people, a
people with a sense of purpose—to belong and contribute to
something greater than our pueblo. On that day I seek to recover
and reshape my spiritual identity. Anlmate! Raza, a celebrar et
ella tie la Chicana.
El retorno
MI movements are accomplished in six stages,
and the seventh brings return.
—1 Ching8

Tan to tiempo sin verte casa mIa,
ml cuna, ml hondo nido tie Ia huerta.
— “Soledad”9
I stand at the river, watch the curving, twisting serpent, a
serpent nailed to the fence where the mouth of the Rio Grande
empties into the Gulf.
I have come back. Tanto dolor me costO el atejamlento. I
shade my eyes and look up. The bone beak of a hawk slowly cir
cling over me, checking me out as potential carrion. In its wake
a little bird flickering its wings, swimming sporadically like a
fish.
In the distance the expressway and the slough of traffic like an
irritated sow. The sudden pull in my gut, la tierra, los
aguaceros.
My land, el viento soptando la arena, et tagartijo debajo tie un
nopatlto. Me acuerdo como era antes. Una region desértica tie
vasta ttanuras, costeras de baja attura, tie escasa ttuvla, tie
chaparrales formados por mesqultes y hulzaches. if I look real
hard I can almost see the Spanish fathers who were called “the
cavalry of Christ” enter this valley riding their burros, see the
clash of cultures commence.
Tierra natal. This is home, the small towns in the Valley, los
puebtltos with chicken pens and goats picketed to mesquite
shrubs. En las cotonias on the other side of the tracks, junk cars
line the front yards of hot pink and lavender-trimmed houses—
Chicano architecture we call it, self-consciously. I have missed
the TV shows where hosts speak in half and half, and where
awards are given in the category ofTex-Mex music. I have
missed
the Mexican cemeteries blooming with artificial flowers, the
fields of aloe vera and red pepper, rows of sugar cane, of corn

hanging on the stalks, the cloud of potvareda in the dirt roads
behind a speeding pickup truck, et sabor tie tamales tie rez y
venado. I have missed ta yegua colorada gnawing the wooden
gate of her stall, the smell of horse flesh from Canto’s corrals.
Hecho menos las noches catlentes sin alre, nocbes tie tinternas
y lechuzas making holes in the night.
I still feel the old despair when I look at the unpainted, dilap
idated, scrap lumber houses consisting mostly of corrugated alu
minum. Some of the poorest people in the U.S. live in the
Lower
Rio Grande Valley, an arid and semi-arid land of irrigated
farming,
intense sunlight and heat, citrus groves next to chaparral and
cac
tus. I walk through the elementary school I attended so long
ago,
that remained segregated until recently. I remember how the
white teachers used to punish us for being Mexican.
112 113
La conciencia de Ia mestiza /Towards a New Consciousness
How I love this tragic valley of South Texas, as Ricardo
Sanchez calls it; this borderland between the Nueces and the
Rio
Grande. This land has survived possession and ill-use by five
countries: Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the U.S., the
Confederacy, and the U.S. again. It has survived Anglo-Mexican
blood feuds, lynchings, burnings, rapes, pillage.
Today I see the Valley still struggling to survive. Whether it
does or not, it will never be as I remember it. The borderLands
depression that was set off by the 1982 peso devaluation in

Mexico resulted in the closure of hundreds of Valley
businesses.
Many people lost their homes, cars, land. Prior to 1982, U.S.
store owners thrived on retail sales to Mexicans who came
across
the border for groceries and clothes and appliances. While
goods
on the U.S. side have become 10, 100, 1000 times more expen
sive for Mexican buyers, goods on the Mexican side have
become
10, 100, 1000 times cheaper for Americans. Because the Valley
is
heavily dependent on agriculture and Mexican retail trade, it
has
the highest unemployment rates along the entire border region;
it is the Valley that has been hardest hit.10
“It’s been a bad year for corn,” my brother, Nune, says. As he
talks, I remember my father scanning the sky for a rain that
would end the drought, looking up into the sky, day after day,
while the corn withered on its stalk. My father has been dead
for
29 years, having worked himself to death. The life span of a
Mexican farm laborer is 56—he lived to be 3$. It shocks me that
I am older than he. I, too, search the sky for rain. Like the
ancients, I worship the rain god and the maize goddess, but
unlike my father I have recovered their names. Now for rain
(irri
gation) one offers not a sacrifice of blood, but of money.
“Farming is- in a bad way,” my brother says. “Two to three
thousand small and big farmers went bankrupt in this country
last year. Six years ago the price of corn was $8.00 per hundred
pounds,” he goes on. “This year it is $3.90 per hundred
pounds.”
And, I think to myself, after taking inflation into account, not

planting anything puts you ahead.
I walk out to the back yard, stare at los rosates de mama.
She wants me to help her prune the rose bushes, dig out the car
pet grass that is choking them. Mamagrande Ramona tambión
tenia rosates. Here every Mexican grows flowers. If they don’t
La conciencia de Ia mestiza /Towards a New Consciousness
have a piece of dirt, they use car tires, jars, cans, shoe boxes.
Roses are the Mexican’s favorite flower. I think, how
symbolic—
thorns and all.
Yes, the Chicano and Chicana have always taken care of
growing things and the land. Again I see the four of us kids
getting off the school bus, changing into our work clothes, walk
ing into the field with Papi and Mami, all six of us bending to
the
ground. Below our feet, under the earth lie the watermelon
seeds. We cover them with paper plates, putting terremotes on
top of the plates to keep them from being blown away by
the wind. The paper plates keep the freeze away. Next day or
the
next, we remove the plates, bare the tiny green shoots to the
elements. They survive and grow, give fruit hundreds of times
the size of the seed. We water them and hoe them. We harvest
them. The vines dry, rot, are plowed under. Growth, death,
decay, birth. The soil prepared again and again, impregnated,
worked on. A constant changing of forms, renacimientos de ta
tierra macire.
This land was Mexican once
was Indian always
and is.

And will be again.
118
Notes
6. According to Jung and James Hiliman, “archetypes” are the
presences
of gods and goddesses in the psyche. Hiliman’s book, Re-
Visioning
Psychology (NewYork, NY: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), has
been instru
mental in the development of my thought.
7. Yernayá is also known as the wind, Oyá as the whirlwind.
Accord
ing to Luisah Teish, I am the daughter of Yernayá, with Oyá
being the moth
er who raised me.
8. Another form of the goddess Coatticue is Chirnatma, Shield
Hand, a
naked cave goddess of the Huitznahua who was present at
Aztlãn when the
Aztecs left from that point of origin. Burland, 166-167.
9. A sculpture, described as the most horrifying and monstrous
in the

world, was excavated from beneath the Zocalo, the cathedral
square in
Mexico City, in 1824, where it had lain since the destruction of
the Aztec
capital ofTenochtitlãn. Every year since the Conquest, people
had come dur
ing an autumn festival with gifts of fruit and flowers which they
laid on the
pavement of the central square. The Indians maintained that
there was some
body very holy and powerful underneath. Burland, 39-40.
10. Juan Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, translated
from the
Spanish by Jack Sage (NewYork, NY: Philosophical Library,
1962), 76.
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
1. Ray Gwyn Smith, Moorland is Cold Country, unpublished
book.
2. Irena Klepfisz, “Di rayze aheymirhe Journey Home,” in The
Tribe of
Dime A lewish Women’s Anthology, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
and Irena
Klepfisz, eds. (Montpelier, VT: SinisterWisdom Books, 1986),

49.
3. R.C. Ortega, DialectotogIa Del Barrio, trans. Hortencia S.
Mwan
(Los Angeles, CA: R.C. Ortega Publisher & Bookseller, 1977),
132.
4. Eduardo Hernandéz-Chávez, Andrew D. Cohen, and Anthony
F
Beltramo, El Lenguale cle los Chicanos: Regional and Social
Characteristics
of Language Used By Mexican Americans (Arlington, VA:
Center for Applied
Linguistics, 1975), 39.
5. Hernandéz-Chãvez, xvii.
6. Irena Klepfisz, “Secular Jewish Identity: Yidishkayt in
America,” in
The Tribe of Dma Kaye/Kantrowitz and Klepflsz, eds., 43.
7. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, “Sign,” in We Speak In Code:
Poems and
Other Writings (Pittsburgh, PA: Motheroot PubLications, Inc.,
1980), 85.
119
Notes
8. Rodolfo Gonzales, I Am loaguIn I Yo Soy JoaguIn (New

York, NY:
Bantam Books, 1972). It was first published in 1967.
9. Kaufman, 68.
10. Chavez, 88-90.
11. “Hispanic” is derived from Hispanis (Espana, a name given
to the
Iberian Peninsula in ancient times when it was a part of the
Roman Empire)
and is a term designated by the U.S. government to make it
easier to handle
us on paper.
12. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo created the Mexican-
American in
1848.
13. Anglos, in order to alleviate their guilt for dispossessing the
Chicano,
stressed the Spanish part of us and perpetrated the myth of the
Spanish
Southwest. We have accepted the fiction that we are Hispanic,
that is
Spanish, in order to accommodate ourselves to the dominant
culture and its
abhorrence of Indians. Chavez, 88-91.
Tiliti, Tiapalli I The Path of the Red and Black Ink
1. R. Gordon Wasson, The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in
Mesoamerica (NewYork, NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company,
1980), 59, 103.
2. Robert Plant Armstrong, The Powers of Presence:

Consciousness,
Myth, and Affecting Presence (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania
Press, 1981), 11, 20.
3. Armstrong, 10.
4. Armstrong, 4.
5. Miguel Leon-Portilla, LosAntiguos Mexicanos:A través de
sus cróni
casv cantares (Mexico, D.f: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
1961), 19, 22.
6. Leon-Portilla, 125.
7. In Xóchitl in CuIcatl is Nahuatl for flower and song, flory
canto.
8. Nietzsche, in The Will to Power, says that the artist lives
under a
curse of being vampirized by his talent.
La conciencia de ta mestiza /Towards a New Consciousness
1. This is my own “take off” on Jose Vasconcelos’ idea. José
Vasconcelos, La Raza Cósrnica: Misión de Ia Raza Ibero-
Arnericana
(Mexico: Aguilar S.A. de Ediciones, 1961).
120
Notes
2. Vasconcelos.

3. Arthur Koestler termed this “bisociation.” Albert Rothenberg,
Th
Creative Process in Art. Science, and Other fieLds (Chicago,
IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1979), 12.
4. In part, I derive my definitions for “convergent” and
“divergent”
thinking from Rothenberg, 12-13.
5. To borrow chemist Ilya Prigogine’s theory of “dissipative
structures.”
Prigogine discovered that substances interact not in predictable
ways as it
was taught in science, but m different and fluctuating ways to
produce new
and more complex structures, a kind of birth he called
“morphogenesis,”
which created unpredictable innovations. Harold Gilliam,
“Searching for a
NewWorld View,” This World (January, 1981), 23.
6. Tortillas de masa harina: corn tortillas are of two types, the
smooth uniform ones made in a tortilla press and usually bought
at a tortilla
factory or supermarket, and gorditas, made by mixing inasa with

lard or
shortening or butter (my mother sometimes puts in bits of bacon
or cl,ichar
rones).
7. Gina Valdés, Puentes y fronteras: Coptas Chicanas (Los
Angeles,
CA: Castle Lithograph, 1982), 2.
8. Richard Wilhelm, The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans.
Cary F.
Baynes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 98.
9. “Soledad” is sung by the group Haciendo Punto en Otro Son.
10. Out of the twenty-two border counties in the four border
states,
Hidalgo County (named for father Hidatgo who was shot in
1810 after insti
gating Mexico’s revolt against Spanish rule under the banner of
Ia Virgen de
Guadalupe) is the most poverty-stricken county in the nation as
well as the
largest home base (along with Imperial in California) for
migrant farmwork
ers. It was here that I was born and raised. I am amazed that
both it and I

have survived.
A Black Feminist Statement
Author(s): The Combahee River Collective
Source: Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3/4,
SOLIDARITY (FALL/WINTER 2014),
pp. 271-280
Published by: The Feminist Press at the City University of New
York
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A Black Feminist Statement
The Combahee River Collective
We are a collective of black feminists who have been meeting
together
since 1974.1 During that time we have been involved in the
process of
defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time
doing political
work within our own group and in coalition with other
progressive organi
zations and movements. The most general statement of our
politics at the
present time would be that we are actively committed to
struggling against
racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our
particular
task the development of integrated analysis and practice based
upon the

fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The
synthesis of
these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As black
women we
see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat
the mani
fold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.
We will discuss four major topics in the paper that follows: (l)
The gen
esis of contemporary black feminism; (2) what we believe, i.e.,
the specific
province of our politics; (3) the problems in organizing black
feminists,
including a brief herstory of our collective; and (4) black
feminist issues
and practice.
1. The Genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism
Before looking at the recent development of black feminism,
we would like
to affirm that we find our origins in the historical reality of
Afro-American
women's continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and
liberation.

Black women's extremely negative relationship to the American
political
system (a system of white male rule) has always been
determined by our
This essay originally appeared in Capitalist Patriarchy and the
Case for Socialist Feminism, published
by the Monthly Review Press in 1978. Reprinted with
permission from the Monthly Review Press 271
Foundation. All rights reserved.
2020 22:37:28 UTC
272 The Combahee River Collective
membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes. As
Angela Y. Davis
points out in "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the
Community
of Slaves," black women have always embodied, if only in their
physical
manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have
actively
resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both
dramatic

and subtle ways. There have always been black women
activists—some
known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W.
Harper, Ida
B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon
thou
sands unknown—who had a shared awareness of how their
sexual identity
combined with their racial identity to make their whole life
situation and
the focus of their political struggles unique. Contemporary
black feminism
is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice,
militancy,
and work by our mothers and sisters.
A black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in
connection
with the second wave of the American women's movement
beginning in
the late 1960s. Black, other Third World, and working women
have been
involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both
outside reac
tionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement

itself have
served to obscure our participation. In 1973 black feminists,
primarily
located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate
black feminist
group. This became the National Black Feminist Organization
(NBFO).
Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to
movements
for black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s.
Many of us
were active in those movements (civil rights, black
nationalism, the Black
Panthers), and all of our lives were greatly affected and
changed by their
ideology, their goals, and the tactics used to achieve their
goals. It was our
experience and disillusionment within these liberation
movements, as
well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that
led to the
need to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of
white women,
and antisexist, unlike those of black and white men.

There is also undeniably a personal genesis for black feminism,
that is,
the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal
experi
ences of individual black women's lives. Black feminists and
many more
black women who do not define themselves as feminists have
all experi
enced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day
existence.
Black feminists often talk about their feelings of craziness
before
becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics,
patriarchal rule,
and, most importantly, feminism, the political analysis and
practice that
2020 22:37:28 UTC
A Black Feminist Statement 273
we women use to struggle against our oppression. The fact that
racial poli

tics and indeed racism are pervasive factors in our lives did not
allow us,
and still does not allow most black women, to look more deeply
into our
own experiences and define those things that make our lives
what they are
and our oppression specific to us. In the process of
consciousness-raising,
actually life-sharing, we began to recognize the commonality
cff our expe
riences and, from that sharing and growing consciousness, to
build a poli
tics that will change our lives and inevitably end our
oppression.
Our development also must be tied to the contemporary
economic
and political position of black people. The post-World War II
generation
of black youth was the first to be able to minimally partake of
certain edu
cational and employment options, previously closed completely
to black
people. Although our economic position is still at the very
bottom of the

American capitalist economy, a handful of us have been able to
gain cer
tain tools as a result of tokenism in education and employment
which
potentially enable us to more effectively fight our oppression.
A combined antiracist and antisexist position drew us together
initially,
and as we developed politically we addressed ourselves to
heterosexism
and economic oppression under capitalism.
2. What We Believe
Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared
belief that black
women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a
necessity not as an
adjunct to somebody else's but because of our need as human
persons for
autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic,
but it is appar
ent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever
considered
our specific oppression a priority or worked seriously for the
ending of

that oppression. The mere names of the pejorative stereotypes
attributed
to black women (e.g., mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore,
bulldagger), let
alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we
receive, indi
cates how little value has been placed upon our lives during
four centuries
of bondage in the Western hemisphere. We realize that the only
people
who care enough about us to work consistently for our
liberation is us.
Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our
sisters, and our
community, which allows us to continue our struggle and work.
This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the
concept of
identity politics. We believe that the most profound and
potentially the
2020 22:37:28 UTC

most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as
opposed to
working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of
black women
this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and
therefore
revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all
the politi
cal movements that have preceded us that anyone is more
worthy of lib
eration than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and
walking ten
paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is
enough.
We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive
in black
women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also
often find it dif
ficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because
in our lives
they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that
there is
such a thing as racial-sexual oppression that is neither solely
racial nor

solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of black women by white
men as a
weapon of political repression.
Although we are feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity with
pro
gressive black men and do not advocate the fractionalization
that white
women who are separatists demand. Our situation as black
people neces
sitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which
white women
of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their
negative
solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with black
men against
racism, while we also struggle with black men about sexism.
We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples
necessitates the
destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and
imperial
ism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe
the work
must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do

the work and
create the products and not for the profit of the bosses.
Material resources
must be equally distributed among those who create these
resources. We
are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is
not also a
feminist and antiracist revolution will guarantee our liberation.
We have
arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of
class relation
ships that takes into account the specific class position of black
women
who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this
particular time
some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens
at white
collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real
class situation
of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but
for whom
racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in
their work
ing/ economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement

with Marx's
theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships
he ana
2020 22:37:28 UTC
lyzed, we know that this analysis must be extended further in
order for us
to understand our specific economic situation as black women.
A political contribution which we feel we have already made is
the
expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is
political. In our
consciousness-raising sessions, for example, we have in many
ways gone
beyond white women's revelations because we are dealing with
the impli
cations of race and class as well as sex. Even our black
women's style of
talking/testifying in black language about what we have
experienced has a

resonance that is both cultural and political. We have spent a
great deal of
energy delving into the cultural and experiential nature of our
oppression
out of necessity because none of these matters have ever been
looked at
before. No one before has ever examined the multilayered
texture of black
women's lives.
As we have already stated, we reject the stance of lesbian
separatism
because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It
leaves out
far too much and far too many people, particularly black men,
women, and
children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for
what men have
been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how
they act, and
how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion
that it is their
maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes
them what
they are. As black women we find any type of biological
determinism a

particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to
build a politic.
We must also question whether lesbian separatism is an
adequate and pro
gressive political analysis and strategy, even for those who
practice it, since
it so completely denies any but the sexual sources of women's
oppression,
negating the facts of class and race.
3. Problems in Organizing Black Feminists
During our years together as a black feminist collective we
have experi
enced success and defeat, joy and pain, victory and failure. We
have found
that it is very difficult to organize around black feminist issues,
difficult
even to announce in certain contexts that we are black
feminists. We have
tried to think about the reasons for our difficulties, particularly
since the
white women's movement continues to be strong and to grow in
many
directions. In this section we will discuss some of the general

reasons for
the organizing problems we face and also talk specifically
about the stages
in organizing our own collective.
2020 22:37:28 UTC
The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we
are not
just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two but
instead to
address a whole range of oppressions. We do not have racial,
sexual, het
erosexual, or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have even
the minimal
access to resources and power that groups who possess any one
of these
types of privilege have.
The psychological toll of being a black woman and the
difficulties these
present in reaching political consciousness and doing political

work can
never be underestimated. There is a very low value placed upon
black
women's psyches in this society, which is both racist and
sexist. As an early
group member once said, "We are all damaged people merely
by virtue of
being black women." We are dispossessed psychologically and
on every
other level, and yet we feel the necessity to struggle to change
our condi
tion and the condition of all black women. In "A Black
Feminist s Search
for Sisterhood," Michele Wallace arrives at this conclusion:
We exist as women who are black who are feminists, each
stranded for
the moment, working independently because there is not yet an
envi
ronment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle—
because,
being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has
done:
we would have to fight the world.2
Wallace is not pessimistic but realistic in her assessment of

black femi
nists' position, particularly in her allusion to the nearly classic
isolation
most of us face. We might use our position at the bottom,
however, to
make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If black women
were free, it
would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our
freedom
would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of
oppression.
Feminism is, nevertheless, very threatening to the majority of
black
people because it calls into question some of the most basic
assumptions
about our existence, i.e., that gender should be a determinant of
power
relationships. Here is the way male and female roles were
defined in a black
nationalist pamphlet from the early 1970s:
We understand that it is and has been traditional that the man is
the head
of the house. He is the leader of the house/nation because his
knowl

edge of the world is broader, his awareness is greater, his
understanding
is fuller and his application of this information is wiser....
After all, it is
only reasonable that the man be the head of the house because
he is able
to defend and protect the development of his home Women
cannot
2020 22:37:28 UTC
do the same things as men—they are made by nature to
function dif
ferently. Equality of men and women is something that cannot
happen
even in the abstract world. Men are not equal to other men, i.e.,
ability,
experience, or even understanding. The value of men and
women can be
seen as in the value of gold and silver—they are not equal but
both have

great value. We must realize that men and women are a
complement to
each other because there is no house/family without a man and
his wife.
Both are essential to the development of any life.3
The material conditions of most black women would hardly
lead them
to upset both economic and sexual arrangements that seem to
represent
some stability in their lives. Many black women have a good
understand
ing of both sexism and racism, but because of the everyday
constrictions
of their lives cannot risk struggling against them both.
The reaction of black men to feminism has been notoriously
negative.
They are, of course, even more threatened than black women by
the pos
sibility that black feminists might organize around our own
needs. They
realize that they might not only lose valuable and hard-working
allies in
their struggles but that they might also be forced to change
their habitually

sexist ways of interacting with and oppressing black women.
Accusations
that black feminism divides the black struggle are powerful
deterrents to
the growth of an autonomous black women's movement.
Still, hundreds of women have been active at different times
during
the three-year existence of our group. And every black woman
who came,
came out of a strongly felt need for some level of possibility
that did not
previously exist in her life.
When we first started meeting early in 1974 after the NBFO's
first east
ern regional conference, we did not have a strategy for
organizing, or even
a focus. We just wanted to see what we had. After a period of
months of
not meeting, we began to meet again late in the year and started
doing
an intense variety of consciousness-raising. The overwhelming
feeling
that we had is that after years and years we had finally found

each other.
Although we were not doing political work as a group,
individuals contin
ued their involvement in lesbian politics, sterilization abuse
and abortion
rights work, Third World Women's International Women's Day
activities,
and support activity for the trials of Dr. Kenneth Edelin, Joan
Little, and
Inez Garcia. During our first summer, when membership had
dropped
off considerably, those of us remaining devoted serious
discussion to the
possibility of opening a refuge for battered women in a black
community.
2020 22:37:28 UTC
(There was no refuge in Boston at that time.) We also decided
around that
time to become an independent collective since we had serious
disagree

ments with NBFO's bourgeois-feminist stance and their lack of
a clear
political focus.
We also were contacted at that time by socialist feminists, with
whom
we had worked on abortion rights activities, who wanted to
encourage us
to attend the National Socialist Feminist Conference in Yellow
Springs.
One of our members did attend and despite the narrowness of
the ide
ology that was promoted at that particular conference, we
became more
aware of the need for us to understand our own economic
situation and to
make our own economic analysis.
In the fall, when some members returned, we experienced
several
months of comparative inactivity and internal disagreements
which were
first conceptualized as a lesbian-straight split but which were
also the result
of class and political differences. During the summer those of
us who were

still meeting had determined the need to do political work and
to move
beyond consciousness-raising and serving exclusively as an
emotional sup
port group. At the beginning of 1976, when some of the women
who had
not wanted to do political work and who also had voiced
disagreements
stopped attending of their own accord, we again looked for a
focus. We
decided at that time, with the addition of new members, to
become a study
group. We had always shared our reading with each other, and
some of us
had written papers on black feminism for group discussion a
few months
before this decision was made. We began functioning as a study
group and
also began discussing the possibility of starting a black
feminist publica
tion. We had a retreat in the late spring, which provided a time
for both
political discussion and working out interpersonal issues.
Currently we are

planning to gather together a collection of black feminist
writing. We feel
that it is absolutely essential to demonstrate the reality of our
politics to
other black women and believe that we can do this through
writing and
distributing our work. The fact that individual black feminists
are living
in isolation all over the country, that our own numbers are
small, and that
we have some skills in writing, printing, and publishing makes
us want to
carry out these kinds of projects as a means of organizing black
feminists
as we continue to do political work in coalition with other
groups.
2020 22:37:28 UTC
4. Black Feminist Issues and Practice
During our time together we have identified and worked on

many issues
of particular relevance to black women. The inclusiveness of
our politics
makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the
lives of
women, Third World, and working people. We are of course
particularly
committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex,
and class
are simultaneous factors in oppression. We might, for example,
become
involved in workplace organizing at a factory that employs
Third World
women or picket a hospital that is cutting back on already
inadequate
health care to a Third World community, or set up a rape crisis
center in
a black neighborhood. Organizing around welfare or daycare
concerns
might also be a focus. The work to be done and the countless
issues that
this work represents merely reflect the pervasiveness of our
oppression.
Issues and projects that collective members have actually

worked on
are sterilization abuse, abortion rights, battered women, rape,
and health
care. We have also done many workshops and educationals on
black femi
nism on college campuses, at women's conferences, and most
recently for
high school women.
One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun
to
publicly address is racism in the white women's movement. As
black femi
nists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little
effort white
women have made to understand and combat their racism,
which requires
among other things that they have a more than superficial
comprehen
sion of race, color, and black history and culture. Eliminating
racism in the
white women's movement is by definition work for white
women to do,
but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on
this issue.

In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end
always
justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have
been done
in the name of achieving "correct" political goals. As feminists
we do not
want to mess over people in the name of politics. We believe in
collec
tive process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within
our own
group and in our vision of a revolutionary society. We are
committed to a
continual examination of our politics as they develop through
criticism
and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice. As
black feminists
and lesbians we know that we have a very definite
revolutionary task to
perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle
before us.
2020 22:37:28 UTC

Notes
1. This statement is dated April 1977.
2. Michele Wallace, "A Black Feminist's Search for
Sisterhood," The Village
Voice, 28 July, 1975: 6-7.
3. Mumininas of Committee for Unified Newark. Mwanamke
Mwananchi (The National
ist Woman), Newark, N.J., c. 1971: 4-5.
2020 22:37:28 UTC
Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley Collage
Center for Research on Women. This essay is excerpted from
Working
Paper 189. "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal
Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in
Women's
Studies" (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $4.00 from
the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women,
Wellesley MA 02181
The working paper contains a longer list of privileges. This
excerpted essay is reprinted from the Winter 1990 issue of
Independent

School.
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Peggy McIntosh
"I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness,
not in invisible systems conferring
dominance on my group"
Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the
rest of the curriculum, I have often
noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are
overprivileged, even though they may grant that
women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to
women's statues, in the society, the
university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the
idea of lessening men's. Denials that
amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men
gain from women's disadvantages. These
denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged,
lessened, or ended.
Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a
phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in
our society are interlocking, there are most likely a
phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our
society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of
while privilege that was similarly
denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been
taught about racism as something that puts
others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of
its corollary aspects, white privilege,
which puts me at an advantage.
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white
privilege, as males are taught not to recognize

male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what
it is like to have white privilege. I have
come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned
assets that I can count on cashing in
each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious.
White privilege is like an invisible
weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports,
codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank
checks.
Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we
in women's studies work to reveal male
privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one
who writes about having white privilege
must ask, "having described it, what will I do to lessen or end
it?"
After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of
unacknowledged privilege, I understood
that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I
remembered the frequent charges from
women of color that white women whom they encounter are
oppressive. I began to understand why we
are just seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves
that way. I began to count the ways in
which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been
conditioned into oblivion about its existence.
My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an
oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or
as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself
as an individual whose moral state
depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed
the pattern my colleague Elizabeth
Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their
lives as morally neutral, normative, and

average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others,
this is seen as work that will allow
"them" to be more like "us."
Working
Women's
Wellesley MA 02181
Independent
School.
Daily effects of white privilege
I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some
of the daily effects of white privilege in
my life. I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case
attach somewhat more to skin-color
privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic
location, though of course all these other
factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my
African American coworkers, friends, and
acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact
in this particular time, place and time of
work cannot count on most of these conditions.
1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my
race most of the time.

2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to
mistrust and who have learned to
mistrust my kind or me.
3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or
purchasing housing in an area which I can
afford and in which I would want to live.
4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will
be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured
that I will not be followed or harassed.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the
paper and see people of my race widely
represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about
"civilization," I am shown that people of my
color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular
materials that testify to the existence of their
race.
9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for
this piece on white privilege.
10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in
which I am the only member of my race.
11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another
person's voice in a group in which s/he is the
only member of his/her race.

12. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of
my race represented, into a supermarket
and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions,
into a hairdresser's shop and find
someone who can cut my hair.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on
my skin color not to work against the
appearance of financial reliability.
Working
Women's
Wellesley MA 02181
Independent
School.
14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from
people who might not like them.
15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of
systemic racism for their own daily physical
protection.
16. I can be pretty sure that my children's teachers and
employers will tolerate them if they fit school and

workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern
others' attitudes toward their race.
17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this
down to my color.
18. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer
letters, without having people attribute
these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of
my race.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without
putting my race on trial.
20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called
a credit to my race.
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial
group.
22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of
persons of color who constitute the world's
majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such
oblivion.
23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I
fear its policies and behavior without
being seen as a cultural outsider.
24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the "person in
charge", I will be facing a person of my race.
25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax
return, I can be sure I haven't been singled
out because of my race.

26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting
cards, dolls, toys and children's
magazines featuring people of my race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong
to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than
isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance
or feared.
28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of
another race is more likely to jeopardize
her/his chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.
29. I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the promotion of a
person of another race, or a program
centering on race, this is not likely to cost me heavily within
my present setting, even if my colleagues
disagree with me.
30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a
racial issue at hand, my race will lend me
more credibility for either position than a person of color will
have.
Working
Women's
Wellesley MA 02181

Independent
School.
31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and
minority activist programs, or disparage
them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be
more or less protected from negative
consequences of any of these choices.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the
perspectives and powers of people of other races.
33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body
odor will be taken as a reflection on my
race.
34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-
interested or self-seeking.
35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without
having my co-workers on the job
suspect that I got it because of my race.
36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of
each negative episode or situation whether
it had racial overtones.
37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing
to talk with me and advise me about my
next steps, professionally.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative
or professional, without asking whether
a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I
want to do.

39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect
on my race.
40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that
people of my race cannot get in or will be
mistreated in the places I have chosen.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race
will not work against me.
42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to
experience feelings of rejection owing to my
race.
43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my
race is not the problem.
44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which
give attention only to people of my race.
45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the
arts to testify to experiences of my race.
46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and
have them more or less match my skin.
47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting
embarrassment or hostility in those who deal
with us.
Working

Women's
Wellesley MA 02181
Independent
School.
48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people
approve of our household.
49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly
support our kind of family unit and do not
turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.
50. I will feel welcomed and "normal" in the usual walks of
public life, institutional and social.
Elusive and fugitive
I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I
wrote it down. For me white privilege has
turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to
avoid it is great, for in facing it I must
give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is
not such a free country; one's life is not
what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through
no virtues of their own.
In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have
listed conditions of daily experience that
I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these
perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that

we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for
some of these varieties are only what
one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give
license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant,
and destructive.
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a
patter of assumptions that were passed on
to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural
turf; it was my own turn, and I was among
those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for
any move I was educated to want to
make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways and of
making social systems work for me. I
could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything
outside of the dominant cultural forms.
Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.
In proportion as my racial group was being made confident,
comfortable, and oblivious, other groups
were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and
alienated. Whiteness protected me from many
kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being
subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people
of color.
For this reason, the word "privilege" now seems to me
misleading. We usually think of privilege as
being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or
luck. Yet some of the conditions I have
described here work systematically to over empower certain
groups. Such privilege simply confers
dominance because of one's race or sex.
Earned strength, unearned power

I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and
unearned power conferred privilege can look
like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to
dominate. But not all of the privileges on my
list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that
neighbors will be decent to you, or that your
race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a
just society. Others, like the privilege to
ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders
as well as the ignored groups.
Working
Women's
Wellesley MA 02181
Independent
School.
We might at least start by distinguishing between positive
advantages, which we can work to spread, and
negative types of advantage, which unless rejected will always
reinforce our present hierarchies. For
example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle,
as Native Americans say, should not be
seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned
entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is
an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a

process of coming to see that some of the
power that I originally say as attendant on being a human being
in the United States consisted in
unearned advantage and conferred dominance.
I have met very few men who truly distressed about systemic,
unearned male advantage and conferred
dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is
whether we will be like them, or whether
we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race
advantage and conferred dominance,
and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need
to do more work in identifying how they
actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white
students in the United States think that
racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color;
they do not see "whiteness" as a racial
identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only
advantaging systems at work, we need similarly
to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or
ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or
advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.
Difficulties and angers surrounding the task of finding parallels
are many. Since racism, sexism, and
heterosexism are not the same, the advantages associated with
them should not be seen as the same. In
addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage
that rest more on social class, economic
class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity that on other
factors. Still, all of the oppressions are
interlocking, as the members of the Combahee River Collective
pointed out in their "Black Feminist
Statement" of 1977.
One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions.

They take both active forms, which we
can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the
dominant groups one is taught not to see. In my
class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was
taught to recognize racism only in
individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in
invisible systems conferring unsought
racial dominance on my group from birth.
Disapproving of the system won't be enough to change them. I
was taught to think that racism could end
if white individuals changed their attitude. But a "white" skin in
the United States opens many doors for
whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has
been conferred on us. Individual acts can
palliate but cannot end, these problems.
To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their
colossal unseen dimensions. The silences
and denials surrounding privilege are the key political
surrounding privilege are the key political tool
here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity
incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and
conferred dominance by making these subject taboo. Most talk
by whites about equal opportunity seems
to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a
position of dominance while denying that
systems of dominance exist.
It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like
obliviousness about male advantage, is
kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain
the myth of meritocracy, the myth that

Working
Women's
Wellesley MA 02181
Independent
School.
democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most
people unaware that freedom of confident
action is there for just a small number of people props up those
in power and serves to keep power in the
hands of the same groups that have most of it already.
Although systemic change takes many decades, there are
pressing questions for me and, I imagine, for
some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the
perquisites of being light-skinned. What
will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching
men, it is an open question whether we
will choose to use unearned advantage, and whether we will use
any of our arbitrarily awarded power to
try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.
Center for Research on Women. This
essay is excerpted from Working Paper 189. "White Privilege
and Male Privilege: A Personal Account
of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women's
Studies" (1988), by Peggy McIntosh;

available for $4.00 from the Wellesley College Center for
Research on Women, Wellesley MA 02181
excerpted essay is reprinted from the
Winter 1990 issue of Independent School.
From “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions”
Audre Lorde
I was born Black, and a woman. I am trying to become the
strongest person I
can become to live the life I have been given and to help effect
change toward a
liveable future for this earth and for my children. As a Black,
lesbian, feminist,
socialist, poet, mother of two including one boy and a member
of an interracial
couple, I usually find myself part of some group in which the
majority defines me
as deviant, difficult, inferior or just plain "wrong."
From my membership in all of these groups I have learned that
oppression and
the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sexes and
colors and
sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of
liberation and a
workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of
oppression. I
have learned that sexism and heterosexism both arise from the
same source as

racism.
"Oh," says a voice from the Black community, "but being Black
is NORMAL!"
Well, I and many Black people of my age can remember grimly
the days when it
didn't used to be!
I simply do not believe that one aspect of myself can possibly
profit from the
oppression of any other part of my identity. I know that my
people cannot
possibly profit from the oppression of any other group which
seeks the right to
peaceful existence. Rather, we diminish ourselves by denying to
others what we
have shed blood to obtain for our children. And those children
need to learn that
they do not have to become like each other in order to work
together for a future
they will all share.
Within the lesbian community I am Black, and within the Black
community I am
a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay
issue, because I
and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian
community. Any
attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because
thousands of
lesbians and gay men are Black. There is no hierarchy of
oppression.
I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression
only. I cannot afford
to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one

particular group.
And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I
must battle these
forces of discrimination, .wherever they appear to destroy me.
And when they
appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to
destroy you.
From Homophobia and Education (New York: Council on
Interracial Books for
Children, 1983).

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