Why is a feminist organization holding a conference on racism?
By Mieke L. Vandersall
I have received several inquiries about the topic of the 2003 Voices of Sophia Gathering: Drawing Wisdom From the Well: Racism, Whiteness and Resistance. The question I have received is: “I thought VOS is a feminist organization? Aren’t we supposed to be dealing with women’s issues?” Also, “We did racism at the conference in Washington D.C. several years ago, why again?” In response to these questions, there are two main issues I wish to address in this article. One is some VOS history: the process by which conferences have been planned, including how topics have been chosen. The other is the real topic at hand: “Why is a feminist organization having a conference on racism?”
Gathering Planning Process
Historically the Central Team has identified a region of the country with an existing active VOS chapter or potential for a chapter (we are now calling them “spirals.”) They have asked this particular chapter to develop a Gathering, leaving the theme to their discretion. The reasoning is that the region/chapter/spiral has particular local resources to draw upon which can be used as a gift to the organization as a whole. One member of the planning team has historically been invited to be on the Central Team with a liaison capacity. That member has been charged with the responsibility of communicating with the Central Team and the organization at large of the plans for the Gathering. In 2001 the emerging Louisville chapter was asked to host the 2002 Gathering.
Amongst this Louisville group there was great interest in exploring anti-racism training and whiteness work. This was begun as a different kind of Gathering than the one in 1999 in Washington DC which focused on racism and was entitled Embracing Wisdom/Sophia: Celebrating her Voices. The purpose of the 1999 event was to “offer an invitation to attune one’s self to the humanity of others and to gain a sense of community in which each can find compassion and recognition of our diversity and individuality.” The focus in 2002 (which has now been switched to 2003) would be to explore whiteness as a social construction and concrete standard by which white folks are expected to uphold and others are judged against. We would also look at the particular grief, pain, anger, and fear white folks hold around our whiteness, a result of our own brokenness and the brokenness of the world, which blocks us from further spiritual development and wholeness. This conference would not be a didactic and simplistic conference about how white people are bad and sinful. This would not be a conference where white folks were to sit in their guilt, keeping us from action. This would not be a topic that we could leave after the Gathering thinking that we had done all the necessary work; this is a beginning.
In the planning process the Louisville group realized that they needed another year to explore the topic on a personal and local level. The planning team met using sections of the VOS Resource, A Guide to Resist, which has since been published. In the meantime the Central Team still felt the need to hold a Gathering. The 2002 Gathering was much smaller than other in the past and was a chance for members to explore our organizational growth and development. This was critical in the life of the organization as we named some of the realities of our presence in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the world and as we refocused and reorganized in light of our dreams towards the future.
The Topic at Hand: Racism, Whiteness, and a Feminist Organization: How Are They Related?
As a feminist organization we are committed to the concerns of all women; racism is a major concern for women of color. To question why a feminist organization would undertake this topic makes women of color invisible. In addition, the question assumes that racism does not inform and impact white women’s lives.
To separate one’s gender identification with one’s racial identification (or class, sexual orientation, etc.) would be to deny the complexity and interaction between them. To think that white women don’t need to recognize our own whiteness presupposes that racism has not affected and damaged us all and that our whiteness does not affect our relationship with women of color in VOS. Not so. Who we are racially greatly determines our experience as a woman, and vice versa. Through feminism I have been able to grow more fully into my potential as I have claimed my power and experience as valid and a gift from God. Feminism has brought the planning team in Louisville to realize that without exploring how their gender is related to their race they are unable to continue this growth process. Beverly Daniel Tatum has said that “racism is in the very air that we breathe;” to deny its interaction in our being pulls us farther away from our Creator.
Our lives are shaped by boundaries of race and white racism on an institutional level as well. Mab Segrest, who will be a speaker at our 2003 Gathering and the author of the fantastic book Memoir of a Race Traitor, says:
It’s my belief that racism shapes all political movements in the United States, for better and for worse, but because white people so seldom talk about how we are affected by racism, we don’t understand how to counter it. We just act it out.
This “acting out” can be seen as we look at our history, both in the secular women’s movement as well as women’s movements in the church.
For example, in the same book, Mab narrates the story of how the first “Woman Rights” movement emerged as an interracial coalition who joined the question of racial slavery with women’s rights. However, in the last half of the 19th century as white men were shifting to the right their white women counterparts accompanied them. In this movement it had become clear that either female suffrage or Black suffrage would be accomplished, but not both. Famous, white, feminist leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton joined with Democrat George Train, the man who financed the The Revolution, the woman’s rights newspaper. Found in this paper was their argument for white female suffrage while opposing Black suffrage: “While the dominant party have with one hand lifted up TWO MILLION BLACK MEN and crowned them with the honor and dignity of citizenship, with the other they have dethroned FIFTEEN MILLION WHITE WOMEN - their own mothers and sisters, their own wives and daughters - and cast them under the heel of the lowest orders of manhood.” Black women dropped out of the equation all together, for feminists had to be only concerned with white women since they played it off against race.
On a denominational level I take a more recent example of how racism was “acted out.” In 1992 plans were underway to re-organize the church, just four years after the last reorganization. The Women’s Ministries Unit’s budget was cut from $2 million to $1 million dollars. Staff was cut nearly in half and the offices of women employed by the church and women of color were eliminated. White women were virtually silent about the loss of specific support for women of color in the denomination. The only existing group was Presbyterian Women. Barbara Dua, former Director of the Women’s Ministries Program Area spoke at our VOS Gathering in 2001 about this move. She said:
As white women, we must critique our own silence here in relation to our sisters of color and women employed by the church. Here we see blindness as work was done to preserve a largely white laywomen’s group without significant concern for women of color. The racism that exists within white women in the PC (USA) is clearly demonstrated in this major program change. While much of it was blindness to and denial of the problems of women of color in the denomination, our systemic racism is clearly exposed.
The years of division, history, and fear were used to add silence upon silence, providing even more pain and baggage we need to wade through to reach healing and solidarity.
I provide one more example directly from our own organization. As I have been involved in organizing the 2003 Gathering I have heard about the 1999 Washington DC Gathering. At this event the white composition of the Central Team was addressed, a result of the beginnings of the organization. A mandate was made to increase the percentage of women of color on the Central Team from 0% to one-third. Incredible speakers and leaders came to this event and dialogue was difficult and painful, yet fruitful. I do not with to downplay this important work. However, one aspect of this event needs to be dusted off again as we engage in our own history: worship. Native American rituals were misappropriated, abusing the meaning of these rituals, offending and hurting Native American women and other women in attendance, and taking from an “other’s” tradition without claiming our own participation in the destruction of that tradition and livelihood. This was never discussed and worked over as a community. I am concerned that the silence just reinforced our collective history of violence and reinforced the “depravity” of white worship traditions having value or meaning. It also left a horrible taste in some VOS member’s mouths.
At the 2003 Gathering we have pain to expose and sins to repent. We are living with scars on our ability to be in community and ministry together. We are all still paying. I believe, and so does the planning team of the 2003 Gathering, that systems behind racism and sexism want us to pit classifications of oppression against each other. But it is the same system that uses sexism and racism to silence, oppress, and hold down. We cannot address one without the other.
I hope that this article continues the dialogue around our preparation for the 2003 Gathering. This is only a beginning. To continue the conversation I suggest the Resource A Guide to Resist, which can be obtained by contacting me at voicesofsophia@nyc.rr.com or 718-623-3732. Or you can send your address and a suggested donation of $10 to Voices of Sophia, Mieke Vandersall, 218 St. James Pl. #3B, Brooklyn, NY 11238.
