Wanderlust

Being an ally and the politics of skin color

June 2, 2007 at 5:38 am gvblog Leave a comment

As we rode home from the Sistersong conference, the air hung thickly with the shrieking of cicadas – supposedly they return every seventeen years and ravage the trees. We’ve been biking out to the conference, which is at the Wyndham next to the airport, and it makes me incredibly grateful to not be in car. Elizabeth and I spent the last two days talking and listening and learning, and my head is brimming with ideas and analysis about the conference and the things I heard there.  One of the things I thought about a lot today is my role as a white woman in a space that is explicitly by and for women of color.  I’ve never been to a sistersong event before, partly because I feel like it’s really important for women of color to have their own space to talk about reproductive justice and sexuality.

My intention at the conference was to be an observer rather than a participant, which was a really interesting (and slightly novel) role for me – I tend to be a talker in group situations, so sitting back and NOT participating felt a little uncomfortable for me. I felt strongly that it was important for me to be an observer due to my experience working within the reproductive justice movement. The conferences, meetings, and coalitions are generally predominantly white. The places where women of color are the majority are either organizations with a general social justice mission that are explicitly committed to being majority women of color (two Bay Area examples are SF Women Against Rape and ACCESS), or organizations that are devoted to serving a particular ethnic group or constituency, such as California Latinas for Reproductive Justice.

More mainstream organizations often talk about prioritizing the voices and experiences of women of color, but that didn’t always translate into action. I’ve sat through several conferences in which white women earnestly express concern that there aren’t more women of color at the table and involved in the conversation, yet there isn’t any follow-up after the conferences to actually involve women of color.

I was really moved by one workshop I attended by WORTH, an organization composed of women affected by the criminal justice system that advocates for the rights and worth of women in prison or otherwise involved in the justice system. Tina, who coordinates the program and was once incarcerated herself, was adamant about the importance of WORTH chapters being led by currently or formerly incarcerated women. She expressed forcefully and passionately that it was imperative that people who were running organizations advocating on behalf of women in prison must BE women who know what they’re talking about. She said that WORTH is happy to collaborate with other organizations, but that if the conversation is about them, they are the leaders.

That makes a lot of sense to me, and I think that within the reproductive health organizations, we’d go a long way to true reproductive justice if the women most profoundly impacted by policy issues were also the leaders in those organizations. I recognize that it’s incredibly difficult to do that, especially because it often means shifting priorities and potentially devoting fewer resources to critical short term goals in favor of long term strategy. This argument about priorities has traditionally been used by mainstream organizations to explain why they can’t prioritize the concerns of women of color, and I think it would behoove all of us, no matter what our ethnicity or background, to think about what we really aim to achieve with the work we do, and the relationship between our short term strategies and our long term goals.

I think that it’s incredibly powerful to create spaces like the Sistersong conference where women of color from diverse backgrounds and experiences can talk together without being tokenized, without being asked to represent everyone of their ethnic background, without being asked to explain why more of their sisters aren’t there. I also really appreciate sistersong’s focus on sisterhood – on the power and importance of women coming together to support each other in doing really difficult work. But what is my place in the sisterhood of women of color? Do I have a role there? I know that we can’t work in isolation, and that a critical part of being an ally to women of color is understanding their concerns and priorities.

What I have trouble with is the balance between being an ally and being an intruder, imposing my presence on space that is desperately needed by women who don’t have it. There were several times during the conference where I felt uncomfortable with the way in which white women were participating – when they would talk first, and about their experiences, during workshops, when they would speak on behalf of their group after break-out sessions. I felt uncomfortable with what I perceived from those women as lack of awareness of the importance of prioritizing the voices and experiences of women of color in that space.

I thought it was interesting that there wasn’t any explicit conversation about the role of allies at the conference, and I wonder it that was deliberate on the part of the conference organizers. I wonder if other people who attended the conference as allies experienced similiar feelings and emotions. I wonder if the women of color who were represented by white women after their breakout sessions resented it. Am I being oversensitive? What responsibility do I have as an ally to women of color to call out other white women if I think they’re not acting like allies?

Spending time with the fierce, intelligent, passionate women of sistersong taught me, helped me clarify my beliefs and challenged my assumptions. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we think and talk about teen pregnancy, and tomorrow I’ll write about Sistahs on the Rise and the evolution of my thoughts on pregnant and parenting teens.

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