February 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Reviews

A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism, by Becky Thompson University of Minnesota Press, 2001 (for sale at New Words bookstore, a women's bookstore and an invaluable community resource; mail order at www.new wordsbooks.com)

Wendy Sanford is a co-founder of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective and a member of Friends Meeting at Cambridge.

Cover: A Promise and a Way of Life

Weaving together the stories of thirty-nine white people for whom working against racism is "a promise and a way of life," Simmons College sociologist Becky Thompson examines the place of white antiracist activism in the social change movements of the past four decades. At every stage, she shows how the leadership, mentoring, challenge and example of people of color have guided white activists into their most focused and effective work. Concomitantly, she argues, white activists unconnected with communities of color (as in much of both early second-wave feminism and the Vietnam-era anti-war movement) have lacked a critical antiracist edge.

Thompson's carefully researched analysis, and the voices of the committed antiracists she interviewed, invited me to look in new ways at movements in which I participated. The usual history of early second-wave feminism, for example, features middle-class, white women's initiatives to the exclusion of honoring early participation by African American women like Pauli Murray and Margaret Sloan, who helped found the National Organization for Women in 1966. The usual history also portrays white women coming to feminism out of frustration with male domination in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. Closer to the truth, suggests Thompson, is the witness of white women who actually learned their activism from people of color in organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and whose lifelong commitment to antiracism made them unable to join the early white, middle-class feminists in their single-minded focus on sexism.

Thompson chronicles the evolution of a vigorous multiracial feminism in the 1980s, led by women of color in the academy and beyond, and facilitated by an outpouring of their published work. White women coming into feminism in this era (Thompson highlights lesbians and Jewish women here) had, she suggests, a better chance than ever before of grasping--and acting on--the links between oppressions of class, race, gender, age, disability, and sexual orientation. Reading Thompson's book as a white member of a women's health movement organization that has remained predominantly white for much of its existence, I remember with new appreciation the role feminists of color played in our shift from a focus on sexism and capitalism in medical care to a wider politics. I also understand anew what the organization lost by not opening ourselves sooner, and more fully, to the issues, perspectives, and leadership of women of color.

Peacework readers may find especially informative and challenging the testimony of those whom Thompson calls militant antiracists, who came, in the 1960s and '70s, to believe in the necessity of armed struggle. Several of Thompson's subjects are currently serving long prison terms for participation in the Weather Underground and other predominantly white activist groups whose members sought to live out a meaningful solidarity with the Black Power movement in a time of increasing government repression. Does Thompson advocate violence as an anti-racist tactic? Not necessarily. Does she value and learn from white activists who have made that choice? Fully.

Thompson brings her lens, finally, to the Central America peace movement of the 1980s, including the Pledge of Resistance, prison activism, and so-called "diversity training" of the present day--always asking whether a truly anti-racist consciousness is at work, always looking for the leadership given by communities of color. Criss-crossing the US in pursuit of the in-depth interviews that give such strength of her new book, Thompson has brought her incisive mind and passion for justice to bear on a history in which many Peacework readers have been active. I believe that many of us will be changed, not only by the book's new perspectives on our shared history but also, and more importantly, by the lens that Thompson invites us to take on as our own.

The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), edited by Howard N. Meyer, Da Capo Press, 2000, 6000 pp.

Horace Seldon teaches history at Boston College, serves as a National Park Ranger for Boston's Black Heritage Trail, and founded Community Change, a Boston-based anti-racist organization.

Cover: The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson

 On my desk is a list of over ten nouns, a longer list of adjectives, and a half-page of phrases which could be used to identify and describe the man who has been called by Howard Meyer "the magnificent activist." Meyer has done a great service to everyone interested in the history of the nineteenth century "Age of Reform." He has collected the writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and has provided a chronology, and introductions, and commentary on this very remarkable, but infrequently celebrated figure. Becoming acquainted with Higginson through this work makes one wonder, as Meyer does, how one who was so prominent could have "departed from the radar screen of history."

Higginson's witness as an Abolitionist is exemplified by his participation in Boston's Vigilance Committee, for active defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law, and particularly by his strong action in the attempted rescue of the fugitive from enslavement, Anthony Burns. Higginson is remembered as one of the Secret Six, primary supporters of John Brown. Less known, buried in the film Glory, is the fact that he was the colonel who commanded the first volunteer regiment of black troops for the Union during the Civil War. Of those troops he said, "They are intensely human." Those four, simple words are all that are really necessary to devastate the institution of enslavement.

Higginson's Abolitionist activity would be enough to merit a prominent place in history. But in this life there is much more from which to learn, and from which to take courage and inspiration for activism. Here was a strong supporter for women's rights. At one point he sounded a note that today might be called Affirmative Action: "We have got to do more than mere negative duty. By as much as we have helped to wrong them, we have got to help right them."

Here too was a naturalist admired by Thoreau, a champion of Emily Dickinson, one of the earliest people to publicly address the connections between tobacco and cancer, a death penalty opponent who was active in prison reform and against child labor, a philosopher who contributed conversations with Transcendentalists, a clergyman, writer, editor, essayist, legislator, linguist. There's that list of mine!

Perhaps the best summary of the life of Higginson comes in the motives he traced to his mother's influence: "...the love of personal liberty, of religious freedom, and of equality of the sexes."

Previous Article    Next Article