June 2002

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

A Report on the "Color of Violence" Conference

Breai Mason is an AFSC intern from Harvard Divinity School, where she has just earned her Master of Divinity degree.

The smell of sage perfumes the air, creating ritual space and blessing those present. The smoke calls the ancestors forth to bear witness to our work, and to give us strength for the struggle. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, 1400 women of color and allies have united to examine the "color of violence," and to build a movement.

I come to you with my reflections on this event as the descendant of Africans enslaved in America, the child of unnamed Natives, and the daughter of a matrilineal line. The 24 years of my life have been spent as Black, black, and African American. This is when and where I entered this rite of passage in Chicago.

Growing up in "the disputed South," (as Maryland is fondly called by this ex-patriot), below the Mason-Dixon Line, and beside Robert E. Lee Park, my concept of race in America was limited to the hegemony of Black and White. Issues about the poor were issues about me, or about those who looked like me, but lived a little further into the city. Issues about crime were about me, or my brothers. I was the quintessential oppressed, the black stain which caused America to hide its face behind white sheets.

Although I had taken to saying "women of color" in the academic circles I have found myself in over the past few years, upon walking into the Illinois Room, which housed our large plenary sessions, I realized that using this term required me to reexamine and challenge my own attachments to racialized solidarities. As I sat, black, behind rows of brown, tan, and tawny faces--heads veiled, braided, bald, and locked on the final day of the conference, the unsettled, confused feeling of disrupted solidarity drifted from my body at the sound of Yuri Kochiyama's voice. She demanded that we organize no more isolated projects over single issues. I was not here merely to explain the realities of my particular social location, but to identify the ways in which the experiences of women of color overlap, intersect, and can work together in order to effect social change. The details of the weekend came flooding back into my mind.

Before 1400 inspirited women entered our first plenary session, to engage panels of speakers with cries of joy, laughter, and "Amen!", a small group of fewer than 50 women met for an Activist Institute, also organized by the group Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. By the end of our seven hours together, we had repapered the walls of our meeting room with lists of the concerns and realities faced by outreach workers, activists, and members of communities struggling to hold together the politically polarized, fractured and fragmented pressures of womanhood, marginal race status, class, family, sexuality, and People.

Those working with battered women are concerned that the "victim's rights" campaign is fueling the criminalization of men of color, and in turn, the communities they are a part of. Women's battery has been used to support the call for "mandatory minimums," the expansion of crime zones with increased penalties, the expansion of the "War on Drugs," the strengthening and increased use of the death penalty, the decreasing age when one can be considered an adult, the shifting of immigration law, and the networking of oppressive institutions. How, they asked, do we protect the rights of women--our bodies, minds, and souls--without subjecting more men of color to the inhuman treatment of the prison-industrial complex?

Activists whose work is protected under the nonprofit 501(c)(3) tax status are struggling with what it means to be held accountable to the central organizer of violence: the state. In light of this commitment and others like it, these people are disillusioned by the feeling of having become a national network of service providers rather than a movement. Weary organizers reported a desire to end unnecessary and often unconscious competition between service agencies. They are no longer willing to participate in the rat race of grant proposal and fundraising competition to the detriment of their real callings. There was a consensus that it is time to link the personal with the political, and to reframe violence against women as a social justice issue.

The talks given in the plenaries over the course of the weekend, in conjunction with the smaller topic panels held in intervals, provided an unrehearsed opportunity to put that commitment to ideological use. members of Incite! spoke about the use of a drug called Quinacrine, "a form of chemical sterilization inserted in pellet form into the uterus, where it dissolves, scarring the fallopian tubes and possibly resulting in irreversible sterilization," usually without the knowledge of the affected women. The distributor of Quinacrine, the North Carolina-based Center for Research on Population and Security, "markets" this product throughout Over-Exploited (a.k.a. "underdeveloped" or "Third World") communities, in countries including Bangladesh, Chile, Croatia, Egypt, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the United States. Quinacrine is illustrative of the interconnection of personal and state violence visited on the bodies of women, and in this light it is not a separate issue from the way in which fear of the INS deters battered women from seeking help, from the horrifying conditions in sweatshops run by transnational corporations in Free Trade Zones, or from the environmental toxins discarded in communities of color and metabolized by pregnant and lactating women. Connecting the personal to the political requires us to recognize that such state-sanctioned treatment of women's bodies exemplifies terrorism.

Needless to say, the joy of community--the affirmation of sisters in the struggle--was tempered by the agony of daily realities. Hands raised in praise, or clapping in song, also wiped away tears at the testimony of a sister's suffering. We shared unheard stories, danced, and began to think of strategies to build solidarities, generate communities, broaden options, and move from consciousness to action. Angela Davis urged us to understand the name "Women of Color" not as a reference to racially identifiable bodies, but as a statement about a radical, political body. Nor should we consider Third World women who don't identify with that term as somehow 'not politicized.' Cathy Cohen pointed out the importance of articulating differences within our race, class, and sexual identity groups. Our goal, she feels, is not just to add new issues, but to reframe those issues already at the heart of our work.

We left on Sunday with our eyes open, our fatigue overpowered by the hope and promise of community, and the words of Brooklyn youth group Sista II Sista on our lips: "Together, Forever, Sistas!"

Incite! is in the process of building a chapter in Boston. The local contact person is Kartika Palar of the City School at 617/542-2489.

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