NOW in Color FEMINISTS WORK TOWARDS A MORE REPRESENTATIVE MOVEMENT by Maria K. Pulzetti graphic courtesy of NOW "You, my sisters, you be a sight for sore eyes!" proclaimed Dr. Johnetta Cole as she stood up to speak to the final plenary session of the NOW, Women of Color and Allies Summit. Dr. Cole is the former President of Spelman College in Atlanta and in fall 1998 she will begin her term as Presidential Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Women's Studies, and African-American Studies at Emory University. When I first arrived at the summit on Friday afternoon I had a similar enthusiastic reaction at the sight of hundreds of women: mostly women of color; women with black, brown, pink, or white hair; grandmothers and teenagers and everyone in between; beautiful women, passionate women, feminist women. I arrived at the conference late and immediately joined a tide of women walking to the metro to take part in a protest against wage discrimination in the United States Capitol. Women custodial workers there receive a dollar less in pay per hour than do their male counterparts. Our corps of women from the summit joined union members outside the Rayburn congressional building as we chanted slogans about equal pay for women. The tremendous energy I felt from the other women gave me a sense of anticipation for the summit's topic of the troubled relationship between the feminist movement and women of color. Seeing so many women of color not only present but also excited and proud to participate and be a part of NOW gave me hope that perhaps the divide was not as wide as I had thought. Earlier in the semester, NOW at U.Va. co-sponsored a forum on women of color and feminism entitled "Feminism: Is it a White Women's Movement?" The presidents of the Asian Student Union, Black Student Alliance, and La Sociedad Hispanica participated along with the president of NOW at U.Va. The leaders of the ethnic organizations described a feeling of alienation from feminism among some members of their organizations. They cited the historic invisibility of women of color in mainstream feminism and the current perception of NOW and even the label "feminist" as representative of only white, middle class women's concerns. Certainly these perceptions are both common and valid. I believe they result from genuine faults of the women's movement but also from the media's success at depicting feminists as only white, middle-class women. This misleading depiction devalues the tremendous contribution to women's rights made by women of color since the early nineteenth century. For instance, history tells us that Betty Friedan, a white woman, founded NOW, instead of telling us the whole truth: Pauli Murray, an African-American feminist and Episcopal minister suggested to Friedan the idea of a national advocacy organization for women's rights and joined Friedan as one of the founders of NOW. The current executive officers of NOW include an African-American woman and a Latina woman as well as two white women; and the second president of NOW, Aileen Hernandez, was a Latina woman. Opposing racism is and always has been one of the five goals of NOW. As the weekend continued, however, my initial excitement gradually faded. It hit bottom on Saturday when I attended the Young Feminists' Caucus and saw that more than three-quarters of the young feminists in the room were white women. Everyone recounted similar problems including women of color in their organizations. An African-American woman from a black women's college said that one of the fears that drives African-American women away from the label "feminist" is the association of "feminist" with "lesbian." As many times as I had heard this issue before, hearing it at this summit made it especially disheartening. "Maybe my generation of feminism has failed women of color," I thought. "Maybe there will never be a common sense of purpose among women of different racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds. Maybe this whole conference is just a cover-up to make us think the problem is not as big as it really is." The next morning, as sleep tempted me, I thought, "Maybe I don't need to get up and go to the conference today." All I would miss was one workshop and the final plenary, but I did not want to miss hearing Mandy Carter, a phenomenal black lesbian activist. As it turned out, Mandy Carter spoke well, but she did not change my entire experience of the summit. Dr. Johnetta Cole did. Robin Morgan, feminist author, edited a book of feminist writings entitled Sisterhood is Powerful. As I listened to Dr. Cole on Sunday, I began to hope that sisterhood is also possible. I doubt whether I can capture here any sense of how much Dr. Cole's speech affected me. I scribbled notes furiously as she spoke, trying to preserve her words, should I need her spirit sometime in the future to re-inspire me. She opened by quoting Sojourner Truth's extraordinary "Ain't I a Woman?" speech: "If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down, all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!" Claiming to feel a sense of the summit's collective ability to turn the world right side up again, Cole named why we cannot do so: the divisions among us. These divisions, Cole said, prevent all of our meetings from looking like this summit. These divisions explain why so many of our sisters of all colors do not identify with the women's movement. These divisions were not news to anyone in the audience. We have all heard people say that feminism is a white women's movement, all feminists are lesbians, all feminists hate men, etc. But Dr. Cole did not only recount the myths and suggest ways to combat them; she also emphatically and sometimes angrily deconstructed the myths. When speaking about the myth "All feminists hate men, I don't hate men, so why should I be a feminist?" she said that the problem with a woman who stands behind her man is that she cannot see where she is going. "We cannot find a sense of freedom in our African-American-ness until we find it in our woman-ness," she said in response to the myth that a black feminist cannot truly be a part of the liberation of black people. She also described how women of color who claim that the women's movement does not address any concerns that relate to their lives might not realize that many feminist issues not only affect women of color but affect them disproportionately, such as domestic violence, rape, prostitution, and lack of access to reproductive health care. The audience hung on her every word. When she reduced her voice to a whisper, the complete silence in the room allowed us to hear her clearly. As the emotion of her words rose, audience members shouted out words of encouragement. I felt that we were all with her. Dr. Cole spoke about the necessity of recognizing our differences but not letting those differences divide us. Many people in many liberation struggles have articulated this idea before, but Dr. Cole's complete conviction, her willingness to tread into very sensitive topics, and the overwhelming support from the audience made her speech revolutionary. I turned to my girlfriend after the speech and we marveled simultaneously, "I have never heard anyone say that before!" The bond of mutual affirmation between speaker and audience was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. The Summit closed, fittingly, with a drummer and singer who sang about women knocking on closed doors: "We are your conscience and we have returned."

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