'Liberation for some is liberation for none'

[ismnotwasm]

Should be facinating

'Liberation for some is liberation for none': Reni Eddo-Lodge on women and black radical movements
By Reni Eddo-Lodge / 15 October 2015
Reni Eddo-Lodge looks at legacy of the Black Panther movement, explored by Stanley Nelson's new documentary Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (Dogwoof Films), and its conflicts with women's liberation. The great potential of Black Lives Matter, she argues, is to overcome the androcentrism of previous struggles.

In 1968, black sanitation workers went on strike in Memphis, Tennessee. Two of their fellow workers had been crushed to death thanks to a rule that stopped black workers from sheltering from the rain anywhere but in the back of their rubbish trucks. Local Reverend James Lawson took a leadership role in the strike, telling press at the time: ‘at the heart of racism is the belief that a man is not a man.’ He was paraphrasing an erstwhile civil rights slogan that had emerged in abolitionist circles in the movement to end the transatlantic slave trade. At the time, medallions created by English potter Josiah Wedgwood were circulated, engraved with an image of a black man pleading on one knee. Lettering around the edge read: ‘am I not a man and a brother?’ Decades later, this pleading sentiment coined by white abolitionists had evolved into a defiant, black led civil rights cry: I am a man. Am I not a man?

In resistance to racism, an idea of personhood is created, and it is passively hostile to women in order to assert its sense of self. Although two key women Black Panthers—Kathleen Cleaver and Ericka Huggins—are interviewed extensively in Vanguard of the Revolution, the film’s nods towards women’s labour in the Black Panther movement could do with a little more unpacking. Women’s under-recognised domestic labour is too often the foundation of political movements, and the Black Panthers were no exception. In Vanguard of the Revolution, the audience hears of women Panthers putting in hard graft for the (in)famous free breakfasts for children programme. One woman talks of a time when she was in the kitchen, about to give birth, her dedication to the movement compelled her to keep cooking as she was struck by contractions.

Women like Vanguard of the Revolution’s Ericka Huggins led regional chapters of the Panthers across the globe - but when we look to name the leaders of the Black Panther movement, it’s easier to reel off men rather than recall women. In a statement on the film, director Stanley Nelson writes: ‘the Black Panther party emerged out of a love for their people, and a devotion to empowering them’. That struggle for freedom wasn’t limited by gender. Yet when we talk about the women of the movement, their names comes with a caveat of the Panther they were married to, insinuating that they were somehow influenced by their husband’s politics, that they couldn’t possibly have drawn their political conclusions on their own. We don’t make those assumptions of the men.

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2287-liberation-for-some-is-liberation-for-none-reni-eddo-lodge-on-women-and-black-radical-movements

[F4lconF16]

1. Excellent. Thanks. Nt