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Women Against Racism records, 1982-1984
""El Laberinto"" Volume X, No. 2 Page 6
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Women Against Racism Cherrie Moraga will be the keynote speaker at the "Women Against Racism" Conference scheduled for May 1 at the University of Iowa Memorial Union. Cherrie and Gloria Arizaidua recently edited an anthology entitled This Bridge Called My Back: Willings By Radical Women of Color. The conference is being planned by a committee of Anglo, Black, Chicana and Latina women representing many university and community organizations interested in the issues of racism and feminism. This steering committee has established the following goals for this conference -How to function in the feminist environment and still maintain cultural identity. -How to confront our own and other people's racism on a day-to-day basis -How and why racism continues to work and its effects -How to build alliances with each other (Anglo Women and Women of Color) Everyone-- women and men-- are encouraged to participate in this conference. Child care will be provided. Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Cherrie's preface to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color. On page 7you'll find a poem by another contributor to the anthology. Chrystos, entitled Ceremony for Completing a Poetry Reading. ----------------------------------------------- A place of Breakthrough: Coming Home (San Fransisco, California -- September, 20, 1980) When Audre Lorde, speaking of racism, states: "I urge each one of us to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there." I am driven to do so because of the passion for women that lives in my body. I know now that the major obstacle for me, personally, in completing this book has occurred when I stopped writing it for myself, when I looked away from my own source of knowledge. Audre is right. It is also the source of terror-- how deeply separation between women hurts me. How discovering difference, profound differences between myself and women I love has sometimes rendered me helpless and immobilized. I think of my sister here. How I still haven't gotten over the shock that she would marry this white man, rather than enter onto the journey I knew I was taking. (This is the mode) we have from my mother, nurturing/waiting on my father and brother all the days of her life. Always how if a man walked into the room, he was paid attention to [indulged] in a particular Latin-woman-to-man way.) For years, and to this day, I am still recovering form the disappointment that this girl/this sister who has been with me every day of my life growing up-- who slept, ate, talked, cried, worked, fought with me-- was talked, cried, worked, fought with me-- was suddenly lost to me through this man and marriage. I still struggle with believing I have a right to my feelings, that it is not "immature" or "queer" to refuse such separations, to still mourn over this early abandonment, "this homesickness for a woman." So few people really understand how deep the bond between sisters can run. I was raised to rely on my sister, to believe sisters could be counted on "to go the long hard way with you." Sometimes for me "that deep place of knowledge" Audre refers to seems like an endless reservoir of pain, where I must continually unravel the damage done to me. It is a calculated system of damage, intended to ensure our separation from other women, but particularly those we learned to see as most different from ourselves and therefore most fearful. The women whose pain we do not want to see as our own. Call it racism, class oppression, man or dyke-baiting, the system thrives. I mourn the friends and lovers I have lost to this damage. I mourn the women whom I have betrayed with my own ignorance, my own fear. The year has been one of such deep damage. I have felt between my hands the failure to bring a love I believed in back to life. Yes, the failure between lovers, sisters, mother and daughter-- the betrayal. How have we turned our backs on each other-- the bridge collapsing-- whether it be for public power, personal gain private validation, or more closely, to save face, to save our children to save our skins. "See whose face it wears," Audre says. And I know I must open my eyes and mouth and hands to name the color and texture of my fear. I had nearly forgotten why I was so driven to work on this anthology. I had nearly forgotten that I wanted/needed to deal with racism because I couldn't stand being separated from other women. Because I took my lesbianism that seriously. I first felt this the most acutely with Black women-- Black dykes-- who I felt ignored me, wrote me off because I looked white. And yet, the truth was that I didn't know Black women intimately )Barbara says "It's about who you can sit down to a meal with, who you can cry with, whose face you can touch.") I had such strong "colored hunches" about our potention connection but was basically removed from the lives of mos Black women. The ignorance. The painful, painful ignorance. I had even ignored my own bloodline connection with Chicanas and other Latinas. Maybe it was too close to look at, too close to home. Months ago in a journal entry, I wrote: "I am afraid to get near to how deeply I want the love of other Latin women in my life." In a real visceral way I hadn't felt the absence (only assumed the fibers of alienation I so often felt with anglo women as normative). Then for the first time, speaking on a pane about racism here in San Fransisco, I could physically touch what I had been missing. There in the front row, nodding encouragement and identification, sat five Latina sisters. Count them! Five avowed Latina feminists: Gloria, Jo, Aurora, Chabela y Mirtha. For once in my life every part of me was allowed to be visible and spoken for in one room at one time. After the forum, the six of us walk down Valencia Street singing songs in Spanish. We buy burritos y carveza from "La Cumbre" and talk our heads off into the night, crying from the impact of such a reunion.
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Women Against Racism Cherrie Moraga will be the keynote speaker at the "Women Against Racism" Conference scheduled for May 1 at the University of Iowa Memorial Union. Cherrie and Gloria Arizaidua recently edited an anthology entitled This Bridge Called My Back: Willings By Radical Women of Color. The conference is being planned by a committee of Anglo, Black, Chicana and Latina women representing many university and community organizations interested in the issues of racism and feminism. This steering committee has established the following goals for this conference -How to function in the feminist environment and still maintain cultural identity. -How to confront our own and other people's racism on a day-to-day basis -How and why racism continues to work and its effects -How to build alliances with each other (Anglo Women and Women of Color) Everyone-- women and men-- are encouraged to participate in this conference. Child care will be provided. Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Cherrie's preface to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color. On page 7you'll find a poem by another contributor to the anthology. Chrystos, entitled Ceremony for Completing a Poetry Reading. ----------------------------------------------- A place of Breakthrough: Coming Home (San Fransisco, California -- September, 20, 1980) When Audre Lorde, speaking of racism, states: "I urge each one of us to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there." I am driven to do so because of the passion for women that lives in my body. I know now that the major obstacle for me, personally, in completing this book has occurred when I stopped writing it for myself, when I looked away from my own source of knowledge. Audre is right. It is also the source of terror-- how deeply separation between women hurts me. How discovering difference, profound differences between myself and women I love has sometimes rendered me helpless and immobilized. I think of my sister here. How I still haven't gotten over the shock that she would marry this white man, rather than enter onto the journey I knew I was taking. (This is the mode) we have from my mother, nurturing/waiting on my father and brother all the days of her life. Always how if a man walked into the room, he was paid attention to [indulged] in a particular Latin-woman-to-man way.) For years, and to this day, I am still recovering form the disappointment that this girl/this sister who has been with me every day of my life growing up-- who slept, ate, talked, cried, worked, fought with me-- was talked, cried, worked, fought with me-- was suddenly lost to me through this man and marriage. I still struggle with believing I have a right to my feelings, that it is not "immature" or "queer" to refuse such separations, to still mourn over this early abandonment, "this homesickness for a woman." So few people really understand how deep the bond between sisters can run. I was raised to rely on my sister, to believe sisters could be counted on "to go the long hard way with you." Sometimes for me "that deep place of knowledge" Audre refers to seems like an endless reservoir of pain, where I must continually unravel the damage done to me. It is a calculated system of damage, intended to ensure our separation from other women, but particularly those we learned to see as most different from ourselves and therefore most fearful. The women whose pain we do not want to see as our own. Call it racism, class oppression, man or dyke-baiting, the system thrives. I mourn the friends and lovers I have lost to this damage. I mourn the women whom I have betrayed with my own ignorance, my own fear. The year has been one of such deep damage. I have felt between my hands the failure to bring a love I believed in back to life. Yes, the failure between lovers, sisters, mother and daughter-- the betrayal. How have we turned our backs on each other-- the bridge collapsing-- whether it be for public power, personal gain private validation, or more closely, to save face, to save our children to save our skins. "See whose face it wears," Audre says. And I know I must open my eyes and mouth and hands to name the color and texture of my fear. I had nearly forgotten why I was so driven to work on this anthology. I had nearly forgotten that I wanted/needed to deal with racism because I couldn't stand being separated from other women. Because I took my lesbianism that seriously. I first felt this the most acutely with Black women-- Black dykes-- who I felt ignored me, wrote me off because I looked white. And yet, the truth was that I didn't know Black women intimately )Barbara says "It's about who you can sit down to a meal with, who you can cry with, whose face you can touch.") I had such strong "colored hunches" about our potention connection but was basically removed from the lives of mos Black women. The ignorance. The painful, painful ignorance. I had even ignored my own bloodline connection with Chicanas and other Latinas. Maybe it was too close to look at, too close to home. Months ago in a journal entry, I wrote: "I am afraid to get near to how deeply I want the love of other Latin women in my life." In a real visceral way I hadn't felt the absence (only assumed the fibers of alienation I so often felt with anglo women as normative). Then for the first time, speaking on a pane about racism here in San Fransisco, I could physically touch what I had been missing. There in the front row, nodding encouragement and identification, sat five Latina sisters. Count them! Five avowed Latina feminists: Gloria, Jo, Aurora, Chabela y Mirtha. For once in my life every part of me was allowed to be visible and spoken for in one room at one time. After the forum, the six of us walk down Valencia Street singing songs in Spanish. We buy burritos y carveza from "La Cumbre" and talk our heads off into the night, crying from the impact of such a reunion.
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