RAISE YOUR VOICE

THE CONTEXT
Written by Ruby Sales, from a work in progress: Ruby Nell, Ruby Nell, Your Mama’s Calling You.

My generation of African American women grew up in the light of Black women’s history and Black women who taught us how to live dignified and meaningful lives without the weight of segregation and demeaning stereotypes on our backs. We watched and listened to them as they sang their songs and the songs of Black people in a society that conspired to render them mute, unworthy and unnecessary. They did not bend low to public white lies; they refused to murder themselves in their eyes, in the eyes of their children and the world. They were neither silent nor invisible. Nor did the racial and sexual violence of enslavement and southern apartheid destroy them. They spoke, boldly, courageously and with moral authority telling the world, as Nikki Giovanni notes “what was on their minds.”

This is what they did in whatever territory that they occupied. These fantastic and sometimes sorrowful women refused to be contained in predetermined and small spaces. They sang the blues and danced in juke joints on Saturday throughout the United States and Europe. They testified in churches on Sunday. They had the daring to be pretty, to wear their hats tilted to the wind, to travel around the world, to be necessary, to create culture and to raise artistic projects out of small towns like Snow Hill Alabama, to be multifaceted, to be irreverent, and to love as Janie Starks loved Teacake and as Lucy Diggs Slowe loved Mary T. Burrill.

They were visionaries with deep a faith in God and a burning impulse for freedom. In their faith, work and mind’s eye, they saw the world whole where there was no disconnect between hindsight, insight and foresight. It is from these corners of life and out of the arid landscape of segregation that they raised extraordinary communities and generations of sons and daughters … freedom fighters. They were spiritual and social geniuses who imagined a new world and worked to achieve it when there was no evidence that it would come.

They were not alone. Women of color in communities everywhere held together the seams of their lives, their families, their communities and democracy. They passed on their stories, knowledge and gifts. It is out of the social fabric of their lives, struggles, victories, defeats and aspirations that we, some of their daughters, construct our identities and live out of our lives today. We say loudly and boldly that our mothers, aunts, teachers, grandmothers, neighbors and cousins brought us this far, struggled too hard, sacrificed too much and gained too much ground to trade the “ substance of our lives for the shadow.” Like them, we refuse to be branded out of our names or bend down at the altar of white and male lies that misrepresent of us as whores, unfit mothers, hoochie mamas, tragic mulattoes, mammies, servile objects of men’s desires, bitches and victims. We stand together proclaiming through our work the power and authority of our lives, voices, images and history. Together we say, “Our name is our own.” It reflects our history and our connections with each other. Our name is both ancient and contemporary. It cannot be stolen, commodified, and sold back to us. We come before you as daughters raising the names of our mothers out of the ashes of local communities long forgotten or discarded.

This soil anchors our work and binds us together as SISTERALLS as we celebrate Women’s History month. We are here. We are now. We are a continuum.

©2007
No part of this essay may be used without the permission of Ruby Sales.

Halliburton, Vice President Cheney's company of parasitic cronies, has been given another major contract. This time it is to build "centers to detain immigrants." According to David Bacon in New America Media, Commentary/Analysis, The Halliburton Corporation has already been given a U.S. contract for construction of immigrant detention facilities near the border with Mexico, and proposals have been made for reopening closed military bases to house deportees and detainees.

Note that Halliburton continues to gets rich off suffering and backs of the people at home and around the world: Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, jails, and the list goes on.

This is the standard posture of President Bush and his pals. I read this morning that President Bush is proposing another tax cut for the very wealthy that rips off poor people and lets them carry the economic burden and weight of the nation while the rich gluttonously "eats cake." This is borne out in a report by US mayors in 2005 stating that hunger and homelessness will continue to increase in America’s big cities during 2006.

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reports:

Georgia Federal Court Says Separate But Equal Schools Are Once Again OK

A federal district court in Georgia has ruled that a condition of racial segregation in the local schools caused by grouping students according to their perceived ability is not unconstitutional. The school district tracks students according to their ability as measured on standardized tests. In some cases, this tracking begins in kindergarten. The result has been that black students make up the majority in the groups with lower perceived ability, whereas the vast majority of white children are placed in the higher-ability groups.

In Shernika Holton, Thomas County Branch of the NAACP et al. v. City of Thomasville School District, the court ruled that race was not the deciding factor as to where students were placed. It also said the current racial imbalance was not impacted to any degree by the district's history of de jure racial segregation prior to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

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