What is of use in these words I
offer in memory of our common mother. And to my daughter.
What can the white man say to the
black woman?
For four hundred years he ruled over
the black woman’s womb.
Let us be clear. In the barracoons
and along the slave shipping coasts of Africa, for more than twenty
generations, it was he who dashed our babies brains out against the rocks.
What can the white man say to the
black woman?
For four hundred years he determined
which black woman’s children would live or die.
Let it be remembered. It was he who
placed our children on the auction block in cities all across the eastern half
of what is now the United States, and listened to and watched them beg for
their mothers’ arms, before being sold to the highest bidder and dragged away.
What can the white man say to the
black woman?
We remember that Fannie Lou Hamer, a
poor sharecropper on a Mississippi plantation, was one of twenty-one children;
and that on plantations across the South black women often had twelve, fifteen,
twenty children. Like their enslaved mothers and grandmothers before them,
these black women were sacrificed to the profit the white man could make from
harnessing their bodies and their children’s bodies to the cotton gin.
What can the white man say to the
black woman?
We see him lined up on Saturday
nights, century after century, to make the black mother, who must sell her body
to feed her children, go down on her knees to him.
Let us take note:
He has not cared for a single one of
the dark children in his midst, over hundreds of years.
Where are the children of the
Cherokee, my great grandmother’s people?
Gone.
Where are the children of the
Blackfoot?
Gone.
Where are the children of the
Lakota?
Gone.
Of the Cheyenne?
Of the Chippewa?
Of the Iroquois?
Of the Sioux?
Of the Mandinka?
Of the Ibo?
Of the Ashanti?
Where are the children of the Slave
Coast and Wounded Knee?
We do not forget the forced
sterilizations and forced starvations on the reservations, here as in South
Africa. Nor do we forget the smallpox-infested blankets Indian children were
given by the Great White Fathers of the United States government.
What has the white man to say to the
black woman?
When we have children you do
everything in your power to make them feel unwanted from the moment they are
born. You send them to fight and kill other dark mothers’ children around the
world. You shove them onto public highways in the path of oncoming cars. You
shove their heads through plate glass windows. You string them up and you
string them out.
What has the white man to say to the
black woman?
From the beginning, you have treated
all dark children with absolute hatred.
Thirty million African children died
on the way to the Americas, where nothing awaited them but endless toil and the
crack of a bullwhip. They died of a lack of food, of lack of movement in the
holds of ships. Of lack of friends and relatives. They died of depression,
bewilderment and fear.
What has the white man to say to the
black woman?
Let us look around us: Let us look
at the world the white man has made for the black woman and her children.
It is a world in which the black
woman is still forced to provide cheap labor, in the form of children, for the
factories and on the assembly lines of the white man.
It is a world into which the white
man dumps every foul, person-annulling drug he smuggles into creation.
It is a world where many of our
babies die at birth, or later of malnutrition, and where many more grow up to
live lives of such misery they are forced to choose death by their own hands.
What has the white man to say to the
black woman, and to all women and children everywhere?
Let us consider the depletion of the
ozone; let us consider homelessness and the nuclear peril; let us consider the
destruction of the rain forests_in the name of the almighty hamburger. Let us
consider the poisoned apples and the poisoned water and the poisoned air and
the poisoned earth.
And that all of our children,
because of the white man’s assault on the planet, have a possibility of death
by cancer in their almost immediate future.
What has the white, male lawgiver to
say to any of us? To those of us who love life too much to willingly bring more
children into a world saturated with death?
Abortion, for many women, is more
than an experience of suffering beyond anything most men will ever know; it is
an act of mercy, and an act of self-defense.
To make abortion illegal again is to
sentence millions of women and children to miserable lives and even more
miserable deaths.
Given his history, in relation to
us, I think the white man should be ashamed to attempt to speak for the unborn
children of the black woman. To force us to have children for him to ridicule,
drug and turn into killers and homeless wanderers is a testament to his
hypocrisy.
What can the white man say to the
black woman?
Only one thing that the black woman
might hear.
Yes, indeed, the white man can say,
Your children have the right to life. Therefore I will call back from the dead
those 30 million who were tossed overboard during the centuries of the slave
trade. And the other millions who died in my cotton fields and hanging from
trees.
I will recall all those who died of
broken hearts and broken spirits, under the insult of segregation.
I will raise up all the mothers who
died exhausted after birthing twenty-one children to work sunup to sundown on
my plantation. I will restore to full health all those who perished for lack of
food, shelter, sunlight, and love; and from my inability to see them as human
beings.
But I will go even further:
I will tell you, black woman, that I
wish to be forgiven the sins I commit daily against you and your children. For
I know that until I treat your chil dren with love, I can never be trusted by
my own. Nor can I respect myself.
And I will free your children from
insultingly high infant mortality rates, short life spans, horrible housing,
lack of food, rampant ill health. I will liberate them from the ghetto. I will
open wide the doors of all the schools and hospitals and businesses of society
to your children. I will look at your children and see not a threat but a joy.
I will remove myself as an obstacle
in the path that your children, against all odds, are making toward the light.
I will not assassinate them for dreaming dreams and offering new visions of how
to live. I will cease trying to lead your children, for I can see I have never
understood where I was going. I will agree to sit quietly for a century or so,
and meditate on this.
This is what the white man can say
to the black woman.
We are listening.
