Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism Read Free

would help us go back home. We began to realize, however, that working with our own was only the groundwork. To make change happen we needed to partner up with other women of color. To work on this book we had to venture out of our safe zones.
    And then 9/11 happened. People from our communities turned on each other in new ways. Girls wearing the hijab to elementary school were being slapped by other colored girls. Any mujer dating an Arab man was now suspect in her own community. People we considered friends were now suspicious of Middle Eastern men, Muslims and Arab immigrants, even if they were immigrants themselves. Living near Ground Zero, we watched people respond to their grief and fear with violence that escalated in both action and conversation, and we felt our own fear close to home: Daisy was afraid that, with the surge of pro-American sentiments, her mother would be mistreated for not speaking English, and Bushra feared for her mother and sisters who veil, and for her father and brothers with beards who fit the look of “terrorists.”
    In response to the war, we wanted to do “traditional” activist work, to organize rallies and protest on the street, but abandoning this book project didn’t feel right. Darice Jones, one of our contributors, reminded us of Angela Davis’s words: We are living in a world for which old forms of activism are not enough and today’s activism is about creating coalitions between communities. This is exactly our hope for this book. Despite differences of language, skin color and class, we have a long, shared history of oppression and resistance. For us, this book is activism, a way to continue the conversations among young women of color found in earlier books like This Bridge Called My Back and Making Face, Making Soul.
     
    After many late night talks, we chose the title of Cristina Tzintzún’s essay for this book in order to acknowledge how the stories of women and colonization are intimately tied. But when we first sat down to write this introduction and looked in the dictionary, we found that colonize means “to create a settlement.” It sounds so simple and peaceful. We rewrote the definition. To colonize is “to strip a people of their culture, language, land, family structure, who they are as a person and as a people.” Ironically, the dictionary helped us better articulate the meaning of this book. It reminded us that it’s important for women of color to write. We can’t have someone else defining our lives or our feminism.
    Like many other women of color, the two of us first learned the language of feminism in college through a white, middle-class perspective, one form of colonization. Feminism should have brought us closer to our mothers and sisters and to our aunties in the Third World. Instead it took us further away. The academic feminism didn’t teach us how to talk with the women in our families about why they stayed with alcoholic husbands or chose to veil. In rejecting their life choices as women, we lost a part of ourselves and our own history.
    This is difficult to write because, initially, white feminism felt so liberating. It gave us a framework for understanding the silences and tempers of our fathers and the religious piety of our mothers. It gave us Ani Di Franco’s music to sing to and professors telling us that no, patriarchy isn’t only in our colored homes, it is everywhere. There is actually a system in place that we can analyze and even change.
    But our experience with white feminism was bittersweet at best. Daisy felt uncomfortable talking about her parents’ factory work in the middle-class living rooms where feminists met to talk about sweatshops. Bushra realized how different she was from her feminist sisters whenever there was a flare-up in the Middle East and she was asked to choose between her identity as a Muslim and an American. There was always a dualism at play between our “enlightened” feminist friends at college and the