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

“unenlightened” nonfeminist women in our families. We wondered how it could be that, according to feminist thought, our mothers were considered passive when they raised six children; worked night and day at stores, in factories and at home; and when they were feared and respected even by the bully on the block.
    It was only after college, through word of mouth from other women of color, that we learned about another kind of feminism. These groups practiced women of color feminism, sometimes naming it as such and sometimes not saying it at all. Daisy joined WILL, a collective founded by three Latinas to use writing as a political weapon, and that’s how she first read Cherríe Moraga’s writings on homosexuality and began publishing her own work. Bushra joined SAWCC (South Asian Women’s Creative Collective), where she found a desi audience and began performing her poetry first in New York City and eventually around the country. It was among these women that we both began developing a feminist way of looking at la vida that linked the shit we got as women to the color of our skin, the languages we spoke and the zip codes we knew as home.
    Our feminism lies where other people don’t expect it to. As we write this introduction, the cop who (allegedly) took part in sodomizing Abner Louima has just been released from jail. We see pictures of the cop kissing his wife splattered across the newspapers. This sanctioning of sexual violence and police brutality against a black Haitian immigrant feels like a slap in the face. As women of color, this is where our feminism lies. When the media vilifies a whole race, when a woman breaks the image of a model minority, when she leaves her entire community behind only to recreate it continually in her art and her writing, or when our neighborhoods are being gentrified, this is also where our feminism lies.
     
    As young women of color, we have both a different and similar relationship to feminism as the women in our mothers’ generation. We’ve grown up with legalized abortion, the legacy of the Civil Rights movement and gay liberation, but we still deal with sexual harassment, racist remarks from feminists and the homophobia within our communities. The difference is that now we talk about these issues in women’s studies classes, in classrooms that are multicultural but xenophobic and in a society that pretends to be racially integrated but remains racially profiled.
    We have also grown up with a body of literature created by women of color in the last thirty years—Alice Walker’s words about womanism, Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories about living in the borderlands and Audre Lorde’s writings about silences and survival. In reading the submissions for this anthology, we found that it was the books that kept young women of color sane through college, abortions and first romances with women. Many of us just needed the books: We needed another woman of color writing about her fear of loving a dark woman’s body or about being black and pregnant and feeling the scarcity of her choices.
    In working with the writers in this book, we often thought of Audre Lorde’s words from her poem, “A Litany for Survival”: We were never meant to survive. Who would think that we would survive—we, young girls prey to the hands of men, the insults of teachers, the restrictive laws of holy texts and a world that tells us “this is not your world.” For the young women in this book, creating lives on their own terms is an act of survival and resistance. It’s also a part of a larger liberation struggle for women and people of color.
    With these ideas and essays in hand, we locked ourselves up for weeks at a time until the book took form. We chose to focus on the four major themes of family and community, mothers, cultural customs and talking back. Our first section, “Family and Community: A Litany for Survival,” describes how we band closer to our birth or chosen families because of the