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

hostility in the world, of someone calling us “spic,” “nigger,” “fag,” “terrorist” or because political and economic wars are only a phone call away to aunties living in Nicaragua or the Philippines. But family is only a safe zone until you kiss another woman, question the faith or go to the movies with a white boy. With our communities we’re expected to suppress our individual selves and our dissent in order to look strong in the face of racism. In this section, mixed-race women write to those of us who question their belonging to a women of color community. Women search for chosen families, act like the “man of the house” because there isn’t any man and choose different lives after being diagnosed with HIV. Their feminism and community activism are based on the model of family.
    “Our Mothers, Refugees from a World on Fire” is about our inclination as young women of color to see our mothers as the “real” feminists, the ones who practice rather than preach. While college may have given us the theories, many of us return home for a working definition of what it means to be a feminist—whether that means learning lesbian femme tactics from a mom who did sex work or taking after a fearless auntie who owned a brothel in Colombia. The mothers in this section are strong women who told us to get married, go to school, pray and avoid sex. They depended on each other, on sisters, neighbors and best friends to watch over us while they themselves were coping with mental illness, poverty or raising too many kids. They are the women Cherríe Moraga wrote about twenty years ago when she said our parents were “refugees from a world on fire.” We were just kids then, playing on the streets and translating for our mothers in supermarkets and at the doctor’s office.
    “Going Through Customs,” our third section, is about when every part of us is vulnerable at the checkpoint, when we’re asked to check our language, our clothing, our food at the door. Many of us have been negotiating identities from the time we first step out of our parents’ homes. When our parents came here with stars in their eyes and fear in their guts, they didn’t realize all they would have to give up. When they hoped for a better future for us, they didn’t realize they were giving up a chance to have good Hindu, good Nigerian, good Mexican daughters. “Going through customs” is our own way of picking and choosing what we will keep from our traditions and what we will bring into our lives now. It is a young black woman with guitar in hand, playing with the cultures of black and white America.
    Our last section, “Talking Back, Taking Back,” borrows from the title of bell hooks’s book and shows women talking back to white feminists, white Americans, men on the streets, their mothers and liberals. For young women of color, so much of feminism has meant talking back and taking back the world that we live in. It is a taking back of our image, and a breaking down of roles imposed on us, whether it’s that of the model minority or the affirmative action kid. These women talk back when someone tells us that racism is over because there are a handful of African Americans in the honors class, when we can’t walk down the street wearing what we want because we’ll be sexually harassed, when they tell us that Black women have no problem with body image just because all the women in the magazines are white. Here are women talking back to stereotypes and taking back a history that has been denied to us.
     
    We hope that this book will introduce some of the ideas of woman of color feminism to women who have thought that feminism is just a philosophy about white men and women and has nothing to do with our communities. We also want this book to deepen conversations between young women of color. We believe that hearing each other out about our differences and similarities is an important step toward figuring out how to work with