> http://www.thenation.com/historic/bhm2000/19890522walker.shtml
>
> The Nation
>
> May 22, 1989
>
> [In April of 1989, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Alice
> Walker delivered this poetic address in support of the
> National March for Women's Equality and Women's Lives
> in Washington D.C. The march, held a few months after
> the Supreme Court agreed to review a case involving a
> restrictive Missouri abortion law, was meant to demonstrate
> support for safe and legal abortion. Reprinted in The Nation
> on May 22, Walker's essay surveys the history of relations
> between white men and black women in America and questions
> the right of white lawmakers to make decisions about black
> women's lives.]
>
> What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?
>
> by Alice Walker
>
> 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.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L
Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
