![]() I use the pronoun “we” when discussing Black women’s erasure because we all contribute to the overt and covert actions that I discuss below.įirst, our penchant for focusing on only the perceived final product of movement work-a specific march or a specific sit-in for example-not only ignores the care and work that went into organizing and mobilizing for a protest action but also ignores the Black women who did the work. We erase Black women in at least, but not exclusively, three ways. I’m equally interested in how the work is erased and how we can all work to prevent future erasure. This lack of desire or fear of telling the truth of social-movement work miseducates the next generation of organizers and activists.Īfter successfully defending my dissertation that centered the experiences of Black female students while detailing Fayetteville State University students’ participation in the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement(s), I no longer think about the issue as simply the erasure of Black women’s labor. Who did the day-to-day movement work such as political education, canvasing, voter registration drives, surveys, rapport building within the community, coalition-building outside the community, action planning, mobilization, mass mobilization, and record-keeping matters, because no movement’s existence begins and ends at the public-facing spokespeople-most often men. The problem with this viewpoint is that it does matter how we detail the work of social movements, if for no other reason than historical accuracy. Several of the narrators in my dissertation research echoed this facet of their organizing philosophy. ![]() I spoke directly with one of the founders and she, like hundreds of Black women before her, spoke of the movement being more important than the particulars of credit. Instead, I witnessed this interesting obsession with actively recreating the organization’s genesis, genealogy, and goals while the three women existed and were available to answer questions.īlack women who served as leaders of individual chapters faced the same treatment. Three queer Black women founded the BLM National Network and chose to assert that each Black life matters. It is 2020 and naysayers continue their refusal to read or listen to the intellectual work of Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. BLM co-founder Alicia Garza carefully detailed the origins of Black Lives Matter in October of 2014. Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Once this sleight of hand happens, the story shifts to “great men” and away from the quotidian work of community and national organizing and activism, and the brave leadership and vulnerability it takes to sustain a movement. The advent of social media, however, allows for a public and more accessible real-time listing of not only our accomplishments but our slights as well, as movement action after movement action shows the organizing might of Black women with an almost immediate privileging of Black men as the leaders of the movements (Cooper, 2017, p. During the six years I spent in graduate school, I lost count of the number of journal articles and books that sought to excavate Black women’s historical and contemporary labor. Several decades of scholarship show that Black women’s labors are consistently erased in the stories of social movements. I conducted my dissertation research while facing an incident in which I was accused of not giving someone credit for her work, only to realize this accusation was only possible because my work on the project had been so thoroughly minimized that even people close to the project had no idea of the depth of my contribution. How could the origins be so completely erased when all the key players were still alive and consciously aware of the division of labor? ![]() As this market opened in 2014, I was appalled at how quickly the public narrative moved away from the student-led genesis of the work and shifted toward the after-the-fact funders and selected market directors. ![]() I simultaneously conducted my dissertation research while actively agitating against my own erasure and the erasure of the team I worked with to create a farmers market in my hometown. I do this work because of the numerous ways organizations I’ve helped create have minimized or erased my work in their master narratives. I study erasures of Black women’s labor in social movements.
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