Words of Fire (78 page)

Current public health efforts must address the long term stigma that African American women continue to experience with respect to sexually transmitted diseases. As the uninterrupted disparity in the incidence of these diseases within this community over the last fifty years indicates, those efforts have largely failed. Bringing to the fore the historical treatment and experience of African American women, their children, and their partners with respect to sexually transmitted diseases in the past is a necessary step.

In addition, most of all, what is needed is a viable black feminist movement. African American feminists need to intervene in the public and scientific debates about AIDS, making plain the impact that medical and public health policy will have on African American women. An analysis of gender is desperately needed to frame the discussion of sexual relations in the black community. Sexism lies behind the disempowerment and lack of control that African American women experience in the face of AIDS. African American women are multiply stigmatized in the AIDS epidemic —only a multifaceted African American feminist analysis attentive to issues of race, sex, gender, and power can adequately expose the impact of AIDS on our communities and formulate just policies to save women's lives.

ENDNOTES

1
Testimony of Margaret Rivera, Report of the Public Hearing, “AIDS: Its Impact on Women, Children and Families.” (New York State Division for Women, 12 June 1987), 21.

2
Victoria A. Cargill and Mark Smith, “HIV Disease and the African American Community,”
New England Journal of Medicine
, 1990.

3
Tedd V. Ellerbrock et al., “Epidemiology of Women With AIDS in the United States, 1981 Through 1990; A Comparison With Heterosexual Men With AIDS,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
265, no. 22 (12 June 1991): 2971.

4
Ibid.

5
IV drug users were constructed as male in the mass media before the spectacle of “crack babies.” Moreover, drug treatment models and facilities continue to favor male clients while the despair of women's addiction to crack disappears quickly behind our image of them as monsters for “delivering drugs” to their babies.

6
By using the term “attention,” it is not my intent in this essay to disparage or belittle the heroic efforts of the many health care workers, activists, and others who
have
labored to bring the plight of African American women and other women with AIDS to light. By using the term “attention,” I only mean to address the fact that the deaths of African American women with AIDS have not garnered the kind of front-page headlines or other prominent popular media attention given to other people with AIDS, as will be discussed more fully later in the essay.

7
Jane Gross, “Bleak Lives, Women Carrying AIDS,”
New York Times
, 27 August 1987.

8
N. S. Padian, “Heterosexual Transmission of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome: International Perspectives and National Projections,”
Review of Infectious Diseases
9 (1987): 947—960.

9
Gross, “Bleak Lives.”

10
“Tale of Revenge Stirs AIDS Furor: Woman Claims She's Trying to Infect Men, Prompting a Surge of Concern,”
New York Times
, 1 October 1991.

11
Ibid.

12
Ibid.

13
Ibid.

14
Shaharazad Ali,
The Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman
(1990). This is a very controversial and widely discussed book in the black community, which points to the tensions in heterosexual relationships

15
Ellerbrock, “Epidemiology,” 2973.

16
Ernest Drucker, “Epidemic in the War Zone: AIDS and Community Survival in New York City,”
International Journal of Health Services
20, no. 4 (1990): 605. Drucker notes that fewer than ten percent of the estimated 150 to 250 thousand people infected with HIV in New York City know their HIV status.

17
Ellerbrock, “Epidemiology,” 2974.

18
Drucker, “Epidemic,” 609.

19
Drucker, “Epidemic,” 613.

20
“AIDS: Its Impact on Women, Children and Families,” 51.

21
“Searching for Women: A Literature Review on Women and HIV in the United States” (Working Group at the College of Public and Community Service, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the Multicultural AIDS Coalition, April 1991), 54.

22
Robert A. Hahn et al., “Race and the Prevalence of Syphilis Seroreactivity in the United States Population: A National Sero-Epidemiologic Study,”
American Journal of Public Health
79, no. 4 (1989): 469.

23
Ibid., 469.

24
Ronald Bayer, “AIDS and the Future of Reproductive Freedom,” in
A Disease of Society: Cultural and Institutional Responses to AIDS
, ed. D. Nelkin, D. Willis, and S. Parris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 202.

25
Charles S. Johnson, “Public Opinion and the Negro,”
Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life
1, no. 7 (1923): 127.

26
Thomas B. Turner, “The Race and Sex Distribution of the Lesions of Syphilis in 10,000 Cases,”
Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital
46, no. 2, 159—185.

27
Thomas Murrell, “Syphilis and the American Negro: A Medico-Sociologic Study,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
54 (1910): 846—849.

28
Johnson, “Public Opinion,” 204.

29
Paula Giddings,
When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
(New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 146.

30
John C. Gebhart, “Syphilis as a Prenatal Problem,”
Journal of Social Hygiene
10, no. 4 (April 1924): 208—217.

31
J. W. Williams, “The Significance of Syphilis in Prenatal Care and in the Causation of Fetal Death,”
Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital
31, no. 351 (May 1920): 141—145.

32
Mable Mildred Galt, “The Medical-Social Aspects of Pre-Natal Work as Related to Syphilis: A Study of the South Medical Clinic of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA” (Ph.D. diss. Smith College School of Social Work, 1923).

33
See Molly Ladd Taylor, “Women's Health and Public Policy,” in
Women, Health & Medicine in America
, ed. Rima Apple (New York: Garland Publishing, Co. 1990), 403.

34
Allan Brandt, No Magic Bullet:
A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 17.

35
Gebhart, “Syphilis.”

——NELLIE MCKAY

A
frican American women have been passionate about education and consummate institution builders for over a century both here and elsewhere. Despite racist and sexist treatment in a variety of institutional contexts, they have continued to struggle for equal access, fair treatment, and images of themselves within the academy. Their contemporary battles include transforming higher education to make it more responsive to the needs of black women, establishing black women's studies, and revamping both black studies and women's studies because of their insensitivity to gender on the one hand and race on the other. Since many contemporary black feminists find themselves within the academy, much of their discourse has been ignored or maligned because of its seeming irrelevance to the lives of black people.

A major challenge for feminists as we approach the twenty-first century is generating theory that is useful in liberating the black community from a host of ills. The continued development of our intellects, devalued by the larger community and frequently unappreciated or ignored within our own communities, is critical for both self-understanding and the survival of the group.

M
argaret Walker Alexander, poet, novelist, and teacher, is professor emerita, Jackson State University, where she taught for nearly forty years. She also directed their Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People, beginning in 1986, and hosted the first national conference on black women writers. The daughter of educators, Walker grew up on a college campus surrounded by books—the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Her publications include her first collection of poetry, the award-winning
For My People
(1942);
Jubilee
(1966), a historical novel inspired by the story of her enslaved great-grandmother, Vyry;
Prophets for a New Day
(1970);
Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius
; and
How I Wrote Jubilee
(1972), which includes an autobiographical essay on the sexism that black women, including family members, experience within the academy. This painful account of her own struggles as an academic underscores the importance of gender analyses of higher education, which have been sorely lacking in the literature on historically black colleges. In an essay, “On Being Female, Black and Free,” included in
The Writer and Her Work
, edited by Janet Steinburg, Walker reveals that she didn't notice sexism growing up in the South because of the blatant nature of racism, but after she returned to graduate school for the doctorate, she began to notice discrimination against women. She concludes: “As a woman, I have come through the fires of hell because I am a black woman, because I am poor, because I live in America, and because I am determined to be both a creative artist and maintain my inner integrity and my instinctive need to be free.”

T
he first woman in my family to experience discrimination in academia was my mother. She was the first woman in her family to get a college degree and to teach school. Her father and uncle taught school, but her mother did not get an education. My mother was the youngest of seven children, and her older sisters, like her mother, had done washing and ironing and cooking for white folks. They wanted my mother, a talented musician, to have an opportunity to get an education to be a lady. So they sent her from Pensacola, Florida, to Washington, D.C., to boarding school. Although she received a scholarship to Howard University for her college training, she did not accept it. She was homesick for Florida. After three years scrubbing floors to help pay for her schooling, she wanted nothing so much as to go home.

Completing high school, she returned to Pensacola, where she met my father and became engaged to be married. That next school term she taught country school in Greenville, Alabama, making only a few dollars a month. The first year she lived with her grandmother, and the next September she married my father and went to Birmingham, Alabama, to live.

Six weeks after I was born she was asked to teach music in the small Methodist church school, Central Alabama Institute, which was located close to the church my father pastored in Mason City. After a brief year at Central, my father was moved to a church in Marion, Alabama. In the middle of the year, my mother received a letter asking her to return to Central Alabama Institute. She wrote she would very much like that, but she had to stay with her husband, and added that she could only accept the work if they offered my father a job as well. They hired my father and thus began twenty years of teaching in church schools for my mother and father. In all that time my mother's salary never was as much as a hundred dollars a month.

My mother finished college in New Orleans by going to school at night for four years while working in the day. Obviously this would not have
been possible had not my grandmother lived with us and done all the cooking, washing, ironing, and housecleaning. When my father received his master's degree at Northwestern, after going six summers, my mother was offered a scholarship to complete her graduate work in music, but could not accept because of her children and family. I was a teenager, and she said it was the wrong time for her to leave me as well as my sisters and brother. Her teaching job grew so impossible that she suddenly quit while I was in the middle of college. The day I graduated from college, my father also ended his teaching career and went back to the ministry as a pastor. My mother said she worked around the clock teaching private pupils, music classes, conducting the singing, playing the organ, conducting the orchestra, arranging music, and traveling with the singing male group, all for a pittance plus harassment. She had no rank or tenure, and she was reduced to receiving a few dollars (about thirty-five) in a small bank envelope. This was during the Depression. Soon afterward she began working on the WPA, where she made more than she had teaching.

I also graduated to the WPA, but unlike my mother, I had gone uninterrupted through Northwestern, getting my degree in English when I was nineteen. After three years I went to graduate school in order to get a master's degree and teach. Getting my master's in one school year nearly killed me. I was on NYA (National Youth Association, a governmentsupported agency) and had so little money I ate lunch only once a week when a friend bought it. When I went home in August, my father lifted me from the train and I was in a state of collapse. For eighteen months I was unable to work.