November 26, 2006
Domestic Goddess - Part 1 - Racism is Always Bad....
In the mid-late 1970's, I worked as part of a woman's collective that was called "Woman to Woman Bookcenter" on lower Colfax Ave, in Denver Colorado. Ours was a multi racial multi class group. We ran a woman's referral hotline. We called ourselves "feminists".
In late 1980, just after the reagan lanslide, the various services that our collective's rolodex offered/referred to the needy, were "unfunded" by the reagonites, who's sole purpose was to begin the dismantling of the middle class. The first step in this class warfare was to flood the streets with mental patients released from hospitals, thereby putting all the social burden of that on the mom/pop stores in the area, who almost immediately began to go out of business.
We saw our first glimpse of the future when an older woman, well known to all on colfax avenue's skid row, was taken down by two uniformed police officers, one of whom held her head to the pavement with his black boot. I ran outside to yell... "officer, what are you doing?" I had never seen the likes of it. "did she pull her fork on him?", I wondered. "get back in your shop!" he yelled. But I, indignant and suburban crossed the street anyway and said, "I want your badge number! I am reporting you!"
My sister Geraldine, and two big black lesbian women who worked there before me and sis joined in on the fight against "Patriarchy" (our commitment came from seeing what the mormon church in Utah did to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment) grabbed me by the arms and told me to get back in the shop and to shut up. This was my very first vision of what was coming to America.
I was then sheltered and schooled by black, latina and native american women who have long since been removed.
Back in the mid seventies, jewish and black and latino and native women used to hash out the old racism charges back and forth and it involved some blood too. By the time we found agreement, everyone white and middle class had left the collective and started to join together to build a gay and lesbian community center instead.
They were more comfortable joining ranks with white gay men than with black women who were almost obsessed with leveling charges of racism.
Sister and I stayed and were two of the four white women who chose "international feminism" over class/race. One of the books in our library said this same thing had happened before, back when feminists were trying to force suffrage, and turned the radical black women out of that group too, thereby weakening the entire anti-slavery movement. For her troubles, Susan B. Anthony was given her own silver dollar posthumously.
Sis and I flung back our charges of anti-semitism, yelled about zionism, cried and argued, admitted our racism, let go of it, and cried and argued some more.
We all, brown black and jewish, having agreed that feminism "Womanism" was the thing that mattered most, after years of inner and outer struggle, closed down the bookstore and shipped all of the books to palestine israel egypt and india, where we hoped they would be read and studied, now that no careerist feminists wanted them to live in denver anymore. The books at the new gay and lesbian center were all about sex and "gayety". No politics, no socialism, no feminist analysis. Those having been removed, the turn to republican money worship was encouraged amongst gays.
Racism is what killed the woman's movement...racism is always, always bad for white women and for gays too!!! Michael Richards' implosion is going to happen to more and more folks.
Posted at 8:55 PM - Permalink
November 27, 2006
Domestic Goddess - Part 2 - More and More Factions
The bookstore was dividing more and more into factions. I was the last of the straight women. Most of them had been run out of there by the lesbian separatists, who wanted no straight women in the collective. I stayed because I wanted to work with my sister, and I loved her lover as one loves one's in laws. The lesbians used to call me all kinds of names, from dikey - likey to closet case, and I would good naturedly tell them to go fuck a man. We kidded each other, and sometimes things got unmercifully tense as a result. Mostly, we saw each other as compatriots for choosing to stay in the collective at woman to woman because we were taking a multi-cultural, multi-racial position in the movement to international feminism.
Next faction, Lesbians who were self identified as Sado Masochists vs. the Lesbians who were Pagans vs. Lesbians who wanted to have "baster babies" vs. the Zionists vs. the socialists, and the transgendered vs. the Butch dyke...to see two of those folks fighting about being female was quite an eye opener for me.
About this time, I decided to become a stand up comic. My first act was written for an all black/jewish/latina lesbian audience. The first time I performed was in the basement of woman to woman bookstore, in the year of our white lord ronald reagon, 1980.
Posted at 9:27 AM - Permalink
Domestic Goddess - Part 3 - Living in Interesting Times
I remember my dear friend, the woman who taught me about yoruba and africa disappearing for days, especially after the one time when she hid in her basement under a pile of dirty clothes, and was miraculously not seen by the mormon fbi agents who kicked in her door and asked her lover if she knew her whereabouts. Bella said no, and Chi just happened to be downstairs washing clothes when they burst in yelling, "get down Negro" to bella, Chi later said "what are the odds that my 250 lbs. would just fit under a pile of laundry? I can't believe they didn't see me there, or at least hear my breathing, or my pounding heart!"
What the fuck did you do I asked? She got quiet like she did when she was serious and she said "I tried to educate Black Children in Oakland." That was when I knew I was cursed, and indeed like the Chinese say, living in interesting times.
"I guess the goddess wants me to be out here still." she remarked, while turning the world over in her mouth like cud.
I said "Let's go check out that woman's group by the terminal annex, that group of witches there, and see if they want to join up with a bunch of black latina lesbian jews".
Chi: "yeah, maybe this women's movement could use some goddess energy."
Posted at 8:39 PM - Permalink
November 28, 2006
Domestic Goddess - Part 4 - Wiccans and the Closing of the Bookstore
Before, we always argued to keep wiccans out, mostly because we felt that they were counter revolutionary, in that they settled for personal politics and sexual power games over Radical Feminist analysis of Socialism.
Also, too, the wiccans were still largely heterosexual and were fighting with their own lesbianing factioners over the issue of males leading their worship circles...the straight women preferred their husbands as Priestesses to lesbians, whom they said were "too male".
Chi and Bella used to make fun of the wiccans by grabbing old scarves and prancing in circles waving them around and singing in falsetto voices about how they were magic wood nymphs who were trying to teach "negroes" how to worship a white female as God.
Chi was an excellent musician, because her family members were considered some of america's jazz greats. I wrote my first comedy routine around that time...I strummed the acoustic guitar and sang in falsetto these words (think Holly Near):
"I was born twenty nine years ago
I didnt know it then, but I
was a Les-bi-an
I went to school
and got my msw
and now I drive a bmw.
I believe in freedom of the press
and Equal Rights for Whales..."
(then I would say "Bridge")
And say "have any of you guys
ever read atlas shrugged by ayn rand?
I really love that book I want to be a libertarian"
Then I would start hacking and coughing and bow and leave. Oh what a laugh I got from my dark skinned pals on that one!
We were desperate for more members in our collective though, and even though we snickered behind their magical backs, we admired the wiccans somewhat for at least being out of the cultural box enough to see Female Divinity.
It was all fun and games until someone got hurt, and someone did. The wiccans opened their faux castle door one day to find it smeared in chicken blood. They called it "being blooded", and they immediately closed down their witchy storefront and disappeared. We heard that some latina lesbian wiccans blooded them over letting white men lead their woodsy ceremonies.
When rational people ask me why it is that women are on the bottom of every group on earth, my answer is that women have developed the need to think the bottom IS the top, thanks to our religions and we are hopelessly lost in the victim/martyr mindset.
The solution for women is not the top at all, but the middle, where everything is drama'd down.
Continual celebration of spitting out more children to supply the fairy tales, has been forced on women, in the glorified "pedophilia-without-sex" called "Motherhood".
About this time, sister came up with the idea of reaching out to the Women at the University in Boulder. The Women's studies group there was busy standing powerlessly by as the Black History group was being dismantled, and because there was no groundswell to protest that development, due to the fact that white students were starting to claim that black students were getting preferential treatment on campus, all groups that had anything to do with racial or gender parity were disappeared too within a year or so.
The whole divide and conquer thing has never ever failed in making slaves out of everyone who chooses a side.
By 1982, everything that took root in the 60's was dead.
The collective was approached by a woman named carol chargingthunder, who was involved with Yellow Thunder, an Indian group that was fighting the government in South Dakota. She had been arrested for smuggling guns from central america through mexico and to the indian encampment. She came to us to ask if we could help her pay for attorney fees.
But, because she was a member of the armed services when she smuggled those weapons, we knew we could do nothing. She said she knew many soldiers were also becoming arms dealers too.
After that, Chi disappeared for a number of years, scared off by the fbi men who broke into her house looking for her. I was scared off too, and started closing down the bookstore, shipping the books out of america. It was devastating to lose all that international history written by women of every culture, but I still feel that the books are alive somewhere though, and when I read of women's parity groups in palestine and among the dalits of India and in parts of Africa, I think sometimes that the voices in those books are still unburned and living.
I think now too, of the genocidal gluttony that is destroying everything in Africa, and how we, at Woman to Woman Bookstore saw that all coming way back then, when race was a subject not yet taboo in America. Africa is our Mother, and this is the age of the motherless.
Posted at 1:01 PM - Permalink
Domestic Goddess - Part 5 - Only Victims Ask Why
I saw Chi again after I had debuted in a television comedy that was about a woman who lost her union job at a plastics factory, took a series of minimum wage jobs, opened and lost two businesses, then her husband, and at her lowest point, began to write about a woman who wins the lottery and buys the town's plastics factory.
Chi came to New York to visit me and told me all about how she had been living in a village in South Carolina, where she had been made an oruban priestess. I already had been a mystic since I was very very young, and I was excited to hear more about everything.
We walked all over the city, and we saw a street fair, I picked up a voodoo dolly and she took a picture of me holding it up. The next time I saw her was when she summoned me to San Francisco, where she was living back amongst Black Lesbian good graces there.
We walked the streets smoking cigars dressed in black all night long for a few days.
Gangsters approached us, and remarked on how we were vulnerable. I will never forget chi looking at the leader of the group and saying very softly..."Your choice". She was scarier than DeNiro in taxi driver, and with that only, the guy backed off, and so did the ones with him. The Power of Presence is not well known to women. Mostly we know about the presence of absence, because demurring to power is all that was ever shown to work on our behalf.
She taught me how to grab people's thoughts as they passed by. I was a fast learner, and stand up comedy had helped me hewn that part of my awareness. We picked a man on a bus and when he got off, we got off. It was three am. We circled him slowly and clockwise saying nothing. "Slow his heartbeat". she demanded, and I did, after some resistance on my part to believing that it was so simple to do that.
"Why"? I asked over and over again, regarding a number of subjects. "I will tell you why", she promised, and after we left the man, humbler than before, and never to dare ever again to think he understood women, we went to the docks that overlooked Alcatraz. She told me there... "ONLY VICTIMS ASK WHY" I recognized that that was the truth, the deepest truth of all.
"I have a solution for all the shit that separates you and me" she said..."I will teach you, but then you will become a worthy opponent and we will never be able to see each other again." I sat stunned because I did not want to lose her again. I wanted to learn more than any other thing, though. I absorbed all that she taught me, and at the end of our last weekend together, she said to me.."Now when you walk down that hall and out that door, you are taking my ancestors with you and you are leaving yours here with me too." Everything of race and class and religion that ever separated us in any way was healed, and when I walked down her hallway that night, I felt all the African and all the Yoruban ancestors settle into my blood and make themselves my own. I could feel all my jewish forebears getting comfortable in her body, and at last leaving the exile of the western world for darker soil that felt like home.
Posted at 9:16 PM - Permalink
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