| I looked forward to listening to the Lee Rayburn and Jodie Shawback Pro-Show on the MIC 92.1 in the mornings. Saturdays, I listened to John Quinlan's Forward Forum. This was before Clear Channel pulled both shows and threatened to change the MIC to an all-sports format. The MIC is back in Madison, Wisconsin, but it is not the same. As an African American, I am never sure what to expect, except that I am sure to feel uncomfortable if not insulted by the casts of new hosts. One morning, I woke up thinking I was listening to "Name that Black American!" I heard Zora Neale Hurston's name. She was an anthropologist, one of the hosts said. Sojourner Truth. Then one host mentioned Black History Month. Well, yes. It's February. I heard in the voices of the hosts that familiar effort to see black history as something outside and yet vaguely related to U.S. history. The familiar effort to disconnect and at the same time to espouse the "facts" is way to distance and, at the same time, possess the subject. Language is a place of struggle, bell hooks reminds us. Zora Neale Hurston wrote an important literary work, so important that white women in women's studies programs have claimed her for their own feminist of every month. She wrote "Their Eyes Were Watching God" in 1937 -- 11 years after Hemingway wrote "The Sun Also Rises," one year after Faulkner published "Absalom, Absalom!" and one year after "Gone with the Wind" won Best Picture at the Academy Awards with Hattie McDaniel (Black American) accepting the award for Best Supporting Actress. There's jazz and Billie Holiday, T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes. Hurston is right there in the mix responding to the American experience, which included genocide and the "peculiar institution" of slavery. What is trivial about this American experience? What is trivial about those who fought for freedom and against injustice? How does one trivialize those who stood up for freedom and fought against the injustices of White supremacy? Sojourner Truth was recognized by most Black feminists (that includes some Black men) as the mother of Black feminism who transformed her personal rage over the loss of her eight children in slavery to activism in the procurement of freedom for all enslaved blacks. Isabella, born in New York where "white supremacy was not codified legally" as in the Southern states, was still subject to suffering from "unpaid overwork" and "racial denigration," writes Black historian, Nell Irvin Painter. When her mistress called her dirty, worthless Negro, no one reassured the child of her human worth. Sojourner Truth escapes the confines of Isabella. Thereafter, the nation encountered a woman who was not afraid to speak before heckling whites who called out for her to shut up. Don't let her speak! These "listeners" distanced themselves from the content of her speeches while displaying that remarkable phenomenon of "knowing the subject" based on her physical attire. They reminded Sojourner that she was, after all, speaking, and she was no longer in bondage. Truth pushed on, however, because she recognized a national crisis: equally determined people who despite reality reject the knowledge of their connection and complicity with detrimental social policies. Sojourner Truth forced audiences to consider her humanity, her strength, her self-determination to challenge the logic of White supremacy that forces those acquiesced to it, directly or indirectly, to lose their own humanity: "I have borne 13 chilern and seen 'em mos all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard." She offered lessons of civilization to everyone. Paulo Freire wrote that "when people lack a critical understanding of their reality, apprehending it in fragments which they do not perceive as interacting constituent elements of the whole, they cannot truly know that reality." Yet, such is the manipulative logic America's narrative of history apprehended in fragments so some cannot truly know the reality of the American experience. Sojourner Truth is not a "dead icon" of Black History Month. She is one of the many ancestors occupying the heart and soul of this nation's effort to create democracy for all. She represented the force that spoke to those who uphold white supremacy. Who wants to distance themselves from this force? |
| Voices/Dr. Jean Daniels Sojourner Truth |
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