Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973–2001

By Dan Berger and Emily K. Hobson

This book brings together documents from multiple radical movements in the recent United States from 1973 through 2001. These years are typically viewed as an era of neoliberalism, dominated by conservative retrenchment, the intensified programs of privatization and incarceration, dramatic cuts to social welfare, and the undermining of labor, antiracist, and feminist advances. Yet activists from the period proved tenacious in the face of upheaval, resourceful in creating new tactics, and dedicated to learning from one another. Persistent and resolute, activists did more than just keep radical legacies alive. They remade radicalism—bridging differences of identity and ideology often assumed to cleave movements, grappling with the eradication of liberal promises, and turning to movement cultures as the source of a just future.

Remaking Radicalism is the first anthology of U.S. radicalisms that reveals the depth, diversity, and staying power of social movements after the close of the long 1960s. Editors Dan Berger and Emily Hobson track the history of popular struggles during a time that spans the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush and bring to readers the political upheavals that shaped the end of the century and that continue to define the present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780820357270

Book preview

PART 1

Bodies and Lives

In 1979, members of the Black lesbian and socialist feminist organization the Combahee River Collective marched to protest a series of recent murders of Black women in Boston. They carried a banner that read 3rd World Women: We Cannot Live without Our Lives. The banner’s words point to the cutting edge politics that illuminated the time period and that are illustrated in this part of the book. To say that we cannot live without our lives is to acknowledge how many people live at risk of premature death and how many have been lost already. The causes of such deaths lie in racial, gender, and state violence, including systems of poverty and disease. To mark premature death is to value those living at risk. It is to insist on the freedom to make choices about our bodies and lives. In addition, it is to honor the unpaid or underpaid labor, typically assigned to women and people of color, that is required for daily survival in capitalism. Though our lives are sites of risk, radicals have redefined this vulnerability as the source of a transformative politics.

Combahee’s banner illustrated the growth of intersectional feminism, not only because Black women created it but because in centering on radical women of color, Combahee challenged and expanded feminist thought. The group borrowed the phrase we cannot live without our lives from a 1974 book by white feminist writer Barbara Deming, who—adapting the line from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights—used it to think through the ways that sexism harms women’s sense of self. Combahee expanded on Deming’s analysis of the psychological costs of patriarchy by naming women of color as particularly vulnerable to both state and interpersonal violence. Through this, Combahee articulated sexism as interwoven with racism, capitalism, and empire.

Part 1 of Remaking Radicalism, Bodies and Lives, explores how activists worked for liberation from the intimate scale of the body and through struggles to sustain everyday life. Feminist, queer, labor, and antiracist politics are the central frameworks reflected here. A host of activists grounded agendas for liberation in the body and the home, through work to secure sexual and reproductive freedom, rights and dignity on the job, and an end to poverty. As they did so, they fought back against deindustrialization, attacks on labor power, and the meticulous dismantling of social programs that often hit poor people of color the hardest. They faced down the rise of the New Right, whose attacks on welfare and civil rights mobilized through the antifeminist, homophobic, and racist language of family values. They worked to counter—and envision alternatives to—neoliberalism, which solidified through liberal-right consensus and which made some bodies and lives more vulnerable than others.

Section A, Feminist and Queer Flashpoints, documents the growth of intersectional feminisms. Across the 1970s and early 1980s, feminist and LGBTQ politics grew dramatically and pushed well beyond frameworks of liberal civil rights. Many feminist and queer radicals crafted multi-issue politics in dialogue with antiracist, antiimperialist, and anticapitalist agendas. The first half of Feminist and Queer Flashpoints illustrates this through sources reflecting socialist and women of color feminisms, the gay and lesbian left, and the politics of reproductive justice and of rape. Many of the flashpoints here turn on the problem of how to conceptualize and respond to violence. Should feminists ally with police and prisons to address sexual and domestic violence? How is poverty itself a form of gendered and racialized violence? The second half of section A builds on the debates over these concerns, while also addressing the boundaries of identity in 1980s and 1990s feminist and LGBTQ politics. How can queer people of color, sex workers, and trans activists claim space in the face of marginalization? How are the politics of AIDS intertwined with feminism, antiracism, and antimilitarism? Debating these questions drove activists forward.

At the same time, radicals also faced down a growing threat: the rise of the right, in the form of both elected officials and social movements outside the government. From the 1970s forward, elements of the racist right joined forces, and Christian fundamentalists mobilized to influence policy. By 1980, conservatives claimed victory in the Reagan presidency, which shut down briefly held, mildly liberal gains. Bolstered by state repression, New Right politicians worked to turn back civil rights for people of color, women, and gay and lesbian people. Through the language of family values, it worked diligently to cut social programs, particularly welfare. A further measure of the New Right’s power came as a growing number of Democrats joined in slashing cuts to social programs. Antiracist feminist and queer politics offered the clearest rallying cry against these threats.

This context is illuminated in section B, Fighting the Right. Many of the documents here call for confronting a common enemy or for standing together against shared threats. Some address the racialization of gender and sexuality, the gender and sexual politics of race, or the class dimensions of these intersections. Key strategies reflected include opposition to the racist right, the defense of sexual and reproductive freedom, and efforts to maintain such policies as affirmative action. The documents here emphasize radical-liberal alliances that formed at the grassroots to challenge the right. These coalitions were especially significant in rural areas. This section also includes texts documenting feminist and queer debates over pornography, censorship, and the policing of sex. Among other contributions, the texts show how rising conservatism—in both its moralistic and free market faces—set much of the tone for debates over sexual freedom.

The 1970s through 1990s brought another threat into everyday life that was intertwined with the rise of the right. This was the accelerating concentration of wealth. Most people experienced this concentration through a loss of power on the job (or loss of the job itself), the deepening of poverty, the decimation of public services, and the narrowing worldview evident in a media environment dominated by just a handful of companies. Looking forward in 1970, many had been optimistic about radical, even revolutionary change. The decade kicked off with strong union power: 1970 saw 5,716 work stoppages involving over three million workers. Slowdowns, wildcat strikes, and efforts to democratize union leadership were frequent—targeting both unjust workplaces and corrupt union leadership. Socialist feminists, Black union activists, and other radicals appeared poised to win more rights on the job rather than to lose them and to be in a good position to push back against business unionism. Further, an array of activists pursued the radical community services, such as health clinics, that the Black Panther Party modeled through its survival programs.

By the mid-1970s, however, a recession arrived. Inflation took hold; union cutbacks hit full swing; and deindustrialization appeared relentless. Cuts to urban budgets and to public services shook communities across the country. Then Ronald Reagan became president. Campaigning on the promise of undoing decades of liberal and radical advances, Reagan ushered in a wholesale assault on welfare, health care, affirmative action, reproductive rights, and unions. These attacks amplified other crises, particularly that of AIDS, which Reagan—following hardliners in his administration—did very little to address. Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, continued his legacy, and Bill Clinton, the first Democratic president in twelve years, continued many of the fiscally austere policies of Reagan and Bush. Clinton’s signature welfare reform bill of 1996 consigned millions to lifetime precarity by drastically cutting benefits and the length of time that people could receive them. Further, the policy allowed states to administer welfare funds through degrading tactics such as marriage promotion courses and Dress for Success programs rather than cash aid.

Despite all these onslaughts, radicals worked to sustain dignity, autonomy, and health in the face of deepening inequality and exploitation. Section C, Labors of Survival, illustrates these efforts. Integrating labor, welfare, disability, and health activism, the section shows how radicals worked to win value both for work performed on the factory floor and for that done inside the home. It includes documents on welfare politics, texts from the 1970s for welfare rights and texts from the 1990s against welfare reform. It illustrates labor feminism in contexts ranging from food canneries to flight attendant unions. It touches on queer labor activism, notably through health care unions’ responses to AIDS. More generally, the section considers how activists responded to the US economy’s shift away from industrialized, unionized work toward a low-wage service economy and right to work laws. (Labor activism is also represented in the book in part 3, Borders and Maps, which addresses immigrant worker organizing, international solidarity, and global justice movements.)

Throughout Bodies and Lives, activists’ breadth of vision appears in the ways they connect particular issues—whether a union contract fight, resistance to racist violence, or caring for people with HIV and AIDS—to broader contexts of repression and austerity. Activists across the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s organized during a period of mounting loss and amid harsh threats to collective survival. By merging feminist and queer politics, participatory democracy, and traditions of radical labor organizing, they not only confronted neoliberalism but built toward an alternative society.

SECTION A

Feminist And Queer Flashpoints

1.A.1.

Combahee River Collective

From A Black Feminist Statement (1977)

The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist and lesbian organization in Boston active from 1974 to 1980. Its 1977 statement is one of the founding documents of contemporary Black feminism and intersectional feminist thought. This edited version does not include the full statement’s sections on the historical origins of Black feminism and on what Combahee saw as problems in Black feminist organizing.

We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face. . . .

What We Believe

Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s may because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western hemisphere. We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.

Although we are feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.

We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and antiracist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.

A political contribution which we feel we have already made is the expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political. In our consciousness- raising sessions, for example, we have in many ways gone beyond white women’s revelations because we are dealing with the implications of race and class as well as sex. Even our Black women’s style of talking/testifying in Black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political. We have spent a great deal of energy delving into the cultural and experiential nature of our oppression out of necessity because none of these matters has ever been looked at before. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black women’s lives. An example of this kind of revelation/conceptualization occurred at a meeting as we discussed the ways in which our early intellectual interests had been attacked by our peers, particularly Black males. We discovered that all of us, because we were smart, had also been considered ugly, i.e., smart-ugly. Smart-ugly crystallized the way in which most of us had been forced to develop our intellects at great cost to our social lives. The sanctions in the Black and white communities against Black women thinkers are comparatively much higher than for white women, particularly ones from the educated middle and upper classes.

As we have already stated, we reject the stance of lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. As Black women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. We must also question whether lesbian separatism is an adequate and progressive political analysis and strategy, even for those who practice it, since it so completely denies any but the sexual sources of women’s oppression, negating the facts of class and race. . . .

Black Feminist Issues and Projects

During our time together we have identified and worked on many issues of particular relevance to Black women. The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women [and] Third World and working people. We are of course particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex, and class are simultaneous factors in oppression. We might, for example, become involved in workplace organizing at a factory that employs Third World women or picket a hospital that is cutting back on already inadequate heath care to a Third World community, or set up a rape crisis center in a Black neighborhood. Organizing around welfare and daycare concerns might also be a focus. The work to be done and the countless issues that this work represents merely reflect the pervasiveness of our oppression.

Issues and projects that collective members have actually worked on are sterilization abuse, abortion rights, battered women, rape, and health care. We have also done many workshops and educationals on Black feminism on college campuses, at women’s conferences and most recently for high school women.

One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white women’s movement. As Black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture. Eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue.

In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving correct political goals. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics. We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society. We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice. In her introduction to Sisterhood Is Powerful Robin Morgan writes:

I haven’t the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white heterosexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power.

As Black feminists and lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.

A Brief History of SisterSong

Loretta J. Ross

In 1997, sixteen women of color leaders of community-based organizations, including me, organized a reproductive health coalition called SisterSong. Four previous attempts over the past decade had floundered due to lack of funding, yet we were not deterred. We represented Native American, Latina, Asian Pacific Islander, and African American women, four organizations from each group. We responded to a heartfelt need for women of color to organize our voices to collectively represent ourselves in policy debates on reproductive politics in the United States and Puerto Rico. Some of us were prochoice and others prolife. But all were impatient with the paralysis of the prochoice vs. prolife binary dominating reproductive health issues. We identified our common ground as women of color seeking to deliver services to our communities. Some worked as midwives, others on issues of HIV/AIDS, teen pregnancy, community health services, human rights, and abortion advocacy.

One of our founders, Juanita Williams (an AIDS survivor from Project Azuka), noticed that despite our differences, we were all saying the same thing about why our work was so hard. We faced inadequate funding, reluctance in our communities to talk about sex and sexuality, missing infrastructure like computers and fax machines, and a lack of support from the mainstream prochoice movement. Williams observed that if we sang our individual songs in harmony with each other, we could raise a powerful chorus for change. Thus, SisterSong was born, and our mission became our motto: Doing collectively what we cannot do individually.

Luz Rodriguez, then the Puerto Rican director of the Latina Roundtable on Reproductive Rights, had a providential meeting in 1996 with Reena Marcello, then a program officer with the Ford Foundation. Reena, a Filipina nearing the end of her five-year term with Ford, sadly reported that she had never made a sizable grant to a women of color organization because many lacked institutional capacity. She asked what Luz would do with an opportunity from Ford, and Luz pulled out a cocktail napkin and drew a schema that would include sixteen organizations representing four major ethnic communities. After planning meetings in New York City and Savannah, the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective was born.

There were several critical issues facing the original founders. The first was that Ford wanted the organizations to pursue the foundation’s agenda, which at that time centered on reproductive tract infections. SisterSong founders pushed back because they were familiar with funders demanding that women of color meet outside demands rather than building their infrastructures and reoriented the grant from a focus on programming and service delivery to longer-term capacity building.

Our second critical issue was developing a common focus. We decided to use the reproductive justice framework created in 1994 by African American women as our conceptual glue for strengthening a movement of women of color. Reproductive justice is built on three major pillars: 1) the right to not have a child, using birth control, abortion, and/or abstinence; 2) the right to have a child by resisting strategies of population control, including the right to use midwives and doulas; and 3) the right to raise children in safe and healthy environments. This intersectional framework expands the conversation about reproductive health to include environmental justice, gun control, quality schools, tax policies, police violence, and a host of other issues not addressed by the prochoice vs. prolife divide. Reproductive justice has grown to become the dominant framework of the women of color reproductive health movement and has exerted a profound influence on mainstream organizing as well.

Over time, SisterSong grew to include eighty women of color and allied organizations and changed its name to SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. The group celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2017 and has enlarged its membership base to include white allies, men, and LGBTQ members attracted to its radical politics. In its third decade, SisterSong proves that women of color, working together, can transform themselves and the entire landscape of reproductive politics.

The founding SisterSong organizations were the National Latina Health Organization, Women’s House of Learning Empowerment, Casa Atabex Aché, and Grupo Pro-Derechos Reproductivos of Puerto Rico (Latina); SisterLove, the National Center for Human Rights Education, California Black Women’s Health Project, and Project Azuka (African American); MoonLodge, the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center, Wise Women Gathering Place, and Minnesota Indigenous People’s Task Force (Native American); and Kokua Kalihi Valley Comprehensive Family Services, Asian Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health, the National Asian Women’s Health Organization, and THE (To Help Everyone) Clinic (Asian American/Pacific Islander).

1.A.2.

Iris Morales

Sterilized Puerto Ricans (1970)

Struggles for the right to bear and raise children, as well as to choose not to, have been fundamental to women of color feminism. Iris Morales served as minister of education in the Young Lords Party, a Puerto Rican radical organization in New York City and Chicago, and first published this essay in the Young Lords’ newspaper Palante.

Genocide is being committed against the Puerto Rican women! In no other nation has sterilization been so prevalent as a means of genocide against an oppressed people. Why Puerto Ricans? First, the united states needs Puerto Rico as a military stronghold to maintain political stability and control in the rest of Latin America. Second, Puerto Rico is the fourth largest worldwide consumer of amerikkkan goods and yields massive profits to amerikkkan capitalists. Also, Puerto Rico supplies fighting men and a cheap labor pool, both necessary to u.s. capitalism. One way to control a nation of vital importance is to limit its population size. The u.s. is doing exactly this through sterilization.

The practice of sterilization in Puerto Rico goes back to the 1930s when doctors pushed it as the only means of contraception. As a result, throughout the island, Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were sterilized. In 1947–48, 7 percent of the women were sterilized; between 1953–54, four out of every twenty-five Sisters were sterilized; and by 1965, the number increased to one out of every three women. This system was practiced on Sisters of all ages. But, since 1965, the trend has been to sterilize women in their early 20s when they have had fewer babies. This is especially true among lower-class Sisters where future revolutionaries would come from. Committing sterilization on young Puerto Rican mothers with fewer children means that the u.s. is able to significantly reduce and limit the Puerto Rican population in a short period of time.

Genocide through sterilization is not only confined to the island of Puerto Rico. It is also carried out within the Puerto Rican colony in the u.s. In El Barrio, sterilization is still practiced as a form of contraception among women, especially young Sisters. One out of four sterilized women in El Barrio has the operation done when she’s between twenty and thirty. But the system justifies the shit, saying the Sisters go to Puerto Rico to get it done. Yet the evidence says that over half the Sisters get the operation done right here in New York City and are strongly encouraged by their doctors to do so. Again, sterilization in the early reproductive years of a woman’s life limits the Puerto Rican population substantially and permanently.

Sterilization is also a form of oppression against Puerto Rican women. We are oppressed by our own culture that limits us to the roles of homemaker, mother, and bearer of many children which measures male virility. We have been made dependent on family and home for our very existence. We are used by u.s. corporations to test the safety of birth control pills before placing them on the market for sale. Our bodies are used by capitalists for experimentation to find new moneymaking and genocidal gadgets. We are prevented from getting adequate birth control information and legal abortions. As a result, one out of every four Sisters who try it die from self-induced abortions, giving Puerto Ricans the notoriety of having the highest death rate casualties from abortion than any other group. Sterilization is just another form of oppressing us.

Sterilization is irreversible and as such the u.s. can control the Puerto Rican population. Sterilization once done cannot be undone. We must stop sterilization because we must leave the option open to ourselves to control the Puerto Rican population. Our men die in Vietnam, our babies are killed through lead poisoning and malnutrition, and our women are sterilized. The Puerto Rican Nation must continue. We must open our eyes to the oppressor’s tricknology and refuse to be killed anymore. We must, in the tradition of Puerto Rican women like Lolita Lebron, Blanca Canales, Carmen Perez, and Antonia Martinez, join with our Brothers and together, as a nation of warriors, fight the genocide that is threatening to make us the last generation of Puerto Ricans.

Stop the genocide! Off the pig!

No more sterilization of Sisters!

Que viva Puerto Rico libre!

1.A.3.

United Front

Forward Macho (1973)

Feminist and gay politics, along with antiracism, made major inroads among the radical soldiers and veterans who resisted the Vietnam War. This essay comes from an underground newspaper, Hansen Free Press, that was produced by the United Front, an association of antiwar soldiers who were affiliated with Vietnam Veterans against the War and stationed in Okinawa, Japan.

Forward Macho! Perhaps that command best characterizes sexism in the military. The drill instructors in training are quick to call the gentle or soft-spoken marine a pussy or some other lifer cliché. The recruit who fails in a task is a lady or a girl, while the gung ho recruit is praised as a swinging dick. The marine’s personal relationships with women are put down, his wife or girlfriend used for drill instructors’ dirty jokes. Sometimes recruits are encouraged to have their old ladies send skin pics which are put on display on hog boards for public derision. Chauvinism is perpetuated by the attitude of those pigs who train recruits, plus the two-month isolation period with no contact with women. Women become dehumanized and objectified to a sickening degree. Shower-room walls tell the story with disgusting displays of graffiti and smut. Barracks slang is well known for its disgusting content.

When a marine leaves training, he is an American fighting man. He’s been taught to kill in a racist and sadistic fashion. He’s been regimented to uphold America’s finest image. He has been programmed as an automaton for the military and taught to expect women to become automatons for him.

The attitude in the military towards women is similar to that in society at large. Men fight, men win, men take. However, that attitude is intensified and perpetuated in the military to such a degree that it is physically dangerous. (Ask any woman who walks down the street in a military town on payday.) Because the marine has now become a man through the military, it is hard for him to understand why every woman he meets doesn’t want to sleep with him. He has been brainwashed to the point where he knows that women find him sexually desirable because he is a tough, hard killer. He actually believes that so much that when he is rejected or rebuffed by a woman, he blames her for not acting as he has been told she would. This sometimes manifests itself not only in contempt, but in a genuine dislike for women. It is not unusual to see pinup nudes with breasts and crotches burned out by cigarettes and adorning walls and wall lockers.

The difference in attitude towards women at different duty stations is interesting, and of course, sick. In Germany, GIs may take their pleasure at bordellos, but don’t go near a blonde German woman. In Vietnam, on the other hand, marines are systematically taught to see Vietnamese women as whores. Vietnamese women become not only sex objects, but subhumans, pieces of flesh in vaguely human form, suitable only for sexual outlet. A marine who displays any emotional attachment towards a Vietnamese woman is put down and ostracized by his comrades. It’s no coincidence that US presence in South Vietnam has produced a generation of pimps and prostitutes. Crimes of rape in South Vietnam are too numerous to record.

The brass that conspires to turn out regimented robots understand machismo in much the same way that they understand racism. Machismo is considered the proper attitude for a marine. It pictures a strong man with a dumb blonde on each arm killing commie gooks in the shadow of old glory.

Like racism, machismo is used to divide and conquer. It produces troop morale instead of solidarity between people. By making enemies out of people who could be on the same side, it divides us and weakens our ability to fight back against the military.

1.A.4a. and 1.A.4b.

In March 1974 Inez Garcia, a Latina woman in Soledad, California, was charged with murder for defending herself against rape. Feminists, lesbians, and others organized to support her in court, linking her case to other women of color, such as Joan Little, Yvonne Swan (then known as Wanrow), and Dessie Woods, then facing similar charges. Garcia was convicted in 1974, then found not guilty on appeal in 1975. Racist Sexism in the Trial and the article that follows it, We Need the Power to Defend Ourselves, were published in the Bay Area newspaper the Feminist during the campaign to overturn her conviction.

1.A.4a. The Feminist, Racist Sexism in the Trial (1974)

The possibility that the predominately white jury might be swayed by a racist attitude toward the defendants was obscured for some people at the beginning of the trial of Garcia and Medrano, because of the fact that not only were both the defendants members of an oppressed nationality, but the dead rapist was also, as was the prosecution’s chief witness, Luis Castillo, who had committed the physical rape.

Garcia’s defense lawyer, Charles Garry, when asked by a woman spectator why he did not question any of the prospective jurors on their racial attitudes, answered that racism had nothing to do with this case. I know what I’m doing, he told the woman. I’m an expert on racism.

The jurors were in fact not questioned on either racism or sexism, except for one question which was asked of only some of them—Do you consider rape a violent crime?

What was at work in that Monterey courtroom was racist sexism, which is a particularly virulent instrument of oppression against women of color and is something more than simply the sum of those two patriarchal poisons.

Judge Lawson led the pack, suggesting that the illiteracy of the defendant Inez Garcia must be a sign of being a little retarded, and not a result of poverty, atrociously bad New York schools, neglect by American school systems toward Spanish-speaking children, and the lack of importance given to resolving learning difficulties for girls—in both the Anglo and Spanish cultures.

There was no attempt by the defense to tackle this view of illiteracy, thus leaving a wide gap for this suburban jury to fill in with its own prejudices, aided by Garry’s painstaking reminders that Garcia had spent time in mental hospitals, more than once.

There were several attempts on the part of the prosecution to insinuate that Garcia was immodest and tended to invite rape. This slur is used against all women, white included, who have been made objects of male depredations. But it is used with particular viciousness against women of color. The prosecutor’s insinuations fell flat, but some residue of this attitude was left in the jury’s minds, as indicated by a woman juror who believed, "It would not have happened to me!"—meaning, a woman who gets raped must have been doing something wrong. (And if she is not of my color or not of my class, then even more must she have been doing something wrong.)

The prosecution also tried to imply that the reason why Garcia killed Jimenez was not rape at all, but drugs. And here the emphasis was shifted to the other defendant, Fred Medrano. Without bringing in one shred of evidence to back up this charge, the prosecution was content to leave the impression in the jury’s minds that Medrano, being nonwhite, was probably mixed up in something illegal. And that Garcia, being a woman, was probably helping her man.

An Anglo woman would still have faced a mountain of tradition which says that a woman never meets violence with violence, that a woman must endure male violence and humiliation with stoicism and self-blame. (If she fights to the death, it must be her death, and not that of her attacker.)

But Inez Garcia, born in Spanish Harlem of Puerto Rican and Cuban parentage, faced several mountains.

This is not to say that the conviction was inevitable. But it does mean that it needed a real struggle, both in and out of the courtroom, to win justice for Inez.

And the struggle will be all the harder after the courtroom defeat that came down October 4.

1.A.4b. The Feminist, We Need the Power to Defend Ourselves! (1975)

There are no rights without power. We need the right and the power to do whatever is necessary to see that we are secure in our persons.

Physical and political weapons are inseparable—both of them indispensable to any oppressed group.

Without political struggle we will remain physically defenseless. Without forcefully proving that we value ourselves and will back up that self-value with whatever weapons are available, we will remain politically powerless.

We need economic power. We are expected to beg and grovel for the means to maintain life. They pour saccharin praises on our roles as mothers—but rob us of the means to carry out those roles with dignity.

Women make up the great majority of the working poor. The work we are allowed or forced to do has been made a series of purgatories of monotony or degradation. Our wages make us nothing more than slaves.

We must attack the sources of our economic slavery.

We need political power. The federal, state, and city governments are nothing but instruments of the few rich men who keep us poor. As soon as women begin to fight for real gains—not tokens, not pretty phrases—we find ourselves up against the police, the courts, the jails.

There is no accommodation with this repressive apparatus nor with the politicians who cover for it. It is them or us!

Any protection which robs us of our autonomy is no protection at all. Any protection which uses white women as pawns in racist frame-ups is no protection at all. It is a deadly poison designed not only to undermine the struggles of Third World men, but to render women of all colors immobile, powerless, and terrorized.

We want no more of the protection racket.

We want self-determination.

Crimes against women will not cease until they are dealt with by women, whether they are in the street, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the jail, in the court, in the welfare building, in the plant, in the office, in the bank, in the governor’s office, or in the White House.

1.A.5.

Yvonne Swan

Witness statement (1976)

Yvonne Swan, formerly known as Yvonne Wanrow, is a Native American woman from the Colville Indian Reservation who became a major figure in anticarceral feminism and Native activism through her insistence on her right to self-defense. In 1972, she killed a violent man who attempted to molest her children. Initially convicted of murder, she won a retrial in 1975, then faced delays as prosecutors sought to block her case. In this witness statement, which she gave as part of the first International Tribunal on Crimes against Women (held in Brussels in 1976), Swan describes the sexism and anti-Native racism of her first trial. In 1977, the Washington Supreme Court upheld Swan’s right to a retrial in a ruling that helped expand women’s access to self-defense against gender violence. Swan ultimately accepted a plea deal that allowed her to maintain her claim to self-defense and that kept her out of prison. Her case can be usefully compared to that of Inez Garcia (1.A.4a., 1.A.4b.) and Leonard Peltier (2.A.3.).

My name is Yvonne Wanrow. I am a Native American. I was born and raised on an Indian reservation. I left there to get an education, and I completed high school. I married young but got divorced right away. I have three children, aged twelve, five and twenty-two months, whom I have had to raise by myself. I live now in the state of Washington on the Colville Indian reservation with my mother, sister, two nieces, my children, and two other family members. Thirty-two years ago I was born into a defensive position. I was born to be oppressed, and I am fighting for my life.

Three and half years ago, I was arrested and charged with murder and assault. I was put in jail. I was brought before an all-white jury at the time of the Wounded Knee occupation in South Dakota, a time when all Native Americans were seen as militants and extremists. I was convicted by this all-white jury on Mother’s Day, May 13, 1973, and sentenced to two twenty-year terms, and one five-year term for the use of a gun. Why? Because I had killed a man in defense of my child, my babysitter’s child, and myself. William Wesler was a sixty-two- year old white man, six feet, two inches tall. He was known to the police as a child molester and rapist. He wasn’t particular: he molested both boys and girls. He had previously raped the seven-year-old daughter of my babysitter and given her venereal disease. He had also attacked my son. He lured him into his home, locked the door, and picked up a knife. But my son was able to escape with only a lump on his arm. The next night when I was at my babysitter’s home with my children, my babysitter, and her daughter, Wesler and another man broke into the house at five in the morning.

I had a broken leg at the time, and when Wesler headed towards one of the children, I screamed for help. Wesler, who was drunk out of his mind, turned, lurching toward me. So I shot him. I immediately called the police to report what had happened. They arrested me and put me in jail. I feel all I was guilty of was being a mother who loves her children.

At my trial the judge refused to allow evidence on Wesler’s history as a child molester and rapist. He did not allow the babysitter’s daughter, whom Wesler had raped, to testify because it was irrelevant, and she was too young to be believed. It was said by the probation officer at my sentencing that I must be prone to violence because I had purchased a gun. But I had purchased the gun for self-protection, because my life had been threatened by white people, and I was living alone in a neighborhood known to the police as a troublesome area. I was told that I could pursue my career in art in prison and that I could teach other inmates art, and that I could counsel other Native American women in prison. And the probation officer said that as I come from a large family, there certainly would be no problem as to who would care for my children during my incarceration. He also implied he was an authority on Indians because he had spent two years on my Indian reservation. They really didn’t care what happened to me. The judge said, Hurry up. Let’s get this over with. Let’s wrap it up by the weekend!

My tone of voice was used to convict me; they said I was calm because I was not screaming on the telephone when I reported what had happened to the police. And the prosecutor used my calmness in the courtroom against me, telling the jury: Look at her, how cold blooded she is. How calmly she sits there!

When they put down in their books, the state of Washington vs. Yvonne Wanrow, they declared war on me as a person, and as a woman, and as an Indian woman, and as a mother. Since the Indians started to ask for their rights, there has been an undeclared war on Indians. My people are being killed every day, little children are being shot, their mothers are being shot in the back, in the head. And they are using the Bureau of Indian Affairs to train Indians to kill Indians. I am a political prisoner because the prosecutor is a political climber. He wants to have a higher position someday, and it’s easy for him to get there by putting minority people in prison. It’s easy to put minority people in prison because those who do not have money to hire an attorney, have to take a public defender, men who are paid by the state to defend poor people—and they talk you into pleading guilty.

I appealed my convictions and won the appeal, but the feeling of happiness was short lived. The prosecutor is now appealing that decision. The case rests now in the hands of nine white men in the state supreme court in Olympia, Washington. They are going to decide over the next few months whether or not I got a fair trial, or whether or not I deserve another trial. So, I wait, as I have been waiting for years, with the threat of being separated from my children, with the threat of a lifetime in prison. They want me to hand over the next twenty-five years of my life to satisfy a system that is dominated by men. By white men. But I decided not to sit back anymore and quietly watch the judge plan my destiny. I decided to make a stand because I had nothing to lose anymore. And I am asking you to stand with me, whether it be in spirit, or whether it be physically, by writing letters or doing whatever you can think of to help me raise money, to fight my case. I have been able to organize some defense committees in the States. I have one in Canada too. I would like to have one or more overseas. If there are any of you who are willing to help me establish some defense committees, please contact me later. If the men in the state supreme court know that the world is watching, they will be very careful in reaching their decision in the next few months. If I win a new trial, we will fight for a dismissal. If I lose, we’ll fight for a change in sentence. This can go on for another two years. But at least I am able to remain out on bond, to be with my family. Thank you for your kind attention.

1.A.6.

Lavender and Red Union

Gay Liberation/Socialist Revolution (1976)

Active from 1974 through 1977, Lavender and Red Union (L&RU) was a Los Angeles group of self-described dyke and faggot communists. It located itself at the nexus of gay liberation and the New Communist Movement. This statement and other publications the group produced were widely circulated in the gay and lesbian left.

We would like to step back a moment and try to explain a slogan that is commonly used by L&RU: Gay liberation is impossible without socialist revolution—socialist revolution is incomplete without Gay liberation.

First, there can be no measure of real freedom for Gay people or any oppressed people in a capitalist society because all oppression is tied to the economic base of society and must be maintained in order to keep the capitalist system alive. How does antigayness reinforce capitalism?

Antigayness is a technique for dividing workers which has had awesome success.

In addition antigayness is necessary for the maintenance of the capitalist division of labor. By division of labor we mean that women are assigned the role of homemaker, wife, mother, servicer, etc., while the men are the producers, the providers, etc. Along with your particular function are supposed to come other characteristics like femininity and masculinity, passivity and aggressiveness, emotionality and intellect, etc. As well as models for how woman is supposed to relate to man and man to man and woman to woman. The role of woman or wife is supposed to interlock with man to create a unit or complete whole. It is through this division of labor and the ideology that accompanies it that capitalism enslaves women and keeps them out of productive labor. It is through this division of labor that the subjugation of children is ensured. It is through the ideology of this division of labor that Gay people are deemed to be sick and perverted. It is through this division of labor that the capitalist maximizes consumption, since each family unit in this society must own their own stove and refrigerator and automobile.

Ultimately, the sexist division of labor is a necessity for the survival of capitalism. While the ruling class can accede to economic demands and legal reforms, the capitalists cannot agree to the most profound demands being put forward by women and Gay people for the overthrow of the sexist division of labor, the bourgeois nuclear family, and the ideology of sexism without cutting deeply into the very fabric of this system. The demands of Gay liberation and women’s liberation cannot be granted to any large degree without playing havoc with the roles that are so necessary to maintaining capitalism. We are taught to look for support almost exclusively from our families rather than from coworkers, comrades, and friends. The family acts as an enormously conservatizing factor in organizing workers because a worker feels that any action she or he takes will also be suffered by her or his family. Women workers are discouraged in organizing because they believe that their jobs are only temporary or