Issues
of hyper masculinity and misogyny plagued Black and Brown activist groups of
the 1960s and 70s, among which were The Brown Berets, Young Lords Party and the
Black Panther Party, and alienated their female members. While the women of the
Young Lords Party were able to compensate for harmful views with intra-group
education, the men of the Brown Berets were not as impressionable; women group
members were forced to break off and establish their own activist space, the
Chicana Brown Berets. Interestingly, the perception of male gender performance
through a hyper-masculine lens cuts across color lines, as Black Panther Party
(BPP) leaders like Huey Newton and Bobby Seale held views directly reflecting
those that Brown feminists spoke out against. Still, Intra-group conflict was
not the only dragon for Black and Brown activist groups of the 60s and 70s to
slay. State sanctioned violence and deterrent operations against these social
movements also worked to see to their demise.
While
the concept of Black and Brown love is one of unity and allyship, there are far
less romantic notions that connect the two communities. It feels impossible to
research Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and not think of the Chicano activists. To
hear the founders of the Black Panther Party speak on the emasculation of the
Black man, at the hands of the White man –and with the approval of the Black
woman—is to experience the confounding intersection of gender and race, of
hyper masculinity and black liberation, of machismo and revolución. But a
people cannot be liberated while embracing an identity that was imposed on them
with colonial force and without consent –a colonized identity cannot advocate
for its own liberation. Chingón Politics
Die Hard writes:
“We
can begin by understanding the narrow nationalism that usually characterizes
chingón politics….Aztlan symbolizes the righteous rejection of racist
oppression and the colonized mentality that facilitates that oppression. It
echoes a very genuine longing not to feel like a stranger in one’s own land,
not to feel like some kind of misfit, to taste self-respect…the concept of
Aztlan can also be used oppressively…the concept of Aztlan has always been set
forth in super-machismo imagery. The Chicano activist today…might imagine like
to imagine himself garbed in an Aztec warrior outfit, looking ferociously brave
next to some red lipped princess with naked breasts…the concept of Aztlan
encourages the association of machismo with domination,” 104.
Although existing in an
American context and not that of an Aztec myth, the founding rhetoric of the
BPP,
used by Seale and Newton, reflects an identical
attempt to reclaim a stolen identity that, upon its return, will grant its
rightful owners their deserved sense of dignity and manhood. Samuel Joseph
writes in his Whose Revolution is This?
Gender’s divisive role in the Black Panther Party, “From its inception,
appropriate definitions of gender were a primary concern for the Black Panther
Party. Founders set up to challenge existing notions that black men had been
stripped of their manhood…. there was a relatively wide held notion within the
black community that black men had been metaphorically castrated by racism…” p.
404, 405. The battle waged by these men of color to reassert the identities
that were placed upon them as a means of dehumanization, lies at the heart of
the matter when analyzing the women of these organizations’ discomfort and
dissatisfaction with the intra-group politics. The fantasy of resuming these
identities of animalistic savagery, dominance, and simple mindedness is as
perplexing as it is disappointing, but it also tells the story of male
privilege, and how privileged groups pick and choose which parts of an
oppressive system to attack, and which have proven exclusively beneficiary.
Female Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver saw through this dance between roles of
victim and victimizer.
“…the
oppression of [black] women by the black man is something that is perpetuated and
encouraged by the system of colonialism run by the white man. …As Black men
move to assert themselves, as black men move to regain a sense of manhood, to
regain a sense of humanity, and to become strong enough and powerful enough and
manly enough to fight against the oppressor, they many times take out their
resentment of their position against their own black women,” Gender’s Divisive
Role in the Black Panther Party, p. 407.
Beyond the harm afflicted
on Black and Brown women at the hands of Black and Brown men, machismo has a
broader counter-productive effect on activism. Cited historians in Gender’s Divisive Role in the Black Panther
Party are joined by Alma Garcia in Chicana
Feminist Discourse as both parties present the argument that the
celebration and circulation of these images of hyper masculinity do more harm
to the public perception of these communities, than any good they can do. These
images actually present a step back
in time for Black and Brown men. Not only are machismo politics divisive, but
they are working to reassert the public perception of Black and Brown men as
inherently criminal, deviant, and dangerous. It seems that subscribers to a
machismo that has been mythically reclaimed and is now a tool of strategy,
organization, or means of attaining liberation, have failed to acknowledge the
social leg of white supremacy. A people have to be made sub-human in the mind
of the larger society in order to justify their oppression; enforcing
dehumanizing stereotypes is dangerous, and no small thing for Black and Brown
men. Garcia writes,
“…many
Chicana feminists disagreed with the cultural nationalist view that machismo
could be a positive value within a Chicano cultural value system. They
challenged the view that machismo was a source of masculine pride for Chicanos
and therefore a defense mechanism against the dominant society’s racism.
Although Chicana feminists recognized that Chicanos faced discrimination from
the dominant society, they adamantly disagreed with those who believed machismo
was a form of cultural resistance to such discrimination,” p. 223
The problematic conflict between Black and Brown women and
men in these spaces, as men romanticize an identity which has proven toxic to
their wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters, is not confined to any singular or
simple philosophy. Instead, it reflects the complex, nuanced, and rather sticky
nature of women of color’s existence at the intersection of multiple marginalized
identities. Their attempt to navigate all of these identities in male-dominated
activist spaces creates narratives that, like machismo, cut across color lines.
While Cleaver’s perspective on intra-race gender interaction illuminates a
sinister reality in which abuse of the Black woman at the hands of the Black
man is normalized in the transfer of oppression, Chicana feminists also speak
on the problematic of acceptable femininity being associated with a high
tolerance for the pain of both White supremacy and machismo. “Chicana feminists
criticized the notion of the “ideal Chicana” that glorified Chicanas as strong,
long-suffering women who had endured and kept Chicano culture and family
intact,” Chicana Feminist Discourse,
p. 222. The concept of the Strong Black Woman, durable enough to sustain abuse
outside and inside the home is no more Black-woman specific than machismo is
solely found in Latinx communities. Sadly, the fight rages on. Where woman
Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver spoke out on intra-racial abuse at the hands of
Black male machismo, BPP founding father Eldridge Cleaver centered Black men as
the victims in a fantastical legacy of belittlement at the hands of Black
women. Gender’s Divisive Role in the
Black Panther Party writes that Cleaver went as far as to assert that Black
women were actually the ones responsible for the transfer of oppression from
the White man onto them. “He asserted that for 400 years black men were unable
to look black women squarely in the eyes. The reason for this, he wrote, was
because, ‘I [the black man] knew I would find reflected there a merciless indictment
of my impotence and a compelling challenge to redeem my conquered manhood,’” p.
409. This demonization of Black women appears to work more to support Kathleen
Cleaver’s narrative than Eldridge’s. Still, the pseudo-reality in which Black
women are agents of white supremacy has been allowed to thrive, as Black women
activist of the 60s and 70s, unlike the Chicanas Brown Berets, were laregly
against creating their own feminist and Black activist spaces. Alma Garcia
quotes Bell Hooks in Chicana Feminist
Discourse in her writings that while Black feminists rallied against issues
of racism and sexism, they did not organize independently of Black men (page
221). This reality is difficult to conceptualize without a substantial
understanding of intersectionality. While many Black women were openly critical
of the machismo in Black activist spaces, their failure to organize as the Chicana
Brown Berets did, gives way to the larger narrative of multiple axes of
oppression. For these women to stand beside the Black men that they labeled
oppressive, speaks volumes about the process of compromise and negotiation
through which Black women sustain their survival in a White supremacist,
capitalist, and misogynistic society. Chicana Brown Berets took a much different
route.
“Marking
the formal segregation of women and men in what seemed to be a negotiated
process, the designation of separate meetings –and separate space –underscored
the conditions for women to play a decisive role in the success of the Free
Clinic, a major Brown Beret accomplishment, and to come to a deeper sense of
mutual recognition and solidarity,” Revolutionary
Sisters: Women’s Solidarity and Collective Identification among Chicana Brown
Berets in East Los Angeles, 1967-1970, p. 34.
Still, an analysis of the demise of groups like the Black
Panther Party and Brown Berets would be incomplete without acknowledgement of
what scholar Jennifer G. Correa calls state sanctioned violence. In The Targeting of the East LA Brown Berets by
a Racial Patriarchal Capitalist State: Merging Intersectionality and Social
Movement Research, Correa asserts that the state employs all resources on
hand in order to derail social movements.
My
views of the racial patriarchal state and its deployment of state sanctioned racism
are parallel to Goldberg’s ideas of physical force, violence, coercion,
manipulation, deceit, cajoling, incentives, laws, taxes, penalties,
surveillance, military force, repressive apparatuses, ideological mechanism and
media – in short, all the means at a state’s disposal. I would add direct and
indirect killing of movement members, judicial racism via sentencing,
collective/subjective (internal) discipline, and colonization of the mind
leading to internalized racism, patriarchy/sexism, and capitalistic control,
p.85
Of all that Correa lists
--and then adds-- the matters of internalized racism, patriarchy, and sexism
appear to take center stage in social movement scholarship. In fact, Correa
condemns published scholars for their failure to apply the same zeal in their
research of the external factors that
lead to the demise of these social movements, as they did when documenting the
groups’ internal bleeding (p. 85, 86). Correa’s perspective works to
contextualize the demands and battle cries of female Black Panthers and Chicana
Brown Berets, as they became fed up with and exhausted by their exclusion from
their own movements. Their male counterparts’ machismo was not simply born of a
male-inherited arrogance or compulsion to oppress, but actually—in part, at
least—resulted from the veiled influence of a racial, patriarchal, capitalist
state hell-bent on the destruction of these social movements, and equally
focused on ensuring that it was an apparently implosive crumbling—working its way
from the inside out. Correa’s critique of the state illuminates the surveilling,
operative, and government-level realities that destroyed these movements – and
many of them came from the outside. She writes that assassinations of those at
the head of social movements has been a strategy employed by the state as a means
of disabling social movements, while, in my opinion, avoiding the inconvenience
and messiness of multiple assassinations of lower level activists. The FBI’s
murder of Fred Hampton, BPP leader of the Chicago chapter, serves as a
heart-wrenching example (p. 86). Further, the details of this murder (Hampton
was murdered in his own home, while he lay in bed) illuminate the other evils,
unethicals and even potentially illegals of the FBI’s strategy of “de-escalation;”
it is clear that party leaders like Hampton were being surveilled and attacked
at their most vulnerable. Further, Correa counters popular arguments made by
social movement scholars that it is the radical and extreme social movements
that draw the attention of a police force and government anxious to disassemble
them: even White Liberal America’s beloved Dr. King was surveilled and
harassed. “[Scholar Doug] McAdam overlooked the many racial barriers
intentionally set up by the state to block Dr. King and his movement from
reaching its goals. For example, … both the home of Dr. King and the
headquarters of SCLC were wiretapped,” p.87.
Still,
the social movements of the 60s and 70s were flawed, and, in some cases,
cripplingly so. Although not always a positive example, The Black Power movement’s
influence on Brown Paper movements of Chicanx and Puerto Rican people cannot be
overstated. In the case of Puerto Rican activist groups like The Young Lords
Party, both the good and the bad, the constructive along with toxic, made an
impact. While the Young Lords were of the more dynamic organizations among both
Black and Brown movements as their acknowledgement of gender inequality complemented
launched attacks on racism and colonialism –not to mention their successful revolutionizing
of machismo for the good of the people—they weren’t always so inclusive. In
fact, it wasn’t until experiencing the overt dehumanization of Black women by
Black poet Ami Baraka, a cultural nationalist, that Denise Oliver and other
women members of the Young Lords Party felt incited to demand real change in
their own organization.
“Oliver
described her shock and rage at the scene that unfolded when the Lords arrived
at Baraka’s headquarters: ‘Women crawled into the room on their hands and knees
wearing elaborate headdresses decorated with fruit. …She immediately fired
questions at Baraka about women’s role in his organization, but he would not
answer her. …Oliver became so furious she marched out of the room…Oliver
returned to New York City and immeadiately held a women’s caucus meeting … “if
we don’t do something we would end up on our hands and knees with fruit on our
heads.” The women’s caucus decided that it was time to force men in the Lords
to take feminism seriously,” Nelson, Jennifer, Abortions Under Community Control: Feminism, Nationalism, and the
Politics of Reproduction among New York City’s Young Lords.
As hideous as this scene
in Baraka’s was, it spurred one of the most dynamic changes to the Young Lords’
organization. Beyond this point, women of the YLP withheld sex from male
members, placing them in a position of considerable discomfort, as members of
the YLP were forbidden from engaging in extra-organizational affairs. Still,
the denial of sex is far from innovative, as women across space and time have
reduced disagreements in philosophy, religion, general morality, and parenting,
to genitalia. What should be noted about this demonstration, though, is that
when male Lords broke the YLP law, and engaged in sex with outside women,
female Lords actually possessed the agency within the organization to enforce
the punishment for this transgression, an incredible change from the demeaning
“secretarial work” Chicana Brown Berets were publicly credited for. “[Oliver]
demoted the entire central committee to cadre status. They could eventually be
reinstated, but not until they took time to think over their transgressions,” Abortions Under Community Control, p.
163.” While many Chicana Feminists spoke about machismo as inherently toxic,
corruptive, and unproductive, and asserted that it had no place in activism or
cultural nationalism on these bases, the YLP revolutionized the term in a way
that worked within gender inclusive politics –feminism, even. Female Lords
called for the redefinition of hyper-masculinity as a characteristic which
encouraged men to treat women as equals, and join them in the trenches of
battle waged against patriarchy, misogyny, and inequality—within, as well as outside
of the organization. Perhaps, the machismo reclaiming of Aztlan is not the only
way to reconcile manhood with activism. Still, the redefining of machismo by
YLP was just that—the organization gave it an entirely different meaning. It
seems that their success in incorporating machismo into their activism was not
a counter to Chicana feminist claims
that it is inherently destructive and exclusive. Instead, the extreme
transformation the philosophy had to undergo as to make it compatible with activism,
seems to speak to Chicana feminists’ point: the presence of machismo as we knew
it, could not exist in activist spaces, but actually disabled their potential to provoke progress and change.
In
Puerto Rico en mi Corazon: The Young
Lords, Black Power and Puerto Rican nationalism in the U.S., 1966-1972 Jeffrey
O.G. Ogbar writes that the Black Power Movement also laid the groundwork for
Brown Power outside of the gendered context, and in more positive ways than
Baraka’s impact.
“As
the Black Power movement took root, the charisma of Black Nationalism resonated
among other people of color as no radicalism had heretofore. Some Puerto
Ricans, particularly those who were darker-skinned, identified as Black, since
most Americans viewed them as such. As Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman once explained,
‘Before people called me a spic, they called me a nigger.’ Small numbers of
Puerto Ricans joined the largely insular Nation of Islam(NOI),” p. 151.
The pains of otherness,
displacement, and identity crises felt by Puerto Ricans living in New York
aligned with the rhetoric and energy of the Black Power movement—and
specifically, its focus on the arts—not just because of how Puerto
Rican-Americans felt in the present, but because of the similarity of the
histories that prompted such feelings in both Black and Brown Americans. In Gendered Geographies of Home: Mapping Second
and Third-Generation Puerto Ricans’ Sense of Home, authors Maura Toro-Morn
and Marixsa Alicea unpack the New York City-dwelling Puerto Rican’s homesickness
in a way that illuminates the striking resemblance between Brown Power and the
rise of the Black Arts Movement. “…the second and third generation seek solace
from the multiple forms of oppression they confront as colonized people in the
United States by invoking romanticized images of the homeland,” (p. 195). The
Black Arts Movement (1965-1975) saw the explosion of Black-centered creativity,
and that meant Afrocentrism. With Black visual and sculpture arts, literary
arts, music, and performance arts all focused on the rejection of Whiteness and
White standards, and the explicit embrace of Blackness and Mother Africa, the
Black Arts Movement was born of a colonized peoples’ feelings of otherness in a
foreign land, and a longing for the space in which they felt they belonged. For
the second and third generation Puerto Rican living in New York, identical feelings
prompted a deep love, interest, and romanticizing of life in Puerto Rico,
oftentimes without regard for the issues a colonized people (sexism/patriarchy,
colorism, homophobia) cannot escape simply by returning home, as it, too, has
been colonized. Likewise, the Black Arts Movement overestimated their connection
to a continent upon which Black Americans held no clue from which country they
originated, tongue they spoke, or culture they indigenously belonged. Both
Black and Brown, colonized people are reduced to constructing fantasy in which
home still exists—a utopia of safety, acceptance, and belonging.
Still,
the Puerto Rican activists had their own battle to wage against dominant
society. While NOI and other Black Power organizations believed in the unifying
of all people of color against a common enemy, they largely failed to address
the Puerto Rican struggle explicitly or an individual basis; many Puerto Rican
activists longed for their own spaces. Cha Cha Jimenez, who would go on to be a
major activist force, was introduced to the philosophies of Black Nationalism
in a space which hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown people take up residence,
but will never call home—prison. From his early learnings of Black organizations’
recruitment, and education of gang members on how to transfer their leadership
skills, man-power, and even rage, to fight for their communities on a broadened
and productive scale, Jimenez was able to implement strategy for the Puerto
Rican struggle against the dominant society. “Unlike any major Black Power
organization in the country, the leading Puerto Rican radical organization of
the era would have its roots in gang culture,” Puerto Rico en mi Corazon, p.153.
In summation, color lines blur upon analysis of the Black
and Brown Power movements of the 1960s and early 70s. Issues of the machismo
that would later give rise to a strengthened feminism presence, as well as the
ways in which these groups actually organized, were shared among both movements.
Beyond these similarities, however, was the Black Power movement’s distinct
influence on organizations like the Young Lords Party and the larger Brown
Power movement. It was not until Denise Oliver saw a mirror held up to her own organization
by the explicit dehumanization of Ami Baraka’s, that the women’s caucus in
which feminism would truly find its place in the YLP, was held. Likewise, the
demands of Chicana Feminists that machismo as it stood could not be
revolutionary, and instead worked to marginalize and substantiate women’s abuse,
were also vocalized by woman Black Panthers like Kathleen Cleaver. She asserted
that Black women exist within a horrifying reality of circular oppression in
which they doubly feel the wrath of white supremacy as their husbands,
boyfriends, fathers, and brothers transfer the abuse of the white man onto
them. Naturally, Chicana feminists further seconded this notion and demanded
that the trope of a good Latina woman as one that could withstand the trauma of
both white supremacy and machismo, only worked to normalize and justify their
abuse. Heart-wrenchingly, the similarities between Black and Brown Power extend
to their collapses, as well. The hand of a white supremacist, capitalist,
patriarchal state in the orchestrated demise of these social movements, is
apparent in both Black and Brown Power groups' fall.
