• ELIXHER
• On March 18, 2013

When you think of Black History Month, what images come to mind?

Do you take a journey to the South, wave at Rosa Parks as you make your way to the Civil Rights marches? Hear echoes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech?

What about when you think about Women’s History Month?

Admittedly, it was much easier for me to wrap my mind around Black History Month as I was growing up. In my schooldays, I considered it another season, and just like how in elementary school we would draw Christmas trees and talk about Santa Claus for a few weeks in December, we would talk bus boycotts and sing MLK Is Coming to Town in February.

Women’s History Month, on the other hand, was taboo. Even whitewashed, it was a no-no movement—the granting of far too much power to a group of individuals who are probably too emotional to appreciate such recognition. Women’s History Month was always announced in hushed tones towards the end of the month. And, it was never designed with me in mind, as far as I was concerned.

We womyn participate in a social game where we exist simultaneously within and on the periphery of our collective experiences. In fact, we must often appeal to the male status quo just to insert a little herstory into what we understand and conceptualize as history. However, womyn of color, and especially Black womyn, occupy a particularly peculiar position, wherein we find ourselves excluded and silenced along the lines of race and gender. We are forced to remain in the background of movements that are supposed to represent us.

In the case of Black womyn, Black men can easily argue that we do not need “special attention” during Black History Month because we only need to wait a few weeks for Women’s History month. White womyn might ask, “Didn’t you already have a month celebrating your experiences?” when we ask for our narrative to also symbolize women’s history. If you happen to be queer, Black, and a woman… you may find yourself playing commemorative month musical chairs, hopping from one selfhood to another, celebrating your identities while not really being celebrated.

Singer, scholar, and social activist Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon once argued that in order to think about her own history, she had to think through the women in her communities who had come before her. Her herstory was the continuation of a matrilineal legacy, the collective inheritance of her mother’s herstory, and her mother’s mother’s herstory, and all of the womyn before who laid down the framework that informed her present. Likewise it is important for us to recognize that our identities are not new, even if the language by which we define ourselves is.

Perhaps the womyn who have constructed our legacy did not have access to words like “queer,” but the linguistic nuances do not change the fact that work accomplished before us is in fact our birthright, and that we do not stand alone in our struggle, searching for inclusion into mainstream conceptions of identity politics. Furthermore, we do not follow in antiquated footsteps but rather, we continue building the path our mothers and sisters walked along, fiercely paving a way for progress.

“With Black people in the United States, we understand that one of our responsibilities is to live and struggle so that there will be another generation of people. This makes us, Black women, as a group within the Black community, nationalistic,” explains Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, demonstrating that we Black womyn indeed are a part of a body politics. When we conceive of ourselves as a nation of queer, Black womyn constantly informing and reshaping our communities’ narratives, it is clear that we are embedded in these collective histories.

We exist and have always existed, and do not have to extricate our identities from one another to be recognized. We were and are the womyn who fought as men did in the Civil War. We are the Barbara Jordans, the political leaders in a male-dominated, white supremacist, and heteronormative society. We are the Audre Lourdes and the Nikki Giovannis, defending our identities through written word, through art, through soul. There is nothing new about our love; it has been a staple in our communities’ growth and development for centuries. What is new about our work is that today, we are closer than ever to each other. We can see each other, we can speak our desires aloud, and we can hold on to each other as we move our footsteps forward.

“We must be everywhere our people are or might be,” Johnson Reagon encouraged as she left her mark in our path, “in order to continue to do what my mother did, and her grandmother did, and what my sisters of the Civil Rights Movement did—fighting each generation, each decade, to seize and hold more space to continue to deliver the goods of survival in a society that does not know how big we are and how much room we need to stand to our full height.”

- Helen McDonald

Helen McDonald is a 20-something college student living off of bad cooking, social justice and a lil snark. She also discusses the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality on her personal blog revolutionaryrainbows.tumblr.com and is a contributing writer at BloodyShrubbery.com.