I always felt that one of the reasons the Occupy Wall Street
99% movement (of 2011/12) was doomed to failure, aside from hostile external
forces like the police, the corporate media, and the ostensibly non-political
real estate market, was because there was a wall of misunderstanding between
those who set up the occupy camps (where everyone gets 5 minutes to speak at a
microphone), and those fighting more through the formal mediation of art,
writing, or recorded music. Both were needed for the movement’s success, but some
of the former, at their worst, declared that they were the true activists and
accused the latter of wanting to be “leaders” or “spokesmen”—or too individual
while the latter, often on the defensive, would respond by accusing the former
of making no room for the contemplative mode or the more inwardly-driven
introvert. It didn’t help matters that many of the whites whose voices tended
to dominate this “leaderless” movement were also not taking seriously the
concerns expressed of the black women who showed up at rallies with signs that
said “blacks have always been the 99%.”
By contrast, in my experience, I’ve found that the most
vital, engaging, even potentially revolutionary, grassroots social arts and
political scenes and movements are able to form bridges across specialized
professions or segregated communities. For instance, the underground scenes
that provided me shelter and community in Philadelphia (in the 80s) and to a
lesser extent in Oakland (during the 00s), at their best, found the creative
spark that fueled them by crossing lines between “town” and “gown” (the streets
and college), between “doers” and “thinkers,” or a more ‘blue collar’ (punk and
hip hop) and white collar ethos, and not merely on a fashion level; they even
helped bridge the gap (if not smash the wall) between whites and blacks
(graffiti was an especially important bridge in the 80s). Sure, there were
limits to this “unity in diversity approach” (since many of these scenes were
youth scenes, they still struggled with ageism, even if it was a defensive
ageism), but there was a recognition that the thinker and doer, the artist and
the activist, need each other if there’s any hope that the alternative economy and culture we were creating was
to be sustainable, something more
than another transient flash in the plan, and generally, in my experience, the
women in these scenes understood this—and served as voices, and forces, of
unity—more than the men.
Ex-Black Panther, and “lone wolf,” Judy Juanita’s new De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland (2016) sheds many insights
into these dynamics in ways that can be useful for any future artists and
activists who wish to work together to form a movement that may topple the
patriarchal, plutocratic, racist imperialism that dominates American reality in
an era of global capitalism. She understands the psychology in which “activists,
oft called anarchistic, despise artists who don’t overtly join them.” (108)
Some feel it’s an unequal trade, that somehow the artists aren’t giving back
what they’re receiving. In any event, I’ve heard many activists scold the very
people they’re trying to recruit, or seduce, “you’re acting too much like an
individualist, a bourgeois
individualist.” But it’s one thing for a white (often male) ideological
anti-individualist to scold another white male for being an individualist, but
given life in a country where whites (especially men) have been afforded the
full-rights of individualism compared to black men and women, it’s quite
another for an ideological anti-individualist to criticize a black woman,
especially when it may be as an individual that a woman is able to create
alliances across factions.
In De Facto Feminism,
Judy Juanita celebrates the working class
black individualist…by showing the (oft-unheralded) ways they help build
community, not through theoretical imperative, but simply in order to survive.
The women Juanita celebrates transcend the false “binary thinking dilemmas” (between
artist and activist, and between individualist and collectivist) to engage in
an artistic activism, and an altruism that need not be self-abnegating that
occupies a fertile, proliferative, place where selfishness and altruism,
individualism and community activism can unite. For sometimes the reason why
one doesn’t “fit in” to one social scene is the same reason you can get along
with more people from other social
scenes.
For Juanita, this has
been a life-long struggle, “an act of self-creation spanning 4 decades,” and De Facto Feminism is a record of her
findings that can be useful for current and future generations of artists and
activists in their struggles.
During her time with the Black Panthers, which in hindsight
she calls her phase of “naively determined black womanhood,” Juanita had been
an idealistic anti-individualist collectivist (In “Black Womanhood,” an essay
Juanita wrote at the age of 20 for the
Black
Panther Newspaper, she writes that the struggle requires “her strength, not
her will, her leadership, her domination, but her strength”). But, it must not
be forgotten that Juanita, even as a young woman, was not just a Black Panther,
but also part of the Black Arts Movement (BAM which may not be as well known to
the general reader)
:
“As student activists at SF State, the Black Student Union
fought to bring Jones (Baraka), Lee (Mudhubuti) and Sanchez onto Campus. We
formed the Black Arts and Culture Troupe and toured community centers
throughout the Bay Area with poetry, dance and agit-prop plays. We enacted
ideas we were hearing on soap-boxes about black power, black consciousness, and
black beauty. We staged mock conflagrations like ones that were taking place in
urban cities. We were empowering ourselves, our communities and getting
academic credit. A natural progression was community activism.” (110)
When she joined the Black Panthers, she was drawn to the
alliance between artists and activists, but witnessed, during an era of
“shattering community,” a growing split between the two groups: “to look at the
BAM and its relation to the BPP renders a vision of the poets and the
dramatists standing in counterpoint.” Ultimately, however, “the activists
upstaged the artist/intellectuals. I had immense sympathy for the second group,
but pitied them (pitied their women more. How much subservience would soothe a
wounded ego?)” (107)
Despite the chauvinism she found in the BAM more than in the
BPP, and the factionalism and her torn allegiances, Juanita appreciated what
the BPP and Black Arts Movement had in common, and celebrates this legacy:
“The BPP was appropriating the oppressors’ language, and
using it to shatter oppression. That new use of language, in the BPP and the
BAM, was as powerful as any gun, and even more powerful because it aroused
feeling and changed the terms of discourse between friends, enemies, lovers, generations
and cultures. Being an agent of change meant I aroused deep feelings, affected
discourse, found the powerful voices that I had heard in childhood, in church,
in soul music, in the pulpit—in my own voice.” (111)
Juanita’s allegiance was both to art and to activism, and
she didn’t want to be forced to choose, and as we see her mind go back and
forth between the BPP and the BAM, weighing the advantages of each and trying
to develop a new synthesis, we see her
ability to step back from the heated conflicts and tense
divisiveness between the artists and activists to see the productive symbiosis:
“Black music, musicians and dancers became ambassadors at large to the
world
“But the airwaves and new media
amplified the beat, the dances, the Soul Train lines, the frizzy hair, the
handshakes, the lingo (bro), now of which needed the Gun or its bullet because
the BPP handled that task,” (113) and part of the reason the BPP was able to
handle the task is because of what women like Judy Juanita (a.k.a. Judy Hart)
provided.
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of both the
BAM and the BPP, the role of women in the Black Panther party (which was
numerically mostly women) is still not emphasized enough in biopics like the
recent PBS Vanguard of The Revolution,
(2016), yet even in Seize The Time
(1970), Bobby Seale wrote of the first women in the Black Panther’s power
to educate and recruit new members to the party. Juanita, ex-editor-in-chief of
the Black Panther newspaper, gives
her own account of the importance of these young women as bringing together
rival factions to create and sustain a larger, more rooted, movement.
Certainly, Juanita and the other women were no passive recipients of edicts
from Bobby, Huey, and Eldridge:
“Our gang of five affected policy and high-level decisions
by virtue of our intense participation, outspokenness….we also formed liaisons
and romantic relationships with brothers in the party. From the upper echelon
to the lumpen proletariat, we lived, slept, ate and cooked with the BPP…. We
were the initial link between the campus and the party. Three of us married ‘brothers
in the struggle’ who also happened to be educated brothers. This is significant
because our connections and intimacy (which some labeled promiscuity) connected
brothers from the party with brothers from SF State. The BSU brothers like to
talk about supplying the BPP with guns and money, but this bridge called my
back supplied the people’s army with equal and greater provision.” (40)
This final point provides a great example of what the mature
Juanita refers to as “De Facto Feminism.” In her title essay, she offers her
own definition of “de facto feminism” by contrasting it with the 20th
century feminism she experienced:
20th Century feminism is “defensive, lean-in
elite, scarce, historical, white-ish, precious, theoretical, lawful, contempt
for men but not their $$$.” De-facto feminism is “offensive, classless,
proliferative, a historical, black and then some, inside/outside the law, do
you with/without men” (146). This contrast does not get tangled up in the
academic debates between the “difference” and “sameness” feminists, but is a
celebration of the practical de facto
feminists who “stand between peace and war everyday in…the Gaza Strips of
the US” in the absence of being able to change the laws.
Although she claims de facto feminism is “classless,” it’s
clear that it’s working class as Juanita never loses sight of the economic
dimensions to patriarchal sexism, especially when coupled with “the stigma that
black people carry as pigment” that “forces them to be what others would term
illegal, immoral but not impractical.” (151):
A whole class of workers constitutes women who braid hair,
part of the underground economy in the black community. Overwhelmingly black
and youthful, they work from home, a cadre of postmodern kitchen beauticians
who make a way out of no way, to raise children, make money, be stylish and create community.” (150—emphasis added).
Her accounts of these various and varied women remind me of
other women I’ve met in Oakland. When I read about “Shelly,” (152) I think of
the amazing Phavia Kujichagulia (“She also had a disinclination to sell her body
for a recording contract”). And when I read: “In New Jersey, I lived in a
six-unit building with several foxy single mothers who attracted and “housed”
members of the New York Giants football team during the season,” I am reminded
of another book by an Oakland author released this year, ElTyna McCree’s Oh What A Ride!
Although, like Juanita, McCree was born in 1946, and ElTyna
can certainly relate when Juanita writes “hands-on celibacy became my unspoken
choice for years,” their two stories are very different. Eltyna grew up near
Pittsburgh, PA, working for Allegheny Airlines while Juanita was editing The Black Panther.” A devout
church-goer, McCree worked closely as Director of Convention Services, and was
the official travel coordinator for the Church Of God In Christ COGIC, booking
reservations for conferences and becoming ordained as a preacher. Fleeing from
a destructive marriage back east, she (with the help of God) reinvents herself
in Oakland running the Connections Unlimited travel agency for over 30
years—and running for School Board as a republican in a democratic city—all
without a college degree--before gentrification cost her her shop. Reading
Juanita’s book, I think of Eltyna’s quite different (but in some ways similar,
minus the sex) services she provided for the Miami Dophins when they came to
Oakland for the Super bowl:
“The one and only
superbowl was being played at Stanford. The SF 49ers and the Miami Dolphins. We
had our new hotel in Oakland, which was hosting the Dolphins. We were beyond
excited. In those days I was so dressed up every day. I decided to walk up to
the Hyatt just to check on everything. I arrived at the concierge desk. There
were about 30 folk there all needing something. She was overwhelmed, I told her
to take a break. I sat down. Well, that was Friday morning. I didn’t walk out
of the Hyatt til Monday at 1 p.m. Some of the Dolphin players wanted their game
tickets sold. The women needed babysitters, needed to have their hair and nails
done. They wanted to do to San Francisco for dinner. I knew where to get every
resource. Jim Cole’s sons and my goddaughter Ayoka (they went to Calif Prep
school together) helped with kids activities. Hair and nails got done. I rented
Lincoln Town Cars and we got coaches for their wives to dinner in San Fran and
Sausalito. Local folk were asking for transportation to the game. I chartered a
bus, got box lunches, and cases of champagne for the bus. I, Miss Fly, was
wearing 14 karat gold nails and players wanted to buy them for their wives, or
girlfriends. I got Ruby’s Gold Finger nails to come over to the hotel, an we
sold those…Dolphin general manager Mr. Callahan andI remained friends for
years. When I walked out of the hotel that day, I had profit of 4800.00 in
cash. Through her ups and downs, Eltyna too may also join the legions of women
Juanita celebrates as “walking talking political education classes who teach
persistence when things don’t work out?” Ain’t she a de-facto feminist?
Juanita’s essay can also remind me of my own Italian
grandmother who I know, alas, too little about, aside from her having to come
to America as a mail order bride and, when her husband died young, leaving her
with 8 children, used her social and business skills to, among other things,
run a numbers racket, even though she was illiterate and I could barely
understand her English. Juanita’s own great grand mother, an Okie from
Muskogee, took books and magazines from the homes of rich white folks where she
worked, and helped form that town’s first free colored library! (160)
All of the women Juanita celebrates in this essay, she
boldly claims, “are far more feminist than the broadcast/weathercasters who’ve
memorized feminist principles and theory from prep school through Ivy league.
Juanita also nods to the women who founded #BlackLivesMatters when she writes,
“a new wave of feminists instead might envision women of color setting policy
and leading, being arbiters instead of being left behind,” (153) and I think of
the #LaughingWhileBlack women scolded by a white woman on the Napa Valley Win
Train (2015), and their unheralded contributions to the legal corporate economy
when Juanita celebrates the book clubs that gave “mainstream publishing a shot
in the arm.”
Reminding us that “in protest movements, as in wars, the
people on the bottom don’t write history,” Juanita uses her literate skills throughout De Facto Feminism to speak of, to, and
for, those de facto closer to “the bottom,” and asks “will it take 200 years
for respect to come to those de facto feminists sitting on the bottom, squeezed
into pink collar ghettos and brown security guard uniforms lined up at the
minimum wage margins of this world?” (156)
Although Juanita expresses a justifiable disgust with “the
white-ish, lean-in elite” characteristics that is the legacy of dominant 20th
century (second-wave) feminism, her book does contain one instance that
celebrates the de facto (rather than de jure) feminism of the white women. During
her adolescence in 1964, during the period when Sly Stone wrote “The Swim,” and
helped create a dance craze working closely with white topless dancer Carol
Doda, Juanita writes of the powerful convergence that The Birth Control Pill
and Beatles created for whites. As a teenage Juanita watches young white women
starting to dance more with black women (even as their parents are leaving the
neighborhood), she notices:
“All the prepubescent and adolescent white girls having
orgasmic and orgiastic responses released a long suppressed sexuality from its
Victorian, Southern, and Puritan constraints. As these women let it rip in that
prolonged moment of free public expression, they freed up black women from
whoredom, from bearing the brunt and hard edge of the white men’s sexuality. We
were no longer the only culturally-sanctioned object of naughty or forbidden
sex, of plantation promiscuity.” (33-4)
This is one instance where young white women—by liberating
themselves—were able to do more to liberate black women than any of their
paternalistic Moynihan-Report inflected proclamations could….or would.
Juanita’s perspective on this time when de-segregation seemed promising through
music and dance should be must reading for any historian of the swinging
sixties sick of the Male Baby Boomer Rock Critic establishment’s version (Greil
Marcus, et al) and shows the ways in which the more ostensibly “apolitical”
music of the early 60s (the groundswell from the segregated R&B stations)
had more power than 70s “profound” light rock whose rise paralleled the rise of
white-ish feminism.
And, finally, she offers a powerful argument for why whites
should care, and not just for “altruistic” (paternalistic) reasons, but yes,
for selfish reasons. “Black people often serve as an early warning system for
the American populace…for better and worse, the hardcore issues blacks
face—guns, crime, poverty, failing schools—define the newest America.” (161).
As the standard of living for most whites in America has been noticeably
decreasing since the great crash of 2008 (although not as much as it is for
blacks), Juanita reminds me a little of those women at the Occupy Rally with
the “Blacks have always been the 99%” sign, as if to say “welcome to the club.”
+++++++++
I’m a woman. POW! Black. BAM!
Outspoken. STOMP! Don’t fit in. OUCH! The lesson? Sometimes when one takes a
stand one becomes a lone wolf, a neighborhood of one, a community of one to
declare sovereignty for art, sexuality, spirituality, and say-so, an
individual.” (7)
De Facto Feminism,
however, includes a much more varied range of writing than my essayistic
explorations of two of its more publically-inflected threads may suggest to one
who hasn’t read it. Even if you have no interest in the Panthers, or community
activism, or in feminism, per se, there are many personally-inflected essays
that focus on her life as a writer. It is not merely a series of essayistic
arguments, but maintains “the feel of memoir” as these essays are arranged as a
loosely constructed chronology/autopbiographical journey. Eschewing the
fictional mask of the “unreliable narrator” Geniece in her semi-autobiograpical
Virgin Soul, the political and the
personal come even closer in De Facto
Feminism, as Juanita casts a retro-spective glance from which to build a
present and future, without debilitating nostalgia.
Because Juanita published Virgin Soul (2013), in her late 60s, what people used to call one’s
retirement years (when one could get away doing that), some may “see” her as a
“late bloomer.” Yet, what Juanita was doing these years, was not merely honing
her craft, but also exploring different social dynamics in which art circulates
(as she explores the social interactions in the theatre world, the stand-up
comedy world, and even the poetry world), and also digesting (if not exactly
recoiling from) the extremely intense “baptism by fire” she experienced at age
20 in the Black Panthers as an agent of change. The years in between are hardly
“lost years.” Juanita is able to make art out of stint as a maid in “Cleaning
Other People’s Houses,” in addition to increasing her empathy for the working
class women she champions. In a sense, the essay on Carolyn Rogers may be the most
personal, as obviously Juanita can relate to a woman celebrated by the BAM, but
later forgotten as she eschewed the “militant” posture which made it easier to
get published during this time.
In these essays, Juanita emerges as a working class
artist/intellectual (which our dominant culture tries to tell us is an
oxymoron), and a working class teacher, one who is highly skeptical of the
ready-made solutions, and the ridiculous gerrymandered specialized genres. She
challenges the social nexus that too often determines the circulation of
literary texts in our society, and yet emerges triumphant. As she speaks of the
way she learned to become a novelist, by jumping from many social scenes and
roles as artist/intellectual, I see a writer relentlessly measuring the inner
world by the outer world, and vice versa.
Although she doesn’t mention much about her role as teacher
in this book, many of the essays can be useful in a creative writing class, in
the sense that they show the many different social roles a novelist may play in
order to enhance one’s long-term commitment to her art. If people say your
story telling it not funny enough, why not show up at stand-up comedy night,
and try that out….with no illusions you’ll become a famous stand-up comic, but
it can help your writing. And seek
out writers groups! When she writes about some golden lessons she learned about
herself and writing (in A Playwright-In-Progress), one insight is “I learn
through making big, fat mistakes vs. reading/perfecting it in my mind.”(73) I,
for one, can relate to that, and I know many others who can: yes, sometimes we
publish precisely in order to make a mistake public, as if that is the only way
to move beyond it. Part of why Juanita’s such a great teacher is because she
can relate to the student going through that, or the student who doesn’t know
which genre they should put their primary emphasis: poetry, fiction, or
plays…for in this specialized society, you must choose one, and for one like
Juanita, that is not always an easy choice…(as if she, like Frank O’Hara, is
more interested in that “grace to live as variously as possible”), but it
precisely the life-long battle with that choice that makes Virgin Soul such a great novel, as this novel is conversant with so
many other genres (drama, and poetry, and stand-up comedy, with Black Panther Newspaper agit-prop, as
well as with the oft unheralded art of cleaning other people’s houses). This,
in fact, is why Virgin Soul, through
its art, has been able to help create community years after many other Panthers
were jailed for the same thing. One doesn’t have to have read Virgin Soul to appreciate De Facto Feminism, but they certainly
complement each other.
In another writer’s hand, such reflections may seem
self-indulgent, but Juanita never loses sight of the light she’s shining for
those unspoken for which her younger self may have been tempted to judge. She
never loses sight of the collective struggle, and of the fact that some things
must be kept secret, in offering brilliant advice for organizers: “Caucus as an
intransitive verb meant your group agenda had to be strengthened privately and
exhaustively to have maximum ”impact.” (111) Indeed, this is a book a 20, or
30, or even 50 year old, could not have written….
