Speak out

Barbara Smith's new book brings her '70s activism into the '90s

by Michael Bronski

Barbara Smith, a writer, artist, and political thinker who's been at the forefront of discussions about race, gender, and sexuality in both the queer and African-American communities, recently published a new collection of essays, The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom. On February 16, Smith will deliver the Audre Lorde lecture at OutWrite '99 at the Park Plaza Hotel.

Smith, 52, moved to Boston in the mid-1970s and became a founding member of the Combehee River Collective, a black feminist organizing group that became famous for its statements confronting racism in the gay movement and homophobia in the black community. Her essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," which appeared in Radical Teacher and has since been anthologized many times, was the first critical look at matters of feminism, race, and literature together. It appeared when writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker were on the cusp of achieving fame; at the time, women's studies scholars did not address matters of race, and black studies neglected issues of gender. In the late 1970s, Smith was one of the founders of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first independent press to focus on the work of feminists of color. Among its publications were the now-classic Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Smith has lectured and served as writer in residence at numerous colleges and universities, including Radcliffe College, Emerson College, UMass Boston, Barnard College, and Mt. Holyoke. She is now at work on a history of gay and lesbian African-Americans. One in Ten recently spoke with Smith.

Q: Although you now have a high profile as a political activist, much of your early work was as a literary critic and a publisher. How do you think that has affected your political vision of the world?

A: My love of and immersion in literature has helped me enormously. I've always thought that the world is organized by stories. It is how we communicate with one another. When you ask someone who they are, they tell you a story. It may be a brief one, without too much drama, but this is how people have related to one another for eons. In our modern world, this has been taken away from us by new forms of communication and media. I think that my love of literature -- human stories, really -- has given me a deep grounding in and understanding of human nature and passion, which are the most important things.

Q: Your 1977 essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" was an explicit call to arms to combine race and gender politics with literary studies. Do you still believe they should be combined?

A: Art and politics are inseparable. If I were not politically involved, I would have nothing to write about. I felt that I had to create in the world a movement with other people -- black, white, male, lesbian, gay, transsexual, all people -- who are on that road to liberation and freedom. If I didn't have that, the world would be too dire, simply too hard to live in. So in this way my writing and my politics are really inextricable. When I wrote my essay "Sexual Politics and the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston," it was one of the first attempts to look at her work outside of the black male literary establishment of the Harlem Renaissance, where she was disliked to a large degree because she was a strong, determined woman. It is impossible to separate art from life and politics.

Q: Along with your essays on literature, a great deal of The Truth That Never Hurts is political theory. What do you see as the relationship between politics per se and actual organizing?

A: I have always thought of the kind of theory that applies to organizing as analysis -- an ability to look at a situation that you are faced with and be able to figure out what is going on. To me, "theory" has the connotation of being fixed in a book, written down -- signed, sealed, and delivered on the page. Whereas analysis is far more ongoing and vital -- it is on the ground, on your feet, and you can look at a situation and assess it by comparing it to your other experiences -- like how homophobia and race and hate crimes are connected.

Q: A number of gay and lesbian political thinkers have increasingly been incorporating postmodern theory into their work and using the ideas of thinkers like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Jacques Lacan. Do you find this useful?

A: I have not been drawn to this type of theory. One of the things that I think it does not address -- and no one has been able to counter this impression for me, and I have many friends who are academics who think about and teach this -- is that it never talks about what you do about the problem that you describe. So you can talk about gender as performance, fine, but then what do we do about rape? If gender is performance, can I walk around at 10 o'clock at night? Or is being armed for protection part of my gender performance as well?

Q: What do you think about the postmodern idea of race as a construct?

A: Oh, please. Only people who have never been the victims of racism could cook that up. Yeah, race is a construct -- it was constructed by white people in order to keep a system of power alive and well. Sure it's a construct -- a construct that runs the highest and lowest levels of the US economy. What does race as a construct mean to James Byrd Jr.? What does it mean to me when someone tries to run me off the road in Watertown, Massachusetts, as they did years ago, because they see a black in a car on what they think of as their turf? Only people who have not experienced dead-on racial hatred and violence can play with "race" in that way. To me it is nothing to play with.

Q: Race politics are at the heart of American politics and increasingly at the heart of gay and lesbian politics -- as your book points out. Interestingly, the idea of assimilation that is debated by gay and lesbian activists -- becoming part of the mainstream -- has also been debated in the African-American community. Is this idea of assimilation even possible for African-Americans? Is it desirable?

A: Never! [Laughs] I find the whole concept of assimilation offensive. It implies that there is one group of people who are better, more normal, more worthy than another group, and that in order for that "out" group to achieve recognition and rights they have to conform to the mores and standards of the "okay" group. As a black person, I think assimilation was never really offered to us by the US social structure. I think there are black people like Clarence Thomas, for instance, who actually thinks he has arrived, but all he has to do is be in his car in the wrong white neighborhood to be disabused of this notion. There is no doubt that racism is alive and well despite our efforts to conform.

Q: This is not a new idea, though.

A: No. Radical black thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X -- who is now on a postage stamp, go figure -- were never about assimilation. They were about asserting that we had rights based on the fact that we are human.

Q: And the gay movement now?

A: Everything I said about being black in America I would say about being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered in America. What I thought was so wonderful when I first came to Boston was how in-your-face and whimsical, how willing to confront and not conform, the lesbian and gay world was in contrast to the heterosexual world I had not so successfully been a part of just months before. There was something so alive for me about how we did things -- socially, politically -- and I can't imagine giving that up to wear business suits and suck up to vested interests of power. To me, assimilation is so beautifully spoken about in James Weldon Johnson's wonderful 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. At the end of the book, the protagonist -- who has passed for white, gone back into the black community, and then back again to the white world -- wonders if "he has sold his birthright for a mess of pottage."

Q: How has this idea -- this goal -- of assimilation affected gay and lesbian organizing?

A: If we had a true understanding of human rights and civil rights, we would realize that we have these rights because we are part of society and not because we act a certain way, speak a certain way, or dress a certain way.

Q: The question of assimilation has been at the heart of the debates around the Millennium March. And the underlying subtext of this debate has been progressives, and progressives of color, demanding to have their ideas and politics be heard by the organizers of the march. The Ad Hoc Committee for an Open Process has challenged the almost all-white march organizing committee and has been consistently denied any real input. Do you think there's any place for black lesbians and gay men to have leadership in the national scene of gay organizing?

A: Well, there should be. Definitely there should be. The question is, will there be? Can there be?

Q: But do you expect this to happen, given the impulse to assimilate in the national scene and the political leanings of most of the national organizations?

A: We really don't look to the Human Rights Campaign for ground-shaking agendas. They have very conventional strategies for securing some rights for gay men and lesbians. More power to them if they actually get any. But we, as progressive people of color, don't really look to them for any cutting-edge leadership. NGLTF [the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force], on the other hand -- we're waiting for them to make a principled decision that will distinguish where they are coming from in contrast to HRC. And up until now, we have not seen that on an organizational level, both about whether they are reconsidering their participation in the march and whether they will help to bring the nation together as a whole to have the discussion about whether to have the march. That, we are still waiting for.

Q: If the national groups are so entrenched in what you see as an assimilationist -- even conservative -- agenda, who do you see yourself working with?

A: I can't see myself in an assimilationist model because I am a radical and am very up-front about that. But one of the things that I have discovered is that this is what attracts people to my perspective. I am not doctrinaire. I have worked and am willing to work with many different kinds of people, and I think many activists of all political stripes are very much drawn to a political vision that is larger, that asks for a lot more and is a lot more challenging. Ultimately this vision of social justice promises more respect, freedom, and joy -- for gay people and for everyone else.

---

Respond to this article.

---