As noted last week, POCO is honoring International Women’s Day. Within this post you will find the POCO “Best ofs” regarding women of color and Part 2 of Watershed’s second episode. In addition, I have some brief commentary on the liberal tendencies of such celebrations which lump the struggle of all women together in one super structure of oppression. This tendency enrages me because there is a major difference between the oppression women of color and white women face.
As colonized women, we are used strictly as commodities only to be seen working and serving those of the privileged classes. This is even true of the comprador professions many of us work in (see the “Or Can We?” article posted here where I present such circumstances). When I think of my grandmother who attempted to provide for her family by cleaning white womens’ houses, this point becomes even more potent. Reactionary white women who identify as oppressors are afforded the same “rights” as white men to control and affect the lives of women of color as they see fit.
In the book Slavery and Social Death by Professor Orlando Patterson he describes natal alienation as one constituent 
element of the slave relation. According to Patterson, natal alienation defines the slave as a socially dead person, alienated from all claims of birth, blood relations, and remote ancestors/descendents. In such a relation our mothers and grandmothers are torn from their families, whose existence is of no consequence, to care for genuine human beings and their development. In such an arrangement the needs of mother/child, husband/wife, and other family bonds for colonized women are left fragmented and crushed.
Currently, many African, Indigenous, Latina, and Asian women are forced to work low paying jobs that require them to commute long distances. Once the work day is done, they have little or no time to properly tend to their children’s development and their husbands needs. In the face of all these stressors, we are constantly blamed for being incompetent mothers breeding criminals and undesirables. It becomes a function of individual responsibility, as opposed to a social problem caused by stagnant wages (which have never risen for most women of color), poor social safety nets, rabid capitalism, and a fundamentally reactionary state apparatus. We are blamed for being drains on the society and one cause of the national “deficit” (which I am convinced does not exist). When has such criticism been put forward to explain the inadequacies of white womens’ family values!? Even when they are driven to kill their own children, the social engineers still find a way to humanize their deeds.
Of course such realities can be proven and fleshed out in more detail, but I wanted to offer these few points to highlight that International Women’s Day is a celebration whereby these inequities should and must be explored. If these questions are not put out on the table, then International Women’s Day stands as a hollow day where we wear a Red pin or heart, sing songs, and move on to the next day just as reactionary as before.
Podcasts
African Women and Revolutionary Politics – Part 1 and 2
http://www.peopleofcolororganize.com/activism/1461/
Articles
The Model Minority Myth
http://www.peopleofcolororganize.com/analysis/model-minorities/
Media’s Discovery of the Scott Sisters
http://www.peopleofcolororganize.com/general/medias-discovery-scott-sisters/
Demystifying Divide and Conquer
http://www.peopleofcolororganize.com/general/demystifying-divide-conquer/
Or Can We?
http://www.peopleofcolororganize.com/general/or-can-we/
Saturday Radical Culture
“Don’t Let Them Rape the Assata Out of You”
