Barbara Smith on Reproductive Justice and Black Feminism: An Interview
Black feminist pioneer and icon, Barbara Smith. Collage by Doriana Diaz.
Black feminist icon and pioneer, Barbara Smith, speaks on reproductive, Black feminism, and freedom in an interview conducted by scholar Joseph R. Fitzgerald.
Barbara Smith is most certainly an icon–a Black feminist icon. A prolific writer, educator, author, organizer, and socialist, Smith has been dedicated to the struggle for freedom since her teenage years; starting her organizing work in school desegregation during the Civil Rights Movement in her native Cleveland, Ohio. At age 75, Smith is still just as committed to dismantling oppressive systems and structures and in catalyzing coalitions and solidarities to create a world where people can truly be free.
Internationally recognized and known for her groundbreaking work in building, fostering, and sustaining Black feminism as a field, study, a theoretical framework, and political praxis, Smith is the co-founder of the Combahee River Collective, a Boston-based Black lesbian feminist and socialist organization established in 1974. Named after the Combahee Ferry Raid, a military operation led by freedom fighter, Harriet Tubman, along the Combahee River in South Carolina during the Civil War in 1863, members of the collective including Smith, her twin sister, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, wrote and published one of the most important and significant Black feminist texts: the Combahee River Collective Statement. The Combahee River Collective Statement ushered in a intersectional, radical Black feminist analysis that examined and emphasized the simultaneity of oppression in the experiences, perspectives, and identities of Black women. Moreover, the Combahee River Collective Statement has paved the way for what we know, understand, and interrogate as intersectional feminism.
In 1980, Smith, at the urging of her friend, Audre Lorde, co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first national publishing company run by and for women of color. Working in collaboration with countless feminist pioneers such Lorde, June Jordan, and Gloria Anzaldúa, Smith spearheaded and published works such as This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color; I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities; and Cuentos: Stories by Latinas. She also edited pioneering works such as Conditions Five: The Black Women’s Issue (1979) with Lorraine Bethel (which Smith’s trailblazing essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” was originally published and was later re-published in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology); All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1982) with Akasha Gloria Hull and Patricia Bell-Scott; and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, with the first edition published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1983 and a second edition by Rutgers University Press in 2000.
Nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and elected to the Albany, New York Common Council in 2005, Smith continues to lecture, politically organize, and speak out against social injustices such as war, colonialism, and racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence, imperialism, and more. Relentless and unwavering in her values and in the fight for the liberation of all marginalized peoples, Smith is most certainly the epitome and embodiment of what it means to be a Black Woman Radical.
In this video interview, Joseph R. Fitzgerald, Associate Professor of History at Cabrini University and her biographer, interviews Smith on the fight for reproductive justice. An abbreviated and slightly edited version of this interview was published in Black Perspectives on August 8, 2022. The interview was conducted on July 14, 2022. The transcript of the 55-minute video interview is below as well.
(The original text above on Barbara Smith was written by Jaimee A. Swift an interview with Barbara Smith in March 2020 for Black Women Radicals’ blog, Voices in Movement).
Video interview featuring Barbara Smith conducted by Joseph R. Fitzgerald.
Joseph R. Fitzgerald (JRF): Today’s date is July 14th 2022. This is Joseph R. Fitzgerald. I am speaking with Ms. Barbara Smith and we are goingto be talking about the really important topic of reproductive justice. So, Barbara, I sent you a list of questions before today’s interview and I’m going to read them just like a regular script. So, in a recent email exchange with me, you wrote about the documentary film The Janes. You stated: “It is really good, but so painful to watch having lived through that time and now being subjected to even worse.” Can you please speak about what it was like to live in a pre-Roe America?
Barbara Smith (BS): It was incredibly difficult and nightmarish because if one got pregnant, and particularly if you were not married, you became like a persona non grata. You were stigmatized. There was incredible shame. I was speaking a few weeks ago, Ithink it was before Roe fell, to a friend who is in their fifties and she said, “Well, when you were growing up,” she said, “I don’t suppose there was anything like sex positivity.” And I said “What what’s the opposite of sex positivity?” I said it would be sex negativity but I said it went a lot farther than that. Actually, what we’re talking about during in my growing up years was sex nihilism. It was much worse than that because it was so much shame and so much fear.
And I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1950s and 60s. I was born in 1946. And there was in Cleveland, like in manycities and in many places, there was a home for girls who got pregnant and who were not married. And it was just as frightening when we drove by that place–it was just as frightening to contemplate it as if we had driven by the juvenile detention home. It was that much fear. And my sister and I–we’re twins so we experienced all these markers at the same age and stage–and also had similar friends because we were in the same age group–and often friends come from your age group and also when you’re in school classes and things like that–and so she and I had a discussion recently, my sister Beverly Smith, we had a discussion about girls we remember who were the unlucky ones what who became pregnant and how much shame, fear, sadness there was about that.
Now, I was not dating in those years, in my high school years. In my era young people were not necessarily expected todate in middle school, not real dates, but you know what I’m saying, but because of the era that it was it was high school when one might have been dating and I was not dating at that time. But it was just something hanging over our head. I remember a student who we knew and who we liked who was at our junior high school who had developed earlier–she reached puberty earlier than most of the rest of us–and she did get pregnant and I remember when she came back to school and how there was just this atmosphere around her that she was different from everyone else and thatsomething really bad happened. So it was just such a great fear.
And then when I went to college and was involved in dating and in sexual relationships, that was a point of great fear too. And it wasn’t just me. That was everyone. And then of course I’m talking about my experience as a not married, very lucky to be a college student in my late teens and early twenties. And of course there were people who were grown-ups, who we would see as adults, who had children that they wished to have, whose health conditions mitigated against having more children whatever their situation was. I’m talking about married women and parents. And they, of course, were caught up in this nightmare as well. So that was the way it was.
One of the things that is different now, post-Roe, is that there is a much more draconian effort, and much more, I think, hatred involved in prosecuting and criminalizing everyone who’s involved. If it’s possible, in some ways it’s worse than pre-Roe, but another way it’s better is because there are abortion medications and people can self-manage abortions. While that will unravel and how that will come about with the new absence of Roe as a constitutional protection, we will see. But there was nothing like that in the pre-Roe days. But I’ve heard other people in my age group talk about what it was like in those days.
Because people have always been sexual. I was surprised to find that out because when you go back and look at historyyou find out that “Oh! Well people were having sex in the 1930s? In the 1920s? Oh! Even in the 1800s?” People were getting caught. One of the classics of so-called American literature, An American Tragedy, is about just that. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that novel. I think it’s Theodore Dreiser and it is about a young man who really wants to move out of his class position as a working-class young white man. And this all happens in upstate New York, just right around here, the Hudson River, this setting around here where I currently live. And he gets someone pregnant. He is falling in love with the factory owner’s daughter and thinks that that might be his way out of his class position and his economic circumstances. But then he gets another woman pregnant and the only thing he can think of to do is to killher. And so they go out on a boat and he basically pushes her in and drowns her. And of course he is found out. But yeah, that was some time ago. I don’t remember. I think that was the early 1900s setting. So, we’ve always had to deal with this.
And another thing that people should really know is that at the point that people discovered where babies came from, people who can become pregnant–women and people who can become pregnant–have always made efforts to controltheir reproduction. Always. So this is not new. The stigma and the illegalization, the criminalization of abortion really only happened in the United States in the Nineteenth Century. Before that there was a very different legal and cultural atmosphere.
JRF: Thank you for that. My next question is: Many people are terrified by the SCOTUS’s ruling last month in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) because it means that people around this nation won’t have access to safe and legal abortion services. Some people point to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale as apredictor of what awaits pregnant people now that Roe has been overturned. What’s interesting about this take is that it presumes that we’re in new territory but as Dr. Dorothy Roberts shows in her classic work Killing the Black Body, this nation has a long history of controlling girls’ and women’s bodies during and after the period of enslavement, which includes forced or coerced pregnancy and sterilization.
You’ve experienced a lot in your six decades of political activism. Does a person’s knowledge level of US history factor into their preparation for being an effective advocate and activist in human rights struggles such as reproductive justice?
BS: The answer is yes. And that is always a case no matter what issue you’re working on. Knowing our history and not just knowing it in broad strokes helps us to understand what we’re seeing now and also what the possibilities are moving forward [video feed freezes]...justice. So if we don’t understand that past it’s very hard for us to be creative and effective in the present and into the future because we don’t know what we’re dealing with.
A few years ago I was buying multiple copies of Howard Zinn’s book SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Most people know Howard Zinn because of A People’s History of the United States. He wrote many books–we’re just talking about two right this moment–but SNCC: The New Abolitionists was written quite a while before A People’s History of the United States and it is a chronicle of SNCC organizing in the South during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. SNCC [pronounced “Snick”] is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And to me if you want to know whatorganizing is–that’s why I was buying the multiple copies–if you want to know what organizing is and looks like, what it takes, what the sacrifices are, and why it is so important, that is an excellent book to read. Because people now think that organizing is something you do as your day job at a 501(c)(3) organization and that is far from the case. Most organizing that has been effective has been done at the grassroots. SNCC was a grassroots organization. And it’s just really important, as I said, for people to know what the stakes are.
People think that the only danger that ever existed is the danger that they themselves face. They don’t know how greatthe dangers were in my lifetime. This is not, like, far away and you know we’re not talking–today is Bastille Day–we’re not talking about the French Revolution and that danger. [chuckles] We’re talking about something that happened when I was in elementary school and in high school–how much danger and violence there was for Black people who wanted to do very, very simple things.
In relationship to reproductive rights, one of the things that has come to my attention and has come up recently, iscomparing the situation of people who can become pregnant–comparing that situation to slavery. Which means people don’t really know what US slavery was about. And in some ways we can’t blame people–unless they’re full grown adults who know how to read–but we can’t blame people because of course the history of slavery and the history of raceand racism in the United States has never been thoroughly and accurately taught across the board in K-12.
The way you get that information is if you’re lucky to go to college and you’re interested in this subject matter then you take these courses as electives. Sometimes you major in Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, etcetera. But as I said, you can’t generally count on anyone who was educated in the United States as having a clear understanding of that history and much more. So that comparison then we can see why people might think that itis the case but if one understands that not having access to abortion doesn’t mean that you cannot walk into, let’s say a business office, and have a transaction there. Or going to a medical office for another kind of reason and not have to enter through the back door.
I heard people recently talking about what Jim Crow was. There were laws that said that Black people couldn’t play checkers in a park. We know that many swimming pools closed during the Civil Rights era because these towns that had public swimming pools were bound and determined that no Black people would be able to swim in these pools. Not being able to go to the library. You know, of course I lived in the library when I was growing up and the thought of not being able to go to the library is just tragic and so upsetting to contemplate. But I know because I am in African-American Studies too and have read as much history as I possibly could, although my field is literature. I now know that people who are my same age when I was growing up–that is, Black kids my same age–is they lived in certain places, namely the old Confederacy, the post-Civil War South, if they lived in that place it’s quite likely they were not allowed to go to the library. The library! So it was a totalizing system.
And I don’t think I’ve thought of the best examples. So here’s an example. With the fall of Roe can a woman who has children, can she take them to an amusement park if she’s white and if she’s not white, I mean because we’re living in the Twenty First Century. Yes, she could even though she doesn’t have access to abortion. In my day Black kids couldn’t go to parks and amusement parks even in Cleveland when I was growing up. The most popular and accessible amusement park, which was called Euclid Beach, it was known that there was racial animus there. So even though I went on a number of occasions, and of course it was so exciting and so much fun, never went as much as I wanted to, but even being in Cleveland we knew that there was a possibility that there would be racist incidents happening. And of course I’m talking mostly about Jim Crow at this point but if we go back to chattel enslavement we’re talking about a whole different level of nightmare.
And Professor Deborah Gray White, she talks about how she sees The Handmaid’s Tale as a metaphor for USslavery.∗ That it’s not a dystopia, just as you said Joe, it is a description or a depiction of what life was like in theUnited States and what it could be like again, if people– who mean us in the human race, no good–if they get their way.
JRF: People also are rightly concerned that other fundamental rights and personal liberties are now on the table to be strippedaway, including access to contraception, same-sex intimacy, and marriage equality. For many years now, Black feminists such as yourself were warning us that Roe could be overturned and then other rights would be in jeopardy. What do you think is the reason, or reasons, for why so many reproductive rights supporters seem to have been caught flatfooted on this? Is there a generational divide in whether people thought Roe would be forever enshrined as a fundamental right and if so, what is the cause of that divide?
BS: I don’t know if it’s generational. I think it’s more political. I think that people who are born after Roe and only grew up knowing that they had a constitutional right to abortion have a different perspective than those of us who grew upbefore Roe. That’s true. But as far as “Would the right ever be taken away?” I think it’s a political difference.
I think that one of the reasons the pro-reproductive justice movement–in fact in some ways I’m not using the right terminology. Because reproductive justice is a term and a concept that was developed by women of color. And it was to counter just reproductive rights, or a pro-choice perspective. Reproductive justice is the entire range of what people need in order to be able to function well and safely in their communities and in their families. So reproductive justice includes being opposed to and ending sterilization abuse. It includes having universal, accessible healthcare as opposed to having healthcare be a consumer product that some people can afford and some people cannot, and tying healthcare to employment. I mean, what an evil kind of way of organizing a healthcare system that if you’re not employed then you don’t deserve to live, basically, because you don’t have access to the basic health protection and services. As I said I think that the political difference is really the pro-choice perspective, I think, that was much more narrow in itsunderstanding and its assumptions about what they–with their privilege–could and would always have.
I was speaking to someone who’s a friend of mine, Laura Kaplan who was a member of Jane, just a few days ago. And she talked about how she knew the person who first started using the term “pro-choice” and getting it out there as a widely used term. And she told me, she said “I told her at the time that this was not a good idea. That pro-choiceframing is not a good idea for making sure that rights were protected and that everyone had access to them. It’s just too narrow.”
And so you have pro-choice. You have anti-choice. You have pro-life. You have people who are supposedly not about life. And you get the people who are pro-life and they’re for capital punishment. They don’t care about police brutality. They love prisons and incarceration. They don’t provide anything for families to survive and thrive. Because we have an unjust economic system and given that that’s the case–and that system is racial capitalism–given that that’s the case, there’re always going to be people who cannot make it under an unjust system which is in its place for only one reason; which is to make profit for those who own the means of production. Capitalism is not to make anybody–exceptfor the people who do own that–rich. We see that with Amazon. Amazon workers, thank goodness, are beginning tosuccessfully organize around the country but Amazon isn’t to help them. Amazon is to make Jeff Bezos a multi- billionaire. So, as I said, as long as that’s the system we’ll have people who are not able to survive in it.
In other so-called Western industrialized countries, like the United States, they have a social safety net. But the UnitedStates does not. Unless we do our politics in relationship, and frame our politics in relationship to the situations that weactually face then we will indeed be caught up in complacency. I think that people who experience multiple oppressions were not looking necessarily to the system for solutions for oppression. I think they were much moreaware that Roe could indeed fall.
And another thing [video feed freezes] Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg even she said that she wished it had been decided on a different legal basis. Because it was decided, I think, on the basis of privacy rights and it could have been decided in such a way that it would have been much harder for it to be knocked down.
JRF: You were one of the founders of the Combahee River Collective, a collective of Black feminists and socialists who lived in Boston, Massachusetts, in the mid- to late-1970s. The Combahee River Collective utilized study groups as a means by which members raised their consciousness on the issues in their own lives. From this work came theorganization’s “Statement” in 1977 and it was where you all first introduced and defined the concept of identity politics, and you all argued for an intersectional approach when working on social issues. Importantly, the “Statement” is routinely cited as an operational model for multi-issue feminist organizing and ethics. Why do you think the “Statement” has been so influential during these forty-five years since you all wrote it?
BS: Well, we could not have predicted that. But one of the things that I wanted to say is that it is looked at and used not just by feminist organizers. It’s used in progressive movements across the board. So I think it’s because it was of a multi-issue, multi-level analysis it works for more than one group of people. Someone sent me–I think it was a tweet or meme, something like that, but something that was online–and this is a transgender activist and they had taken a section or sentence, maybe just one or two, from the Combahee River Collective Statement. And our “Statement” said somethinglike we see Black feminism as the analysis and practice that will free Black women. And the person who had found it–and obviously liked it–they added “transgender people” and everything else in the tenets applies. It was beautiful because it was like, “Yeah! This is why the people embrace it.”
We had a very open perspective about who we saw as our allies and who we saw as people with whom we were in struggle, who we saw as our comrades. The fact that it was written from a socialist perspective also gave it, and has given it its incredible staying power. And I often say that that’s what made it unique because we had a material analysis of what was going on in the lives of people like ourselves, namely Black women, a lot of whom were also lesbians. Wehad, as I said, understandings, and beginning to have a new understandings, of what was going on in our own lives. But we were also concerned about what was going on in the lives of people who we were connected to and identified with. So we didn’t have any illusion that we didn’t have a perfect life if we just got rid of sexism and racism and didn’t do anything about economic exploitation. We did not have an illusion that we could have nice lives if we did nothing about police brutality or incarceration. The number of people who are incarcerated now as in comparison with the number of people who were incarcerated in the 1970s is exponential, has skyrocketed. But we still had issues and relationships to incarceration back in the day in the 1970s.
But in any event, and as I said, it was a very open perspective and it was a perspective that was really believed in coalition work and did not dismiss people based upon the fact that they were not exactly the same kind of people thatwe were. We actually practiced and worked in coalition with other people in the Boston area and probably the most significant example of that was when twelve Black women were murdered in Boston in early 1979. These were not serial murders and most of the murders were done by Black men. The murders that were solved, they were done by different Black men. That tells you something about the state of sexual politics in the Black community that that number of Black women could be murdered by different people. And yet, it wasn’t business as usual by any means, but we wanted to make sure that people had a deeper understanding of what was going on because Boston is so racist, so notoriously racist. People, when the murders first began to happen,saw them as racial murders. But it was only women who were being murdered and some of the women had been raped. So then we had to think about the situation differently. The Combahee River Collective was absolutely at the center of bringing various communities together at a time of extreme crisis in the city of Boston.
We were speaking truth to power to the Boston police, which is more than a notion because like most police departments it was very scary, a very scary police department. When I say that I’ll just tell a little story. I remember we had a demonstration once during that time in front of one of the major police stations and I remember thinking, “This takes a lot of nerve.” I was thinking about South Africa, you know, what happened when people confronted the powerstructure there, particularly the armed power structure there. This is not just like a walk in the park here. We are confronting the Boston police on their own turf so-to-speak. And we were confronting the Boston Globe which when they first began to report the murders had the story buried with the racing forms in the back of the newspaper. Eventually it was a Sunday newspaper front page story. That was our effort.
And we also brought together people from the feminist movement who had not only an analysis of violence against women but also had some institutions like one or two battered women’s shelters. There was also a battered women’s shelter that was started during that time, Casa Myrna Vasquez, which was started by women of color. And as I’ve said, we brought together communities and that just embodied what our politics were.
The “Statement” is written in clear language. It’s not jargon. It’s not high theory. And it has stood the test of time. Ourdefinition of identity politics was clear. What we meant is that we had a right to organize around issues that affected usas the people who we were–Black women. That was not agreed upon at the time. People were very anti-feminist and very homophobic. And we were just saying, “Can’t we work on stuff that’s affecting us, like sterilization abuse? Please?!” And people have taken the term identity politics and have really degraded it. And we know that there’s a lot of controversy about it but that’s not what we meant.
JRF: Thank you for that. Let’s stick with this topic of coalition building because some people might not understand why thisis such an important part of multi-issue organizing. So, can you explain a little more in detail, and maybe use an example or so, of how you went about building these coalitions, and what were some of the challenges that you all inthe Combahee River Collective, that you faced in trying to build coalitions, and how did you work through them?
BS: Well I think the most important thing is that we had an attitude that it was important to do so. We were not separatists. And we took hits from lesbian separatists in particular because we didn’t think that, across-the-board, men were the enemy and that if we just got rid of all the men that everything would be fine. We were not living in that world of illusion. I think it’s a world of illusion.
I think that lesbian feminism–and even lesbian separatism–we were carving everything out from scratch at that point. And by “we” I mean those of us who sought to build the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. It wasn’t like it was all written down somewhere and we were just going through a script. We were making it up from scratch. Every strand of the feminist organizing–even if we did not fully agree–contributed something to our understandings of what was going on in the world that we were trying to understand ourselves. So I just want to make sure that even though we were not separatists I don’t want to imply that people who had those politics did not contribute anything to thatstruggle because I think that they did, as we look at it from this vantage point, certainly.
But as I said, we believed in working across differences. I think that as Black women we had had the experience of being that “fly in the buttermilk” on many occasions. And we also, because of being socialists and anti-capitalists, weunderstood that we were part of really a world struggle, a global struggle. We identified as Third World as did most people of color who were on the Left during those years. The term “Third World,” basically we’re talking about those regions that were colonized and where imperialism wrecked the infrastructures and the environments of the indigenous people of the land that were colonized. So that was the Third World. Europe, of course, was primarily implicated in that but also the United States as well. Now we refer to “the Global South,” we refer to “developing nations.”
But when we said “Third World” we understood that the majority of people on the globe are not of European heritage and are from different groups of people of color, and that we had something in common with those struggles. We were looking at struggles in other countries not just on the African continent but in Latin America. In Central America and the Caribbean. In Asia and South Asia. We were looking at where people were in struggle and seeing, “Yeah. We have some things in common here.”
I think nowadays there’s much less willingness on the part of people who define themselves as Black feminists, or feminists of color, there is much less willingness to make those leaps. The book This Bridge Called My Back and also Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on borderlands, kind of speaks to that consciousness of “We’re on the margins but we have something to share, and something to do to make what’s not on the margins function a lot better than it is.” As I said,just a lot more willingness to cross those borders and to cross those bridges. But I see a lot of separatism now. And separatism, also another word is nationalism, and of course the Combahee River Collective was arising at a time when there was a significant Black nationalist movement in the United States from the 60s into the 1970s. And we were not down with that either. One of the reasons we were not so down with it is because there was so much sexism, genderoppression, and homophobia in those movements. And if the term transphobia had existed, that was true too. Transphobia is a more recent term to talk about what happens to our trans community, to people who are a part of our trans and gender nonconforming community. But as I said, they were just wrong. They were wrong and they were backwards.
So we were willing to go there. When people who started one of the first battered women shelters in the United States, which is Transition House in Boston–which still is operating–this is in the mid-70s, when they asked us if we would consider doing anti-racism training with staff because of the fact that so many of the people coming to the shelter wereindeed women of color, we said yes. Because we understood that a stronger women’s movement benefited us. We didn’t say “No! Go to hell! Read a book!” What book? There were very few books. [laughing] I mean, I was working on All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave but that hadn’t come out yet. And I worked on Conditions: 5, “The Black Women’s Issue.” Which book?! Which book?
But now people get very angry if you even quote on social media without paying them for quotes. It’s just, it’sdifferent, you know. It’s a different kind of politics. And we were willing to go there. I think that people on the Left believe in solidarity–I think we’ll be talking about solidarity–but we were practicing solidarity politics which sometimes means that you’re not always comfortable and that you have to be, I don’t know, a more expensive person than you might be if you’re just left to your own singular devices.
JRF: Let’s jump to that. We only had a couple questions left and that was my last one. Solidarity, as you pointed out, is an important aspect of human rights work. So, how do you define political solidarity and what does it look like when activists are practicing it?
BS: Solidarity is when you have the backs of people who are in struggle whether it’s exactly your people or your issue or not. So, for example, here where I live, and I just want to point out that this is actually Mohawk, Mahican, andHaudenosaunee land–stolen land–that’s where the capital of New York State actually is located. I usually acknowledge that earlier in a conversation. But right here now there is a unionizing effort at a place called Joseph’s House which is a very important agency dealing with the issue of houselessness and people who don’t have a place [video feed freezes] on Sunday that they’re going to have. And a friend of mine who is a labor organizer, one of my closest friends is a labor organizer, but he’s also pro-feminist and anti- racist, and well-loved in the Queer community too–although he himself is not–because he’s an ally. Well, what I prefer; “co-conspirator.” But in any event, he sent me an announcement. I had heard about it because I know one of the people who works at Joseph’s House who is indeed involved in the effort. And I’d already heard about this meeting on Sunday. But he sent me an email yesterday and my immediate response is “Well, I need to send this out to some people.”
Because even though I haven’t gone very many places since the pandemic started, and I will not be going to that either. And then we know there are other reasons too around mobility and stuff that’s hard for me to do some of these thingsthese days. But the thing is I thought, well if I can’t go I certainly wanted to let other people know. And that was a tiny,a miniscule act of solidarity.
My work at this time since Roe fell, and even before Roe fell, but particularly now that it has, has been laser-like focus on reproductive justice. And I sit at my computer–this is an unusual week because I haven’t had a lot of medical appointments or anything like that, health appointments–I don’t want people to get concerned–and I have found myself for the last three days sitting in front of my computer from morning until night doing nothing but trying to weave the pieces together around what I found out about reproductive justice organizing. I’m talking to various kinds of people. I’m talking to someone who I knew in college, who was a friend of mine in college–which was a long time ago–and we recently reunited. And she is very much an organizer and she is focused on these eight races for Senate in the United States that will not only determine the outcome for the 2022 election but as she told me yesterday, will be significantly important for the 2024 election.
Now, I am not devoting most of my time to electoral politics despite the fact that I served in elective office for twoterms on our city council, which is called the Common Council in the city of Albany. But that’s not where I’m spending most of my time. But we had a really long and fruitful discussion yesterday about how the kinds of things that I’m involved in around reproductive justice, how for an upcoming meeting that she herself was a catalyst for and initiated among our classmates. That’s the Class of ‘69 at Mount Holyoke College. But I can work with her. I have no issues about working with her and sharing what it is I know that might be helpful. Because I know that those eight Senate races are important.
There are people who don’t think that electoral politics are important at all. I understand that perspective. And I am not a Democrat Party faithful by any means. But I do pay attention to these issues and as Barbara Ransby the great historian and Black feminist says that “electoral politics are just one tool in our tool box.” So in the middle of the day it’s like talking about these eight Senate races and what are some things that people could do on the ground if they don’t want to get involved in electoral politics. Which she greatly valued because I had some ideas that she thought were really good, like finding out what’s going on around abortion access in the town or city where you live. Because I’ve been doing that. I’ve lived in Albany for almost forty years and think I know most of what goes onaround these issues of reproductive justice, etcetera, but I found out some things in the last couple of weeks that I did not know previously. Because of organizing and what the access is particularly for women of color living in economically distressed neighborhoods and communities. So that’s something that anyone can do wherever they are and that was one of the ideas she liked.
And then in the evening I was on a webinar with Women’s March which is an organization with which I’m affiliatedbecause I’m a senior adviser for Women’s March, and have been for the last couple of years. Women’s March has gone through a lot of changes since the major action, huge demonstrations and protests, that it called right after the inauguration of the other president, President 45. But now in its current state it is led by predominately women of color, and I felt good about being able to be helpful around the things that they’re involved in. So that’s what I was doing in the evening. And then this morning I was looking at an online panel, looking at it again. A panel that I had participated in of women who define themselves as leftist feminists, talking about the new abortion strategies. So you can see even in my daily activities I’m going from one thing to another. I forgot the other meeting that I went to about housing and those kinds of issues in Albany, but we only have so much time. [chuckles]
But solidarity, you have to be able to see your humanity in other people and their humanity in you. That’s what makes it possible to be in solidarity. If we think that everyone who’s not exactly like us means us harm and is really out to get us then we won’t necessarily get very far. And I’m really fortunate that my family raised me with a value system of doing case-by-case evaluations of everyone I encountered. They did not necessarily make global statements about everybody. They did talk about white people because they had had some experience with them and the post-Civil War state of Georgia. But they didn’t have like a big propaganda thing about them. It was more about keeping us safe than it was about, “They’re like this and you’re like the other. You could never trust them.” My aunt, who raised my sister and me after our mother died at a very early age, she actually had friends who were of different races. And that’s saying quite a bit for a person who was born in 1914 in the Deep South, moved to Cleveland, and was having these friendships in the 1950s and 1960s when almost no one was associating with each other across racial lines unless they were inorganized struggle–civil rights organizations. So I feel like I had good role models for solidarity. And I’m just really interested in people. I’m not an extrovert but I am fascinated by the human project.
JRF: Thank you for that. My final question is–and you’ve mentioned some things that you’ve been doing to stay involved even when it comes to your ability to get out and about, but also to utilize technology to stay engaged and connected,and to promote, or as some people would say “boost” or “amplify” these important topics and the people who are working on them–but if you were on your way to the car in the parking lot and you came across somebody, you know, a younger person–broadly defined, in their teens, 20s, 30s, or maybe even 40s–and they said “Ms. Barbara, you know I want to do something. Do you have any suggestions on where I can start?” What would you say?
BS: One of the things I would say is what I was saying to my friend from college yesterday. I think it’s important to find out what’s available and what’s going on. One of the situations I think that might concern that person who said “Ms. Barbara,” which is kind of a tip-off to me that they might have been African-American [laughs]. I know you say “Ms.Barbara,” but whenever I hear that–somebody who was raised. But in any event, there’s an issue that’s going on herethat has to do with reproductive justice. And by here I mean where we live in the Capital Region. We have some incredibly atrocious statistics around maternal and infant mortality. And there are census tracks in our economicallystruggling, primarily Black communities, that are similar to those that you would find in countries that have much fewer economic resources. They are egregious statistics. Now that’s something to find out about.
I don’t think I said this quite as clearly as I should have before but when you take a reproductive justice approach you’re concerned about everything that affects the lives of people and their families to be healthy and successful. I did years of work on sterilization abuse. The mainstream abortion rights movement or pro-choice movement was not as concerned about sterilization abuse. As Laurie Bertram Roberts, who is my new hero, or shero, and who is in the South–Mississippi and Alabama–as theypointed out in this panel that I have referred to, they were pointing out how the mainstream reproductive rights movement has taken a eugenics approach because they’re not concerned about, like, “Well how do you make sure that people can have children if they wish to? How do you teach them or give them information about how to monitor theirfertility at home so that they might be more likely to be able to have those dearly wanted children.”
When we used to organize around both sterilization abuse and also abortion access in Boston in the seventies, we would have what we called “Third World Women’s Committees” that were part of the larger organization. And when we had events they were publicized as conversations about Black women’s health, or the health of Third World women. We would have a flyer–because that was the only way we could communicate in those days, there was no internet–but the flyer might say “We will be talking about reproductive rights, sterilization abuse, quality healthcare, childcare,nutrition.” You know, the whole thing. “How to advocate for yourself in a medical setting.” I mean that’s just a few things but we would make sure that we were covering bases, not just a mono-issue perspective. So that’s just that’s really important.
I would really beat the drum for abortion funds. There are abortion funds locally, around the nation that have been in existence for quite a long time. So they have the staff, they have the infrastructure, and they have the methodology to help people who otherwise would not be able to access abortion usually because they don’t have the financial means. Women of means have always been able to have abortions. And those people on the Supreme Court they know thatpeople in their family have had abortions. They’re a bunch of liars. They’re big liars. You know, they lied to Congress when they were being vetted for the position. So, they’re big liars.
But people with money have generally been able to access abortion here. The less money you have the less likely. So, middle-class women even when shut out of the process. Women who could travel to Europe, to Puerto Rico, to wherever abortion was accessible before Roe because they had it like that, they were okay. And those people will be okay post-Roe. But everybody else, and let’s face it–the 99% percent is bigger than the 1%--everybody else, we have issues. And abortion funds are a great way to get your money. Even if it’s five dollars. Because when a hundred people give five dollars that five hundred dollars. But if you want to financially be involved and supportive they are good. And there is a national network of abortion funds and I would tell them about that.
Some people want to do things hands on. The abortion provider that we’ve been able to identify in our area is PlannedParenthood. That’s true of many places. They definitely accept volunteers. Now New York State is a state where abortion is legal and accessible, except for those barriers. Some of those barriers are I just mentioned; racial and economic. But that doesn’t mean that these organizations that provide the services are not under greater attack. We have some concerns–that the empowering message of the Dobbsdecision will have–the attacks on the resources will be even greater. So that’s much more than five minutes walking tothe car. But those are some things that people could do.
And also one thing I would say that if indeed the person is interested, to find out about the history of African andAfrican American women–people who became African American–to find out the reproductive history of enslaved women. Because enslaved Black women, because they were subject to rape within the context of enslavement, they had many ways and interventions of preventing more capital for the master through their reproduction. As I said, as soon as people found out where babies came from they have tried to control their reproduction. Becausereproduction uncontrolled fills graveyards. I used to tell my students when I was teaching African-American literaturefor the first time in the early 1970s, and I was in New England, I was in Boston. I was teaching Black women writers too, so we were looking at women’s issues, and I would say the graveyards of New England are filled with the bodies of women who had no access to reproductive choice.
Because without contraception and abortion, you know when that becomes your choice, without that you just had baby after baby after baby. And doctors would tell women, “You can’t have another baby. It will kill you.” But what was there to do? So as I said we are very wise. You know, women have wisdom, so do others, have wisdom, but we have wisdom that we share with each other around kitchen tables and everywhere we are.
And one of the things that we share is like, “So how can we have safe families and children? How can we keep our family safe and be able to be there for our children throughout their lives?”
JRF: I want to thank you very much, Ms. Barbara Smith. This was an excellent interview and I appreciate that you made time in your very busy schedule to speak with me. And I will be in touch.
∗ Smith mistakenly cites Dr. Dorothy Roberts.