I’ve spent much of my life fighting patriarchy, even when I didn’t know it. When I was a kid, my dad used to drink coffee like his life depended on it. He would wake up in the morning and drink a cup – lightened with half-and-half and sweetened with three packets of Equal. I knew how to make it expertly, and so did my mother. “Lynette, make me some coffee!” was a common phrase in my home. Sometimes it would come for me. “Alicia!” my dad would bellow. “Make me some coffee!”
I hated hearing it. Something about the demand to drop everything and run to the kitchen to make an able-bodied man a cup of coffee made me angry, deep in my spirit. I was a child, so it wasn’t like I was doing anything important. But in my eight-year-old mind, that wasn’t the point. My mother did everything in our home – she made sure the bills were paid, the house was clean, we were fed and taken care of. My dad ran the family business, which was also hard work, but in my mind he spent most of his time telling other people what to do, and we spent most of our time doing it. And it incensed me, each and every time.
We bring the things that shape us, consciously and unconsciously, everywhere we go
One day, I responded to my dad in a way that I hadn’t before. “Make it yourself!” I yelled from my room. Needless to say, it didn’t go over well – I’m pretty sure I was grounded and continued making cups of coffee for my dad on demand. But for me, it was a punishment well worth taking.
Every social movement I’ve ever participated in has been infected by patriarchy. When people come together to solve problems, they do not automatically become immune to the distorted ways society and the economy are organised. We bring the things that shape us, consciously and unconsciously, everywhere we go. Unless we are intentional about interrupting what we’ve learned, we will perpetuate it, even as we are working hard for a better world.
As an organiser, I am used to environments where women, usually women of colour, are carrying the lion’s share of the work but are only a minuscule part of the visible leadership. The majority of our membership would be women – poor and working-class women of colour, immigrant women and queer women. But when men came to our community meetings, they would often take up the most space. They would talk the most, pontificate, and be quick to try to tell people what they “really needed to be doing”.
I was regularly hit on by men. Some would come to community meetings because they thought that, even though I was talking with them at their door about environmental racism and police violence, what I secretly wanted was for them to ask me out or at least ask for my phone number. The first time I ever did outreach, I was locked in a house by a man who was high on what I assumed to be methamphetamines. The only way I got out unscathed was by inviting him to come outside and smoke a cigarette so “we can get to know each other better”. There, thankfully, the person I was doing outreach with, a man, was waiting for me.
In 2007, I attended the United States Social Forum, where more than 10,000 activists and organisers converged to share strategies to interrupt the systems of power that impacted our everyday lives. It was one of my first trips with Power, a small grassroots organisation working for Black residents in San Francisco, and I was eager to prove myself. One day, the director of the organisation invited me to attend a meeting of a new group of Black organisers from coalitions across the country. I was becoming politicised, and I yearned to be part of a movement that had a specific focus on improving Black lives. When we arrived, I looked around the room. There were five Black women and approximately 95 Black men.
An older Black man called the meeting to order. I sat next to my co-worker, mesmerised and nervous. Why were there so few Black women here, I wondered. In our local organising, most of the people who attended our meetings were Black women. The older Black man talked for 40 minutes. When he finally stopped, man after man spoke, long diatribes about what Black people needed to be doing, addressing our deficits as a sleeping people who had lost our way. That feeling I used to get as a kid when my dad would yell to my mother or me to make him coffee began to bubble up inside me. Nervous but resolute, I raised my hand.
People shifted in their seats. Some of the men refused to make eye contact with me. Had I said something wrong?
I introduced myself and my organisation, then said: “I believe in the liberation you believe in, and I work every day for that. I heard you say a lot, but I didn’t hear you say anything about where women fit into this picture. Where do queer people fit in this vision for Black liberation?” I had just delivered my very own version of the Sojourner Truth “Ain’t I a woman?” speech, and the room fell silent.
It was hot in there. People shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Some of the men refused to make eye contact with me. Had I said something wrong? In the 40 minutes the older man had spent talking, and the additional 40 minutes the other men took up agreeing profusely over the liberation of Black men, not one mention was made of how Black people as a whole find freedom. I looked at him, at first with shyness and then, increasingly, with defiance. He started to talk about how important “the sisters” were to the project of Black liberation, but by then, for me, it was too late. The point had already been made.
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Later, I asked my co-worker if I was out of line. “No,” he said. “It was a good and important question.” Well, if it was a “good and important” question, why did I have to be the one to ask it?
• The Purpose Of Power: How To Build Movements For The 21st Century by Alicia Garza (Doubleday) is out on 22 October at £14.99. To order a copy for £13.04, go to guardianbookshop.com.
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