Black Womanist Leadership , livre ebook

Black Womanist Leadership
tracing the motherline
edited by TONI C. KING and S. ALEASE FERGUSON

COVER ART: Secrets from My Mother by Gary Williams, created for this text in May 2010.
Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2011 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Black womanist leadership : tracing the motherline / edited by Toni C. King and S. Alease Ferguson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3601-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-3602-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Womanism. 2. African American mothers. 3. Leadership. I. King, Toni C., 1953– II. Ferguson, S. Alease.
HQ1197.B56 2011
306.874'308996073—dc22
2010032056
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To our Mothers, Otissey and Thelma, … who made us be
Preface
Writing African American Women's Leadership
When you educate a woman, you educate a nation.
—African Proverb
B EFORE WE EVER STUDIED LEADERSHIP in its formal and organizational terms we both knew that our mothers were leaders. We also knew they had imbued us with the power to be leaders. At their hands we were taught that leading was a natural phenomenon that sprang directly from and in proportion to one's clarity, conviction, and caring about what happened in the world. While we grew up in two different regions of the country—Oklahoma and Ohio—we were each steeped in the lived traditions of leadership we saw around us in the black church women, sorority and club women, neighborhood women, and working women we had known. We were exposed to nurses, teachers, social workers, child care providers, domestic laborers, shopkeepers, and business owners. They were straight and lesbian, single, married, separated, divorced, abandoned, and widowed. We saw women work two and three jobs to sustain their lives and the lives of loved ones; we saw them leave violent homes, taking their children with them with no assurance of employment or livelihood; and we watched them give sanctuary to other women and girls who were for whatever reasons also going through a time of being on their own without financial or emotional support. 1 These lives we witnessed were our first teachers in the cultural laws of leadership from our mothers and women of our communities.
Although much of what we learned we absorbed by what we saw women do, there was also the spoken tradition. Initially we learned by overhearing women talk with each other in a soul-to-soul sharing of their lives, dreams, and goals. As girls not yet invited to the table where “grown folk's business” took place, we hovered as close to this power and mystery as we were permitted. This way we could feel for ourselves the exhilarating energy of women as they deconstructed the lives of other folks, or problem solved, made plans, and delineated visions. But as we came of age, these kitchen-table-talking women intentionally included us. Our incremental acceptance was the rite of passage that culminated in a seat at the table.
We watched as they not only crafted their visions but in “due time” carried them out. In our watching tutelage, we saw glimpses of the struggles that accompanied bringing a vision to fruition. Admittedly, we were invested in “knowing more than was good for us” 2 ; and, through our “womanish” 3 interest, we learned something of the costs of asserting one's self in the world. Our tutelage began to reveal that the price for this self-assertion was heightened by the fact of race, further complicated by the presence of gender and exacerbated by the conditions of poverty or socioeconomic class “status” that gave or denied social skills and entre.
All around us we learned of the consequences to women who took a stand to create self-actualized lives. We knew of neighborhood women who fought bloody emotional or physical battles with husbands or boyfriends to stop abuses to themselves and their children or to assert their right to further their educations. We knew of women who pushed against the dictates of society, by working outside the home in settings disapproved of by their own families; by risking their employment for refusing to perform certain kinds of tasks; or by accepting a job heretofore unheard of for a black woman to take on. We knew of women who defied expectations about who they should or should not “take-up with” or marry, about how they should express their sexuality or sexual identities, or about how they would fashion lives of dignity for themselves and for their families, in spite of being single mothers. We began to discover that each of these hard-won battles, no matter how dramatic or seemingly mundane, was in reality a monumental assertion of black women's humanity in the face of a society that questioned that humanity. And as we watched, we learned that we too could step up to such tests of our “belief in self greater than anyone's disbelief.” 4
While we were enamored of the range of victorious stances women around us took to lay claim to their own liberation, not every contest resulted in victory. Yet among the broken or silenced women, among the depressed or despairing women, among the substance abusing or suicidal women, among the self-sabotaging or self-deceiving women, and among the women felled by physical or mental illness were “sheroic” examples of reversals of these downward spirals. We beheld our own Tina Turners, Oprah Winfreys, Maya Angelous, Iyanla Vanzants, Natalie Coles, Whitney Houstons, 5 who, just when the village murmurings prophesied defeat, would find their way back and lay claim to their right to live a healed and whole life. And—more important for our leadership tutelage—these women would ultimately bring their newly acquired wisdom and hope into our communities, showing others that they too could find a way through.
Our early exposure to women who broke through conditions of oppression also occurred through what we were taught about the epic tales of our foremothers. Our upbringing and education varied, yet each of us was exposed to learning about some of the legendary black women leaders who preceded us: Harriet Tubman, “Moses” of the Underground Railroad, leading more than two hundred slaves to freedom, and reconnaissance spy for the Union Army; Sojourner Truth, itinerant preacher, abolitionist, and human rights activist; Ida B. Wells Barnett, journalist, activist, leader of the antilynching campaign of the 1890s; Althea Gibson, volleying a serve as the first black woman to play in the U.S. Open; Wilma Rudolph, who overcame polio to win an Olympic gold medal; and Phyllis Wheatley, America's first woman poet and first published black poet. As coauthors, our exposure to these vital women figures in the cultural memory of African Americans became a part of how we saw leadership.
We cut our teeth on stories of these legendary foremothers as well as on those of women in our own blood lineage who had shown extraordinary efforts toward “uplifting the race,” “making a way out of no way,” “taking up one's burden in the heat of the day,” or “staying on the battlefield.” Through them we imbibed will, gumption, courage, bravery, intestinal fortitude, striving, and an attitude of “overcoming.” Although we had internalized these leadership lessons of our female forebears, our expression of these recollections was kept close to our hearts. Typically, such cultural knowledge was shared only in the company of intimates and trusted colleagues. To share this knowledge openly exposed us to a negation of the very culture in which our spirits were rooted and from which we continued to draw nourishment.
We had each earned our doctorates in the era of the late eighties and early nineties. During these decades, leadership studies was the hot new organizational term. However, the private sector's dictate of what constituted leadership knowledge was only beginning to include women's leadership as a topic of serious study. These studies often compared women's “styles” and approaches to those of men, but little querying of women's leadership on its own terms occurred. During the 1980s and nineties, the language, values, vision, and strategies passed on to us from mothers and allomothers served to aid us in deciphering the new codes of modern racism. 6 Allomothers are those women who helped mother us by developing our characters, providing us with emotional support, or mentoring us to leadership. In short, they are women who played a role in our mothering. These women within the cultural communities of our youth and young adult years transmitted gender-specific cultural insider knowledge to us that could not be recognized or understood in the context of then current paradigms of leadership. Such paradigms, on the cusp of recognizing women's leadership, were not prepared to recognize and understand the cultural context and assumptions key to the meaning of black women's leadership. Black women's leadership remained, as Mary Belenky and colleagues would later describe, “a tradition that has no name” ( Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock, 1997, pp. 11–12 ; Omolade, 1994 ).
We knew that our contribution to the various organizations and individuals we were working with as academics and organizational consultants was an integration of two paradigms. Our own praxis portrayed both the mainstream theoretical perspectives of leadership and some finely honed theoretical per