Women's Studies. Black women - Essay Example

Women's Studies Life is not a bed of roses, especially not for women and specifically not if the women are black. Black women inherit life more as a bed of thorns, their only fault being the coloured skin covering them. But undoubtedly, along with agonizing and heart wrenching stories of them, there are also innumerable true stories of African/African American women's struggle against slavery and discrimination and the subsequent successes in their lives. Finding a website that focused solely on the lives and accomplishments of African women and/or on African-American women wasn't a piece of cake. There were websites that contained information about famous African-American people, who after a lot of struggle made it big as artists, musicians, sportsmen; or information posted about the blacks in the Black history month, but a website based entirely on African-American women's lives was not that easy to find. However, after skimming around numerous websites for about an hour and seeing if they had the required material, I came across docsouth.unc.edu, a website featuring the "First-Person Narratives of the American South", that provided voice to the minority groups (i.e, Southerners) who remained unheard or were not given the value they deserved. (The University Library, n.d.) One of the memoirs the site contains is of Joice Heth, a black woman who was born on the Island of Madagascar, on the Coast of Africa, in the year 1764, and lived up to around 161 years. She was a slave too, but her life was not nearly as bitter as most of the others of her kind, for she was blessed with the fortune of having kind masters. She is said to have been the nurse of George Washington since he was born, and this is one of the things, apart from her astounding age, that grabs the attention of people towards her. This memoir was published in 1835 and it also contains several testimonies of people who knew Joice, affirming her goodness and the belief that her piety could never be doubted. The Narrative of Bethany Veney, A Slave Woman: Electronic Edition is yet another story of a black slave, which shows that the right to education was a far off thing; she had to ask her master's permission to even go to Church (Malburne, n.d.). When she got married to a slave named Jerry, and later when he was sent tp jail and she went to visit him, she was not even allowed to meet him in private. "We had committed no offence against God or man. Jerry had not; and yet, like base criminals, we were denied even the consolation of privacy. This was a necessary part of the system of American slavery. Neither wife nor mother could intervene to soften its rigors one jot."(Collected Black Women's Narratives, 20) Highlights from Fanny Jackson Coppin's autobiography Reminiscences of School Life, and Hints on Teaching were also found in the website, which proved to be quite helpful in learning about the achievements of capable black women. Coppin, too, was born a slave in Washington DC in 1837, but luckily for her, she was bought by her aunt for $125. Her autpbiography shows how keen she was not inly to pursue education for herself, but also to do as much as possible to help and educate others. After taking a lot of diverse courses, she became so good at teaching that when she was chosen to teach a preparatory course at Oberlin, they feared the children would rebel against her due to her coloured skin, but instead, the children loved having her as their teacher so much that the course had to be divided until no more students could be added to it. In 1865 she joined Institute for Colored Youth(IYC) and in 1869 became the principal of it, where she worked on the dire need of providing vocational education to African Americans with very clear demands: "We do not ask that any one of our people shall be put into a position because he is a colored person, but we do most emphatically ask that he shall not be kept out of a position because he is a colored person" (Collected Black Women's Narratives., 37). Moreover, she emphasized on elementary education along with teaching strategies. She believed in respecting the students and specifically instructed the teachers to give only positive punishment. She said about penalty "should always be administered in a kind spirit" and should be "reasonable" so that "a child's sense of justice would agree with it" (Collected Black Women's Narratives, 54). Coppin devoted her life to helping those of her kind to attain the necessary education which she knew would help them get ahead, until during her travels with her husband, she became ill and passed away after returning back home. A virtual tour of this website helped us learn about the amazingly unforgettable stories of some African-Americans, and there are numerous more for us to read out there. We shed a tear for the sad, heart wrenching ones, and we clapped our hands for the success tales, but is that all we are to do about the sheer racism that we witness everyday ? McIntosh explains in her essay that although men in the society admit that women are under privileged and efforts should be made to make their position in the world better, they are unwilling to affirm that they themselves are overprevileged. Similarly, McIntosh explains white privilege "an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious" (McIntosh, 71); furthermore she says, "My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture." (Coleman, 31) The point being, that we do not see ourselves as an oppressor in the first place. And once we do, we become "newly accountable." Once the Whites realize that the Blacks are deprived of many a few rights such as being able to live in an accommodation of their choice, being able to go out alone without the fear of being harassed, being able to express their views openly about the government, being able to be in company of people of their race most of the time, etc, they will understand that “They must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.” (McIntosh, 9). They will understand that while their "racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated."(Tylor et al, 16). But merely disapproving of such a system will not do much to change it. As Peggy McIntosh puts it, "What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base."(Kimmel & Abby, 24) We are part of the system and we will have to change ourselves first. Work Cited Top of Form Top of Form Top of Form Bottom of Form Top of Form The University Library. "Documenting the American South homepage." Documenting the American South homepage. UNC, n.d. Web. 30 May 2013. .The University Library. "Documenting the American South homepage." Documenting the American South homepage. UNC, n.d. Web. 30 May 2013. .The University Library. "Documenting the American South homepage." Documenting the American South homepage. UNC, n.d. Web. 30 May 2013. .The University Library. "Documenting the American South homepage." Documenting the American South homepage. UNC, n.d. Web. 30 May 2013. .Bottom of Form Bottom of Form Bottom of Form Top of Form Coleman, Jonathan. Long Way to Go: Black and White in America. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998. Print. Collected Black Women's Narratives. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Print. Kimmel, Michael S, and Abby L. Ferber. Privilege: A Reader. Sydney, Australia: Accessible Publishing Systems PTY, Ltd, 2010. Print. Malburne, Meredith. "Fanny Jackson Coppin." Documenting the American South homepage. UNC, n.d. Web. 30 May 2013. Retrieved from http://docsouth.unc.edu/highlights/coppin.html McIntosh, Peggy. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies. Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women, 1988. Print. Taylor, Verta A, Leila J. Rupp, and Nancy Whittier. Feminist Frontiers. New York: McGraw Hill Higher Education, 2009. Print. The University Library. "Documenting the American South homepage." Documenting the American South homepage. UNC, n.d. Web. 30 May 2013. . Bottom of Form Read More