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Altar Magazine was delighted to
sit down with Elaine Brown, former Black Panther Party head and current prison reform activist, as well as Constance Curry,
Civil Rights and Freedom Summer organizer, to talk about issues involving current social justice work. It is very important
for us to hear the voices of such influential women who have committed their lives enacting positive social change. As
a new generation of activists, candid, critical analysis of the work that is presently happening is very important and necessary
to hear in order to continue to effect change and combat a new generation of social ills.xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
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Altar Magazine: We were all at the Southern Girls Convention
2002, what was it like being the keynote speakers at SGC in the context of it being representative of Third Wave feminism?
Elaine Brown: I just don’t see any there there. There is no there there. I don’t know what the Third
Wave feminist movement is if there is such a thing. I don’t even know if you can say there is such a thing because they
can’t even define what exactly it is. It’s like saying ‘Let’s define Bush’s war with xml:namespace
prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" ?>Iraq.’
How ridiculous is that. You can’t define it. There are these supposed terrorist threats against the United States, but they exist in the air somewhere and we’re
not sure where. So, it boils down to I don’t know what Third Wave feminism is so I can’t comment on it. What I
saw there was some very interesting counter-cultural clothing and behaviors, but I didn’t see that it represented anything.
People running around worrying about their clothing are ridiculous. You’re not gonna put Kente cloth on Colin Powell
and make him a brotha. If George Bush puts on some fatigues and smokes a Cuban cigar, it doesn’t make him a revolutionary.
There used to be some rock and roll singers and other people who dressed like that in the past who were also involved in anti-war
activism and such. Now there’s just the veneer of counter-culture and that’s all it is. It’s not even counter-culture.
But I don’t see any cohesive philosophical or ideological issues that any so-called feminists are addressing today.
It’s clear that they want something, but they just aren’t sure what that something is. Many of them aren’t
even addressing issues that they could have. When Clinton
proposed the Welfare Reform Act, I didn’t see any feminists out opposing him.
No one thought welfare reform was a feminist issue. I saw Gloria Steinem protecting the president and saying that it
was okay for him to have a sexual addiction. I saw Jill Ireland saying “Shame shame shame,” but that was about
the extent of what feminists were saying about what was a very devastating change for poor women. I don’t think there
really is a feminist movement. I haven’t seen it. I don’t know what its role is.
Constance Curry: I would agree with that. When you said Third
Wave feminism, I didn’t know what that meant. I understand if you’re talking about age groups, but I agree with
Elaine, and I often comment that those of us that were involved with SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), white
and black women, none of us went into the “feminist movement.” You know how they talk about Mary King and Casey
Hayden writing A Kind Of Memo, the paper that was supposedly the beginning of the
Second Wave feminist movement, and now Mary and Casey say ‘We were just talking about some stuff that we thought SNCC
ought to be aware of. We didn’t mean to set off the Second Wave feminist movement.’ And it often gets attributed
to them. I never went into the feminist movement. I was never a member of NOW. I think when you have been involved in a struggle
for dignity, justice, humanity and stuff like that; feminism is more a binding thing rather than an issue itself. I mean,
when some of those women were out on the road doing voter registration, and they were glad to come home every night alive,
who served the coffee was not an important issue. I was happy that the SGC was being held and that there was enough of a consciousness
for young people to know that they need to meet to talk about issues. I was flattered that the organizers felt that Elaine
and I were people important enough to be heard. I was disturbed by the fact that most of the people there were white. I don’t
know if people of color aren’t attracted to it because it doesn’t have the nitty-gritty or because they haven’t
reached out.
AM: What do you think about progressive politics today?
EB: (laughs) What’s progressive about being Condaleeza
Rice? Let’s hope she’s not the feminist movement of today. Many of these women who have reaped the benefits of
the Second Wave feminist and Civil Rights movements with Affirmative Action, the fight for equal pay, entrance into the universities
and so forth have gone and gotten these jobs as lawyers and business owners, and they are worse to their secretaries. The
Third Wave needs to be reexamining the failings and misgivings of their foremothers’ actions. When you have women in
other countries, women right here in the United States living in Appalachia that are starving and don’t have the money to feed their children it’s a slap
in the face to have these feminists running around worrying about abortion rights. Another thing that kills me are these neo-soul
folks like India Irie and Alicia Keys who say some really good stuff in their songs and then go play a benefit show for the
New York Police Department after 9-11, the same police department who are killing black men left and right. It’s very
disappointing.
AM: What do you think is going to change that?
EB: Well, I think people are waiting on a triggering moment.
During the Civil Rights movement that moment happened when the television was introduced. Suddenly, everyone could see what
was going on. I think one big problem is that a lot of people are unaware of the past. They haven’t read anything either
by choice or because they have been totally denied the access to that kind of information. You ask some kid today who Martin
Luther King, Jr. was and they can tell you that he was a leader of the Civil Rights Movement and that he believed in nonviolence,
but after that they don’t have a clue. If you ask who was W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, or Malcolm X you get nothing.
CC: I recently had a student ask me who Malcolm Ten was. I couldn’t
believe it.
EB: The level of misinformation if powerful. You have these
young black men at Morehouse walking around saying ‘Saddam Hussein is my enemy’ and I’m like, ‘Brotha
you don’t even know where Iraq is.’
I think people are not informed and not educated. The mass media is certainly nothing except propaganda. You can’t even
find a reporter who opposes Bush and the war.
AM: What do you think about Bush and the War against Iraq?
This country’s military interests,
corporate interests, and government interests are all the same now. We’re sitting on so many weapons of mass destruction,
chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, biological weapons. They won’t tell anyone a thing about what we have, but they want
to go check up on Saddam Hussein. It’s ridiculous. Who armed him and gave him this stuff in the first place? Ronald
Reagan. We go into Iraq and kill 400,000
people and for what? And how can they want to hold up the American flag after we’ve done that… and want to do
it again. I don’t know what it’s going to take. Maybe it will take another Vietnam War or something like the television
that showed and exposed what was really happening.
CC: In a culture where Americans really can’t trust the
government anymore nor can they trust the media to tell us the truth, it’s just tragic.
AM: Do you see anything positive going on?
EB: The answer is no. Twenty-four million people in Africa are infected with HIV/AIDS and nothing’s being done about it. Women all over the world
are being exploited to work for pennies a day to make Nike shoes and folks aren’t even boycotting Nike. Don’t
get me wrong; there are some things that are happening that are good. The Green Party is getting some attention. Human life
still exists. People are still working to make things better. This is all wonderful and absolutely necessary, but I do feel
that it’s overwhelming sometimes how far we still have to go. This is a very sad period for me. I have never seen things
so bad, felt so personally defeated. Have you?
CC: No. Never. The lowest points of the Civil Rights movement
were better than now. Now, you try to change the smallest thing, like get parole under strict conditions for some juveniles
in jail and you’d think we were trying to bomb…
EB: …the World
Trade Center. Even when people
died, we always knew that there was something bigger, something better going on. We kept that thought in the forefront of
our minds, and it brought us together. We were willing to die for that. I’m not ready to die for this… especially
not for Bush. One of my favorite lines from a movie is from the original Rollerball when the main character is reflecting on how bad off the world is, and he asks
his girlfriend how things got so bad. She tells him that there was a point in history where people had the choice to vote
for freedom or comfort and they chose comfort. That is what I feel people are doing today… choosing comfort.
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