Speak On It is a Teen Vogue column by Jenn M. Jackson, whose queer black feminist perspective explores how today's social and political life is influenced by generations of racial and gender (dis)order. In this piece, she explores the ways that history lessons too often leave out unrespectable black, queer, and trans people and how that needs to change.
March is Women’s History Month. It’s also the month of International Women’s Day, a day rooted in at least a century of struggling against misogyny and gender-based exploitation, especially for working-class women.
I didn’t learn about the importance of this month until well after college. When I think back on the women in history I did learn about, suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott, I am reminded how so much of what I remember is rooted in the erasure of darker-skinned, poor and working-class, queer, and trans black women who contributed significant work to make this country a freer place.
Angela Y. Davis, freedom fighter and professor emerita of the University of California, Santa Cruz, writes in her book Women, Race, & Class about how early suffragists’ efforts to secure freedoms and rights for others like them weren’t actually rooted in a sense of racial equity. Instead, they were a part of a larger system of white supremacy.
While discussing one of the many resolutions passed to secure women’s right to vote — which at the time of the suffrage movement served middle-class white women — she says, “the suffragists might as well have announced that if they, as white women of the middle classes and bourgeoisie, were given the power of the vote, they would rapidly subdue the three main elements of the U.S. working class: Black people, immigrants, and the uneducated native white workers.” During their time, these white women activists were roundly critiqued by black women like former slave Sojourner Truth and foremost anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, but they still actively contributed to anti-black systems that would, inevitably, make it harder to secure liberty for all black people. That’s why, in 1896, black suffragists founded the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).
I was never taught that backstory. And, even into adulthood, I wasn’t fully aware of how incomplete my understanding of women’s history truly was. I learned a great deal about the importance of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 growing up, but I never learned that there was a queer, black, gender-nonconforming (GNC) person named Pauli Murray, who was foundational to ending “separate but equal” accommodations for black and white Americans. Their research, unbeknownst to Murray, was fundamental in arguing the case — and winning.
Murray’s role in history is important for a number of reasons, especially because their gender and sexuality placed them at a complex set of intersections situated outside the normative standards of both the white women–led rights movement and the black church–led freedom struggle. For Salon, Brittney Cooper writes, “it is not just racism and sexism that shaped her experiences as an attorney, activist and civil rights leader in the early to mid-20th century. Pauli Murray was a gender nonconforming person, who favored a masculine-of-center gender performance during her 20s and 30s.” Murray’s gender-nonconforming (GNC) body and experiences makes their contributions to the work of freedom and liberation of black people that much more critical. Sadly, these experiences are also the likely cause of Murray’s erasure from so much of history.