Digital Program | Ain't I A Woman: a symposium honoring bell hooks

Ain't I A Woman a symposium honoring bell hooks

Presented by The Ujamaa Society Department of Political Science at Clark Atlanta University

EVENT PROGRAM Tiffany Williams reads from Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks Welcome by Tamill Harris on behalf of Ujamaa Framing of Event by Ejim Dike Emily Herrera reads from Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks Video Clip of Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall in conversation with bell hooks Introduction by Ejim Dike Ejim Dike in conversation with Keynote Speaker, Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall Nzinga Parham reads an original poem titled Melanin Sydney Wilson reads from All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks Panel Discussion featuring Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Penelope French, Malika Redmond, & Farah Tanis Audience Q&A Honors by Tamill Harris Acknowledgments/Closing by Dr. Kurt Young

SPEAKER BIOS: (Keynote Speaker) Dr. Beverly GuySheftall is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center (1981) and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies at Spelman College. For many years she was a visiting professor at Emory University’s Institute for Women’s Studies where she taught graduate courses in Women’s Studies. At the age of sixteen, she entered Spelman College where she majored in English and minored in secondary education. After graduating with honors, she attended Wellesley College for a fifth year of study in English. In 1968, she entered Atlanta to pursue a master’s degree in English; her thesis was entitled, “Faulkner’s Treatment of Women in His Major Novels.” A year later she began her first teaching job in the Department of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1971 she returned to her alma mater Spelman College and joined the English Department.

She has published a number of texts within African American and Women’s Studies which have been noted as seminal works by other scholars, including the first anthology on Black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (Doubleday, 1980), which she coedited with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye Parker Smith; her dissertation, Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880-1920 (Carlson, 1991); Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (New Press, 1995); an anthology she co-edited with Rudolph Byrd entitled Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Indiana University Press, 2001); a book coauthored with Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (Random House, 2003); an anthology, I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, co-edited with Rudolph P. Bryd, Johnnetta B. Cole, and Guy-Sheftall (Oxford University Press, 2009); an anthology, Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies (Feminist Press, 2010), with Stanlie James and Frances Smith Foster. Her most recent publication (SUNY Press, 2010) is an anthology co-edited with Johnnetta B. Cole, Who Should Be First: Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign. In 1983 she became founding co-editor of Sage: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women which was devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African descent. She is the past president of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017).

(Moderator) Ejim Dike is a human rights and social policy advocate with over 20 years of experience in the field. She has extensive experience building literacy in using human rights laws and mechanisms particularly at the United Nations for grassroots activists, and has worked with groups in the United States and globally. Ms. Dike currently consults with nonprofit organizations including philanthropy to advance gender and racial justice.

Her work is featured at The Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, GA. She has taught courses on using human rights mechanisms to advance racial, gender and economic justice at Hunter College, Sarah Lawrence College, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Ms. Dike has a Bachelor of Science from Berea College, and a Master of Public Administration from the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. She is in a doctorate program at the Department of Political Science at Clark Atlanta University.

(Panelist) Farah Tanis is an internationally acclaimed grassroots activist and advocate for Black women and girls. She has over twenty years of experience in community leadership, fundraising, human rights initiatives, movement building, organizational development, public speaking and strategic mobilization. She is co-founder and co-Executive Director of the Black Feminist Organization Black Women’s Blueprint. She launched and Chairs the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the U.S. ever to focus on Black women and their historical and contemporary experiences with sexual assault. Tanis is a U.S. Human Rights Institute Fellow. Tanis founded the Museum of Women’s Resistance (MoWRe). Currently housed at Black Women’s Blueprint’s HerStory Archives, MoWRe is internationally recognized as a Site of Conscience. Farah Tanis created Mother Tongue Monologues, a vehicle for communicating Black feminist praxis at the grassroots and for addressing Black sexual politics in African American and other communities of the Black Diaspora.

(Panelist) Malika Redmond is the co-founder and CEO of Women Engaged, a 501c3 organization based in Atlanta, GA, that works to inspire Black women and young adults to become impactful leaders, key decision-makers and effective agents for social change through voter engagement, reproductive justice advocacy and leadership development. Malika has worked for 20 years both nationally and internationally managing projects that focus on women's human rights, racial justice, and youth empowerment. She recently completed two terms (2016-2021) as the elected Board Chair of ProGeorgia Statewide Civic Engagement Table seeing the organization through the historic elections of 2020 and run-off elections of 2021.

Malika's tenure at ProGeorgia makes her the first Black woman leader of a reproductive justice organization to be elected as the Chair of the Board of a State Voices Civic Engagement Table anywhere in the nation. In 2021 Malika was nominated by Atlanta Mayor Kiesha Lance Bottoms, and unanimously voted in by the City Council of Atlanta, GA, to serve a three year term on the Reproductive Justice Commission of Atlanta. Her most recent writing and interview can be viewed at Essence MagazineMagazine and Adam Mendler Leadership Blog . Malika holds a BA from Spelman College and MA from Georgia State University.

(Panelist) Penelope French is a womanist spiritualist activist and community organizer with the Movement for Black Lives. Her pronouns are she/her/they. She has a background in wholistic wellness and healing with a focus on curating spaces of healing for the LGBTQIA+ community.

They bring 15 years of experience in facilitation, public speaking, youth pastoring, pastoral care and community development. They are dedicated to the liberation and self expression of all creation. She’s currently receiving her M.A. Inter Religious Leadership with a concentration on justice, peace building, and conflict transformation from Candler School of Theology, Emory University focusing her coursework on womanist studies and intersectionality.

EXCERPTS FEATURED IN THE PROGRAM: “To forge a place for Black females in this revolutionary movement for gender justice, I had to deepen my understanding of our place in the large society. Even though I was learning so much about sexism and the ways sexist thinking shaped female identity, I was not being taught about the ways race shaped female identity. In classes and in consciousness-raising groups when I called attention to the differences created in our lives by race and racism, I was often treated with disdain by white female comrades who were eager to bond around shared notions of sisterhood.

And there I was, this bold young black female from rural Kentucky, insisting that there were major differences shaping the experiences of black and white women. My efforts to understand those differences to explain and communicate their meaning, lay the groundwork for the writing of Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism.” - bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 2014 edition (p. X)

“The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility, we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom. “ - bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom (p. 207)

“Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society, we make much of love and say little about fear.

Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture, we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other. - bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (pg. 93)

Melanin Melanin, Worth more than gold itself Look it up, In your eyes, ears, hair, and skin I’m stuck, Beautiful brown Glistening in the sun Goes back many centuries Hold on, I have just begun, Melanin, What are you doing daughter or son Brown being shunned for fun Hair being straightened Curls being undone Trying to become unone, with your past Feeling they have lost Being cursed with this brown, Little knowing they have won, Melanin

- by Nzinga Parham

Transcript of video clip from Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall in conversation with bell hooks: 00:29:21 | Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall Why do you think that we as black folk in particular are less inclined, for example, to say anybody can define what anti-racist means? But we’ll say in a minute oh no, no no, you can't just say I'm anti-racist and your behavior is the opposite of that. But we've been much more loose in our willingness to say that anybody can say I'm feminist. I mean, and I would say that most of us who've been really committed deeply committed to feminism know feminism when we see it. I mean, my mother never used the term feminist, but I knew she was a feminist because of what she did. And I can name about 8 different things.

00:30:11 | bell hooks One of those things is Beverly's mother when she was in high school let the world know her daughter was not going to be taking home economics. She was going to be taking typing. And I tell people to this day I have never seen Beverly even so much as make a piece of toast.

00:30:33 | Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall But we need to add to that because it wasn’t individual. My mother petitioned the Memphis public schools in the 50s; a bunch of white patriarchal men, she petitioned the public schools to not have 9th-grade students in Memphis take home economics. So it was even structural.

Which is really just amazing. Uh, as as well As for example, tell me when I was 15 years old, 14 or 15 years old. If I was careless enough to find myself with an unwanted pregnancy, she would make available to me the services of a wonderful woman who lived on our street who did illegal abortions. I mean, this is when I was 15 years old. So my mother would not have used that term, but I knew that that was feminism. But I would not have thought my mother was a feminist had she told me a whole bunch of other things that many young women my age got from their mothers.

This event was made possible thanks to the Ujamaa Society Department of Political Science at Clark Atlanta University and the Ain’t I a Woman: Honoring bell hooks Symposium Planning Committee .

The Ujamaa Society is a graduate student-led organization formed 50 years ago. Ujamaa works to meet the needs of the students in the Political Science Department and to nurture a spirit of communalism and common purpose between students, faculty, staff and the broader community with an emphasis on providing an intellectual and spiritual sanctuary for African and African descendent learners.

Planning Committee:

Readings by:

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Tiffany Williams Tamill Harris Jayme Beasley Nykia Green-Young Alexis Harris Dehjah Vaughn Dr. Kurt Young Ejim Dike

Tiffany Williams Emily Herrera Nzinga Parham Sydney Wilson