Duke Women of Color United held its first major public event last night, hosting a forum that examined how minority women can be forced to choose between their gender and their race.
A four-person panel, comprised of two graduate students and two professors, spoke before a diverse, 50-person audience in the forum, called "My Race, My Gender." Audience members then joined the discussion, largely centering comments on a question posed by Trinity senior Tamara Cannon, president of Ashanti.
"Why is it that feminists have not been able to incorporate the issues of cultural groups into their platforms, and vice versa?" Cannon asked.
The history of feminism has been laced with racism, responded panelist and fifth-year graduate student in literature Jennifer Doyle. "A lot of shame and guilt are felt about the issue, which prevent it from being addressed," Doyle said.
Trinity senior Stacy Ebron, programming chair of the Black Student Alliance, said that this problem applies directly to the University's feminist groups.
"The women's groups that exist on this campus are not willing to address the issue of racism," said Ebron, adding that very few campus organizations are racially diverse. "You can't reach common ground until racism no longer stands in the middle of it," she said.
Duke Women of Color United seeks to address this issue and plans this month to hold a meeting of various women's groups on campus. The group formed early this year after some students said the Women of Color Advisory Board--operated from the Women's Center--did not fulfill the expectations of volunteers.
Blair Murphy, a first-year graduate student in history, disagreed with Ebron's claim, saying that some members of the community are taking action on the matter.
"Racism within women's groups is being addressed," she said. "There are efforts being made by black women. No one else is going to address them for us; it is up to us to push these issues."
Also in response to Cannon's question regarding race and gender, participants discussed last month's Million Man March in Washington, D.C.
"Feminism hasn't penetrated racism and vice versa because of the missionary consciousness," said second-year graduate student in literature David Freeman. "Missionaries are deployed to help others--they are very passionate about their cause. In their zeal to correct their oppression, they often fail to see the issues which should make their mission problematic."
Freeman said that this concept applies to black men who fail to see sexism within the black community.
Early aspects of the discussion sought to define the concepts of race and gender as functions of social constructs.
"The ways in which race intersects with power and social hierarchy varies within each social construct," said panelist and history professor Sucheta Mazumdar. "In America, I am an Indian woman. In China, I am an almost-white woman. In India, I am a woman. Gender is not male or female; it is a social construction that we have invented."
The panelists then discussed how women of color can have difficulty defining their identities. Panelist Karla Holloway, English professor and acting director of African and Afro-American studies, said that in a book she authored two years ago, she wrote "black woman" as one word.
"Why do we want to separate these two words when each of us has a complex identity?" she said. "This is an identity that someone is going to have to deal with as a coherent unit. To separate it is some sort of psychological destruction."
The panelists also discussed how minority women are forced to prioritize either their race or their gender when defining themselves.
"Everything in our political and societal life asks us to choose: census forms, SATs, catalogs, fraternities, sororities. You always have to chose who you are going to be before going on about your business," Holloway said. "We live in a world which constantly forces us to identify ourselves in social constraints that I think we all agree are problematic."
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