What it takes to be in true coalition

Feminist activist history can show us

Photo by Kelly on Pexels

Hey there everyone—

In 1981, the musician, cultural historian, and activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, gave a talk at a feminist music festival. That talk, “Coalition Politics, Turning the Century,” was reprinted a few years later in Home Girls, one of the most important Black feminist anthologies of the time, and still a foundational feminist text.

Reagon opens her talk by saying she can’t breathe. The conference is happening at Yosemite, California. She’s not from a high altitude, and the women who are, the majority of the attendees, are mostly white. Reagon speaks to the white feminism of the women’s music scene and the need for feminists to learn how to struggle together across racial difference.

 In her talk, Reagon differentiates between “home spaces” and the work of coalition:

Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets. And it is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn't look for comfort. Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there. They're not looking for a coalition; they're looking for a home! They're looking for a bottle with some milk in it and a nipple, which does not happen in a coalition. You don't get a lot of food in a coalition. You don't get fed a lot in a coalition. In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home. You can't stay there all the time. You go to the coalition for a few hours and then you go back and take your bottle wherever it is, and then you go back and coalesce some more.

For Reagon, a home space is where you go to rest, to commune with other people who are like you, who get it, who share your language, your identity, your needs. But this space is also a fantasy, for even in home spaces differences among members will inevitably cause tension and further struggle.

Coalition is the space where you build the muscles to be uncomfortable and stay in the work. A coalition is tactical. You come together not necessarily to be friends, not to rely on mutual trust and security, but rather to ensure the literal survival of all people, whether you are personally invested in their struggle or not. 

In the moment Reagon was speaking, the struggle in the music scene wasn’t just about the fact that so many of its participants were white. It was that the scene was also a lesbian subculture; coded by the term “woman-identified-woman.” Was the “women’s” music scene for all women? Or did it say it was for all women, and then in actuality act as a home space for white lesbians? What to do when Black musicians like Reagon, and women who were not comfortable with lesbianism, many of whom were also Black, showed up? Was there room for them? Was the scene pretending to be a coalition but in actuality a home space, a place where people expected a political and identity-based consensus, or even homogeneity, under the guise of being a feminist gathering place that welcomed everyone?

The publication of Reagon’s talk in Home Girls broadened the conversation. Home Girls was edited by Barbara Smith, a Black lesbian feminist and a founding member of the Combahee River Collective, whose Black Feminist Statement (1977) is one of the first theoretical texts to define what Kimberlé Crenshaw later named intersectionality. 

Speaking to the specific needs of Black women, and in explicit dialog with both the Civil Rights and the feminist movements of the 1970s, the collective writes:

We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g. the rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political represssion.

The statement noted that its members refused to participate in lesbian separatism, even though many of the members were lesbians, because they wanted to work on the needs of Black men as much as those of Black women. They also refuted essentialist arguments about women—that is, that they share qualities due to the fact that they are “biological women” and thus have a natural affinity for one another—seeing any form of biological essentialism as tied to racist arguments about Black inferiority.

Part of the reason I love reading movement history is because you can see the roots of today’s unfinished struggles in the conversations activists were having with each other as the Civil Rights, feminist, gay rights and anti war movements were trying to figure out if they were going to come together as one in the ‘80s and ‘90s. You can see how the Michigan Women’s Festival was set up to collapse under the pressure of trans liberation. You can see how difficult it is to braid struggles together, when there are so many theoretical differences, let alone differences in material resources and access to power.

But the rise of Reaganism and the stripping away of funding for social services in the ‘80s put a lot of movement work on the defensive. To ensure their survival, many activists moved into identity-specific organizational homes, either in universities or non-profits, and the hard conversations that were happening across issues and identities shifted to conversations about how to deal with conservatism and how to defend specific groups from attack.

I remembered that Bernice Reagon had written about coalition when, in the days after Biden stepped back, the Harris organization let everyone know they were holding identity-specific calls with volunteers—40,000 Black women one day; 20,000 Black men the next; raising large sums from small donors. It felt like a version of Reagon’s home space, only with Harris having permission to step in and listen. At the level of publicity, it also seemed like a reversal of the idea of “smoke filled rooms” in which powerful white men decide who will be the President, and effort is made to make sure no one knows it’s happening. The Harris campaign asserted, symbolically, that nothing would be decided in secret, because the “powerful” was the mass—all the callers and volunteers—rather than the few, the well connected, the elite.

When the Harris campaign publicized the White Dudes for Harris call, and when they reported the white women call drew 160,000 attendees, they were pushing back against the historical fact that white women voted for Trump in high numbers, and that Trump has been credited with speaking to the struggles of white men. It was a kind of masterstroke, one that extended into the DNC’s main stage—minus the needs of Palestinians—an assertion that coalition is the model for the nation state.

It was also a rebuttal of the conservative idea that the building block of the nation state is the family. But not just any family, the white Christian family that is self-sufficient, strong enough to not require support from social services or big government. The family that is said to be a historical artifact but in actuality is a projection for the future, outlined in Project 2025. 

Similarly, the story of coalition that the DNC hailed was said to be an extension of the Civil Rights movement and the rights-based movements that followed, when in fact, the coalition it seeks has yet to be built. The convention stage and the phone calls were meant to represent a kind of rainbow unity. By celebrating its identity-specific calls, the Harris organization was able to describe the complexity of the nation and stave off the possibility of tension and disagreement across groups. The calls let people stay in their home spaces, but be represented as if they were already in coalition.

What does it mean to hold identity-specific calls, when you only have 100 days to try to win? Was that a tactic to prevent the eruption of struggle that is coalition? Was it an acknowledgement of just how far apart each group is, right now, and how much the pain and disconnection of the last eight years—let alone the last 200+ years—could get in the way of the Joy Story? 

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Two days ago I dug out my copy of Bernice’s talk, to see if I remembered it correctly. I wanted to see if we had moved from the place she described in the 1980s. In my memory, it was inspiring and full of gentle teasing about difference, an exhortation to the mostly white women gathering to stretch. Since the piece is a transcript of a speech, it’s informal and in parentheses it notes the places in the talk where the audience reacted with applause or hollers of agreement and approval or laughter.

Reading it this week, I was stunned by what I couldn’t yet hear, the first few times I read it. Bernice says if you’re doing coalition work, you will feel like you could die at any moment, and you stay in anyway. In the past, I read that comment as a metaphor. You feel like you could die, but you’re not going to. I identified with the white audience, whose laughter now seems to me to acknowledge the truth of what she was saying, but also attempt to soften its intensity.

This time, when I read the first lines about Bernice not being able to breathe, my entire reading of the piece changed. I heard her say I can’t breathe, and I couldn’t hear it outside of the Black Lives Matter marches and protests. Now I see that she was talking about literally dying, and about the fact that in coalition you are working with people who might be ok if you died, or if your people died, or who might see your people as a literal threat to their people’s survival. That you have to believe so strongly that the power of the collective is the only thing strong enough to ensure the survival of everyone, that you will stay in, even if it’s that hard.

I felt enormous shame that I didn’t hear what she was saying, back when I read it the first time; that I thought the audience’s laughter meant that everyone was all together, having a good time, talking about hard things.

When I think about their laughter, and when I think about my memory of what that talk was about, I confront the way in which I was colluding with the audience, years after the talk actually happened. I think that white audience took Bernice as a presence to respect and learn from; she was already a lion in both music and activist communities. But I wonder if they still thought she was there for them—that her words were designed to make them better. That the focus is and always will be on the needs of white people.

I think about the ‘80s and the entrance of white women into corporate spaces that was happening around the same time as this festival. I remember the absurd fashion: the pastel blouses with huge bows at the neck; the way the suits tried at once to downplay the threat of women’s prospective power with pastel, and at the same time ask women to dress as if they had the bodies of men, to the point of giving them false broad shoulders with padding. To say: you can be here, but you have to prove that you can fit in, that you can be as much like us as possible.

I thought about Kamala’s blazers and her blouses with bows now. I wondered if the same dynamic I can imagine at that music gathering is happening now. Is the white audience, even as it’s celebrating Kamala’s speeches, assuming she is there for them?

Is the implicit expectation that a Black woman president will still foreground the needs of white people above all others? That her Blackness is there to let them stop having to confront white supremacy, as if her election innoculates the country against its power? That who she is and what she’s experienced and knows and could create isn’t of interest because she’s never going to upend the way things are? 

Do you remember the front page of The Onion, the day after Obama was elected, with a headline that white people were congratulating themselves for electing a Black president and expecting to be thanked?

What will it take for white people to get big enough, to build our emotional stamina, as Resmaa Menakem exhorts us, to manage the destabilization of not being the center? If we are truly to be in coalition, that means our needs, let alone our wants, must be only one part of a vast whole. Perhaps, after centuries of white supremacy, our needs should even be put on hold? At the very least put on pause, while the needs of others are finally addressed? 

Because at the end of the day, isn’t that another white fantasy—that we can welcome and acknowledge racial and ethnic diversity, even the complexity of identity; that we can appear to be sharing power by having a Black woman president, that we can do all of this without giving up anything in terms of our material and social privilege? 

Isn’t that the white dream? We can do inclusion because we’re adding you to a culture that doesn’t have to change. That as the DEI hires start to be quietly let go, corporate America can avoid taking on not only questions of representation, but of transformation: of asking what could be enabled by letting go of its baseline assumptions about how things need to be and let itself become something it cannot yet imagine?

When white people ask ourselves: what is true transformation, what would it be like to not be the center of attention, to not be the ones who get the resources first, then we’re finally in coalition. Then our lives really will depend on others, because we won’t have white supremacy to insulate us from harm. 

I know that even as I write these sentences, I have yet to live in a United States that is not practicing white supremacy, and thus I cannot say I have the stamina, I’ve done the emotional weightlifting, I’m ready to relinquish what I’ve been taught is my birthright. What I can say is I know I need all the help, all the support, all the tools other white people are using to make the transformation happen. 

The home space that Reagon talked about was the home space as a refuge from oppression and domination. A place where the fact of violence wouldn’t be denied. A place of relief from having to code switch, to survive a dominant culture that wasn’t for you. 

What is a home space for people who have been granted privilege and whose needs are centered by the dominant culture? What is its work? What is a home space for people who experience both privilege and oppression? How do we make the true coalition happen, so that we can practice creating space not only for other human beings, but the more than human world, which is not being granted the dignity and respect it deserves?

Stay safe out there this week—

xo

Rebecca