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NEWS & LETTERS, April-May 2006NWSA Fighting racismOakland, Cal.--The organizers of the National Women's Studies Association's (NWSA), Women of Color Caucus and Anti-Racist Workshop were thrilled at the turnout of over 30 women at their all-day workshop in January, "Stop Dreaming, Keep Working." Organizer Pat Washington is a fighter for Black women in academia through her own struggle against San Diego State University (see www.patwashington.org). This was the fourth annual workshop co-sponsored by both groups. It started out as "stop dreaming, start working," as in stop dreaming about ending racism and start working on it. It has been titled "stop dreaming, keep working" since its second year. This year they had a professional anti-racism educator, Shakti Butler, who gave a workshop on "making whiteness visible." It was mostly her talking, so none of us got to know what others in the room were thinking and doing. She imparted her words of wisdom and we were supposed to exercise them on our own after she left. At lunch, Betita Martinez gave a very "left" talk: Everything you know is exactly backwards; this country is not founded on freedom and democracy, it is founded on genocide, slavery and the land grab from Mexico. No one would disagree, yet her talk gave no "founding" status to any form of resistance except to say that it has always been great. An aspect of NWSA history that came up was how, at the 1990 Akron, Ohio NWSA Conference, the women of color and their white allies--including several N&L members--walked out (see "Racism splinters women's conference," July 1990 N&L). Since then it has been a secret everybody knew, but no one talked about, and a dread. So NWSA is now trying to say what happened, what the organization learned, and in what way it has changed. Unfortunately, that part of the agenda got postponed until the general meeting in June. Clearly, there is much more that needs to be done on the subject of "Stop Dreaming, Keep Working, and Start Dreaming Again." --Urszula Wislanka |
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