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Memoir of a Race Traitor
Mab Segrest
South End Press, 1994
275 pgs.
ISBN 0-89608-474-4 $15 paper
ISBN 0-89608-475-2 $30 cloth
What It's Like to Live Now
Meredith Maran
Bantam Books, 1995
338 pgs.
ISBN 0-553-37491-I $11.95 paper
During the appalling, debilitating Reagan/Bush years, and their not much-better aftermath, many progressives have been hungry for books that both chronicle and analyze the fightback efforts we have been engaged in. Last year I found two books which almost filled the bill; No More Nice Girls: Counter-Cultural Essays by heterosexual feminist Ellen Willis, and Sarah Schulman's My American History: Lesian/Gay During the Reagan/Bush Years. Both of these books are essential reading. But neither quite provided the integrative, far-ranging perspective a bi feminist multi-issue activist like myself needs. So I keep searching.
This spring I've come a little closer with my discovery of two new autobiographical accounts of activism by progressive women-loving women. Both books passionately document the struggle to balance loyalties to families and friends with the need to tell and live urgent truths.
Mab Segrest coordinates the U.S. Urban-Rural Mission of the World Council of Churches. She has been in the thick of the lesbian writers movement, has worked as an anti-racist within the feminist movement, and as an out lesbian in the peace movement. She is a white southern lesbian who came of age in Tuskegee, Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement. She co-founded Feminary: A Lesbian-Feminist Journal for the South, has published a book of essays (My Mama's Dead Squirrel) and co edited an anthology on feminism and racism for Kitchen Table Press.
Mab's 1994 book, Memoir of a Race Traitor, tells two vividly different, but related, stories: (1) the story of her six years fulltime anti Klan work in the 80s as coordinator of North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence and (2) a mini-history of U.S. racism -- traced through Mab's own family lineage, as linked to key historic events.
She ends the book with the text of her amazing, and controversial speech, "A Bridge, Not A Wedge," which was originally delivered at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Creating Change Conference in Durham, November 1993. (Controversial only because it unswervingly connects the struggle for les/gay rightsÞwith local anti-racist and international struggles around the world.)
"Race traitor," of course, is what white supremacists call
whites who oppose racism. Race Traitor opens with a quick
historic sketch of North Carolina in the 80s, where she started her
anti-Klan work. She describes what it was like coming out to her
prospective employers (a coalition of heterosexual black and white
Christians and Jews) as a lesbian, and how she won their trust and
approval to connect homophobia to the issues of racism and
anti-semitism in her work.
Early on, Mab explains how painful the break-up of her
Feminary lesbian magazine collective was, at a time when she
had given up trusting straight feminists, and finally come out and
commited herself to working with women-loving-women. Ironically it,
combined with the rise of the Klan in North Carolina in the 80s,
and drove her back into working in mixed groups.
"It was 1983 and I was ready to take the plunge. In this border crossing from the lesbian and feminist to the anti-racist movement, I began to realize how such movements separate people as much as bring them together. I found a compelling and complicated reality that neither race theory and organizing, nor class theory and organizing, nor feminist theory and organizing is capable of handling.
"Lesbian-feminism had given me a clear analysis of how power operates among people and in a culture's institutions. But it gave me few of the specific skills I needed: how to put on a press conference, build up a data-base, interact with community agencies, organize white and Black people in small towns and cities, or monitor and call to accountability the criminal justice system. With Feminary, our battle had been largely interior, a psychic confrontation with the lethal forces of the culture as we had internalized them. It was an intense, revealing, but sometimes insular process. The `politics of identity' could easily slip into a politics of victimhood and guilt, its focus more purity of consciousness than effectiveness of social change. By 1983, I had hit the limits of this internal work. (I was not the only dyke to think that lesbian-feminism was dangerously over-literary and under-strategic.)...Somewhere in my metamorphosis, I realized that I could no longer settle for `lesbian space' as just one room, or camp, or building, although I was, and am, still grateful for those gathering places. The Reagan era made it clear: there is no separate safety. `Lesbian space' had better be a world where everyone belongs."
Read this book for the many scary, courageous stories she tells, and about how she agonized carefully and bravely (with her lawyer and editor) about what exactly she could write about the crimes she knows were committed by people among whom she still lives, who still may threaten her life. Suffice it to say I was particuarly impressed by the way she juxtaposes her own personal/familial responsibility for racism (her cousin shot one of the first blacks in the civil rights movement, her Dad fought for segregated schools) with a larger account of our legacy of slavery, capitalism and hatred of women and gays. Race Traitor showsÞus in concrete, everyday ways how the "invention of heterosexuality" and the "invention of whiteness" are related, and how we contribute to perpetuating them. It also gives us real people examples of changing these systemic oppressions for the better.
My other find, What It's Like to Live Now, is also
about a white woman-loving-woman involved in left activism.
Meredith Maran, however, is a New Yorker expatriated to California.
Her book is set in the San Francisco Bay Area, about as far from
Klan Country backroads as I can imagine.
Maran talks about her uneasiness with increased crime rates in the Oakland neighborhood where she lives, speaking in the anguished voice of a protective parent -- "Now I find myelf poised for what must honestly be named white flight...." She wonders if urban life "has simply gotten exponentially worse (along with my fear level)...Backed into a nineties corner by my sixties politics - and by my sons, whose childhoods and values reflect those politics - I am forced to confront the most difficult decision of all. Can I carry on the struggle to overcome what's wrong in the world, while keeping my children, my family, myself safe and sane within it?"
Maran is a consultant and free-lance journalist who lives with her lover Ann and two teenaged sons. She describes herself repeatedly in the book as someone who is attracted to both women and men. But on the back-cover she uses "lesbian" as her label and often talks within the book about her sons as having "two lesbian moms." There is no indication that she lives in one of the urban birthplaces of bi culture and bi politics. Instead, it indicates to me how much bisexuals are still pushed to identify as straight or gay, even in places where bi community is somewhat available, and how isolated most of us still feel and are. Ironically, Maran was one of the original editors of OutLook, the now-defunct lesbian/gay literature and politics magazine best known among bisexuals for its horrendous but provocative 1992 cover story, "What Do Bisexuals Want?." (So, she can't claim complete ignorance, yet, in this book at least, she does.)
Unlike Mab, Meredith got a hefty advance from a major publisher and a rave New York Times review. The Way We Live Now was touted, in all its marketing promo blurbs, as the revealing story of a sixties radical grown up and coping with the contradictions of the nineties. She was in the October League (a sectarian leftist group) and has supported herself by working for progressive businesses such as Working Assets, Ben & Jerrys, and Banana Republic. The book's most moving effect comes from its account of her love for her sons and what she's learned about parenting them in a politically-conscious way. Most of the chapters are a pastiche of recollections on family, love, health, aging, spirituality and therapy. "Changing the world," in an outer-directed way is not really discussed in depth until page 275, which starts with Clinton's election. A lot ofher story of how she changed from urban revolutinary to corporate image maker seems missing.
Okay, I admit it. I have trouble with someone who calls
$45,000 a year "unglamourous wages." I would like to make enough
so that that amount looked small too. But, never having made it,
and coming from a family where no one has either, it's hard for me
to identify with this attitude. Maran has been one of the
architects of the socially-conscious marketplace, a middle-manager
who came up from the ranks, and the rank and file of Marxist union
workers at that. I expect more class analysis from her than I got.
She, like many of us, seems to have lost the threads of class
critique since the 80s, and to not be able to replace them with
anything more broad than humanizing capitalist economics. It isn't
enough and it scares me, too. To give her credit, she is not
oblivious to these contradictions, just feeling lost. As she says
in reflecting on her efforts to "make progressive business
progressive" -- "Big surprise: it turns out that I have not
escaped the harsh reality I hoped to leave behind when I fled
Marxism and the Ford assembly line and landed on the soft, inviting
shores of new age business. Too bad, but true: the laws of
capitalism still apply...Companies like Smith & Hawken and
Working Assets offer their customers a real alternative: a chance
to `shop for a better world,' to `vote with their wallets.' But
when it comes to their employees, the best that Paul or Peter and
the people who work for them can do -- the best that `socially
responsible business' can do - is tweak the formula."
Don't get me wrong. The Way We Live Now is sensitive,
poignant, disarmingly self-critical, funny and wise. It's a great
book for understanding progressive parenting and relationships.
When, towards the end of the book, she turns her focus more on the
class/race warfare going on in this country, particularly in the
corporate workplace, it gets more frustrating. She speaks about
how guilty she feels creating a comfortable life for her kids, and
how homelessness and violence in the streets makes her realize that
things have gotten worse, not better. But her passion is somewhat
gone, or blocked. She speaks about "the urgency not being the
same." "I couldn't tell what good my work was doing, or if it was
doing any good at all." "I had causes but no cause...Suddenly I was
building a career instead of a movement....I missed the war." (But
she wrote this 1987, still as if there were only one big war that
shaped all of us, the Vietnam War. 1987 is when there were hugh
wars all over Central America that the U.S. was involved in. But
they weren't "her" war!)
She acknowledges that in 1980 when she got pregnant with her second child the auto industry (where she'd worked) was moving overseas and organizing workers wasn't the same. She and her comrades even tried to unionize the burgeoning electronics industry in Silicon Valley but were defeated by the many different languages spoken by the workers and the "engineers who just wanted to toot their coke." All this is real, tough, important. But, her conclusion? "What was the war, really? The war was in my disoriented, weary head." NOT! Too much therapy and new age mantras I think! Too much taking everything personally, a sure sign of organizer's burn-out and parenting and relationship stress.
Both of these books are precious to me; they made me mutter, laugh, scream, cry, reflect and want to call up their authors immediately and invite them over for tea and debate. Read them, discuss them, and, most importantly, don't hold back your own stories that match these and counterpoint them, too!
* Published in a slightly altered form in the Summer 1996 issue of Anything That Moves: The Magazine for the Discriminating Bisexual TM a great mag, check them out at their temporary web site: or write qswitch@igc.apc.org for a sample copy. They're hilarious, informative, essential and hot!